¶1Hey guys, welcome to Capturing Christianity. I'm Cameron Batuzi here with Ethan Muse, Cesar Bernstein, and Noah McKay. And tonight we're talking about Joe Schmid. So if you don't know, you probably do if you're watching this, Joe. Joe Schmid recently converted or reverted to Catholicism.
¶2And there have been some reactions so far, some positive, some negative. And tonight we're going to spend the entire night defending Joe against the bad responses that have been offered in response to his announcement video. And then today he just recently posted this 7-hour video defending God's existence. There have been some responses to that. But for the most part, people have been responding to his announcement video in which he just sort of tells his story of, you know, this 30inut video of just announcing to the world that he is now Catholic and people have assumed the worst in some cases and some people were congratulating him.
¶3Even some Protestants we saw were saying very positive things, which is good. But tonight, we just want to uh spend some time defending his honor. And I I've the the panel that I have uh here tonight, we all know Joe personally. And so we're going to uh just begin the stream by just telling a little about our knowledge of Joe, our interactions with him, our relationship with him, like how do we know this person in the first place? And then we're going to start looking at some responses and responding to those responses.
¶4So I'll begin. I knew Jew knew Joe uh back on Facebook actually is the first place that I met him. And he he was an atheist or an agnostic at the time. I can't remember which one, but it was at a point in my life where I had been interacting with atheists a whole bunch. And so I was very jaded.
¶5I was very jaded toward toward atheists that I was interlocuating with. And so I treated Joe with that same kind of like, oh, here's just another atheist with their oneliners or what, whatever they're going to say in response to these arguments, handwave it away. And so I was very jaded at that point. But he, my first interaction with him was like, "Wow, this person is like being nice to me and actually knows what he's talking about and is is very just it was a great interaction. My first interaction with him.
¶6From that point, we developed a relationship and we started to share memes with each other and we just developed a friendship over time to where it was basically at the point where we just had this level of canandor and uh rapport that we wouldn't really even challenge each other because we were so good friends at this point and he was still agnostic throughout this entire point. And uh so eventually though over time we started to have some disagreements and some back and forth. And one of the things that he mentioned in his Matt Frat interview is that I asked him about exorcisms. I was like, "Hey, what's going on with these uh with these exorcism videos that I've been doing? Have you been watching those?
¶7Like what are your thoughts on those? Like what what is a naturalistic explanation of these accounts that we're hearing from all these men independently?" And so he tried his best to to give me a response. And I think at this point we had such a good relationship. I like laugh reacted his message and stuff and we had some good back and forth. Um but let's fast forward a bit to his transition to Catholicism.
¶8He randomly sends me this video where he sort of tells his story and he's like, "Hey, um I'm now Catholic and you know these are the reasons and most of you guys know the basic outline of what happened." But just to give one anecdote of sort of where Joe is as a Catholic now is there there was this time I was walking outside. I called him on the phone and we were just I forget what we were talking about but there was an ambulance that drove by and it was so loud and so I had to like tell him to to hold on for a second. So he stopped and uh they they drove by and he was like, "Hey, we should say a prayer for for that person in in the ambulance." And I was like, "You know what? I should like why don't I do that? And he was like, "Hey, let's pray the Hail Mary." And um at this point in my life, like I had not memorized the Hail Mary prayer for whatever reason.
¶9And so I just did my best to keep up with him. And it was that's this was this was super early on as well, like right after he told me. I think this was either February or March. And so immediately he was already like in full Catholicism mode, if I can put it that way. And no, I think you have you can speak to that as well.
¶10Like Joe is just like an inspiring person. He's he's so inspiring and he's he's helped me develop my spiritual life in ways that like are are incredible. And um I don't want to take too much time. I want to pass it over to Ethan. But yeah, Joe is like the the the point of what I want to get across in this this just first part is that he is a genuinely amazing person and a very very good Catholic.
¶11So Ethan, >> yeah. No, I mean I've had uh great experiences with Joe and it's sort of funny and jarring to see all of these people psychizing him where I'm just in like a firsthand position to be able to know that like it's not just that all these things are false and baseless, right? you could see why people are throwing them at him, but like they are literally the opposite of the truth to such an absurd degree that it's like laughable and like dumbfounding almost to be in the firsthand position of knowing what the truth is and then to see the way he's being portrayed and dismissed and it it is it is crazy. But basically my first experiences were with him were back when I was posting my first article on Substack about Fatima and then it started this whole miracle discourse on Fatima and I I had known about him beforehand because I'd seen his philosophy content and I had you know I had liked it and I'd always thought he was a smart guy but it had never been exactly my cup of tea the presentation style of all of his videos. But I get an email from him basically following up on the Fatima article where he's like, "Well, it's great that you posted this and I think we should, you know, exchange contact information and maybe start talking because I think we get along well because over the past few months I've been just looking into Catholic miracles." And so then he starts like laundry listing all the miracle evidence that he's sort of been sifting through over these past few months and giving me all the resources that he had compiled, right?
¶12And so then I start working with him and talking with him back and forth and it becomes clear over the next few months that at this point in time despite the fact that he's aware of all this amazing evidence. So the fact like him being aware of the evidence and talking about it and presenting it the way that he was. I was like, "So, he's converting tomorrow, right?" And then you go and you talk to him and he's like, "Yeah, I'm basically at like 0% that Catholicism is true right now, like some some crazy value, you know, and so he's exploring like maybe what this means for theism or maybe what it means for Christianity and come up with some kind of liberal Christianity." But over the next few months with Joe and I'm going back with him and I'm trying to make some of the Catholic teachings more palatable, but I'm also just trying to show him that the like cope like accommodationist responses to the Catholic miracles that those are really untenable and that that's just too much of a bullet to bite and that really the types of objections he's raising are like the wrong kinds of reasons to dismiss this kind of evidence and really just pressing them on that and trying to make him reconsider and then give like debunking explanations of all these intuitions. But the thing that happened was the over the initial period where I knew Joe, he was like it wasn't that he had this like motivated reasoning where he was desperate for Catholicism to be true or it was the religion of his youth. And so the moment he found evidence to support it, he then was biting on that evidence or he was just looking for a way to talk himself into it.
¶13No, no, no. It was he had a mountain of evidence and he was resisting it basically by testing out every single possible alternative that he could and trying to cling to that and was going and was like he sent me a document with like 150 objections that are like multiple subpoint objections to Catholicism. You go through it, it's all like mory and intuitions and it's like book of Daniel's a forgery. Doctrine on hell is abominable. Natural law theory is completely untenable and you go through the whole giant document.
¶14He's like and and sorry I don't know where he gets the time for this by the way, but he's like and sorry I just took a quick break from writing all my peer-reviewed articles to just throw together this 800page document that you couldn't write in a year. I wish I could do more. Maybe I'll get back to it in the winter. And you're like, whoa. And I'm like, "Okay, well, how about we just stop and just take whatever you think the best one is and then see if we can work through that.
¶15And if that one has an answer, maybe just inductively we're going to think that if me and you do these like hashing it out sessions that we're going to make some further progress here." And we basically take that approach and we get more miracle evidence and we, you know, work through some of these individual objections taking it very peacemeal rather than comprehensively trying to deal with everything. But like at every stage here, given where he was at with the evidence, it seemed to me that he was like desperately dragging his feet to coming to the conclusion that a normal credulous person would have arrived at, right? It was like dealing with the hyperskeepic and it was just that there was an extraordinary burden of proof that needed to be met. But then after we had that conversation that one night about Padre Peio and he especially had that Adam Bllye stigmatist case in the background which is also something that was very plausibility raising for him for stigmata because he just really didn't want to call Adam Bllye a liar but he also didn't see how Adam Bllye could be conce could be sincere and it just not basically prove you know that this was that a miracle had taken place and so when he sees all this evidence the overwhelming evidence for the authenticity of Padre Pio's charism At that point, he decides not that Catholicism is true. That's actually something he's simplifying, right?
¶16At first, he decides Christianity is true that night. That's his initial conclusion. And then by the time I hear about it and I'm I'm and so then I'm talking with him that night about why, okay, well, if you go for Christianity, you got to go all the way to Catholicism. Like, and if your main reason for being Christian is all these Catholic miracles, you're going to be in kind of a weird situation. Um, but anyways, so then when he wakes up the next morning, that's when I'm getting, "Okay, fine.
¶17I decided I'm going to spend the whole day preparing my whole life confession and do my whole general confession and confess all my sins and I'm going to be in right standing with the priest." And I'm telling you, like a week later than that, he has like surpassed me with like a year head start on like Catholic spirituality. And like he's got like this crazy prayer regimen that he's adhering to and he's making I won't go into this just to protect his privacy, but like I'm guaranteeing for you he has made extremely costly personal sacrifices for Catholicism. Okay? Like extremely like that most people wouldn't make. Okay?
¶18And so it is it is kind of incredible to see that and then to see him also then spend the next few months and he was planning on doing it for even longer and we encouraged him to come out sooner with this cuz it was just taking a toll taking a toll to basically not be able to tell people that he was Catholic but then have to keep up appearances right without lying to people or deceiving them. Um and it was hard for him to do that. But over that whole period, he's just doing like prayer, sacramental life, like going and working at, you know, soup kitchens and like do like he's literally living out Catholicism to a much greater degree than the vast majority of Catholics do over this whole period. And he's doing it without getting any attention or publicity for himself. And he's the one who's so anxious about the backlash he's going to receive, right?
¶19and how he's going to explain this to everybody that he's the one who's wanting to push it and he's having to be encouraged by all of us to accelerate the timeline for when he's going to make this announcement to the world um just so he doesn't have to be in this sort of weird liinal position anymore. But yeah, so my experience with Joe has been first he was not a motivated reasoner who was just looking for reason to be Catholicism to be true. He was extremely motivated against Catholicism. Second, he was convinced largely by overwhelming evidence, right? But you could also see there was a change happening spiritually too over this period and he was becoming more receptive to it.
¶20And then finally once he believed it was true, he has just completely radically transformed his whole life to live in accordance with it. And he's made extremely costly personal sacrifices and he takes it like as seriously as anybody you've ever met. >> Right. Yeah. Let's uh turn it over to Cesar now.
¶21Cesar, what is your experience with Joe? >> I've known Joe for I think um coming up close to a decade, I think sometime after my own conversion in 2016 when I was doing grad work in philosophy. And mostly it was just online Facebook arguing. Anyone who knows Joe knows that he's like quick to respond and write a book about why you're wrong. and we had a lot of back and forth back when he was an agnostic or an or maybe even an atheist.
¶22Um, but just an anecdote to illustrate a a very recent anecdote to illustrate everything Ethan just said about how unlikely it was that Joe would be like this major convert to Catholicism. Um, I think probably maybe it was la last week I I uh texted a a buddy of mine who's um very anti-atholic. this kind of guy who's never going to convert. Well, um, we have to pray for him. But I asked him, you know, what kind of miracle would it take for you to be convinced of Catholicism?
¶23And he didn't answer me. But then Joe Schmid publishes his announcement video and my friend texts me and he says, "I'm so glad I didn't answer you because the the first thought that I had was uh responding by saying Joe Schmidt converting to Catholicism." And of course, you know, if he had done that, I was in on it. I I knew that Joe was about to do this and I would have held him to that. Um but alas he he didn't but but that just highlights that like for people who um have known Joe online over the years and have seen him progress um you know uh as a philosopher and also um on his channel. It was extremely unlikely that he'd move in this direction and yet here we are.
¶24Um, so, uh, Joe let me in on it, um, I think some time ago now. Uh, but this would have been when he was getting into the miracles and, you know, he'd share all this evidence with me. I I had a very, you know, much more conventional conversion to Catholicism. It was like I was already convinced of Christianity because of the philosophical arguments and the resurrection. And then I discovered history and the early church doesn't look Protestant.
