DEBATE: Is it reasonable to believe in the Resurrection? (with Matt Dillahunty)

Well hello, hello, hello, and welcome to Pints with Aquinas. My name is Matt Fradd and today we have Matt Dillahunty and Trent Horn who will be debating whether or not the resurrection is reasonable. We plan on taking 15 minute opening statements, we’ll do cross-examination eight minutes each, and then the two debaters will go back and forth for a little while. We’ll do some Q and A from super chatters and patrons and then closing statements of five minutes.

Matt Fradd:

If this is the first time you’re here, welcome to Pints with Aquinas. Do us a favor, click that thumbs up button. And if you like the show, be sure to share it on social media. Hello, Trent and hello, Matt. Are you with me?

Matt Dillahunty:

I am here.

Trent Horn:

I am here. Can you hear me?

Matt Fradd:

Yes. Good, terrific.

Trent Horn:

And Matt, I apologize, there was a bit of a confusion about the debate format before. We can just go with the format as it was and just do opening statements and then jump into a 30-minute discussion is fine.

Matt Fradd:

Okay. Sounds good. All right. This is great. It’s great to have you here. I don’t want to bog down the beginning of this debate with big bios, so links in the description below to Matt and Trent Horn’s website. Trent, you’ll be arguing the affirmative, that the resurrection is reasonable. So you’ll be going first and I’ll set the alarm here for 15 minutes. Does that sound good?

Trent Horn:

Yes. That should be fine.

Matt Fradd:

I hope so or else bloody hell. All right. Whenever you’re ready, begin, take your time. And I’ll just click start whenever.

Trent Horn:

All right. Well, I’d like to thank Matt for hosting this debate. I’m grateful for the other Matt for participating in it. Tonight I’m going to defend the statement that it’s reasonable to believe Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead. Matt has the burden of defending the negative, that it’s not reasonable to believe Jesus rose from the dead. In order for each of us to defend our positions, we each have to present a standard for what makes a belief reasonable, especially belief in unusual, unrepeatable events.

Trent Horn:

Now being reasonable is not the same as being convincing. You could fail to be convinced by a belief, but still think that the belief is reasonable. For example, Matt is not convinced of Alex O’Connor’s ethical veganism, but I doubt Matt would say Alex is unreasonable for being an ethical vegan. Likewise, Matt’s personal doubts about the resurrection are irrelevant to whether belief in the resurrection is reasonable. Instead, Matt has to defend an objective standard for what makes beliefs reasonable or unreasonable.

Trent Horn:

So let me offer three tests to see if belief in an unusual event is reasonable. Number one, does the belief contradict well-established facts about the subject in question? If it does, then the belief is unreasonable. For example, the claim that everyone buried in Arlington National Cemetery physically rose from the dead would be unreasonable because it contradicts the facts about those bodies still being in the ground, but claiming Jesus rose from the dead doesn’t contradict any similar fact about Jesus remaining in his tomb. Now you might say the science of biology shows dead people stay dead, and so the resurrection contradicts this fact. But this isn’t a fact about Jesus, it’s a fact about human beings in general. Atheists like Matt are often skeptical of universal statements like everything that begins to exist has a cause, so why not be skeptical of statements like human beings never come back from the dead when we are presented with a reasonable counterexample?

Trent Horn:

Moreover, the claim that Jesus miraculously rose from the dead requires that dead people stay dead. That’s because a miracle is a supernatural intervention that serves as a sign of God’s revelation. And just as an orange life vest is a sign of a survivor in the ocean, because it’s so unlike the surrounding blue water, the resurrection could only be a sign from God or a miracle if it was so unlike our usual experience of people dying and remaining dead. But does this mean we have to accept every miracle claim that doesn’t contradict a fact about the subject in question? No.

Trent Horn:

Here’s test number two. Is there a lack of evidence we would expect if the event did occur? If there is, then it’s unreasonable to believe the event occurred. For example, it’s unreasonable to believe Jesus appeared to every person in ancient Rome after his crucifixion, because ancient historians would have written about that. But suppose Jesus really did rise from the dead and appeared to Peter, the 12 disciples, James, Paul, 500 others as recorded in 1 Corinthians 15, what kind of evidence would we expect to emerge after these events? The people to whom Jesus appeared would tell other people about what happened. Some people would believe these disciples and some wouldn’t. This process of oral communication would result in the establishment of communities of believers, or churches.

Trent Horn:

The tiny minority of believers who were literate might write about the resurrection and non-Christian historians who are aware of this group might reference their beliefs, but not accept them. And that is exactly what happened with early Christianity. Now, I’m not saying this proves the resurrection happened. I’m only saying that if Jesus rose from the dead as the New Testament describes, then there is no absence of expected evidence that makes this particular resurrection belief unreasonable.

Trent Horn:

But an unusual belief could still be unreasonable even if it passes these two tests, which brings us to the final test. Is the evidence for the unusual event just as easily accounted for by a usual explanation? If it is, then it is unreasonable to believe in the unusual event. The claim that the Muslim prophet Muhammad received poetic recitations from an angel doesn’t necessarily contradict anything about Muhammad, and if an angel only dictated the story in medieval Arabic conventions, we’d expect the Quran to sound as it does. But test number three says there are usual explanations that account for these historical facts.

Trent Horn:

This includes fraud or even mistakenly attributing one’s subconscious thoughts to the voice of God or an angel. Therefore, it’s not reasonable to believe in the central miracle of Islam, but the central miracle of Christianity is literally a different story.

Trent Horn:

Before I explain why, I must note that in previous debates, Matt has said there is a difference between claims and evidence. He said there is no evidence for the resurrection, only claims about things that happened to Jesus and his apostles. But most historical evidences, nearly all of them, are just claims that something happened, including unusual things. If I told Matt I rode an elephant across the Swiss Alps, he might want extraordinary evidence for such an extraordinary claim, but the only evidence for the Carthaginian general Hannibal crossing the Alps with war elephants in the third century BC is just a claim made by a Roman historian decades after it happened, yet no major historian doubts this took place, even though historians don’t even agree on basic facts, like what route Hannibal took.

Trent Horn:

So given this proper understanding of historical evidence, what is the evidence for the resurrection? The most important evidence would be claims that Jesus appeared in a bodily form to groups of his disciples after death.

Trent Horn:

So how can we explain these claims? Well, here are four possibilities. One, the claims never happened and were invented by later Christians as a legendary development. The problem with this explanation is that we have Paul’s writings and he had contact with the disciples and even makes this claim about himself. We also have accounts from Luke who shows himself to be a very reliable historian and he both documents these appearances and Peter’s testimony about the resurrection in Acts two. Finally, if the disciples never claimed Jesus rose from the dead, then we have no explanation for how church communities based on this belief arose so quickly when other messianic movements fell apart after the death of their leaders. This is why scholars universally agree that an authentic experience motivated the disciples to make these claims. The agnostic New Testament scholar, Paula Fredriksen says, “I know in their own terms what they saw was the raised Jesus.”

Trent Horn:

That’s what they say, and then all the historical evidence we have afterwards attests to their conviction that that’s what they saw [inaudible 00:08:00] I wasn’t there. I don’t know what they saw. But I do know that as a historian, that they must’ve seen something.

Trent Horn:

Similarly, the atheistic historian Richard Carrier says, “I think it more probable that Peter and James and certainly Paul, maybe several others, saw something that inspired their faith. I think it most likely that others had these visions earlier than Paul and that Paul’s letters give more or less a correct version of his own experiences, such as his persecution of the early believers.”

Trent Horn:

The disciples, maybe they just made the resurrection claims, they made the claims, but they were lying. But this doesn’t really explain the involvement of outsiders like Paul and James, who had no reason to lie or the evidence of the disciples’ sincerity and their willingness to be persecuted.

Trent Horn:

Three, maybe the disciples sincerely believed they saw the risen Jesus, but they were mistaken. They had some kind of grief-induced hallucination. But this doesn’t explain many other facts related to Jesus’s death. One, we should be skeptical of the disciples being grief stricken. It’s equally likely they were angry they wasted years of their life following another failed messiah. Moreover, Paul and James were not grief stricken over Jesus’s death because they weren’t believers when he was crucified.

Trent Horn:

Two, since ancient Jews believed the resurrection wouldn’t take place until the end of the world, it follows that even if they had grief-induced hallucinations the disciples would have thought they saw Jesus’s soul in heaven, not his glorified body on earth. Moreover, given their fierce monotheism, we would expect them to hallucinate Jesus as a man exalted in heaven and not as the creator himself, unless Jesus told them he used divine power to raise himself from the dead.

Trent Horn:

Three, Paul tells us Jesus appeared to groups of people. And the closest thing we have to group hallucinations or mass hysteria usually involve people psychosomatically experiencing a similar illness, not individuals claiming to all see the same thing that doesn’t exist, especially something that didn’t conform to their previous expectations.

Trent Horn:

Four, the New Testament authors repeatedly make it clear when someone has a dream, a vision where they think they’ve seen a ghost or a spirit. The resurrection appearances in the New Testament all point toward groups of people seeing an embodied recently deceased individual that would not be the subject of a hallucination.

Trent Horn:

Five, since the resurrection was preached in Jerusalem, within a few weeks of the crucifixion, the disciples or enemies of the faith could have checked Jesus’s tomb to see if they were hallucinating. And the evidence suggests they visited the tomb and found it empty since the first recorded visitors were women, whose testimony was not trusted in the ancient world. The [inaudible 00:10:25] inclusion makes sense as simply being a recollection of what actually happened.

Trent Horn:

This shows that appeals to hallucinations do not easily account for this case, because it involves outsiders, appearances to groups, evident sincerity, and a general lack of an expectation for the hallucination in question. Therefore, given that belief in the resurrection doesn’t contradict a known fact about Jesus, it doesn’t lack evidence it should have if it did happen, and no other usual explanation just as easily accounts for the evidence, it follows that it’s reasonable to believe Jesus rose from the dead.

Trent Horn:

Now, you could stop there and just say, “Jesus rose, but you don’t know how he did,” and the resolution for the debate would hold [inaudible 00:11:04] explanations for Jesus’s resurrection for the same reason we should be skeptical of natural explanations for the claims that Jesus rose from the dead.

Trent Horn:

If natural causes are behind them, we would expect these causes to produce many similar resurrection claims. But the resurrection is very unique. The world-renowned atheist, Anthony Flew once said the evidence for the resurrection is better than for claim miracles in any other religion. It’s outstandingly different in quality and quantity. However, if supernatural explanations are allowed, then couldn’t we propose them for almost anything and destroy their explanatory power?

Trent Horn:

Well, first if that were true, atheists who say the universe exists without a cause would commit the same fallacy because having no cause could explain anything we don’t understand. Second, we can rule out many unusual explanations like God or aliens as unreasonable because they’re ad hoc. There’s no reason to appeal to them aside from explanatory power. For example, in 1872, the Mary Celeste was found adrift at sea in relatively decent condition with ample supplies onboard. The 10 passengers and crew vanished and historians still don’t know why they all got in a lifeboat and left a seaworthy vessel. You can say that God told them to leave as a test of faith and took them up to heaven or aliens abducted them, but there’s no evidence that remotely points in that direction.

Trent Horn:

Now if the ship’s log said something about heavenly voices or a ship in the sky, you might have a reason for an extraterrestrial or supernatural explanation, but it didn’t. However, the resurrection is different because we have reasons to believe God was involved based on the nature of the disciples’ testimony. That means if you’re a non-Christian who believe God exists, which is half of religiously unaffiliated Americans, you could consider the resurrection within your own current worldview. And what if you don’t believe God exists and so it seems like there’s nothing to cause Jesus to rise from the dead? Well, the resurrection could make you rethink that idea, but I might also argue an argument for the existence of God.

Trent Horn:

This one’s called the argument from change. I like it. It goes like this, change occurs when a potential X becomes an actual Y. We see change all the time. It can be like growth or movement, but no potential X can become an actual Y on its own any more than water can freeze itself or a train car can propel itself. Instead something like a freezer or a locomotive has to actualize the potential for change. But then these actualizers only change because other things actualize them. So could an infinite series explain why we have change at all? Well no. Just as an infinitely long train of box cars would sit motionless without a locomotive, an infinite number of things that must be actualized by something else would be changeless unless there was a cause of the series that’s just pure actuality. So just as a locomotive pulls without being pulled, this uncaused cause for the series would actualize everything without being actualized by anything else. It’d be pure actuality.

Trent Horn:

Since the universe contains a mixture of potential and actual, it can’t be that uncaused cause. If there is a cause of the universe that’s purely actual, what would it be like? Well, if it has no potential, it can’t change because change is potential going to actual. If it’s changeless, it would have to be immaterial and timeless, because material temporal objects always change. The cause couldn’t be limited in power, knowledge, or existence because these imply potentials and it doesn’t have any potential. The cause would be omnipotent, omniscient, have necessary existence because it had no potential for non-existence.

Trent Horn:

It also would be all good because evil is a lack of goodness and this cause lacks nothing, has no potentiality. Also, the cause would be personal and not a mere force because the only immaterial things that exist are minds and abstract entities like numbers. But abstract entities can’t cause anything. They’re causally a feat. So this means the ultimate cause of the universe… Causally impotent, I should say. Must be something that’s similar to a mind that exists in an unlimited way. And so for a lot of people, that’s what they mean by the word God.

Trent Horn:

Finally, as the debate continues don’t forget about Matt’s burden of proof. He has to show it’s unreasonable to believe Jesus rose from the dead. So keep asking this question as you hear his opening statement, Matt says belief in the resurrection is unreasonable because fill in the blank. So as the debate continues, I think you’ll see that Matt’s reasons that fill in the blank are flawed because they either lead us to one, rejecting many facts of history we already know to be reasonable, and two, they make arbitrary judgements about reality based on Matt’s assumptions about the world, instead of keeping an open mind about how the world works. So instead of that particular epistemology or way of not… That term will show up a lot, epistemology. That just means the study of knowing, like, how do we know about the world? How do we figure out what’s really going on?

Trent Horn:

So I have a way of figuring out what’s going on when it comes to unusual events, I gave a three prong test for it, and I hope Matt proposes a way of figuring out how to discern unusual events and claims of unusual events. And as I said, he’ll try to show that this unusual event, the resurrection, is unreasonable because fill in the blank. Why does he think it’s unreasonable?

Trent Horn:

And then you’ll see those reasons either lead to rejecting other reasonable beliefs or they end up being arbitrary. Instead, I would argue that you should accept the standard that I’ve offered and then seriously consider the truth and meaning behind Jesus Christ having risen from the dead and consequently demonstrating the truth of the Christian faith.

