¶1Just think like you're there with Christ, right? Like you watch him get crucified, you know? You watch all the all the nails go into his hands and his feet and whatnot. And you see him getting interred in the tomb. Maybe you're there and you're like putting the spices on him.
¶2You put him [music] in the tomb. Later, you're with the apostles in the upper room and then like Christ appears to you and you're literally there and he's like he's like breathing on you as it says and you're like feeling his wound. You're feeling his hand. You're like poking his side and whatnot. And then he's like sticking around for 40 days with you and all these other people and they're like, "You see this, right?" And they're like, "Yeah, I see it.
¶3We see it. We're interacting with him." Like, if I saw all of that, all of that, [music] it would just be ridiculous to be like, >> "Yeah, but you know what, Jesus? Like, all this stuff you say about hell, it grades against my intuition. So, I'm not going to believe you. You know, I'm just I'm just going to leave you." That would be ridiculous, right?
¶4Utterly ridic. You should just conclude in that case that, oh, >> maybe I'm just maybe my intuitions are off track. Hm. Joe Schmid, you are now a Catholic indeed. >> And uh we are here talking about objections to Catholicism that you overcame on your journey.
¶5And this will obviously be applicable to a lot of people who have similar objections. But in your case, you had a number of objections that you had to overcome. And so I'm super excited for this episode. I think it's going to be very, very helpful. >> Yeah, I'm very excited.
¶6And if people want more on these objections, I sort of go and do a lot of them in much more depth in my like I don't know how long it is, seven hour video or something like that. But, you know, we're going to kind of talk about them in conversation here and that'll just bring out some interesting new things that I probably won't even go into in the in that video and then also we'll hear your take on them. So, >> yeah. Yeah, we will. So, let's start with the first objection.
¶7What was what's the the biggest objection I think that that comes to mind for you? Is it the the moral objections that you had? Is that because that's first on our list, but I didn't know if that was like your biggest one that you had to overcome. >> Yeah, the biggest objection I mean it was probably moral problems, hell, and biblical problems. Those three.
¶8>> Okay. So, >> and we'll get to all those in the course of the interview, but let's start with the moral problems. >> Okay. >> Yeah. What sort of moral problems did you have with Catholicism?
¶9>> Right. So this is just a huge category of problems of course and there were just like lots of individual problems like the church just has lots of moral teachings that just like fundamentally graded against my moral sensibilities and my intuition basically um >> as an agnostic. >> Yeah as an agnostic who had kind of just like embibed a kind of like a very secular liberal kind of atheisty kind of humanist ethics of sorts. Um so that's like the general gist of the problems here. Um well there are really two aspects to this.
¶10one is just grading against the intuitions and then another one which is also ultimately just grading against intuitions but like the fact that Catholicism teaches a kind of absolute deontology. So that's just a fancy word for basically saying that there are certain moral prohibitions on certain actions that you just can't perform under any circumstances. So they're like uh percealum they're intrinsically evil uh such that even if doing it would lead to better consequences and even drastically better consequences, you still can't do it. uh and that just like was seemed very implausible to me as I was going through my kind of conversion journey. Um so just you know some examples of these teachings would be things like you know the impermissibility of homosexual activity >> the uh teachings about like you know intentionally engaging in suicide is impermissible under any circumstances whatsoever.
¶11So for instance you know like people who are escaping North Korea and if they're caught they're going to basically be tortured. So sometimes they bring like cyanide to pills so that they can pop them and basically intentionally kill themselves to avoid that and that's going to be categorically impermissible for Catholicism. Um you know other basically other sorts of teachings about transgenderism and uh but yeah I mean basically like LGBT stuff was like a big one to kind of get over. >> Uhhuh. >> Just like the church says that these sorts of things are impermissible.
¶12Not only can I not see how they could be impermissible, like I have these intuitions in favor of permissibility, you know, like it seems permissible to me. Uh, and you know, there are various other teachings about like lying under certain circumstances which to me seemed permissible, but maybe the church teaches that it's impermissible and and just various other things like that where like things seem to me to be permissible and the church says that they're impermissible. Um, that was probably one of the biggest ones. >> Yeah. What what was it that started you sort of secondguessing your moral intuitions?
¶13What was like the first thing that that started to make the whole thing unravel, so to speak? >> The first thing it was probably just the like the palpability and like almost the undeniability of some of the miracles that I was coming across >> and like >> so not only is that just like very significant evidence on the other side. So, like, you know, we can think of the scales as like evidential scales, right? We got the evidence for Catholicism over here and the evidence against Catholicism over here. And maybe I've got some like intuitions and whatnot over here against Catholicism.
¶14And maybe that's some evidence against Catholicism. But if you start like piling on the evidence for Catholicism, that can start to put a lot of pressure on this evidence against Catholicism to the point that like maybe you should accept Catholicism. But it wasn't just a mere matter of like evidential outweighing or counterbalancing. There seemed to just be something like almost categorically or qualitatively different about miracle evidence and just like empirical evidence compared to this like almost seeming like wishy-washy like intuitions where like they're very significantly shaped by personal factors. There's lots of interpersonal disagreement about intuitions.
¶15intuitions seem like highly cognitively penetrated in the sense that like what intuitions you have are significantly influenced by your background beliefs and desires and the way that you live and what you want to be true. >> Um >> so there just seemed to be like a very significant like almost categorical difference between these kinds of evidence. On the one hand, we got this like seemingly tenuous, highly socioulturally bound, extremely cognitively penetrated intuition concerning which there's lots of disagreement both today and throughout history on the one hand and then like, okay, X-ray beforehand, afterhand. Am I going to debate with an X-ray? Like the X-ray is just telling me that my intuition is wrong.
¶16[laughter] Uh, and it's like the miracle evidence like just like the empirical evidence is palpable in a way that >> the intuitions kind of aren't. you know, they the intuitions almost feel like malleable in some sense. They >> I mean now looking back it's almost like >> they feel at least in some indirect way like voluntary in some sense. Um, >> so I don't know just like it was it was seeing just like the sheer force not only of the miracle evidence but like it just seems to be a different kind of evidence from the intuitions that like I really shouldn't be holding these intuitions basically fixed as like yeah fixed points that are unalterable and basically like they screen off any possible empirical evidence. um like you know as we were talking about in our uh discussion that was hopefully posted yesterday on capturing Christianity um you know like we've got pictures beforehand and afterhand of the club feet and it's like okay I guess my intuition is wrong.
¶17[laughter] So that I guess that was the first thing. There's lots of other things I could say about this but that was just the first step is just seeing not only the extreme evidence for Catholicism but seeing that there there does seem to just be like a qualitative difference in the kinds of evidence here. Did you at that point did you just start to like because you you just said something interesting how these moral intuitions almost seem voluntary right is that what sort of happened where you like voluntarily started to real or like I don't even know how to put this in the right words like voluntarily start to change your moral intuitions or >> I've seen this sort of thing happen at least a lot of times in my life so just like one example and oh absolutely like um for instance like concerning hell like my intuitions just as a result of like going through this whole process have themselves just changed and it just shows you how like malleable intuitions are. But um >> like going back in the past, this is just an example like you know sometime often times academics go onto these websites where they can download free books that they're not legally allowed to go onto. Uh and when I first came across that when I was way younger like I just like sort of intuited I had a kind of like intuitive reaction that like oh that's impermissible.
¶18I shouldn't be doing this. And I felt really guilty when I did it the first time, but then I just like kept on doing it and doing it and doing it and doing it and doing it and I was like, "Oh yeah, this is really normal." Like people around me are doing it and everyone's doing it and just over time I completely lost that sense and now it's just I have no intuitive sense whatsoever against it. Isn't that interesting how like I initially thought that this thing was like this is really bad. I shouldn't be doing this, but I did it anyway and I kept on doing it. I sort of trained myself, talked myself out of the intuition and like it was just like a you know everyone's like oh yeah this is fine you can do it you can do it and that just like trained me to now I like yeah it's just like clicking a button now to be very clear um I think you know this is one of the places I don't think that the church has like an official teaching um and just to be very clear uh there are lots of even like highly conservative traditional Catholics who think that yeah it's totally permissible to download those sorts of books because custom is the interpreter of of law uh you know custom basically has the force of law as Aquinus says Uh so if it's like if these laws aren't actually even being enforced at all as they aren't um and if it's just custom within your discipline say to go and download the relevant books then at least a lot of confessors even even highly traditional confessors um and people like you know Christian Wagner from Scholastic Answers um like they'll basically say yeah it is permissible under under these conditions to do that sort of thing.
¶19Now I'm not I'm not here to actually claim whether or not that's permissible. talk with your confessor or whatever. But like my point is just that at the time all I'm trying to illustrate is like I had an intuition against something very strongly and just as a result of habituation I lost it. >> And like come on like >> that sus. Isn't that sus?
¶20>> Well, you're giving an example in another context to to sort of give the the pump the intuition pump that like it can change. Your intuitions can change in some cases like voluntarily on your own engaging in certain behaviors that result in these these different intuitions. >> Yeah. And if it's just like the normal people treat it as normal around you and you have all these social pressures and maybe you want to do something. You have desires that affect your intuitions.
¶21Your background beliefs affect it. So if you just come to believe that something is permissible, that may very well start to affect your intuitions. You come to believe that it's impermissible, that might start honing your intuitions in another way. So like I don't know the these the kind of evidence here is just so cognitively penetrated that like it just seems highly influencable extremely influ influencable by non-truth tracking factors and that just means that I I shouldn't be um treating these as like basically fixed points that I sort of sift theories according to the intuitions that I hold fixed. No actually I can revise these things and maybe I've just been going systematically arry with respect to at least some of my intuitions.
¶22And this brings me to maybe another response that kind of I started to see the the force of which is one that that Ethan Muse has brought to me to to my attention and I was like, "Oh man, that actually does have force." Which is just that um under Catholicism it wouldn't actually be very surprising if some of us a lot of us could go pretty seriously arai with respect to certain elements of the moral domain with our moral intuitions. um because of I mean various reasons but um you know like we teach that like as a result of the fall our intellects have been darkened in various ways and we um experience the noetic effects of sin. So that's basically just like intellectual effects of sin where we you know we don't see the truths as well as we should and uh basically you know like kind of darkening of lots of our tendencies and whatnot and like it wouldn't be then surprising that like with respect to some of these things that have to do with like how I want to live or have to do with like pleasurable things or things about like oh I don't want to go to hell and that sort of thing it wouldn't be too surprising under Catholicism it still may very well be surprising but it wouldn't be too surprising if at least a lot of us could go systematically astray with respect to some of our moral intuitions given Catholicism's own lights. So basically, Catholicism has a kind of debunking account or debunking story of these intuitions where like a debunking story is like if you're going to go against if your theory is going to go against some intuitions, you want to have some kind of explanation for why people may very well go astray in those particular ways to try to mitigate the damage of having to go against the intuitions cuz like a lot of us think and I think like you know it is still some evidence against a theory if like it's intuitively implausible. Um, but if you can have alternative explanations of why you'd have the intuition that don't cite it being true, that may very well either serve as a defeater for the intuition or if it doesn't undermine the intuition entirely, its evidential force, it could nevertheless at least significantly mitigate its evidential force so that other considerations can come in and win the day, which in my case was like, you know, just all these arguments for theism and Catholicism and whatnot.
¶23>> The miracles. >> Yeah, the miracles. >> Yeah. I mean, that that's super interesting. In my case, like I I never really had those problems.
¶24I never had like a moral intuition that really conflicted with some Catholic teaching. And in my case with respect to the papacy, I was like very very happy that I was put onto that topic from people like Mike Winger and Gavin Orland because it really does seem to have some sort of link epistemically to these moral intuitions. It's like if you accept the papacy is true, you accept the pope, you accept the church teaching, then everything else just kind of falls out of it. It just like flows and and is connected in at least some way that is recognizable so that you can start to accept and realize like, okay, well, maybe I was just wrong about this, right? Maybe that's what it's just a a failure of mine in some way to realize what the actual truth is.
¶25And it's not too surprising that we would get stuff wrong like we I'm I'm wrong about all sorts of stuff, right? >> You know, and so to to realize like my own fallibility and then say uh accept something that's a little bit more I say a little bit more a lot more authoritative than I am to accept that it just flows naturally. And so personally like I can't add a whole lot to like what what you're describing here. You know, you know what you just added? You like you just added a like a data point where you're like you're like, "Oh, yeah.
