¶1Hello, this is Syncratic Idealism and today I'm going to be doing a response to the great Joe Schmid. Now, this is going to be a three-part series, and I thought it might be necessary to first lay out how this is going to go. So, in this video, I'm gonna be mainly um basically only doing a sort of defense. Um so, basically show that Joe's objection. So, Joe and also a little bit of Ethan Muse as well, although they kind of work together in the So, if you like if you watch all three videos, Joe is like mainly relying upon Ethan Muse and a lot of what he has to say.
¶2Um, so it's mainly even though it is a response to Joe, it is also a response to Ethan as well. Um, and some of the arguments that they've put forward. Now, I want to make clear that this first video is mainly a defense strategy. The second video, so the next video is going to be at least it's going to be counter evidence. So, um, specific objections to Catholicism that they obviously didn't get into um, and more.
¶3So they're more technical objections that I thought were necessary to bring up. Um just to kind of present a reason as to why even if you accept all these miracles that they talked about that there's other reasons to reject Catholicism besides what they mentioned. And then finally the last video. So video theory is going to be mainly a reductio showing like there's actually a huge gap between going from a miracle to your theology. And there's no real plausible way to bridge that without a bunch of other auxiliary assumptions that you know people can disagree with and people could dispute.
¶4So that's the first thing. Now I want to also make clear what this series is because some people might be confused. So I am not going to refute every single claim that Joe makes, right? It's not going to be a pointby-point comprehensive response to Joe because not number one, I have no time for that, okay? I don't have time to literally investigate every single miracle claim, every single claim, every single proposition that he puts forward, right?
¶5That's kind of crazy. Um, secondly, there are other people, there are atheists who are, you know, they're going to go after the miracles, right? So, um, there's two kinds of skeptics that will object to Joe. There's the atheists, the naturalist skeptics, which will obviously have to push back against a lot of the miracle stuff because that threatens their worldview more. And then the second group, so skeptics like me are those that are willing to grant the miracles, but simply disagree with the inferences that are being drawn from those miracles.
¶6So, I obviously occupy that second group. Now, this is both positive and negative. It's positive because I don't have to, you know, dispute really any of the miracle stuff, but also because um well, because I'm willing to grant these miracles and because I'm also a skeptic of their implications, um this I think opens a at least I can expose some of the problems with the inferences made from miracles to theology. Um, so that's the second thing. Now, third thing with this series, right?
¶7This is probably the most important thing is I'm going to treat this like you would treat, let's say, um, a court case, right? So, let's say that Joe and Ethan are like the prosecution and their job is to basically convince everybody else that, you know, they're correct, that their case goes through, that the person is guilty. Right? Now, of course, this is not a murder trial, so it's not exactly like the same way that a court would work. But in the procedures of a court case, what would happen is a prosecution would make a case and if the burden is on them, right?
¶8So, the burden of proof is on the prosecution to make their case that their conclusions actually go through given the evidence that they have. And then the the job of the defense, right, is going to be showing why the case doesn't go through. Now, there's two kinds of defenses that you can make. The first kind of defense is where you literally dispute everything. So, you literally go and literally dispute every single piece of evidence that the that the prosecution might bring, right?
¶9Um, now, of course, this is very rare. This doesn't really happen like if there's DNA, if there's, you know, there's there could be a lot of data in in certain cases. Um, the the the defense doesn't typically dispute the evidence, right? That's the important thing you have to realize about a defense is a defense doesn't have to always dispute the evidence. Instead, the defense can offer an alternative explanation that is more plausible and at least if not more plausible, at least it decreases the probability of the prosecution's case, right?
¶10Um, and basically it's to show it's to bring doubt upon the case that the prosecution brings. not because you dispute the evidence, but because you dispute the interpretations and the inferences that you draw from the evidence. Um, and so that's what I'm going to be doing in this series. I'm not going to dispute really any of the miracle cases that Ethan or uh Joe has brought forward. Instead, I'm going to be offering different alternative explanations of these miracles that don't require not only do they not require Catholicism, but they also don't even require theism.
¶11And we're going to go over that. Um and of course there are some other issues like I said there is some counter evidence that would actually count against the Catholic um you know view um on this. So I just want to make that point clear that this is mainly going to be a inferential level attack um you know similar to how a defense attorney would you know critique a prosecution's case. Um, and so that's what I hope to really do in this in this series, at least this minieries. Um, so I'm not going to be, you know, I'm not going to be a naturalist skeptic.
¶12I'm not going to go in and investigate all the miracles, right? I'll let them handle that, right? There are, of course, a lot of problems, which I won't mention with a lot of the miracle cases that, um, Joe and Ethan bring up. Um, but here, I'm just going to grant it, right? So, I'm not even going to really dispute um, any of those miracle cases.
¶13um which puts me in a very unique position because I can grant all the data but then disagree with what the data is actually saying. So yeah, that should be consequential for the series. But anyways, with that in mind, I'm going to now um start with my critique. All right, so make sure it's working. Yeah, it should be working now.
¶14Um, this is the full PDF of his his entire case. Um, now we're only going to be going through certain parts of it, certain sections that are sort of required in order to make his case. Um the first thing we're going to go over is his um his divine hiddenness model specifically because this is actually one of the places that I think is um very very problematic I should say the least. Um, now here's the thing, right? I I can sympathize with Joe on the point that you want to have a model, right?
¶15You want to have an explanation of why we see the mixed data that we do. Um, see here should show up. Oh, great. Gonna Oh, wait. Hiddenness.
¶16I think I misspelled it. Oh, sorry about that. Anyways, what I was saying, so basically, um, I don't know why I had to go to page 376. Let me see on here. yada yada yada.
¶17Um, 376. 376. See, there's a lot of there's a lot of data in here that skeptics are going to have to look through. Um, but should be fun for them. All right.
¶18376. I think this is this is it. Yeah. Um Oh, wait. That's 276, not 376.
¶19376. Um, what was I going to say? So, well, first of all, this is this is this video is not really scripted too well. Um, so I'm going to be talking a lot while we go through this. But here's the thing, right?
¶20So I agree with Joe that you need a model, right? In order to like explain why we have this mixture of positive and negative evidence, right? Um so like you need a model, right? Because I mean any any theory is going to need a freaking model. Um so I I I can grant for the sake of argument that you need that, right?
¶21Um, I think this is the um, that's weird. Okay, I'm gonna I might have to play his actual video just so that people get the co the full context. Um, let's see here. Just want to make sure I Okay, we will focus on this. Now, why am I focusing on this head in this model?
¶22Well, because this is like a big part of his case, right? Because in order to explain, right, why we have this mixture of positive and negative evidence, right? Even if he thinks the positive evidence outweighs it, you have to explain why that negative evidence is there. I have to explain if God is relating to us and if God is trying to lead us to the Catholic Church specifically, not just Christianity, but like literally the Catholic Church, why do we have this mixture of positive and negative evidence? Why do we have these moral intuitions, right?
¶23And so what he does is he basically has this model, right? um where he says more among Okay, so this is what he says, right? Um and I'm going to be reading mainly from his original text because the video just kind of this is more formal and I'll play the video of course if I need to. But he says this, right? God's aim with miracles is to provide enough evidence to convince sincere honest open inquirers but enough to wiggle room and obscure to preserve the psychological possibility of doubt.
¶24Right now he says possibility right now that's important because you can have possibility of doubt in the sense that oh well let's say for example and this is just a thought experiment that's not really critique of Joe but like let's say I don't know someone said oh well maybe we're living in the matrix or maybe we're being hallucinated right and so you you kind of need this weird you know okay that's not what he's I mean sure he might claim that that's what's going on, that God is allowing this possibility of doubt. But notice like his actual model makes more claims than that, right? So that's the issue is that he talks about maybe he now of course maybe he means possibility doubt in the sense that the specific miracles you can still doubt, right? But that's different, right? Because his entire model has to explain the totality of the data.
¶25Not just the not, you know, not just these specific miracle cases, but literally the totality of the data, right? Including animal suffering, prom evil, um those sorts of things, right? And it's weird because later on, so here um Oh, that's the same passage. Oh, yeah. So, here he's talking about um let's see.
¶26Okay, this is where he talks about the biblical passages. Okay, this is what I want to talk about because he basically says he's basically implying that if his hiddenness model is true, right? Then you can explain away the or you can accommodate the problematic ideas of historical political scholarship, right? That there's actual apparent errors, right? So like literally when he goes and talks about the problems in the biblical text, right?
¶27He's literally he uses this hiddenness model to explain why there would be apparent errors in the text. So literally you have it where you can have a holy book, you call it the holy book, inherent holy book make apparent errors, right? It just seems like these that the Bible is making errors, right? Um, and of course it does make errors. I'm not going to go over that in this video, but um, just watch David Kip and just read anything outside of um, Christian apologetic content and you'll you'll see that there are errors in a lot of different areas.
¶28Um so he he says if the Bible were prescriptously inherent that would compromise the current posture in the divine hindness model right or yeah in the Henness model. Um so it's not especially surprising under the Hindness model that there will be quite a deal of apparent errors in scriptures and again given our fallible access to author tent a very limited knowledge of the relevant genres literary devices audiences and context it wouldn't be exceptionized in a lot of these apparent errors seemed recalorant. Um so basically he's saying that essentially his model allows for him to explain away these errors right now. Here's here's the problem, right? Um, sorry, I need to get my my uh my exact notes out.