Matt Fradd:

All right. Thanks Trent. Matt, whenever you want to start, I’ll click the 15 minute timer. No rush.

Matt Dillahunty:

All right. Thank you. All right. So first of all, thanks for having me here. I appreciate it. It’s nice to meet Trent virtually for the first time and to hang out with the Pints with Aquinas crew and fans. Thanks everybody for showing up to this, especially because I didn’t do too much to promote it as I had weird technical issues this week.

Matt Dillahunty:

So let’s get started. First of all, it is not my intent ever to offend people, but the nature of these discussions about topics that are at the heart of people’s deeply held beliefs often offends. I once believed many of the things that many of you believe. I believed many of the things that Trent believes, including a belief in the bodily resurrection. It’s difficult to state something like that without someone interpreting it as, “Oh now he thinks he’s better than us.” I don’t necessarily think I’m better than any of you as people.

Matt Dillahunty:

But I do believe that my position is more rational. And if that bothers you, I’d ask you to consider whether you think your position is more rational, because if your answer is yes, then we’re in the same boat and we can argue it out. And if your answer is no, then you need to consider why you are willingly, knowingly holding a view that you consider less rational than the alternative.

Matt Dillahunty:

So how do we go about telling if it’s reasonable to believe a claim? And it’s worth noting this is separate from whether or not the claim is in fact true. The claim could be false and yet you could still have a reasonable belief in it. Once upon a time, it was reasonable to believe that the sun went around the earth because that’s what we saw when we looked up in the sky. It would have been absurd to think that the earth was spinning at an unbelievable rate and reasons why we would call it unbelievable, and yet that was the truth.

Matt Dillahunty:

So what’s reasonable to believe and what’s true are separate. But we’re stuck, because we may not actually ever have access to the truth so all we can hope for is what’s reasonable. So how do you tell what’s reasonable? Well, there’s many answers to that and they are all problematic because at the end of the day, each individual is going to be responsible for determining what’s reasonable to them, and the rest of society is going to say, “Ah, you’re unreasonable or you’re incredibly reasonable.” And so we try to work together. This is one of the reasons why we have scientific methods that remove as much of the bias and subjectivity as possible, even though we can’t completely remove it.

Matt Dillahunty:

I’d argue in simplest terms a claim is reasonable if the claim is consistent with what we know to be true and possible within reality. It simply does no good to argue that it’s reasonable because it’s internally consistent, because that’s true for many sci-fi fantasy stories or at least some of the best ones. So what does the physical evidence about the resurrection tell us? Well, as far as I’m aware, there is no physical evidence. There’s only a story and testimonials. Testimonials about hey, so-and-so saw this or this is what happens. If Christianity is true, then the resurrection of Jesus must be the single most important fact in history. And for that fact, we have nothing but hearsay.

Matt Dillahunty:

Now that hearsay wouldn’t be admissible in a court, and certainly the standard I would think for adopting the foundation of a religion is true, to the extent that one is willing to conform one’s life to it, should at least rise to the level of surviving courtroom evidentiary standard. One might wonder as I do, if this event actually happened and there’s a good and wise God behind it, why did he leave us with such a paucity of anecdotal evidence and place this event in such a temporal situation as to make it unverifiable and unfalsifiable? Because I’d argue that an untestable claim of a matter of fact such as this event occurred, no matter what the event is, can never be reasonably believed unless that matter of fact is wholly mundane and when the risk of being wrong is minimized.

Matt Dillahunty:

So if somebody were to say, George Washington had a dog named Piggy, the risk of accepting that claim being wrong is fairly trivial. We don’t have any way to verify it, as far as I can tell, and it’s probably also not falsifiable because we don’t have a time machine, we don’t have the ability to exhaustively explore every aspect of it. But the risk of being wrong is trivial. Oops, I thought George Washington had a dog named Piggy, it turns out I wasn’t right. I guess that’s not a big deal, unless maybe you’re on a quiz show in front of millions of people and then you suffer a terrible embarrassment and harm to your reputation. And then all of a sudden believing something like that is a problem.

Matt Dillahunty:

It’s important for people to recognize that there’s a difference between verification and falsification. Verification is the note… the note… verification is the concept that we should produce the thing. If we were to say all intelligent beings are on planet earth, verification you could run around, hey, there’s an intelligent being on earth and there’s one on earth and there’s one on earth and there’s one on earth, but verifying it exhaustively would be completely impractical, because you would have to search every planet at all times in order to determine that in fact all intelligent beings are in fact on planet earth.

Matt Dillahunty:

But falsification is a separate issue. Falsification is whether or not it is theoretically able to be shown to be false. And so while we may never be able to verify that all intelligent beings are in fact on planet earth, we could at least in theory falsify it, because if we produced an intelligent being that wasn’t on earth, that would falsify the claim.

Matt Dillahunty:

Now that would show that the claim is wrong. But if we have a claim that is unverifiable, unfalsifiable, it is essentially untestable. And my foundation is that if you have an untestable claim, it had better be mundane, trivial, and consistent with the facts of reality before you should ever risk believing that it’s in fact the case. Well, we can’t really believe, or we can’t argue that it’s rational to believe something that we can’t test at all, and so we do the best we can when it comes to history.

Matt Dillahunty:

And so when we take a look at history, all we have are reports. Somebody said they saw this, somebody said they knew this person, somebody said this other thing. That’s all well and good when we’re trying to put together the best understanding of history we can, but we shouldn’t be proclaiming it as truth, and we shouldn’t necessarily be saying that this particular version of history is particularly reasonable, as history tends to be written by the victors.

Matt Dillahunty:

And so history is always suspect. There are two quotes from David Hume that are the cornerstone of how and why I go about determining if something is or should be considered reasonable. The first one is that he said, “The wise man proportions his belief to the evidence,” and all he’s really saying is your confidence level in the truth of a claim should be proportional to the evidence that is there to support it. You barely have any evidence for, and similarly if there’s mountains of evidence of something and you’re just like, “Well, you know, meh,” then you’re not proportioning your confidence to the belief, or to the evidence, sorry.

Matt Dillahunty:

The second quote from Hume, which I’ll go ahead and read because it’s lengthy, “When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether it be more probable that this person should either deceive or be deceived or that the fact which in he relates should have actually happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other, and according to the superiority which I discover, I pronounce my decision and always reject the greater miracle.”

Matt Dillahunty:

Now what Hume is essentially saying there is, is it more probable that someone has either been deceived or is intending to deceive me than the claim is true? And when he says reject the greater miracle, that is incredibly important and significant to understand. Hume is not saying accept the lesser miracle, that is not it at all. It is reject the greater miracle. It doesn’t just say, “Oh, here’s two potential candidate explanations that we have at this particular moment in time, throw the one out that’s more ridiculous and accept the other one.” No, it’s just you should throw out the one that’s more ridiculous.

Matt Dillahunty:

And so if we’re hearing a claim that someone rose from the dead when we have no evidence that this sort of thing is possible, probable, then the greater miracle is that someone rose from the dead versus that someone was deceived or that someone was intending to deceive, that someone was mistaken. Nobody has to lie for any of this, they can just be wrong. Or we can just have stories that don’t accurately represent the facts at the time.

Matt Dillahunty:

So if a claim isn’t falsifiable and there’s no way to show it’s wrong, we can’t reasonably accept that it’s correct. And if we’re left with no physical evidence about the existence of Jesus or the interactions of Jesus or his death and resurrection, what we’re left with is testimony. Now, I’m not willing to dig in on whether or not the gospels were written by eye witnesses, I don’t think they were. I don’t think that most reasonable scholars aren’t going to say these are eye witnesses, but it doesn’t matter to me because even if they were all eye witnesses, we already know that eye witness testimony is unreliable under the best circumstances. In this case, we don’t know whose testimony, eye witness second or third hand, we can’t investigate it at all.

Matt Dillahunty:

The things that they say happened don’t have corroborating evidence, they don’t have supporting physical evidence. We don’t have any way to question them about their reliability, we don’t have any way to talk to them to determine are these stories accurate or do they overlap? What we do know is that the Easter narrative from the different gospels does not line up and cannot be reconciled with the different accounts of it.

Matt Dillahunty:

But in the absence of any physical evidence, we’re left with assessing the nature of the claim and the nature of the reports. If it’s an extraordinary claim, and it needs to be an extraordinary claim, as it would be really remarkable to say Jesus ate figs for our salvation. The claim needs to be extraordinary because of the narrative. So extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Oh, wait a minute. Is that actually true? Everybody’s heard that. I’ve said it, other people have said it. I accept that aphorism for what it means, but not as it’s written, because all claims require sufficient evidence. And what counts as sufficient evidence to believe a claim is going to differ based on how consistent that claim is with reality.

Matt Dillahunty:

Mundane claims benefit from having a common pool of knowledge and evidence within reality. We know that figs exist. We know that dogs exist. We know that people name their dogs funny things, and it’s not extraordinary to think that somebody might name their dog Piggy. We know that figs exist and are eaten, so it’s not extraordinary to claim that Jesus ate a fig, unless Jesus didn’t exist or figs weren’t around at that time. Although we have from the Bible, a strange claim of Jesus cursing a fig tree for not producing figs when it wasn’t in season, which I would argue isn’t something that a divine entity knowledgeable about figs and fruit seasons would do, and it seems bizarre to curse a fig tree. But I can’t say whether or not that actually happened, maybe it didn’t happen and it’s just there to teach another lesson. I have a hard time going through some of these things and saying, “Yes, that’s being reported as this actually happened.”

Matt Dillahunty:

So what evidence do we have? Copies of copies of translations, copies from unknown sources that may have been, but probably weren’t eye witnesses. And even if they had been eye witnesses, it wouldn’t be sufficient to confirm that someone actually rose from the dead. What sort of evidence would we expect for a claim where someone rose from the dead? It depends on the timeframe, sure. Back in first century Judea, probably not a lot. You don’t have a way to test for sure that somebody is dead. You don’t have x-rays, you don’t have DNA.

Matt Dillahunty:

But the question is if the story is true, then Jesus was divine and God exists. And what sort of evidence could a God provide? Well, God could provide the best evidence possible, such that there would be no reasonable debate to be had at all. [inaudible 00:28:31] often claimed that it’s more believable because it’s a miracle. It’s more believable because the first people to the tomb were women and women weren’t trusted. Nobody would put these details in, so therefore they must be true.

Matt Dillahunty:

But that’s like saying that’s exactly what the butler would say if he did do it. If it’s on par or worse than the evidence offered by someone trying to sell me a bridge, someone trying to get me started as their underling in a multilevel marketing campaign, or the money that my Nigerian prince has set aside for me, then the evidence isn’t strong and no amount of pretending will change that. It is unreasonable to believe it because there isn’t sufficient evidence. No physical evidence, nothing about this claim would pass muster today, there’s no body, no tomb, no blood, no sword, no cross, no DNA, no burial rags despite the fake Shroud of Turin, no witnesses to question currently, no crime scene investigators, no findings of fact at all.

Matt Dillahunty:

I understand and appreciate as I’m a former believer that there are testimonies here that people find compelling. And I could probably speculate as to what it is that convinces people and what it is that keeps people in belief, but it is not the physical evidence. It is not what is reasonable. It is probably the extraordinary narrative, the emotion that people feel and connect with it, fear of finding out you are wrong, fear of dying and not going on to an eternal paradise, fear of being the odd one out when everybody around you believes. I have experienced those same concerns.

Matt Dillahunty:

For the Christians out there who believe this, and you believe all kinds of supernatural things, and many of you believe in demons and angels and all of the things that go along with this because you’ve accepted the supernatural, the only reason this feels reasonable to people is because they’ve already accepted other things that aren’t reasonable to accept. We have no way currently to investigate or confirm the supernatural at all. We can’t confirm that anything supernatural exists, we can’t confirm that anything supernatural interacts with reality. And to say that, well, we’ve seen the writings of these people who we don’t know, we can’t investigate, from a long time ago, and it’s just so darn extraordinary and we can’t think of a better explanation than it likely happened, therefore it’s reasonable to believe it, I cannot get on board with that and it frustrates me that other people can’t see this.

Matt Dillahunty:

Because if I were to come to you with the story like this today, if it didn’t have the history and the baggage, not of actually being true, but of being convincing enough to foster a bunch of followers, nobody would reasonably… all right, let me take that back. Almost nobody would argue that they could reasonably accept it today. And many of the people who are accepting these sorts of claims are also at odds with science, and it frustrates me that someone could… I don’t know, fear getting a vaccine for fear of being microchipped or it being the mark of the beast while they accept claims that don’t have good evidence.

Matt Fradd:

All right. Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Trent. Those were two excellent opening statements. I’m going to make an executive decision here if that’s okay. We kind of did agree upon it before the debate began, even though there was some confusion. What I’d like to do is do two eight-minute cross-examinations and then open it up to just kind of 20 minute general chat between the two of you. Because I think that-

Trent Horn:

Well I remember… This is going to get confusing. Fradd, I remember Dillahunty. It sounds weird to do that, like I’m a sergeant or something. I remember Dillahunty saying that the original email only said just 30 to 45 minute discussion, which I don’t know. I guess you’re in charge, but I’m fine with whatever the original said. But you’re the host.

Matt Fradd:

The reason I like the idea of you guys beginning with eight-minute cross-examinations, it’ll put one of you in the driver’s seat to kind of drill into the points the other was making, and you can be rude during that time. You can cut them off, you can press them and then maybe-

Matt Dillahunty:

Oh you’re trying to give me a little leeway here. I come in with the reputation.

Matt Fradd:

Well see, that’ll be good. You’ll have eight minutes to just sort of be full Matt Dillahunty. It’ll be great.

Matt Dillahunty:

I’m fine with whatever. Tear me up, Trent.

Matt Fradd:

Okay. Well, I’d like to… I think we’ll do that and then we’ll go into 20 minutes just the two of you can chat and we’ll see how civil and logical we can both be.

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:33:04]

Matt Fradd:

the two of you can chat and we’ll see how civil and logical we can both be. But before we do that, I want to say a big thank you to our sponsor, Catholic Chemistry. So if you are a Catholic and you are single and you don’t want to be single, what do you do in a time such as this, where you can’t go out, or maybe you can, but it’s difficult to meet people? You can go to catholicchemistry.com. This is the fastest growing dating site for Catholics on the web. My friend, Chuck Gallucci actually put it together. It’s really well done.