¶26I mean, I didn't I haven't had any like intuitive clashes with moral teachings of Catholicism. It's like just look at like there are two people here. Why why do I think that why do I think why am I holding fixed? It's like like an unalterable fact that my moral intuitions are just definitely correct and your yours are just wrong." Like and there are literally like millions of people like you, you know, throughout like today throughout church history. You got Alfonsus Lori, Thomas Aquinus, Ambrose, like you know Bellererman like you Padre Peio who like completely disagree with my moral intuitions.
¶27Their moral senses, their moral intuitions are very divergent from mine. Why I think I am special? Why I think I hit the epistemic lottery. See, but that's that takes I think one of the barriers that like so so someone watching this who's maybe on the fence, maybe is an agnostic and is watching this video and is like, "Yeah, I've got these same objections." What you just did, what you just described takes a lot of humility to to to realize like I I might be wrong about these like really serious matters, >> right? And so I think that's like a barrier for probably a lot of people.
¶28And I think in your case like the humility that you that you just expressed obviously is an intellectual virtue, but it's it's hard like it's hard to express that virtue sometimes. >> Yeah. Well, and it's a gift of God's grace, right? Like this is not my own kind of natural virtue. This is like God infusing grace into me and basically, you know, it's grace powered, grace enabled.
¶29So, um, but like that was one of the biggest realizations that I had, which is like, >> you know, I just go up to Ethan, I'd be like, I in this. He's like, I'm going to show that intuition. Like, and what are we to do at that point? Like, oh, I'm just going to be like, nope, I'm right. I just I just keep on pounding the table.
¶30Like, nope, my mine are right. >> Yeah. >> I don't have any other independent reason for thinking that. And like, why think again? Why think I hit the epistemic lottery when like I'm just I'm sitting next to you and you literally just reported that like your intuitions just were totally divergent from mine.
¶31Um, >> yeah. [laughter] So I mean you know just like also all these people throughout history that I just mentioned like Bellereman, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinus like you just go through the list Alphonsus Lori, Padre Peio are just like far more morally virtuous than me certainly you know they seem to have like you know even like highly evident mystical charisms that I was finding out about. So like these are the people who seem to be much closer to God than me and yet like I'm the one who like got the moral intuitions right like I hit the epmic lottery. Um, at the very least, like I'm I'm not even saying that these these intuitions, at least for me and for those who have them, I'm not saying that they don't have any evidential value whatsoever. That's like not what I'm saying.
¶32But just like I don't know how you could like consider all the the things I just said and not at least considerably dampen their evidential force, right? And that's all that I was sort of going for in this conversion is to dampen their evidential force to basically mitigate the strength of the considerations against Catholicism so that the considerations for Catholicism could basically win the day. Yeah. >> Um >> so I just think like I could sufficiently mitigate the damage of going against some of my basic moral intuitions that it would just be irrational for me to cling to them. And I was just starting to see that and I was like, "Oh man." But dude, I can see someone like really digging their heels in in this in, you know, we haven't even gotten to the other objections, but like this one is like such a big deal.
¶33>> It was such a big deal for me. I mean, this was, you know, you ask Ethan and he'll probably say that like cuz you know, we just had so many conversations and debating and going back and forth for hours upon hours on end and he'll probably say like, "Yeah, you just kept on going back and just saying like, "Yeah, but it's so intuitively implausible." You know, like I would just keep on saying that. So like I would be trying to give these like implausible accommodationist stories for some of the miracles or other things like that. Um and then when he'd point out that like no like isn't this just like profound evidence for Catholicism? And he'd explain the million reasons why that is the case and I'd be like yeah but I maybe I could take an evidential hit because Catholicism takes such a huge evidential hit from my intuitions.
¶34Like I would always go back to the intuitions basically. Um >> wow. >> So yeah it it was this was one of just the biggest barriers. Um, but you know, I mean, as I said, like even since then, like my intuitive reactions to things have just been like molding and changing, which is I mean, it's just like almost vindicating what I was what Ethan was saying, like these things really are pretty malleable, highly cognitively penetrated, super influencable, my non-truth tracking factors. Why I think I won the epistemic lottery, lots of peer disagreement about these things that should lead me to consiliate to at least some extent.
¶35Um, to basically, you know, diminish the evidential force of my intuitions by my own lights to some extent. And um and then like he you know just think like you're there with Christ right like you watch him get crucified you know you watch all the all the nails go into his hands and his feet and whatnot and you see him getting interred in the tomb. Maybe you're there and you're like putting the spices on him. You put him in the tomb and then you know later you're with the apostles in the upper room and then like Christ appears to you and you're literally there and he's like he's like breathing on you as it says and you're like feeling his wound. You're feeling his hand.
¶36like poking his side and whatnot and then he's like sticking around for 40 days with you and all these other people and they're like, "You see this, right?" And they're like, "Yeah, I see it. We see it. We're interacting with him." Uh, and then he's like, you know, eating fish with you and he's like, "Simon, do you love me?" And you're like hearing that like if I saw all of that, all of that. It would just be ridiculous to be like, "Yeah, but you know what, Jesus? Like all this stuff you say about hell, I know we're not talking about hell, but like it illustrates the point.
¶37All this stuff you say about hell, it grades against my intuition. So, I'm not going to believe you. You know, I'm just I'm just going to leave you. That would be ridiculous, right? It would be utterly ridic.
¶38You should just conclude in that case that, oh, >> maybe I'm just maybe my intuitions are off track. Hm. Cuz, you know, there's been like a manifestation of divine power in front of you that you can just see and that you've palpated. Like, it just shows that there's like a categorical difference between these kinds of evidence, I think. And it would just be very implausible to cling to the intuitions even if they're very strong to cling to the intuitions uh running contrary to um like the manifestation of divine power.
¶39And then you know like basically when you look at the miracles you know it's like well again we got X-rays before and afterhand. We're like one person removed from being able to palpate Padre Pio's wounds in the way that I just described for the apostles. Uh so when I thought of that I'm like man I wouldn't say that to Jesus. And so then it just seems irrational for me to say that with respect to the Catholic miracles. So I became Catholic.
¶40[laughter and gasps] But anyway, that those are all the sorts of considerations that led me to >> at least get over the hurdle of these moral objections. And but and this is also the thing. It's like >> I'm not fully like over all of those intuitions. Like some of them still remain and they've been mitigated in their force even just like psychologically. Um but like that's ultimately what what faith is like you know you can't fully understand everything like I maybe I can't exactly see how it all fits together.
¶41Um and maybe it grades against my intuition to at least some minor extent now. Um although even there it's just it has been like just even psychologically significantly which is just cool but um maybe that's a gift of divine grace but like my broader point is that um you know this is ultimately what faith is you know you give intellectual ascent to divine revelation on the authority of God revealing you know because he's manifested his power he's put his divine stamp of approval on something and so even if I can't fully understand it even if I have some intuitions to the contrary which even persist up until now um like I give the ascent of faith because it is you the motives of credibility are so manifest and manifold and so um >> in other words we >> submit to Rome >> indeed yes we do indeed submit to Rome but it's faith-seeking understanding right like the faith is there and now like I still have some and oh and it's backed up by like hordes upon hordes of motives of credibility like reasons to accept to think that the revelations are credible um and then you know you seek understanding it's like okay I know that some of these remnant intuitions that are weak like must be wrong somehow so how do I make sense of that right and then you just work through it. Um, and I think that's like the proper epistemology for um, Catholics and Christians more generally. >> Let's move on to the next objection. Is it hell?
¶42Is hell the the the next object? >> Yeah. So, I think hell was the the next biggest one. And of course much go on. >> I was going to say is is it similar in type to the moral intuitions, the e ethical intuitions?
¶43Like seems it seems related. >> It is very related. So like this is another thing was like I was starting to notice that a lot of my objections like a meta point which like this is also something that led me to theism but um it's like a meta point. A lot of my objections weren't actually independent from one another. >> Mhm.
¶44In other words, like if you solve if you you can't like take them into account like separately and think that their evidential force like compounds or multiplies like no actually there's like an underlying unity to the problems that uh makes them no longer like separate independent pieces of evidence against Catholicism which further significantly dents their force. So, like I was just thinking like, hm, I actually can't treat my intuition against let's say the church's teaching on homosexuality and the church's teaching on like transgenderism as just like independent intuitions, you know, like clearly uh if if I found out that I was wrong about the um the homosexuality intuition, then like I should very significantly start doubting the other intuition because like maybe there there would be some kind of systematic story to how I'm going mistaken. And they're both just like it's the same kind of evidence. They're both just like contrary intuitions. And so I was starting to notice it's like, oh man, my objections from hell, my objections to all the different ethical teachings like about lying and homosexuality and transgenderism and just like, you know, suicide and whatnot, they like all go back to just some of these like basic moral intuitions that kind of grade against Catholic teaching.
¶45And you I I I think I was just like implicitly I didn't recognize it, but I was treating these as like independent super forceful pieces of evidence that were just like compounding one on top of another such that I had like you know dozens of problems for Catholicism. But no, it's one unified problem. The problem of divergent intuitions and so then you can you start to see that the the objections are actually probabistically correlated. And so then uh you know if you can find some kind of unifying explanation for how I might be going astray with respect to these as I think Catholicism provides then you're just like oh man >> you know these and the intuitions have so much psychological force but you start to see that their evidential force is nowhere near as strong as the psychological force. >> H so there's like a divergence between the evidential force of the intuitions and their and and their their psychological force.
¶46And I didn't really realize that they can't be treated as independent pieces of evidence um until much later on in the process. And it was that realization that that led me to be like, whoa, there actually aren't as many objections that I had to Catholicism that are independent. And it was a very similar realization with respect to theism and atheism, you know, like a lot of the objections to theism at bottom are like, "Oh, here's a bad thing. Oh, here's another bad thing. Oh, here's another sub-optimal thing or here's another really bad you know, like hiddenness or uh religious diversity or like you know, horrific >> human suffering and then animal suffering and then like oh like you know there's like other kinds of suffering or there's like horrendous evil there's like social evil there's like natural evil there's moral evil but like that's one unified problem the problem of bad suboptimal stuff and I can't we can't be treating these as like independent pieces of evidence like if you if you conditionalize on or if you take into account let's say one instance of horrific evil like the Holocaust sure theism may very Well, take an evidential dent from that particular piece of evidence.
¶47But then what the resulting theistic picture is going that that you're going to basically rule out all the views on which God doesn't have a justifying reason for allowing that sort of thing to occur. And the resulting theistic picture even though it takes some dent from that horrific suffering is now going to make it far less far less surprising that you'd get other instances of horrific evil, >> right? and other kinds of evil and other sorts of suboptimality like oh maybe if God's allowing the Holocaust maybe he also has some reason to allow people to temporarily not believe in him like so you start to wonder you start to notice that like actually the even the objections to theism aren't probabilistically independent and you're like oh man these don't have as much force as you think and then actually like the theistic arguments it's like no like solving fine-tuning won't help you explain Padre Pio >> it also won't help you explain psychophysical harmony it also won't help you explain moral knowledge And like you just see like whoa, these are actually probabilistically independent arguments for the that are like independently converging lines of evidence. It's like whoa. Um so that's like a higher order realization that was like in the background that really affected my conversion.
¶48>> Uhhuh. But but on the topic the specific topic of hell well yeah I was I was curious what other considerations led you like apart from these sort of meta considerations of like these seem to be related you know intuition so to speak. Um, but was was there anything sort of specific that helped you with with help? >> Well, I mean I can articulate like we haven't really even laid out the problem. So like there's like proportionality concerns and then there's like heavenly grief concerns and there are a few other like much weaker concerns I think that we don't really need to get into that I had.
¶49But like those are the two main ones. So proportionality is basically like the thought is doesn't hell seem like a disproportional punishment like what? Like an infinite eternal punishment for like finite crimes on earth? Doesn't that seem kind of disproportional? Doesn't seem like an unjust punishment.
¶50And if God's perfectly just, he's not going to meet out an unjust punishment. So um that was like the objection that I had there. Seems like hell is a disproportional punishment. Um and then the other objection that I had to hell. The other main one is like this problem of heavenly grief.