¶25So you got to be Catholic if you're a Christian, right? Um but I was always you know my vestigial protest Pro Protestantism made me skeptical of all these miracle claims like you know I I had heard of course of Padre Peio and um and Eucharistic miracles and I saw the pictures of the Eucharistic miracles you know with the red on the on the host but you know in the back of my mind I was like the these these things can never be um useful apologetically. Um, and then Joe comes into the picture and here is the skeptic, you know, who's like, I mean, you've got to look into this this there's a lot of evidence for a lot of these miracles and it's kind of scary. And he was totally right. So then I think he shared that video that um or or it was a conversation that he had with Ethan that they recorded and he shared that to me privately and um I think in that video he said, "Well, I think I've got to be Christian." but it was uncertain whether he would be Catholic.
¶26I followed up with him um not long after that just to see how he was uh doing. And then he responds by saying I think it was with you now. Correct me if I'm wrong. Um I went to confession, went to mass, and for the first time in ages, I um participated in the Eucharist and I'm back home. and I was a, you know, I was able to welcome him home and it was just an awesome moment and Joe's an inspiration.
¶27Anyone who thinks um he's insincere um well I mean it just flies in the face of a mountain of publicly available evidence but now you have four people who actually know him who can confirm that this is the real deal. >> Cesar, real quick before we move to Noah, just because some people might not be familiar with who you are, who are you? Um I did a master's at Oxford in philosophy but then I decided to go to law school. So now I'm a lawyer and I write on u my substack at Clazia Antiqua where I you know my hobby is basically church history. I I publish some um essays in some scholarly journals uh in that area and also I I publish a bunch of my substacks.
¶28So Joe Joe and I had conversations about the church history side of his uh journey as well. >> All right, Noah, let's turn to you now. And you you've got a really personal relationship with Joe as well. I mean, cuz you guys both are both at Princeton, so you're like in person with him all the time. I say all the time, I don't know how often it is, but you you just you know him maybe even better than the rest of us.
¶29So I'm I'm super excited to hear your story. Yeah, Joe's my closest friend. We're students together in the philosophy PhD program at Princeton, but we've known each other for longer than that. We were both affiliated with Purdue University in the past and so we had some connections via Purdue and we actually met at a philosophy of religion conference a couple years ago. And I remember sitting down with him at that conference and asking him what would convince you that theism is true?
¶30And you know what he told me? He said, "If I became convinced that someone had prayed over an amputee in the name of Jesus and their amputated limb had grown back, I would be a theist." And then just a couple years after that, he encountered the overwhelming evidence for the miracle of Colonda, which our friend Caleb Jackson has done a lot of good work on. So, he was true to his word. Um he said that's what would convince me and here we are. So the the overwhelming impression I got from Joe when I first met him and first started spending time with him was just that he was extremely philosophically competent and extremely intellectually virtuous to the point where one of the things that most unsettled me about my faith I was Protestant at the time was that Joe was agnostic.
¶31because he was so smart and so wellinformed and had such an intense zeal for the truth that I thought, "Wow, you know, maybe there's something I'm missing. Uh, maybe I need to reevaluate the evidence." Um, and for a while I was trying to convince him to convert to Christianity, just really any kind. Um, I didn't care too much about his theology at that point, but I was just trying to convince him to become a Christian of some kind. And so I remember one time we were walking around Princeton. This is actually before I before I was a student at Princeton, but this happened at Princeton.
¶32We were walking around and he asked me, "What are your two favorite arguments for theism? What are the two arguments that you find most forceful?" And I said, "Well, the first one is fine-tuning. And then I said, 'The second one is don't laugh. And he said, 'I think I know what you're going to say. And I said, 'The argument for miracles.
¶33And he puts his face in his hands and he looks at me and he says, "Oh my goodness, me too." And then he just talked for like two just like un you know, Joe, like an uninterrupted spiel for two hours. Just like this all this information, all of this evidence that he'd been gathering over the last few months and how was really starting to unsettle him. And so from that moment on, we talked about miracles every chance we got. And I can corroborate what Ethan said about the gazillionpage document about objections to Catholicism. That's something that we also discussed at length.
¶34for the people watching and in particular for the people reacting to Joe's conversion by saying that he hasn't thought carefully enough about the objections to Catholicism. Joe has thought and written more about the objections to Catholicism in the last year than you will ever think or write in your entire life most likely unless you're like a theologian or a philosopher of religion watching this stream. Um, and he was coming to me with objections about hell and about Old Testament violence and about biblical inherency. Every objection you can imagine to tra traditional Christianity, it came up and we talked about it extensively. And he was not I mean he did not receive my answers passively.
¶35Like there was a lot of push back. Um, he was really really wrestling with this stuff. And I agree with Ethan Ethan's assessment. he was, if anything, he was picking away from Catholicism, not toward it. Um, and yeah, so, uh, I remember when he went to confession, he texted me and he said, I'm he's this was after the Padre Peio call.
¶36So, he talked to Ethan. They recorded the conversation and I watched it. Um, and I watched Joe on video just like his facial expression change. I just like I saw the moment when he finally just gave it up. He finally just said, "Come on.
¶37Come on, guys. Christianity is true. There's just no getting around it." And that night, I mean, here's something you need to know about Joe, okay? He is extremely cautious and meticulous in his search for truth. But as soon as he's convinced he has the truth, he acts on it immediately.
¶38He just goes allin. And so that night he went and he made a general confession. We went to mass together shortly after that and I saw him receive the Eucharist for the first time ever. I was very jealous because I had I had come to believe that Catholicism was true. uh partly as a result of his influence over the course of the previous months and I could not yet receive the Eucharist because I hadn't been confirmed.
¶39And then within a couple of weeks, Joe emails me and he says, "Hey, you know, I've been thinking about Christ's command to care for the poor and I think we should start serving at a local soup kitchen regularly. Do you want to come?" And I said, "Yeah." So we and I just went there with him today. I just came back from spending 3 hours at the soup kitchen with Joe Schmid. He's like standing back there with a hairet packing dinners for people because he loves Jesus and thinks that's what Jesus wants him to do. Okay, so that's what's going on with Joe Schmid right now.
¶40If anybody was confused about it, just tell I know I'm talking a lot, but I just want to say tell one more anecdote about Joe. That's just like just a perfect Joe moment. Joe attended my confirmation. Okay, because I I converted around the same time he did also largely on the basis of the evidence for vindicatory Catholic miracles. And Joe, well, first of all, he cried when I received the Eucharist for the first time, which was very moving.
¶41his crying about it. Maybe my reception of the Eucharist for the first time was also moving. I mean, evidently it was for him. But he was also watching very carefully. And the reason I know this is because after he came to me and he said, "Noah, don't freak out, but I think your confirmation may have been invalid because the priest used the wrong verbal formula." So he like came to my confirmation to make sure that the priest used the proper formula so that all the sacraments I received would be valid.
¶42And then he went with me to that priest the following day to ask uh for a conditional confirmation just to cover the bases in case the first one was invalid. Um, and I was very stressed about that because obviously it's a very awkward thing to do to go to a priest who just conf just confirmed you and say, "Hey, I know I've been Catholic for like eight hours, but I'm pretty sure you used the wrong verbal formula and I would like to be confirmed again, please." Um, so so he knew I was very I was very uncomfortable, so he came with me for moral support and I really appreciated that. And yeah, I mean, I agree with Ethan. Just being around Joe Schmid makes all of these reactions, not all of them, but most of the negative ones seem not only basis, but just completely antithetical to the truth. Totally absurd.
¶43Just bonkers. I mean, these people are >> they're 180 degrees turned around. They're facing in the opposite direction. So, >> Well, yeah. I mean, we could we could probably spend the whole night just talking about our experiences with Joe and how he's had a positive impact on our lives and stuff.
¶44Let's turn though to some reactions. Okay, I promised you that we would respond to some of the things that people have been saying. So, let's turn to our first one. We're going to look at Twitter first. So Gnostic informant says, "Wow, the same exact sect that Majesty of Reason devoutly grew up in just magically happens to be the only true religion with the only real miracles.
¶45Just amazing. What are the odds?" Uh, what do you guys think about this one? >> Okay, I can go on this. So, okay, the first thing I would say is no, he doesn't think that Catholicism is the only religion that has real miracles, right? In fact, one of the first miracles that he acknowledges in almost all the videos where he's mentioned the argument for miracles is Our Lady of Zun, right, which is happening in a Coptic Orthodox context rather than a Catholic context, right?
¶46But he's more than willing to concede that there are miracles that happen across all these sects. Now he does think that Catholicism is uniquely privileged by miracles both because Catholicism has miracles with vindicatory implications that are specific to Catholicism. So it's an authentic miracle where there's good evidence that it's naturalistically inexplicable where you it seems like you can exclude like a demonic explanation, right? And where it seems like God is like affirming some actual religious proposition that wouldn't make any sense for him to affirm unless Catholicism was true or God was a liar, right? And he also is looking at the overall distribution and he's saying, "Oh yeah, this does seem to conspicuously favor Catholicism in particular." Right?
¶47So just so we're clear on the form of the reasoning that he's using, he's not saying that we're the only ones with real miracles, though he is saying that the miracle record has features that privilege Catholicism uniquely. Now then he makes the second point, which is, oh, the one that he devoutly grew up in, right? What a coincidence that that's the one that's uniquely privileged by the miracle record. Well, actually, let's get clear here. It's not actually that much of a coincidence if the religion he happens to grow up in is also the largest and most important and most ancient religion on the planet.
¶48Right? So if if Christianity was the biggest religion, if there was one religion that was the sole religion that was uniquely privileged by God, it would kind of make sense that actually lots of people would wind up being growing up and it wouldn't be like a huge conspiracy, right? That the big important one that's the most ancient institution on the planet, right? that that was the one that turned out to be right. You know that.
¶49So I I don't think it actually is a striking coincidence, but we've got it from all angles, right? So I'm a guy who has a similar background as Joe in terms of being like this like analytic philosophy guy going through the atheist agnostic, you know, non-atholic phases of my life, right? And so I grew up Protestant, right? Now, using the logic of this argument, I looking at the same considerations as Joe, reasoning through them the same way, should arrive at a different conclusion that my Protestant Baptist sect, which was way more consistent with my upbringing than Catholicism, right, was the one that was favored by miracles or at least that miracles were inconclusive or what have you. But that's not the conclusion I arrived at, right?
¶50I come to Catholicism, right? And we can see this with a whole bunch of people. I mean, we can also notice we are the ones who make arguments for miracles. These other sects, everybody else we're talking to, all the Protestants, they're not like, "Oh, these Catholics are so stupid." Because they don't realize we have amazing Protestant miracles that are way better than their Catholic miracles, right? They're like, "No, miracles, they're not the right sort of thing to look at, right?
¶51That's what the Muslims are saying, too." Okay. Well, isn't that weird? We want everybody to pay attention to miracles. They don't want people to pay attention to miracles. Maybe that's because we've got the best miracles that it's not just because Joe's biased.
¶52>> A little little push back because Protestants often appeal to the resurrection which is a miracle. >> No, but they're not appealing to the resurrection to prove Protestantism over Catholicism. Right. >> So that's what we're saying. And so and literally all these Protestants where you go through Twitter right now, all of them are saying it's actually silly to try to use miracles to prove the right to domination.
¶53Now, I agree there's an inconsistency with Protestants, right? Where why can you use the resurrection to prove Christianity if miracles in principle can't be used to prove specific religions and religious doctrines are true, right? So, what is the logic of using the resurrection argument for Christianity if you're just going to say in principle we can't use miracles to decide which Christian sect is right? Right? So, either it's going to be God when God vindicates somebody who has a message, he's not going to do that if it's the message is a lie, right?
