¶1Big news. God exists. Christ is Lord. And he established the Catholic Church. I'm not kidding.
¶2I just converted to Catholicism. I'm Joe Schmid. I'm a PhD student in philosophy at Princeton University, and I've been an agnostic and public critic of theism and Catholicism for quite some time. But earlier this year that all changed. >> I want to begin this video by making something absolutely clear.
¶3I am not making this video to insult Joe Schmid's character, and I am certainly not making it as some kind of personal attack. Joe has chosen to return to Catholicism. That's his prerogative. People believe and disbelieve for all kinds of reasons, and ultimately all we can hope is that whatever someone chooses to believe makes them a better, happier, and healthier person. So this isn't about making Joe look unreasonable.
¶4In fact, I have a lot of respect for the fact that he is willing to put his intellectual journey out there for everyone to examine. But there is another side to that that I'd like to tackle. When someone like Joe Schmid, who has spent years publicly criticizing theism and Catholicism, suddenly announces that he has returned to the Catholic Church and intends to dedicate his platform to defending Catholicism, I think we are perfectly justified in critiquing the arguments he is making. Not because Joe owes atheists an explanation, but because thousands and perhaps millions of people are going to hear his arguments, and it's our duty to ensure they have a place to go to if they desire a second opinion, so to say. Basically, arguments from both sides of the aisle.
¶5So let's get into it. Now Joe has promised to release what amounts to roughly 25 hours of material explaining why he believes Catholicism is true. I've watched a few hours of both the first and second video, and at the time that I'm recording this video, he is yet to release the third one. So, I'm not going to pretend that I've watched every single minute of Joe's enormous case, but there is a question that kept coming back to me again and again while watching his videos, man. Why Catholicism?
¶6Seriously, man, why Catholicism? Because Joe isn't simply arguing that some kind of God exists. He is going much further than that. He has gone from rejecting God to becoming agnostic to becoming convinced that theism is probably true, and then eventually to the conclusion that Christianity is true, and more specifically that the Catholic Church is the church established by Christ. That's an enormous number of philosophical and evidential steps because when you think about it, even if we granted Joe his entire philosophical case for some kind of higher intelligence, there would still be a massive question sitting on the table.
¶7Why should we become Catholic? Joe was raised Catholic. He attended Catholic schools. He prayed as a Catholic. He participated in the sacraments.
¶8Catholicism was the religious framework through which he first understood the world. Then he lost his faith. He became an atheist, later became an agnostic, then somewhere along the way he became increasingly convinced by arguments for theism, and eventually as you've said, after examining miracles and other evidence, he found his way back to the very same religious tradition he had grown up in. Now, let me be very careful here. I'm not saying that this proves Joe chose Catholicism because it was comfortable or familiar.
¶9That would be unfair. Joe clearly believes he has some intellectual reasons. But, here's the thing, ladies and gentlemen. I've pointed out multiple times on this channel that any arguments that can show that atheism isn't perfect doesn't automatically show that a particular religion is right and the vice versa is true. Any argument that can be used against one religion doesn't mean God doesn't exist completely.
¶10So, every time Joe presents a miracle and says, "Look at how difficult this is for naturalists to explain." My immediate question isn't just, "Can atheism explain this?" It's, "Why should I conclude that Catholicism explains it?" If Joe tells me that Catholicism has miracles, I can simply ask, "Is Catholicism the only religion associated with miracle claims, man?" Obviously not. Human beings have reported miracles for thousands of years. People from different cultures, even secular ones, have reported healings, visions, apparitions, unexplainable phenomena, supernatural encounters, and inexplicable events, man. So, the mere existence of extraordinary testimony doesn't automatically tell us which religion is true. And by the way, I'm not asking Joe to compare religions merely for the sake of being exhaustive.
¶11I keep coming back to that point because I have a prediction about what would happen if Joe genuinely subjected Catholicism to the same level of scrutiny that he applies to other religions. If he took the major claims of Catholicism and placed them side by side with the claims of Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, the various forms of Protestantism, Eastern Orthodox, and other religions, if he applied the same evidential standards to all of them, or if he took the same credence he has granted to Catholicism and gave it to all other religions, I suspect that would take him right back to where he started, man. Agnosticism. Because Catholicism isn't uniquely compelling. So, perhaps the most interesting test for Joe's new position is in today he can defeat atheism.
¶12He already believes he's done that man. What I would really like to see from him is the part of the journey that established why the final destination had to be Catholicism and if Catholicism can't survive a fair comparison with the alternative religions, it means Joe is left with the same conclusion he had come to before. He doesn't know. And this actually brings me to another problem, which is Joe's original journey from theism to agnosticism man. His journey started with what I consider one of the best arguments against God.
¶13I'll let Joe describe it to you himself. >> For hundreds of millions of years, animals have been ripping each other to shreds, preying on one another, parasitizing one another, languishing, being burned in forest fires, lying there in agony, crying out. This stuff has been going on for hundreds of millions of years, right? Like just I mean again, just like think about the most brutal kind of death you can imagine. Like imagine an elephant getting trapped in a tar pit.
¶14It's there. It's wondering where it's parents are, where its family is, and it's just slowly sinking. A day goes by. It's starving. And I would just think like, where is God in this?
