In this episode Trent sits down with John an atheistic “Counter Apologist” to discuss the evidence that would (or should) convince us that God exists.
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast. A production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answer’s apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. Today, we’re going to have a dialogue on the question of, what would prove God exists? What should we look for when we look to evidence for the existence of God? And a follow up to my previous episode that I did on “The One Question Atheists Can’t Answer”. Which I admit, it’s a little bit of a click-baity title, but that’s okay. As long as you deliver on the bait, I always think that’s fine. So my guest today is John, the counter-apologist. He has a YouTube channel. I believe he has a blog and other resources, where he engages in counter apologetics. But part of me feels… I guess well John, you’re here. You’re a counter apologist to Christianity, am I a counter apologist to atheism?
John:
So you could certainly frame it that way. I’m used to apologist basically almost has the connotation of like, “Oh, I’m a religious apologist,” I guess.
Trent Horn:
Right.
John:
Right? So, now when you talk about… There seems to be a good amount of us philosophy of religion inclined atheists. I guess you might say we’re atheist apologists, if you’re going to be more accurate.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, because I’ve noticed this online a little bit. Sometimes I have been the recipient of this backhanded compliment or denigration, I’m not sure what it is, saying, “Oh, he’s just an apologist”. And I believe and I understand that there are people who engage in apologetics that have a very limited skillset and knowledge and come off more like used car salesman. And so if that is what they mean, I see what they’re saying. But I do think it’s a misuse of the term because in general, anybody who defends a position is an apologist.
John:
Correct. So there’s so much misappropriation of philosophical terminology. And you’ll almost see it even in the political discourse too. You’ll have people get called apologists on whatever partisan news network you want to watch, right?
Trent Horn:
Right. You’re an apologist for X, which means you’re a slimy used car salesman, snake oil salesman. Well, no, I’m defending a position. Everybody does that. So why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself and then we’ll get into our topic.
John:
Sure. So my name’s John, I’ve been doing this almost 10 years now. I was a believer until I was about 28 years old. I de-converted around 2010, 2011 ish. I became an atheist. And I wanted to put out resources to help people who were going through what I went through because I tried to use apologetics to go back into my faith, and it actually had the opposite effect. I ended up not liking the arguments, found the counters, and then found out when there’s bad atheist apologetics and then there’s good atheist philosophy of religion almost. And not that the good stuff isn’t apologetics too. [crosstalk 00:03:26]
Trent Horn:
Right. But there’s kind of a growing movement. I guess if you look at it, let’s say in the past 20 years. Really the new atheism gets kicked off with Richard Dawkins, 9/11, and the internet, I would say, is when we see this kind of an explosion. Because before you might have a used net group, you meet other atheists on in the ’90s or something like that, but takes off in the 2000s of social media, internet, Richard Dawkins, 9/11, concerns about religion. And you see the new atheists, get to really… Suddenly, now we have all these YouTube videos of “Look at all these Bible contradictions”.
Trent Horn:
Suddenly, it’s just like an open field. But what I have noticed in at least the past five years or so, a growing number of people… So even people who started off with atheism, kind of that new atheism bit in the early 2010s. Now as we get into the 2020s, they’re kind of disenchanted with it a little bit and they want something meatier because the problem is that it’s an arms race, if you will. You have the new atheism and then more sophisticated theism and explanations of Christianity come forward and you need to either meet that or you can’t basically.
Trent Horn:
So I think for example of a popular British YouTuber, Rationality Rules. You always get a lot more of an audience as an atheist if you’re British. It’s just, wow, listen to him. But you think of Rationality Rules, his earlier videos is your standard new atheist objections to William Lane Craig. But more recently… And others like Skydivephil and other people. They’re upping the game and incorporating the insights from people like atheistic philosophers like Graham Oppy or other, even people like Real Atheology and others. So it seems like you might be in that kind of trajectory.
John:
Yeah, it was ironically, I just made a joke about it. Real Atheology had posted a meme about that, about the decline of new atheism, so to speak. And why did anybody ever do this? Some of us were baby atheists and were not yet philosophically trained.
Trent Horn:
We don’t talk about that time.
John:
I definitely had, especially the beginning, I even use the, “I’m an agnostic atheist”, that terminology and you try to do the lack of belief theism, and then I don’t agree with that now at all. I think a positive atheism in terms of; I affirm the proposition, there is no God. So, it took other philosophically inclined atheists to kind of pull you aside gently and go, “This is why that framing is wrong”. And then kind of take you through what it would entail.
Trent Horn:
I always thought it was funny with atheists who had that view. On the one hand, you’ll say, “I’m not saying there is no God. I lack a belief in God”. And then in the next breath, “Well, God is as silly as Harry Potter or Santa Claus”.
John:
Right! [crosstalk 00:06:25]
Trent Horn:
You don’t lack a belief in Harry Potter, you know he’s not real, just say it.
John:
I don’t like Lack-theism. I do appreciate where it came from, and I appreciate the view because if you especially go back to the kind of apologetic, so like you said, the use car salesman, there are some apologists who are popularizers that I won’t name names. But they regurgitate standard arguments put forward and developed by actual philosophers. And there is a cottage industry for Christians. And I was given many of these books of, “It’s irrational to be an atheist. You can’t account for all sorts of things”. And they hit you with this litany, like Kalam moral, fine tuning resurrection arguments.
Trent Horn:
But it’s always in a book and it’s a 10 page long chapter.
John:
And it’s almost like you’re forced into believing it. And so the start of the Counter Apologist channel and my work was countering all that. And you go, “If you can’t establish theism, I don’t have to be a theist”, right?
Trent Horn:
Right.
John:
And then you would give… You can give affirmative arguments for atheism. There’s a whole litany of them as you’re very adept at countering, and knowing the ins and outs of too.
Trent Horn:
Right.
John:
Right. So, but you could just get to the position of like, I just don’t want to be a theist. Almost. And people would just, “If I just counter all of the apologist arguments, then I don’t have to be a theist”. And that’s because the apologetic world was very much, “You have to be a theist because of XYZ arguments” and the kind of overconfident…
Trent Horn:
Right.
John:
Presentation that dominated a lot. Now you have a lot better. There’s a lot of people.
Trent Horn:
You notice how you said “Overconfident”. I like that Randall Rouser, who I’ve had on the show before, who is a Protestant theologian and apologist. His Twitter handle is The Tentative Apologist. And I’m concerned about that as well that someone gets a handle on an argument, they really like it, but will hold on, see what the other people are saying and you’re right. I think it’s that popularizing concern. So, let’s hop into the subject here, though we are going to brush back and forth on some things we’ve brought up. So you made a reply to my episode on “One question atheists can’t answer”. And actually I think we have a fair amount of common ground. So I’m looking interested to see where the discussion will go forward. But here is my concern in the original video that may have been lost on some people, hopefully not too many, is that there is a popular atheist argument, the God of the Gaps objection.
Trent Horn:
As a way, if you push it too strongly, it’s a kind of cheap, lazy way to just not deal with the case for God. Say, “Well, look, it’s always just, ‘I don’t know X, so it must have been God'”. And I agree, that is a bad argument. “I don’t know, therefore, God”. My concern though, is that if you reduce every single classical proof or evidence that is offered for God, “I don’t know, therefore God”, and you claim to be open minded and say, “Oh yeah, I’d believe in God if you showed me evidence”. Well, how do I know you wouldn’t just say, “It’s another case of, ‘I don’t know, therefore God'”? And so I’ve asked you them hypothetical examples of what would convince them and some are better than others. And the worst ones seem very clear to me. It’s just a case of, “I don’t know, therefore God”.
Trent Horn:
But others may not. So, for me, because you gave an example in your reply, “Well, what if we had a possible world, an alternate world where only Catholic…” And I brought this up in the video. “Catholic priests are always able to, and only they, are able to turn water into wine just by uttering a certain prayer?”. And I would agree with you that if someone was able to do that consistently, I would be very, very open to that being evidence for God. But that’s because I don’t push the God of the Gaps objection super hard. I’m worried somebody who would, could still not be convinced. That’s a lot I threw out there that you can throw back. [crosstalk 00:10:39]
John:
So, like you said, this is going to be a horrible click-bait video because we’re going to agree too much, even though we are on different sides.
Trent Horn:
Right.
John:
So, I would agree that the idea of atheism or naturalism, I don’t want to identify as a naturalist, but I just think it’s a plausible thing. So that’s typically the world view of an atheist would be, would be something like that. You could make it just as unfalsifiable as a lot of atheist popularizers like to accuse theism or various religions of being unfalsifiable, right? So, even in the scenario like you said, so I came up with the thing of Catholic priests doing water into wine when I made a countering the resurrection argument video. It’s part of a general argument against miracles.
John:
And so the specific example was more to prove why I would give credence to one religion’s historical miracle claims over others, right? I need something. And it would also work, I think as a proof of God, but you have to be careful because you could, there’s always a way out. Any metaphysical position in atheism is a metaphysical position as is naturalism, right? Ultimately is unfalsifiable. It’s unprovable. It’s an unanswerable question almost, right? There’s no definitive proof, like I prove gravity exists by just dropping my phone. So, it’s not an empirical question because we have empirical questions because we make unfalsifiable metaphysical assumptions to let us do the science, right?
Trent Horn:
Right.
John:
So, you could always say, “Oh, well there’s some alien that is doing technology to change the water into wine. And they just want to mess with us”. You could always even get out of it. But I think to do that, if you push the God of the Gaps objection too far, and I think we agree on God of the Gaps, you end up with a situation that… The way I would frame it, if you had the Catholic priests doing this miracle and we could capture it with science repeatedly, then you would say, “If you’ve established that Catholics could do miracles as well as I empirically establish anything”. Right?