¶51So it seemed like you know in the afterlife I would be aware of the fate of the damned. Um and you know I would be like radically conformed to the image of Christ. So it seems like you know what's the fitting emotional reaction to people suffering? It's some kind of negatively veanced emotional response right maybe some kind of grief or some kind of sadness. Um, and if that's the case and if like you know basically I'm fully flourishing and all my faculties are fully manifest and flourishing in the afterlife in heaven say um then if I'm aware of the fate of the damned as it seemed I would be um I don't think God like just like uh zap our minds free from like oh like oh I had that one friend that at that one point and like he's not here with us so like I don't think God would basically just like like remove knowledge from our brains or something like that in the afterlife so that we like somehow are unaware of the fate of the damned.
¶52That seemed really implausible. >> Um >> so shouldn't I then be like grieving about the fate of the lost especially if it's like let's say like my own child or something like that, you know? Um shouldn't that then like at least at the very least like tinge my heavenly joy? But then isn't heaven like doesn't that kind of visiate the heavenly uh blessedness or bliss or perfect happiness? Like I thought all tears will be wiped away there, but like no.
¶53It seems like we we should we're actually going to be having grief. So, it's like a problem for the kind of blessedness or bliss that is supposed to be had in heaven. Um because like it seems like we'd have to be grieving um given that that's the fitting emotional response to the fate of the damned. Um >> so proportionality and heavenly grief, >> proportionality and heavenly grief, those are the the two main ones. So I mean with respect to proportionality um the thing that helped me the most was this paper by um Brian Cutter on hell and proportionality and he just gave a bunch of different models at least many of which I have talked with people like father James Dominic Rooney who just wrote a book on hell for Routlledge.
¶54I've like they a number of them at least seem to be consistent with what the magisterium teaches um on which actually even though um hell is everlasting and involves everlasting suffering like the total amount of suffering is finite and so it's not actually like a disproportional punishment for crimes on earth. Um so you could have models on which like the suffering decreases proportionally over time. Um you could have models on which uh you know people reach a eventually after various like sensory pains that they experience the sensory pains diminish out of God's mercy and uh all that's left is like the pain of loss of the botific vision um you know there are various other models like uh that we probably don't need to get into because they get a little bit tricky and complicated but like basically Brian Cutter's paper hell and proportionality was like a huge thing that helped me and also just like Alexander Puce he has this model of hell on which Um like yes, hell is going to involve everlasting suffering cuz that's that's dogmatic for Catholics of course. Um but suffering is compatible with living a life that is at least worth living. Like at at the very minimum it's like worth living.
¶55It's like good that there exist such beings and their lives are like good on the whole according to Alexander Pruce's model of hell. Um, and so I was like, "Oh man, okay, maybe maybe if God ensures that people live lives that are at least on the at minimum worth living and uh like God God could very well be justified in um basically allowing people to, you know, definitively self-exclude themselves from the botific vision out of respect for their autonomy and then all like as a natural consequence of that they experience very significant suffering and whatnot which God kind of um you know repurposes for like retributive ends." Um, so I was like, okay, I I can I can see even though it seems implausible to me for various reasons, like I can see how this this could be a proportional punishment given what Brian Cutter says and given that like Alexander Pruce's model of hell. So I was like, okay, um, this is this is like significantly damaging my the force of my objections from hell. Um, or at least the proportionality objection. And like even then like you know I don't even think I'm I'm open to you know like Ethan Muse had this interview that he did with um Pat Flynn on philosophy for the people.
¶56Maybe you can we can link it in the description or something like that. Um and like I'm I'm also open to models on which like we don't go in for the Brian Cutter stuff. Um but like no actually like um like grave sins like mortal sins the sorts of sins that damn you are indeed of infinite gravity because like you a mortal sin you have to have full knowledge of the grave wrongness of the action in question. You have to have deliberate consent. You know you deliberate about it and you fully consent to it and you're not there aren't like these freedom mitigating factors like coercion or being the under the undue influence of alcohol or you know various other like addictions and whatnot.
¶57Um, and you know, it has to be a grave matter. So, it has to be a serious wrongdoing like ser it's like fundamentally opposed to love of God. Uh, and if you meet all those three conditions, what is that? You stare clearheadedly at evil. You know it's evil.
¶58Not only evil, gravely evil. The sort of evil that is fundamentally opposed to love of God. And you deliberate about it. You know that it's gravely wrong. And you choose it nonetheless in wickedness.
¶59that evinces a kind of hatred of God that's a it's a completely contrary to God's law um and completely as I said fundamentally opposed to love of God. >> Yeah. >> So you definitively turn yourself away from God who is infinite goodness itself. And if if like you know at least I I wouldn't be surprised if a story like the following turned out to be true. Like maybe just like the the gravity of a crime scales somehow in proportion to like the worthiness or the honor due to the to the person offended.
¶60So, like, you know, I gave this example in the Matt Pratt interview that hopefully people have seen, but like, you know, you step on you intentionally go out of your way to like step on an ant. Like, okay, you shouldn't you shouldn't do that. Like, like love insects. Like, you know, we shouldn't be like dismembering insects or things like that. Like, stop, you know?
¶61Don't don't go out of your way to like step off step on an ant. Um, well, it would be much worse to do that to a puppy. Go to go out of your way and like step on the neck of a puppy or like crush its skull. Like, you shouldn't do that. That's very bad.
¶62Um, now do that to like an infant or like a grandma. That's even worse, right? And now like imagine doing that to like God himself. Like I don't know. It it does seem to be the case like intuitively that like the gravity of the wrongs here scale somehow in proportion to like the dignity or the worth of the thing that you're doing it to, right?
¶63Cuz like um puppies have like uh more moral value than uh ants. Sorry ants, but puppies do. Uh and like humans, sorry puppies, but humans have more moral worth or dignity than puppies. Um, and you know, God is infinitely worthy. He is due or owed like infinite honor and whatnot, right?
¶64Um, and if that's the case, then like again, like I'm not even I'm not even to like again to mitigate the force of my objections to hell. All I need to like give is at least some story, some account of how this could work, which is like not hopelessly, overwhelmingly, extremely, ludicrously improbable. Like cuz I'm just trying to offer an accommodation here. Like I'm just saying like, okay, maybe this is true. philosophy is hard.
¶65Like ethics is hard. You put like a 100 ethicists in a room and you're going to get like 400 answers, right, to an ethical problem. So like at the very least, uh like something like this might be true. Uh and so long as it might be true, then I can't really take these again, I can't really treat these problems of hell as like fixed points that they're unalterable, definitive. >> Yeah.
¶66And and like again when I compare like when I compare what I'd have to say um as like a Catholic to embrace the problems uh sorry to like resolve these problems. It just didn't seem anywhere near as implausible as the things that I'd have to say as a non-atholic to explain the Catholic vindicatory evidence cuz again like X-rays before and after like people palpating his wounds. We've got pictures of Padrick. We have pictures of him with his stigmata. you know, like thousands of people would go to his masses.
¶67They'd be like 3 hours long. At his death, at his death, we have pictures of no scars or anything. It's like, okay. Um, you know, like we got pictures before and after like club foot, no club foot, you know, like the miracle of Kanda, like no leg, leg, you know, it's like, what am I to do? Like it's I don't really have any comparably plausible story as like a non-theist to tell to try to mitigate the the force of that evidence.
¶68Certainly as like a non-theist in my agnostic state. I was like, whoa. Okay. >> Yeah. And so looking into Brian Cutter's paper and stuff for it like functioned as >> offering a way to to understand really just in a way that's like possible like this is a possible reconciliation of the problem that that I'm experiencing.
¶69The reason why I'm bringing that up is because one of my objections to Catholicism was divine simplicity. And I just didn't like it it didn't make any sense to me. How can all the properties be identical to each other? Like and and then there's there's no parts in God. Like what?
¶70like what about the trinity and how does that function and everything. And so I what sort of started me down the road like this was the first thing that got me open to Catholicism for real was listening to a lecture by Joshua Siguad on uh on his new model divine simplicity you trope theory and all this stuff and um I still don't completely understand it but it was the first time that I heard some explanation of this theory that didn't make like that was like somewhat but reasonable. >> Yeah, >> it was like, okay, this is this could be possible. Maybe I'm just wrong about that, you know, and it sounds like that's sort of similar to how >> Yeah. >> reading Brian Cutter's paper and and thinking about >> it's like a proof of concept, you know?
¶71It's like, you know, Brian Cutter, he doesn't even say in the paper that like, oh, any of these are true. Like he's saying like, listen, they're like consistent things. They like might be true. They resolve the problem and they're consistent with what the magisterium says. So, it's like, oh man.
¶72And like it the more of those you pile on just one on top of another like there's this huge paniply of things that are like totally consistent with everything that the magisterium says uh and like each of which is like okay you know even if I have some difficulties it's like okay maybe you know like I could sort of see it you know and then you pile them up you're like oh man okay this is very significantly denting the force of my objections um cuz like what's the probability that at least one of those stories may very well be true. It's not it's not that low. Yeah. >> And even if it is pretty low, again, that's just nothing in comparison to what I'd have to say is in my agnostic shoes all the miraculous evidence. Um, >> and like again, we'd have we're having to take into I'm taking into account all these high order considerations that these aren't like again independent objections to Catholicism.
¶73There's like a deeper unified story as to how I might be going wrong with respect to my intuitions. And um, this is like qualitatively categorically different kind of evidence from like the empirical evidence. And >> yeah, >> well, let's move on to the next objection. >> Heavenly grief. We should >> Yeah.
¶74What I was going to say about that actually is with respect to heavenly grief, I want to point people to your video. Do you cover it there? Heavenly grief. Okay. Yeah.
¶75So, if you guys want to to hear about the response to heavenly grief, go check out his video. I wanted >> the 7 hour one, the really long one. >> Yeah. I wanted to give a plug for that video. So, that might be a good opportunity.
¶76I mean, I'm I'm like genuinely curious what the response is. So, I I'm going to go watch the video, too. Uh, but yeah, let's move on to our our next objection. What's the next one >> or your next objection? >> Yeah.
¶77Well, I think the three biggest ones that I had which we're covering first are the moral problems, hell and uh biblical problems. So, so the next kind of category is just biblical problems. Okay. Um and I guess >> like Old Testament violence. >> These fall into two main categories.
¶78So, one is just like objections to inherency and then another one is like Old Testament violence and whatnot. Um so, you know, as Catholics, we are dogmatically committed to a version of inherency that I just like to call Catholic inherency. Okay? So like get out of your mind what like fundamentalist preachers and highly literalistic people tend to think like get that out of your mind. Get also get out of your mind like views where like you're super liberal about the Bible like oh yeah like maybe they just the authors went radically astray in all these different ways like get get all that stuff out of your mind.
¶79Here's what the Catholic is committed to thinking uh with respect to inherency. Whatever the sacred writers intended to assert is true. is protected from error given of course the genre that they're using given the various literary devices that are available to them given their context given their audience etc. You have to take all those things into account uh when you're trying to assess you know like the authoral intent or the writer's intent. There's I still have to like resolve some questions in my mind about whether or not like inherency might the sacred writer might be able to be attached to like a redactor for instance.
¶80So the redactor might have certain purposes that like intentions for including things in a text that might diverge from what like the original person wrote on a papy. I still have to like resolve some of those things in my mind. But like the broader point is that whatever the sacred writer intended to assert is protected from error given the genre and literary devices and whatnot. Okay. So we're committed to that sort of thing.
¶81And so I don't know. I just worried about lots of different things concerning the Bible. There just seemed to be lots of different objections to inherency or at the very least like the more fundamentalist kind of inherency. um where like ah aren't there like puditive contradictions across the gospels and aren't there like puditive contradictions in the Old Testament and like what about some potential historical inaccuracies in books like you know Daniel or various other things and like you know >> was Moses a real historic >> was Moses a real person yeah or like you know they're saying like these people lived 800 years and I'm like that seems kind of ridiculous like you know that seems incompatible with everything that we know from biology or like you know what about these like incompatible genealogies you know like this person said you came from him this person said you didn't come from here or like that you came from someone else. Uh and so I'm like what am I to do?