¶54Either you're going with that in which case then if we're making claims like for instance in the Fatimus years that Mary is affirming the papacy and then is confirming that in extraordinary way either that's perfectly okay in principle as a form of argumentation or you can't run the resurrection apologetic that you guys like to run. >> Let's do this. Let's let's move on to our next one. I think that that was pretty comprehensive. We don't need to get any more uh responses.
¶55Although we probably could get more responses unless you guys want to hop in. Um, let let's move on to this one from Paul Gia. So, we're focusing on like the secular responses so far. All right. So, Paul Gia uh posted this a day ago.
¶56For now, the biggest takeaway from the Joe Schmid conversion is the love bombing from Christians. His previous best video had 88K views, but him but his I'm Catholic now announcement video got 100k views in 2 days. He gained 10,000 subscribers, 25% jump in 4 days. He is appearing or scheduled to be on the biggest Christian platforms. I'm often told I'm unwilling to become a Christian because it would hurt my career.
¶57On the contrary, if I was in it for the money, I'd become that celebrated prodigal son. Watch them bring out the fattened calf. Note, this is a post about my motives, not Joe's. I'm not a mind readader. So, yeah.
¶58Any Yeah, go ahead, Noah. >> I'd like to address this one. So I think what Paul Oia is implying here is that Joe converted to Catholicism in order to boost his career prospects. This is completely absurd for a variety of reasons. The first being Joe has for a long time been angling for a job in analytic philosophy.
¶59Coming out as Catholic does not improve your career prospects in analytic philosophy. It just doesn't. There are Catholic analytic philosophers, but they're a small minority. And outing yourself as Catholic involves publicly committing to committing yourself to a bunch of propositions that are widely considered false and absurd and perhaps even like compromising of one's character or philosophical competence by analytic philosophers. So I can guarantee that Joe's job prospects like qua candidate for a professorship in analytic philosophy have gotten worse and he knows that.
¶60Let me just give an anecdote about the philosophy department here at Princeton. Now I won't name the individuals involved in this story for obvious reasons but I last year attended a departmental event. We hosted a colloquium speaker and uh we treated them to dinner and at dinner several senior faculty from the department started making fun of Catholics. Um they were lamenting the fact that a former student from the department who was extremely bright, extremely talented and extremely industrious had despite that left the department a Catholic. um and that they were like making fun of the resurrection and various potential like models for the bodily resurrection.
¶61So that just that's just to say this might not be obvious to people outside analytic philosophy, but this is a hostile environment for Catholics. Now, I don't want to really exaggerate it. It's not like we're being constantly persecuted or talked down to or anything like that, or at least that hasn't happened to me yet. But it's certainly not the case that analytic philosophers especially analytic philosophers who know Joe personally are going to be happy about his conversion. Here's >> Can I make a point on that?
¶62Um ju just just quickly because I I'm a lawyer now precisely because I was convinced I could not get a job in academic philosophy having published as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student in the wrong areas God guns and abortion and having converted to Catholicism. So, I mean, I know firsthand having experienced all the the sorts of comments, you know, Christianity is stupid. And the funny thing is that all the people saying this, including Polyia, think that Christianity is absurd, right? So, they're precisely the kinds of people who would be biased against um uh conservatives and Christians or or Catholics in academia. And you see that in this very post.
¶63It's a hostile environment for us. And the idea that coming out as a conservative or as a Christian or as a Catholic would improve your chances of getting a tenure track position at a secular university versus being restricted to religious institutions where you might end up um in an arctic tundra or a cornfield because you won't have a choice about where to live. you're restricted only to these small religious institutions. I mean it it's obviously transparently absurd and the f and the other evidence is that Joe obviously was on track is on track to an academic career. He was publishing in the top journals, news, Phil mind, Phil studies, I think as an undergraduate books, right?
¶64So he had, you know, like like this is this is the worst one of the worst things he could have done to improve his chances. He was already there. >> So it's in spite of that motive. >> Let's discuss just a bit more broadly because this is, you know, even if Paul Gia, he says at the end of it like this is not a post, this is a post about my motives, not Joe's. So, I want to speak to that actually real quick.
¶65The little >> Okay. Well, I Yeah, come come come in on that. But what I wanted to just say is that we'll we'll spend just maybe five minutes talking about the whole grifting narrative that has been developing um even in the comments of his own video and stuff like, "Oh, you're obviously doing this for money." And it it's just a very common sentiment. So, we'll address it more broadly after you make your comment. >> Yeah.
¶66So, the two things I want to say, one is I want to say, hey, obviously it's super underhanded to make this point about well, when there's like a thousand comments under the video and on Twitter from atheists all accusing it of being a grift and him of being insincere and calling his motives into question for this to then come out and do this whole post about how he's uh basically, oh, look at all this attention he's getting and look at all these additional subscribers that he's getting, right? to then and in a way that obviously you're going to have to include an explanatory note at the end to clarify to people. Also, I'm not psychologizing and saying that he's here for the grift. Well, obviously, first of all, that's just not called for, right? Just the even the insinuation, even if you're explicitly saying the opposite, right?
¶67The insinuation is bad. this is not the time for you to remark upon what your career prospects would be like if you converted to Christianity in a way that's obviously going to be seen by many as a snide insinuation that that's really what's happening with Joe right so just even if he's not psychologizing you can by insinuation which is in the context in which he's saying this in the atheist community the way they're reacting to it it's problematic to basically make this statement but second is the substance of his point is also wrong so like it would get a lot of attention in the short term if Pelogia converted to Christianity for sure, but it would also completely hollow out his actual subscriber base and all of his patrons and financial supporters and he would become like a pretty generic Christian apologist guy where it would like like we get, you know, he there'd be an initial spade of attention and he'd have like a good media tour for a little while, but the thing where he actually has a distinctive content and brand. So, I'm just saying like I hope you sincerely convert and we'll pray for you and I advise everyone to pray for you that you sincerely convert, but I'm just saying it will be irrational for you to do that as like a financial decision. >> Yeah, that's a good point. Um, >> can I add something?
¶68>> Yeah. Well, well, let's Yeah, let's let's talk more generally about this uh you know, the grifting narrative that that's developed. >> Yeah. So, I think people are neglecting to ask themselves what Joe likely would have done had he intended to grift. And I think the answer can't be convert to Catholicism.
¶69Because even if we grant the assumption that Joe could reasonably have speced expected this sort of influx of love from Christians postcon conversion. The most rational thing for him to do from a career standpoint would have just been to convert to some more generic form of Christianity, like to identify as a mere Christian or maybe a liberal Protestant. Why? Well, because that certainly would have made Catholics happy, right? I mean, I would have been thrilled for Joe to at least be a Christian of some kind.
¶70And like most Christians in the English-speaking world are Protestant. You know, all of Joe's content is in English. And so it would have been more appealing to a much broader audience. And it would have had fewer drawbacks in academia. Why?
¶71Well, because there are lots of people who identify as Christian in academia, but still hold views that are politically progressive and, you know, sort of like progressive when it comes to morality and when it comes to theology to the point where if you're at an elite university and you identify as a Christian, people are going to assume that you're a progressive Christian. And so, you're not going to get as much flack as you otherwise would have gotten. So had this been a grift, like the thing for Joe to do would have just been to identify as some kind of Christian and then let people assume that he was progressive on politics and morality and was liberal theologically speaking and didn't accept all of those sort of dumb backwards things that Catholics and other like very traditional confessional Christians believe. And that's not what he did. Instead, what he did was he went in for the version of Christianity that's probably going to be the least popular on the English-speaking internet, and that's also going to put him uh like put him in the worst light from the perspective of his colleagues in the academy.
¶72>> I I'll say something really quickly about this, then I think we can move on to another objection. So, this was and is a common response that I get to my conversion. So Cameron is grifting. He just converted to Catholicism because he wanted more patrons or whatever. And it it's really really unfortunate to be accused of something like that when personally you know that like for at least in my case like I was literally just trying to follow the truth.
¶73Like I was I went through this whole ordeal of working through the objections that I had. Then I found these arguments for the papacy I found convincing and I was like okay well I just need to convert. And that was that was my story. That was like the literal only reason why I converted. And it wasn't until after I converted that I started to look around and I was like, "Wait a second, the practical like I should have taken into account the practical side of things in my case a lot more seriously." Like I should have I should have thought how it was going to impact those closest to me.
¶74I should have thought about how it was going to impact my finances. Like I should have thought about those things. before I decided, oh well, this is true, therefore I'm just going to to convert to this religion because I didn't consider those things because it was really about like just trying to get to the truth in my case. That's that that that's my story. And so it's just it's so unfortunate and with someone like Joe, you know, I mean I I can't like get inside of his mind, but there's so many indicators that he's on a similar path where he was just trying to discover the truth and he just happened to become Catholic at the end of his journey.
¶75And so it's just so I mean as someone speaking from the inside of like this is same kind of thing that I see all the time. It's it's really unfortunate that these sort of narratives I mean really what it comes down to is uh CS Lewis had this this story I forget where it comes from I don't know you guys might be able to to help me out with it he he came up with this term bulverism basically means that like instead of explaining why someone is wrong you explain how they became so stupid you know and so you just come up with this like psychoanalysis this story of like this psychology of what led them to this belief and so you're you know it can't be because of the evidence. It can't be because they're really they really care about truth because that that these arguments are so stupid. It can't be because of that. It's got to be some personal motive that they've got.
¶76It's uh there there's a term for it that's been developed and it's just the wrong way to do things. Like just just respond to the arguments. Like why do we have to go through this whole thing of applying these these motives, trying to guess his motives, trying to guess his psychology? like just just stop. He's he's releasing these videos, you know, one a day where he's going through this massive case for Catholicism, the case that convinced him.
¶77Like, wait until that comes out. Respond to that. Don't don't do what you're doing. Don't try to psychologize. It's it's hurtful, you know?
¶78It it really is like it it some of these criticisms that come through like think about what you're doing, okay? Because some of these get through to him, some of them will reach him. And it like it it can be hurtful because you you as as someone who is trying to like go through this whole thing of like figuring out what's true, convert, going through this huge public conversion process as a public figure to to receive these comments of people going after you, your personal motives. Oh, you're just like this evil person really deep down. That's why you did all of this.
¶79It's extremely hurtful. be careful about doing that. That's all I want to say. >> I mean, yeah. And people who are quick to psychize are actually missing out on valuable evidence.
¶80So, the fact that someone much smarter than you and much better informed than you, has changed their mind on a controversial topic constitutes evidence that their new view on that topic is correct. Like if they're if again if they're very competent, very well informed and they've changed their mind against interest, which is true in this case as we've established, you should update in favor of whatever the controversial position is that they've now taken. This is actually like a way especially for non-experts who don't have a lot of time to dive into the first order issues to get closer to the truth. And so if you are a longtime viewer of Joe's, then you probably love the truth, right? you're wedded to the majesty of reason.
¶81And so that means you should be interested in getting all of the evidence that you can when it comes to important issues like the fundamental nature of reality and religious truth. And so like just just before you're quick to psychize Joe, just stop and ask yourself if I psychize him, will I miss something important? Uh will I miss sort of like some evidence that's actually going to get me closer to the truth? >> But let's get I also think it would be good to get more examples. uh to go through some more examples more quickly.
¶82>> Well, um let's do this. Let's take a a quick break and talk about uh or or address some super chats that have come in. Holy Forever says, "Cam over here assembling the Avengers for Catholicism." Uh we actually do have a show planned on Capturing Catholicism this Friday and Joe Schmid will be there. So go check out subscribe to Capturing Catholicism if you're not a subscriber already and be on the lookout for that stream. Four of us and Joe will be there.
¶83Thanks for this show. You're welcome. Magisterium of Reason from Caleb Jackson. Nice. Uh, why didn't Joe consider the Book of Abraham?