Trent Horn:
Well, you could establish in that example, it seems like scientifically you would establish, there is some causal relationship between ordained Catholic priests uttering a certain prayer and waters molecular structure changing. So, you would establish some kind of reliable causal relationship between the two. But then I would think an interpretation beyond that would start to take you away from science to say, you’re right. Because God, aliens. Because there, I think it would just then I think for me, when you look at apologetics, there’s classical and evidential apologist, there’s a slight difference there. Classical is, Hey let’s show there. That’s like William Lane Craig, Peter craved, Aquinas, just show there’s God. And hey, if God exists, there’s this thing that looks like a miracle. Well, I’m more inclined to believe it’s a miracle because I already know that God exists. Or you’re an evidential say hey, here’s this thing I saw like a resurrection or a miracle. Looks like there’s a God. That that’s enough to get you to get you to God.
Trent Horn:
So some people would look at the water to wine and say, “Yeah, that gets me to God”. Other people, it definitely makes more sense of the preexisting God belief I already have.
John:
Right.
Trent Horn:
So, I don’t know if it’s a concern or not, would be that science would establish the causal pattern here, but we would have to make inferences beyond that. That there’s no scientific method for the inferences we would make. For example, and I thought about bringing this up as what is something we have out there that’s empirical, repeatable, that we could use as another example? And one might be prayer studies.
Trent Horn:
Like, does intercessory prayer work to heal people? And that’s a really interesting field, but suppose a Catholic priest goes to your bedside and says a certain prayer and then you always get sicker? Well, we could establish the causal relationship there, very clearly. But as to why it’s happening, suddenly we’ve opened many, many more doors. Is it God? Is it the devil? Is it trickster aliens? Is it God testing our faith?
John:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
You see how I think science can get the causal thing down, then we kind of have to make our own inferences based on the established causal relationship.
John:
Sure. So, this is basically… This is actually very much comes close to general philosophy of science views, right? And so we have paradigms and all sorts of other interpretive frameworks that we use to kind of look at this. And I think the neat thing about the water to wine thought experiment is, you say, “All right, so any time there’s a miracle in general, you have this question of either a miracle is happening or our understanding of the laws of nature are incorrect”. Right? And so to use a humean phrasing, right? And so you could say, “Well, I’m either going to revise my understanding of the laws of nature, or I’m going to admit that something supernatural is affecting what I’m observing here”. And so the nice part about the empirical verifiability of all of this is that you get to eliminate all the other variables.
John:
Right? And so it’s not just my beliefs in saying words as a Catholic priest, an ordained Catholic priest, it’s their amount of things that would get violated, right? Just like from pure standard model physics.
Trent Horn:
Right.
John:
The amount of energy that would have to be… You’re violating conservation of energy laws…
Trent Horn:
Right.
John:
When you do this, right? So, you would be violating a huge amount of the way we understand a very well established, empirically established science by having this miracle occur. So you basically are left with, “Okay, even the alien thing seems to me to get even more implausible, but yes, you’re right. You’re making a philosophical argument almost in terms of how to interpret the data, but that’s every experiment”.
Trent Horn:
Sure. So, I guess then my concern then when atheists put forward, because I don’t want to make God of the Gaps arguments. And I think atheists would agree that if they’re open-minded saying, “Yeah, I’ll believe if you give me the evidence”, their hypothetical example should not be a simplistic kind of God of the Gaps argument either. And so I think the key of avoiding God of the Gaps is, I wrote this down to make sure that I would get it right. You don’t want to be in the position of… Because this is what I’m wondering, how you would say this for your example, and I want to return to the repeatability, empirical nature of it, that you’d say, “Hey, we’d have evidence, strong evidence of a miracle here if Catholic priests can always change water into wine when they do a certain thing”. That because it’s repeatable, we’re observing it. It’s empirical.
Trent Horn:
It sounds like there’s two types of things we could say in the face of weird stuff. I have no knowledge of a natural cause, therefore God. Or I have knowledge of no natural cause, therefore God. You see the difference I’m saying there? One is ignorance, one is from a principle of knowledge. That I think you and I agree God of the Gaps is when you just say, “I don’t know what natural cause could do this, therefore God”.
John:
Right.
Trent Horn:
That’s going to get you into trouble really quickly. But if you can argue from a place of, “I know there is no natural cause, therefore God”, you’re not God of the Gaps anymore.
John:
Correct. Right. When I was trying to come up with this over a number of years, when I had had been thinking about this argument, it was basically the key part was the verifiability of it, the repeatable-ness of it. In my example, I go through and I say, “You can do it in controlled conditions”. I can use the methods of science to eliminate everything except the belief and the ordained-ness of the Catholic priest. And so that you basically boil it down to the beliefs and ordained-ness of the Catholic priest is the only thing that changes or that causes the effect to happen. And so then you have to say, “It’s the belief that causes a physical change like this”, and you go, “Well, beliefs can’t do that”. It violates every single part of our known piece of science that we’ve established.
Trent Horn:
Sure. So some people might say, all we have is correlation.
John:
I mean, you could get into all sorts of anti-realist stuff with philosophy of science to try and get around this. There was some subset of online Catholics I was talking to who were saying that evolution is incompatible with Catholicism. But evolution is so well established. Wouldn’t you just leave Catholicism if you thought meta physically? Now, obviously that’s not a well accepted thing, right? But this was their view they’re presenting to me. And I said, “But it’s so well established.”, and he goes, “Well, I could just be an anti-realist about science”.
Trent Horn:
[crosstalk 00:20:04] What is hard me is I think realism is more well established than the theory of evolution. And I think the theory of evolution is a well established theory.
John:
Yes.
Trent Horn:
Some people don’t like hearing me say that. That’s a top actually that’s a top [crosstalk 00:20:15]
John:
It’s it’s own special topic. I was more for an example but, you can try to philosophy your science out of this, I think, but then you start looking really weird, right? So like in the example, let’s pretend we had this and I had, you could cap could do this. Am I saying that everybody would be a theist? No. So you could look at young earth creationists, you could look at flat earthers. It doesn’t have to be a religious thing. There’s anti-vaxxers. There’s people who do engage in all sorts of science denial to avoid conclusions they don’t want. But I think it’s a fringe position, then. Society starts acting not well towards those people, right?
Trent Horn:
Right.
John:
And it becomes a less socially acceptable thing.
Trent Horn:
So I guess my goal as an apologist, someone who wants to share and defend the Catholic faith, is to present the evidence in as robust and convincing a way as possible. So, when I engage in atheist or anyone who’s non-Catholic, I guess one thing I have to look at is what is their evidence threshold, basically? There’s a threshold of evidence that would convince someone or at least make them think that it’s reasonable. And then I really do feel like my evidence can cross the threshold. Although if the threshold is much higher than the evidence I have to offer, I suppose one option I would have is to say, “I’m concerned your threshold is a tad too high”.
Trent Horn:
And so like the example you give, and I agree it would be very persuasive, this repeatable type of situation with the water and the wine. Though I do think though that in general, when we think of miracles, they tend to be one off occurrences. They tend not to be built into the fabric of nature as such. So, I guess, would you say that a similar thing where if it was a one time occurrence that was very well observed of water going into wine but that’s it, it wouldn’t be as persuasive as the example you gave, but it might still have persuasive power? Even it’s not repeatable?
John:
So a big part of the thing that I think makes my case so convincing is the repeatability of it, if you had a one off event. Let’s say we had some major event happen, some kind of miracle, I don’t want to come up with a specific example, but let’s say it was definitely a miracle and it was incredibly widely observed and you have mass conversions and that sort of thing. It might be of the sort that I became convinced, even if I wasn’t physically there to witness it. It might work for me, but the problem is distance and time.
Trent Horn:
Sure.
John:
And so then these things start becoming a problem. So you have to remember this experiment, this thought experiment of mine was in, why should I take the resurrection argument, the testimony of basically five people in the Bible, for your miracle claims over the miracle claims of everything else? And so, it was more of a historical miracle problem rather than proof of God problem. Although I would admit it would, like we said, it would serve as a proof of God I think too. The issue is, yes, it could if you had like the big one off and it was widely attested and I had all sorts of other pieces of evidence I can go look at for it, but then my great-great grandkids are going to have trouble believing on the basis of that event.
Trent Horn:
Right. And so, that’s why it seems like with any of these, whether it’s your repeatable example or the one off that’s widely documented, and one example I would think of, of a more recent would be like the miracle of the sun at Fatima in 1917. The claim that, and I think many atheists, the most common reply there is that people misperceived the sun’s movement in an expectation of something. But there at least we do have newspaper accounts. Nobody doubts the event happened, that people sincerely thought they saw something.
John:
Right.
Trent Horn:
So, that allows us to get over a fair number of hurdles, like legend, hearsay, things like that, to say, “All right, well, something happened”. And so what is the best hypothesis for that? And I think when we get to resurrection claims with Jesus, I do think we can get to that at least past those hurdles to something happened. I think it was, what’s his name, Komarnitsky I think? Has a book called Jesus in the Black Box? You know this. You’ve probably read this one.
John:
I actually have not.
Trent Horn:
Oh, okay. But it’s Komarnitsky. Jesus. Black box. It’s called Doubting Jesus’s Resurrection.