¶82There are so many of these. It's like [laughter] so um that was the inherency problem. Uh maybe we can just pause on that and then we'll go to uh Old Testament violence. >> Sure. >> So here once again there was a cluster of higher order considerations and first order considerations that le led me to basically be able to resolve or at least sufficiently diminish the force of this objection in my mind.
¶83So some of the higher order considerations were like um you know like we have to take into account that uh God may very well have uh certain purposes in promulgating revelation that um concern his like broad the broader distribution of evidence that he wants out there for kind of lulling people to believe. So like what do I mean by that? Well, I came across this that Ethan Muse, he has this like divine hiddenenness model of God's activity in the world. So, basically, God epistemically fine-tunes the level of objective evidence out there um [snorts] that he gives through both um general revelation and like special revelation. uh he epistemically fine-tunes the level of objective evidence to basically provide enough objective evidence to make the ascent of faith rational or perhaps rationally obliged but enough counter evidence and also enough like psychological factors and various other barriers that preserve the freedom of the ascent of faith and that basically preserve the psychological possibility of doubt so like uh >> which is in itself a good >> right yeah no and it's yeah I mean it's in itself a good to like basically preserve the freedom of the ascent of faith it's also basically having that kind of level of obscurity where they're like there are psychological factors that can like significantly temper the rational force of the evidence that uh basically that that kind of level of obscurity posited by this model can allow basically us to be able to um you know like help other people in their faith journey when they're struggling with things or like help other like help other people come to knowledge of God and the truth and whatnot.
¶84So like also allows us to make significant differences in each other's lives. Um and you know like there are also various biblical passages that make this model very plausible. One is like it's the glory of God to conceal. You know like Jesus is giving parables and he's like his apostles at one point he's like why do you speak in parables and he's like his answer is almost like because they're obscure so that the people who are real sincere seekers like you guys who are coming to me and asking to me about them I'll then like explain further to them what's going on. But like other people you know uh >> he just like allows them to choose whether or not they're going to seek further and try try to go past the obscurity.
¶85Um so it allow it allows the goods of sincere seeking. It allows the goods of like difference making responsibility to each other's lives and coming to knowledge of the truth and knowing God. It preserves the freedom of the ascent of faith. There are lots of goods that are enabled by this kind of divine modus operandi at least in general. This is like at least a general modus operandi that God might take.
¶86But and given that model which is at least anticedently like reasonably likely under Catholicism given the various biblical passages the goods that I just mentioned and also like I don't know it's just like not a very implausible agential motive that like a like a being might have. Um given that this is a kind of like anticedently plausible conditional on Catholicism given Catholicism uh it's then actually not very surprising that if God is going to give us a book which is uh even inerent or inspired it wouldn't be prespicuously so. It wouldn't just be like obvious in a way that like compels rational ascent. Um and like you know just imagine if we had like yeah 40 different authors across like what 1,500 years and different historical eras and whatnot. and it like perfectly coheres and it's like there's like no issues whatsoever and they're like nailing all these historical facts that are like super hard to get like literally across the entire thing for all these different genres for 1,500.
¶87it would be it would then start to be really sus like >> predicting all these events in advance >> you know yeah predicting like demonstrabably true like uh prophecies what like if you had all of that that might start to compromise the goods of um of like the divine hiddenist model and so like it wouldn't be too surprising even conditional on Catholic inherency and even conditional on um you know on Catholicism more generally that even if there's like a an inspired book it wouldn't be prospicuously so like there may very well be certain like apparent difficulties uh And basically like if you have if then it's not very surprising that there would be apparent difficulties. Yeah, some of them would be resolvable upon further inspection. But like the further and further you get from the facts and from the genre and whatnot like you may very well have some that like slip through the cracks and that seem kind of intractable and whatnot. So like even under Catholic inherency it wouldn't be very surprising if there are certain seemingly intractable apparent errors. So like actually there's this like again it's almost like a debunking story.
¶88There's like this unified explanation for why there may very well be apparent errors in the Bible. uh including ones which are seemingly recalcitrant. Um so like I was like okay that seems interesting. Um at the very least I can't be super confident that this model is false. Yeah.
¶89>> Uh again I'm just here just trying to mitigate the evidential force of of the of the counterveailing considerations. >> So there's that was just like a higher order consideration that was like leading me to think that >> hm [clears throat] >> okay that's interesting. Uh and that also means that I couldn't be treating this is another crucial thing. You can't treat all these apparent difficulties as like independent objections, right? Because there may very well be some unifying story under Catholicism for why the apparent the apparent difficulties are there.
¶90Yeah. Right. So you can't actually treat these as like compounding an evidential force. Again, it goes back to the intuition point. Like you can't just like treat these an intuition about homosexuality and transgenderism as like these independent objections that somehow like >> like massively increase the evidential force of the objections.
¶91You also can't do that with respect to the biblical problems. And I was like, "Oh, wo." So okay, there's a probabistic correlation between all these potential errors and that's going to significantly dent the evidential force of any objection to um inherency. So I was like okay um but it won't altogether remove it. So I was like okay I need to like work through some of these first order issues. So then you basically you just take some ones that that might bother you and you just see if you can resolve them and if you start to find that like no actually like I took a few of them and I was able to resolve most of them just like very diligent and careful study and whatnot you start to be like oh you start to almost like inductively generalize like you know if I actually put myself to it maybe I would be able to resolve at least lots of these or most of these.
¶92Yeah. Uh and then you also start to become sensitive to the fact that like again given Catholic inherency we are bound to what the authors were intending to assert and there's lots of interpretive leeway with respect to authoral intent. Right. >> Right. Cuz even if they write down some proposition P and P in a strict and literalistic sense is false.
¶93That's no threat to Catholic inherency in and of itself because maybe the sacred authors, the sacred writers weren't intending to assert P in a literalistic manner when they were writing that down. Maybe they had some other intention in mind. Maybe they were trying to make a theological point. Maybe they were trying to um kind of elicit some practical effect in the reader. Maybe they were trying maybe they were using some kind of like established literary device that's like totally within the bounds of the relevant genre by which you can like change certain facts or by which you can do those sorts of things.
¶94And they're like, "Oh, that's interesting." So that actually allows us a pretty significant degree of leeway with respect to um uh our interpretation of of scripture. And thankfully, you know, like we have a magisterium which gives us like bounds. Um unlike some other people um [laughter] and we can see where that takes them like these like thousands of do denominations which can't agree with each other. But anyway um so like we do have very significant degree but >> they're more unified than we are. >> Indeed.
¶95Totally. >> Yes. [laughter] >> We were literally just talking about that. >> I know you're more unified to the extent that you allow disunityity. Okay.
¶96Um, >> but I started to see that uh, you know, I could work through some of these individual problems by attending to literary devices or at least by like seeing not terribly implausible literary devices that they might be using. So like the genealogies, you know, they're like using established literary devices of compression by which you can just like completely omit certain people and just say like, yeah, you you descended from this person even though that person's like way earlier on in the chain, say, or like, you know, so they can use compression. they might have some other kind of uh theological purpose in in including certain facts or like changing the dates of something or you know like when someone says like oh yeah I am Daniel. Uh firstly, we could just think that like that particular portion was indeed written by Daniel, say, but you could also say that like maybe there was some sort of established literary convention at the time by which um let's say like a follower of Daniel or someone who's receiving a tradition from Daniel can actually say that they're speaking instead of Daniel or something like that. Or maybe it's some kind of like unique like backwards retro retrodicting like prophetic kind of like visionary account or something like that where it's a super obscure genre that we have very little knowledge of.
¶97Uh, and like again we already there's this huge cloud of unknowing about the sorts of genres that were uh operative in like the ancient near east. So like okay maybe maybe like there just is some kind of like interesting literary device that we don't know about that they're utilizing or something like that or the genre allows for this sort of thing or like we have so little knowledge of the genre that like we're having to use we're having to like reconstruct the kind of genre that it is based on like two other papyri from the time or something. So it's like there's such a cloud of unknowing about like at least some of the Old Testament stuff certainly. Uh but then also just like there's a lot of leeway with respect to like authoral intent given literary devices and genre and whatnot that I was like okay you know like I can actually see like working through these various problems and you know as I said I was like working through them I looked at this 800year thing I was like come on like that seems ridiculous doesn't it? One thing you could say is like God just miraculously preserved them for that long.
¶98But also >> you just look and actually at the time we do know now that it was just a totally established literary convention that if you just want to >> if you want to like show great honor to someone like a patriarch, you just exaggerate how long they lived. So we've like I think it's like ancient Assyrian things where they're saying about their like kings or something or like Babylonian things like yeah they live like thousands of years and whatnot. Um, so like it's it's an established literary convention by like that you can you're not intending to assert in a literalistic fashion that yes, if you like had a timer and you put the timer there from the moment that they were born to the moment they died, it would say 800 years. Like that's not what they're even doing by the writer's own lights, right? By the writer's own lights.
¶99what they're doing, what they're trying, what they're intending to promulgate is not the literalistic content of what they say that the person lived 800 years, but instead like this person was a big deal. That's what they're saying. >> Yeah. And so then like just like notice it gives you again a proof of concept like wo okay I thought that there was something which is like a very big problem for like Catholic inherency but I was like oh no actually >> like the strict and literalistic content just diverges from the authoral intention given established literary conventions that the genre allows. So that sort of thing once you see it in a few cases and you're just like you have a like a pretty decisive objection that you think is like a demonstrable contradiction you're like oh I was wrong or at the very least there are lots of like non-silly stories according to which I could be wrong then you can basically be like okay you know it wouldn't be terribly surprising if that's the case more generally and then you add that to the higher order considerations and then you add in all the miraculous evidence and this is just like like a trivial objection.
¶100I mean like not not trivial but uh I don't know I I I don't really think it has significant force. Yeah, it's like uh I like the example you gave earlier like you see Jesus, you know, crucified and he rise rises from the dead. You go and eat lunch with him and you see him and you hang out with them for 40 days and then you're like, "But Jesus, what about the you know, you're [laughter] like, "Yeah, but John says that there were two angels and Matthew says that there were one." [laughter] And you're just like, dude, like if you saw Jesus do all that, like just think, okay, maybe maybe I'm just making a mistake there. Or like, yeah, saying that there was an angel there or there was one angel is compatible with there also being another angel, right? >> The temple cleansing happens earlier [laughter] in John.
¶101>> Like you wouldn't say that if you're there palpating Jesus's hands. It would be ridiculous to reject Jesus. Even if he says, "Yes, it's in Aaron." >> Are you going to reject him? Are you going to walk away after you saw him get crucified and felt his hands? >> No, you would walk away like, "All right, I was wrong." >> Yeah, I was wrong.
¶102Maybe there's some sort of literary device that they're using. Or maybe like yeah, somehow the author for whatever reason was not intending to assert that or like or maybe they're just trying to there's another there's just so much leeway. Maybe the author was intending to give the general gist of the story without intending to cuz we do this all the time. Like I'm telling you a story, right? And even if I like say that P, >> it doesn't automatically mean that I'm intending to assert that P.
¶103Like you might just like nitpick certain details. I'm like dude, I'm not I'm not actually in trying to like assert those particular details. I'm just trying to give you a gist of the general story. Right? So if that's like what they're intending to do in certain places, then like even if there are things like which as I said are like strictly and literalistically speaking false, like that does not show that what the authors were intending to assert what they're intending to do was mistaken, >> right?
¶104>> And so like again, if you saw Jesus do all those things, you should just conclude that maybe I'm maybe I made some mistake here or maybe there's something about the genre, maybe there's something literate devices and you just have this huge disjunction of things each of which is like not silly. Uh and then you can just totally mitigate the force of the objection and that's how [snorts] I overcame that one. So that's inherency and then there's Old Testament violence. I could even be shorter with this one. So >> yeah.
¶105Yeah, let's cover that one a little bit shorter because I mean a lot of what you've already said is gonna >> Oh yeah, I mean most of what I already said is just going to apply. Um so like yeah, I mean there are all these conquest narratives where you know it it seems like at least on like a very premacious superficial reading that God's like commanding genocide and there are various other things it seemed like yeah there's just lots of violence that seems to be divinely sanctioned and isn't that implausible? Now, of course, like one way that you could go is to say like, "No, God does have like just like the right to deputize people to take pick others lives." Um, that's one way you could go. I didn't find that very plausible at the time. And so, like I just wanted to go in for something which is much more along the lines of like the um like the the kind of moves I was just mentioning with respect to inherency.