¶84Uh, he he sent in another one. He said, "Why is Ethan duck in the Mormons?" No, we have our So this morning, Jacob Hansen reached out and he said, "You know what? I'd like to challenge you to a 2v2 debate where I with an unnamed debate partner, his um ringer that he's going to bring in, would like to debate you and Joe about whether classical theism is consistent with the Bible. So I say, "Well, and I know who his guy is, right? It's going to be Blake Oller, the Mormon thought leader." So then I say, "Okay, I'll take you and Blake on solo.
¶85Okay, I'll do you guys one versus two. Okay, but my one condition is that after we do the debate, you have to do a one v one debate with me about whether the book of Abraham is a forgery. Okay, now to give the audience context, the book of Abraham is the most obvious forgery on the planet. and they come up with like these desperate cope theories like it was never intended to be an accurate translation but it was a stimulus or it's a secret masonic cipher or some crazy stuff that they come up with and Jacob has videos all about it and he knows that if anybody knows the actual facts it's going to be it's really going to be brutal right to do a book of Abraham debate so then after issuing this big public challenge and me saying great let's do it let's do two debates No response. It's been dead radio silence from the Mormons.
¶86>> Catholic says, "Uh, Ethan's background is as blinding as his intelligence." >> I always get comments that say, "Are is Ethan in heaven? >> It's pretty good. Alex Okconor versus Ethan debate on Fatima Padre Pio win. I want to see how he handles the miracle case." Yeah. No, I would love to have Alex Okconor on the show.
¶87Um, so Alex, if you happen to be watching this, just reach out. We will set something up. Uh, Riiff Rifka, please pray for my for the conversion of my family. Thank you for your work on miracles. All I am going to try and pray a daily rosary because of Fatima.
¶88That's great. Let me pray a Hail Mary for this person really quickly. Please, please pray for the conversion of my family. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Hail Mary, full of grace.
¶89The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
¶90All right. It's a done deal. It's a done deal. All right. Next one.
¶91Coins 1985. Joe said he didn't have an answer for hell, but strongly thought the miracles are true, so accepted it. Can we reverse the logic? I can't answer the miracles, but no, eternal conscious torment is wrong, so I reject it. Um, yeah, this is an interesting The reason why I'm I'm responding to this one is because I want to uh try to get back to the uh the responses.
¶92So, I'll just say I'll just I'll just point you to the video that's coming out on capturing Catholicism tomorrow where we talk about the objections that Joe had to Catholicism. And I think that you'll see throughout the course of that interview that this move cannot be made. Okay? There were reasons why it can't be made. But instead of responding to it and and taking super long, I'll just point you to that.
¶93Um, unless either one of you want to uh to take a a quick shot at it. Um, we can we can just move on. >> I think we should just move on to get back to it. We yeah I' I've also addressed this where we think there's an asymmetry between these types of evidence where we can give debunking explanations for the intuitions that favor hell that can't be given for the Catholic miracles and also just relying on highly contested intuition that is also subject to like voluntary control to a much greater degree is like way less sure path than just like the empirical evidence for miracles and you could just think like the example Joe gives in the interview is so you can see that there is an asymmetry is just imagine you hear Jesus teach hell and then you witness him perform all his miracles. You're obviously going to still think that he's the authentic guy and hell must be okay even if you don't know why.
¶94Right. So that's just showing you in real time that this type of evidence can outweigh that type of evidence. >> Yep. All right. Good.
¶95All right. Let's move on and address some more. So now we're going to turn to Protestant responses to Joe's conversion. Just dipping into this from Bethl Mcgru, uh, who is the daughter of Tim and Lydia Mcgru. Let me say really quickly, I have so much love and respect for Tim and Lydia McGru.
¶96Like, I adore them. And so, I have nothing but good things to say about them and their family. So, this is we're we're not trying to bash Bethl here. We're not trying to bash the McGru. That is not the point of this.
¶97The point of this is to respond substantively to the things that she's saying here. Just dipping into this, but it's frustrating that Schmid still seems to have only a very surface level understanding of New Testament evidences intersecting with his weak grasp of epistemology. Hopefully, someone can guide him here. Yeah. Does Joe have a weak grasp of Let's start with that one.
¶98Epistemology. >> No. That's ridiculous. Um, I think it needs to be emphasized how unbelievably good a philosopher Joe is. He really is in the running for like the most prolific philosophy graduate student in recent history.
¶99He's published multiple papers in Noose. People who aren't part of the philosophy world don't know what that means. I'll translate it for you. Um, he's extremely accomplished as a philosopher. He's placed more articles in top philosophy journals than most philosophers can hope to place over the entire course of their career.
¶100Okay? And he doesn't even have a PhD yet, right? He hasn't even written he hasn't even started writing his dissertation yet. Um, so the suggestion that Joe is making a mistake here because his grasp of any major area of philosophy is weak is just completely untenable. Um, but I'll make another comment about this.
¶101In the interview that Mcgru is commenting on, Joe actually grants that all of the gospels are or are immediately based on eyewitness testimony. And what everything he said in that interview is consistent with thinking that they're written very early. And so even if we grant uh the most conservative dates for the gospels that New Testament scholars have entertained, we could even place all of them prior to 70 still probably the earliest gospel mark we're going to date to the early 50s in that case. And Joe's point was in this case we have a total of maybe four or five eyewitnesses writing decades after the fact. And that claim is true even given like a very conservative perspective on the quality of the evidence in the gospels.
¶102Um, and so she's going to say she's not going to count it based on the author. She's going to count it based off of the sources for the author. So she's probably going to give us a number that's like dozens of witnesses or the sources that are that are basically going into the gospels. Yeah, that that could be right. But >> but I but I think I I mean the point stands which is just that um obviously for all the Catholic miracles that she summarily dismisses, right?
¶103We have contemporaneous testimony where it's witness statements taken down where it's like a name is signed to it. It's sworn, right? Here's the date. Here's a detailed statement of what I specifically saw oftentimes from hundreds of individuals, right? Including people that we could show were hostile and educated and all this stuff, right?
¶104And so there is a big inconsistency in Mcgru's epistemology for miracles, right? Which is to treat where we're having to infer who the notnamed sources are for the document, which we can do and we can say, oh well, these probably are reliable documents and this provides us with good probitative evidence. But the thing we shouldn't do is then set aside cases where we've got photographs, where we've got videos, where we've got hundreds of witness statements that are contemporaneous, where it's names, where they're sworn, where it's hostile, where they're educated, right? That if and so when you're setting aside all of that miracle evidence and summarily dismissing that miracle evidence and saying that we just need to exclusively focus on what evidence that may be good, but that is just qualitatively inferior, right? That does seem to be like an inconsistency.
¶105And then additionally, if you're going to do an entire, as the Mcgru do, an apologetic for an exclusivist religion based on miracles, you can't denigrate appealing to miracles in principle, right? So obviously our kinds of evidence are better and our style of reasoning is the same. So why are you making fun of us? What what and she this is another thing she does is she doesn't explain. She likes making these vague statements where she's sort of like giving us like a condescending lecture from the high tower like, "Oh, I know a lot about New Testament evidence because I narrated my mom's audio book." Right?
¶106And then meanwhile, Joe, new kid on the block rolling in with his very superficial grasp of these matters, right? And obviously Joe's not claiming to be a New Testament scholar. That's not the basis for anything he's saying here. He's not claim his case isn't really based off of he's he's not really offering substantive commentary on the historical case for the resurrection based on the gospels. That's not that that wasn't the point of anything he said or did.
¶107Right? But then we're getting these vague references. What is the problem with his epistemology? That might actually be useful. Like the ad hominemum insult that's like you have a weak grasp of epistemology.
¶108Not helpful. Could you tell us why? So I go and I make this criticism in one of my replies to Bethl there. Okay. She's like, "Just so everybody knows, nothing of importance stands or falls on Padre Pio's stigmata." And I said, "Okay, well, if it turns out that there are videos and photographs and medical examinations and literally thousands of witnesses to naturalistically inexplicable wounds that the priest says he acquired when Jesus Christ appeared to him and said, "I unite you to my passion." That's extraordinary evidence for Christianity.
¶109So, it's very important if true, very big if true, right? That's amazing evidence for Christianity which Bethl should even be happy about. Right? So then to be like scandalized that Joe's appealing to that as very important evidence for Christianity, right? And then we go into specific stuff that has even vindicatory implications that are more specific to Catholicism.
¶110So I just go out and I point out the inconsistency and I'm like, if you think the evidence sucks, like it's clearly better than the resurrection evidence, right? Just the first order evidence is clearly better um than the types of evidence that you're appealing to. But like the vindicatory implication of this is very exceedingly clear. So what's the problem? And so what was Bethl's?
¶111This is this is going to be the part where Bethl is going to tell me my poor grasp of epistemology, right? She's going to explain why I have a very weak understanding of epistemology. And her response, I'm not joking, is literally all lowercase bro with no further elaboration. >> Yeah. I think it's important to emphasize.
¶112I mean, cuz people get tripped up when we say things like, "Well, we have better evidence for Christianity than what we have for the resurrection." And that really trips out Protestants because if you look and like in my case, when I first started to investigate Christianity, I looked the first thing I looked up was like, is there any evidence that Jesus rose from the dead? Like, what is the what is our evidence base? And then I learned from people like William Lane Craig that, oh, actually, you can make a case for the resurrection and it's not too shabby. Like, it's not too bad. And but the the problem though is that like if you're if you're just sort of inculcated in the Protestant world, that's the only evidence really that you have for the truth of Christianity.
¶113Some people do appeal to miracles outside of the resurrection. Um so I'm not saying that, but like pretty much everyone in the Protestant world will say, "Oh, well the the the resurrection is the best evidenced miracle for the truth of Christianity that we have." Okay. And what we're saying is that actually no, there are more modern miracles that are better evidenced, not necessarily more important than the resurrection. And that's the key thing that people are missing is that we agree that the resurrection is more important, say, theologically, but it doesn't mean that there's it's got to have like the best evidence epistemologically speaking. And >> sorry, >> all of this is consistent with saying that the historical evidence for the resurrection is very strong.
¶114So, we're not attacking that claim. We're just pointing out that in order to be consistent, you can't maintain that the evidence for the resurrection is very strong and the evidence for these Catholic miracles is very weak because it's it's of much greater quality. >> Yeah. Oh, sorry. >> Sorry.
¶115I'll go after you, Ethan. No, no, no. I was just going to say, yeah, so it is important to distinguish between the theological significance or importance of an event and the evidence for it, right? I think all of us can concede that the virgin birth, right, is actually a more important and more significant miracle than any modern miracle like the healing of Barbara Schneider or whatever. But all of us also realize that the evidence we have for the virgin birth is just theological authorities that presuppose that we prove Christianity by other means, right?
¶116We don't generally go and say if you're a hard-nosed skeptic, we're going to prove a virgin birth happened just based off of the, you know, historioggraphy that we have available to substantiate it. So, all of us recognize that, right? That they're going to be particular examples of histo, you know, the parting of the Red Sea, right? It's going to be harder based on sheer historioggraphy to be like skeptics, you need to posit a miracle based off of the evidence we have for the parting even though that's a very significant event theologically compared to a modern prayer that's answered, right? So we need always need to be it's not actually a remarkable claim to say that there are very theologically significant events with varying levels of evidence for them first order right but then the second thing we need to say is also that there is one sense in which the evidence for the resurrection is better right which is that all the miracle evidence we're saying is further evidence for the resurrection right it's way more expected given that the resurrection is true that Jesus Christ appears with his passion wounds to Padre Peio and says I unite you to my passion >> right I All of those things are actually instances of further amazing evidence for the resurrection that's continuing to this day, right?
¶117And so because it's so central to this web that's receiving constant viticatory evidence, actually the resurrection evidence accumulates the more of this modern evidence that we give credit to. And then finally, I'll just say this as a brief aside, the evidence for the resurrection is pretty good, not just historically, but also archaeologically. Like we do happen to have a photograph of the event called the Holy Shroud of Turin, but that's a whole discussion for another day. >> Yeah. All right, let's move on to another one.