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:25:04]
Trent Horn:
… Black Box. It’s called Doubting Jesus’ Resurrection: What Happened in the Black Box? And it’s this idea, how do we go from sincere claims and perception to resurrection belief. But sorry, I lost my train of thought there with that. It seems then with these examples, what we’re trying to do, I guess someone who wants to defend the faith, is to get beyond the, I have no knowledge of natural cause for this miracle claim, to raise the evidence threshold to, I know there is no natural cause for the miracle claim. And as you said, that gets harder as it gets extended further away from us. I don’t know if it would be insurmountable though, but I do see your point of there are going to be claims that are more persuasive than others. I guess what I’m looking at is, where does the basement lie for believing miracle claims?
John:
So a lot, when I say if it was well attested, there’s all sorts of things I would be assuming there, maybe there was a video of it or something. And you could always question, right? So that’s the problem is you don’t want to be this dogmatic atheist and be like, it’s impossible in principle. Right? So the general problem of testimonial attestation of a miracle claim becomes… Well, there’s a number of problems with it, but the biggest one is, you’re contrasting my experience of… I use my contemporary experience of the world and my experience of the regularity of nature versus testimony. And I don’t see nature being violated in my contemporary experience of the world. And I have a lot of experience of people lying about supernatural things happening, right. Or being mistaken. It could be mistaken. It could be lying. It could be a combination. And so that’s where it becomes a problem.
John:
And so what I wanted for the case of the repeatable miracle was give me the contemporary experience of the world of a miracle occurring in a specific religious context. And now your testimony, I don’t need God raising a person every century or every 50 years to believe the resurrection. I need something supernatural that I can observe, that gives me the free of reference to then give credence to your testimonial miracle claims over others. So I think the resurrection argument starts having problems because it’s just based on testimony.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Although if you do think about it, repeatable, empirically verifiable things, they become testimony. They get published in journals. You get people-
John:
Certainly, certainly. You can though, so the important thing though, about that though, if it’s empirically, if it’s repeatable and verifiable, if I start doubting it, I could do it.
Trent Horn:
Sure. So I guess to me, one comment on your reply is that the Humane approach, I see nature be nature all the time. I don’t personally witness supernatural things. People claim stuff. I also witness people lying or being mistaken about claiming stuff. My concern though, is that our… I think one of the common retort to Hume, at least the time was that, you might shut yourself off from other extraordinary claims. Like the Polynesian Islanders who hear about walking across frozen water who’ve that’s never been a part of their culture for as long as their culture has been and British sailors tell them about it. Well, are they justified in believing that claim or not? I think Hume’s reply to that is yes, but they’re talking about another aspect of the natural world.
Trent Horn:
And then just filling in a gap in the laws of nature. But I don’t think that’s a totally compelling response, because you could apply with a miracle saying, well, I’m just filling in more data about reality itself for it to make sense. So that would be my concern about weighing nature being nature versus the rarity of miracle claims that we may not have the full picture in that regard. Do you see the example of… I think that’s a cogent one with, well, I don’t know. What do you think?
John:
So there’s a couple of problems. It’s not just my experience of nature versus testimony and people. I know people will lie, right? I have equal amounts of contradictory religions giving me testimony of miracles happening. Right? So then the way I phrased my argument against the resurrection is that you have a dilemma. So if you’re going to use testimony to establish that a miracle happen, right, I can have very close, very well-documented attestations of Sathya Sai Baba, Joseph Smith. And those are just the more contemporary ones. And there’s mystics all over the Middle East, China, India, Pakistan, of mystics, and we’re using a bad term for it, but that’s just to convey of working miracles. So you can either say, well, you could use the basis of testimony to say a miracle happened, but then you’re admitting contradictory religions’ miracle claims.
John:
And so that gives up the fundamental thing of the resurrection argument where you assume that the miracle is the evidence of the truth of the theological teachings of the miracle worker, right? I start my video off and I say, “It sounds crazy if I tell you I believe God rose Jesus from the dead, but I don’t believe that belief in Jesus is the way to salvation and eternal life and reconciliation with God.” Right? If I told you I believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, but that all of Jesus’ theological teachings were bunk, that sounds nuts, right?
Trent Horn:
There is a scholar who holds that view actually. He’s a Jewish scholar named Pinchas Lapide, actually, who affirms the historicity of the resurrection, but doesn’t believe that Jesus still fulfills the role of the Messiah. So you can always find somebody. He’s not a nobody, he is a scholar, but you’re right. I think most people-
John:
Jesus Smith is a scholar, too.
Trent Horn:
That’s true.
John:
It takes all kinds, I guess, but as a layman, from me to you-
Trent Horn:
Most people would agree with you.
John:
That sounds pretty nuts. Right? So then you have the alternative, if you say well, if I do allow this, if you do say, well, history establishes these miracles occurred, well, then you have to violate that principle.
Trent Horn:
Right.
John:
And so now I can’t prove Christianity’s true.
Trent Horn:
Well, I have a thought on that. Actually, I’m working on a book on Christian theism. I thought about writing a whole book just on this subject. And I might at some point, but it’ll definitely be a chapter in that book. And I call it The Resurrection and Evidential Parity. So the idea is, as you’re saying is, and I noticed this is a very common objection to the resurrection that if you follow the methodology to prove the resurrection, you have to believe other things that most of us don’t believe in or are theologically contradictory. So some of this, these other counterclaims with the testimony, some of them are natural things, Big Foot, alien abductions, stuff like that. Others are going to be supernatural things. Joseph Smith receiving from an angel, other religions having miracles. What does the Christian do with that? And I have a few thoughts on some of those things.
Trent Horn:
One is I think some of the natural things aren’t that unreasonable to believe in. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe aliens exist and maybe they have visited this planet. I’m not going to write off that testimony right off the bat. You’ve grimaced a bit. We’ll bracket that just for right now.
John:
You’ll bracket, yeah, not going to go there.
Trent Horn:
But my point is that some of the claims is say, well, maybe those aren’t as unreasonable things to believe in. I think the more problematic is what you brought up, are the theologically contradictory ones. And that would be if a methodology can… It’s not a principle reason. If a methodology can lead you to two contradictory answers, it seems like there’s something wrong with the methodology to use that. Though, I guess in we philosophy, people get to contradictory answers. Maybe they just had errors in their reasoning when they were doing philosophy.
Trent Horn:
So when we do that, I guess I have a few thoughts on that. One, for me, I think that many of the other claims of supernatural occurrences, even if they’re not Christian, I’m not prepared to write them off or reject them. I think there could be cases where a miraculous event happens in a non-Christian setting and the true God does it, even though the people involved aren’t invoking him. I was watching a documentary the other night on, do you remember in Thailand, the boys on that soccer team, they were trapped in a cave and had to be rescued.
John:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
If you remember that. You should watch it, it’s a really good doc. It’s crazy good documentary. And they were trapped in there for 10 days. And to get them out, you had to use scuba divers. It took two hours to get them out of this cave. They had to tranquilize and sedate them. And that’s crazy, because they’re going to panic. Right? So they had to sedate them, put positive pressure masks on them, float them out. They had 15 body bags waiting. They thought this was going to fail. And everyone got out of there alive. I’m not saying that’s a miracle, but man, that is a ridiculously improbable outcome. Now there were… Everybody there is praying to Buddhist deities and local indigenous deities for these children to come out. And I believe that if God exists and he’s all good, he may have certainly granted those prayers, even though they weren’t directed to him. So I think that it is possible in these other religions, you have other claims, like I prayed to Ganesh and this thing happened, maybe it was a miracle.
John:
That seems to be biting the bullet, then you’re going to give up the evidentialist framework that you can use a miracle to establish the truth of the theological teachings of the miracle worker. So if I am preaching about Ganesh or Buddha and I perform some miracle and it’s granted by God, well then how do I know that Jesus’ theological teachings are the correct ones, right? And then you get into all sorts of really weird relativistic answers to that.
Trent Horn:
Well, yeah, that would be right. So there’s a few other points I would add. So there with the example I gave was a providential occurrence. So it’s not miraculous.
John:
Sure.
Trent Horn:
You’re right. It would be very difficult if someone is a Hindu holy person who turns milk into wine or whatever. Water, they do water into wine.
John:
Yeah. Right.
Trent Horn:
And it’s like, how do I explain these kind of things? And a religious person could… I guess there’d be a few different options one might go down in these areas. There could be other supernatural forces at work causing these things. Maybe malevolent ones,
John:
That’s a problem.
Trent Horn:
You’re saying they’re demons.
John:
That’s a huge problem.
Trent Horn:
Well let’s-
John:
If you go that route, you have shut the door on the resurrection, aren’t you? Because now I say, well, how do I know that Jesus wasn’t resurrected by devils trying to confuse the Christians and make another false religions against the truth of Hinduism?
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Right. He drives out demons. He drives out Beelzebub by the prince of demons. Yeah. Because that was actually the charge leveled against Jesus by the Pharisees in the New Testament, ironically enough.
John:
Sure. So did that one really happen or was it a? False flag operation. I’m going to Alex Jones for Jesus. Right?
Trent Horn:
Well, right. Well, let me finish up through here, then we’ll see your-
John:
Sure, sure.
Trent Horn:
I’m offering it as one example in some of these cases. I don’t believe that it would be the whole explanation. Though I do think there is credence to the argument that just like when Jesus was opposed in the New Testament describing the Pharisees saying he casts out demons with the help of the prince of the demons, Jesus says a house divided against itself will not stand, that if the devil has certain particular aims, unless they happen to be identical with Jesus’ aims, why is he building up someone that is encouraging people to reject him, to not follow him, things like that? So that’s one thought there.