¶29So, there's there's a few problems with this, right? Um, so here's the problem, right? Is this basically relies upon what I call the delivery model, right? So on the delivery model, revelation is fundamentally the transmission of some of some deliverable content from God to the creature. Propositional belief, doctrinal ascent, grace sufficient overcome sin, right?
¶30epismic conditions for a free response, right? Um now of course this is what I call this generates what I call the mutation problem, right? Which is that and this is basically the logical structure is if a perfectly loving God exists, God ensures every non-resistant person has access to whatever is necessary for relationship. Call it X. Right?
¶31Now you could say some non-resistant persons lack X. Right? Therefore, no loving no perfectly loving God exist. Right? Now you can name X whatever you want right you can name it grace you can name it a better start you can gr you can say soulmate conditions calibrated evidence right um so like basically the idea is you can generate all these responses to divine hiddenness but because they rely upon this background assumption right or at least the you know this model revelation that Joe's defending um relies upon his background assumption that God has to deliver something, right?
¶32God is trying to, you know, create believers. God is trying to make people believe in the Catholic Church. God is trying to give grace, right? Grace that because ultimately, right, I mean, in the Catholic tradition, if you come to believe that Catholicism is true, the idea is God gave me the grace to do it, right? So, um you if if that's the case, right, if if people only come to the faith because God gives them the grace to do it, then you run into the mutation problem, right?
¶33you basically just say like, yeah, God just didn't give people grace to believe that the Catholic Church was the true church, right? Um, and the problem is of course you can just run this problem ad infinitely, right? So even if you solve one version of the problem, this doesn't actually solve the mut what I call the mutation problem. Um, now of course there are if you actually look at the history of divine the divineness, right? you have Swimburn's case, his responsibility argument.
¶34Um, then you have Howard Snider's better response argument. Um, so like these are different responses, right? You have Hicks soulmating the Odyssey. You have Rooney's the Odyssey, which is sort of a fault the Odyssey. Then you have Vanagramri's theodysy or again not necessarily theodysy but like a response, right, to divine him.
¶35Um so like you know Vanagramrif and I think Vandergri's view I think is probably the most plausible out of all these which is like God may permit temporary non-resistant non-belief because non-theistic resources sometimes offer you know and they can sustain um a person second order desire to be moral right um and of course there are other skeptical theist responses as well right um now of course the issue is like every single one of these doesn't work against um mates specific um demographic version right because um basically you have this unevenness happening whether it's grace whether it's it doesn't matter right now here's the thing right I don't want to talk about other people's models because you know that's not the point of the video so the thing about this is that Joe's model right fits within this taxonomy and basically what I would say is that this is basically the idea that you have evidence calibrated to be strong enough to make faith reasonable and non-corrosive but not so strong that it forecloses freedom right now what I would say is like this is basically the delivery model response using calibration itself as a mechanism so basically like the calibration like there's this fine-tuning you know use Joe's words, fine-tuning of evidence, right? Um, and so because not everyone gets the sufficient evidence, right? Then you can, you know, because of that ambiguity, you can then say, oh, well, there's value in preserving freedom, right? Now I would grant that this is certainly a better model than what you see in the literature. So better than Swimburn and Howard and but the problem is this right if calibrated evidence is God's general policy right the problem is why does this calibration track cultural and historical accidents right so you still run into Mason specifically Mason's um problem now just to be clear so people understand the argument um So it has to do with the the distribution of divine hindness, right?
¶36Because it's not simply like just non-resistant non-belief. It's like you have specific data like for example like Saudi Arabia has 95% theistic but then you have Thailand who is um non-theistic right not even necessarily atheistic in the western sense but you know non-theistic right because you know you could be you could be a non-theist but still reject naturalism. Um but the problem is like the issue is these things don't cluster right um in a in an even way right because so this is why like for example like soulmotes don't work against this argument because at least for soulm you could you could make the argument that essentially like there's an evenness of soulm processes but here it's actually uneven distribution Right. Um and so belief is not uniformly dist distributed, right? Um it seems like it would just be, you know, the the distribution of belief and non-belief that we find in the world is mainly due to cultural considerations.
¶37Um now I I I'm presenting that as like what I think to be what I consider to be the strongest form of divine hiddenness, right? And so because of that because of that problem and once you combine it with the mutation problem um basically you can run the same argument where well actually god you know not everyone is a ca not everyone in the world is a Catholic because they're not given sufficient grace right to become a Catholic. Well, it's like, okay, so God is not giving out graces to become Catholic, right? I mean, and of course, in certain circumstances, like you have people like me who literally deconverted from the church. So, God just took away like the faith of grace for what what reason would God do that, right?
¶38It doesn't make any sense. Um, especially if God is supposed if I'm supposed to relate to God like in this tradition, right? Why would he take away my grace? Why would he take away the grace of faith, right? So it actually is a bigger problem because it's not simply just an unevenness right of grace more generally but literally God has taken away graces from certain people like myself and of course other ex Catholics.
¶39So I don't understand like what exactly is the calibration here that Joe is proposing, right? And so here's the here here's where Joe's specific at least this is one of the problems, right? There's other problems I'm going to get into, but the pro the first problem is why is sufficiently calibrated evidence for reasonable Catholic ascent, right? Apparently available to the historically Catholic West in a way that was demonstrabably not and for over a millennia the entire eastern half of the world, right? So that's the problem, right?
¶40is there's not actually a uniform distribution of this grace going around, right? Of this evidence going around, right? Um, so that's that's kind of the issue. And of course, I as far as I'm aware, I don't think you address the demographic version of the argument, although I do agree that Shelonburgger's argument has a lot of problems. Now, this gets to my second problem and actually um someone else I think it's I can't I can't pronounce his name but um somebody else mentioned this another skeptic online and basically it's you can actually turn this model against your own magisterium Joe.
¶41So what I meant this well so you said explicitly right is because of this hiddenness model then you can have apparent errors in scripture right so that's the first thing is you're willing to grant that you can have apparent errors Right. Um but then on the other hand, you don't apply it to your own magisterium. And of course, this is the problem, right? Because you need to explain why God doesn't just make theism, Christianity, or Catholicism obvious to everybody, right? So you need this divine hidden model to explain two things, right?
¶42Why is it not obvious to any everybody, right? Um and then why is your entire case why does your divine hiddenness model why is your magisterium exempt from apparent errors as well? Right? You don't really talk about that because the thing with Catholicism is in order to be a Catholic, you have to believe that the magisterian is infallible, right? Can't there can't be any errors at all.
¶43Now, in my next video, I'll go over those errors. So, there are errors that they do make that are demonstrabably that could be demonstrabably shown. Um, but the problem is that you don't even apply your own model to the magisterium. Right? So, here's the problem, right?
¶44If hiddenenness collaborated non-coneristed culturally and historically contingent evidence is a general feature of how God operates towards his creatures then why would it stop operating right at the magisterium itself? Doesn't make any sense. Now that's kind of the main issue that I see. Now of course there's other things I can mention like for example pine primacy right in the strong sense that Catholicism needs um developed as a matter of contested historical record right over centuries right um there's a formal schism right and as we all know the great schism of the west and the east um and so literally it's not simply like we are questioning Catholicism from outside of Catholicism. But you can question Catholicism even within its own tradition.
¶45So even within its own schism, you can question it, right? So your model has to also explain why, for example, why the Eastern Orthodox were wrong to go in schism, right? Because obviously they weren't convinced of the evidence for papal infallibility or primacy or whatever, right? Um now of course that wasn't necessarily the main reason why they split. I mean, there's of course many reasons why they split.
¶46So, I'm not going to get into the history of that, but um so here's here's my thing right here. Here's here's um here's my challenge to you, Joe, is let's run Maidson's exact I guess version of the argument on this, right? Does confident settle belief in the specifically Roman Magiston claims track anything about the openness, resistance, culpability or spiritual seriousness of Eastern Christians or Protestant Christians? Right? Or does it track with the same uncanny precision mion documents for theism generally?
¶47Right? So if you look at the history of the church, right? You have a lot of these disputes that happen, right? And a lot of these disputes happen for what reason? Well, for cultural reasons, which is exactly what mates whole thesis is about.
¶48They're cultural reasons. But notice that your divine hidden model doesn't doesn't really explain why that's the case. Right? Now, if you Now, here's the thing, right? If we run the same level of rigor that you that let's say that Mason would apply against general theism then your very own hiddenist model the very tool you use to diffuse um these objections to Catholicism become a demographic style objection to the magisterium specifically.
¶49Right now, here's the thing, right? Um, and I'm going to get into this a little bit soon, but you don't have to adopt this strong hiddenness model. There's other models that you can accept that don't allow you or I guess not allow you, but like they don't force you to, you know, be a Catholic apologist necessarily. You could be just a general theist and think that divine him fails for other reasons, which I do think it fails for other reasons. But notice how this specific divine him especially given the messiness of the church and the history of the church right that's a problem for your view.
¶50So in summary, your model faces this problem, right? If God's general strategy of leaving enough counter evidence to preserve genuine doubt operates across the board, then by your own logic, it should be entirely unsurprising if magisterial infallible pronouncements likewise contain real unresolved errors or apparent errors in the same way that scripture does. But this isn't a minor cross, right? Vatican 1 doesn't define infallibility the way Catholic inherency is defined for scripture as authoritarial intented relative right it defines infallibility as a positive supernatural guarantee against error under specific conditions right an ex cathedral pronouncement that turned out to be erroneous wouldn't just be an apparent difficulty requiring accommodation right it would be falsification of the Catholic faith itself right [laughter] it would literally falsify Catholicism itself. It doesn't matter how many miracles you have.