¶118Uh oh, yeah. No, this was this is the one that you were just referencing, Ethan, where she says, "I'm happy for this Joe Schmid fellow, but absolutely nothing of importance hangs on Padre Pio stigmata." Just so people are aware. >> Could you click on it to see if we can show the part where she just goes, bro? >> Yes. >> Yeah.
¶119There it is. >> Yeah. If you I'll read it out for for the audience who uh might just be listening to this. If you This is what Ethan Muse said in response to that. If you dismiss the overwhelming evidence for the authenticity of Pio Stigmata, photographs, videos, medical examinations, contemporaneous, incredible testimony from thousands of witnesses, then you have no leg to stand on when making a historical case for Christianity based on the resurrection of our Lord.
¶120If you accept it, then how do you fail to realize that a Catholic priest being graced with naturalistically inexplicable wounds that represent the five holy wounds of Christ during an apparition where our Lord appeared to him and said, "I unite you to my passion," is amazing evidence for the Christian faith. Not to mention the abundance of evidence for thousands of miracles connected with this same priest. Her response, "Bro." All right, let's move on. Uh, let's see. Hang on a second.
¶121There we go. All right. So, this one from our favorite Protestant Twitter account, Lizzy. Um, I've been quiet, but I can't now. Protestant saying Eucharistic miracles and apparitions are evidence of God is tragic.
¶122These are the things he named off that led to his conversion. Talking about Joe. We direct people to the word of God, not false and possibly sinister m quote unquote miracles and wonders. redirect people to the gospel, not the Roman Cath Catholic list of fables. Stop this.
¶123This man didn't convert to Christianity. He converted to Romanism by way of lying wonders and/or madeup stories. Can I just uh do a little exercise here? So, I'm just going to read the first two paragraphs of this tweet, but with some words substituted in these followers of Jesus saying resurrections and healings are evidence that Jesus is the son of God is tragic. These are the things they name off that led to their conversion.
¶124We direct people to the law of Moses, not false and possibly sinister miracles and wonders. We direct people to the law, not Jesus list of fables. Now, I think any Christian can see what's problematic about the substitution instance I just read out. This pmic would have worked against Christ. This pmic would have worked for the religious authorities who oppose the ministry of Jesus.
¶125And that like that indicates that's suggestive that there's something wrong with it. Yeah, I think that's good. Do do we need to say anything really else about I mean we we could take it by peace meal, but >> I just want to say um the sentiment expressed toward the end, which is this idea that Catholics aren't Christians. I think uh is believed by many Protestants but increasingly so amongst reformed Baptists which is still a tiny uh fraction of Christianity but it's very loud on the internet and fortunately I think most Protestant apologists and most Protestants uh generally who know about um theology or a lot of the evidence would be happy to see that Catholics are Christians. But this is a this is a growing and increasing view.
¶126And just reflect on how absurd it is to imagine that most people who call themselves Christians, who affirm that Christ is Lord, that he died and was resurrected, that he's God, are not Christians. And just reflect how absurd it is to suppose that for 1500 years when people who called themselves Christians believed all these sorts of accretions, these uh these doctrines that people like Lizzy believe are damnable um were in fact not Christians. And it's not until the 16th century that finally you you get a restoration. It's obviously absurd. Well, and just lastly, I mean, we want to acknowledge that there are going to be, you know, lying or false signs and wonders that are performed as deceptions, right?
¶127And there are going to be prednatural forces that work them. But the whole point is we're trying to maintain two commitments in harmony with each other, right? One is that the way Christ authenticated himself was by saying, "If you don't believe that I'm in the Father, the Father's in me, then believe on the evidence of the works themselves, so that you may know that the Son of Man has the authority to forgive sins. Get up and walk." Right? God's going to confirm his word by the signs that accompany it.
¶128Right? So throughout the entirety of the New Testament, and even going back to Moses, when Moses is first being accredited as a prophet, right? You have miracles that are worked and that are pointed to as credentials and are pointed to as proofs, as certain signs to where people who had theological difficulties weren't justified in rejecting the person that was purporting to be a prophet just because of their theological difficulties in the face of the evidence of miracles. So that's our first commitment we're trying to harmonize. But second is we know that false signs and wonders can occur and that demons are real and that there are deceptions that are going to occur to try to mislead people or lead people into false sex.
¶129Right? And so there needs to be criteria that we can apply to particular cases that allow us to say, okay, this one could be a demon, this one couldn't be. And it needs to be ones that would work for Jesus when he's performing his miracles. Right? So say the miracle worker has inspired sanctity in a way that doesn't presuppose whether his theology is right or not but it's just sort of generally accessible by natural reason to people that this person has inspired sanctity.
¶130We can look would the motives of the demons make sense right within the broader context we can look we can say hey is God the creator as he can be known through natural reason being invoked as a witness to the sign to where he would be lending his name to the deception if he permitted deception to take place where there weren't evident signs of deception accompanying it. And so we go through this and develop this line of thought elsewhere. But we're trying to have a biblical hermeneutic that allows us to say two things at the same time. Miracles can prove they can prove contested theological doctrines. But there are demonic deceptions that are going to occur, but there's discernability.
¶131So you can tell the difference by applying theological criteria. And so there are certain signs that exceed demonic power where if you can verify they've taken place, you can know it wasn't demons that did it. Like prophecies are an example, right? that's given in the Bible. Certain types of healings are given as examples in the Bible, right?
¶132There are certain moral criteria that could be used. So moral circumstances, physical circumstances, certain theological criteria. So all of this is a project called fundamental theology. But you can't summarily dismiss it without reducing yourself to absurdity when you're confronted with the full range of biblical texts. >> Let's do some super chats.
¶133We've had a bunch come in, then we'll turn to some more comments on Twitter. Caleb Jackson, I've been told I look like Jacob Hansen. I don't know how I feel about that. Uh, no, dude. You don't look like him.
¶134No. Skyight. Uh, wait a second. Who's Joe? Talking about Joe Schmid.
¶135Just type in uh YouTube Joe Schmid and you'll see. Intellectual Catholicism. Swansona says, "Had a friend asked whether Ethan engages in God of the gaps in his case for Catholic miracles. How would Ethan the goat respond? Also, hi everyone.
¶136>> Sorry, I'm trying to mute. >> Oh, >> yeah. Yes. >> But yeah, basically the first the first point is that whenever we're going to posit a miracle, it's never going to be because we've just observed some phenomena that we don't know how to explain naturalistically. That'll be part of a making a compelling case for miracle is to show is to exclude naturalistic alternative explanations.
¶137But every miracle case will actually begin with some primmaascia aspect of what has occurred that suggests or recommends to us the supernatural explanation of what has occurred. Right? So there's like for instance if you look at Jesus raising himself from the dead in a glorified body, right? The reason why we're inclined to posit a miracle is it's just evident from the context that this has a sort of religious significance that it's the type of thing that would make more sense for a god to perform as a supernatural act. It's connected with a religious figure, right?
¶138And it's obviously not the sort of thing that we would expect to happen through like an arbitrary undirected natural process without an intelligent plan behind it to suspend whatever the natural laws are that prevent this from ordinarily occurring. So notice how there's two elements here. a positive element and a negative element, right? The negative element is trying to show that there aren't plausible naturalistic alternatives, right? And so that's the part that would be the gaps.
¶139But what makes it not gappy is that we're also requiring a positive element, which is that there have to be features of the case that strongly recommend a supernatural intelligence as being the the causal agent that's responsible for the miracle, right? And so that can be the context or the content of the phenomena that occurs, right? So like for instance, if every time a priest says a prayer and to tell basically some couch to teleport wherever the priest prays for it to be teleported and the priest a 100 times in a row causes macroscopic teleportation of a couch all over the world and the only common factor is the priest's invocation of of God, right? Then we see okay it it's not just if there was just a couch teleporting around without that context then it would be God of the gaps to say it must be God teleported the couch around right but once we bring in the key element that's the context which is that it's through someone explicitly invoking God that's commanding the couch to do things based on the power of God. Now, the fact that it just so happens to coincide with this inexplicable event, then Glenn's plausibility or add initial plausibility to the miracle to where it's now more reasonable to posit a miracle.
¶140And so that's that's the general response. >> All right, next one. As a Protestant, I'm happy Joe found his home and has many loving Catholics making this new life a little easier. That's a good response. This is a this is a paradigm example of >> an appropriate response.
¶141>> Sky Knight. Um I wanted to mention Sky Knight because he is in our Discord server. So if you guys don't know, every patron or channel member um a channel member on Capturing Catholicism, not on this channel. This channel I'm I'm trying to change things around so that we can actually merge the two right now. But if you become a a Patreon member or if you're on our Capturing Christianity channel membership over there, you can gain access to our Discord.
¶142Sky Knight is in there and we talk all the time. So, what's up, Sky? Uh, he says, "Do St. Dominic's visions of our lady What's up?" >> No, go ahead and read the chat. I'm just uh I have something to say.
¶143>> You wanted to talk about it. Okay. Um, do St. Dominic's visions of our Lady of the Rosary give more credence to Fatima because of how they near parallel the miracle of the sun prophecy? Yes.
¶144Here's something people might not know. Joe and I actually co-write a blog on Substack called Veritatus Splendor. Until a couple of days ago, it was anonymous because we wanted to have the freedom to better manage the news of our conversion. But the first post and at the moment the only post although we have more coming soon on that blog is called in defense of the miracle of the sun and it's a 20,000word response to some objections raised by Matthew Adstein and Dustin Kummit to the miracle of the sun at Fatima. So if anybody wants to see Joe's thoughts about Fatima they are available in that article not explicitly under his name but many of those thoughts are Joe's.
¶145But yes, we we point to this case. So, one of the criticisms that Adelstein and KMT, who we refer to collectively as Kredlestein, raised is that the content of the miracle of the sun seems disconnected from the contents of the messages delivered by the apparition to the children. And I think that's surprising given the hypothesis that what people saw at the Kova was miraculous. But we pointed out actually the phenomenology reported by the Fatima witnesses align nicely with other imagery present both in the Bible and in the history of Mary and apparitions. So uh central to the miracle of the son at Fatima was the exhortation to pray the rosary.
¶146Now the rosary was introduced by St. Dominic and I believe the 13th century and there's a story possibly apocryphal of what happened when St. Dominic introduced the rosary and people claimed there was a miracle and here are some of the elements of the miracle. The sun darkened so you could stare at the sun and then an image of the Virgin Mary on the wall behind St. Dominic raised her hands three times to heaven as uh like to symbolize uh the coming judgment of God against those who refused to repent.
¶147And these this parallels the phenomenology at Fatima, right? We have the sun darkening, right? Becoming painless to gaze at appearing in the sky as a pale disc and then the sun descends from the sky three times. And the people present at Fatima interpret this as a portant of divine judgment. So it's actually it's actually kind of striking how well the content of the miracle of the sun uh parallels symbolism that was already associated with the rosary.
¶148And to make this point we again we don't have to assume that this story about St. Dominic is actually true. What's important is that the rosary was already associated with a miracle with similar phenomenology by the time Fatima occurred. >> All right, let's keep going. He sends another one, Noah.
¶149And then he's got some glasses on like you're a nerd, I guess. >> Thank you. >> All right, next one on Adelstein. Have you read Adstein's recent article about why he's not a Catholic? I thought his comparison of Catholic with non-atholic miracles was somewhat weak, but interested in hearing your thoughts.
¶150We'll we'll try to be brief on these so that we can move back and and pick up where we left off. Um, any thoughts on this one? I have not read it, so I can't comment. I wrote a response on my Substack, not on the miracles, but on what he had to say about the papacy and the bishops of Rome. But Ethan, you might have something more to say about the miracle angle.