Trent Horn:
The other thought is I actually think, and I’d like to do more of an in-depth study on different miracle claims that form the foundational miracles of religions, that I don’t think there is that evidential parity, that the resurrection is different in that regard compared to others. So that would be an entirely other lengthy discussion, but I’m not prepared to bite the bullet. I do think the resurrection has better evidence than other non-Christian miracle claims, but that’d be subject to more discussion research, but those might be two different paths I might go down there.
John:
Yeah. So there are a couple of types of responses that I’ve seen. So those two, so I think the demon one becomes a problem. And I don’t think that like, oh, he drove other demons out. Well, those ones could have been doing it in such a way to build this guy up because they were trying to build a fake religion against whatever the true God religion is. Why would God even allow demons to interact to do supernatural things at all would be its own fun question as a response to that. Right? That’s gets into a bigger argument for or against God. But you could say there are multiple types of factions of demons. They don’t all agree. So maybe there’s just one faction of demons that are doing one thing and another faction is doing another, it’s not just two sides necessarily. So you could say that.
John:
And I think you just get into the problem of, well, how do I know which miracles are from God and which ones are from demons? Well as soon as you open that door, that demons have free reign to do what they want supernaturally like that, I think you’ve opened that door and the resurrection argument falls on that ground.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. And I guess my reply to that would be like in a lot of these cases, I think a basic principle we follow to not become high hyper skeptics is things are as they appear unless evidence suggests otherwise. So in your hypothetical example of Catholic priests turning water into wine, and there are these good upstanding Catholic priests who represent one religion, it certainly appears the God of Catholicism is doing this. And unless we had some other evidence otherwise, even though there are other remote possibilities in that regard, with Jesus rising from the dead, I think we can apply a similar example. I guess your concern is, yeah, what do we do with these other miracle claims from other religions?
Trent Horn:
And I think it’d be probably for another discussion, more fruitful to contrast specific claims rather than the generic umbrella, other claims of miracles. Like we have Joseph Smith and others, Muhammad. Because I think what’s in interesting here, and even an atheist could do this, and it might be interesting for an atheist to do this, is to rank the evidences for particular miracle claims, because you could be an atheist who rejects all miracle claims, but recognizes that some have better evidential value than others. And to wonder if any of them do rise above the others. That that would be an interesting question to answer.
John:
Real quick on the first response in terms of the demon thing, as it looks, this was basically on the assumption that you said, well, other miracles happens, but demons did them in other religions. So once you’ve granted that demons can do miracles to make it look like the theological teachings of the person doing it were correct. I think you’ve opened the door. That’s the problem. So you say it is as it appears. Right? Well, you’ve kind of violated that with your example of saying the other miracles are explained by demons doing it. So I think that’s a foundational problem with the demon response.
John:
Your other stuff, you have other responses. That’s why I think the demon’s case is like a doom scenario. Once you’ve brought supernatural deception into play as a factor for explaining why some miracles have happened, everything’s in doubt then. Right?
Trent Horn:
Well, I guess it would depend what we mean by demon. If demon is just a word that just means some other supernatural entity besides God-
John:
Right.
Trent Horn:
And we don’t have an understanding of their motivations or character or goals.
John:
Right. That’s why I say supernatural deception. Right. It doesn’t matter who, it doesn’t no matter who.
Trent Horn:
But I guess my concern would be, it’d be sort of parallel to the super technological aliens and the water into wine. It’s like, if we admit them into the framework, suddenly we can’t get rid of them and they could pop up into any explanation.
John:
Oh, absolutely. That’s why I think it’s so fringe it’s unreasonable. That would basically be the response. You’ve obliviated any kind of, it’s like saying the moon’s made out of green cheese. Oh, well we’ve got moon dust. Well, there’s a rough covering of dust from-
Trent Horn:
Let’s move past the demons. It’s always a good thing to do. But I think that that is something that is worthwhile to investigate, that also atheists could take a look at, in that there are miracle claims that are more evidenced than others. And in doing that, we would then be able to rank them. And so if we have competing miracle claims, the one that’s on top could get more credence, because it’s better attested than all of the others. And so for some theists, they might say, “Well, it’s a resurrection. It passes my threshold.” Atheists might say, “Maybe it’s a resurrection or some other miracle is at the top of the pile, but it’s still nowhere near the threshold.”
John:
So I think the problem with that is that ultimately all these miracles are based on testimonial claims, right? So it’s just like, well, the Bible, like I say, it’s at best, I think the best framing for the biblical case for the resurrection is five guys. You’ve got Paul and the four gospels, right? Paul and I Corinthians and then the four gospel accounts. And that you would say at most I have five different authors, one of whom is not anonymous, who claim that the resurrection happened. And you’ve got a whole bunch of testimony in there, and you could look at the testimony and I don’t want to get into the debate about gospel contradictions or whatever, but you just have five claims. So if I have from however many hundreds of years ago and the gospels were written how many decades after the event, at least by biblical scholars, and you could get into all sorts of debates about how good that testimony is, But at its base, it’s five dudes.
John:
So if I get six dudes or six guys who are on the record and I know who they are, it was documented by a third-party, independent newspaper, published in a, that sort of a thing. Joseph Smith’s thing was published in a newspaper, he healed a woman, right. That’s one of the examples. Sathya Sai Baba, some of the people are still alive who have a testimony, have given testimony about some of his miracles. Right? So if I have that many and that much more, and there’s also the timescale. And I think the timescale works to the Christian’s advantage specifically, because we have a lot of reports of opponents of Smith and Sai Baba and a bunch of others who were like, wow, look at this, look at the ladies, Smith married four women. And he was taken to court over false statements. But then the Mormon apologists were like, well, he was never convicted.
John:
The biblical stuff, it was happening 2,000 years ago. The vast majority of the population wasn’t literate. So let’s pretend these guys did have bad motives that wasn’t really going to get recorded. So I’m not saying they were, but I just don’t know. So a lot of the questions that would happen in the more modern examples, you just wouldn’t get to apply that kind of skepticism that you would apply to the Smith and Sai Baba, which is one avenue I think Christian apologist try to use for the resurrection argument.
Trent Horn:
Okay. So you’re saying that yeah, Christians try to invalidate Smith and other miracle claimants and it’s convenient. We don’t have access to that other kind of damaging testimony in the case of Christian origins.
John:
Right. I think there was some cases of Josephus. Josephus is the first century Jewish historian Josephus. And he had some writings of Christians, but a lot of it was tampered with. We know Christians tampered with that data. And so you might wonder how much of it was-
Trent Horn:
Well, I think a lot of what we would have for opposition testimony would be particularly what we have among the apostolic writings or the early church would be what is preserved or quoted. They’ll say critics are saying this, or you’ll quote a critic and include, we don’t have the writings of the pagan critic Celsus from the early church, but we do have his writings preserved and Origen’s reply to him and things like that.
Trent Horn:
But, okay, so what I’m trying to run through here and to go back to my original framework, you’ve got the wishlist miracle. Yay, I’d love to have that. We don’t have that though. It’s like a fundamentalist who says, “I’ll believe in evolution if you give me a time lapse video of it happening.” I don’t have that. I mean maybe with bacteria in a lab, well, that’s micro, whatever. But I would say it’s pretty impressive.
Trent Horn:
So then it’s like, well let us go down, and because it seems to me, my concern would just be, it’d end up being an arbitrary cutoff for amount of time or number of witnesses. It’s like the heap paradox. When does a few guys turn into a reliable crowd? It always seems like wherever you draw the line in that kind of stuff will be a cutoff rather than just being more open to say, all right, here is the testimony, the claim, the evidential claims. Do other natural hypotheses better explain it, whether it’s non-Christian religions, whether it’s the resurrection. I think that’s something that we should apply and I would be concerned about having a prerequisite of a certain time period or number of people, because I don’t know where we would draw the line there. That’s where I’d be concerned with.
John:
Right. In my personal opinion is I just don’t think testimonial attestations of miracle claims are going to get you to establishing that a miracle happened. I think in principle, that’s what the argument that Hume had originally. I’ve tried to put my spin on it, get you to, and you’re like, I need more than just testimonial miracle claims. It doesn’t matter of that. Now, if you had a contemporary one, like your original example in our discussion here, where you were like, it was witnessed by 500 people. If I told you 500 people saw a miracle, well, you just have one person telling you that. But if I had 500 people and they all saw it, and then you could go interview them, they’re going to make this awesome documentary. And they film one by one by one by one by one. Right. And that these people are doing a tour. You have the contemporary experience is what builds my confidence in that many people witnessing the miracle, because I can go and verify that now. So that’s what makes your contemporary example of a lot of people witnessing a miracle. That was what would build the confidence in that scenario, although I can already see the skeptic objections to that. And I might even be one of them. I don’t know. It depends on the quality of the evidence and the type of claim.
Trent Horn:
I want to go back to your water-wine example, because I think what’s interesting is what we can do with some of these cases. We start whittling things down to get to that threshold.
John:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn:
So what if it was not automatic, but 5% of the time priests can turn water into wine. I would still find that to be incredibly persuasive.
John:
I think so. So if you did it in the control conditions and five out of a hundred times, it happened, but it only ever happened with Catholic priests, hey, cool.
Trent Horn:
So obviously there is interesting, so we don’t necessarily need automatic. There just has to be definable statistical correlation.
John:
I mean-
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:50:04]
Trent Horn:
… To be definable statistical correlation.
John:
I mean sort of, yeah. I think once you have it happen and I can at least capture the miracle occurring, right? And I eliminate all the other… That’s the whole point of the empirical verifiability, is science gets to rule out everything else. Once you have it at a statistical rate, now I can still do all the science that I do in the first scenario, right?
Trent Horn:
(AfOkay. So it would just change, our claim is just not, it’s not automatic. It’s just, it’s statistical…
John:
Statistical correlation.
