¶1Big news. God exists. Christ is Lord and he established the Catholic Church. >> All right. I've been I've been in the lab.
¶2I'm getting ready. You know what? Thanks to Mark Souza, my friend, making a documentary about Padre Pio, not just an average video. And I want to talk about something a patron of mine wrote recently because it's been sitting on me for a couple of days while I've been cooking up this Padre Pio stuff. And I think it's worth taking to the public, letting you hear my reasoning.
¶3And one of my thinkers that are part of what we do here at Myth Vision, bright guy, uh, his name is Rick. I won't say his last name in case he doesn't want that out there. He left this really thoughtful comment under one of my recent videos that were on the Patreon about the miracle claims that Joe Schmid has been making. And I told him I'd probably build a video around the idea. So, here we are.
¶4I don't want to leave Rick hanging. Rick uh, disclosed that he's not an atheist. He's a student of Vidanta, actually. So you can tell he's a deep thinker. He goes in depth here and he describes himself as a methodological naturalist.
¶5Meaning it would take a genuinely strong case for him to abandon natural explanations for something other than that, something supernatural. And the first thing he pointed out is one I actually agree with completely. Even if suppose you could somehow establish that a miracle happened, which I don't think they can, but even if you did, okay, something like truly inexplicable by any natural process, that alone doesn't get you to therefore God exists. And it definitely doesn't get you to all the way to the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church specifically is the one true church like Joe Schmid has done.
¶6Those are completely separate leaps. Each one needs its own justification. You don't get to bundle them together and call it one argument. This is something Rick brought up. Here's where it gets really sharp, though.
¶7Joe didn't just say miracles support Catholicism. He said miracles prove Catholicism. like capital letters with his chest out. It proves it. Not just for miracles, but for miracles that seem to vindicate distinctive Catholic doctrines.
¶8Miracles that only seem to make sense if Catholicism is true. And Rick's point is that when you use the word prove, you're not just saying this would be convincing to someone who already leans Catholic. You're claiming it should be convincing to someone starting from naturalistic assumptions, someone who isn't being unreasonable or obstinate by asking hard questions. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a much bigger claim than most apologetics actually earns. And the burden of proof sits on Joe, not on the rest of us to disprove him.
¶9Even though I'm going to go out of my way to show you some things that most people in the Catholic circles who buy these miracles just somehow, I don't know if it's cognitive dissonance. Anyway, I think the distinction gets blurred constantly in this space. A lot of apologetics works by presenting evidence that only moves someone who's already inside the club, that's already inside of the framework, and then treating it as a failure of the listener when it doesn't move anyone else. But if an argument only works on people who already believe the conclusion, it isn't an argument for the conclusion. It's just decoration for people who are already in the club.
¶10So Rick wrote another thing. He he told me something that I thought was really interesting about his own background and I felt it was really useful. He said his interest in this whole area didn't start with religion. It started in high school with psychic phenomena ESP and that kind of thing for those of you who know a little bit about that. What changed his mind wasn't some big dramatic debate which I get endless requests on YouTube to participate in myself.
¶11And I'll tell you straight up, if I practiced, I'd probably be really good at it. It's not my thing. And if debating is how you measure if something is true, you have gone down the wrong path. You have found word salad word games, rhetoricians, and sophist. They are going to be better at word games unless a really accurate, very precise thinker is willing to become rhetorically skilled in combat, in word fight.
¶12Honestly, it it tells me a lot about the people who beg me to participate. You're afraid to debate. You won't do this debate. And it's like, dude, read a book. Investigate and research on your own.
¶13Like, I don't find it's like a football game. Sure, you you pick a team. But how many people actually come in neutral and honest and come in and go, you know what, today I'm going, you know, I used to root for my team, the Seahawks. Let's just say because I lived in Washington State for a while. Today I'm going in and the Seahawks are competing against uh a whole another team.
¶14Uh I'm going in neutral and I'm going to say let the best man win and who earned it is who deserves it and I'm not going to root for one side. No, debates don't operate that way. This is so tribal it's not even funny. It isn't my thing. The reason it also isn't my thing is often times what my opinion of something is isn't something that I care to overly nail down on my own audience as well.