¶151No, I mean there's part of it which is a lot of Adelstein's stuff is based off of Morian intuitions that he has but about and a lot of them pertain to moral topics and then weighing those against the evidence for uh Catholic miracles, right? And then obviously he gives his various like here's my take on how to mitigate the Catholic miracle evidence and to draw parallels or to offuscate and to muddy the waters right and I mean that would be a whole show into itself that we don't need to get into right but the the thing that I will say just for now in commenting upon his case is that and in further conversations that I had with him after he published this post is just the extent to which he's willing to say even when there's very contested intuitions right so for instance whether absolute deontology is tenable, right? Where there actually is just a strong moral divide between people, but a lot of people find one of the answers plausible and he just happens to be a person who's very strongly on the opposite side, right? So, this is dealing with questions like, would it ever be okay to like torture and kill an innocent child to prevent greater harms, right? Or would it just be categorically impermissible for you to do it even if it would prevent infinite kids from being tortured, right?
¶152For you to just torture this one. So let justice be done though the heavens fall. Right? And so and people famously their moral intuitions are actually very divided on these types of cases especially when you put them in those like extreme limits. Right?
¶153And Adstein is saying him falling on one side of that right that it's definitely okay to go with the consequentialist judgment. He's saying not only does he accept that based off of its intuitive force to him even though it's so contested but actually he's like 1,000% sure it's true. so true to an extent that it would just overturn all miracle evidence that you could present. You know, so true that he's more sure of that than basically any rival argument that you could ever put forward for any proposition, right? And to me, this seems like a very unreasonable way of reasoning, which is in order to give that type of force to the intuition, he'd have to be thinking that somehow he won the epistemic lottery to where just the fact that an intuition is in his head makes it way more evidentially valuable, right?
¶154Than if the intuition is in somebody else's head. But if you just go with a social epistemology where you're like, "Yeah, give weight to intuitions, but don't treat the intuition just cuz it's in your head as if it's more valuable than everybody else's." If you consiliate between them, you then have to say, "Okay, we need to be more moderate about this. It's a highly contested first order issue." And literally the only data here is how you feel, right? You think you're seeing it. Other people think they're seeing the opposite.
¶155And there's a wide range of different diverse takes that are being given. I say, "Let's treat that as weak or equivocal evidence." And he's trying to treat it as like this is like a axiom of mathematics that I can't possibly reject, right? Even though it's not widely shared, universal, entrenched, it doesn't meet anything other than this sort of subjective criteria of how forceful it seems to him, right? And so, and we see that is something that's going to keep coming up again and again in how Matthew's reasoning through these issues, which is he has very idiosyncratic moral judgments. So just like for context for the audience, he's a person who has encouraged people to donate large amounts of money to the shrimp welfare project and thinks because there's so many shrimp, right?
¶156If there's even a small chance that they're suffering, then it's really important that we stop everybody from buying shrimp, right? And so and and so he's devoted himself, you know, uncompromisingly to this task, right? And so he's a guy who has like weird idiosyncratic takes about a bunch of stuff, but he gets himself like super convinced of them. And then because he performs this confidence now I have unshakable certainty that this is true that I'm not willing to revise based on the empirical evidence. And so it gets you to this thing where it's just and I I will stop rambling, but the thing I'll say is I think the thing we need to work on with Adelstein's response is thinking through when appeals to like strong intuitions are really strong evidence and when they're just like moderate or equivocal evidence because the phenomenological strength of the intuition doesn't translate onetoone to the evidential value of the intuition.
¶157>> All right, let's move on to another one. Wouldn't it be nice to make the nettle self-sacrifice a thing again? Like paired with contrite prayer and reflection to show how tame it really is. Um, I saw this one pop up a little bit earlier. I just wanted to to point people to the debate review stream that we did with Ethan on Fatima.
¶158Ethan debated Sean Luke on whether Fatima was demonic. And we did a debate stream uh review after the fact over at Capturing Catholicism. And uh I actually went out and found some nettles that were like in this little forest like by my house and we did a little experiment there on how bad it was to actually like whip yourself with nettles. How what does this sensation actually feel like? So um I would highly encourage you to go check that out if you're having problems with the whole nettles thing.
¶159Uh let's move on to our next one. Jean Rousus, I don't care. Joe was published in philosophy journals. They are not scientific journals, but they won't tell you that. If you know, you know.
¶160>> They are not scientific journals. We just told you that. >> Yeah. I think he's making a joke. >> He's referencing Cade Bradley's video.
¶161>> Wait, that was attacking me. >> Yeah. Yeah. Uh, Sky Knight, another one from Skyight. Hey, Ethan.
¶162How do you discern whether a certain prophecy is pre-ternatural, demonic, or from God? To what extent did demons know the future? Um, let's maybe not spend too much time on this just because you've you've talked about this at length other places. >> I'll I'll cover it a bunch more times and I'll write methodological posts in the future. So, we'll get more on this, >> but I actually do I I came here to defend Joe.
¶163We we talked about like three posts. >> We'll we'll do this la we'll do this last one. We'll get back to uh >> to uh the the X. What prophecies and physical he physic healings can only God do? Um, yeah, let's let's hold off on that one.
¶164We'll we'll get back to uh to X here. All right, so we've talked about Lizzy. Um, we're back to Bethl McGru. Protestant friends from Drago. Protestant friends, on a scale of 1 to 10, when you see an intellectual like Joe Schmid become Catholic, how much does it lead you to consider the case for Catholicism again with fresh eyes?
¶165And Bethl says zero. That answer wasn't on the scale. I just like to point out she hasn't actually answered the question. >> Well, she's >> well, she's trying to be facicious so that she shows that it's like even off the scale. That's how low it is.
¶166>> It's off the charts how unimpressed she is by Joe's conversion. But it's just it's just the thing that I think everybody should take seriously. Even Joe with his very superficial understanding of New Testament history and weak grasp of epistemology. But even someone like that for him to have been as strongly motivated against Catholicism as he was and to have spent as much time as he has digging into the Catholic miracle evidence. If you yourself have not looked at this evidence at all, if your opinion is in large part based off of your assumptions about how good this evidence is, learning that a really famous skeptic guy who was strongly motivated to reject Catholicism did months of deep diving into all the disputes on both sides about whether there was any there there for the miracles.
¶167the fact that it convinced him despite having all these massive objections that he didn't know how to solve on the strength of that evidence to set them aside and convert, that should give you a really really big boost that hey, there's some there there. So, if you started out initially skeptical and didn't think it was worth looking into, well, now you know that if if your if your skepticism is mainly based on the quality of the evidence when subjected to a thorough and critical examination, this is telling you, okay, well, I at least need to now take this seriously. I need I should take this seriously if it's the sort of evidence that a guy like this could set aside all his philosophical objections because he found this just so compelling >> and just Let's appreciate that the question she's answering is how much does it lead you to consider the case for Catholicism again with fresh eyes. So the question isn't even like to what extent does this make you more confident that Catholicism is true. The question is just is this a reason to reinvestigate?
¶168And she thinks no it's no reason at all to even reinvestigate which is kind of I mean that's just about the most extreme claim you could make in this context. It's also, I think, not one with which her father would agree because on Twitter he was engaging um the two of us, Ethan, on the evidence for Eucharistic miracles. So, he's taking a look at some of these miracle claims and there's at least some evidence that he was reading Ethan's article on the subject. So I'd just encourage Bethl to take a look at the evidence for Zetun, for some of these eucharistic miracles, for Fatima and just compare them to the sorts of things that she believes about the evidence for the resurrection. All right, let's move to another one.
¶169Uh let's see. Okay, so these are two from Lizzy and Danny. No, I won't rejoice when someone converts to Catholicism. Sorry, I'll stand alone if in that if I have to. Just me and my Bible.
¶170No worries. Danny, I'm with you. There is no cause to celebrate when someone goes from atheist to false religion. The person remains unsaved and is in danger of hell. I mean, we've already talked about this, so we may not even need to cover this anymore unless you guys want to say something.
¶171Uh, we can move on. Amos Woolen, if Joe had been honest and said, I'm afraid of death and want to make money, this video could have been a whole lot shorter. >> Yeah. So, I think isn't Amos like trolling here? He's he's kind of trolling about his motives, but we can still talk about it, right?
¶172>> Uh sort of psychologizing Joe that he's just, you know, doing this for really bad reasons or really, you know, personal psych psychological reasons. Um outside of just outside of grifting, >> but let's respond to this in the context of one of the real posts. Uh >> what are you talking about? I'm saying let's get let's let's have in addition to AO saying this in justest let's just let's save some of these comments for when we get a person who's unironically making the charge. >> Oh uh I don't know that I've got someone uh I don't I don't know that I've got an example of someone making that comment ready to go.
¶173>> Okay, I can pull them up. >> I'll pull them up, but we can keep going as it is. >> Okay. Uh we've got needgod.net. net.
¶174Protestants need to be far more discerning about celebrating Joe Schmid's conversion to Catholicism. He's sadly straight into bad theology from the get-go. Take a look. And he's already vocally telling people to embrace Rome. This is uh this is the Rome that says it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff and anathematizes justification by faith alone.
¶175In in another post he said that Joe jumped out of the frying pan as an atheist agnostic and into the fire. And um th this by the way just so everyone knows this is same needgot.net net who in his debate with Joe Heshmire um couldn't identify a single Christian a single Christian um who in his theology would be saved because in the first few centuries all of our evidence suggests that Christians believed that baptism is necessary and Ryan thinks that if you think if you even believe that baptism is necessary you're out so he can't name any Christian for like the first 1500 years of church history. And so it's not surprising that he takes this view that Joe is on his way to hell, which again is just an absurd view for someone who confesses that Christ is um is God and is resurrected, etc. >> Ethan, if you want to share your screen, we can show some >> Sorry. Sorry.
¶176On his way to hell on account of not being a Christian, I should say. Yeah, Ethan, if you have some more that you'd like to go through, uh, we can do that. Converting to an institution is different than converting to Christ, particularly if that institution rejects the biblical way of salvation and elevates Mary to the status of queen over all things. He went from the frying pan into the fire. There you go.
¶177Uh, okay. Do we want to cover anything from Tim Mcgru on Eucharistic uh, miracles or should we uh, cover Timothy Gordon who is our first proatholic? One thing uh um Tim Mcgru suggested. C can you scroll down a little bit? Yeah, that one.
¶178If I may say so gently, that that might be worth one. No, no, go up. That one. Yep. All right.
¶179He says here, "If I may say so gently and without casting any doubt on the sincerity of Joe's conversion, I think it would be a good idea for new converts." Yeah, this is a good one to cover. be a good idea for new converts to put a moratorum on splashy public appearances for a while to make sure they get things sorted. This goes for Protestant converts as well. Kudos to this user for taking his time in working things through. Noah, do you want to take this one?
¶180>> So, yeah, there are two things I think to say about this. First, Joe has been Catholic for approximately 6 months, I think, at this point. And as Ethan mentioned when we were introducing ourselves and talking about our relationships with Joe, many of us encouraged him to speak publicly about it sooner, but he resisted and said, "No, I want to have six months of the sacramental life of the church under my belt before I engage in pmics because it's just too spiritually risky otherwise." So, I think that Joe actually agrees with Tim Mcgru on this point and that's precisely why it's taken so long for him to release this information publicly. The second thing is um Joe is not new to Catholicism. So, he was raised in a very devout Catholic family and he's been very familiar with Catholic teaching for a long time.
¶181Even when he was an atheist and an agnostic, he was dialoguing with Catholics much of the time. So he understands the Catholic faith. He's lived the Catholic faith for years if you include his Catholic formation in childhood. And um it's been 6 months since his reversion. I think if you click on the tweet I responded with those considerations and Mccrew responded to to those sorts of considerations, it might be worth looking at what's going on in uh in their minds when they say these sorts of things.