¶51It doesn't matter, right? It would literally falsify the view. It would falsify your entire tradition. So like I'm sorry, but like that's the first horn. Right?
¶52Now let's say that it doesn't apply. Let's say the magisterium is exempt. But then you owed a but then of course if this is the case, you owe a principal reason why God's general policy, right? to explain everything from tied demographics to, you know, literally talk about like we're literally talking about like all the objections against Catholicism, all the objections against theism. Why is it the case that God works in this divine in this way here, but then also doesn't work in the magic steering, right?
¶53And of course it suddenly stops at the one place where a wrong outcome would be dogmatically catastrophic for your position specifically. Right? So it would be one thing if your divine hindness model was more general and then you did of course apply it to your own magisterium, but you're not really giving a reason why it can't also apply to your magisterium, right? Um, and of course this runs into the auxiliary problem, right? An exemption introduced exactly where the theory needs it with no independent motivation apart from the need to protect the theory at its most vulnerable point, right?
¶54So the other So now here's the thing, right? Why do why am I spending so much time on the sentence model? Well, because it's doing so much background work in your case, right? It's your answer to the inherency problems. It's your answer to the demographic problems.
¶55It's your answer to religious confusion problems. Right? But the problem is like if you actually are consistent with your own model, right? It doesn't work. It undermines literally your own views, right?
¶56So that's that's the issue here. and I don't really see any way around it. All right, so that's all I have to say about that. Now, things are about to get a little more spicy because Joe and Ethan have decided to attack accommodation models and oh boy, it's really bad. Are you comfortable betting, risking losing out on union with God, being separated from God, and suffering eternally as a result of such a choice?
¶57Are you are you comfortable with that? I would not be. >> Hold on. So listen what he said. Let's go back.
¶58Let's play this. >> Miracle in connection with such a non-indigatory apparition would surely kindle faith in the members of the relevant Catholic societies, right? And then sixth and finally once again at some point dude just snap out of it. Like St. Peio and Ma Nazour are like supernaturally reduplicating Christ's passion wounds.
¶59They're literally >> So that's actually not true. Um, again, I'm not disputing the miracle, but the claim that they are replicating, so St. Pean specifically is replicating Christ pastor was actually false because the passion wounds were on the wrist, not the hand. [laughter] So this claim by Joe is not actually true. [laughter] Now again, I'm not disputing the miracle, the alleged miracle, but to say that he is reenacting, reduplicating the historical Jesus's passion wounds is actually we know it's not true.
¶60We know that he's not literally replicating it exactly despite the fact that there might have been a miracle. Again, I'm not disputing that there is a miracle, but he's not he's not making like he just completely like makes a false claim here. um now I want to focus on this last part that he says here. Um which is this living icons or representations of his glorious passion. How do you stare that in the face?
¶61These people like who are having like complex multimodal visions of Christ himself saying like I unite you to my passion for instance and then being an icon of Christ sharing his passion. How do you stare that in the face and deny Christ? How do you see Mary reciting the nyine creed with Mna and Christ saying that he's the creator and Mary saying that Christ alone is the most high and good above all things and not become Christian? Oh, generic or pluralist theist accommodationist. Are you comfortable betting your soul on generic or pluralist theist accommodationism in the face of the miraculous evidence?
¶62>> So the whole point of a pluralist is that they don't reject Christ. they simply don't see um Christianity as the exclusive truth above all other traditions. Now, of course, it depends on what kind of pluralist you are. Um and I'm going to go over a plausible pluralist model that I think gets around all of Joe's objections. Um, but it really depends upon what you mean by pluralists because not all pluralists are going to agree with Joe's characterization of pluralism as simply oh all religions are equal because that's pretty much I mean sure there might have been some pluralists that held that view but that's certainly not the view of more sophisticated forms of pluralism or at least pluralisms that reject Catholicism specifically.
¶63Are you comfortable betting risking losing out on union with >> bit betting? So, see this is the problem with like I mean I'm not going to talk about passcode wager but this is the problem right you're you're treating like this as if I'm going to go to hell right if I don't come to the right religion right why would a good god do do that right it it makes no like if god really like loves all people why would he why would he do that make it dependent upon whether you accept or reject some list of propositions. Like tell me Joe, why would a good God do that, right? It it makes no sense whatsoever. God being separated from God and suffering eternally as a result of such a choice.
¶64Are you are you comfortable with that? I would not be. Okay, let's get to the next one. The spirits are running. The spirits are aliens are running a muck.
¶65Um [laughter] maybe they're just powerful spirits causing miracles in different sects and you know these rather than God are responsible for Catholic vindicatory miracles or you know maybe maybe like aliens are responsible for them. You know maybe they also did like the the pyramids as well. Okay. So this at least has the advantage of you know not making God a deceiver. So that that's pretty good.
¶66But like >> I'm going to respond to all these but I want to play this specifically because it's a really big straw man. Basically, [laughter] what does this amount to? There's like super powerful spirits, running around deceiving people into believing Catholicism, performing boatloads of deceptive signs and wonders, putting tons of people like St. Padre Pio and Mir Nazour and Theresa Vabalo and Joseph Guptino and St. Pastina and St.
¶67John of the Cross and Venerable Lucia Dos Santos and the Truman Show like that is your hypothesis. Like like Decar's evil demon is or evil extraterrestrial is basically real and has essentially boundless powers of deception. So, so here's the thing, right? On this part of the video, he talks about these boundless powers of deception. And on the other side of the video, he's talking about his divine hypnosis model where, oh, well, God plants, you know, this positive and negative evidence.
¶68It's like what are you being consistent, Joe? you're not being consistent in your in your own like we are if your divine hindness model is true. We are in that scenario like literally like an evil demon kind of view where like there's a mixture of positive and negative evidence on both sides, right? That's what we're dealing with. If your bottle is true, um it it makes no sense.
¶69Why? How is this any different from your own view, Joe? Tell me. Um now, of course, I don't Maybe I can have a discussion with him about this. Um but this is this is not like you're not being consistent with your own your own views as you stated them.
¶70and is like regularly actively deceiving people about basic facts about the world around them and like who they're interacting with on a daily basis. Like come on, this just has like intolerably skeptical implications. Second of all, this hypothesis just does not predict that the spirits or aliens would favor Catholicism specifically, right? if there are spirits or aliens. >> So, here's here's the problem, right, with with this whole and now I'm going to talk about Buddhism in the next and like pretty soon.
¶71Um, because he just completely like ignores how the Buddhists would respond to this. So, I do have a comprehensive Buddhist response that we'll get into in this video. Um, but I do want to point out how he's basically responding to like the weakest form of these hypotheses and then treating it as if this is applicable to literally all the um alternatives, right? Um the other thing too is like a Protestant can accept Catholic dogmas but then reject infallibility. So just because you have miracles that let's say confirm let's say certain Catholic teachings that doesn't therefore mean you have to accept the infallibility of the church that literally doesn't follow from the evidence running a mock the spirits or aliens could have singled out with massive vindicator miracles Sunni Islam or Shia Islam orthodox Judaism or liberal Judaism or liberal Christianity or me Christian or Lutheranism or Presbyterianism or Anglicanism or the Baptists or the Quakers the Coptic Orthodox or the Eastern Orthodox or the Syrians the evangelicals the pentecostals the Hindus or the Buddhists or the Janists or the Dowists or any other of the thousands of religious religions or sex or they could have done any mixture of vindicatory miracles, right?
¶72And so it's extremely surprising even conditional on this spirits or aliens running a muck. Oh, we'll get into miracles later, non-Christian ones, especially in the third video. Um because Joe has just not looked at non-Christian miracles. Um he's just not familiar with any of them. um especially not ones from the tradition I follow which is Buddhism.
¶73Um so yeah this is he's basically narrowed down to only his miracles and has ignored all the other miracles in the other traditions. Um, again, I'm not going to talk about this in this video, but um, that's one thing I want to point out because obviously this video is more about the combin how we would accommodate these Catholic miracles. Um, not talk about miracles more generally, but I think it's important to point out that this claim that he's making is not true that they singled out Catholicism specifically. By contrast, the vindicatory miraculous favoring of Catholicism is not at all surprising under Catholicism. exactly what we'd expect.
¶74And so this ex this is extremely powerful evidence for Catholicism over and against these spirits. >> No, it's not because even if I grant all these miracles, right? Even if I grant like these are supposed to be quote unquote victory miracles for these Catholic dogmas, I don't have to accept the infallibility church. I don't have to accept the whole package. You you can't get from this Catholic dogma is true to therefore Catholicism is true because they're not equivalent at all.
¶75So, I don't know what like it's like the inferences machine has is just off for some reason because I'm thinking about this and it's like I could just accept again speaking as a I'm not a Protestant but like if I were a Protestant I could just say yeah Catholic you know Mary's immaculate immaculately conceived um I could accept a lot of claims Right. I mean, if you talk to an Eastern Orthodox, they accept a lot of these claims, too. [laughter] So, it just doesn't doesn't work. >> Aliens are running a muck hypothesis. Third, this hypothesis can be used to like just like explain away anything like like like, oh, there there never were dinosaurs, right?