¶15Where is God in the suffering of the elephant? It was hard for me to believe that a perfectly good all powerful, all knowing God would institute that as his divine creative means. That was That's what initially caused my deconversion from Catholicism. >> When you hear him describe it himself, you can understand why he chose to leave religion man. For hundreds of millions of years, animals killing one another, eating one another alive, starving, being infected by parasites, etc.
¶16etc. man. And this is a great argument because when it's human suffering, believers often claim that pain is one of the ways God builds our moral character. But you can't say the same thing about animals, man. So, Joe's question was essentially, where is God in all of this, man?
¶17Now, the question I have today is, what changed? Well, in the same interview, Joe goes on to give several possible answers. One is what philosophers call skeptical theism. It's essentially when believers say, we shouldn't expect to know all of God's reasons, man. You know, God works in mysterious ways.
¶18But then Joe gives a possible justification that I swear took me a few seconds to process. Here it is. >> So, under theism, it just wouldn't be terribly surprising that maybe there are just reasons that God has of which we're unaware for allowing various evils >> Yes. >> And notice, I'm not saying that we're just we're totally in the dark about God's reasons. That's not what I'm saying cuz my my various natural theological arguments for God's existence required me to make some judgments about um comparative judgments at least about divine psychology.
¶19And then the third point that I make is just like, I don't know, there are so many theodicies out there in the philosophical literature which identify various goods that God may have that justify him in permitting various evils. I mean, there's a more recent one um by uh Brian Cutter again. He's one of my favorite philosophers. And Philip Swenson. It's called the omission theodicy.
¶20It's the paper that won the Sanders prize, a very very like esteemed, renowned prize in philosophy. Um and it's published in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion. I think it's actually forthcoming. Um and the thought basically is that um uh we already have in our background knowledge that for God has given us very high-stakes moral responsibility for how well the lives of other creatures go, like other animals, but also for other human beings. Like he's basically put us in high-stakes [snorts] moral circumstances where either through our omission to help or through our helping, we can make a massive difference to how well the lives of others go.
¶21And why might why might God do that sort of thing? Well, because if we do indeed help the person, that can reap infinite benefits across and across all of eternity because that in at least enables a better relationship between me and the person that I helped for all of eternity. Like, you you saved me. You saved me from the I was drowning and you saved my life. Think about like if if that improves our relationship for all of eternity, that good can kind of aggregate and be an infinite good.
¶22>> Okay. >> So, that can uh the the possibility the enabling that kind of infinite good can justify risking finite harms of us omitting to help other people. >> Mhm. >> Now, so we already have in our background knowledge that this is kind of God's MO. This is something that like God um may very well plausibly be interested in doing giving us high stakes more responsibility.
¶23But then just apply that to the evolutionary process. Maybe there are various beings, non-human agents, who were delegated with the task of benevolently guiding the evolutionary process away from pain and suffering and languishing and death and whatnot and towards a more kind of kumbaya symbiosis, but they freely omitted to intervene. And if again, the reason why So, maybe these are like um angels for instance. And some of them said, "No, I will not serve and I will not guide the evolutionary process uh in the direction of in a kind of benevolent direction." Uh and so again, this this can be justified by the fact that if they had done their divinely appointed task, >> Interesting. >> that could enable infinite goods for all of eternity.
¶24>> So, according to Joe, perhaps God gave certain non-human beings, possibly angels, responsibility for guiding the evolutionary process so animals no longer suffer someday in the future. And the reason that day hasn't come yet is perhaps because some of these beings failed to perform their divinely appointed duties. Now, I want to be fair to Joe here. He isn't saying this is definitely what happened. He is explicitly presenting these as possible explanations.
¶25But still, this is the only real answer he could come up with, man. And even if I were to take Joe's probable theory seriously, it still raises more questions than it answers. One, how is it possible that divine beings can disobey God's instructions? Maybe they have free will. So, that brings us to the second question.
¶26After years of these beings not doing their job, why didn't God intervene and maybe appoint new wings? Why has he been simply watching as generation after generation of animals continue to suffer needlessly, man? Now, as someone else pointed out in that video's comment section, it's almost as if Joe is just looking for a good reason to stop caring. And actually, by the way, I call this the only real answer he gives because saying God works in mysterious ways isn't a response, it's a cop-out, man. It can't be used as a response to any claim in the universe because if an atheist observes something that looks inconsistent with God's nature, believers can't simply say God has a reason for doing that way.
¶27So, yeah, that isn't really an argument. So, now I hope you really understand why I think Joe's return to Catholicism deserves scrutiny, man. Not because I think he is stupid, quite the opposite, actually. Joe is clearly an extremely intelligent person, and that's why all this is so interesting, man. None of the problems raised by myself as well as other many videos that have been covering his reversion, none of the arguments that we raise are new to him, man.
¶28He knows all the objections. He has debated them. He has spoken to some of the smartest people in philosophy and theology, man. He knows about the problem of evil, about divine hiddenness, etc., etc. So, I'm not sitting here saying Joe hasn't thought about these things.
¶29He obviously has. The question I'm asking is a little bit different. All I'm asking is what finally convinced him that these objections are actually being defeated. What changed the evidential balance for him, and more importantly, why did the answer ultimately become Catholicism, man? So, Joe, if you happen to see this, I'm genuinely interested in hearing the rest of your case, man.
¶30I'm not asking you to return to atheism. I'm not even asking you to abandon Catholicism for another religion. What I'm asking is much simpler, man. Just show us the bridge.