¶15I've got a mixed audience of people. It's not just atheist. I have a plethora of different people who have different perceptions and different views. And truthfully, I've also been wrong in the past. And I don't want to sit here and go five years down the road, look back and go, look at the debate.
¶16I've sat there and I participated in debates. I've done a debate not too long ago and I'm like, okay, not my thing. So anyway, what did it for Rick? Rick's describing ESP. It wasn't some debates.
¶17All right. He says it was learning how easily people fool themselves and fool each other without even meaning to. I relate to this idea from learning more about the brain from Michael Shurmer's book, The Believing Brain, and other people who [clears throat] study the brain and how superstitious and pattern seeking we are and all of this kind of stuff. This is stuff I don't think Joe Schmid really factors in personally, but this is my opinion. He he brought up uh Rick on my Patreon.
¶18and he says, uh, classic card guessing experiments, someone tries to guess the image on a hidden card and early on in that they do better than chance would predict. And sometimes with strikingly small odds against it being random, but then if you add in controls, like you're able to control and and do certain things to manipulate the situation so that it isn't easy to just guess. There are controls and factors into this as you measure it. You put a physical barrier up, for example, so nobody can see the back of the cards. You separate the guesser from anyone who could unconsciously cue them.
¶19You tighten the recordeping so results aren't getting rounded in a favorable direction without anyone intending it. And every time once the controls go up, Rick says the results fall right back to chance. He drew the connection to historical miracle claims himself and it's I think a brilliant one. It's really really a good one. Let's just play this one for a game like for a second.
¶20You take a reported miracle and go looking for more detail and what you usually find is either not enough information to actually verify anything happened or specific details that undercut the story once you check them against the record. The same pattern we see with the cards that we just talked about putting up the controls. The controls in a sense in this analogy is investigating and getting closer and actually looking at this stuff without this distance. Having those controls, it's impressive from a distance for many people, but the closer you get, the thinner it is. The it becomes obvious.
¶21Now, the part I want everyone to absorb. This is important because I think it's the strongest thing in his whole comment. Rick asked essentially, "Why doesn't God heal amputees?" If God occasionally performs miracles specifically to demonstrate his own existence, and regrowing a limb is trivial for an all powerful being, creator of the universe. Then why do we have plenty of claimed remissions and unverifiable healings, but not one well doumented case of a semeed limb growing back? Obviously, I know Joe Schmid and other miracle style Christians, they'll point back to one supposed verified example in the 1600s.
¶22The 1600s. We'll get to that. Yet, Rick predicted the response you'd get from someone defending the miracle claim that God wants to preserve free will. So, he only performs miracles subtle enough that faith is still required. But think about what that concession would actually do to the original argument.
¶23If let's just play that game and suppose that was the rebuttal. If that's true, then miracles by definition can't function as proof of anything because the whole point of keeping them ambiguous is so they don't force belief on people. So if that position needs that kind of hedge just to survive the amputee question, then the claim that miracles prove Catholicism, as Joe has said, has already collapsed into something a lot smaller. Miracles might be consistent with Catholicism. That's a completely different claim than proof and a much much weaker one.
¶24I keep coming back to why this particular pattern gets to me. It's the same pattern that took me out of the tradition I grew up in. I was raised, for those of you who don't know, before my Calvinist days, in a believing evangelical, miracle, charismatic movement. We were all in, dude. All of it.
¶25I believed it with everything I had. The reason I don't anymore isn't that I got angry at church one day or some scholar said something super clever and I immediately gave into the criticism. It's this exact pattern Rick brought up happening over and over. Every time I went looking for the kind of documentation that should exist if a claim were true, I found gaps where there should have been evidence and explanations that only worked if you already believed the conclusion going in. Now, I'm going to say something that I think a lot of people are going to call unfair, and I want to say it anyway because that's what I do.
¶26I think I really do think it's true. All right? And because apologists do the exact move to people like me constantly. So here I go to point out the obvious. Joe was raised as a child Catholic.
¶27He wandered away from it for a while, many years, about a decade I guess. I'm not sure how long, but the way a lot of us do this, like I have done, and now he's found his way back and he's making the strongest possible public case for the tradition he grew up in. I don't think you can talk honestly about that without at least asking what role the psychology of coming home coming home to the church plays here separate from the actual arguments. I know exactly what that pull feels like because it points at me too. And I think a lot of you watching would probably agree with me.