¶76There's just like powerful spirits or aliens. >> Consider that to be ironic given your divine hiddenness model. But anyways, >> who happen to want to convince us that dinosaurs existed by planting fossils? We wouldn't take this seriously in any other context. >> Dragon has another one.
¶77>> All right. So, this is where this is where Ethan gets into um the Buddhist and this is where they briefly talk about the Buddhist um view. Now, this is where I'm gonna go really, really hard um against Ethan here because he completely misrepresents the Buddhist view and I have to step in and literally educate him, Joe, and anybody else watching of what the actual Buddhist view is because what he's about to say is absolutely like wrong. >> How do you respond to people who say Yahweh and Jesus exist and do miracles but he they are not God but just a powerful deities? Some Buddhists and Hindus believe that.
¶78This this actually raises a good question I wanted to get into which is that Protestants like Mike Lacona, Gary Habermass, a lot of these guys working on the resurrection, a lot of the Protestants working on the resurrection will use the resurrection like event as proof of Christianity being true, right? And so what they're doing is essentially what we're doing with the Catholic miracles is they're saying, "Well, the this miracle, this event has this sort of vindicatory element to it which proves that Christianity is true." And then when they turn to discussing these Marian apparitions, it's like we just forget all of that. Like we we forget the fact that a miracle can be vindicatory in this sense. And so, um, I I would assume that's going to be your response here is that the vindigatory implications of the event themselves. >> What he's talking about here is different because what he's saying is basically imagine that we can see that there is a supernatural being that identifies itself as the Christian God, but the Christian God is not who it claims to be, right?
¶79So it's just some kind of powerful entity that isn't actually like the god of classical theism that it purports to be. And so basically this would leave us with two scenarios like either this being which is super powerful super >> so there's there's a few problems with this. Number one, if if you read the the Old Testament and and David Kip has a good good stuff on this um the idea of a perfect being or classical the so like our understanding of classical theism is not the biblical is not what's in the biblical text. Um especially Old Testament. So like the Old Testament God right is not not a perfect being.
¶80It's not presenting itself as a perfect being. In fact, many many biblical scholars argue that um there are certain instances where God literally loses in a fight, right? That God literally is like he loses a battle, right? Because in the ancient near east, that was the view that Yahweh was a storm deity. So actually, weirdly enough, as as crazy as it sounds, you know, viewing the biblical God as a as a powerful deity and not the classical theist God is actually very consistent with how the Old Testament was viewed, right?
¶81These later ideas that you find in Christian theology, especially like classical theism, perfect being theology, these are later ideas that get latched on to, right, philosophically and, you know, developed through over the centuries, but they're not the original view of the biblical authors, right? At least from a historical critical perspective. Um, and so that's a problem because the original, if the original intention of the authors was not the perfect being theology that we find in the west, then they're working with a different paradigm in the biblical text. So actually, it's not true that the biblical god is being the classical theist god. That's a later interpretation on top of the text.
¶82it doesn't match what the original text was saying. And of course, many scholars um would also argue that even God as a creator god was also added later to the text. Um at least creator in the sense that we understand like creation xilo, right? Um so that's another additional problem. And of course we can't really for some reason we can't take that into account here.
¶83But anyways, I just want to mention that because it's important for what he has to say next. >> Intelligent is like deceived about its own nature and identity in a way that's sort of hard to fathom. Like how you could be wrong that like you're the self-existent ultimate ground of all being that's eternal that's outside of time and space upon >> Ethan. Ethan Okay, you know what? Let's go to I'm going to go to Derek Lambert's video.
¶84Okay. He just uploaded a video today going over this exact thing. Okay. And I'm going to play [laughter] this section of the video that is important. So, I'll give Derek credit for this.
¶85But it is it is absolutely wild that Ethan is mentioning this despite the fact that um this just completely like undermines his entire case. Go do it. The deception didn't. He's most certainly >> the veracity of God. When you start denying that didn't >> All right.
¶86All right. I'm not going to Now, here's the thing, right? Ethan, he's trying to respond to Ethan here. Right. I'm not going to respond to Ethan's specific thing here.
¶87I'm respond to Ethan what he said previously, which was again recall that, oh, well, God can't deceive us, right? Like that's the claim. That's the claim he's making, right? He can't the the the the Christian God or the let's say the biblical God cannot deceive us about his true nature. Are you sure about that, Ethan?
¶88>> Indicatory miracles could actually point you to the true religion. >> Yes. Basically, it would be God bearing witness to a lie. >> God would never bear witness to a lie. >> Again, God would never bear witness to his own nature.
¶89Right? That's the claim that Ethan is making. Now, this is what he this this is something that Look at what Derek does to this, right? This is this is this is wild. Just listen.
¶90>> Beautiful premise. One problem. I've read that Bible. So as he and that Bible says on record repeatedly that this God signs off on deception whenever it serves him. Don't take my word for it.
¶91Take the text. his own church canonized. Deuteronomy chapter 13. If there arise among you a prophet or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, and the sign or wonder come to pass, saying, Let us go after other gods, thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, for the Lord your God proveth you. Deuteronomy 13:1-3.
¶92Read it slowly. The sign comes to pass. A real wonderworking verified pointing at the wrong God. And the text says the Lord himself is running the test. The Torah's official position is that true firing signs can back false religion and God is the one administering the exam.
¶93First Kings 22 goes even further. Yahweh in his own throne roomm staffing a deception. And he said, I will go forth and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And he said, thou shalt persuade him and prevail also. Go forth and do so.
¶94First Kings 22:22. Look at the scene. This is King Ahab's court. 400 prophets. And these are not pagans.
¶95These are the king's own prophets of Yahweh. all delivering the same message in his name. Go to war, you will win. And where did that message come from? A lying spirit volunteered for the job.
¶96And Yahweh said, "Go do it." The deception didn't sneak in from outside. It came down the official channel on orders from the top. Remember that because Joe is about to walk face first into it. And in case you think kings is a one-off, Ezekiel has God say it in the first person. And if the prophet be deceived when he hath spoken a thing, I the Lord have deceived that prophet.
¶97>> Okay, so I'm not going to play the whole video, but I want to mention this because this completely undermines everything that Ethan has said, right? At least in this portion of the uh of the video. >> Any other context? >> Uh Dragon has another one. So listen to what again let's repeat and listen to what Ethan said right >> we imagine that we concede that there is a supernatural being that identifies itself as the Christian god but the Christian god is not who it claims to be right so it's just some kind of powerful entity that isn't actually like the god of classical theism >> yes [laughter] of course the god the Christian god can do that because that's literally what he does in the biblical that it purports to be.
¶98And so basically this would leave us with two scenarios. Like either this being which is super powerful, super intelligent, is like deceived about its own nature and identity in a way that's sort of hard to fathom like how you could be wrong. That like you're the self-existent ultimate ground of all being that's eternal that's outside of time and space upon which everything depends, you know, and you communicate existence to everything that exists outside of you and you have full knowledge and awareness of everything that's going on. The problem is that classical theist picture of God is not the biblical God itself >> all the time. So it's it's not clear how you could be mistaken about that.
¶99It's a little bit of a baffling and confusing view. So but then or it's just lying, right? So it's like pretending to be that even though it's not. >> Yes, you can pretend to be that because that's what he does. That's what the biblical text that's what the biblical dog actually does in the text, right?
¶100[laughter] So this doesn't help you, Ethan. This does not help you. Now that we have that out of the way, I should clarify I guess what the Buddhist view is briefly. So what would be the Buddhist view? Well, in the Buddhist view, you could have the Christian God exist, right?
¶101So like literally a literal heaven, literal hell, right? But then of course it not be ultimate reality, right? Um and so basically the Christian God, right, we'll talk about just the Christian God because of course the Buddhist view there could be other gods that are karmically created. is that the Christian God exists because of karma. Right?
¶102So literally because you have Christian devotees and because everything is created from the nature of mind or generated from the nature of mind, then because you have Christians who devote themselves to the Christian God, then they build the karma so that their next life they can then experience the Christian heaven. Right? Now, I'm not going to get into details here because I'm going to get into karmic ripening sooner in order to explain like how miracles would happen um because that's important. But that's how the Christian God would exist at least on a Buddhist um you know on a Buddhist view of the nature of the world. All right.
¶103So I want to now go over um an accommodationist model that I think answers pretty much all the objections that Joe threw it. Um so what are the objections? Well these were the four objections. So number one deception charge. If God accommodates false doctrines by performing ridicatory miracles within them, God is there by an act of deceiver.
¶104Right? Objection two is the non-uniqueness or surprise objection. Right? So basically the idea is that generic theist accommodationism doesn't predict the slightest that the pattern of miracles would uniquely privilege Catholicism specifically. Right?
¶105Objection three is Padre Pio. Right? So accommodation is supposed to be about meeting someone meeting someone gently within their existing framework. But it's not plausible that a god shaped by um gentle social cultural accommodation would inflict involuntary stigma stigmata on Padre Pio right against his wishes and of course you know against other people's wishes. And then finally, you have the awesome miraculous evidence objection.
¶106Right? So like if you have personally witnessed everything reported in the gospels unfolding exactly as depicted, you should believe Christ is Lord. Anyone who witnessed that and didn't convert would be irrational, right? Um so he tries to use this as like, you know, a problem against the accommodationist views. So here's the thing, right?