¶106So, I you know, and even even here there's like textual indicators within some of these texts. For instance, they're like where one passage they're like, "Yeah, we totally destroyed them. They were completely wiped out down to every last baby and whatnot." But then like a few passages later, the people show up again like no, they weren't totally right. So like, okay, clearly something is something funky is going on. They weren't actually like cuz like the writers of Joshua or Judges, like they're not morons and the redactors aren't morons.
¶107They can obviously see that like this thing says that they were totally wiped out and this thing says, "Oh, they're back just like a few minutes later." Like they're not morons, right? Um so like clearly there's something else going on. There's some sort of something literary that's happening here. And then it's just like open it's open to the exodite to try to figure out what that might be. Some people think that like >> yeah maybe like these these passages serve some kind of just like prop propagandistic um end.
¶108So like actually they're not intending to depict strictly and literalistically a kind of historical genocidal conquest, but it's more so like it has like a practical intention. Or some other people are say things like um oh you know uh maybe like we should allegorize this or maybe there's some historical core like there maybe were some skirmish skirmishes between the Israelites and Canaanites and whatnot and maybe there's like very significant hyperbolizing or maybe um uh yeah like maybe maybe there's some like allegorizing like like maybe this serves some sort of theological end where like the the point of the story what the authors are actually intending to convey when they put these words in God's mouth is just that God hates idolatry. Don't do idolatry, you know, like and maybe God hates sin and stamp all the sin out of your life down to every last remnant, right? Even the occasions of sin, remove those. Um, so like maybe there's some sort of theological end that they're trying to serve.
¶109Maybe there's some other practical end. Maybe there's like maybe they're even trying to depict some kind of literary core, but then hyperbolizing in all different sorts of ways that that lead to the seemingly problematic moral aspects of it. maybe um the more localized affairs, the more localized skirmishes or something like that were actually like um like you know just impositions of violence um like cuz you know like there are such things as just wars, right? Um so I just think again there's lots of leeway here with respect to and this again I just I picked the conquest narratives as one example. Yeah.
¶110>> But there are lots of other cases where like I just think like the Catholic inherentist has lots of resources at their disposal. And again like I'm not even this I I just want the audience to understand this. I'm not even saying that if you came to came came to this evidence without a cath without Catholic eyes without knowing about all the other evidence that you would come to this conclusion. Right? That's not what I'm saying.
¶111I'm just saying like there is so much extremely powerful evidence for Catholicism that it's totally rational to take these more like accommodationist approaches. Uh and it's totally rational to just have this more like I don't know exactly what's going on, but it's like I have this huge disjunction of things which are not totally silly. And maybe yeah, like if you came if you if you didn't have all that miraculous evidence and whatnot, and if you just came with like these like secular historical eyes, you would conclude that like, oh yeah, they just like made some kind of error or something like that. But like that's not what I'm doing. And that's not what like we should be doing.
¶112In fact, like if there actually is overwhelming evidence >> that like God exists, that he established the Catholic Church, that he's performing all these manifest vindicatory miracles throughout the past 2,000 years of church history. Um, and like once you have that in the background, then like that actually very much legitimizes, I think, and makes totally rational these more accommodationist approaches. Um, so I'm not even saying that like this is the most plausible on totally independent grounds story. Like if we just use critical historical scholarship, what would we what would we conclude? Like my resources aren't limited to critical historical scholarship.
¶113I've got lots of more background evidence that influences what what the rational response is to this particular evidence. >> That's a good clarification. Um, one question I did have for you though is did the the canon ever come into your like can canon how the canon was formed and stuff like did that inform your responses to the to to the objections to the Bible or did did it like not even play a factor for you? >> Uh, it didn't I mean can you elaborate um like what exactly what aspect of the canon are you interested in? >> Yeah.
¶114So like people that have objections to inherency like the reason why we adopt inherency as Catholics is because we accept the teaching of the church and one of those teachings as well is the the the canon itself is like the extent of the canon which books are included which books are excluded and so if the Catholic Church is the one who like put the canon together in the first place then maybe we should also trust it when it says that it's inherent that this cannon that it put together is is also inherent. So like despite you know despite our uh problems or or perceived flaws that we see within scripture like uh yeah the canon is >> interesting >> is a Catholic you know. >> Well it's [laughter] very true but I don't know that didn't really come in all that much. I was like [laughter] even a Christian that's the thing. >> Yeah it had just started to occur to me as as you were talking.
¶115>> Yeah. I mean so I [clears throat] wasn't really even a Christian. So I just thought like okay listen conditional on Christianity or Catholicism like I don't know it wouldn't be too surprising that yeah like maybe as is like depicted in one of the scriptures themselves like in one of these books that like uh you know maybe the holy spirit or god would like just guide the church to get the right books right like that didn't seem terribly unlikely to me um like this is another thing is like when we're examining these uh the evidence here against or for Catholic inherency um we have to we have to examine how probable is the evidence conditional on Catholicism and compare that to how probable is the evidence conditional on the falsity of Catholicism or like conditional on the truth of Catholic inherency versus conditional on the falsity of Catholic inherency. Again, a lot of people sometimes will come to this and they they'll they'll conditionalize on the wrong things. they'll they'll think in the back of their mind at least implicitly like oh yeah assuming that this is an ordinary book or something like that or assuming just like the critical historical methods that we have available to us like how probable is it that all these independent problems would just happen to fall in the way of the Catholics and then yeah like if you're conditionalizing just on this being an ordinary book there being no god who's guiding the process or anything like that then yeah it's going to be super unlikely because these are going to be independent problems that are going to all have to fall in the Catholic direction but you're just attending to the wrong hypothesis there right you're not doing like the basian reasoning correctly.
¶116You have to examine how probable is the evidence conditional on sure. Yeah. You're like atheistic kind of historical scholarship kind of approach versus how probable is the evidence conditional on Catholicism, right? And so you have to you actually have to take into account Catholicism's own commitments there that there actually is a God >> who may very well have some kind of unified story for why there are all these apparent errors and whatnot and who is guiding the church and whatnot. So um I think that was maybe also another at least potentially an implicit mistake that I might have been making.
¶117No. All right, let's move on to the next objection, which is, as I understand it, magisterial objections. And I'll tell a little bit about my background with that one as a convert as well, is that [snorts] they never really function. Well, so what was different for me was that I was already in the apologetic space when I converted. And so I was already really familiar with the harmonizations that people like Lydia, Tim Mcgru offer in defense of inherency and stuff in the Bible.
¶118And I know that Lydia is not an errantist, but she offers a lot of harmonizations for these, you know, apparent contradictions in the Bible and uh has done a lot of work on this. And so I was I was already familiar with like the harmonizations that can be offered to harmonize these apparent contradictions in the gospels and in the Bible. And then I heard Trent Horn basically give a very similar type of response for the magisterial objections that it's like this is is sort of similar to how atheists argue against the Bible is that they point to these contradictions and that's what Protestants do with the magisterial documents is they they find one contradiction in this paper bull and then you know some other magisterial document later on they'll say well this contradicts this and and what you do is the same thing that you do with the Bible is you just look for some sort of harmonization. And if it's like somewhat plausible, you're like, "Okay, that's good enough for me." It's like, you know, it shouldn't bother you to the degree that, you know, people let it. But then there are, as you say, I I love this term higher order considerations.
¶119You just have so much evidence for the truth of your view that you don't have to like resolve all of these minute details all at the same time or all at once. Um, so that was that was kind of my like that that's why I never really took them seriously. I never took like objections to biblical inherency super seriously. I was just like, well, Jesus rose from the dead, so like what are you going to do with that, you know? So, yeah.
¶120But how did how did this objection function for you? Was it was it more serious? >> No. So, I mean, it was somewhat serious. Uh, but it wasn't among like the three I don't know.
¶121There was like category one very serious like blinking red lights, objections. And that was like moral problems, hell, and biblical problems. The ones that we just covered. These next ones are like, I don't know, category 2, category three, where it's like, yeah, you know, there's some yellow lights and they're a little worrying, but I don't know, like if if I solve the first three and I've got all the the positive evidence, like I don't know, they don't really bother me all that much. Um, >> but as I understand it, you had been watching people like Gavin Ortland.
¶122No, I watched them very Yeah, very significantly. Yeah. So, I I watched like Aan Ortland, Redeem Zoomer, uh Sean Luke, and I was just like taking notes on their stuff and like I even compiled like this big document with all my objections to Catholicism. It's like 200 pages long and whatnot. And there was like a big section on magestisterial punitive magisterial contradictions and whatnot.
¶123But yeah, no, so I I definitely watched these guys. I paid careful attention what they said. And I also watched very diligently um responses to these videos from people like um Scholastic Answers, Christian Wagner um especially on like you know the no salvation outside the church. He was super helpful with that one. And he has some like blog posts on this was pointing out that like no actually there's like a continuous harmonious development here and totally consistent.
¶124Um people like since 33 AD so Kevin Fernandez I watched him there's this uh YouTube channel which is really good called like the Cathodox which talked about some of these and you know also just like Joe Heshmire he's one of my favorite uh Catholic apologists. Um, and you know, like Trent Horn, they had some response videos to these sorts of things. And I was basically like following the dialectic, doing some research on my own as well, um, on some of these, you know, puditive, sometimes historical difficulties, but also just like magisterial, um, problems. Um, and I think what what really helped me here was just picking like two of like the biggest, baddest, puditive objections and then just like delving into them and seeing uh, could I resolve them? Uh, and I could.
¶125So, the two biggest ones for me were just like religious liberty, uh, and no salvation outside the church. >> So, like with the religious liberty one, we even have like, um, >> there's this amazing Protestant fellow uh, who is so gentle and kind and loving. Uh, I think his name is Austin. He's from like Gospel Simplicity or something. Is that what it's called?
¶126>> Austin Suggs. >> Yeah, Suggs. Um, that uh, he had this video where it's like the I forget exactly the title, but it's like the clearest magisterial contradiction. and it's like on religious liberty and I was like so like these are the sorts that like everyone's like oh this is like the all the Protestants are like oh well this is the clearest contradiction and another one they think it's the biggest where it's like the no salvation aside the church you know like Wes Huff has this video where he in my estimation kind of sort of butchers that um punitive contradiction um so I sort of worked through those two and I just found that like there were very actually quite plausible harmonizations and I was like whoa okay and that gave me like I was like okay I picked the two biggest baddest ones that you guys threw out and they could they were solvable with like pretty diligent effort. And so I was like, "Okay, >> let's go through one of them." >> I kind of want to go through both.
¶127I I think we should I think that might be Well, I will I'll talk about that in my my conversion video. Well, let's I'll I'll do what I'll do. >> I was I was going to say the not the religious liberty, but the no salvation outside the church. >> Yeah, cuz people can check my video on the religious liberty thing. For that one, I just I picked up this book by Michael Dunigan, which just did wonders for my epistemic life.
¶128like the scales fell from my eyes after I read this book. Um it's a book called like religious liberty and the hermeneutics of continuity. But anyway, Michael Dunigan has gone on channels or on podcasts like the classical theism podcast. He's gone on um other YouTube channels to talk about uh this punitive contradiction on relig religious liberty and I was I saw the the harmonization that he gave and I read this 600 page book and I was like whoa that makes so much sense and it's super plausible uh and it like resolves things really nicely and there are even other harmonizations as well that like Thomas Pink and various other people give. Um but let's focus on the no salvation outside the church thing.
¶129So uh yes this is it is extra ecclesia null salus. This is a dogma of the Catholic church. It is still taught. It has always been taught. Um, and uh, you know, like you go back to I think it's one of the like the uh, canate domino or something at Florence or maybe this was like a paper bull where it's like you know it's even saying like you know like schismatics, heretics, Jews, Muslims and whatnot if they're not united to the church by the end of their lives they're going to be cast into you know the eternal fires of hell or something like that.