¶28Maybe not everybody's experience is the same. I know that to be true from the comment sections and the years of doing this. But do you understand how happy my mother who I'm a mama's boy? My father, my sisters would be if I walked back into the faith I was raised in. Honestly, they would be indescribably happy in tears.
¶29It it would be unbelievable to them. And that's not a small thing to these people. Family approval, right? belonging, the sense of finally not being the disappointment at Thanksgiving that pulls on people whether or not they admit it, it's pulling on them. Okay, it's happening.
¶30Joe growing up Catholic and eventually finding his way back to Catholicism specifically out of every tradition on earth he could have ended up inside is worth pointing out. It must be pointed out. It's literally the prodigal son's story and his family almost certainly experiences it that way. Whether or not Joe frames it that way himself, I'm not sure. I haven't kept up with all his videos, but the entire Catholic world has slaughtered the fattened calf in honor of his return with the many appearances on top Catholic channels and the love bombing that you can see.
¶31Um, I'm not going to get too much into the Patreon stuff, but I can tell you he absolutely is going to be more successful these days than he was as an agnostic who probably couldn't find a home. You know, atheists don't accept him. He's agnostic. Generally, atheists want atheist. You're a softy.
¶32You're not. He's too sympathetic. Believers, they'll play nice, but they keep the distance in a way. He had to have somehow coddled up or got very close to many Catholics. And it would not shock me if after a while he was willing to compromise in some way and turn off some of those critical thoughts in order to return to the softest, easiest path.
¶33I bring this up because apologists treat this kind of observation as completely offlimits the second it's pointed at them. Motives are irrelevant. They'll say only the arguments matter, but they don't actually believe that because they do the exact same thing to us constantly. How many times have you heard that people leave the faith because they just want to sin because they want to live however they want without any moral accountability. I heard that line more times than I can count having this channel in 8 to 10 years.
¶34And for what it's worth, I did plenty of sinning while I was still a believer. So the explanation really never even fit my own case particularly well. My point isn't that psychology explains everything or that it settles whether Joe's arguments are good or bad or any of that. They need to be on their own merits. I understand that.
¶35It's that if psychological motive is fair game, and it should be when it's pointed at us, they're willing to do that. It's fair game when it's pointed at in the other direction, too. But I honestly do think there is some psychology in both directions that play a role. You don't get to psychoanalyze the apostate and then declare the subject closed the moment someone looks at the convert. Okay?
¶36And yeah, there's going to be psychology on the person who escapes the religion and reasons for why they escaped it on top of their arguments and they found them convincing and vice versa. You can do that. But I think it's important to note that he ended up born in the right religion, the very specific version of Catholicism. That's correct. So Rick actually followed up with a second comment on the Patreon uh a couple days later after his initial one, and I think it might even be more useful than the first one because it gets at a mistake that's really easy to make and really hard to notice once you've made it.
¶37He pointed out that when people investigate a historical miracle claim, they usually ask the wrong question. They will ask something like, "What's the probability that this specific event happened by chance given naturalism?" Rick's example he brought up was Padraio and the sigmata. And by the way, the documentaries coming, but I want to do more documentaries on the other ones. I want to do Zetune. I want to do, you know, Fatima, Lady of Lords.
¶38I want to do all of that. So, if you're interested in making a documentary, a polished one, and you want to be a sponsor of that, let me know. So, about Padre Peio and Stigmato, Rick points out, you could ask, "What's the probability that a really nice, sincere guy like that would deliberately harm himself to deceive people?" And on its own, that probability sounds and looks low, which is what Catholic apologists do. It makes the miraculous explanation look more attractive by comparison. But Rick says that's the wrong question entirely in his view.
¶39The right question is out of a population of over 10,000 friars, what's the probability that at least one of them somewhere does something like this? Whether through self harm, suggestion, an undiagnosed condition, or plain fraud, that is a completely different number, and it's a much bigger one. 10,000 friars. Scale that up. There are over a billion Catholics in the world.