Matt Fradd:

Once you set up an account you can actually do video streams with a person directly from the website. So you don’t have to exchange numbers right away or something like that. So I’d recommend clicking the link in the description below and checking them out because it’s really well done. And these are kind of serious Catholics. I think there are probably some other dating websites where you can say you’re this or that, but give it a shot if you’re single and you’re open to the possibility of marriage, catholicchemistry.com.

Matt Fradd:

Now, of course, if you’re an atheist, I guess you could still show up there, but no one will prohibit you. All right, Trent, let me ask you one last time because I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable about this. You’re okay. Doing an eight minute cross examine and then Matt?

Trent Horn:

Eight, it is fine my friend.

Matt Fradd:

All right, let’s do that. Let me just set this timer. So just to reiterate this, especially for the crowd who are watching, and by the way, we’ve got over 1,100 people watching right now. It’s fantastic. During the cross-examination period, the one who is doing the cross-examining is welcome to interrupt the other debater, to press them, to cut them off. This isn’t considered being rude. This is just so that the debaters can ask questions regarding the opening statements, I suppose, that were just made.

Matt Fradd:

So we’ll start with eight minutes for Trent to cross examine Matt, and then Matt will have eight minutes. So Trent, whenever you’re ready.

Trent Horn:

Sure. And Matt, just for common ground, I also am irked by Christians who deny basic aspects of science. I’m very irked at those who deny the efficacy of vaccines, the fact the universe is billions of years old. So for to find common ground you, I share your frustration. I want to be reasonable in my beliefs. And frankly, there are Catholics even who believe things about the Catholic faith that I don’t share because I believe they’re being unreasonable.

Trent Horn:

So, okay. Here are a few questions I have. You said something really interesting. You said 2000 years ago, it could be reasonable for someone to believe in geocentrism because that’s just how the world appeared. That’s the way the evidence was. Did I hear that right?

Matt Dillahunty:

Well, I don’t know if I tied that to 2000 years ago. At some point in the past it was reasonable. All of the best evidence, the most reasonable conclusion was that the earth orbited the sun. Yes.

Trent Horn:

I’m just saying because 500 years ago, people believed, 2000 years ago is pretty uniform. Okay. So if that’s the case then, is it reasonable for people to live according to this motto, things are as they appear, unless evidence shows otherwise?

Matt Dillahunty:

No.

Trent Horn:

What would you consider faulty about that kind of a way of approaching the world?

Matt Dillahunty:

It’s one of those things that I would say is probably generally true. And by the way, thanks for the comment earlier. I don’t want to take any of your time up, but it’s been frustrating to me to watch people who deny vaccines and COVID and all that stuff.

Matt Dillahunty:

So to say things are as they appear unless evidence shows otherwise is the sort of truism that feels right and maybe a good kind of starting rule. But we already have, at this point in human history, a good understanding of how we can be fooled by optical illusions, let’s say, and mirages. We know those sorts of things exist. And so now I would say that while generally speaking we should largely trust our senses and how things first appear. We have to do so tentatively with the knowledge that we might get it wrong.

Trent Horn:

Unless the evidence shows us as things appear that’s not the way they are.

Matt Dillahunty:

It’s one thing to say, “I’m convinced that this is likely to be the case,” and it’s another thing to say, “I think this is the case.” And what I worry about is that this statement would be like, “Oh, I’m right and rationally justified until you prove me wrong.” And that’s not the way it is.

Trent Horn:

Well, okay, let’s go to the meat of this.

Matt Dillahunty:

Okay.

Trent Horn:

Fill in the blank. Belief in Jesus’s resurrection is unreasonable because, and I tried to, I think you put down multiple things. At the very beginning you said something like it’s unreasonable because it’s not consistent with what we know to be true, or in accord with reality. Is there a way you could give me a one or two sentence if that’s correct or more needs to be added on? Belief in the resurrection is unreasonable because I caught at the beginning, not consistent with what we know to be true. A reasonable belief has to be consistent of what we know to be true, is what you said earlier.

Matt Dillahunty:

Well, at the closing of my opening, it was, it’s not reasonably because there isn’t sufficient evidence. There isn’t physical evidence. There’s none of this. We just have testimonial accounts.

Trent Horn:

Okay. But part of it is you you also said that it’s like, it’s an extraordinary event. Because resurrections don’t happen. They’ve never been confirmed.

Matt Dillahunty:

Right.

Trent Horn:

Okay. How many resurrection claims have you investigated?

Matt Dillahunty:

Well, just from the Bible we have Jesus’s, Lazarus’s and then all of the saints who rose up out of their graves and marched on Jerusalem in the middle of it. I find no compelling evidence for any of those. There was a resurrection-

Trent Horn:

Okay, and-

Matt Dillahunty:

Oh, I’m sorry. I cut you off.

Trent Horn:

Right. Were you alluding? I’m curious if you have… The question is just how many resurrection claims outside of the Bible, have you investigated to see if this does happen?

Matt Dillahunty:

Well, I don’t know what we’re going to call investigating. I saw a YouTube video that purported to be of a resurrection, but there was no way to investigate it. If there’s no way to look into the details of the claim beyond the claim itself, I don’t know what investigation can happen. I don’t know how to investigate something that supposedly took-

Trent Horn:

Well, in Craig Keener’s two volume work on miracles, he lists about 600 resurrection claims. I think about 500 of them are… At least more than 500 are outside of the Bible. Let’s say only 5% of them. You know, 30 of them, you could contact witnesses or things like that. It seems like there are these claims of resurrection out there. So is your answer to the question, how many resurrection claims outside of the Bible have you investigated? The answer is one by watching a YouTube video.

Matt Dillahunty:

So I don’t know how this is remotely relevant because what I’m trying to say is-

Trent Horn:

Well you-

Matt Dillahunty:

I’m-

Trent Horn:

It’s relevant Matt, because you’re saying that resurrections don’t happen. It’s an extraordinary event. It’s not consistent with reality and that’s a claim, but I’m wondering what’s the evidence for that claim?

Matt Dillahunty:

What is the evidence for that claim? If resurrections were known and we would have scientific journals on them, people would be getting Nobel prizes for demonstrating resurrections. People would be coming on the news to say, “Hey, here’s a resurrection”, which is what happened with the YouTube video that it was purportedly a resurrection. I’m not a resurrection investigator, but of the ones Craig Keener investigated, how many resurrections did he confirm actually happened?

Trent Horn:

Well, he’s providing the evidence there for other people to look at. So I’m just curious, you say it doesn’t happen, but there are claims out there even today, but they’re not investigated. So, I think that’s sort of like-

Matt Dillahunty:

Do you believe those claims, Trent? Do you believe those claims that there-

Trent Horn:

You can ask me in your cross-examination, Matt, that’s fine. Okay. Here’s the next one you say that we don’t have sufficient evidence for the resurrection. So that’s why it’s unreasonable to believe in it. What would sufficient evidence for Jesus’s resurrection look like?

Matt Dillahunty:

I listed the thing. It would be nice to be able to show that we have good reason to think that that person existed, that they died, and that they rose afterwards. Something other than just a story and claims of that, is there physical evidence for this?

Trent Horn:

Okay. Fine then, is it reasonable to believe that Jesus was crucified under Pontius pilot?

Matt Dillahunty:

I don’t think so.

Trent Horn:

Okay. So do you think that all historians in the world that teach at major universities it’s unreasonable for them that they believe Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate?

Matt Dillahunty:

For them to believe it? Perhaps. Perhaps it’s unreasonable for them to believe it. For them to teach it as this is what is believed is not problematic.

Trent Horn:

No, I’m saying that, you’re saying it’s unreasonable to affirm that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate. This is what happened to him [crosstalk 00:42:22]

Matt Dillahunty:

I’m saying I am not convinced. I am not personally convinced that that’s the case, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about though.

Trent Horn:

I’m not interested in what you’re convinced by. Because you agree there’s a difference between what would convince you and what is reasonable to believe. Are there any things out there-

Matt Dillahunty:

No.

Trent Horn:

Well, let me ask you a question. Are there any things that you don’t believe, but you think it’s reasonable for other people to believe them?

Matt Dillahunty:

Other people at different times? Yes. As I already alluded to, but no, of course I think I’m reasonable.

Trent Horn:

Okay. So no, I’m not saying you’re not reasonable. I’m saying there are other, sorry. We might be running out of-

Matt Dillahunty:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

That was to keep me on track.

Matt Fradd:

Did you want to finish that question, have Matt respond and then I’ll let him go?

Trent Horn:

No, like I gave an example in my opening statement, at least from what I saw with your engagement with Alex O’Connor you do not believe a person-

Matt Dillahunty:

Oh my God.

Trent Horn:

What’s wrong.

Matt Dillahunty:

What the hell does Alex O’Connor have to do with this? You’ve mentioned him twice. He’s an atheist. The discussion wasn’t about- okay.

Trent Horn:

Look, what I’m trying to find is that there is a belief you’re not convinced of, but you wouldn’t say as unreasonable. Do you think ethical veganism that Alex endorses is unreasonable?

Matt Dillahunty:

Yes. And I was getting ready to get to that in my response.

Matt Fradd:

Okay, when we-

Trent Horn:

But yeah, all I wondered was, because there are things I reasonably disagree with others, I don’t know if you do, but, it’s your turn.

Matt Fradd:

All right, Matt, I’ll give you nine minutes. Start whenever.

Matt Dillahunty:

Yeah, no worries. So yeah, it was the first time I’ve had an advertisement mid debate, especially one for a dating site. And since I’m neither Catholic nor single, I’ll just skip it. But that was kind of cool. So I wanted to thank Trent from the start, because he said something that was incredibly true and that other people frequently get wrong in his opening. Which is, my position is not to show that it’s not reasonable to believe that it did happen and not to show that it’s reasonable to believe that it did not happen. I don’t have to be convinced that it didn’t happen. I just am unconvinced that it did. And so on the issue of Alex and whether or not his ethical veganism is reasonable. No, I don’t think it’s reasonable. Of the claims that Craig Keener, since you referenced him, found about resurrections, how many of them was he able to confirm actually occurred?

Trent Horn:

Well, I don’t know because I haven’t spoken with him about how many he believes happened. I think some are related to them.

Matt Dillahunty:

Okay. How many, how many do you believe happened?

Trent Horn:

I don’t know. I’ve heard a claim. Well, there’s one by a guy named Simon Kimbangu in the 19th century in Africa who had a reputation for raising people from the dead that Robert Price cited as an example of having evidence similar or less than to Jesus and that’s possibility, but I’ll be Frank. I haven’t investigated them thoroughly because I’m not setting out to debunk them. They could have happened, they couldn’t have happened. It doesn’t really change my major views on things. So I haven’t really set out to say they don’t happen, but I’m open to them having happened. It’s quite possible.

Matt Dillahunty:

Okay. Except that resurrection stories are at least likely happening now or that resurrection, sorry, not resurrection stories.

Trent Horn:

It’s possible. But, I think that it would be very infrequent. But I-

Matt Dillahunty:

How do you know it’s possible? How do you know it’s possible?

Trent Horn:

Because Jesus rose from the dead and so that means-

Matt Dillahunty:

You don’t know that. I mean, that’s the thing we’re debating, you don’t get to assume that. If your belief-

Trent Horn:

Well, I showed you.

Matt Dillahunty:

Hang on, if your belief that resurrections are happening now is based on the fact that you think Jesus resurrected, that doesn’t mean that your belief is reasonable. That just as a cascading unreasonableness?

Trent Horn:

Well, no, because I gave an argument for why it’s reasonable to believe Jesus rose from the dead based on the evidence provided. And so if he rose from the dead and he’s divine, he could have power to work miracles today or throughout history. So it’s quite-

Matt Dillahunty:

So you’re basically saying that you’re willing to accept a claim of a resurrection as reasonable without any physical evidence.

Trent Horn:

Well, what kind of physical evidence would a resurrection have? Especially one in the past, we would just be trying … when it comes to a claim on resurrection-

Matt Dillahunty:

All resurrections are in the past. Everything is in the past.

Trent Horn:

Right. Well-

Matt Dillahunty:

I’m asking you, are you willing to accept a claim of resurrection is reasonable in the absence of any physical evidence?

Trent Horn:

What do you mean by physical evidence?

Matt Dillahunty:

Well, do we have doctor’s reports on the cause of illness and death and then a period of time where they were confirmed to be dead? And then a period of time where they were confirmed to be living again after that? With medical examinations and how do you know you’re not just being conned?

Trent Horn:

Okay. So you’re saying to be reasonable… I think I see where you’re tracking here. For it to be reasonable, to believe in resurrection, you’d have to affirm a person did exist and they died, and they were seen alive after their death, in some cases to prove that that happened-

Matt Dillahunty:

And you skipped past the important points there. I was specifically asking about with a lack of physical evidence and the physical evidence that I will be talking about is medical scientific evidence about that individual. It’s not that it may be the case-

Trent Horn:

That wouldn’t be physical evidence. That would be another kind of testimonial evidence from someone like a doctor who says, “Yep, this person is dead because I’m very familiar with what constitutes a dead person”. Now, modern medicine is fairly new, so in older resurrection accounts, like the one we’re currently debating, we would have to rely on other kinds of testimony. And I think it’s very likely, well, basically what happened is that Jesus did die from crucifixion based on all the details and all the accounts related there.

Matt Dillahunty:

So, you’re willing to accept that an individual rose from the dead with nothing more than just testimonial evidence.

Trent Horn:

Well, how do we know that anything happened in the past? It’s based on testimonial-

Matt Dillahunty:

I don’t know why you won’t answer the question. I’m asking you are you saying you’re willing to believe a resurrection with nothing more than testimonial evidence?

Trent Horn:

I am willing to believe that Jesus Christ died by crucifixion under Pontius pilot for the same reason-

Matt Dillahunty:

That is not the question I asked. Why is it every time I ask a question you go back to something that’s not the answer?

Trent Horn:

Well, Matt, can I answer the question?

Matt Dillahunty:

Is it my time to ask questions or not?

Trent Horn:

Sure, you can ask them.

Matt Dillahunty:

I thought this whole thing was to be able to interrupt, to redirect-

Trent Horn:

Sure.

Matt Dillahunty:

I’m willing to let you answer if you will answer the question. Objection, your honor. Non-responsive. Are you saying you are going to-

Trent Horn:

I’m going to-

Matt Dillahunty:

Are you saying-

Trent Horn:

I’m going to answer, I’m just not going to give your answer.

Matt Dillahunty:

Are you going to keep trying to talk over me while I’m asking the question again?