¶182But I do think with um I mean there's this thing that's like the easiest thing in the world is to say oh there should be a moratorum on converts when you're not a convert like talking about and defending their faith right and then everybody's just like in fact I only want to hear from you like explaining and justifying the decision that you've made like 5 years from now. Oh, why don't we make it 10 years just so there's more spiritual formation? Why don't we make it 20 years, right? How about this? How about you need to have spent 25 years before you start becoming a public representative of Christianity at all?
¶183And so, we all have to realize there has to be some reasonable threshold that we set for when people could actually start talking about why they converted and like explaining their decision and like witnessing to the faith, right? There's some point in time where that comes and there's responsible ways of doing it and there's irresponsible ways of doing it. Right? Now, one of the things that I think should be a criteria is what Joe did, which is basically make sure that he's spiritually ready and he's in a good place in his own prayer life in the sacraments morally speaking before he comes out and basically starts going and being a public advocate and defending the faith. Right now, there was a certain thing where it was a matter of practical necessity that at some point he tell people, "Hey, I've become Catholic." And if he goes out and tells people, hey, I've become Catholic.
¶184A big thing people are going to want to know is why. And so then Joe explaining the reasoning behind his decision, right? And doing so with people on platforms that he's invited to to go just share this news that he knows is going to have a positive impact. I think that's a very reasonable thing for him to have done. So he took a long period of time to prepare for relative to his lifespan, you know, of and then he's coming out and now he's explaining his decision and there's obviously going to be a lot of initial publicity because this decision has a huge impact on a lot of people that that he's announcing it and then we're going to ask okay well does Joe have the competence right and it's clear if every if anybody is allowed to talk about this at any level of knowledge he has a very advanced level of knowledge compared to the average person, right?
¶185The average person who's been a devout Christian for 10 years and when it comes to the intellectual side obviously is going to be less equipped than he is right now given the amount of focused attention that he's put into researching the issue. So it can't be a matter of that right. So being illquipped from the competence perspective from a from a level of spiritual maturity I think that makes sense. I think apologists need to stay grounded and make sure that apologetics isn't having spiritually deletterious effects. and it can be a bad thing early on in a conversion.
¶186Now, the the unfortunate thing is Joe is a public persona in philosophy of religion. So, it's not that he out of nowhere decided I'm starting a apologetics career out of nowhere, right? The thing he decided was, hey, all the content that I've produced where I have this big YouTube channel and all these patrons and all these people who have relied on me for years and where I'm publishing academic articles all the time, this thing that's relevant to all of that, I'm going to have to explain my decision to everybody, right? So, he's sort of forced into this situation in a way that an ordinary person isn't. And we also need to take into account when we're evaluating these things, take into account the unique situation that he finds himself in, right?
¶187where this is he's a public intellectual needing to explain the rationale behind a decision in a way that he knows foreseeably is going to have a positive impact on people if he does so thoroughly and he does his job well now but yeah so that so I I would not recommend us to just set sort of arbitrary heavy burdens where we're excluding people from ever or we're just setting like we're continually pushing back how long before people can publicly talk about it. I think we need to take into account that he's in an exceptional situation. And I think we also just need to take into account that he just has unique talents and gifts that make it to where he can just do so much good right now. And I think it needs to be done. >> Cam, if you if you click on the replies, um there will be Tim's response to some of these considerations.
¶188I can't remember if they they'd be worth going into. So that's my response. And then he replied to me. He hasn't dug into the epistemology or the evidence for the historical reliability of the gospels. He's out there spouting Bartman level talking points about these things and this is not helpful.
¶189If six months wasn't enough time for him to come up to speed on these things, he shouldn't be talking about them in public forums. Yeah. So I mean he >> just another quibble. Go ahead. >> Right.
¶190This is like a very small part of the case that he's making. And I understand that the Mcgru's devote a ton of attention to their maximalist approach to the uh to their defense of a single miracle, which happens to be the most important miracle, but it's not the best evidenced one, but it's just not um a significant plank of his case, even if what they are saying were true about Joe's making mistakes, which I don't really even think that he uh he did make. So this is exaggerated and it's obviously not a good justification for the initial tweet which is that he should remain silent about the sorts of things he's been talking about because he doesn't have according to McRe um the requisite amount of knowledge about very niche um topics within the historical debate about the reliability of the gospels. For context, for for people who may not have watched all of the interviews that Joe has done about his conversion so far, this is fixate this this response fixates on a comment Joe made in his interview with Matt Frad that couldn't have occupied more than 30 seconds of the interview. It's not like a major part of Joe's case for Catholicism that he's like out there critiquing uh arguments for the resurrection presented by scholars like Mcgru.
¶191That's just not this is like this is a very weird thing to focus on. >> Right? Suppose Joe incorrectly said that the gospels were written decades after the resurrection. First of all, it's not obvious that he's incorrect even on conservative estimates. But but suppose he's incorrect.
¶192How does that even mildly imply that he should remain silent about his conversion to Catholicism and other arguments that he thinks uh strongly favor that conclusion? >> Well, yeah, doesn't offer any support. >> Ethan has already like refuted that as well that uh even if you give the Mcgru the best case possible, it doesn't follow that the best evidence that we have for Christianity happens to be for the resurrection. That just doesn't follow. Uh yeah, let's move on.
¶193Okay, so we've been covering Protestant responses to Joe. Let's look at a recent Catholic response. So this Timothy Gordon says, "Bro, 7 hours." So this is in response to Joe's announcement today that he's posted his comprehensive philosophical case for God's existence. He says, "Bro, 7 hours. I thank God you finally discovered the wheel, but you're boldly planting a flag on a continent we've all been living on for years." And uh the the most egregious one though is here.
¶194St. Thomas's five ways is roughly 1400 words and takes about seven minutes to read, not seven hours. You're mistaking arriving last for discovering first. >> Okay. Can I do this?
¶195>> This is one. >> Yeah. So, let's just go a few things. So, first is Joe doesn't claim novelty for basically any of the arguments that he presents in the seven hour video that he just posted, you know, like there's maybe one argument where he can lay claim to it, you know, but a lot of it is actually going to other people and playing extended clips from them explaining arguments, right, before his videos come out. So the first thing is he's not there's no pretense in the video that this is Joe's unique novel contribution or that it's something that he's the first person to have discovered, right?
¶196And that everybody else has been doing it wrong that preceded him. So that that's that's not a pretense of the video. Okay. The second thing which is just the main premise of both of these is that the existence of God is so obvious and evident that it requires no sustained defense. like rigorous thorough defense right that would last for extended periods of time say seven hours okay now I am personally a person of an opinion where if there are people out there who have plausibility structures like that make it to where it's just obvious to you that God exists like you go look at a tree you look at the beauty of nature you know like teological argument occurs to you like it's just a very strong brute intuition whatever that for lay people I think that's perfectly fine and respectable and I do think that intellectuals for the most part thinking themselves wise have become fools in this regard and they just do perceive less clearly this the most evident of all truths you know um the existence of God and it's only the fool who says in his heart there is no God right so I actually think it's perfectly reasonable even for people who haven't done what Joe has done to have high confidence in the existence of God using even very simple and what may be like naive or crude arguments right I also think there are rigorous very well thoughtout arguments like St.
¶197Thomas's arguments that can be stated compactly, right, and written down shortly. But I also think if we put all the useful commentaries on the five ways in a in a room, do you know how many pages of material we would have, right? Expounding upon and explicating to people the arguments and anticipating further defenses and clarifying and elucidating things and that there clearly is value in hundreds of years of toistic scholarship relating to natural theology that has come since, which he's apparently denigrating because all we needed were the original 1400 words, right? And so who cares about anything sub any subsequent development of the arguments, right? So that's also just ridiculous to think that just because because an argument can be stated compactly that it doesn't make sense to then give a more lengthy and detailed treatment of it that explicates it and elucidates it.
¶198The third thing is we clearly live in like if we look at secularism in the culture around us and infecting the minds even of the Catholic faithful and of causing doubts. Clearly more work just does empirically need to happen. There are people out there who are not convinced where it might be helpful to have a really smart guy going and marshalling a whole bunch of arguments that convinced him starting from a secular paradigm that his secular paradigm was untenable and that the belief in God was reasonable despite the sort of sophisticated rationalizations he had come up with for why God was very improbable and why none of these arguments worked. Right? So there clearly is a role for that.
¶199There's a niche there. Like I'm happy for you that it didn't take much to convince you of God, but there clearly are people out there where it'll be a service to them to give them more to put more meat on the bone. And I think we shouldn't like ankle bite at Joe cuz he's performing that service for people. >> Yeah. Suppose the fifth or the five ways are rock solid.
¶200They're obviously sound, etc. But also suppose that there are 20 ways and Thomas only spoke of five. Why would it be problematic to go through the 20 ways to God instead of just the five? It doesn't really make much sense. >> Yeah.
¶201No, I don't know if you have any thoughts on Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead. >> Yeah. I mean, it's comically absurd to suggest that Joe is arriving last on the scene when it comes to theistic arguments.
¶202He's one of the people doing cutting edge work in this area. Um, and I think this tweet aged poorly because most of the arguments that Joe discusses in his video are based on very recent work. So what he what he covers there is cutting edge work on contingency arguments, fine-tuning arguments, harmony arguments, arguments from aesthetic experience, arguments from non-skeepticism. Um, and much of it is drawn from a book that he's currently co-authoring uh with a few of his colleagues. And so he's not arriving last to anything.
¶203Um, >> yeah. Something else I kind of wanted to point out is like I I don't know the extent of Timothy Gordon's audience, but I would suspect it's not that large, right? Maybe you guys can inform me on like I I I just don't know a ton about his his audience numbers, but the the the kind of comment it seems like he's making here is like, "Dude, I've been doing this a long time. Like, you're new to the scene. Slow down.
¶204Like, you you don't have much to offer kind of thing. Like, I've been I've been here a long time. I've been doing a lot of work." Um, I think what that assumes is that Joe has like no unique contributions to offer that he doesn't already have. Like he because he's been doing this for so long, like he knows all the stuff. He's been talking about the same things.
¶205Um, I I don't know that that's true. Like in the top in the context of Catholic vindicator miracles, how many times has Tim Timothy Gordon's name popped up? I don't know that it's that many. I I've like I I haven't seen it. May maybe that's just because I don't follow his work very closely.
¶206That might be that might be the case. But like now everyone is talking about every >> You do a lot of work Cameron on natural theology. You have in the past. Were you getting lots of comments being like, "Wow, I I I was an atheist, but I was convinced of the existence of God because of all that Tim Gordon content I watched." Did you ever see one of those? >> No.
¶207>> He's he has he's nothing burger in natural theology. He's >> But I'm talking about more generally because he's he's talking about Catholicism more generally, right? He's talking about like I I've been doing the Catholicism apologetics for ages and you're just getting here. So like slow down, slow your roll. And I just want to point out like dude, you you no one really knows who you are.
¶208you're you're not this bigname Catholic apologist. Like you've done some stuff, sure, but like now we we've been talking, Ethan, you and I um you know, Joe Joe's sort of in the background, but we we've been talking about miracles for several months now, and it's just like recently, as of the last week since Joe made his announcement that now everybody is talking about Catholic miracles, right? And uh be thankful for that, Tim. Like be thankful for that that now we have someone a public convert who converted on the basis of these things is now coming out and is now going to start defitting them probably at a level that you could never hope to to do. Tim like I I don't know this this one really bothered me.
¶209Also, I think we know of one maybe two cases. There are probably many more of people who uh may well convert because of the work that Joe has already done. If that's true, why would you why would anyone object to him putting this all down on paper, as it were, to try to help other people uh uh come back home into the church? It just it's it's like what Ethan said. It's it's it's gratuitous ankle biting.