¶130Um and there are various other uh magisterial statements that um you know like it is a matter of necessity that you be you submit to the Roman pontiff or something like that. Um >> it's like based you know it's like [laughter] true. So um how are we to oh and then you look at like Vatican 2 for instance um even things like even well before Vatican 2 but uh you look at Vatican 2 and it's saying like oh yeah like the plan of salvation includes like Muslims for instance or like Jews or um you know like our separated brethren like the Protestants can be saved um and you know goes through all this stuff about invincible ignorance and whatnot and how um how you know the Holy Spirit can actually effectuate their salvation. Um, so you're like, "Okay, hold on a second. I thought you said that there's no salvation outside the church, but these guys seem to be outside the church, so how could they be saved?
¶131Isn't there a contradiction here?" Um, turns out, no, because if you actually look at the magisterial statements, right? For instance, that one where it's like, uh, unless they be united to the church before they die, they're going to be damned. Um, it all turns on that term united. And it turns out that there are just different ways to be united to the Catholic Church. And this has been recognized for a very long time.
¶132>> And this is what the Scholastic Answers points out uh in his uh articles and in his videos and whatnot. So there's one way you can be united to the church which is like you know uh >> a sort of visible >> you can be you can be a visible explicit formal member of the church right like you're within the literal physical institution. You've been like baptized Catholic. You you know participate in the sacraments and whatnot. That's one way of being united to the church.
¶133But there are other ways of being united to the church that we have recognized for like at least a millennium. Like you know like catechumans for instance if they die they're not actually united to the church in that sense. They're not actually part of like the jeritical bounds of the church. They're not actually formal members of the church yet. But nevertheless you can even go back and uh like people uh have like long recognized that like catechumans for instance can be saved.
¶134Um we even have like popes in the middle ages saying that sort of thing. This is what the Cathodox has pointed out. So okay what's going on here? They're not actually like because these same sorts of councils and whatnot who are recognizing that for instance catechumans can be saved are also saying that like if you're not within the church, if you're not united to the church, then you can't be saved. So what's going on?
¶135Well, it just turns out that there are different, as I said, different ways of being united to the church. So you could be united um as some people put it like Father Garland, like you could be united to the soul of the church. You can sort of be mystically united. So you can have a kind of um like implicit faith in Catholicism because you're um basically you know you want to believe uh everything that God has revealed but just through no fault of your own. You're just unaware that uh God has revealed that you know the Catholic Church is the one true church that you need to be a part of.
¶136Uh and so if you are if you have you know uh that kind of invincible ignorance and moreover you are um you have that kind of uh implicit faith in Catholicism so you're so favorably disposed that maybe if it were like credibly presented to you or something like that um you'd accept it or you know there are different accounts of that >> is it is it kind of like the baptism of desire. >> Yeah. So like there are lots of different ways that you can be united in the church. Um one is um yeah like explicitly formally. Another one is basically um in vodto or like yeah through desire like an explicit desire as in cacumans or there's even like an implicit desire and that's one way you could be united to the soul of the church.
¶137you're sort of mystically united even though you're not within like the jeritical external bounds of the church. And again like you just go back and this stuff this sort of like other ways of being united to the church have been recognized for at least like a millennium, right? like you go back to even the the medieval church >> the patriarchs the the Jewish patriarchs before Jesus know that certainly um but also just even even like with within the time of the Catholic church because um like there are certain people who I think we even venerate as saints who died following an anti-popee so they're literally like in a formal also people who have been like form in a formal state of jeritical excommunication which we sort of later recognized was um I forget if it was later recognized as unjust or something like that I I forget yet. But anyway, there are people who have um been like venerated who are following an antipope for instance. And if you do that, like you're not part of the extra external jeritical bounds of the church cuz you're not in like explicit formal jeritical union with the actual pope.
¶138And yet they're viterated as saints, right? So even going back into medieval times, we recognized that you can be united to the church without being in the jeritical bounds of the church. And so like uh it's totally consistent with um conte domino that for instance protestants can be saved. It's not saying that all Protestants will be saved like you know uh it is a >> it's still very important matter to >> it's still extremely important. There is a grave objective obligation that everyone has to become Catholic like you need to become Catholic and that I think that's what um the you know is a matter of necessity that you be united to the Roman pontiff.
¶139Um Catholicism has long distinguished different kinds of necessity. There's like necessity of precept and necessity of means per accidents, necessity of means per se. So like uh I think this one is like a necessity of precept. So like uh and it is a matter of necessity that you be united to the the you submit to the Roman pontiff. Like that is it.
¶140You need to do that in the sense that it is an objective obligation. It is a grave objective obligation that you need to fulfill. But you know if there is an objective grave obligation that you're not culpable for fulfilling, then you're not going to be damned on account of not fulfilling the objective obligation. It's just like when for instance, you know, um you sleep with uh like unbeknownst to you Cameron, like you have no clue about this and you had no way of knowing, but your wife has an identical twin and she came and you know, she kidnapped Britney a little while back. Uh she just like killed Britney, got rid of her and then started sleeping with you, put on all of her clothes and what not and you had no clue, no way of knowing.
¶141Well, you have actually just like maybe we shouldn't say she killed her. She's existed but she's on a separate island. You have now been committing adultery unbeknownst to you like objectively. you're not having relations with your wife, right? That is objectively gravely wrong, committing adultery, right?
¶142But you're not culpable for it. And so you're not going to be damned on account of it, right? >> So, um it's like, and we have recognized this for like a very long time that uh you know, basically like you can be non-culpable for violating an objective obligation. >> Um and so, you know, you're not going to be damn damn damned on account of that non-culpable violation of an objective obligation. Um, so yeah, I just I do think that there are totally reasonable ways.
¶143Um, and this is why, for instance, we can say things like, yeah, adult all adulterers go to hell, even though you can be an adulterer and not be like and not go to hell in a in a strict and literal sense. Um, because like you can commit like a material act of adultery, which you're not formally culpable for, right? And when we say that all adulterers go to hell, we're saying, yeah, we're talking when we say that, we're talking about people who are formally culpable for doing that, right? And so for likewise if we're talking about like oh yeah all schismatics and heretics go to hell like we're talking about people who are formally >> it's more of a truism >> um a truism. What do you mean?
¶144>> It's more of a truism. So like it's it's true most of the time like without if you make sufficient clarifications like there's >> we just need like basically scholastic answers traces through the like the history of this. He goes through why like no actually this is like even recognized that these councils who are like like promulgating the relevant um extra ecclesia the de loalos kind of declarations and whatnot like this stuff actually does go back um and so yeah I just was able to resolve that in my mind and I think that there's lots of mistakes on this front >> well and and so looking at this one well two in particular you were able to see that just like with biblical inherency like if you if you just take like a a paradigm example and you're like oh well there is a way to actually resolve this. Then at that point you were like, well, this seems like it would be a representative sample if this was the number one or number two, you know, magisterial alleged magisterial contradiction. And then from there, you were just like, well, I'm sure the others can be resolved as well.
¶145>> Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely how it worked. And it was basically just like, yeah, I mean, I took the biggest and baddest ones, was able to resolve them, and it's like, okay, these other ones aren't the biggest and baddest. Like, they even have even more reasonable things to say with respect to them. So like uh they they aren't particularly serious in by my lights.
¶146Um and yeah, again I would just like I'm not explaining this as best as I could. This is not my kind of area of expertise. I'd recommend watching like Scholastic Answer stuff. He's got one on like the medieval roots of Vatican 2. He's got like a video on that.
¶147got like a like two really good like blog posts on extra ecclesia nulisalus where he's just he traces through like how even the council fathers at Florence like couldn't possibly have meant given their own commitments and given the theologians that they drew on they couldn't possibly have meant that you like it is a matter of complete and absolute and utter necessity without which you cannot be saved that you have to be an explicit formal visible member of the church in order to save find me one magisterial statement that says that I dare you you won't find it cuz we haven't cuz God has protected us from error. [laughter] >> Well, maybe this is a good opportunity to to move on to the next objection. So, we've got theistic objections that you had to go through, but there's one more, right? >> Um different what objections >> you had theistic objections, but then wasn't there one more objection? >> Oh, one more category or class of objections?
¶148Yeah, we had theological objections. I had theological objections. >> Yes. So, let's get to those. >> Okay.
¶149So theological objections were mainly three-fold. First, I worried about the Trinity and just how is that coherent? Secondly, I worried about the incarnation. How is that coherent? And thirdly, I worried about just Catholicism's model of God.
¶150How is that coherent? >> So, you know, Trinity, you know, the father is God, the son is God, the holy spirit is God, but the father is not the holy spirit. The holy spirit is not the son, the son is not the father. And I was like, okay, how do we make sense of that? Like oftenimes is is transitive, right?
¶151So, if the the Father is God and the Holy Spirit is God, well, shouldn't they be the same thing as one another? But then you're denying that they're the same thing as one another. So, how do we make sense of that? Um, and like with the the incarnation, for instance, it seems like, well, because Christ is God, he's uh impeccable uh and he's impassible and he's immutable and he's timeless. But because he's human, he's also temporal and he's limited.
¶152Yeah. And he's limited in power and he's peeable and he's, you know, etc. >> Um, passable and mutable. Okay. So, Christ is both mutable and immutable.
¶153both timeless and temporal. How do we make sense of that? Um and then the the concerns of the model of God just mainly concerned objections that I had to divine timelessness, to divine impassibility, to divine simplicity, that God is without parts. Um so those are the three big ones. >> Yeah.
¶154>> And I can just briefly blitz through the first two ones and maybe we can focus on the model of God because those are the bigger ones. >> Yeah. Um, so I don't know like with respect to the trinity thing, it's just another one of these things where it's like I don't know, dude. Look at the philosophical literature and there are probably like dozens of accounts for how to make consistent sense of trinitarianism within the bounds of magisterial orthodoxy, right? So, you know, like there are appeals to relative identity, appeals to like qua objects that Robert Coons has worked on and there's like constitutional models of the the trinity and there like all these different sorts of things where it's like yeah, you know, like okay, I guess I could see that maybe there are ways for making sense of this and like it actually like so long as we don't say that like the is here is firstly um the is of numerical identity and secondly numerical identity is transitive um then we're fine.
¶155like maybe they're just different senses of is here. One of them is maybe like the is of constitution or the is of like associated with qua objects or the is of relative identity or something like that. Um and so that way you can kind of block the argument from like you know the logical problem of the trinity. Um or you know some people some Catholics want to say that um this is certainly not like I I don't think this is what Catholics are required to say but some of them want to say that numerical identity is not even transitive. So I mean I don't find that plausible but like there are just other ways that people have proposed going there.
¶156Okay. So that's like trinitarianism. Again, I could just have this big disjunction of things that I each of which I found like yeah, reasonable enough like maybe somewhat implausible, but like that's another thing. This is the fundamental nature of reality as this is something that Alexander Cruz has pointed out and it wouldn't be too surprising if we just got like if the fundamental nature of reality is really hard to wrap your mind around and it's like difficult to make sense of science all the time, right? Like you know the part it's like both a particle and a wave or something.
¶157It's like ah electrons like clouds of probability. It's like what is that? It's like so hard to wrap your mind around. um like it wouldn't be terribly surprising if you know given the puniness of our intellects that the fundamental nature of reality would be like just kind of difficult and hard to make sense of you know kind of mysterious and even according to Catholicism again these are like deep mysteries of our faith right so I don't know um it just wouldn't be terribly surprising if I had some difficulties with these doctrines even conditional on Catholicism and it's just like yet another sort of higher order consideration that led me to very significantly mitigate the force of these objections um >> incarnation as I understand was also a very similar move. >> Yeah.
¶158Incarnation. Yeah. No, very similar move. Like you can say, oh, you know, he's like um passible qua human, impassible qua divine. That's like one approach.
¶159It's like the qua strategy. I didn't actually favor that one. I kind of like Tim Paul's approach that he takes in some um books that he's published with Oxfordian Mercy Press. And he has one. >> Shout out for Tim Paul.
¶160>> Yeah, Tim Paul's amazing. Tim Paul is amazing. Thank you, Tim. He's also been helping me work through my um models of God worries that I had for Catholicism. So, absolutely loved him.
¶161He's he's amazing. Check out his work for the audience listening like excellent work. Yes. But anyway, he basically points out that like no actually when we say that Christ is impassible we can just like >> give a metaphysical cashing out of what exactly that predicate means and we can just say that it means like okay Christ has a nature which is impassible, >> right? >> So then we're just saying Christ has a nature which is impossible and he has a nature which is passible and that's not a contradiction so long as he can have two natures which like he can.