Trent Horn:

Go ahead.

Matt Dillahunty:

Are you saying that you are willing to believe that a resurrection occurred based only on testimonial evidence?

Trent Horn:

Will you allow me to answer the question sufficiently? I promise I can do it in less than 30 seconds.

Matt Dillahunty:

It’s a yes or no question Trent.

Trent Horn:

Yes.

Matt Dillahunty:

Thank you.

Trent Horn:

I believe that people can testify to things that happened in the world.

Matt Dillahunty:

That’s not what I asked. I said, are you willing to-

Trent Horn:

Okay, if you want to, it’s not interesting, fine, yes. Yes, yes. Fine. So you only want a yes or no then? Yes. It’s not interesting, but okay.

Matt Dillahunty:

I’m not here for interesting. I’m here to find out what’s reasonable and here’s the crux of it, which we can have this discussion afterwards. Because I don’t have any follow-up questions after this. And that is this, you are willing to accept that an extraordinary miraculous event occurred based only on testimony and I am not, that’s it. That is the foundational difference between our epistemology. I will not accept that the physical understanding of the universe was suspended for an individual based only on testimonial accounts. It is unreasonable. That is how you get conned. That is how magicians fool you.

Trent Horn:

Do you have a question Matt? Do you have a question?

Matt Dillahunty:

No, I didn’t, but it’s my time, isn’t it?

Trent Horn:

If you want to pontificate, go ahead.

Matt Dillahunty:

I did. And now I’m done.

Matt Fradd:

Okay.

Trent Horn:

Well, Matt, how would you like to proceed?

Matt Dillahunty:

All right. What about discussion time? I’m just trying to get the-

Trent Horn:

It is.

Matt Fradd:

Yeah. We’ll, we’ll move into 20 minutes of discussion. I want to kind maybe kick it off by asking each of you a question. Would that be okay? Trent, do you think that uniformity of the laws of nature provide evidence against miracles?

Trent Horn:

I think, well, actually, no. The uniformity of the laws of nature are necessary for something to be a miracle. In my opening statement, I gave the example of a life jacket. Like you notice an orange life jacket because the water around it is totally different. So if you didn’t have uniform laws of nature, we wouldn’t have any way. The word miracle actually comes from a Greek word that means “sign”. So if God were to make a sign of his intervention in the world, it has to be different from the natural world around us. Otherwise, we just say, “Oh, well, that’s like how everything goes”. We wouldn’t notice it. So I don’t think that it’s evidence against it. I think rather that we have to think, okay, well…

Trent Horn:

I agree with Matt. We should try to figure out how the world is, but the world is a strange place. And so there are things that upset the applecart a bit, and this may be one of them. And so I say, is this an exception to a general rule we have? Just like, we have discovered other exceptions, for example, and I promise to be done, for 1500 years in Europe, people thought swans were always white. That was their uniform experience. But then there was testimony in 1697 that black swans had been found in Australia. But it wasn’t like, “Oh, we can’t possibly believe that!” It’s like, “Oh, we might need a little bit more”. But if it’s sincere reliable testimony, that actually shows the world’s very different from what we know. And I think the same can be done for the resurrection.

Matt Fradd:

Matt, why don’t you respond to that question? Then I’ll ask you a question and have Trent respond and then you guys can get into it.

Trent Horn:

Is this how you want to do it?

Matt Fradd:

Well, I just want to ask each of you one question and give you both time to respond and then I’ll let the two of you go at it. So I just wanted to give Matt a chance to respond to you there.

Trent Horn:

Oh, okay.

Matt Dillahunty:

So yeah, actually I’m in agreement with Trent. In order for something to be considered a miracle it must violate the laws of nature. There needs to be order in order to recognize the thing that’s different. That’s not controversial at all. I think it’s absolutely hilarious though, that all the people in chat who are claiming that I’m angry and rude when, during my questioning time, I’m just trying to get a question across. It’s funny.

Trent Horn:

Oh, it’s in my message. Everyone in the chat, that’s just how it goes. It actually, I mean-

Matt Dillahunty:

Yeah, it’s the internet.

Trent Horn:

I wish I could drive to Austin. I’m only three hours away from you. We could grab a beer or whatnot. It’s just, folks, it’s just part of our-

Matt Dillahunty:

Once the quarantine’s over, do it.

Trent Horn:

I will.

Matt Dillahunty:

Once this quarantine’s over I’m up for my second inoculation in like two weeks, I think. Yeah. We can sit down in the studio and record.

Trent Horn:

I think I can’t get an appointment.

Matt Fradd:

All right, here’s the-

Matt Dillahunty:

Well I’m older. I’m older and diabetic, so I got my appointment.

Matt Fradd:

All right. Here’s a question for Matt. I’ll let you take some time to respond and then Trent, you can respond to him and then I’ll let the two of you feel free to have a conversation. Matt can evidence alone, make a belief reasonable?

Matt Dillahunty:

On its own? No, but the testimonial evidence is always viewed within the pool of things we already understand. If you say, “I got a new puppy last night”, that is reasonable for me to accept because I know that puppies exist and people get them for pets. And there’s nothing extraordinary. Everything about that, your claim is consistent with what I already know and understand to be true about reality by experience and evidence. You could view that as, “oh, your testimony alone is enough”, but that’s a colloquial thing, that is us saying, “I will take you at your word”. But the truth is when I say that, I’m saying, “I will take you at your word, considering all the mountains of evidence I have about how the universe already works”.

Matt Fradd:

Trent.

Matt Dillahunty:

Okay. Yeah, what I would say is that in the vast majority of cases, testimony is sufficient. But in some cases, we might need a little bit more. So I think, for example, if you go to the resurrection, I think we have very good testimony. So, we have testimony going back to St. Paul, who was an eyewitness of the original disciples. So we have good evidence to believe and even atheistic scholars, so as I cited like Paula Fredrickson, Richard carrier, and on this would say that the original disciples claimed Jesus rose from the dead. And this was motivated by a genuine experience that they sincerely thought this had happened.

Matt Dillahunty:

So yeah, I agree, a testimonial is something, one person’s testimony for the mundane or something. That’s extra mundane. I might need more testimony if it’s a group of people and they’re willing to suffer costly punishment for affirming this belief, then that starts to raise the likelihood the belief is true. Most things we believe, nearly everything we believe about the ancient world for example, is based on testimony, like I cited in my opening statement. If you went on Matt’s conclusion and he even said it was not reasonable to believe Jesus was crucified, you’re going to abandon ancient history and scholarship. It’s not reasonable.

Matt Fradd:

All right, I’ll let the-

Matt Dillahunty:

For clarity, I said I wasn’t convinced it was reasonable. I didn’t say it was not reasonable.

Matt Fradd:

All right. We have 18 minutes. I’ll let you guys have a conversation. And then we’ll have 30 minutes of Q&A after that. So if you’re in the livestream right now, just save your questions until that time. All right guys go for it.

Trent Horn:

Well, how do we do this without- because I enjoy talking with you, Matt, you’re fun.

Matt Dillahunty:

I do too. And, gosh, I wish people could understand that more, that just because there might be a minute of “rar” doesn’t mean that we’re… So you talked about having more testimony and I’m on record as saying the plural of anecdote isn’t data. So it doesn’t matter how many testimonials you have, that alone is not going to be enough unless you hear that in the broader stream of things. And the way I’ve explained this is that like my mom, okay, screw it. I don’t like doing this, but my mom is a fundamentalist Southern Baptist Christian who believes she has seen demons.

Trent Horn:

Okay.

Matt Dillahunty:

Now I’m happy to believe that my mom thinks that she has seen something, but that doesn’t mean that I’m justified in accepting that she’s correct about what she’s seen. Same with people who are abducted by aliens or claim people who claim they’re abducted by aliens.

Trent Horn:

Well, so it sounds like your epistemology… Because if you noticed my opening statement, I didn’t use natural/supernatural. I used usual/unusual. Because, alien abduction, that’s a natural occurrence.

Matt Dillahunty:

Well, what’s the difference between- There are plenty of things that are unusual in my life, but usual and unusual, unusual as like that’s a wide spectrum to go from, “Hey, it’s unusual for somebody to win the lottery”. Even though it happens all the time to somebody who’s raised from the dead.

Trent Horn:

I guess what do alien abductions, resurrection claims? It seems like what they have in common is they’re disputed and they don’t happen very often. That seems to be just basically what they have in common. So like what would we use to determine… When would it be reasonable for someone to think they had an encounter with an extraterrestrial be? I guess.

Matt Dillahunty:

I don’t know what it would take. See, here’s the thing, we’re talking about two different things. What would it take for… If I had an experience that I was convinced was being abducted by aliens? That is independent from what it would take for you to believe that I actually was abducted by aliens.

Trent Horn:

Okay. I mean, what if you, you told me you had been abducted by aliens and you called me and I talked to you at nine o’clock at night and you’re in Texas. And then you call me at 3:00 AM and you say, I was abducted by aliens and they dropped me off in Tokyo. And there’s an airline ticket-

Matt Dillahunty:

Well, hang on, you’re assuming… You just invented something that has potential physical evidence that’s completely different. You added something to the story.

Trent Horn:

Well, I’d be adding more testimony. Like there’ll be people who would say, “I saw Matt”. Your Japanese fans would be like, “I saw Matt Dillahunty in Tokyo” and you know, what-

Matt Dillahunty:

It’s not just, “Oh, I saw Matt in Tokyo”. We could prove that I was in Tokyo.

Trent Horn:

Okay, so, okay, let’s just say we have the physical evidence there. Would you then be allowed to go through this reasoning process? I can’t provide explanation for how I got to Tokyo. So it must be an extra terrestrial explanation.

Matt Dillahunty:

No, no, no. That’s a fallacy.

Trent Horn:

Well, then would that circumstance with the physical evidence convinced you, you’d been abducted?

Matt Dillahunty:

No.

Trent Horn:

It wouldn’t?

Matt Dillahunty:

No. If my position is I don’t have an explanation for how this happened, I don’t get to invent one and I don’t get to claim it’s aliens or angels or gods or demons or anything. If I don’t have an explanation, then I don’t have an explanation. And as much as that sucks, that’s the truth.

Trent Horn:

So even if like, there was like Independence Day spaceships over the earth, would that, I mean, I’m picking aliens is I’m just saying this isn’t a natural/supernatural question. I’m trying to figure out, like you say, we don’t have sufficient evidence for the resurrection, but if you can’t tell me what the sufficient evidence is, what would be sufficient evidence? I guess, here, I’ll ask this question and you can rip it apart if you want.

Matt Dillahunty:

Okay.

Trent Horn:

Is your position that you have no idea what sufficient evidence for the resurrection looks like, but you’re confident you haven’t seen such evidence?

Matt Dillahunty:

Correct. In the same way that this is asked to meet quite often about, what would change your mind about God? And my answer is, I don’t know what would change my mind. Because it would be arrogant of me to presume that I have the understanding of reality to be able to tell the difference between a real God and a fake God or some being that’s just powerful enough or a strong delusion or an evil demon or whatever else. But if there is a God that God absolutely knows what would convince me and has not provided that evidence yet.

Trent Horn:

Okay. But then here’s my follow-up question. If you don’t know what the sufficient evidence looks like, you have no idea what it looks like. How can you be convinced you haven’t seen it because what if you failed to recognize it? It would be like if I said I have no idea what a hygrometer looks like, but I know I haven’t seen one. It seems like you’ve left yourself open to you’ve missed it because you don’t know what it looks like.

Matt Dillahunty:

I would never say if I don’t know what a hygrometer looks like. I would never say I know that I haven’t seen one.

Trent Horn:

Okay. What does [crosstalk 01:01:33]

Matt Dillahunty:

I could not say that I haven’t seen something I don’t know what I’m saying is that so, in all the opportunities for somebody to present sufficient evidence, what they have presented are fallacies and testimony. There’s no physical evidence. There’s nothing that would rise to the level of being admissible in a courtroom.

Trent Horn:

Okay. Well, at least in a courtroom, and I’ve heard you make this analogy before and I think it’s problematic for claims related to history, because a courtroom is not actually ordered towards finding the truth. There are biases in the courtroom to prevent the punishment of the innocent.

Matt Dillahunty:

Correct.

Trent Horn:

So, I mean, we can’t do double-

Matt Dillahunty:

But, those biases are… I’m sorry, go ahead, I didn’t mean to.

Trent Horn:

Sorry. We can’t try somebody twice. Even if we get new evidence, it’s slated so that we’d rather let a guilty person go free. It’s not just about finding truth. It seems like… I’m just wary of those kinds of analogies. I think we should say, well, what does the evidence point to, to this in the past? And for me… go ahead.

Matt Dillahunty:

That’s the foundation of my epistemology, which is what I pointed out in the opening. This whole notion about the bias in the courtroom to avoid punishing the innocent is exactly the same thing as I have a bias in my to avoid being conned and duped into believing something that isn’t true. I want to believe as many true things as possible and as few false things as possible. And you have to have both prongs of that because you want to believe is- go ahead.

Trent Horn:

My problem with that, Matt, it’d be like, if we said our courtroom is set up to maximize punishing the guilty and minimizing punishing the innocent, those are actually contradictory. You can’t do both of those. It seems like your epistemology-

Matt Dillahunty:

No, no, no. Those aren’t contradictory. How’s that contradictory?

Trent Horn:

For example, if you wanted to maximize punishing the guilty, we would get double jeopardy.

Matt Dillahunty:

No, no, no, no. It would be, I want as many guilty people to be convicted and as few innocent people to be convicted as possible. That is the direct analogy to my epistemology.

Trent Horn:

Right. But then it’s like, okay, should we have double jeopardy? That would prevent innocent people from being punished, but reduce our ability to convict the guilty. Much the same with your epistemology, you just say, well, I’m going to maximize my true beliefs and minimize my false ones. It seems like your epistemology more, and this is my honest appraisal of it, I’m going to, I want to minimize believing false things.

Matt Dillahunty:

Trent, Trent, I’m sorry, Trent, I apologize. My internet froze. I need you to back up about a sentence or two.

Trent Horn:

Oh, okay. Can you hear me now?

Matt Dillahunty:

Yes.

Trent Horn:

Okay. That it minimizes, I need the train of thought to get on the tracks again. Hold on. That it minimizes believing false things even at the cost of losing true things, like take unusual historical claims though. Like, the Jewish story in Josephus says a thousand soldiers committed suicide at Masada to avoid being captured. And he’s actually our only source for that event happening. And he’s a very biased source because he’s a traitor. Is it reasonable to believe these kinds of things when we only have testimony?