¶210It doesn't make much sense at all. >> Especially especially when it's friendly fire, you know? >> Yeah. It's it's it's it reads to me as like very arrogant. Like, dude, I've been doing this a long time.
¶211Like, you're the new guy in the block. You don't >> to give him a charitable reading of his tweet. The thing I interpreted it as was basically like, "Yeah, idiot. We know God exists." like, you know, welcome to like arithmetic 101. 1 plus 1 equals 2.
¶212Like, you finally caught up. Like, you were behind the curve and now you've caught up to us on like this is day one stuff, dude. And now you're giving us a seven-hour lecture. Now, I mean, that's kind that's kind of a funny point, you know, but clearly there actually is obviously value in what Joe is doing. And obviously given the nature of the value that he's going to provide, it's almost all going to come from how comprehensive he is on presenting the arguments, right?
¶213And so it makes sense for Joe to give these lengthy sustained treatments, right? And just if if literally all he's saying is the entire discipline of natural theology was futile after 1,400 words of text were published, then he's not just torching Joe's 7-hour video, but he's torching like a library of Alexandria's worth of material written by saints and doctors of our church. Uh let's move on to uh I don't have any more uh tweets to go over, but is there any other objections you guys have seen online? We don't have to necessarily put them up on the screen, but are there any other sentiments, any other objections or responses to Joe that you guys have seen that that should be addressed? So, some people have suggested that Joe is suffering a mental breakdown or he's in the midst of a manic episode.
¶214And some of the evidence cited for this is the fact that he's very excited about the fact that God exists and Catholicism is true and that he like justiculates very dramatically and that he speaks in funny voices. He does impressions of influential philosophers when presenting his case for Catholicism. And I just want people to know first I can just certify with absolute confidence that Joe is not having a mental breakdown nor is he in the midst of a manic episode. Um if he is then it's been going on for 6 months and none of us have noticed which is just very implausible. Um, but the other thing is all of these mannerisms, they might seem strange to people who weren't already devoted viewers of Joe's content before this announcement happened, but this is just stuff he's done in all of his videos, okay?
¶215Uh, like the Xjek impressions, that's just standard Joe Schmid fair. Um, and also look, it just makes sense to be excited that you've discovered a very important truth, especially if you're convinced that it's the most important truth. Like the truth that's the truth on which the salvation of the world hinges. And of course, he's going to be excited about that. Of course, he's going to justiculate dramatically about that.
¶216Um, anyway, this is not evidence of some sort of uh mental collapse on Joe's part. Any other thoughts, Ethan, on that one? Or any other responses, objections we should cover? >> I think Joe wanted us to comment. >> Oh.
¶217>> Oh, yeah. I think I there. >> So, I think I think page, which was just >> So, first was there's the skeptic James Foder that I debated. He had a really lengthy >> review stream where he re reacted to Joe's conversion, right? And in basically the title of the video, if you want to pull that up Cameron, maybe just the title, we don't need to play the video, but it's the title is Joe Schmid is a profoundly unskeepical person, right?
¶218and he's going through and basically what he's doing is Joe is advertising, hey, I'm about to put out a 15-hour case for Catholicism. That's going to be my comprehensive explanation of here's what I did with all the objections. Here are the miracles that convinced me. Here's the natural theology that lends credence to the existence of God, right? Um, and so, and I'm, but this is just going to be basically like a 30-inute video that's like a synopsis of my personal story of how I converted to Catholicism, where I'm just going to briefly allude to and mention the reasons that converted me without developing them in detail and giving a very sustained defense.
¶219Right? And so now we're seeing the sort of opposite criticism that Tim Gordon gave, right? So Tim Gordon's criticism is, "Oh, why'd you put out a seven-hour video?" Right? And James Foder's criticism is why'd he put out a 30inute video where he teased his arguments without answering all the questions I have about these arguments and presenting the evidence in forensic fashion. Right?
¶220And you go through his video and he's like, "Look, I know I understand. I know he doesn't need to present everything right now. I know he says that's not what he's trying to do, but I would at least expect and then answer to his little idiosyncratic concerns and criticisms or just demands for rigor that go beyond the genre of the video, right? And then he's like, "This is just terrible. Like, this is sloppy.
¶221Like, this is so bad." There are other parts where he's just like scoffing, laughing that he would reference the demonic possession evidence and specifically that it would be Cameron's videos, right? Because obviously Cameron, well, he's over here. He's our king of sloppgetics, right? And so he put together these sloppetic exorcist videos, right? Where the exorcists talk about rooms being cold.
¶222And now Joe has been snookered. He's been taken in because he just has never heard of people lying, right? Or people misinterpreting, misperceiving. And so he's been taken in by this laughable weak evidence. And next thing we know, probably next week he's heading over to a seance, right?
¶223And so and this is um so those that's basically in summary what the video consisted of which is basically like mockery of Joe because Foder's audience starts out very skeptical and with a low prior in the demonic and imprenatural phenomena and Joe's just referencing the existence of evidence without presenting it in detail and then Foder is just like speculating that Joe's going to make certain epistemic mistakes and then faulting him for making those mistakes before he actually makes them. And then in addition, >> he's going through all of Joe's uh references to, okay, here's the type of arguments that are going to convince me, and here's the type lines of evidence that I sort of thought of, and then here's objections. And he's like, well, in this video, I would expect Joe to give us an a detailed explanation of why he no longer finds the problem of animal suffering that problematic or why he finds hell not that problematic. Well, the good news is there's a that video is the one advertising that he's about to do that. That he's literally about to have a video where he's going to do exactly the thing you're talking about.
¶224Now, that wasn't the that wasn't this video. That was not the purpose of this video. The purpose of this video was I was really in my feelings about animals, right? At the and that's what caused me to apostasize from Catholicism because, you know, I told these very emotional, melodramatic stories about animals and that. So, he does that.
¶225I I was going to say, Ethan, we should probably mention that like it was actually our idea for Joe originally to to to split this up into multiple videos. >> Yeah, it was it was actually my suggestion that look probably if the first video you drop announcing this is a 24-hour like 800 bullet point explanation of literally each line item that that's probably not going to gain as much popular traction as a video or have as much impact as you sort of just in summary fashion explaining what's happened. the change in your thinking, right? But then also all the people who want that, why don't you just give them that, right? So you give them your big explanation that's like your comprehensive survey that's like your style of content, but also in before you do that, just announce it to the world with this conversion video that's like your sort of personal story where you're trying to relate to people on a personal level, right?
¶226And so that was literally like our suggestion to Joe that he do that, right? So that it was not the purpose of this. Like you should not evaluate the rigor of Joe's arguments based off of how superficial the treatment of them was in the video where he was referencing but not developing or Yeah. >> steelman argument. >> Let's do >> go ahead and then we're gonna we're going to change we're gonna do one more criticism and then we'll we'll close out.
¶227>> Yeah. This would be like reading the abstract to a paper and then before reading the body of the text just complaining about all of the things that the author failed to address in the abstract just like completely failing to understand the purpose of the abstract which is to advertise for interested readers the content of the primary document. Um, also one last comment. Voter has a habit of issuing disproportionately long responses to his interlocutors. So, you'll notice that his response to Joe's 30 minute video that wasn't even intended to make any arguments really.
¶228Um, he released a 2 and a half hour live stream. So, I would just like to say that I look forward to James Fodor's 125hour comprehensive response to Joe's cumulative case for Catholicism. >> That's good. Oh, so I almost forgot to include this. We've got Relon KD who produced this response.
¶229He says, "Skeptic YouTuber accepts Jesus, but Christians are divided." So, we're just going to play the key moment though for our purposes. Uh, let's watch. >> Much more akin to a house that you're walking through and there's multiple doors and multiple rooms to different church traditions. Okay. Now, some people disagree with that and they're allowed to do so, but I do think it does beg the question of how does someone come to faith and almost immediately go on the offensive of challenging and debating a billion Christians worldwide?
¶230And I think what this comes down to is two things. One, I think at its core, many of us when we discover new information, we slide into something very common which is called the Dunning Krueger effect. You don't know what you don't know. Dunning Krueger effect is best illustrated by this graph here, which is initially someone's confidence very early on to discovering some new information without understanding everything that they don't know. And unfortunately, as smart as I'm sure this gentleman is, I don't think he knows everything he doesn't know.
¶231I don't think he understands all the arguments and therefore often is kind of presenting low tier arguments with regards to this conversation. >> Yeah. So, is Joe Schmid succumb has he succumbed to the Dunning Krueger effect? Well, there may be someone involved in this conversation that has succumbed to the Dunning Krueger effect. >> I was going to say that uh that he, you know, your exchange with him on the uh the canon debate and the history of the cannon shows that this fellow uh doesn't know what he doesn't know and and there's a lot of it.
¶232>> But no, but I I think it's a little bit ridiculous here. First of all, to think that Joe doesn't at least at the level that Rouslon does understand the arguments right on both sides that are being brought to bear on these issues which I would just invite Rouslon challenge Rouslon if you just sat down across from Joe right I'll be quizmaster and we can play a game of who knows the arguments better who understands the arguments better you know I'll put up a lot of money on my horse here that he's gonna he's going to win in that exchange. So, I think I think this is just absurd, right? First of all, to try to denigrate the amount of knowledge that Joe has bearing upon the arguments here. Um especially with regards to the things that Joe's actually publicly commenting on, right?
¶233Because Joe isn't making huge case based off of scriptural exugesus and you know, here's my case against solid and all that stuff. That hasn't been what he focuses on at all. The things he's going to care about though are fundamental theology and the evidence for the miracles from all the various sects. Right? That's the thing that he's especially focused on when he's saying things like Protestantism has been disproven, which is the thing that has drawn the eye of Rouselon and these other Protestant commentators.
¶234Right? And so in that case I think it's very clear that actually Joe has a very solid grasp of the fundamental theology and so therefore the epistemology through which this evidence should be filtered and interpreted to be applied to Protestant vers Catholic debates. And if I had to wager I would say Rouslon I don't think has probably thought about that at all. I don't think he's thought at all about fundamental theology. And I think it would become immediately apparent if he tries to refute the Catholic miracle arguments that he hasn't.
¶235I'll just note too that Joe's behavior is not characteristic of a person who's suffering from the Dunning Krueger effect. So Joe is aware that there are certain areas in which he's not an expert or largely ignorant. And so months ago when he was discerning Catholicism, he came to me at one point acknowledging that his knowledge of the Old Testament was very incomplete. And so he wanted to talk to me about some of the potential problems with Old Testament war, Old Testament war texts because he thought I would know more about it. Um, and he corresponded, you know, extensively with his friend Swan Sana, who's a biblical scholar who knows way more than either of us about the Bible.
¶236And similarly like he's constantly consulting Ethan on questions about uh Catholic theology that he doesn't feel that he's equipped to answer. And as Ethan pointed out earlier, many of the like a significant portion of the content that Joe is releasing over the next week just consists of him allowing other experts to sort of share their arguments and share their opinions on the issues. So Joe is not the sort of person who overestimates his competence in a field in which he's not competent. and he is the sort of person who seeks advice and seeks input from other people and relies on them when appropriate. >> Yeah.
¶237Um unfortunate and we're still waiting on some more responses from people. So if those do come up then we we might hop back on here and uh and talk about this again. But man, I am just I mean I I've been so excited about this for so long and it's I I think going to do a lot of good and I'm just Joe if you do happen to watch this I'm very proud of you. I think we all are. >> Praise God.
¶238This is awesome. This is awesome news. This is going to be awesome, guys. All right, that's where we'll end things. I appreciate you guys tuning in.
¶239Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. Quick reminder that if you would like to watch my interview with Joe on his objections to Catholicism, it's over on Capturing Catholicism. Channel members have access to it now. You can watch that now. We're also going to be streaming with Joe this coming Friday, two days from now.
¶240So, we'll see you guys soon.