¶162Like there's nothing incoherent about that. Um, so [sighs] I mean maybe it's a little odd or weird but like it's not incoherent, right? >> Um, right. >> So I think you know there were lots of ways that you could resolve both of those problems. And then just turning to um >> the bigger problems I had models of God.
¶163Yeah. >> So I mean I guess you know I've had various objections to divine simplicity. um you know difficult to make sense of but here I I also just had your experience where I was like I don't know I I started to see different models like Catholics are not bound uh to accept for instance like only super high octane to mystic divine simplicity like we're just not magisterally bound to that we're bound to think that yeah god has no parts but there are different like the magisterium has allowed different ways of like metaphysically cashing that out you know like there's like a scotistic approach which allows like some kind of distinction among the attribut like we already know that there has to be some kind of distinction to go which does not introduce composition because of the trinity, right? Uh so like maybe there are just like other kinds of um distinctions that are allowable or maybe like we could take the truthmaker approach to divine simplicity that like Alexander Puce and Jeff Brower have given where basically like it's not as though there is such a thing as omnipotence and God is numerically identical to omnipotence. Uh it's more so just that whenever we make intrinsic predications of God.
¶164Whenever we predicate attributes of God that characterize him as he is in himself, those are simply made true by God the substance. So it's not like he has these itty bitty bits and bobs that attach to him and which make those predicates true. Like no, fundamentally there it's just God and it's not all these like additional bits of reality that kind of attach to him. Instead, like these these predicates are just made true by God. Um so you know there's that approach.
¶165There even other approaches that I'm I'm still I'm trying to like talk with Tim Paul about whether I'm allowed to accept them as a Catholic. So like maybe we could give just like a different because the magisterium hasn't given like a metaphysical account of parthood or a metaphysical analysis of parthood. So like maybe again like I'm trying to discern whether or not this is compatible withism but maybe you could just say oh yeah like God does have like distinct attributes and uh like we can say lots of those things. It's just attributes aren't parts >> like one thing you might just you might just say or something like that. So again, I'd have to think about whether or not that's um we're allowed to say that.
¶166But so yeah, I was just finding all these different accounts of divine simplicity that seemed totally consistent and that actually like a number of them like avoided the objections that I've pushed in the past to divine simplicity even in in print in in literature. And then also I was just like finding new and interesting and plausible ways to respond to those objections that I myself have pushed. So, you know, like um with respect to my alone argument, Tim Paul and um W. Matthews Grant has a response to it in religious studies and like just like reflecting further, I'm like, "Okay, yeah, probably the response works." Um and like that has happened with a number of my other objections as well. Like I pushed all these objections that like, oh, maybe like the timistic view of divine simplicity collapses God's providence cuz like we've just got this like one simple being and like any possible effect can come about without any difference on God's end in those worlds.
¶167like doesn't it seem just kind of like a random lucky kind of coincidence not under God's control which effect comes about but then I was like as I reflected further I tried I tried to argue in the paper there that like like agent causality like libertarian agent causality on humans parts don't face that objection. Um, and so I was trying to say like, you know, but classical theism still would, >> I think I'm wrong in that. Like because, uh, as long as we have a kind of like robust libertarian freedom, which like, you know, that's like defensible on lots of different grounds. Um, and as long as there a kind of agent causal freedom, so that basically fundamentally the kind of causality that happens when we make choices is that we as an agent uh, cause the relevant events in our mind or cause an intention or cause us to act as we do. Then like actually you get that same sort of structure where there's one in the same cause across different worlds which doesn't differ across the worlds but it can bring about different effects and it actually is in control of which of those effects it brings about.
¶168So from one in the same agent cause you can get an intention to raise my hand right now or not no such intention right from one in the same cause without any difference across the world because I can do otherwise. I could either have raised my hand at that point or not raise my hand as it happens I chose not to raise my hand but I could have chosen to raise my hand. um and all the same prior causal conditions would have been exactly the same. And yet it seems like I could still be in control of which effect comes about. And so basically like so long as we can make sense of agent libertarian causality on human like on the human end, I think we can make sense of it on God's end where there just is this one simple agent agential substance or reality which can just like controllably indeterministically produce any possible creation.
¶169Um, so I was like, "Oh man, I can resolve even lots of even lots of the objections I previously pushed." Um, and then, you know, just one final thing. Um, I did worry about like divine timelessness and certain other attributes, you know, cuz I don't know, it seems like if creation itself changes, then, >> uh, wouldn't God's knowledge have to change? Like, wouldn't God's knowledge have to change to ch to track the changing facts themselves? >> Um, >> and here I think there are like maybe three things that we can say. >> One is that you could just adopt like eternalism.
¶170You could just say that all times equally exist and really there isn't a kind of like objective temporal dynamism. Uh and so it's not like God's knowledge has to change. Um he's just aware of all the facts that are just given there and laid out in this four-dimensional block where time is like an extra fourth dimension along which things are extended just like things are extended in space. Um and that actually wouldn't involve any change in God's knowledge. So that's one way you could go.
¶171Alexander Pruce likes eternalism for instance and you know it's like a really serious view among philosophers. Or if you don't want to go that way, you could say that um this is a little weird, but again, fundamental reality is kind of weird. Maybe like which times exist like varies by reference frame. So like maybe the future doesn't exist for us uh and the past doesn't exist for us, but it exists for God. So maybe like which things exist is almost like relative to whether you're God or us.
¶172Again, that's that's kind of weird and spooky, but I don't think we we certainly don't need to go in for that. But like, you know, metaphysics is weird. And then the third thing you can say and maybe this is my favorite thing which is just that like actually you know it's not like God needs some kind of like internal representation in his brain or something of like what's going on in the world which like changes to track the facts like no God is cognitively perfect. So he has direct unmediated access to the facts that are just like laid before his mind his gaze. Uh and so then if there are any changes at all in reality, they're totally outside of God cuz he just has like direct unmediated like sight of them as it were.
¶173Uh and so it's not like there's something in God that needs to change when the facts themselves change. The changes are wholly on the side of creation and that in that case that's totally compatible with God's being timeless >> cuz like again the changes here are on the part of creation. So >> well I think this is also a good segue. We'll get to the the last section which is theistic objections >> to >> theism. And uh what was the biggest one?
¶174Was it was it the problem of evil? >> Yeah, it was totally totally the problem of evil. Um >> yeah, cuz I mean and you did mention earlier I think it was in the show where these atheistic arguments seem parasitic on each other or at least they they seem related in in a way that they're not independent. And so uh so like divine hiddenness, you know, those those types of considerations uh are ultimately going to be related to the problem of evil. And so it's not really going to like compound the problem.
¶175So the problem of evil, if we want to call it distinct from these other arguments, it's not going to provide too much of an like extra negative boost to our probabilities, >> right? >> But uh yeah, let's discuss the problem of evil. Why why was it such a problem for for you in particular? >> Yeah, I guess it's just because I I never really found super plausible >> before kind of going through the conversion process the responses that theists gave to at least the strongest versions of the problem of evil, which I took to be like, you know, the problem of evolutionary animal suffering. Like, you know, there's been hundreds and hundreds of years.
¶176>> What about soul building and and uh all that stuff? you and you are you familiar with trend's like extension of >> of soul building to animals? >> Yeah, I mean at the time I just thought like you know these are like >> super implausible auxiliary hypotheses that were having to add to theism and then even there it wasn't totally clear to me that they like predicted the data and then I was just worried about other problems like how could these animals like sort of like have their personal identity survive in the afterlife and are they still the same kinds of animals if they're if they're given some kind of minimal rationality. So I don't know I worried about a lot of different things. Um but I guess uh a similar refrain I just got firstly overwhelming evidence for theism just from like fine-tuning and contingency and psychophysical harmony and nomological harmony and psychomic harmony and moral knowledge and like you just add all the things.
¶177So I started getting overwhelming evidence for theism and then overwhelming evidence even beyond that from miracles. So I was like, okay, you know, once again, it's like maybe I'm just making some sort of mistake. Like it wouldn't be the first time that that's happened. So that's one thing. Another thing is just that uh again, I could see just like this huge disjunction of approaches to the problem of evil, which basically I think together could significantly, >> as I've always been saying, significantly temper its rational force, its evidential force to the point that I could then accept and embrace theism, Catholicism.
¶178It's like what are some of those things you know like well one of them was just like the omission theodysy by Brian Cutter and Philip Swenson that they published on people can check out a paper on that um another one was this trendory approach which again like yeah I had objections to it but like those things that I just rattled off off the top of my head like aren't dispositive like there are things that you can say and this is difficult philosophy and whatnot and like um >> you know infants and babies and fetuses also go through a transitional phase where they're they're not super conscious but we we do think that we were identical at the time of conception and stuff, >> right? So, so I mean and again there are ways to respond to that but again like this is like difficult abstract highulutin philosophy and uh I could just like yeah sure maybe it's a kind of implausible for various reasons but like what the atheist needs or what I needed to avoid the overwhelming evidence for theism and for Catholicism was like every single one of these theodyies and defenses and whatnot needed to be hopelessly ludicrously pathetically grotesqually absurd absurdly implausible. And not only that, but even their entire disjunction needed to be like that. >> And not only that, but I would have also had to like disagree with a very minimal and plausible version of skeptical theism, which is just that. Um, hey, listen, if God exists, it wouldn't be too unlikely.
¶179It wouldn't be hopelessly surprising that maybe God has reasons for permitting evils of which I'm unaware. That does not destroy natural theology. I'm not saying, oh, we're totally in the dark about God's reasons or the balance of God's reasons or like the reasons of which we're aware or like totally unrepresentative of like the the total range of God's reasons that he has. No, all I'm saying is that it's not like hopelessly unlikely on the order of like 1 in 10 to the 120 that maybe God has reasons of which I'm unaware and that seems really plausible um for like allowing the sorts of evils that I see. So, it's like a very minimal version of skeptical theism that I was like, okay, yeah, that's really plausible.
¶180And then I just was just like looking at the individual theodysies and sure there are objections to each of the individual theodysies but certainly none of them is dispositive. Um and like I was actually gaining some sympathy and attraction to the omission these as well. Like oh man this is actually pretty plausible. Like the goods that it identifies actually do seem to outweigh the relevant bads. And like we already have lots of independent evidence that I was starting to acrew for like demonic phenomena which is like the sorts of beings that this thing posits or you could do aliens or whatever.
¶181Um, but yeah, I was like, "Okay, there actually is a there actually is a way that I could see resolving the the problem of evil." Um, again, maybe not so much resolving. It's not like I don't think I'll ever sort of resolve this or get rid of this. You know, it'll always be like a thorn in the side, but um, again, I'm in the business of giving accommodation accommodations of the data that at least temper the rational force of the evidence. Mhm. >> Um, and I think I've done that sufficiently to make it not only rational but rationally obliged for me to become Catholic.
¶182>> Mhm. Yeah. I mean, cuz kind of getting back to the the higher order considerations of like these these miracles, the empirical evidence that we get from those is just on a level that is it's hard to compare. you know, the these intuitions that we have about the permissibility of allowing these these animals to suffer, you know, even if we compound it to talking about evolution and and through millions of years and stuff and then we look at someone like Padre Peio and we're like, but yeah, uh 50 years of stigmata um >> photos, videos goes away instantaneously on his death. >> Yeah.
¶183The the uh I I Why can't I think of the term the the >> odor of sanctity? odor of sanctity. It's like >> the hypothermia, the blood loss. >> Yeah. >> The regeneration of eyes.
¶184>> Yeah. And it's like we we compare that compare the theories, you know, got to compare the theories. And uh yeah, it just seems >> compare that to like you know, okay, it's a serious problem, right? But like dude, like I don't know, there are like multiverse theodysies, there's like animal afterlife theodysies, there's like the omission theodysy, there's like a minimal skeptical theism, there's the fact that this is like an abstract highutin debate and like clearly if you were there seeing Christ and interacting with him, you wouldn't be like, but the problem of evil, you know, it's like no, it's like God has manifestally vindicated Christ and so you submit your intellect to him. That's the rationally obliged thing to do.