Matt Dillahunty:

Well, my confidence in the claim is proportional to the evidence. And in this case, when we have one biased source of my confidence in that claim being true is very, very low. I wouldn’t even say I’m convinced that it is true.

Trent Horn:

Okay. Why, why do you think though? So it sounds like you’re taking not just an epistemology, but a historiographical approach, how we do history, that is just totally different from every other historian in the world.

Matt Dillahunty:

I’m not a historian. I’m not a historian and I don’t care what methods historians use. Because they can’t confirm-

Trent Horn:

Okay. So, then you say you’re not qualified to tell us what’s reasonable to believe in historical matters.

Matt Dillahunty:

I can explain to you what I do and don’t find reasonable and why. I’m not a historian.

Trent Horn:

Okay. What I’m saying is though, what is, what is reasonable for people to believe about the past? Whether you’re convinced of it or not, that doesn’t matter. You can say, well, I’m not sure of this or that, but there seems to be evidence and historical scholars and agreement on this. And I’m trying just to go with the bedrock here, just starting with Jesus was crucified. He died by crucifixion that’s

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [01:06:04]

Trent Horn:

Jesus was crucified. He died by crucifixion. Its not just that they believe it. Every historian in the world who teaches at a major university, affirms this is a fact.

Matt Dillahunty:

What a strange clarification. Every historian who teaches at a major university, while you’re excluding the two people you’ve referenced, who I disagree with by the way, Carrier and Bob price, who are historians, who don’t think that Jesus existed. I disagree with them on that, even though people keep trying to saddle me with that. My thing is –

Trent Horn:

I included the qualification map because there are many, and I’m not saying this about Richard or Bob or anything like that, but for example, there’s lots of people who go … There are young earth creationist who get PhDs in geology-

Matt Dillahunty:

Yes.

Trent Horn:

… but they’re not teaching except for Curt Wise at Harvard. They’re usually not teaching at major universities. I use that clause because-

Matt Dillahunty:

Well, now we’ve gone to usually.

Trent Horn:

What?

Matt Dillahunty:

Well, now we’ve gone to usually because you had to add a –

Trent Horn:

Well, That was just one.

Matt Dillahunty:

And now you’ve got one outlier.

Trent Horn:

There’s more people in academia, Matt, who believe the earth is less than 6,000 years old and think Jesus was never crucified. It’s a fringe view, it’s rejected. And I know you don’t hold that view-

Matt Dillahunty:

But that’s an argumentum ad populum because the fact that people are convinced of something is not a measure of whether or not it’s reasonable. Reasonableness … So first of all, neither truth nor the reasonableness is determined by the number of people who believe it or how convinced they are.

Trent Horn:

If you knew someone who is skeptical of getting a vaccine, would you think it’d be good evidence then to say that all the major medical associations in the world say it’s safe and effective.

Matt Dillahunty:

I’m sorry, one more time.

Trent Horn:

If someone, a family member was hesitant to get the COVID-19 vaccine, would it be legitimate evidence to tell them every major medical association on earth says this is safe and effective? Would that be good evidence [crosstalk 01:07:56] ?

Matt Dillahunty:

Yes. Yes, because medicine isn’t history. Medicine is science.

Trent Horn:

Is history a kind of science.

Matt Dillahunty:

It’s good evidence because it’s science, not history. It’s a different category.

Trent Horn:

Okay. So you don’t think we can have … What about historical sciences, like geology?

Matt Dillahunty:

That’s not history. That’s science.

Trent Horn:

What’s the difference?

Matt Dillahunty:

Just because it covers a period of time. I mean, everything covers a period of time. Evolution covers a period of time. That doesn’t make it historical science. It’s science. You’re putting that on there because you want to smuggle history in. Well history isn’t a science.

Trent Horn:

Okay. Well, let me ask you and if you have questions for me, you can … I don’t want to … I got one here.

Matt Dillahunty:

I’ll come up with some at some point, but this is a good conversation. I would say that we diverted from the courtroom thing, because on this notion of wanting to convict as many guilty and as few innocent, which is the same as believe as many true and as few false things as possible, neither of those set up a contradiction. Because one category is about guilty people, one category is about innocent people. There’s no contradiction there because what I’m saying both with the epistemology and with the courtroom is this, I want my internal model of reality to match reality as best as I can. And I want the justice system to be as just as possible.

Trent Horn:

Sure. So then the question is, should we have double jeopardy, we don’t try somebody twice for the same crime?

Matt Dillahunty:

I’m not sure whether or not I’m opposed to having a no, hang on. The no double jeopardy seems to me to be a case where guilty people are getting away with it.

Trent Horn:

Correct.

Matt Dillahunty:

And so I would prefer a justice system that didn’t allow guilty people to get away with it. The problem is-

Trent Horn:

But then if you … You’ll see this coming-

Matt Dillahunty:

The problem is, is that you could keep innocent people going back over and over and over and over again. And while they may never be convicted, you’re now wasting their time. And so in that sense, we do this knowing, okay, both with the epistemology and the courtroom. So when I say, “As many true and as few false, as many guilty and as few innocent,” I do it with the recognition that there will never be perfection. That there will always be some … I’m always going to believe something that’s false and I’m always going to not believe something that’s true. But we can get to a point where we have, based on the information available and a consideration of all the evidence, the most reasonable view possible. And for me, when it comes to claims about the supernatural, not once has anybody demonstrated the truth, that there is something supernatural or that it can interact with reality in any way. It’s all just claim something … Where is the testable supernatural claim?

Trent Horn:

I guess, so that’s a claim you’ve made. No one has demonstrated the supernatural. Where is your evidence for that claim?

Matt Dillahunty:

If someone had demonstrated the truth of the supernatural, it would be a function of science and scientific knowledge.

Trent Horn:

Well, what is science?

Matt Dillahunty:

Science is knowledge. Literally what the word means.

Trent Horn:

And are the same thing?

Matt Dillahunty:

Well, that’s what the origin of the word science is, but the method, science is about trying

Trent Horn:

[crosstalk 01:11:14] If I go downstairs and look in the fridge and I see that my wife put Coke in there and I have new knowledge, did I just do science?

Matt Dillahunty:

Yes, you did. Science is not a beaker. Science is the process of investigating the world to come up with the best explanation possible. Science does not make proclamations about truth. It just says, “Based on the information, here’s the best explanation we have.” That’s exactly what science is.

Trent Horn:

Okay, is science limited? So what it tests, it can only test things that are material in nature. It deals with things within the material space, time universe.

Matt Dillahunty:

Well, nobody’s ever demonstrated that there’s anything other than the materials, space, time universe. So obviously we can’t investigate beyond the material until somebody makes a demonstration that it’s there and how we could investigate it. If, in fact, the supernatural exists and someone were able to demonstrate this, it would be a field of inquiry, an investigation within the sciences. It hasn’t happened yet.

Trent Horn:

Okay. Okay. So everything has to be science, things that are tested. It seems like we’ve already said that you can’t really test things in history. It’s just testimony, so it’s not science. You’re saying history is not a part of our knowledge.

Matt Dillahunty:

So, within the realm of things that we know, there are beliefs. And knowledge is a subset of beliefs and within epistemology, sometimes knowledge is defined as [inaudible 01:12:39] justified true belief. I have a problem with that definition because I don’t know how you verify truth. And we’re basically, you and I are arguing, as are many other people, about what is or isn’t justified and so history doesn’t qualify as a science. But that doesn’t mean that if there are claims about history that are consistent with the evidence and facts of the universe … like I can’t … Donald Trump is no longer president, but he was for four years and I remember this and the people around me remember this, but it’s in the past. So am I remotely saying that because it’s in the past, we can’t prove it. No. There’s mountains and mountains of evidence, testifying to the events that took place in that past.

Trent Horn:

Is it reasonable to believe Pontius Pilate was the Procurator of Judea from 26 to 36.

Matt Dillahunty:

I don’t know what the dates are, but my understanding is that there’s considerable, extra biblical support for that.

Trent Horn:

What kind of historical support.

Matt Dillahunty:

But I’m not a historian. [crosstalk 01:13:36] So when you have testimony from the past, what you look for, what is the best source of historical testimony, is what’s being said by the people who don’t have something to sell, who in some cases were the opposition. What is the opposition saying about this and is what they’re saying consistent with what the proponents are saying?

Trent Horn:

Okay. We’re freezing up a little. Are we still doing all right? Sorry. Fradd, are we okay?

Matt Fradd:

Yeah. You’re good. You’ve got just really five minutes remaining. And then we’ll do Q and A.

Trent Horn:

Okay.

Matt Dillahunty:

Did you hear what I said [inaudible 01:14:15].

Trent Horn:

A little bit, maybe a quick …

Matt Dillahunty:

I’ll do it as quickly as possible.

Trent Horn:

You were talking about testing unbiased, they don’t sell stuff. It’s not MyPillow guy. What’s good source.

Matt Dillahunty:

I didn’t mention the MyPillow guy, but that makes me funny that you did, because I almost did. No. It’s when you look at historical events, if the enemies of this particular regime and the proponents of this particular regime are stating the same thing, those things are more likely, more probable, to be accurate. So it’s where they agree.

Trent Horn:

Right, but what I’m trying to figure out, my case for the resurrection, it’s basically just coming down to it’s reasonable to believe someone was alive, they died and they were seen to be alive again. So I’m trying to show when is it reasonable to believe that somebody was alive and for Pontius Pilate, you’re saying, “Well, there’s an extra biblical source that tells us about him.” Why isn’t the Bible sufficient to tell us who was alive and did certain things. These are just ancient documents.

Matt Dillahunty:

They’re not just ancient documents. There are curated collection of ancient documents from a source that’s trying to sell you something. By the way-

Trent Horn:

Is the Roman historian Tacitus trying to sell us something when he’s writing the history of Rome and is paid by Rome-

Matt Dillahunty:

Tacitus is not a contemporary. Tacitus is not a contemporary. That is after the fact.

Trent Horn:

Okay, right. So then-

Matt Dillahunty:

By the way, there’s plenty of people who think they saw Elvis in supermarkets after he was dead. Why don’t we believe that Elvis was resurrected or that he was abducted by aliens or that he never died? Is that reasonable?

Trent Horn:

Would you like me to respond to that question?

Matt Dillahunty:

Yeah, I was saying is that reasonable belief?

Trent Horn:

Okay, there’s three different claims there. One would be that seeing Elvis alive after his death does not necessarily entail resurrection. It could entail that he faked his own death, which is unusual, but people have faked their own deaths, right?

Matt Dillahunty:

I agree. But Elvis’ body is buried and we can exhume it and check.

Trent Horn:

Right? Exactly. And we don’t have that countervailing evidence with Jesus. What makes believing that you saw Elvis after his death, well, [inaudible 01:16:21] gave three tests for reasonability. Test one is it doesn’t contradict an established fact. We have Elvis’s body in the ground. The National Enquirer paid 18 grand to take a picture-

Matt Dillahunty:

You don’t know that.

Trent Horn:

… of his body. So also we have testimony from the medical examiner and then my other things here-

Matt Dillahunty:

I agree.

Trent Horn:

… There are other usual explanations for Elvis sightings because the people who are claiming to have seen Elvis are people who didn’t know him. They could be miss identification. Back in Lego Land in the 1990s, people thought they saw Elvis there, it turned out it was a bunch of Elvis impersonators. So that’s something we have for Elvis, we don’t have for Jesus.

Matt Dillahunty:

But what if somebody … All right, I don’t even want to go down that route. I was going to go, what if somebody removed Elvis’s body so we could no longer verify it. The point is, this is relatively close to us temporally. If in a thousand years, or a couple of hundred years, people start thinking that Elvis rose from the dead, while we have a monument to Elvis in Graceland and a tomb there. Nothing like that exists for Jesus. People keep pointing to, and by the way, hang on one second. I know you did not mention this. I am not trying to saddle you with this, but I think that you accept it. Well, here, I’ll just ask you. Do you accept that there is in fact an empty tomb that was once Jesus’.

Trent Horn:

I believe there’s … I thought you were going to ask me something about Elvis, but I do. Yeah. I do believe there’s good evidence that Jesus’ tomb was empty. Yes.

Matt Dillahunty:

Yeah, but do we know anything at all about the tomb? Where it is? Which one it is? Can you take me to that tomb and show me and prove that it was Jesus’?

Trent Horn:

Well, we have good evidence that the size of the tomb was discovered in the fourth century. Because after Jesus’s resurrection, the tomb became a pilgrimage site. And then the Emperor Hadrian built a temple on top of it to discourage Christians from going there. But that actually helped to mark where the location was. That temple was then later identified by Constantine in the fourth century and a church was built on top of it that you can visit today that is located outside of the old walls of the city of Jerusalem. Even skeptical scholars think this is good evidence where Jesus’ tomb was.

Matt Dillahunty:

Nevermind, go ahead. Sorry, Matt.

Matt Fradd:

No, you’re fine. This is a fascinating discussion. I’m really enjoying it. Thanks a lot, guys. That was great. All right. We’re going to take about 30 minutes to take your questions, whether here on YouTube or over on Patreon. So feel free to address them either to Trent or to Matt. Whoever it’s addressed to, that person will have around two minutes and then the other debater will have one minute to respond. Do that, as I say, for about 30 minutes before doing five minute wrap-ups. So, okay. So I’m going to begin Trent with you. We’ve got a question here from Patron Let’s see here, Steven Roscoe. He says this, “Trent, in a hypothetical situation where archeologists find the bones of Jesus, provided it can be verified, they belong to Jesus of Nazareth, would you cease to be Catholic and maybe follow Judaism? How would that cause you to reevaluate your belief in not only Jesus, but God?”

Trent Horn:

Well, yeah, I would say if some element of Christianity was falsified or Catholicism, then I would fall back on the next major belief system I had. I gave an argument for the existence of God in this debate that we unfortunately never had time to get to, which I think is a demonstration of the supernatural, frankly. So, I wouldn’t just become an atheist if Christianity were falsified.

Trent Horn:

Now this particular example, if we had a bone box and it said Yeshua of Nazareth on it, well, that would make me curious, but it wouldn’t falsify the other evidence that I have related to the disciples proclamation. We’d have a very difficult time saying that this actually was Jesus’s tomb. I don’t know how we could prove that. I think if we found a first century document showing the Apostles recanted, for example, that would cause a severe lack of confidence for me. I’m not beyond falsification, though I will point out that Matt hasn’t shown anything, what specific example would move him towards the position.