Trent Horn:
… With that.
John:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
And it sounds like you’d want something. You’ve picked matter, it’s not really transformation, it’s like trans-elementation, essentially.
John:
Sure, you’re adding molecules or you’re changing the atom… You’re changing….
Trent Horn:
Yeah.
John:
You’re you’re adding a bunch of stuff which would violate all sorts of physical stuff in terms of conservation of energy.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Because I guess my concern going back to the original video is, so we’re still in a… we want to be in a place where I know no natural cause not…
John:
Right.
Trent Horn:
… I don’t know the natural cause.
John:
Correct.
Trent Horn:
Because, suppose I gave another example, let’s say we could scientifically prove that members of a certain native American tribe, you take them places, they can use a dousing rod and always find water. Other people it’s 50/50 chance. But when they do it, it’s 80, 90% accuracy. They can find water no matter where you take them and it’s repeatable and you ask them, how do you do this? They say, “Well, I asked the great spirit, and he leads me to the water.” There, you might be a bit more like, “Well maybe these particular tribe has some weird, natural connection to water underground we don’t understand.” So there it seems there’s more room for “I don’t know”.
John:
Yeah. So you could start… I think given enough time and if it actually is a… If it’s actually miraculous, science can start eliminating… The methods of science can start eliminating the natural cause hypothesis…
Trent Horn:
(Affirmative).
John:
At least… As long as you don’t tailor the thought experiment such that you can’t know, right. So in my original video about the resurrection, I talk about verifiable miracles and unverifiable miracles. There’s a big difference.
Trent Horn:
(Affirmative).
John:
So, a good example, momentum and position of a particle. So, Higgs uncertainty principle says, I can’t know… If I know the momentum, I can’t know the position or something…
Trent Horn:
You mean Heisenberg?
John:
Heisenberg’s, yes.
Trent Horn:
Yes.
John:
Sorry. I need more coffee.
Trent Horn:
Don’t me all.
John:
Yeah. And so if I… It would be a miracle if like Jesus showed up and told me the opposite value. Right. But I could never verify it. Right. I would never be able to know if it was correct. Right. Even if it was physically impossible for that. So you’ve made a miracle that’s unverifiable in principle. But so the reason I picked the one I did was it’s a… It has to be something verifiable. Right. I have to know… I can… You can capture the magic so to speak.
Trent Horn:
(Affirmative).
John:
Right. I can see it happen.
Trent Horn:
Okay. Yeah. So running through this a little bit. And so, you’ve picked an example of trans-elementation, it’s pretty hard to think of any other natural cause or something like that, though… and I would feel the same way if you observed someone coming back from the dead, it seems to involve trans-elementation…
John:
Oh sure.
Trent Horn:
Although with resurrection claims, we’re not directly observing the corpse being restored to glorious life. As you said, we’re relying on the testimonies of that happening.
John:
So, important point. The resurrection of Jesus, if it occurred, was verifiable to the people who knew Jesus and saw him die.
Trent Horn:
(Affirmative).
John:
Right. And like Thomas. So the doubting Thomas thing is a big influence that kind of got me down this line of argumentation, right. Where doubting Thomas got to stick his… He got to touch the wounds.
Trent Horn:
Well, you know what’s interesting, in the end of John’s gospel, in that narrative, it never actually describes Thomas putting his hands in the wounds.
John:
I could just be misremembering then.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. I’ve always found that to be an interesting…
John:
He invites him to at least doesn’t he?
Trent Horn:
Yes. Yeah. He says, “Unless I see the handprint of the nails, place my finger in the mark of the nails, I will not believe.” He said, “Thomas, put your finger here, see my hands, put out your hand placed on my side, do not be faithless, but believing.” So he does make the invitation.
John:
Yes. Yes.
Trent Horn:
And then it… but never says Thomas does…
John:
It never said Thomas does that, but Thomas believes. Right. So it’s sort of inferred, at least.
Trent Horn:
Oh yeah. That’s one way. I will say that it does not explicitly say that he did. It just says that he… And Thomas… It says, “He said to Thomas and then Thomas answered him, “my Lord and my God””.
John:
Right.
Trent Horn:
But, yeah…
John:
That’s seeing him though. Right. There’s a difference. So Thomas knew he was crucified. Thomas goes, “This is Jesus”. Right.
Trent Horn:
(Affirmative).
John:
And then all of a sudden Jesus is there talking to him, because Thomas at that point had not seen Jesus’ body yet, the risen Jesus yet, in the narrative. He had just heard all the other disciples, apostles telling him that they had seen him. And that’s why…
Trent Horn:
Right. And then Jesus…
John:
Jesus first appears and is like, “He touched my hand. What do you want?”
Trent Horn:
Well, I guess the lesson I drive from this is when Jesus says in the next verse, “Have you believed because you’ve seen me, blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” Now, the cynical interpretation is this is the apologist catchall for the very objection that you are raising here.
John:
Right.
Trent Horn:
And for me, the more… The less cynical interpretation is that in seeing Jesus, Thomas certainly had abundant, overly abundant evidence. But prior to that, he had sufficient evidence in the reliable testimony of people he knew. And everyone else who will come to believe in Jesus will have to rely on sufficient, rather than abundant, evidence. And so I think that is my goal. I get my dialogue here with you, which I’m definitely enjoying so far. There is that difference between wishlist abundant, desirable to what counts as sufficient and what’s hard is once we try to figure out sufficient, people are going to have significant disagreements about what where the lowest level lies.
John:
Right. And I think we can argue all day about whether or not Thomas had sufficient evidence or not in that situation.
Trent Horn:
Sure.
John:
Right. And that’s going to be a very parallel to our current discussion and disagreements on the resurrection as it is right now. I think though, there is… So there’s an actual extra argument there because you would say an all loving God would give equal epistemic access to believe. Now I say, I would convert. If Catholic priests started doing this tomorrow, I’m back baby. Right? All of the theodicies that I find implausible to answer my atheistic arguments. Now I got evidence to back up, “Hey, I got to take that”. Whatever the Catholic, theodicy is, problem of evil, [inaudible 00:57:03], everything else, right, now I’ve got something to make me accept it. Thomas got that. Thomas got that huge high watermark. And if God is all loving, and God loves all people equally, God would give equal epistemic access. So the fact that Thomas got it, right, and I didn’t, or a variety of other people in my position don’t get it is its own argument against an omnibenevolent, omni-loving God existing. I think…
Trent Horn:
The argument from non-belief or divine hiddenness…
John:
It’s very much akin, I think.
Trent Horn:
(Affirmative).
John:
And I think there’s a tension between the hiddenness argument and responses to it and the resurrection argument itself. Because if you’re trying to point to it, like, “Oh, look at this, I got this historical criteria, criteria of embarrassment…” The standard overly confident presentation of the resurrection argument. But then you say, “Well, God wants to give people room to not believe”, there’s a tension there.
Trent Horn:
Oh yeah, no, I agree that if you can’t hold with “God gives us freedom to disbelieve” and “The evidence is so strong, only a crazy person would deny it.” I would not say the evidence reaches that level of self evidence, but I do think the evidence is sufficient. So without going down the path… Well, with divine hiddenness, I will say, an epistemic distance to freely choose to follow or believe I do think is a part of answering the problem of divine hiddenness, but like the problem of evil, it’s a multifaceted response for it to be satisfying, which would be a different discussion.
John:
Yes.
Trent Horn:
Your point though about equal epistemic access. I don’t think that’s necessarily required, that for God to be all loving, he does not have to give… Treat us all the same way. He would just have to give us all an equal opportunity, right? It’s not equal outcome, equal opportunity. We all have at least sufficient grace or evidence to be able to come to him. And some people may get a lot more, but it doesn’t mean that I need that it. From a personal example, I lack deeply intense, emotional religious experiences. If I were to have… And I’ve had people tell… Well, I’ve had family members from my other side of my family…. Well actually from my family too, my mom is an ex-Catholic, my dad is Jewish. But my mom told me about my grandmother having these almost veritical religious experiences. And I’m like, “Man I…” Because, I’ve got the proof, so I’ve got the evidences, but if I had a golden shining light in front of me filling a room when I’m praying, I would be even more convinced than I am now, but I’ve not been given that.
Trent Horn:
But I don’t think God has chinced me in that I would’ve really enjoyed dessert with dinner. I didn’t get it.
John:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
I still got enough. Now the reply, so funny, I don’t want to take away from you. You would say well, I didn’t need even get dinner because I just have chicken bones. I don’t have enough to believe. I’m like, “Well it may be there.” I do think that one of the answers to divine hiddenness is that it is related to… A better response to divine hiddenness, one that needs to be explored I think, is that it divine hiddenness is sort of like a problem of evil. It’s a kind of evil.
John:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
But it’s not a positive evil, like suffering. It’s more of the evil of the absence of God that should be there. And so it’s like, why would God let there be this evil situation of people not knowing him? And one of the classic replies to the problem of evil is, why have… God gives us free will, there’s evil because God can make us all do the right thing, but that’d be a great cost. It’s good to have free will. And I think that you can make a parallel there in that just as God gives us moral freedom and that can result in moral errors, God also gives us epistemic freedom. And in that epistemic freedom, we want to make many epistemic errors in this respect. And not just about God, but about lots of things, we make this, but I think God wants to step back and let us have that freedom. And you can have those consequences. That’s something I think might also need to be explored in that area.