¶107Um I actually have my own accommodation model, right, that gets around these objections, right? So my thesis is this right for a person P God's relevatory action towards P is primarily the intentional shaping of P's cognitive effective valitional structure towards divine use towards divine union using P's so importantly using P's historically situated meaning web as the medium of transformation so in other words any propositional religious claims are secondary outputs of that process. Right? So basically the idea is you can have it to where God uses like you can use Jesus, he can use Christian, it doesn't matter what your religion is, right? He can use um doctrines to bring you to him.
¶108Not because those doctrines are true, but because those doctrines help you to connect to God better. Right? Because the whole point is divine union. Right? If the whole point is union with God, right?
¶109Then God has to work within your meaning web in order to in order for God to relate to you directly. That's the idea, right? Now, why is this important? What is a meaning web? What do I mean by that?
¶110Um, well, here's the thing, right? So, a mini web is sort of my term, but it kind of combines different philosophical ideas. So first the first thing we have to understand about a mini web is um is Wickenstein's account of forms of life right so it has has to do with um like how language works right so the idea is like before any proposition can be understood there has to be a background of trained responses habituated practices and and effective orientations that make the propositions um concepts intelligible right because religious claims are not delivered to people as free floating propositional packages, right? There's a certain background you have to understand. So like if you understand like what Jesus is saying in the gospels, you can understand a lot of what he's saying just by understanding second Judaism, right?
¶111But in order to understand Judaism, you have to like, you know, you have to understand how Judaism works, which that is a meaning web, right? So, if God were to like give you, let's say, a list of propositions, if you don't have a meaning web, you're not going to understand anything that's said. You're not going to have a language. You're not going to have concepts, none of that. Right?
¶112The issue is like religious claims are only intelligible within the form of life that constitute their content. Right? And if this is the case, right, this means that revelation cannot be primarily about the transmission of propositional content because propositional content is always downstream of prior practical and effective formation, right? So like for example like you can't hand someone the proposition trans subsidation occurred at consecration and have that have that proposition mean anything to them independent of the entire network of lurggical sacramental and devotional form of life that they live in right so that's kind of like the first I guess idea right in order for language to work you need a meaning web you need to have a form of life now this also relates to Quinn's idea of what belief right it's because no belief faces experience experience individually right beliefs form a corporate structure and their evidential weight is a function of their position within that structure so religious and metaphysical beliefs sit near the center of the web protected from direct evidential pressure by their connection to everything around them. Right?
¶113So basically genuine religious transformation requires transformation of the web's whole structure, not just one or two things here, right? In fact, Catholicism is a good example of this. like, you know, I'm not going to be able to convince that Joe, you know, I'm not going to be able to convince Ethan or Joe that Catholicism is false just by like throwing one objection because they're typically going to have a response based upon their web of beliefs in order and how to and how they would respond to the objection. And then finally is D actually Daniel ironically Daniel Mlelen's um work on this which is that um if you look at the history of religion like the cognitive history of religion um it's never been about propositional belief in and of itself right um religion has for most of its history been about participation in practices right so like material forms ritual activity sacred spaces is right in order to make the unseen divine agent available for encounter. Right?
¶114So you have you know for example like you have the Egyptian statues you have um you have of course the ark of the covenant right so like even even if you look at Catholicism like even the consecrated host itself is a presence of you know allegedly a presence of Jesus right so you don't need to know the proposition of transepation or the exact mechanics of how that works. Um, you just need to be present, right? Um, and so like propositional articulation of what's been encountered comes after and downstream of that encounter. It's not a precondition. You don't have to understand like the mechanics of, you know, the real presence, right?
¶115in order in order to participate. So that's kind of the main thing. Now I want to get into the manifestation hypothesis because this I think actually directly follows from um the individuation thesis. Um so this would be it right. God's communicative action towards any community takes the form of intensifying and deepening the present structures already constitutive of that community's meaning web.
¶116Right? Without metaphysically endorsing the propositional superstructure behind those mini webs, right? So why is this important? Well, here's my point by point rebuttal of what Joe has said. Right now, I will grant that your objection has real force against any views where a miracle function as an endorsement.
¶117Right? But my manifestation hypothesis directly denies that premise. Right? So, we have to actually draw a distinction between manifestation and endorsement. Right?
¶118A manifestation is an occurrence through which divine activity becomes present and available for encounter within which whatever symbolic and practical framework that the recipient already inhabits. But an endorsement is a positive affirmation that a specific propositional system like transidation apostolic succession right um is true. And so on the manifestation hypothesis, God's action intensifies presency structures. It does not therefore certify the propositional superstructure of receiving the community layers on top of the encounter, right? Because the manifestation of like let's talk about eucharistic miracles, okay?
¶119Okay. A eucharistic miracle is not about endorsement. It's about a manifestation. It's not it doesn't justify the claim. The arisatilian metaphysics of substance and accident formalized in Latin for I think it's Latin for is correct.
¶120Right? It's basically God literally working within the meaning structures the meaning webs of individuals. Right? And again, nobody has to be deceived for this to be true. The manifestation is real, right?
¶121So God can literally manifest himself in the Eucharist or whatever, right? Because that is how that community relates to God, [laughter] right? That is how it works, right? The further doctrinal elaboration is a spe is a separate act of theological interpretation that the manifestation itself doesn't license and doesn't need to license for the manifestation for the manifestation to be exactly what it is. Right?
¶122So that's the whole point is even if I grant these Eucharistic miracles, okay, so what God, you know, makes himself present in the Eucharist, does that therefore mean that I have to accept all of Catholicism? No, of course I don't. Because that's how on the manifestation hypothesis, God just manifests to the community that needs it, right? because that's the only way that they know how to relate to God, right? Within that framework.
¶123Now, of course, your argument runs this, right? If God were doing miracles outside the Catholic context and those miracles are endorsing whatever framework receives them, then God is deceiving these communities. Well, okay. First of all, as we already went over earlier, there are places in the biblical text where God is literally deceiving people. But I'm going to ignore that because I've already went over that.
¶124But of course, I want to point out this, right? Even if we ignore that, well, your inference only works if miracles function as endorsements, right? Um but if if the manifestation hypothesis is true then God can manifest himself right within the meaning web of a community and then that doesn't mean that therefore God is stamping approval of that doctrinal package right so I would say that The main disagreement then is that you think it's an endorsement whereas I think it's just manifestation. And so I would say that's of course that would be the main dispute between us. But anyways, so yeah.
¶125Anyways, my my main point is like there has to be a distinction between manifestation and endorsement. Um, and God can manifest himself without endorsing anything because how else is God going to relate to people other than through the meaning by which they come to know God, right? Through their religious structure. So now the second objection that you bring up um is that H2 predicts denominational clustering from one principle, right? Um, now of course you you treat the surprise objection as your strongest point where there's this cluster of pathic miracles, right?
¶126because it has real intuitive force against let's say a folk version of um accommodation models. But my hypothesis so the manifestation hypothesis is not silent under distribution right um which is this right here's an actual empirical test that actually discriminates between H2 and M and call it MC which is metaphysical Catholicism if metaphysical Catholicism is correct and catory miracles specifically function to authenticate the one true institutional channel. We should not expect comparable well miraculous phenomena, credible healings, do augmented answer prayer within Protestant communities, right? Protestant communities that explicitly deny apathic succession, trans subsidation, right? But of course, we do find them, right?
¶127Protestant healing, you have Protestant healings, you have Pentecostals, right? Um, and you of course you have no way to accommodate this without introducing an unmotivated auxiliary which is something like these are misattributed or demonic counterfeits or coincidence while the formally similar Catholic cases are genuine right that just doesn't work. Um, so yeah, now of course Pio and Myra also don't discriminate between the two of you, right? Um, and of course I would say, and I'm going to get into this in a minute, I would say that H2 actually does predict that Padre Pio, right, actually had the um the miracle happened in his hand rather than his wrist because he thought like, oh, Christ was crucified in the hand, right? Not the wrist.
¶128But of course, now we know that's false. But anyways, the point is my hypothesis actually predicts that better. Although I'm not talking about necessarily the Buddhist view, but I'm talking about this accommodationist view. Um, now of course the gospel eyewitness case is actually disanalogous, right? In for the for my individuation thesis.
¶129Um, your objection assumes that it has to be an all or nothing switch, right? So either miracles never license any theological inference or they always license the bulk doctrinal passage right all that it says so the in you know the um it is basically just the um the thesis I mentioned earlier which is that god through works through mini webs right all it says is that inference from manifestation to axiological theism right so you can say like god has acted decisively and specifically in this figure, right? So, it's still God, right? This doesn't deny like I'm not denying that witnessing the gospel events would be overwhelming evidence that something is significant about Jesus. What it denies specifically is this case of inference extends automatically with the same force to a much later and much more specific institutionally elaborated doctrinal superructure that the earlier events don't contain and don't entail.
¶130Right? So like originally metaphysics or all the later councils it doesn't you don't get any of that from the from the miracles in the gospels. Right? Um, so that's what I would say. Now, of course, one last thing I should mention before I get to my alternative explanation of miracles, um, which we'll get into, don't worry.