¶40Given a population that size, it's almost statistically guaranteed that somewhere something will happen that looks staggeringly improbable. If you only look at the one isolated case in a vacuum, and this is where I I had not heard about this, but Rick used a great real world example to make this concrete. In 1913 at the casino in Monte Carlo, the roulette will landed on black 26 times in a row. The odds of that exact run happening on any given night are something like 68 million. If you only looked at that one spin in isolation, you'd call it a miracle, too.
¶41But casinos run millions of spins a year, every year all over the world, and eventually a run like that is going to show up somewhere. It's not supernatural. It's just what large numbers do. So when an institution the size of the Catholic Church actively looks for actively looks for and documents proposed miracles across a billion person population in multiple centuries. Of course it's going to turn up in individual cases that look wildly improbable in isolation.
¶42There's going to be something. At the same time, you got to factor in when the machine itself is self-proporting miracles and status comes with miracles and all of these things could be there's suggestion, there's fraud, there is intentional manipulation. There's all sorts of things that anyone gullible will ignore. Anyone who's falling for it would not recognize and and factor that in as a real plausible explanation that is a natural one. Anyway, that's not evidence of the miraculous is what Rick's point is.
¶43That that a oddity out of such large numbers, something really really rare and random would happen. 26 black on a roulette, you know, table uh in one sitting. The the the statistics are really highly improbable in the grand screen scheme grand scheme of things, right? But that's exactly what you'd expect from natural variation across an enormous sample size. Even if methodological naturalism is completely true, if I'm right, if Rick's correct, that we are biased toward the natural, because that's the world we live in, ladies and gentlemen.
¶44And just cuz Joe wants to poo poo the philosophers who think that there seems to be an ordinary experience that humans have, I I can promise you if they're calling up the shrink or the shaman or the priest to come and evaluate who murdered what and they're able to tap into another world, they're probably never going to find who the murderer is. You have investigation through natural processes in order to get to the conclusions and to go beyond that to try and tap into something beyond that explanation. You really do need serious evidence that is far above what they have been giving in my view. And that just cuz humans have experiences does not equate that supernatural evidence for me. That is not enough for me to go, wow, it's evidence.
¶45Sure, people have testimonies. Those are evidences. They're weak evidences. Testimony is not enough, man. And if you think that's enough in order to persuade you, I've got a story for you, okay?
¶46And I'm not BSing you. You can see how sincere I am. And guys, you know my reputation. I've been here. I've been doing this for a long time.
¶47Last night, I had a vision from the angel Gabriel Joe. and he told me that, you know, he spoke to me and told me that there's a reward in heaven for you if you'd be so kind as to donate $100,000 to me. Uh if you could send me $100,000, Joe, and I will give you back $10,000 in this life, but in the life to come, it will be 20 times the amount in the mansions that we will dwell in with God in heaven. And I'm I'm saying, you know, I'll give you back 10,000. Um, the angel Gabriel told me that this would be a blessing for you, and this is the testimony I'd like to share with you.
¶48Please, will you trust me and give me $100,000? I could greatly use it. And this is what the angel told me. Now, obviously, I just made this up on the spot, but you know, my point is, don't trust me. Don't believe me.
¶49Even if I speak your language and you think I'm a good guy, you really need to be a lot more cautious than buying into these things. So, methodological naturalism. All right. If that's even true, the odds that something weird is going to happen is going to happen. Which means the standard for ruling out natural explanations in any single case has to be very high.
¶50Precisely because we already know some naturally caused cases were always going to look this way by pure statistical inevitability, which is the odds we gave. If you're someone who still believes and you're watching this hoping it'll either confirm what you already think or make you angry enough to stop watching, I'd rather you do neither. I'd rather you just keep asking the kind of questions Rick asked. Not, "Does this feel true to me?" But if this were false, what would I expect to see instead? And am I actually seeing that instead?
¶51And when it comes to motive on either side of this, I'd rather we all just say the quiet part out loud instead of pretending only one direction of psychology is allowed in the room. That's exactly where the next video picks up. I'm going to deal with Padre Pio. All right. Rick's framework makes a prediction.
¶52Across tens of thousands of friars and a couple of centuries, you'd expect at least one case that looks just like his. That's what Rick's point is. Even if nothing supernatural ever happened and nobody ever set out to lie. Now, this documentary is going to bring up some stuff that I am almost certain the Catholic apologist, no matter what I show them, is going to persuade them. That's it.