John:
Yeah, so my problem with, like you say, you don’t… You want equality of opportunity. It’s more along the lines of, it’s similar to what you said my response would be, in that, well… Look, if I would believe because I had this empirically verifiable miracle and Thomas got an empirically verifiable miracle, to give me equal opportunity, right. It said Thomas believed because you have seen, I would believe because I have seen. Give me the equal opportunity. Right. I say I would at least right. You could always throw that back, although that’s extraordinarily unconvincing and it’s terrifying that some mythologists think that’s a good thing to say like, “Well you said he’d believe, but he wouldn’t.”
John:
That would be a way for me to definitively know your apologetic is wrong.
Trent Horn:
Right.
John:
But the second factor is I don’t… So it’s sort of like a free will defense, I agree. You can give that as a response, like an epistemic freedom, I see the parallel you’re making there, I think there’s a problem with that and I generally, why I find the free will defense lacking, is well, God doesn’t have moral free will. Right. What’s so good about moral free will in the first place. If God… Literally, if you take the necessity of God’s omnibenevolence seriously as you do, well then necessarily, God cannot sin, right. Necessarily, God cannot be wrong about something.
Trent Horn:
Right.
John:
Why is it suddenly good that there’s… In my opinion, one of the best arguments for atheism is, if God existed, we would just exist in heaven from the get go. There would only be created beings of a nature such that they would always freely choose to do the good if freely choosing the good even in itself a thing. Right. I just happened to think that…
Trent Horn:
Yeah, and I guess my…
John:
And we would get you… It goes into, we start having that debate, right. We start debating… We start having a debate over the value of the free will theodicy or free will itself.
Trent Horn:
(Affirmative).
John:
So we were just exchanging one argument for the next almost…
Trent Horn:
Sure. There is…
John:
It’s where we go.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, but for me, if someone finds the free will defense at least plausible in some respects for evil…
John:
Absolutely.
Trent Horn:
… It could be transitioned over into divine hiddenness as well. And my reply to those thoughts there, I want to reply to that on evil and then I had a thought about what would convince you, I want what Thomas had, is that when it comes to… Shoot, the train jumped the tracks again, I was also up late last night with the kiddos, but that is all right… Oh, with evil, yeah, and my reply is short on the evil thing is that God… It doesn’t make sense to apply terms like “does God have free will?”, “is God good”, as if it’s a predicate, because at least as a classical theist, I would say that God is not a being with special powers, God is the ground of being. God’s goodness flows naturally from the fact that he is infinite being, and badness is an absence of being that takes… But that’s all I want to say there, because that would take us to…
John:
Oh yes.
Trent Horn:
A far field.
Trent Horn:
So, but going back with you, I want what Thomas, had that would convince me. It seems there’s… When it comes to what would convince a person, there’s two routes you could take. You could have a… It would convince me it’s like a, you could be irrational and non-rational. It’s like, I just have a gut feeling. I just know deep down, you better believe it. And another would be, well, it would meet this certain rational test of sufficient evidence that is developed. So my concern would be with some atheist having the, relying on the gut feeling and think this comes about, I’ve heard this reply, I’m not sure what your thought is, to the question “hat would take for you to believe?” I know Matt [inaudible 01:05:19] says this a lot.
John:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
I don’t know what would convince me, but God knows and he could show it to me and then I would believe.
John:
Right.
Trent Horn:
And I get concerned about that reply because it makes it sound like, okay, so you, what would convince you is just seeing the convincing evidence and it flips like this switch inside of you. It seems like we’ve jumped over, it’s got to have this certain kind of evidence or this kind of… It either has to be this kind of an argument or this kind of testimonial evidence. It reminds me of the person who says there’s no good women out there to marry. Well, what would be a good woman to marry? I don’t know, if you show her to her, I’ll marry her. If you show me, I’ll marry her. Maybe you’ve set the standard so high, it’s a bit unreasonable. So you see where I’m saying to put the evidence. You could either have this gut feeling, I see it, it convinces me, but it feels like now we’re just kind of into feelings versus it’s got to be this kind of a valid argument or this specific kind of testimony. And there’s a reason it’s this specific kind of testimony and not others.
John:
So I think the… There are… I appreciate [inaudible 01:06:29] sort of response there, right? Because you… like you said, “Oh, I got this feeling versus it needs to be this amount or where you draw that line is always going to be subjective.” Right. So obviously you find the Thomastic metaphysics and to be specific, particularly convincing and then there are all the arguments of flow from once you’ve accepted the metaphysics to get you towards Catholicism specifically, whereas I don’t, right. It’s all quite… Where I draw my line might be different than where you’re going to draw your line other people’s. And so that’s why I appreciate [inaudible 01:06:59] thing is to go, well look, it’s going to be subjective, no matter what I do, where I draw the line or gut feeling or not, it’s still sort of going to be person relative in terms of epistemic access.
John:
And I think that’s… A problem in epistemology in general is the relative… There is some level of relativity in terms of what we accept as rational, and reasonable, so to speak. So that’s why [inaudible 01:07:20] thing is like, “Look, wherever that line is for me specifically, God knows what it is and God can meet it.” Right. And so it’s always going to be a subjective thing in terms of what it’s going to take to convince any specific person. So I went the different route, whereas I said, look, here’s this thought experiment of what would get me there. And here it is, right, because this is objectively…
John:
It’s at least something objective. It’s not just my subjective experience. What I personally find convicting is that, hey look, you could witness this supernatural thing occur and we all have access to it equally.
Trent Horn:
Sure.
John:
Right. In the repeatable sense. And so that’s why I tried to draw the line at least up here and say look, this is what would do it for me specifically to get rid of all of my skeptical doubts. Right. Because the testimony, I think, is flawed and this gets around the testimony problem. Right. And so I was trying to find a way around it.
Trent Horn:
Right. So then it would be shifting back, what about something that’s happened in the past? And I think you even said earlier in our conversation, if there were sufficient amounts of testimony for a past event, it could also be justified. We would just need a significant amount of that testimony.
John:
Yeah. And it’s also the contemporary. The distance matters because then I get to start interviewing those people. I get to start talking to them. Right. So just like when Paul says that you appear to 500. Well, I think sometimes some apologists go like a little too ham with that like, “Oh, these people could have gone and investigated.” There were no names. There’s no… if I told you 500 people saw me fly around my room. Right. That’s that doesn’t do much. Right. So the contemporaries experience…
Trent Horn:
Unless you’re able… unless you’re very close, unless you’re a close-knit community. If Christians were close-knit at that time to go and there’s a house church in Corinth and…
John:
So I think there’s definitely some problems there in terms of distance and could I really go there and verify it and then get back and tell the other people like, “Yes, I saw it.” Right, so that itself is a problem but the… If I had some major miracle happened and I had enough witnesses to it, perhaps it might be convincing, especially if there’s a lot of people who converted on the basis of…
Trent Horn:
Let me just jump in at something about convincing and you’re saying now talking about being subjective. Because it seems interesting to me, maybe we should be concerned that we are approaching a question of did X happen? Is this enough evidence to believe in X? And you said, “Well, for everyone it’s going to be subjective as to what is convincing to them or not.” But it seems kind of odd that we approach the question with almost a certain tolerance level or appetite for evidence that we did not choose for ourselves. Maybe we have…
Trent Horn:
Some people might have conditioned themselves to be critical thinkers or not, but I would be kind of concerned there that it’s like, well, does it pass what innately I find convincing or not? What if my innate sense of what is convincing or enough, convincing or not, is maladjusted. It’s either too low and I’m gullible…
John:
Sure.
Trent Horn:
… Or it’s too high and I’m overly skeptical.
John:
Skeptical.
Trent Horn:
So I would be concerned about approaching these questions as if the barometer of what convinces me is totally fine when that… When especially it’s something we didn’t choose and we kind of have these internal feelings about, maybe that needs to be adjusted because we kind of just have it and we approach the question. Maybe we need to recalibrate that. Does that make sense?
John:
I could certainly see the concern you’re bringing up. Right. So yes, I could have set the standard just too high or too low. And it is ultimately… This is a problem in epistemology in terms of well, what makes things reasonable? And then when you get into generally the very popular views on epistemology, they have a lot of relativity play in them. You can have a lot of things that it was reasonable to believe, however long ago that the earth was flat or that the earth was the center of the universe. Right. It was a reasonable thing to believe given the information that they had. So, reasonableness doesn’t… I don’t think it’s a great, very useful metric, right? So, part of the problem that you’re… We have right now is…
Trent Horn:
It’s good place to start.
John:
It is a good place to start, I suppose, I’m not saying Christians are unreasonable. I don’t think that… I think if you’re going to get to the reasonability of Christianity, it’s much more going to be on this sort of planning a style properly, basic belief, sort of a thing, not the resurrection argument. Right. So if you were going to tell me, and I even said this on my video, if you were going to tell me, I believe the resurrection, because I have a properly basic belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Right? Fine. I’m not saying you’re irrational. Right. I’m just saying the resurrection argument isn’t doing the work.
Trent Horn:
Right. A person could know something is true without being able to show its true to others.
John:
I mean, yeah. How do I know you exist? Right. This is [inaudible 01:12:30] other minds and memory, right? You can’t… So these are foundational epistemological problems. I can’t validate memory without appealing a memory sense experience without appealing the sense experience, all sorts of these things. Right. And so you could put religion there, right? And there’s all sorts of responses to that. It’s a side conversation. I guess the important thing…
Trent Horn:
Go ahead.
John:
…That we… To note about this, about where our standards are, is that… The part of the problem is because we’re talking about miracles, right? Miracles are miracles because we have a regular experience of the natural world. And if you don’t have a regular experience of the natural world, you can’t have a miracle. Right? [crosstalk 01:13:06].