¶131It should be fun. um is simply that if my so my individuation thesis is that is if that is actually true which I do think it is because in order for God to actually give us any propositional stuff at all we have to work within a meaning web um well think about it like this right what is the point of God giving us let's say a doc a doctrine is to lead us to union with him right well couldn't he do that like without any religion being the ultimate truth so like think about this right let's say that the purpose of the religious life is to be in union with God right well you can achieve that any number of infinitely many ways is right. And of course, people are going to have different mini webs. People are going to have different psycho psychological structures and all these sorts of things. And so, basically, like it's not like a one-sizefitsall sort of thing, right?
¶132It might be the case where you you kind of need this diversity of practices and traditions and scriptures in order in order to get a lot of people you know to devote themselves to God, right? And for certain people like for a lot of people in fact there might you know the Christian path might be the best path for them to relate to God. Um, notice like if that's true, right, then God can do miracles as a way to show people like, "Hey, I am present with you right now through your symbols, your structures, your scriptures, right? Um so it could be a manifestation event without therefore concluding oh God is specifically justifying this entire religious doc you know the religious superructure because what is the point of the religious superructure? The point of the religious superructure is to bring people to God.
¶133That is the whole point. It's not simply just to get people just to believe in their heads. That is true. It's to actually get them to union with God directly, right? Because what if you have someone that's mentally that literally can't understand their religious doctrine?
¶134So, oh, because I can't understand these religious doctrines, then I'm cut off from union with God. Of course not. That's that's ridiculous, right? So God can work through the meaning webs of different people, different cultures, different religions um and even do miracles as ways of God relating to those people without therefore God being a massive deceiver or anything like that because again there is a difference between endorsement and manifestation, right? Because in order for God to, you know, relate to people, he has to do it through the web, you know, through the symbols and the, you know, the doctrines that they were taught, right?
¶135Because that's their meaning web. That's how they relate, right? For example, and I'll just be brief, like if you go to like the herrrishna temple, they'll literally be like praying hair Krishna and they'll be dancing and singing Hara Krishna, right? And if you go to a Catholic mass, right, they'll be typically very quiet and you know, you'll have the Eucharist, right? Um, so you have like two different traditions that both speak about a personal God, right?
¶136It's just they disagree about, you know, the exact metaphysics and mechanics of it. But notice it's still a personal God, right? Even if it's from two different traditions, right? There's there's a parallel structure where you know you can have devotions to Jesus and you can also have devotions to Krishna, right? They both work.
¶137They're both ways are related to God. They're both different paths, right? But just because God does miracles doesn't mean that he's endorsing the the the absolute objective truth of any of them, right? He could just be endoring himself because that is the way in which they come to understand God through their meaning web right that doesn't require God to be a deceiver. So because it doesn't require God to be a deceiver, because the inference that God is trying to endorse something is actually not entailed from the miracle.
¶138It's only entailed within the meaning web that you interpret the miracle through. Um then yeah, it just doesn't just doesn't work. It doesn't require God to be a deceiver. um at least on that model, right? It's the same thing with Jesus, right?
¶139So like if I saw, you know, if I saw the resurrection of Jesus or all the events in the gospels, am I going to therefore conclude, oh, therefore I have to accept um you know, all of I mean sure, would I accept Jesus? Of course I would, right? Because that is how God is related to us. Just like if I were to see Krishna, right? If I were to see Krishna, same thing.
¶140Wouldn't matter. It doesn't matter the name you put to it. What matters is the character behind the traditions that um that these religions are really talking about. So, okay. So this is another independent problem that I have with this whole approach to the argument from miracles or at least Joe's version of it.
¶141Um is that the whole argument presupposes that there is a neutral in interpretationfree description of the event, right? So the bleeding host the recaped ruins, right? It doesn't really matter what kind of miracle. Um but then of course so the issue is like it assumes that there's a neutral interpretation and then that we have to assign a likelihood under competing hypothesis right um where metaphysical Catholicism scores high and its rivals score low however as per my previous analysis showed so like with the mini webs and those sorts of things um there is no such neutral description available a Catholic worshipper does not first perceive a raw physical event and then apply um an interpretive framework to it after the fact. The event appears already as a eucharistic miracle as confirmation of the real presence as a sign of Catholic community specifically because it arises within a meaning web built by centuries of toistic metaphysics and devotional formation and that meaning web doesn't get applied to the data afterward.
¶142It constitutes the data as the kind of thing it's expressed as being from the start. Right? So the issue of course is like this has an implication for your own argument right so when you assign the that the probability of miracle on metaphysical on you know metaphysical Catholicism is high the event you're assigning that right so like you're assigning a likelihood ratio to that um you're basically saying already the event as described within the Catholic interpretive framework right but of course this is not some neutral physical occurrence Right? You're not comparing a framework neutral piece of evidence against a rival hypothesis. Right?
¶143You're comparing the event as Catholic theology has already described it against everything else and then noting unsurprisingly that Catholic theologyy's own description of the event fits Catholic theology best. Right? This is not confirmation in a Beijing sense at all. It is closer to circularity. Right.
¶144Um so that's kind of the issue with this whole approach. Um now again nothing here disputes that something extraordinary happened or you know at Lords or whatever. Right. Um the problem is well I'm only responding to one case at least one part of the case. There's of course two other videos I'm going to go over.
¶145Um, now we're going to go over the last thing which is um an alternative hypothesis. Right? Now, I'm not going to necessarily defend this hypothesis here. I'm not going to try to show like you know this is necessarily like a better theory, but um it is an alternative. It's a non-theistic alternative.
¶146It's a Buddhist alternative. And there's a few things I want to highlight um at least for this stream, right? Um so um here's the thing, right? Why am I bringing Buddhism into this? Well, it's because Joe Schmid, Ethan, they have not interacted with Eastern philosophy religion or at least they haven't interacted with Eastern traditions on how the East would um be able to respond to these miracles because this is not um an Eastern tradition doesn't have to deny that miracles happen, right?
¶147Um, it's basically that Ethan, well, Ethan and Joe, they both assume that naturalism is the only alternative to theism. And of course, their responses to non naturalist alternatives is really really um really really bad um because they don't they don't really interact with Buddhist views at all. So I feel like I have to like actually defend the Buddhist here, at least defend the Buddhist um perspective here. Um so the argument that they want to propose is this, right? Let D be a doctrinal or metaphysical hypothesis.
¶148M be the relevant miracle data and K background knowledge. A miracle argument for D claims that M obtains and D explains M that no rival explains M as well and therefore M confirms D. Right? Um but of course as sooth establishes this argument fails at the explanatory step unless D is specified with sufficient content to generate a determinable likelihood for M. Right?
¶149So like the problem is of course a bare hypothesis whether Catholicism is true right or even God exists right you can also throw the in here predicts nothing on its own to generate the probability of M conditional on D and K. demly supplemented with auxiliary assumptions A yielding the robust hypothesis DR equals DNR or DNA. Um so of course this creates a problem right this creates a problem for Joe which is the problem of auxiliary assumption right prior of course sudith calls this the prior probability blowback since any conjunction is at is at most as prob as least as its least probable conjunct D and A has a lower prior than D alone whether A is not indep whenever A is not independently established so of course we're talking about A as an auxiliary assumption. Um and of course you have the likelihood blow blowback which is that once the unit of comparison is the robust hypothesis hypothesis must be robust by two and the comparison must be run at that level. A third cost a circularity problem arise when the auxiliaries invoked to generate a's likelihood or themselves shaped by the very miracle duration they are meant to explain.
¶150Right? Um so then they can of course they cannot operate as independent evidential support. Um now of course Suda's original argument was about postmortem survival. Um but of course it applies to equal without modification to any sectarian Buddhist miracle or you know any Catholic apologists or you know what Joe and um Ethan are doing. Um so that's that's kind of thing.
¶151Now I also want to briefly go over like how this would work formal. So um sudos apparatus can be sharpened into an explicitly beijian instrument using necle klelah's mediation result right let c be the proposition that an explanatory connection obtains between d and m in the generalized sense that d causes m causes d or both share common ground a sense broad enough to include a lawful or nominological connection right now against the screen off thesis of roach and sober on which proposition that d would explain ev is evidentially relevant once m is known clement hog shows that in exactly the kind of case that generate confirmation from frequency data, right? If no explanatory connection obtains between D and M, learning D does not raise probability M at all. Um so Clement Honga basically argues against this this screen thesis um that explanation does not merely add confirmation, it guides confirmation. So basically the the explanation is whatever connects the hypothesis to the observation in question right um that's the basic idea now of course this sharpens um the auxiliary problem into an instrument the question is not simply whether D can be supplemented with auxiliary to generate some likelihood for M but how strongly K supports the specific explatory connection um proposition CD D that must obtain for D to explain M at all.
¶152Um so yeah now I understand that MC or metaphysical Catholicism is understood as a conjunction claim. So it's a conjunction of generic theism, incarnation, resurrection, apostolic succession, um trans subsidation, priestly efficiency, magistial guarantee, right? Um so that that's the thing that needs to be understood. Um now I also want to briefly go over what I call the agent gap argument. Um so this applies against specifically bare theism.
¶153Um so the issue is that in order to generate any specific miracle m you have to um the problem is like axiological theism alone says only that a being with reason responsible practic rationality and perfect axiological orientation exists. Um so the hypothesis of God exists right or even that God would do good things that says nothing about why that being should produce this healing at this shrine at this occasion rather than some other healing at some other time or none at all. Right? So in order to bridge axiological theism's character level content to the miracle, one needs an auxiliary of roughly the fallen form. this being has axiological reason on this occasion to select M over the countless alternative actions compatible with his perfect goodness.