Matt Fradd:

Okay, Matt, you got a minute.

Matt Dillahunty:

If Christianity were falsified, I would stop being a Christian, but I already did that. I would stop being an atheist the instant somebody demonstrates that a God exists. Now I wouldn’t necessarily become a worshiper or a follower of the God in question, because I have issues with the notion of worship, but I would definitely believe that a God existed. And I have no objection to believing that there is in fact, a God, just as soon as there’s evidence for it. And we could, Trent and I could maybe have a debate on that at some other time, because when he mentioned his infinite series of boxcars and how they would just sit there without an engine, well they wouldn’t just sit there if they were on a slope and that only requires the physical facts of the universe. That and somebody to invent box cars.

Matt Fradd:

Okay. All right. This question here is for Matt. This comes from, let’s see here, excuse me, David Zapata. He says, “Matt, if there has to be a demonstration that …” Oh no, I want to get a different one than that. You’ve answered that, sorry about that.

Matt Dillahunty:

No worries.

Matt Fradd:

Jack [Skeans 01:22:03] says “Matt, you said in your opening statement, what the physical evidence of the resurrection tells us. As far as I’m aware, there is no physical evidence. There’s only a story. Have you investigated the authenticity of alleged resurrection artifacts, such as the shroud of Turin? If the resurrection is true, the shroud is exactly the kind of physical evidence we would expect to find. And if you haven’t yet investigated it, why should we take your claim that there is no physical evidence for the resurrection seriously? ”

Matt Dillahunty:

Oh, well, because my friend, Joe Nickell investigated the Shroud of Turin, as did many other people and concluded rather strongly than it is, in fact, a fake for a number of reasons that it’s too much to go into here. So my investigation of the Shroud of Turin was in studying Joe’s work and other people’s work early on, to show that this is not what it claims to be and is most likely a forgery, from I think maybe the 13th century or so. I’m not saying, “This is in fact a forgery.” I’m saying, “The most reasonable belief about this, given the results of the testing, is that this is not from first century Judea and Jesus.”

Matt Fradd:

All right, Trent.

Matt Dillahunty:

And by the way, the answer to the second part of that, real quick. You shouldn’t take my word. You shouldn’t take my word for anything. I’m just telling you what I think.

Trent Horn:

I have two thoughts on that. One, I think it’s interesting Matt has said, “Well, I’m not convinced with the Shroud of Turin because I am convinced by Joe Nickell’s investigation that it’s not authentic.” And actually I like Joe Nickell. He does a lot of great investigation, all kinds of paranormal stuff. It’s really fascinating. But I just wonder what Matt would do if somebody said to him, “Why do you believe in the resurrection? Why study Mike Laconas work on the resurrection? And I am convinced of what Mike has found.”

Matt Dillahunty:

I can answer that.

Trent Horn:

Well, I don’t think we have time to do it, but maybe you could bring it up in your next answer. Let me finish and then-

Matt Dillahunty:

Yeah you finish, Trent.

Trent Horn:

Yeah, let me finish. And then you can creatively bring it up in the next question. Because that’s one. Two, I actually agree with Matt and this might make some Catholics in your audience come after me with pitchforks and say I’m a heretic, which Matt and I will have some … Dillahunty and I will have something in common, and that we’re both loathed over this, which is fine because I believe in following the evidence. So I have not done a thorough investigation of the Shroud, but let me finish, but I am generally skeptical of it for the same reasons Matt and Nickell bring up. So for me, I don’t believe things just because they’re a part of my religion or religious tradition. I just believe them because of what the evidence points to.

Matt Dillahunty:

And the ten second answer is, I don’t believe Joe, I believe Joe’s data.

Matt Fradd:

All right here. I’m sorry. I’m trying to go back and forth between Trent and Matt and sometimes they’re a bit lopsided. Maybe I’ll just ask Matt this question and then I’ll give you both two minutes to respond. Matt, what do you make of the fact that the apostles gave their lives for the sake of the gospel? Why would they and numerous Christians after them willingly accept death, if it wasn’t true?

Matt Dillahunty:

This is the, would they die for a lie? They don’t have to knowingly think it was a lie. They didn’t have to knowingly be deceiving. There are plenty of people who’ve died from many different religious beliefs, all around the world. Suicide packs like Marshall Applewhite’s group or in terrible situations like Waco, where they were willing to stay there or forced to stay there as in the case, perhaps in Waco and in Ghana and others. But the notion that someone is willing to die for something, testifies to how strongly they believe, how convinced they are or how convinced they want someone to think they are. It has no bearing on whether or not it’s actually true.

Matt Fradd:

Okay, Trent.

Trent Horn:

Well, two thoughts there, a minor and major point. Minor point is with Waco. I actually did a podcast on this from my Counsel of Trent podcast. I don’t think that they committed suicide, frankly.

Matt Dillahunty:

No.

Trent Horn:

I think they were murdered by the government, but that’s a talk for another time.

Matt Dillahunty:

I agree, I think they were forced to stay there.

Trent Horn:

Oh, right. Some people could make you think that Koresh did that. I think the government, anyhoo. We’ll do a separate show on that. I’ll go on Atheist Experience and we’ll talk about it. Number two.

Matt Dillahunty:

Yeah that’s interesting.

Trent Horn:

I agree that being willing to die for something does not prove the thing you’re dying for is true. Being willing to die or be persecuted is a demonstration of sincerity. So I think because of the disciples, their willingness to endure persecution, which we have good evidence from in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, all of his letters, Acts of the Apostles, non-biblical works, that the Disciples were willing to endure a hefty cost for this belief, which would make it seem like they’re only doing this because they sincerely believe. Then the question arises, well, what caused them to sincerely believe this? And I think my opening statement gave good evidence that a resurrection from the dead is the best explanation for that sincere belief.

Matt Fradd:

All right. Maybe just so Matt can actually be the last one to rest. We have a lot of questions here for Matt. So maybe occasionally Trent wants to go first and Matt wants to go later so he can get the last word, I don’t know. I’m trying to be fair here, but a lot of questions here for Matt.

Trent Horn:

I feel under appreciated.

Matt Dillahunty:

However you guys want to do it, I’m fine. If I really feel like I have to say something, I’ll let you know. And if not …

Matt Fradd:

All right, sounds good.

Matt Dillahunty:

I can switch some answers.

Matt Fradd:

Thanks, Matt. All right, here’s a question. And this comes from Super Chat, thanks a lot. The Castleman, he says, “Matt, are you aware that repeating, I’m not convinced, is just a cop-out for not being able to respond to arguments. It doesn’t matter if you are convinced. What matters if you are able to respond to the arguments, which you never do.”

Matt Dillahunty:

Are you convinced that that was just an ad hominem attack. In fact, not you, the questioner. That in fact, the things that you’re accusing me of not responding to, I am responding to, by talking about what’s fallacious and what’s reasonable and whether or not it’s convincing and to respond to those things. This is where people are like, “Oh, well, you’re going to dodge the question.” And that’s because too many people are wholly uncomfortable with the notion of, “I don’t know,” may in fact be the one and only correct answer at any given time. And they really, really get mad because I’m willing to say, “I don’t know,” rather than arrogantly pretending that the universe was created with me in mind and that I am the special creation of a God who decided to sacrifice himself, through himself to serve as a loophole for rules he’s in charge of. So you can come at me with the dodge thing and “Are aware that this is just a cop out?” Well, I’m willing to say, “I don’t know.” I wish you were.

Matt Fradd:

Trent?

Trent Horn:

Yeah. I will say, Matt Dillahunty is a special creation of God. And if he’s not convinced of that, that’s fine, that’s within his epistemic rights to not be. But Matt’s not being convinced of something or anyone’s not being convinced, tells us more about what they think rather than what we should think about the world. And I think about the world is that, Matt is a special creation of God and Matt Dillahunty would not exist unless God desired that he exists on this earth for a particular purpose. And then I will say, when it comes to saying, “I don’t know,” I share Matt Dillahunty’s concerns.

Trent Horn:

Going back to my own conversion experience with Catholicism, Catholicism has all these Saint stories. A lot of them, people love them in the middle ages and they say like, “Oh, this Saint did this, this Saint did that.” And then I look at the stories and they were written 200 or 300 years later. Way, way longer than what we have with the resurrection accounts. And I say, did they not happen? I can’t say they didn’t happen, but I have to say, “Well, I don’t know if your favorite Saint story happened.” So to say Matt Dillahunty, “I’ve been in that position, I’m just not in that position when it comes to the resurrection.”

Matt Fradd:

All right. We got a question here for, we got a few questions here for Trent now, so we can let Trent go first here. This comes from Jimmy McDermott. “Trent, what do you think of the argument that if Jesus was born in the modern day, it would be easier and more reasonable for us to prove it? Video, for example, it seems like bad timing on God’s part. ”

Trent Horn:

Well, these kinds of arguments, and Matt alluded to one in the debate, like, “Well, if God existed, then he would provide a different kind of evidence to show that he exists and that he loves us.” Well, that’s a claim. It’s an assertion. I don’t see the evidence for that. All we need to say is, “Well, does God have good reasons for revealing himself in the way he does?” If Jesus were to appear today, he would’ve missed the billions of people that lived in the past 2000 years. You might say, “Why doesn’t he go back 50,000 years?” Well, it’s good he appeared in a time and place with writing and Roman roads and things like that, so that eventually Christianity would become the largest religion in the world and 2 billion people would believe it.

Trent Horn:

But even if he appeared today, I mean, the fact is, Matt has not said, what would convince them? Even if you gave something over the top, Matt has never said, “Oh yeah, that would convince me.” Even if he showed up today, there are so many people, if they have the bar set too high, they wouldn’t believe. Instead of talking about the evidence we wish we had, it’s better to talk about the evidence we do have and then subject it to see if it is reasonable.

Matt Fradd:

Okay, Matt.

Matt Dillahunty:

First of all, I didn’t say that God would give better evidence, I said he could give better evidence. It’s not my position to tell you what God would or wouldn’t do. But I would argue that a case for a reasonable God, who purportedly wants us all to know him and love him and understand him, would give the sort of evidence. And for Trent or anybody else to just assert that or suggest that either I or somebody else has the bar too high and no amount of evidence would be enough, that is absolutely ignoring the fact that I’ve already acknowledged that God could, absolutely without question, provide sufficient evidence to convince even me. And it hasn’t happened.

Matt Fradd:

Okay. We got a question here from Anglican Aesthetics, and I might have a followup to this because I think you’ve addressed this already, Matt. This bloke says, “We don’t have physical evidence that Hannibal crossed the Alps. Would you say that historical event is therefore dubious?’

Matt Dillahunty:

So first of all, I’m not absolutely confident about anything and so my confidence level in particular claims is always proportional to the claim. I don’t know enough about this claim to establish a confidence level or say whether or not I believe it. I haven’t spent any time at all studying it. But just say that somebody crossed the Alps, we know people have, or that there’s evidence of other people crossing it. So then it becomes a question of timing and method and all of that. And if the story is that Hannibal crossed the Alps on a flying giraffe, okay, well, I’m more dubious of that than on an elephant or at some other time. So I can’t tell you whether or not I’m convinced it exists, because you’re presenting something that I haven’t spent any time at all looking into.

Matt Fradd:

Here’s a followup question because it sounds like you’re saying, okay-

Trent Horn:

Do I respond to that, Matt?

Matt Fradd:

I’ll give you plenty of time to do that, Trent. I just want to have a quick follow-up here. It sounds like you’re saying, “We experience these things, they’re not outside of our everyday experience, therefore it’s easier for me to accept.” So here’s a question, what is maybe the strangest thing that you think is still reasonable, that you accept? Does that make sense, that you don’t have immediate access to epistemologically?

Matt Dillahunty:

Yeah. I don’t know if I could … I’d have to spend some time thinking about it to figure out what’s the strangest. Maybe if somebody made a list, I could pick what’s the strangest. But I will say that unlike a lot of other people, I don’t accept string theory, partly because I don’t understand it well enough and partly because … string theory and multi-verse. Both of these are speculative things that I’m not convinced are falsifiable and fully testable. That doesn’t mean I think they’re wrong. It doesn’t mean that I’m considering saying that didn’t happen. I’m just talking about, I don’t know enough and haven’t found the evidence for them particularly compelling. It’s a sort of speculative endeavor. And so there are many strange things like coincidences.

Matt Dillahunty:

I’ve experienced things that, as far as I can tell, are extraordinary coincidences. You know, Oh, I was thinking about somebody and I picked up the phone to call them. I was thinking about my mom and I picked up the phone to call my mom and there was no dial tone. And it’s because my mom had called me and before the phone even rang, I happened to pick it up in that gap and so we were connected. And this is the sort of thing that my mom would be like, “Oh, it was Jesus. God has connected us.” And for me, it’s like, “I believe that, that’s a curious coincidence, but I don’t know how you reach the conclusion that the best explanation is Jesus wanted us to talk on the phone.”

Matt Fradd:

Trent, I’ll give you two minutes since I gave Matt a two for, there. Go for it.

Trent Horn:

Sure. One, I would say, I think it was G.K. Chesterton who said, “Coincidences are God’s attempt at humor.” I don’t know anything about that. And that might be wrong. This from the guy who wrote a book on what the saints never said. I don’t know. He might have not said that, but somebody said it. I said it.

Trent Horn:

But coincidence is like, for me, I think yeah, when Christians are like, “Oh, look at this amazing coincidence.” It’s not great evidence for God because we have this thing called the law of large numbers. If there’s billions of people, there’s bound to be weird coincidences. I need the evidence bar to be higher and I think I’ve shown it for the thing we’re arguing for today. Number two, you asked Matt Dillahunty about, “Oh, what’s the strangest thing out there, that’s reasonable?”

Trent Horn:

So for me, I would say belief in a multi-verse and belief that extraterrestrial beings live somewhere in the universe. I’m not necessarily fully convinced of them. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that given the size of the universe and given the nature of inflationary cosmology. So, for me to answer that question, I guess that’s two. And yeah, I just think the world is a super-duper strange place and we’re always learning new things.

Trent Horn:

I mean, prior to 1982, we didn’t know that people could come back from clinical death after failed CPR. It’s called Lazarus syndrome, seen about 30 times. But I mean like 200 years ago, people didn’t know about that, so would you not believe someone came back from clinical death if you had a chat with them? If we have too narrow a view, reality has to be whatever’s consistent about it. How do we know we have a consistent nature of reality? We’re finite. Maybe there’s a counterexample staring us in the face.