Trent Horn:
… The example I’ve used to show people that is the reason you can see an orange life jacket in the ocean is because the rest of it’s blue, it stands out. But if the world was not lawfully regular and you had, if there were irregular things all the time, the miracle wouldn’t stand out very well.
John:
Right. Right. So when you talk about what’s reasonable to accept as your standard of proof for a miracle, it’s just going to be a fraught problem when you don’t have contemporary experiences of miracles, which is kind of why I went the way I did.
Trent Horn:
Well, you don’t have…
John:
Verifiable… that’s where it becomes important.
Trent Horn:
You don’t have a universal consent on it. There’s people who claim to have been subject to miraculous healings and other events that have happened without recordings of it.
John:
Absolutely. But that’s so wide. So the problem is then you get into the widespread problem. Right. So it’s sort of a bifold thing. Right. And so that’s where I kind of got into this. So you have this bifurcation of you either accept the miracles, but then you have to accept all sorts of other ones. Right. And then the theological problem comes up.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. And then…
John:
Or you’re going to reject them.
Trent Horn:
And that’s the problem with evidential parity, which I should, maybe I’ll address that. Well, I’ll address that in my book, at least the chapter, and then maybe people can discuss it when it when it comes out. I want to, one or two other things, and then we’ll close here, but this is super fun. We’ll have to do it again.
John:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
The other… I wanted to bring up, because this is something I thought about doing a video on soon and I probably will, I brought up intercesory prayer studies before as the closest we can get to trying to do it… Now the problem here is that the body is weird and sometimes it heals things without us knowing exactly how so it gets harder to demonstrate what’s going on there. But the idea that you pray and then you notice healings of seeing this causal effect…
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:15:04]
Trent Horn:
… Notice healings of seeing this causal effect. Here are my thoughts on some of the closest, “Hey, repeatable, empirically verifiable stuff’s going on.” And this goes back to when I asked you about the wine, like what if it was only 5% of the time? You said, “Oh, it’s still five out of a hundred. That’s really good.”
Trent Horn:
When I read articles on prayer studies, most of them say, “The vast majority of studies show there is no difference between patients that are prayed for and patients that aren’t. Only in a small minority of cases do we see a positive outcome.” I have one here from the Annals of Internal Medicine, looked at 23 studies: 13 showed a positive result, 9 showed no effect, 1 showed negative, people got worse when they were prayed for. But it seems to me if we’re saying, “Oh, wow, in most studies of prayer, we don’t see anything. But wait, there are these ones that do show something happens.”
Trent Horn:
We’re doing an experiment here on an agent, right? That’s the other problem with empirical verifiable. If we’re testing whether a certain force exists, the force always has to act. If it’s gravity, it can’t just decide, “I don’t feel like doing it today.” It’s got to always act. But if God is an agent, then it seems like he can always say, “No, I’m not going to.” So, when he doesn’t show up, that can be explained as in he didn’t feel like showing up. It’s more problematic, what about the minority of cases where he did? That’s more like…
John:
There’s two important responses. I’m going to go with the most important one first. The thing about, oh, as an agent, and you can’t expect God to just do this stuff on demand. Well, that’s not exactly I think a good response because you think God does respond in a mechanistic way to our sort of religious invocations, right? So, you would say…
Trent Horn:
Like what? What do you mean?
John:
I got you. So, you’re a Catholic. You believe that when the priest consecrates the Eucharist, the accidents stay the same, but the substance changes every time.
Trent Horn:
Right. Yes.
John:
That’s God acting, right? So, you have a metaphysical view, right?
Trent Horn:
Right.
John:
And so that is God acting in a specific response to the Eucharist.
Trent Horn:
Right.
John:
If I was to pray the Savior’s Prayer, and I’m a Protestant. It’s a different world. But God saves me, there’s a process of sanctification that is gone with. And so I think Catholics specifically have the problem because you do think that God does act in this very mechanistic way to a specific kind of action by a Catholic priest. And so I’m using the same exact thing, but with a verifiable way, so it’s just the accidents and the substance changes or perhaps…
Trent Horn:
Yeah, I don’t. Because here’s my thing, I wouldn’t say he’s acting in a mechanistic way.
John:
But he is just faithfully acting in response to our [crosstalk 01:17:52]
Trent Horn:
I believe an agent could choose to act on some occasions and not others, or an agent could choose to always act under certain circumstances. And so as a Catholic with sacramental theology, I would say that God is publicly revealed and promised that when these conditions are met, grace will be imparted to someone and has promised to act in consist ways in this regard. But when it comes to other things like requests for prayer. Asking God to perform a certain act that he has not promised to always do, like heal someone for example.
John:
Sure.
Trent Horn:
There he has the freedom to respond or not. It’d be like you could have a moral agent that promises to always review appeals that are brought to him like a judge that will always review an appeal, brought to him for clemency, but not grant clemency every time.
John:
Sure.
Trent Horn:
I think there, to go back. Yeah, if God were just a force, the fact that when we test the force, it doesn’t show up; that would be problematic. And if we were testing him, if somehow we could scientifically detect whether the Eucharist has changed and it only changed 5% of the time we’d have a problem. But if it’s in a format where God as an agent; we’re not testing whether he has promised to do it every time, but just if he does interact with it… I try to think of another example, it’d be like if we had a question, does Celebrity X donate to GoFundMes? And you might say, “Well, look, you did a hundred GoFundMes, he didn’t donate to 90 of them.” Well, he donated to these five, he just doesn’t donate to all of them. That’s what I kind of think with the whole thing about… The studies that show correlation with prayer and healing, that to me seems like a big deal even if the vast majority don’t show anything, but you said you had two responses.
John:
Yeah, so the first response was like, “I don’t think you can…” If you try to wave away the water to wine thing, with like, “Oh, he’s an agent.” I don’t think that works for the reason I stated, right? If he says, “Hey, I’m always going to do this as a sign, then you’re good.” The same thing as salvation, Eucharist, whatever. The second thing about the prayer thing is if you… A lot of the times, when you say, “Well, these prayer stories aren’t valid just because so many of them show no effect at all.” I know William Lane Craig has a famous quote where he’s just like, “God will not let himself be trapped in the statistician’s data.” Atheists like to use these studies to be like, see there’s no God. And then the response is to make it sort of like it’s unfalsifiable. Hey, he’s an agent. He’s not going to do it.
John:
And so that cuts both ways. When you say, “Hey, here, I did this study and this control group, and I tried to make this randomized thing, and I do pray for these and pray for not.” That could just be chance in terms of those sorts of things where, “Hey, look, this group of people just got better, and the statistical controls weren’t good enough.” I think in order for it to be this kind of evidence… I had a conversation on the same topic with some other apologists, and they were like, “Well, what if the press study showed a positive correlation of Christian prayer versus not?” And I’m like, “All right, that’s evidence.” Even if it was just a statistical thing and it was consistent. Okay, great, I’m in.
Trent Horn:
Well, there would be a difference though between one study with a certain number of people to try to exclude chance versus a meta study that would look at all of the studies.
John:
Right. But so, when you do the meta study, you still end up like, “Oh, well, some of these studies did show the positive, but then a vast majority didn’t right.” That’s not showing you much. Like it just says, “Hey, some of these studies, the fluke happened where it went this way.” Healings specifically are what I classified as the unverifiable miracle, because like you said, the body does just heal. Like cancer does just spontaneously go into remission in a variety of things. So, to say, well, it happened here because I prayed versus it happening to just somebody who’s an atheist somewhere. It doesn’t have family that’s praying for them, and they didn’t even know.
Trent Horn:
Oh, well, what’s hard for me is… I bring this up because I’m not totally settled about how to approach this. I do think that it’s possible for individual studies or small cohorts to avoid, well, it’s a statistical fluke, there’s no correlation between the behavior or not.
Trent Horn:
I do think though that personally for me… so I want to explore this because I never really thought that prayer studies are great evidence for God, because my previous thought was that you really can’t do a scientific experiment in this regard for two reasons. One, is that because God is omniscient, it’s not double blind. So, God can choose to not participate because he doesn’t feel… It’s not double blind on the being we are doing the experiment on. And then number two would be you can’t get a control group. The control group would be a group that is not being prayed for at all. But how are you going to do that?
John:
How do you know that? Right.
Trent Horn:
Watch. Lord, please heal anyone who’s really hurting right now.
John:
Yep.
Trent Horn:
It sucks to you, prayer studies, I just penetrated the control group.
John:
Yes. I agree, so I actually don’t like those. When you want to do that, the only time I bring those kinds of studies up and it’s like, “Oh, it’s nope.” It’s like a placebo. Is when somebody tries to tell me that look at all these prayed for healings, I would use that as a count her in that respect. But I would agree that trying to use like, “Hey, look, statistically prayers no different than a placebo,” is not great evidence in terms of arguing for atheism, I think.
Trent Horn:
Right. And that’s why I haven’t been as keen to them, and that’s why I want to explore the topic more to see that, that for me, if the individual studies that show in effect cannot be explained by just statistical variance or fluke; the ones that don’t show an effect, I don’t think because we’re dealing with an agent that is not always going to act, that’s the research I would like to do to see, all right, are these other studies that show an effect, can they be explained just by it happens to be placebo, and it’s a chance occurrence of placebo or other natural cause with prayer or is there enough people involved or enough of those studies to show the correlation? Like for me, I’m not going to answer the question by just getting the omni meta study of every prayer study ever done and tallying them up, I don’t think that’s necessary. I am wondering about the quality of the ones that do show the variance.