¶185Even if you have this even potentially unresolved version of the problem of evil in your mind, >> right? And it's not just Padre Peio, right? It's it's Fatima, it's Lords, it's Guadalupe, it's it's all >> Eucharistic miracles, it's canonization miracles, it's St. Charbell, it's it's >> it just goes on and on. And um was that like so kind of getting back to your your overall journey, uh was that really the thing that did it for you?
¶186Was was the miracles? Would you say like intellectually that was the thing that like sealed the deal? >> Yeah, I mean I mean I was starting to lean towards theism on independent philosophical grounds because I was losing all my objections to fine-tuning and the psychophysical harmony argument. I was trying desperately to avoid it for the longest time but I was like ah this actually probably works. And then I was finding all these new and interesting other harmony problems.
¶187And so I was starting to actually like lean towards theism on totally independent grounds thinking that like oh man even the evidence in of itself is like really strong. And now I think it's like even way stronger than I'd previously appreciated. Um just like the philosophical >> it's interesting how psychologically that can happen. >> I know >> like once you start to be open to this thing then you can start to see like how strong the evidence actually is. >> Yeah.
¶188Um so that kind of got me to theism first or at the very least maybe I should say more accurately like leaning towards theism. Um, I think I really only like embraced theism after encountering lurids and sort of reading uh, Caleb Jackson's kind of forthcoming chapters on Lords and one of his books on medically documented healing miracles and whatnot. Um, but yeah, so the philosophical grounds were even enough at the time to make me start like taking theism very seriously and start leaning towards theism. And then um, the miraculous grounds were like yeah, it was the the the cold to the fire. you know, it was the the engine to the train.
¶189It was it was what what would really drove it all. Um, and that eventually led me to uh to convert on an intellectual level. And then of course, various factors had to come in to like shape my heart um to get me in the right place to be able to accept. >> Maybe maybe we can discuss some objections to the miracles while we're on the topic of we're still on the topic of objections >> to to Catholicism. And one of those objections is, well, maybe in the case of something like Fatima, you know, I've had Sean Luke on the channel and he argued that Fatima was demonic.
¶190Like, uh, did those hypotheses ever like did you take those seriously? >> No. Okay. So, I mean, the demonic hypothesis I never really took particularly seriously and it just never really struck me as at all kind of plausible as a kind of appeal. Um, now I've since kind of the reasons that I had at the time were like, um, I don't know.
¶191Uh, >> you were more looking for like natural explanations. >> Yeah, I was looking for naturalistic explanations at the time and I was like, how can I how can I avoid having to posit phenomena? Um, and yeah, my plausibility structures were basically such that I I did I did not want to go in for demonic phenomena. Yeah. [clears throat] >> But then I don't know even like even once I was probably leaning towards thinking that there were such things as demons, but I wasn't all the way to Catholicism.
¶192I didn't I just didn't really take it to be a plausible hypothesis cuz it just seemed like a ridiculous demonic MMO where it's like you're going to a Catholic country where it's just a bunch of the obviously primary foreseeable effects are just a bunch of lapsed Catholics and secularists and like atheists and liberals are going to become Catholic. It's like it didn't seem like a plausible demonic mo to just go and do that to basically just like revivify the faith of a bunch of lapsed Catholics. It just sounded ridiculous. And then you know you actually like again you look at the phenomena itself. Um and it's like you know introducing a christocentric prayer like I I have prayed the Fatima prayer with my parents from a very young age like oh my Jesus forgive us our sins save us from the fires of hell lead all souls heaven especially those most in need of thy mercy.
¶193Uh, and it's like, okay, you know, it didn't seem like a plausible demonic emote to do that. And I also just had this intuitive sense that like, you know, if something is predicted three months in advance and it's the most like spectacular miracle since like the resurrection, then like, okay, like I just had this intuitive sense that like clearly that's beyond demonic power, like this is God, you know? I just seemed kind of ridiculous to posit demons in that case. And of course, like since then, I I've learned like the fundamental theology and why like it seems extraordinarily implausible now to posit demons and whatnot. Yeah.
¶194So what what what out do Protestants have with uh [sighs and gasps] >> so if I were Protestant >> Catholic miracles? >> I mean I >> yeah steel man steel man them as as best you can. use the use the Joe intellect and >> well listen I would not go in for the demonic phenomena because I think like the you know the Fatima the Padre Peio the Lords and whatnot they pass the actual scriptural tests right the Deuteronomy 13:18 test about whether the sign comes to pass and then if they're speaking on behalf of God the creator um they pass the test of like well uh is God giving a manifestation of the superior efficacy of his power in the face of the demons well not if Protestantism is true in fact like the demonic phenomena are just basically creating massive of religious confusion and basically just like single-handedly favoring Catholicism. This is another thing. It's like if you look at the broader pattern of miracles.
¶195It's like >> dude like the demon they could choose any sect that you disagree with like Lutheran or or uh or you know Anglicans if you disagree with Anglicans or you they could have chosen like the Methodists or the Baptists or they could have chosen Muslims or Jews who don't even believe in Christ or like Buddhists and what and they could perform all these miracles for them. But no, they're single-handedly going out of their way to manifestly vindicate the Catholic Church. That seems really sus. That seems really weird. They never pick Methodism.
¶196They never pick like Presbyterianism. They never pick Lutheranism or Orthodoxy or like other things. Like that seems really weird. That seems way better predict just under the bare demon hypothesis. You would not predict.
¶197They would single-handedly choose Catholicism and then just like perform all these manifest mitigations of it. They could have chosen Buddhism to bring bring people away from even God, right? They could have chosen Islam, but no. Come on. Yeah.
¶198Um, so like even just the broader pattern made me think that that's just not not a plausible hypothesis in the slightest. Uh, and again since then I've learned the fundamental theology and I'm like oh this is completely like their epistemology is completely different from the New Testament epismology. Um, so, >> so how would you know? >> I would go I I would I think I would go a kind of accommodationist approach. >> Mhm.
¶199>> Where it's like, you know, sometimes God will just perform miracles to enliven people's faith in a particular context. And, you know, uh, >> well, from Protestant like certain forms of Protestantism, like they still think that Catholics are saved. >> Yeah, most Protestants think that. Yeah, Catholics are still saved. So maybe God will just perform some Catholic miracles or something and then like bring them >> one of them.
¶200>> Well, yeah. And also which seem to implicate God in being a deceiver cuz like okay is Mary immaculately conceived cuz she said I am the immaculate conception >> to St. Bernardet. So is she immaculately conceived or not? If not then God is performing a deceptive sign.
¶201Or like for Fatima is the holy father actually the holy father >> does he actually have jurisdiction over things outside of Rome? Is Mary accurately actually immaculately conceived as she says? Uh you know is it actually fitting to convert people to Catholicism to explicitly obtain conversions to Catholicism? Um and then you know you just go through like with Padre Peio like is there actually such a thing as like redemptive participatory vicarious uh like satisfaction for sin or not? Uh because like it seems like God is if God is actually the one performing these miracles and you disagree with all the doctrines that God seems to be manifestly vindicating here then you're implicating God in deception.
¶202God is going out of his way to deceive people. And like you know Padre Pio he's like having these like daily interactions like kind of like mystical experiences with Christ with our blessed mother uh with even like souls in purgatory and various other things. Is God like again if God is the source of this is is God basically just like putting him in the Truman show? Like he's basically like basically Daycart's evil demon just like feeding him all these false sensory impressions like basically constantly almost every day. [laughter] >> Yeah.
¶203>> So like God's basically putting Padre Peio in a skeptical scenario like Okay. Um he's doing that with tons of other mystics and other things and like you know these Fatima children and whatnot. Um >> so you just don't really take the accommodation approach very seriously. >> No I I don't really I don't think it's plausible in the slightest. Um >> but it's the best.
¶204>> It's the best that's what I would go in for. Um, and you know, you could just say, well, you know, maybe deception is sometimes permissible. Maybe it's sometimes permissible to basically put someone in a Truman show. Or maybe I'd say like, oh, okay, maybe like some of the things that Padre Pio were like experienced were like demons, but like other things were God, even though he was able to like discern. He had certain tests that he could like perform to like very reliably discern.
¶205And, you know, you can look into some of his biographies for that. But, um, I would go in for an accommodationist approach. That's what I would have to do, I think. Uh and I mean dude even that again like accommodationism by itself does not predict that when it comes to vindicatory miracles when it comes to distinctive revelations claimed revelations on behalf of God uh which have doctrinal content. Accommodationism does not predict that miracles vindicating those would only cluster in Catholicism.
¶206>> They could have clustered in orthodoxy or Methodism or Anglicanism or Presbyterianism. But no, that's really weird. That's really strange. >> So, what what message would you have? There's there's two groups of people that I want to uh address and see how you would address them.
¶207So, first group is atheists, agnostics. You were part of that group before you converted and then Protestants like what message would you have for them? >> I know I'm kind of putting you on the spot. So well firstly um to the atheists and agnostics I would say you guys are rationally obliged to engage in conditional prayer. So this is something that I did when I was uh an agnostic.
¶208Um and maybe I did it as when I was an atheist. I don't remember. Um but basically you know I would pray things like you know God if you exist please help me to come to know you love you and serve you. You know just something like that takes like two or three seconds. Do that every day.
¶209I think you're rationally obliged to do that. Why? Well because suppose you're stranded. I talk about this with uh Matt Frad. So, you know, suppose you're stranded uh in the forest and you're out of food, but you got this like gun which allows you unlimited flares and you know, you think maybe there's like a low chance that someone's out there searching for you and who's willing to help you if you shoot up the flare.
¶210Um, you think there's a low chance. Maybe you think there's only a 1% chance or maybe you're 99% confident that atheism is true. Um, still, even if there's a 1% chance that there's someone out there who might actually like see your flare in the forest, you should shoot it and you should like continue shooting it. I mean, maybe you don't have to do that all the time. you should like look for food and whatnot and you know keep yourself alive but like at least maybe once a day shoot the flare.
¶211It would be irrational not to do that even if there's a low chance that there's someone out there looking for you. >> And likewise you know that's what praying is. It's shooting the flare. It's like trivially easy to do it. Do it within like you know uh a genuine openness and a loving heart.
¶212Um and ask God to change your heart and change your mind. Um and if you if you persist in doing that with all sincerity um you know God promises seek and you shall find. Seek and you shall find. So that's the advice that I'd give to atheists and agnostics. Well, in addition to like, you know, just like watch my 7-hour video.
¶213Just like have an open mind. Just like don't click away. Don't try to make fun of it. Like just listen. Open your mind and just listen.
¶214Just listen. Hear me out. Hear me out, man. So that that's the other thing that I'd say um is consult that video and then look at the resources that I'm citing, you know, Ethan's post and various other resources. And then to the Protestants, I would just say um again uh pray.
¶215I think commit to doing one decade of the rosary every day. One decade takes about 2 to 3 minutes. That's an Our Father. It's 10 Hail Marys and then it's a glory be and then it's the Fatima pair that I just gave. That takes about 2 to three minutes.
¶216You can meditate on some aspect some mystery of the rosary and you can pick ones that you know you don't have to pick the assumption if you don't believe in the assumption or whatever but just meditate while you're doing it on some some mystery of the rosary uh which are usually concerning you know Christ's life death passion and resurrection um and you know if you don't believe in saintly intercession just say beforehand to God knows your heart right say before hand to God you know if this is sinful I'm sorry you know my heart. You know, I'm I'm just I'm just seeking you. So, if this is idolatrous, if this is sinful, please forgive me. And you can say that before and after doing the prayer, but just do one decade of the rosary every day and see where that takes you. Might take you to Rome.
¶217Nice. Submit. >> Yes. Well, I mean again I would also just Protestants like again I would give them the same advice like hear me out like listen to that 7-hour video or however long it is my comprehensive case and like go to the you know maybe you're not going to be as interested in the arguments for theism what not cuz you're already a theist but like go to the section where I talk about the miracles and then I go through the Protestant explanations and I go through certain meta narrative problems that I had that I have for Protestantism and various other things. Go to the resources that I have in there where like I link a ton of videos that talk about saintly intercession, relics, baptism, ecclesiology, the Eucharist, you know, etc.
¶218Um so check out that resource document and again just pray that decade of the rosary every day with all sincerity with openness um so that God leads you to the truth and he leads you to the true church. Um and again seek and you shall