Trent Horn:

As for Hannibal, I believe the Hannibal account, even though there’s less evidence for the march of the war, elephants in particular. Even though it wouldn’t fit Matt’s standards because the Roman historian Palladius wrote about it 60 years later. It’s secondhand, it’s highly unusual. It sounds like the stuff of legends. We got a few coins minted in Spain that might have pictures of elephants at the same time, but that’s circumstantial. That’s my best to get all three of those in one answer.

Matt Fradd:

All right, Trent, let me ask you more of a psychological question, for what it’s worth. Suppose, because you had a conversion, it seems. You believed in a sort of deistic God, and then you came to accept Christianity. Do you honestly think that if you didn’t believe in God, that the evidence for the resurrection as you are putting it forth now, would convince you of the resurrection of Christ or would that just not be a live option for you?

Trent Horn:

Well, it’s hard for me to think what would I think if I had been different? That’s a hard question to answer. Although I think there is a philosophical view called modal realism that says parallel worlds exist, and all these counterfactuals really exist out there. I don’t think it’s an unreasonable thing to argue for, even though we don’t have empirical evidence for it. It explains why these counterfactuals are true. But yeah, for me, what made me open to the resurrection was that there was a God who was capable of doing this. I do believe that miracles can move people into believing in God, some people, that’s reasonable for them.

Trent Horn:

I wasn’t really wired that way. I had always … My background, I was never an atheist, but I believed in a distant deistic God who struck a cue ball and that’s it. That was that, I wasn’t Christian. So seeing better evidence for God, that he’s more of a theistic God, that made it more plausible for me to accept the resurrection. So if I didn’t believe in God, I think I would have a harder time believing in the resurrection. That’s why, when I share the faith, I try to give philosophical arguments for the existence of God and historical arguments that this God revealed himself. That’s my particular method.

Matt Fradd:

Feel free to respond there, Matt.

Matt Dillahunty:

Sure. I’ll hit a couple of things really quick. First of all, I’m with Trent on the Drake Equation and the likelihood of aliens. I just don’t consider that strange. When I look at the enormity of the universe, it would be stranger that the Drake Equation and other things didn’t suggest that there’s potentially other life out there. I still don’t know how we falsify this claim of the resurrection of Jesus, but Trent’s talking about whether or not he would believe the evidence that he’s presented now …

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:39:04]

Matt Dillahunty:

…talking about whether or not he would believe the evidence that he’s presented now. I used to believe this, and not just because I walked down the aisle at the age of five in a Southern Baptist church, although I’m sure that had something to do with it, and all the people around me believed it. But I thought, hey, when I read the Bible, I’m reading reliable accounts that are necessarily accurate because there’s a God who’s preserved the word. As soon as I realized that I didn’t have a good reason to believe that, and people are like, “Oh, well, there’s your problem,” it all crumbles.

Matt Dillahunty:

Because if there’s not this foundational thing that the words in this particular book or this particular collection of books are being vouchsafed by the eternal creator of the universe, then they become as suspect as anybody as anything else, and I have to view them that way. I have no choice but to view them that way. And I think that if we were all to acknowledge the truth of this, that we all have our biases. And while I have escaped one set of bias, moving from a bias towards Christianity, now I have a science bias. And the difficulty for many people is recognizing that my science bias may in fact be the foundation of the most reasonable position.

Matt Fradd:

Okay, thanks. Okay, question here, Matt, isn’t it arrogant to hold that reasonable beliefs are only those which would convince you personally?

Matt Dillahunty:

I’ll answer this with a question. If my answer to your question doesn’t convince you, is it arrogant of you to hold me to your standard? I don’t have any option but to consider reasonable what I consider reasonable. There’s no other way about it. It’s not about arrogance. It’s not about me thinking I’m special. It’s about recognizing the value of having good standards of evidence in order to avoid being conned.

Matt Dillahunty:

As a lifelong magician, I’ve watched people be fooled by what I’ve done. I see how easy it is for people to fool themselves, and I’ve seen people from the countless thousands of religions that are out there, you’ve evidently got the right one in your mind, and I’m just agreeing with all the rest of them that don’t agree with you as well. And so if you think it’s arrogant of me to say that I am the standard of reason, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying I am convinced that I have a good standard of evidence and reason and a sound epistemology, and if you want to view that as arrogant and dismiss it, I would argue that the same would apply to you.

Matt Fradd:

Trent?

Trent Horn:

Yeah. What I think is key here that I tried to flesh out in our discussion was the distinction between a belief being reasonable and a belief being convincing. And I didn’t really hear Matt offer a distinction for his own beliefs. Because that’s what we’re talking about with the resurrection, reasonable is a lower bar than convincing. You have to have convincing and reasonable, because if you didn’t, you could never reasonably disagree with someone.

Trent Horn:

Like there are events in history, like the Mary Celeste I brought up earlier, why did they leave the boat? One, maybe there was a water spout and it scared them. They got in the lifeboat and left. Maybe they thought the alcohol would explode and they got out of the lifeboat. There’s competing historical hypothesis for things. And so like, I might pick the exploding alcohol, but I don’t think the water spout guys are unreasonable. It’s all on the table. So for me, when I look at reasonable unreasonable, I have all the possibilities on the table and I gave a three-pronged test to show what is reasonable. And I think it was more detailed and useful than the specific examples that Matt gave in his statement.

Matt Fradd:

I’ve got a question here for Matt. This comes from Shivery Bob, you got to love these names. It’s hard not to smile when you’re reading some of them. He says, “Matt, if there were first century doctors’ reports of Jesus’s death by crucifixion resurrection, would believing in the resurrection be more reasonable, or reasonable?”

Matt Dillahunty:

It’d definitely be more reasonable. I mean, the more evidence you can add to something, the more reasonable it becomes until it approaches [inaudible 01:43:12] I’m not sure, and I would love to have a conversation with Trent about this another time because his distinction between reasonableness and convincing is one that I find very interesting because I think that there’s something definitional that we’re so close to figuring out what it is between the two of us in particular, because I’m not convinced that two people can both be reasonable and disagree if they are looking at and viewing the exact same information.

Matt Dillahunty:

So like once upon a time, it was reasonable given the information to think that the sun went around the earth. But once we had the information that showed that that was not a reasonable position, now I don’t know how anybody could reasonably defend that. And so if we’re talking about something, and I don’t know enough about the Mary Celeste to use that as an example, but if we’re talking about something where like, let’s say multiverse. And there are people who think multiverse is reasonable, and there are people who don’t think that the multiverse is reasonable. I don’t think that you can both be reasonable and disagree about that because when we’re in that state, I would say that one can neither reasonably say, “X is true or X is false.”

Matt Dillahunty:

And so in that state where we don’t have enough to be compelled, to reasonably believe a position, I don’t know that there can be reasonable disagreement, but I would really want to think about it a lot more. Maybe Trent, and I can talk about it some other time. Because to me, I do agree there’s a difference between reasonableness and what’s convincing. But I think if an argument is reasonable, you should be convinced. And if you are not convinced by a reasonable argument, you are by definition, unreasonable.

Matt Fradd:

Trent.

Trent Horn:

Well, I’m glad that Matt brought that up, but I think that to say for an argument to be reasonable, it must convince anyone, I think that’s an incredibly, incredibly high standard. I agree that there’s [crosstalk 01:45:13].

Matt Dillahunty:

…reasonable people.

Trent Horn:

Sure. Of course. We only let reasonable people in our club for the hypothesis, for the-

Matt Dillahunty:

No, no. All right. Not reasonable people, because people aren’t reasonable. People are in accordance with reason on a particular subject, not a category of who they are, but on a subject. If the position is reasonable and you’re not convinced, then you are in conflict with reason on that subject, not in general in your life. Is that clearer?

Trent Horn:

Kind of.

Matt Dillahunty:

Okay.

Trent Horn:

We’ll have to have a longer discussion.

Matt Dillahunty:

Yeah, it’s a lot. [crosstalk 01:45:48] I’ll shut up now. I apologize.

Trent Horn:

No, that’s fine, it’s all good. I would say that the problem is, I think we think of evidence as like, evidence is this neon sign that will tell me the way the world is when it really isn’t. Evidence are just things that are out there. It’s stuff in the world, and then we interpret it to reach certain conclusions. That’s why, like when you’re in a courtroom, evidence is introduced. It’s like, “The fingerprints are on the knife. That proves he stabbed her.” No, that only proves that he had the knife when he was in the house that day. So I mean, people will interpret evidence differently and reach different reasonable and unreasonable conclusions.

Trent Horn:

Well, you have to try to establish in a case, and what I tried to show is that certain beliefs, they become reasonable based on other factors, like do they contradict established facts? Like I would flat earth contradicts, geo centrism contradicts tons of facts. Does it contradict expected evidence? Is there a usual explanation that could go in its place? That’s what we’re always trying to look at. Though I will say that in Matt’s example, notice that even if we had, even if Luke said, “I’m a physician.” Because Paul calls him a physician, and, “I was there and I can testify Jesus was dead.” That would be physical evidence, but it’s not enough to convince Matt because Matt has not given us any particular standard of when it would be either reasonable or convincing to believe in the resurrection.

Matt Fradd:

Okay. Man, we could just keep talking forever, but I want to respect your guys’ time. Why don’t we take maybe two more questions and then we’ll do the closing statements if that’s okay. Let’s see here. I just saw it a moment ago, it was… Sorry, guys.

Matt Dillahunty:

I saw a question fly by that I’d like to quickly address if it’s okay.

Matt Fradd:

Go for it, yep. [crosstalk 01:47:56].

Matt Dillahunty:

Somebody was like-

Trent Horn:

Can see the questions? I can’t see them, though.

Matt Fradd:

You can’t click that little… Click the…

Matt Dillahunty:

It just happened to pop up real quick. Somebody basically asked [crosstalk 01:48:04]. “The thing is Matt, if you say you can’t be absolutely certain about anything, why should we take your word on anything at all?” Well, first of all, I said, you shouldn’t take my word. But this notion about not being absolutely certain about anything is a very particular philosophical thing that I think just anybody would accept once they understood it. But a lack of absolute certainty doesn’t mean that you can’t be supremely confident and know at the highest level of confidence that an answer’s wrong, because you can’t be more accurate with your measurement than the measuring device you’re using.

Matt Dillahunty:

And so if we can’t be absolutely confident in reason, which I don’t know how you’d demonstrate that, then we can’t be absolutely competent there. But if you have a ruler that’s divided up into sixteenths of an inch, and I say, “Measure 4.89248923 inches.”, and you do a measurement that is at four and a quarter. I don’t have to be able to measure to eight decimal places to know that you are absolutely wrong in that measurement. And if the ruler only measures things in 16th of an inch increments, it is impossible for you to ever be confident, perfectly confident, that you have measured 4.89248923-ish inches. That’s what I’m talking about.

Matt Fradd:

Go for Trent.

Trent Horn:

Yeah. And I think this actually bolsters a point that I would make in that just because you don’t have the exactitude or exact certainty you would like, that doesn’t prevent you from reaching a certain conclusion. Like I would say, “No, I don’t have enough evidence to show in a court of law that Jesus rose from the dead, but I don’t have enough evidence to show 99% of history in a court of law that it took place.” Yet I, and for most of that history, all the scholars in the world agree, it did take place. We use a different type of tool to still reach certainty to justify belief. And so I would say that we have that. When it comes to like absolute certainty, like I know I exist because who’s asking the question? I know that I’m being appeared to Matt [Fradley 01:50:03] and Matt [Dillahuntily 01:50:04].

Trent Horn:

I can’t even absolutely certainly say you’re there, but I know I’m having an experience of seeing the two of you. That should go into the vernacular, “Matt Dillahuntily and Matt Fradley.” But then from that absolute certainty, we get different moral certainty. And I think that when you weigh the evidence and it becomes more likely than not, that gives you certainty to act in the world.

Trent Horn:

My last point to add to that is that whether a belief changes our lives, the amount of evidence needed to affirm the belief does not change. People need to know that if there is an article that shows Acme paint causes cancer, and the article is sufficient to prove that, I don’t need more evidence if it turns out my house is painted in Acme paint. Much the same way, however Jesus affects your life, it’s the same amount of evidence that’s necessary to affirm whether he rose from the dead.

Matt Fradd:

All right, let me ask one final question before we get into our closing statements here, this is for Matt from Trevor Adams. And I apologize to all of you who’ve been asking questions in the chat. I’m trying to get to them all, but there’s just too many, so forgive me. If everyone, other than you, Matt, claim to see someone die and rise, would it be reasonable for you to believe the world’s testimony?

Matt Dillahunty:

Well, if it’s just everybody telling me, then no. But what I would be reasonably justified in believing is that everybody believes something I don’t, and that that’s an issue. So I may not be convinced that they are all accurate, but see, people phrase this question in such a way that if everybody in the planet said that, “Hey, we saw somebody dying and rise.” Would you believe it? No, I wouldn’t necessarily believe the fact absent other evidence, but I would absolutely believe that all of the people on the planet were honestly trying to convey to me what they experienced and what they saw.

Matt Dillahunty:

This is what I was talking about when I talked about my mom, who, by the way is still alive. She’s not watching me because no way in hell she’s going to watch this debate. She’s not watching me from on high. When my mom tells me that she saw a demon, I believe that my mom had an experience that her best description is to say, “I saw a demon.”, But I’m not convinced that she actually saw a demon. That doesn’t mean I’m convinced she’s a liar. It doesn’t mean I’m convinced she’s wrong. It doesn’t mean I’m convinced that she’s suffering from strong delusions. It just means I am not yet convinced.

Matt Dillahunty:

And the reason that I’m not convinced is because of what I said at the outset, which is from David Hume, that if somebody tells me that somebody rose from the dead, I have to reject the greater miracle. And right now, given the facts of the universe that I know and understand that are demonstrated that we don’t spend any time at all debating, given those facts, it is more extraordinary that my mom actually saw a demon than that she was mistaken or misled.

Matt Fradd:

Okay, Trent.

Trent Horn:

Okay. A point of agreement and disagreement with Matt Dillahunty, I agree with him that it wouldn’t be justified to believe something merely because the entire world believes it. I mean, 2000 years ago, the entire world, except for 12 people believe that nobody rose to glorious immortal life prior to the end of the world. But I wouldn’t say that the apostles should have given up their belief in Jesus because everybody else in the world disagreed with them. Matt Dillahunty is right. You should ask, well, why do they believe it? Why do they believe that?