¶154Right? So you c you can call this the practical reasoning bridge. Right? Now of course the practical reasoning bridge is not entailed by axiological theism. Um because on axiological theism God has libertarian freedom, right?
¶155He could do whatever he he wants to do within the constraints of his goodness. Um, so it doesn't really tell you why God would do one miracle over another, right? That's the basic notion. Not saying this can't be overcome. I'm not saying, you know, I'm not going to be like James Fedor where you have no evidence at all for God whatsoever.
¶156I'm simply saying that there there has to be some bridge between bare theism or axiological theism and then a specific miracle. Um, so that's that's the issue, right? Um, now the one thing I wanted to, um, I'm not going to go over too much here about what the what the the exact framework is for how karma would work, but let me see if I can find the exact Um, [music] [music] I think Oh, wait. All right, let's Okay, so this is the hypothesis, right? Just briefly states that extraordinary phenomena including healings, apparitions, physical relics, right?
¶157including rainbow bodies which I'm not going to go into this video but I'll have a future video on that um in this series are instances of karmic ripening surfacing at or prior to the individuation of perceiver and object um taking symbolically legible form within the conceptual and devotional structures locally available to the individual stream or stream. So talking about like the stream of consciousness that somebody has cuz at least in Buddhism right um there is no such thing as a static person like agent instead we have to use language like um like you are a stream of consciousness so you're not just like one you know agent that just doesn't change at all you're constantly changing you're constantly evolving and you know I mean just look if you just do meditation you look at your own stream of awareness your own thoughts right you can see things just moving Right? There's no like unchanging self there is basically what I'm saying. Um and so basically that for a a ripening so you have this what's called a karmic ripening effect where um essentially um the event so the the karmic ripening is fixed by antecedent karmic conditions and the conceptual furniture by which those conditions individuate into experience. Right.
¶158Um, now here's the thing about karmic ripening is it bypasses the agent gap problem because again in the agent the ga the agent gap is like you need some bridging principle between you know axiological theism and in the miracle right in at least for Catholicism you need you know the Catholic god and then this specific miracle right well the the problem is if you look at the Catholic hypothesis, it requires a whole bunch of different doctrines to be true in order for you to get the miracle. But then on this theory, right, I only need one. I mean, I don't even need an auxiliary assumption because the whole point is like if you devote yourself to the Catholic religion, you will develop karma such that it will create and it can generate miracles, [laughter] right? Um, so I don't I don't even need a reason as to why like I don't need a reason why ripening doesn't happen here over there because it works more like a natural law. It's not an agent that's behind this.
¶159Right? Now again, this might sound strange because this is not a naturalistic theory. So this is something where you know if natural like you know if you're a skeptic atheist if you're listening to this like you might be surprised, right? But I this is not um I'm not a naturalist, right? So my exact um theory on how this all works is basically like a lawlike um structure.
¶160It may not be physicalist in the sense of what of what we think as a as physicalism, right? But it is, you know, a law like it has a lawike nature pattern to it, right? Um, so that's kind of the thing. Um, now I'm going to leave a link in the description if anyone wants to read this paper. Um, but there are some important advantages that I want to mention just briefly.
¶161However, before we get to those advantages, I should also briefly mention exactly how this metaphysics works because it can be kind of strange. So, let's think of it like this. I'm going to use the dream analogy because I think that's the best way to think of it. Um, when you go into a dream at night, right? You can you generate or not you, but let's say your nature of mind or your awareness, whatever you want to call it, generates a dream world.
¶162Now, when you generate a dream world, um you can have like a dream self and you can have um a dream environment. Um and of course, I'm not going to talk too much about dream yoga in this video because that's I could do a whole video series just on that. But the theory or at least the conceptual framework that we can understand this by is the dreams that you have at night correspond to the karma of the day. Right? So it's not like purely deterministic um in the strict sense but it is because of certain things that might have happened throughout the day you can have these karmic ripenings and you can have like a dream like experience right that's that's how dreams are understood within the Buddhist tradition now why do I mention this well because our world right now so the life that we live now in this world is also a result of the same karmic ripening so basically you live in this world in the 21st century.
¶163You know, I don't know, you know, let's just I don't know where he lives because I get viewers from all around the globe, but um the life that you [clears throat] live now is a result of your karmic um ripinning that you gained from a previous life and then now you find yourself in this situation, right? Um, in the same way that when you go to dream, when you dream at night, you can generate a whole world and have these karmic patterns that kind of show up that sort of generate both your your, you know, your dream ego, your dream self and then the the environment. Now, why is this important? Well, in the Buddhist tradition that that I practice or at least that I understand, miracles are the result of karmic ripening. they're they're result of um karmic patterns.
¶164Um and so the other thing too with karma is like it's a non-dual process, right? So it's not like a it's not necessarily like a moral or physical law in the sense of like it's not something that you'll find in physics. It's more of something that goes underneath the entire structure of subject and object, right? Um I get a little bit more into this in the paper but essentially that is basically how it understood. Um but before we get there I just want to mention a few other things to understand this framework.
¶165All right. So I also want to make importantly clear of what I actually mean by this counting as a let's say a naturalistic alternative but not necessarily modern naturalism as we understand it. So um like a a reader let's say or viewer might grant everything argued thus far and still object that the ripeting hypothesis however law governed is not naturalistic right or at least is not continuous with science but this is actually just not true. So if you look at the history of science right um the relevant shift is um what's called disenchantment right um so Galileo pres pro provides the exact mechanism right um where you distinguish between primary and secondary qualities and then um you try to like argue like nature is intrinsically mindless or you know whatever but that's just simply not always has not always been the case like if you look at the if you look at before Galileo Um things were understood as law governed, right? But there's also mind evolving forces, right?
¶166Um and so like for example like stoic stoic physics holds that fumina a rational tental substance pervades the entire cosmos, right? Aatilian physics also works the same way. If you look at like ancient religions like the Egyptian religions is the same thing, right? um where they basically had like literal gods existing but they're natural, right? They're not supernatural in the way that we think of them, right?
¶167Um because so like the point is general, right? It is not merely that preodern frameworks were more hospital to mind and miracle than the postgalan one, right? is that a large family of traditions historically combined miracle performing enchantment with the specific absence of a supreme creator agent. Right? So this is where like my hypothesis, the riping hypothesis actually fits within this kind of I guess family of of hypotheses.
¶168Right? And so my rip hypothesis is enchanted in exactly in the way that these traditions are. It predicts and accommodates extraordinary phenomena in a matter in a matter of course rather than treating them as embarrassments. Right? Um now of course my ripening hypothesis is non-theistic.
¶169Right? It provide it posits no single transcendent will right that looks over us. Um but it's still like you know still naturalistic in the law sense even if it's not naturalism in the modern sense right. Um, now I mention that because this is not something that Joe actually takes the much time to really address. Um, because there are theistic there are non-theistic traditions that have law-like explanations of miracles without invoking any divine agents at all.
¶170Right? Um, so that's the problem. Now, of course, another issue that I want to bring up is James Keller's argument for the activity and accessibility of miracles, right? So, like if you say that a miracle happened in one instance rather than another instance, then you run into this problem of God being unfair, right? So, you need like some kind of miracle theodysy as to why there is an unevenness in in regards to like why miracles happen here rather than somewhere else, right?
¶171But notice how this this problem doesn't exist for a ripening hypothesis, right? I could fully explain all even the Catholic miracles, um, which we'll get into in a minute on this theory. Um, now the other thing too, I'm not going to get too much into this. Um, but within the Buddhist tradition, you can actually do miracles through certain practices, which is again, it's debatable in in the sense like you can you can be skeptical, right? Um, because you have to do the practices in order to know for sure.
¶172Um, and I'm not even claiming that it's necessarily true, but that's at least the claim of the at least within the tradition. Um, now I before we conclude this video, I also want to talk about the distribution of miracles themselves within the Catholic paradigm, right? Um, so the question is not whether miracles occur, right? But I'm going to but basically which hypothesis predicts their shape the distribution of who is healed and who is not and which sides produce apparitions and which do not. Right?
¶173Why some consecrated hosts manifest visibly and the overwhelming majority do not. Right? Um and of course this reframes it because now I'm not arguing that miracles don't happen. I'm simply saying hey let's look at the actual distribution of these miracles and see which hypothesis is better. Right?
¶174an agent hypothesis built on libertarian free will cannot in principle generate a distributional pattern. Right? Um and of course whatever pattern data eventually shows MC M the you know the MC hypothesis so metaphysical Catholicism so the Catholic view could say that afterwards that the agent has a had a reason to do it right. Um, but of course this is compos this is compatible with any outcome, right? It doesn't really tell you why there's one miracle over here rather than than another, right?
¶175Um, so here here's the general pattern, right? And I'm going to go over four data points, right? Um, let's let's grant equal prior, right? for the sake of argument where metaphysical Catholicism and my ripen hypothesis have equal prior, right? Okay.
¶176Um so consider MC in its confirmatory miracle form. A perfectly good omnisient omnipotent agent acting with initiate initiation right through the sacmental apostolic channel to produce eucic transformations right consider rs ancient naturalist form already developed in prior sections a riping event occurs once a threshold is crossed jointly determined by an individuating individuating streams accumulated devotional weight in the accumulated devotional depth of the site or channel. Okay, now let's look at lords. Let's look at um Fatima and then all the other apparitions. Now, here's the problem, right?