¶53But when I actually opened the file on this one frier, I found something that means we don't even need the lottery math that Rick brought up. And I'm only going to give you one sentence of it today. In 1919, the same year the doctor started examining the wounds, Padre Peio sneakily obtained pure carbolic acid, a costic antiseptic, and asking the person that they got it from to keep this a secret. testimony is evidence, right, Joe? Well, that testimony has been sitting in the Vatican's own archive for a century.
¶54Joe says, "Miracles prove Catholicism, capital letters." In the next video, we're going to hold that up against a pharmacy receipt, so to speak. Anyway, that's where I'm at today. Look, if you want to have a documentary made with a topic on Lords, Lady of Lords, Zaiton, you want to help us fund and and support a project like this, um, Fatima, different Catholic miracles, I'm game. I want to do documentaries on this. I want to dive deep.
¶55The Catholic thing has been making so much noise. Joe Schmid capturing Christianity, all the Catholic rounds, they're fighting Protestants and Orthodox Christians, and then they're constantly trying to make up and kiss and all that. Look, dude. Uh I've never taken the time to do that. I've always dealt with the Bible and shown like in my last video, you get the Bible, we have we have different ground we can fight on, but they've been claiming these miracles for a while.
¶56And uh I think it's important that we address them and show you why the last thing on the list you should even be playing with is something outside of that natural explanation. Because even on natural explanations, oddities take place. Statistically, there's going to be strange anomalies that happen. And how do you factor the strange anomaly from a miracle? One person might look at the the hey, it landed on black 26 times as a miracle.
¶57The next person goes, no, that's going to happen. It's just a very rare occurrence that that would occur. But specifically talking about amputees, I want to deal with that case at some point because Caleb Jackson's brought that up. So, I need help. If you're interested in sponsoring something like that, making that happen, putting a documentary out there and getting in the midst of the frey here, bringing the insights to the world, hit me up.
¶58Mythvision podcast@gmail.com. I'm looking for more people. The first one we have on Padre Pio is already being sponsored by my friend Mark Souza. For those of you who might be in the California area, I don't have off the top of my head the exact area he's located, but Souza's Heating and Air do he does amazing heating and air conditioning uh work and he has helped me out in many times that I've needed help getting my air conditioning running. So, I ask everybody check out Mark Sou's heating and air.
¶59If you're in California, you're looking for a great person who actually knows what they're doing and can help get your heating and air right. Um, but thank you, Mark, for making this first one possible. I hope people will reach out. Let's get something cooking and there's a lot of Catholic noise going on right now. I mean, you got another philosopher who converted, right?
¶60So, why not come at this and show people why we're not convinced? It's just not doing it. You know what I mean? I want to show the evidence, though. I don't want to just say, "Oh, I'm just here to fight for a team." I want to give you guys good reason why this method without even examining the Hindu cases and all their stuff.
¶61I it's like you technically this is a fair method to start with and you don't have to examine every damn miracle under the sun. I'll tell you an example. I talked to my brother-in-law and my brother about UFO stuff. They're believers and every time we go online they go, "Okay, I know there's a lot of fake ones. I know there's so many fake ones." And it's like, wouldn't you raise suspicion even more to be like, okay, I'm going to like reserve all caution to think any of them are true until I can be confident and certain that this is what happened.
¶62Instead, what I find is that excuse comes up and they go, "Oh, there's a lot of fraudulent miracles. Oh, there's stuff that's been invalidated. The Catholic Church itself didn't accept some." which is an odd thing to say because in some of those circumstances the evidence is equal in the same u testimonial sense in the same but it didn't quite suit the Catholic Church politically and other reasons why the Catholic Church did not regard it worthy of putting it on its list of accepted miracles. So I want to hit this hard. I don't think it's been hit hard enough by a lot of people.
¶63Don't get me wrong, there's some great YouTube channels that already hit this stuff, but I want to do it in a polished documentary form. If you're down, hit me up. Ladies and gentlemen, never forget we are Myth Vision. Even if you're not convinced by anything in this section, the miraculous case alone should convince you both that God exists and that Catholicism is Throat.