Trent Horn:

So just because a lot of people believe something, that’s a tiny arrow towards truth, but not a big flashing neon sign. We need to go and look at the evidence that’s involved. However, I will disagree with Matt’s assertions about the nature of uniformity of experience, because it seems like, okay, problem with Hume is you can’t believe something if it violates our uniform experience. Well how do we know? And so these resurrections, these weird things don’t happen. Well, how do we know nature’s so uniform? Under these rules, you’d have all kinds of false beliefs.

Trent Horn:

Like for example, if a Polynesian native, if they met a British sailor in the 18th century, under no circumstance could they believe the sailor about people walking across frozen lakes, because they’ve never, that goes against their uniform experience. But that would lead to a falsehood. And that is that’s concerning to me. And also Matt saying, “Well, I don’t believe my mom. She says she saw demons. I don’t believe them.” Why should we think that’s strange? The vast, even many atheists believe that ghosts or immaterial things exist, or at least non-religious people believe that.

Trent Horn:

I would say that the vast majority of human experience affirms the existence of immaterial things, or people have said they’ve cited them. And it’s like, well, we can’t believe that because I can’t test it in a laboratory. Well, yeah, unless we have Ghostbusters, old Ghostbusters, not new Ghostbusters, you can’t get it in the lab, but that doesn’t discount the vast majority of the experiences that people have. This assumption of the uniformity of nature, I think is more a reflection of the arguer’s personal assumptions about nature rather than the way nature really is.

Matt Fradd:

All right. Thanks. Okay. We could keep going, but we need to wrap up here. This has been absolutely fantastic. Trent, whenever you want to begin, you can begin with your five minute closing statement, and then Matt Dillahunty, since he went second in the opening statement, will have the final word.

Matt Fradd:

While are you looking that up, I just want to let people know that if you’re enjoying these sorts of debates, if you want to see more of them, consider going over to pintswithaquinas.com/support. There’s a link in the description below. You can support us on Patreon, or directly if you hate Patreon. And one of the things we’ll send you is a Pints with Aquinas beer stein. Now I know Matt Dillahunty is not a big fan of beer necessarily, but I would love to send him one as a thank you for being on the show.

Matt Fradd:

But we’d like to pay the debaters who come on because they’re going to put a ton of work into this. We just get to sit back and be critical, at least a lot of people seem to be doing that on YouTube live stream and kind of armchair sort of philosophers and stuff. But these guys put in the hard work and I’m really grateful for it. So if you want to see more of this stuff, go over to pintswithaquinas.com/support. You can give on Patreon or directly, and then we give you a bunch of free things in return. So with that shameless plug out the way, Trent, whenever you’re ready, I’ll click the five minute timer.

Trent Horn:

Well, wait before you click the timer-

Matt Fradd:

Yep.

Trent Horn:

Question for Matt Dillahunty, do you just not prefer beer or is it more like a diet issue? Because I also don’t like beer.

Matt Dillahunty:

I think my favorite beer is Paulaner Oktoberfest. I’m diabetic, and so what alcohol I imbibe, I’m kind of picky about. So I go for really good beers on rare occasions, but mostly it’s tequila or bourbon if I drink it all. I’d rather just not drink at all. But I will drink socially with people. I don’t like being drunk. I like my brain when it’s working. And that’s hard enough.

Matt Fradd:

That’s good. I agree. Trent [crosstalk 01:57:08] what’s your favorite beer?

Trent Horn:

Well, I just want to come back with… Who are you asking, Dillahunty, or me?

Matt Fradd:

Trent, what’s your favorite beer?

Trent Horn:

You know what? I don’t like the taste of beer. I only drink it to look like a grownup when I’m out with people. But I guess if I had to have one, a Blue Moon with a orange slice in it.

Matt Fradd:

Oh, gross!

Trent Horn:

Well, there you go. See, that’s why I don’t do that.

Matt Fradd:

It’s completely unreasonable [crosstalk 01:57:30] .

Trent Horn:

If I look like a grownup, that’s why I just go with a rum and Coke. I’m like, okay, that makes me seem mature and it tastes good and it’s smooth. But that was just a little thing, like it’s nice to meet other people that have the same sensibilities there.

Matt Fradd:

All right.

Trent Horn:

Okay, so five minute closing statement.

Matt Fradd:

Here we go. Whenever you’re ready, mate.

Trent Horn:

Yeah. Well this was just a lot of fun. And we really just scratched the surface with this. You know, it’s funny, people are telling me like, “Why are you debating Matt Dillahunty? He’s rude!” Or this or that. And it’s like, everybody has their approach to things, but I don’t mind a vigorous discussion as long as somebody doesn’t totally go bonkers. And that didn’t happen. And it’s okay. Because I mean, here’s the thing. I would rather talk to someone with the vigor and interest that Matt has than just some who’s like, “Oh yeah, whatever. I don’t really care. Whatever.”

Trent Horn:

To me, apathy is more irritating than vigorous denial. I’m more interested in the reasons Matt Dillahunty has, and maybe we’ll dialogue about this again. I think that would be fun. So that’s what I would just affirm to that. And people who might give Matt a hard time, it’s like, look, we’re grownups. We’re big kids. It’s okay. We can have a vigorous discussion and that’s fine.

Trent Horn:

But my closing thoughts are, I think what you’ll notice will come down to this, it’s not even really about Jesus’s resurrection, though it is. Our fundamental disagreement is how do you figure out what’s true in the world? And I think Matt and I would both agree, you should follow the evidence to figure out what’s true. Don’t just take it at somebody’s word per se. But a lot of times the things we know, it comes from testimony from other people. Like the reason I first learned about the Holocaust was because my seventh grade teacher told me, but I know it’s true, and I’ve had to learn more about it when I’ve dealt with obnoxious Holocaust deniers on the internet to challenge them. So testimony informs us, but then says you have to look at the evidence.

Trent Horn:

I think that Matt said, “Well, I have a science bias and that’s okay.” I just think we should use, there’s lots of different tools to figure out and understand the world. Like, let me give an example. Let’s say you have a metal detector that’s 99% accurate at finding metal, and you have a sonar detector that’s 75% accurate at finding inorganic things underground, which is better? Well, you can’t say one is better. They’re both better at different things. The metal detector is better at finding metal, but the sonar gun is way better at finding non-metallic objects. So you’d use the different tools. So I think science is really good at figuring out how the laws of nature work, how they function, how the universe acts though, we have problems. Since 2010, there’s been something called the replication crisis where we think we’ve established scientific truths and we can’t replicate them, and it turns out we haven’t.

Trent Horn:

And sciences gets replaced. Phrenology, the study of like, are you a criminal if you have a lump on your head? That was a respected field. And then it was eventually overturned. So scientific knowledge is provisional. The way we understand the world, our consistent nature in the world, it’s very dynamic. And so I think that the question about Jesus rising from the dead, while it’s a very unique thing, and we want to be cautious with unique claims that are presented to us, I think that the test I gave was not falsified in this debate, the three-prong test. The fact that God can raise Jesus from the dead is a lot of options. I gave an argument for God, and unfortunately we didn’t get to that. Maybe Matt and I will have a debate on God. That’ll be part two of our little dialogue, might be fun.

Trent Horn:

So it’s possible, there’s explanatory thing behind it. It’s reasonable. And ultimately it comes down to what’s sufficient to believe. And I asked you, what was Matt’s standard? And he never gave one. So for Matt, it’s, “Sufficient evidence will convince me, I don’t know what it looks like, but it’ll convince me.” If you don’t know what it looks like, you could’ve missed it. “Well, I won’t have missed it because if I’ve seen it, then I would believe” But if that, and [Mack and Fred 02:01:37], correct me if I’m wrong about this, but if it eventually comes down to, “It will be sufficient if it causes me to believe.”, then by that logic, I have reasonable evidence because it’s sufficient and it convinces me. Or maybe it convinces you. So by that own standard, you can believe the resurrection is reasonable.

Trent Horn:

But hey, I got about 40 seconds left, so here’s what you should do if you’re watching: Research this. Read the best books for and against. So if you’re a beginner, do Justin Bass’s The Bedrock of Christianity for the Christian view, Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God for the non-Christian view. If you’re advanced, read Andrew Loke’s The Resurrection of Jesus Christ: Investigating Resurrection of Jesus Christ, or advanced treatment, read Kris Komarnitsky’s Doubting Jesus’ Resurrection for the advanced treatment. Look up the evidence. Make up your mind. Don’t just follow people say. Go through it and reach your conclusion. I hope you’ll reach it. I hope you’ll come to the conclusion I have that gives me great hope in a world that needs it, that this life is not all we have. And we have hope in rising from the dead by being united with Jesus Christ.

Matt Fradd:

Thank you, Trent. I was going to give you an extra minute for spending a minute saying nice things about Matt. Matt, you’ve got to take one minute out of your five minute-

Trent Horn:

That can be in my, that’s just part of it. That was intentional.

Matt Fradd:

Whenever you’re ready, Matt.

Matt Dillahunty:

I will spend two whole minutes talking about how awesome Trent is. No, in all seriousness, I’ve done a lot of debates and some of them are definitely better than others, and some of them are likely to produce better conversations after the fact. I’ve had opponents who showed up at debates completely unprepared and unwilling to even address the topic at all. Like, let’s talk about 20 other things, and then let me throw in the topic at the end. Trent, didn’t do that. He made a case for things, and I appreciate that. One of the problems is that an audio cut out, and so of his three-prong test, I only had notes on two of the prongs, but that’s okay because there’s some questions that I can kind of address.

Matt Dillahunty:

And in truth, I didn’t phrase this very clearly when Trent talked about what my burden of proof was during this debate, it was that I needed to demonstrate why it was not reasonable to accept the claim. And the important thing about that is that it was not my burden of proof to demonstrate that it was reasonable to conclude the claim was false because the truth of the claim is independent from whether it’s reasonable. There was somebody in chat who, who had gone off on the, “Oh, well how can we even conclude that Genghis Khan exists if it’s all in history, are you throwing out all of history?”

Matt Dillahunty:

No, I’m not throwing out all of history. I’m throwing out extraordinary claims from history that fly in the face of everything we know and understand about reality. Do supernatural events actually happen? Trent, in his closing remarks, or just before that in one of the questions talked about all these people who have told stories of their experiences that they believe are supernatural, and he thinks that all of this together attest to reality having a supernatural component to it.

Matt Dillahunty:

Mike Licona did something similar by talking about trashcan lids flying and ouija boards to argue that strongly suggest that reality has a supernatural component to it. My response to both of those is that that’s not what I see that attesting to. It attests to human brains being fallible in reaching conclusions. And so when we’d say, “Hey, if you don’t know what would convince you, how do you know you haven’t missed it?” Because in this case, we’re talking about a god. And my claim that I don’t know what would convince me that a god exists is independent of other claims because a god necessarily could convince me, which is something that I said from the outset. So I haven’t missed it.

Matt Dillahunty:

God, if he wants me to know and present evidence in such a way that I cannot miss it, which means that the only option that you’re left for is that Matt’s a big fat liar, or slightly less fat than it used to be, but Matt’s still a liar, which I get on occasion from people. Now I promise, and in future debates, I will a better job at ignoring chat and making sure that I pay attention to what’s going on despite the internet hiccups.

Matt Dillahunty:

But if I were to tell you that there’s somebody who never eats a meal and they survive off prana, sunlight, and that they can heal people, would you believe me? What if I found 10 other people to say, so what if I found 100 people to say so? Well, those sorts of claims exist. They’re out there. Do you believe them? What if we move the claim further and further back from us in time where we are less and less capable of investigating it? If somebody were saying, “Hey, here’s somebody who was resurrected last week.”, we would have a much better way of investigating this than we would for somebody 2000 years ago.

Matt Dillahunty:

I don’t need to have absolute certainty or even know what would convince me to know that the amount and quality and style of evidence available for a resurrection claim today is vastly superior to one, 2000 years ago. And by the way, for the metal detector that’s 99% accurate at finding metal and the sonar detector that’s 97 or whatever it was at finding non-organic. The question is, which is better, one of them is definitely better depending on what you’re trying to do. This is the same thing when you say, “Hang on, what methods are we going to use other than science?”

Matt Dillahunty:

Well, somebody needs to show a method that we can use other than science, because science, the scientific methods are the single most consistently reliable method of creating an accurate understanding of the world. And when we find problems with things that are being proposed within the scientific realm, things like phrenology, what corrects that? Science! More and better science. The evidence and the methods that lead to the discovery of how we can better understand the world. At no point in history has a supernatural claim or a religious claim shown that science was wrong about something. That has not happened.

Matt Dillahunty:

And Trent’s already acknowledged that he can’t prove the resurrection with science or in a courtroom, so he wants some other standard of evidence, and that’s the historical argument. That is the trend of people accepting things because we start with this notion that this book is reliable. And I don’t accept that. I’m sorry that I don’t accept it, but moreover, I don’t see how it’s reasonable to conclude that it’s likely a resurrection occurred at this particular point in time with this individual without physical evidence to support it.

Matt Fradd:

Almost time. Matt and Trent, thank you so much. I thought this was an excellent back and forth. Vigorous, respectful, it was great. As we wrap up, I would love to give you both a chance to tell people where they can learn more about you. Trent?

Trent Horn:

Sure. I would recommend, I have a website, trenthorn.com. I have a podcast called The Counsel of Trent, C-O-U-N-S-E-L. You’re Catholic, you get the pun. Hopefully you get the pun if you’re Catholic. The Counsel of Trent, you can get that on iTunes, Google Play. I also am now just breaking into YouTube, episodes are there. I also do videos on YouTube at Counsel of Trent on YouTube, so just search Counsel of Trent, and if you want to become a supporter, just go to trenthornpodcast.com, but there, and also some of my work is available at catholic.com as well.

Matt Fradd:

Thank you. Matt?

Matt Dillahunty:

Well, I’m named after the very first gospel, and I don’t think that’s clever at all. The best thing to do is go to Linktree. Linktree, which is linktr.ee/mattdillahunty, and that will send you to my YouTube, my Twitch, my Twitter, my Facebook. It doesn’t send you the Patreon, but you can go to patreon.com/atheistdebates. You’ll see this debate up there at some point, you’ll see debate review stuff up there, and conversations that I’ve had with debate opponents and other debaters. Maybe one of these days after we get out from under COVID, Trent will come down, we’ll sit over in the studio, and we’ll put some videos up on Atheist Debates talking about the stuff that interests both of us.

Trent Horn:

I would like that a lot.

Matt Fradd:

All right.

Trent Horn:

[crosstalk 02:09:29]. God bless y’all. Thanks so much.

Speaker 2:

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PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [02:09:45]