¶177And I want to I want to highlight this specifically. The eucharistic case is actually a problem for the Catholic because here metaphysical Catholicism so MC's own doctrine forecloses this ever occurring sacramental efficiency operates exop operto right so basically the idea or the objection that I want to bring forward is that if trans subsidition is true then it's always the case, right? That um the appearance and the actual substance are different, right? Um but the doctrine itself asserts that no relevant difference between a visibly manifesting host and any other would occur. So um what ex what exactly explains these eucharistic miracles on a metaphysically, you know, if if Catholicism is true, what exa What what would explain these eucharistic miracles?
¶178Because the own your own doctrine says that they have to be there can't be any relevant difference between the visible manifestation and the substance, right? But that's simply not the case here. And then of course we already talked about Padre Pio, but the problem with Padre Pio is even if we grant the miracle, right? Okay, his miracle was on his hand, not his wrist, right? That's exactly what you would predict on a ripening hypothesis because again his his karma, right, in this case generates the miracle.
¶179So then because his karma was um was focused so much on the hand instead of the wrist then yeah you're going to get a hand miracle right and again this is granting that the miracle happened. So you basically run into this problem right where um on metaphysical Catholicism there's no distribution commitment right any shape so any shape of how these miracles play out the distribution of the miracles is compatible with an unconditioned age agent you know agent's choice whereas on my hypothesis right um a miracle would be predicted based upon the karma the karmic conditions of the devotions, right? Because and here's the reason why, right? A riping event requires the conjunction of sufficient individual stream rate and sufficient channel depth. Neither factor alone suffices the two thr Okay, so let let's try to understand this, right?
¶180Um so the basic idea is that karma is a lawike has a lawike pattern and if karma is what explains these miracles because ultimately karma generates you know not just our individual selves but even the the world of appearance right at least that's the theory then yeah you're going to get um you're going to get a distribution. So basically the distribution that we find ourselves in especially again given Padre Peio given the Eucharistic miracles the fact that you know Catholicism's own doctrine of transation excludes like by definition like by doctrine excludes these miracles from happening. Then it's like okay well what explains these miracles? It's like, well, actually karma does because karma is how the world works, right? Um, so basically my argument is that the actual distribution that we find ourselves with fits better on a karmic theory than it does on the Catholic theory.
¶181And of course, I haven't even gotten into other miracles and other traditions, right? So this is this is literally dealing with their data, not mine. This is their data, right, that I'm using. And you get this result. Um, and of course, this is probably the most interesting part.
¶182A defender of Catholicism might expect that the New Testament's own miracle account, right, excludes this ripening thing, but this actually this is actually not true, right? So like literally, you know, if you read the New Testament, it says your faith has made you well, right? Jesus telling people like, "Hey, if you have a mustard seed of faith, you can you can do these miracles, right? If you actually read the old the you know the New Testament right and if you listen to what Jesus himself is saying he's saying by your faith you can basically do miracles. Um which is that's basically the karmic view right notice it doesn't necessarily require a divine agent from outside doing this.
¶183It only requires faith just like you know when when Peter is walking on water right and he falls to the water. Why does he fall into the water? Well, it's because he lost his faith or at least he he lacked the faith. So that that's basically the karmic view, right? And talk at least that's how the karmic view would work in in Christian language, right?
¶184So that's the thing. Now, of course, I'm I'm not going to get into everything in here um because I told people that I wouldn't um spend too much time on this, but um but yeah, so I guess there's kind of two problems, right? Number one is you have this agent gap for any kind of theism that the karmic theory doesn't. So the priors are going to be a little bit better on the on the karmic side. And then you don't have this distribution problem on on karma, right?
¶185Because again, there's no agent. So you don't need I don't need a theodysy on why, you know, karma does miracles here rather than somewhere else. It's like no, there there's no agent involved. It's just a law-like process, right? Whereas on theism, you have to like explain why there's an uneven distribution.
¶186And then more problematically is actually the activity and accessibility of these miracles because in the karmic view right miracles can happen actively or passively. So they can happen passively in the sense of like I have a lot of devotion and so then I can produce these miracles you know depending upon just depends right there. I'm not saying these things happen very often but they can happen. And then there's also what's called active karmic ripening, which is what I mentioned earlier about how if you do certain Buddhist practices, you can actually do miracles yourself. Right?
¶187So again, why am I mentioning all this? I mean, it sounds crazy, right? And of course, I talk about active ripening here. Um, I'm mentioning this because Joe and Ethan have not they haven't addressed these views. they haven't addressed the eastern like how the east would would respond to this argument.
¶188So basically there are several I would say explanatory advantages right. So first of all ripening requires no separate metaphysics right for spontaneous and deliberately cultivated phenomena. Um it provides a natural and graded account of this. So like if you look at the tric literature reports miracle type phenomena in degrees partial versus complete like you know you have let's say you have like the full rim body and then the small rim of body right and then if you look at other eastern traditions you have internal heat sub body practices which again I'm not going to get into too much but it is good mentioning Um and of course MC standard defense against non-atholic miracle data is basically like demons right but the problem is this becomes harder to sustain against technique produce miracles right because in in Christianity you can't do miracles by practice like miracles are mainly spontaneous right whereas in the Buddhist tradition or these not just Buddhist tradition but just eastern traditions more generally Um you can do miracles by doing the practice. Um so that's basically the issue right and so I would say like R does not merely explain technique produced phenomena more cheaply but R predicts them as a direct color of its own core content.
¶189Right? Since a law like since a lawful substrate response to the structure is precisely what R's content states while metaphysical Catholicism's content specifically excludes the possibility of reliable agent independent human projection of miracle type phenomena right so like if you have a technique-based miracle like a miracle done from practice right um it's actually very low that you should expect these miracles to happen through these practices if Catholicism or true, right? Um so that's kind of the the um issue. Now one thing I should mention briefly before I close this video is I am not proposing this ripening hypothesis as if it is true because even on my own perspective it's still say conventionally true right it's a useful model right but that's all it needs to do it needs to be a useful model right it doesn't literally have to literally describe reality it is simply a way in which we can conceptualize how these miracles can be explained without Catholicism being true and without even theism being true necessarily. Now again I understand it's a weird view and that's fine but theism is also a weird view and so is any other hypothesis that is going to be able to explain these miracles.
¶190Um so we just have to accept that whatever explains these miracles right is going to be weird and that's okay. Um that's totally normal for you know weird things right miracles to have weird hypotheses to explain them right. Um now of course I could have gone into parasychological hypotheses I could have you know but I just wanted to give you know a fair shot of um how a non-theistic tradition like Buddhism would be able to explain these miracles. Um, and of course I will eventually go into like rainbow bodies and all that stuff in a future video, but for now I think um this will do for now. So where does this basically lead us?
¶191Um, now this is only part one of my response, right? Um, I have a lot more I'm going to say, but so far I think we've shown that basically, um, he didn't deal with actual like robust alternatives like at all. He kind of straw man them. Um, number two, he Ethan, at least Ethan's claim that um like, oh well, God wouldn't deceive us. Like, of course, he can because that's what he does in the biblical text.
¶192So, whatever god you're talking about, Ethan, is not the perfect being God of classical theism. it is a completely different deity, right? By the text's own emission, right? So, your own text literally has God literally deceiving people. Um, like it's in there, right?
¶193So, I don't know how you can get around that unless you try to like presuppose your own position on the matter. Um, you basically have to question your position without actually interacting with what the text itself says that God does, right? Um again this is this is working within your own tradition right so I'm not even bringing my own um ideas these are from your own text right so yeah of course God can um lie about his own status because of course if you're if you're a finite being that's doing these miracles then yeah of course you would lie about you being the all all powerful all knowing creator of the world right that's what you do in order to gain followers right so notice how this doesn't help Ethan at all. Right? Because even if I literally grant the existence of his god, it actually doesn't get you to the god of classical theism.
¶194It gets you to a completely different god that has nothing to do with the god of classical theism, which weirdly enough does fit well with my I guess can fit well with some of some Buddhist ideas about how the world works and stuff. But anyways, the point is like so far none of these I guess they haven't really interacted much with alternative hypotheses. Um they haven't interacted with like more sophisticated like accommodationist models of theism because again you can still accept Jesus as God but then understand like Jesus being God is just a path towards union with God, right? doesn't mean that the doctrines are literally true of literally describing reality just like you can do you know just like you can sing the Herac Krishna right and become united to God through the through those practices in the same way Christianity could also make the same claim right at least on a pluralist accommodationist understanding doesn't require that you reject Jesus like that's not what the view says um and then of course it doesn't really interact with eastern views on this so the ripening hypothesis is just one again just one theory about as well as many other theories that would be able to explain this. Um, so yeah.
¶195Um, that is basically it. And of course, like I said, um, this is just part one of a part three series. And in the next video, I'm going to be going over actual like counter evidence against Catholicism specifically, at least what I consider to be counter evidence. Um, but that'll be for the next video. So keep an eye out on that.
¶196But anyways, um, thank you guys for listening. Thank you guys for watching. Um, and yeah, please hit the subscribe button because this is my very first long video response. Um, so hopefully I did the editing well, but God bless you all.