John:
One of the problems, once you bring statistical analysis into the picture, everything gets a mess, and a lot of people start poking holes in the methodology of the studies, because there were some that were done and eventually it was like, “Oh, look at this, it’s positive statistical evidence.” And then those methodologies, they’re like, “Hey look, they had a flawed methodology.” And so you go pick apart the individual study, you start finding methodological problems. I see a lot of this happens when people like skeptics respond to these sorts of things, because specific ones that do have the positive correlation get brought up and then they just get picked apart. So, I think the healing thing and prayer for healing becomes a huge problem.
John:
One of the key things about, like my thought experiment, it’s not world changing. If all of a sudden Christians could just pray for people, and then statistically people who got prayed for by Christians got better, that’s messing with the whole order of God’s natural plan. Assuming I’m a theist, people need to die in order for this world. If there is a God and he has this theodicy…
Trent Horn:
That’s assuming Christians could always pray and heal someone automatically.
John:
Or even if it was statistical, even if it was a positive in some statistical way, just go with it. Once you have the power, and that God will respond positively to my prayers as a Christian, once you’ve established it at all, 5%. If 55% of the prayers work and…
Trent Horn:
I wouldn’t say it doesn’t mess with the natural order, it makes the natural order much deeper and richer than we might realize. But our ability to affect it would still be small in comparison to the almighty. Well, I’ll let you have one last thought and then I have more of a fun question.
John:
Ah, just go to the fun question.
Trent Horn:
A fun question. The fun question is this, another thing I’ve started to look at that I find funny with atheism. I feel like sometimes you can take the atheist out of religion, but you can’t take the religion out of the atheist. Like atheists will criticize Christians, “Look at these people that just do what their Church says, and they’re not free thinkers. They don’t think for themselves.” And yet, when somebody says they’re a Catholic, just says, I’m like, “What religion are you?” “I’m Catholic.” I actually don’t know a lot about what their political beliefs might be or what their personal beliefs are, it’s pretty widely varied. You’ve got, I mean, is he a Joe Biden Catholic, is he a Rick Santorum Catholic?
John:
That’s because you’ve got variance in your denomination. If you’re a [inaudible 01:27:19] protestant…
Trent Horn:
There’s other denominations where it’s very, very narrow.
John:
90%. Yeah.
Trent Horn:
But when somebody says, I am an atheist, and it’s like they want the blunt term, usually there’s a high correlation of particular social political beliefs, so much so that people can get kind of stereotyped, but there’s a lot of correlation there in atheism that… And that’s where I say it’s like the group thinks still ends up in there, even if you criticize religious people for doing that. And I bring it up because I’ve always enjoyed your social media posts, you’re kind of more of a second amendment guy, right?
John:
Two years ago, I became a first time gun-owner because of the pandemic and a spike in crime. So yes, I am normally a card carrying liberal except for second amendment. Although, I’ve had my liberal friends tell me I’m a boot licking fascist, and I’ve had my conservative friends tell me I’m a wild hippy Bernie socialist.
Trent Horn:
That was interesting that you, because of the pandemic. Yeah, we moved out of California for one of those reasons. It was actually before the pandemic, it was when they had the racial protests. The protests where I live got out of hand and they burnt down two banks and people were like…
John:
I’m out. Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Then I was like, I had our car… Because they burnt down the bank, they set them on fire and no one went to do anything. I was watching on my phone, and I was watching the live YouTube stream of like a mile from my house, people were running into Target, running into the stores, looting, breaking things. That was a mile. And so I had like the car packed. I had the gun next to me. Laura was like, “What are we going to do?” And I’m like, “Look, if I see on the YouTube stream, they come into our neighborhood, we’re getting into the van and we’re driving and nothing is going to stop us, basically. And so, it’s just interesting to me because you can get flack from other… Like when people think of an atheist, they think of just your staunch dyed in the wool liberal, but I always found it interesting to see like, “Nope, if you’re going to be a free thinker, you got to be free to think about lots of things.”
John:
There’s a joke there, if you go far enough left, you get your guns back, right? Not that I’m a Marxist, it’s just another one where I depart. You are correct, in that there is… A lot of the new atheism was a response to very conservative Christians and pushing intelligent design in public schools and that sort of a fight. And then, after they won that fight basically. [inaudible 01:29:46] trial, we won that fight, and it looked like liberalism was on ascendancy and the new atheist movement was going strong, and then Obama went in and everybody kind of got complacent and then the fishers developed. So, if you look at the atheism community, they’ll talk about the deep riffs. There was a huge factoring in terms of this, it was over feminism primarily actually.
Trent Horn:
Yes. I remember those days. Do you remember when people wanted to do atheism plus?
John:
I do remember that. Yes.
Trent Horn:
What a pretentious name. We’re a plus.
John:
Look, so I’m going to… A lot of what they wanted there in the plus was, yeah, I was generally more on the sign of… One of the things that scared me was… When I became an atheist was actually right before I became a parent, and so I’m not going to no convention, I got a kid at home, I’m not going to leave my wife home with a kid while I go to some atheist con and fly across the country.
Trent Horn:
Right.
John:
And then you find out, you look at these atheist cons and it’s like, these people were doing some pretty crazy stuff. There was all sorts of sexual things happening, which like, all right, fine, if you’re consenting, that’s fine. But then there was a lot of really bad things of high prominent atheists assaulting young women.
Trent Horn:
Yeah.
John:
No, you’re not supposed to do that. And they’re like, “Oh, you guys are killing our vibe.” And it’s fine if this prominent atheist gets this 22 year old girl a whole bunch of drinks and takes her up to a room, and then something happens.
Trent Horn:
It’s my guy. It’s different.
John:
No, so I wasn’t like all gung-ho like, “Let’s be atheism plus.” But at the same time, I’m like, “They had the better point of that.” I think the branding was weird.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Well, what they wanted to do was try to…
John:
There were problems in that.
Trent Horn:
Well, there was the big debate. It’s like, “What is atheism? I just don’t believe in God.” And we should also be committed to these justice principles and social justice principles.
John:
Absolutely.
Trent Horn:
And you get the people who will say, “That’s for you, but that’s not what…”
John:
Yeah, so atheism doesn’t entail any of that. I think what happened was that the right wing… And so this is very centered on America and certain other Western democracies in that the right wing politically is very closely associated and tied themselves to the hitch of the white evangelical Christian or white Christian movement. I used to be and the Protestants hated the Catholics. Back in the eighties, you guys hated each other. And then we were the barbarian at the gates that united you guys.
Trent Horn:
This is true.
John:
You guys are getting better along. I was a Catholic. My grandparents are from Sicily.
Trent Horn:
Oh wow.
John:
My grandfather came here in the early 1900s. He was not white. My parents were white, and I’m very white. The thing changed, they hated the Catholics. My parents converted when I was eight from Catholicism to being Baptist, actually.
Trent Horn:
I see.
John:
The thing was that to just be an atheist was to almost pull you out of the Republican party. Now, the Republican party is starting to at least take in some of these non… you don’t have to be a hyper conservative Christian that’s factioned…
Trent Horn:
We’re starting to see more people, I think, who are non… Give me your thoughts on this. Because for me, I want to share the truth with people. I don’t want to manipulate people or take advantage of them, but sometimes truth comes to people in different ways and different starting points. I think we’re starting to see more non-religious people who are disillusioned by kind of an overwrought liberalism that… They’re non-religious, but they gravitate towards conservative principles, like they enjoy free markets, they like listening to Jordan Peterson, and so they get into the right wing, so to speak, through that kind of a framework because their disillusioned with more far left stuff.
John:
Sure. There’s all sorts of different things on the left, and I am still primarily on the left, although I live in New Jersey. And if there’s anything that’s going to make you dissatisfied with the Democrat party is to look at the overwhelming corruption that exists in the party. It wouldn’t matter if it’s Republican or Democrat, if your state has it such that you would just have one party as one party rule, corruption is rampant.
John:
Just voting straight D is not going to be in the cards for me, because of in certain specific races, the amount of corruption; there’s literally a political machine that is finally starting to break down a little bit in my specific part of New Jersey. But even when I voted, I voted for Biden, I donated to Biden, but I voted Republican in my local election. They lost because now my town seems to have flipped. But the people who were in charge, they made my town… We made lists in Money Magazine as a great place to live. And the Republicans were in charge of this town for like 30 years, and I met the Mayor. I know these guys, and it wasn’t really a very partisan thing, but Trump turned everybody away from being Republican in my area. That is a very scary thing in its own right. In terms of just hyper partisan, not thinking about individual candidates, individual elections.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, and we should apply that to close it all up with what we are discussing.
John:
Yes.
Trent Horn:
I think it’s important whether you’re Christian or atheist to avoid tribalism and partisanship. The goal is you should look at the evidence, follow an argument, follow it’s reasoning, and it may lead you to a conclusion very different from what you believe before or what others you are associated with believe. But that’s important, what it’s there to follow and to make sure you have good reasons underlining what you believe. And I think that’s the common ground between the two of us right now.
John:
Don’t get sucked into tribalism. Don’t take a position just because my tribe takes that. Or at least don’t defend it to the death. Be open minded. You can’t be an expert on everything, so this is why parties are useful; but at the same time, be willing to explore things on the merits.
Trent Horn:
I agree. Well, thank you very much, sir. Where can people go to learn more about your work?
John:
On YouTube, search for counter apologist? I do have a blog, it’s just almost always a mirror of my YouTube posts. But I do have some blog-only posts, but it’s sporadic. I’m a parent. This is my hobby. It’s not my job.
Trent Horn:
I understand that. This is my job and even at night, it turns it into my hobby because I just keep doing it. Thank you very much, John. And yeah, we’ll have to chat again then sometime.
John:
Thank you very much.
Trent Horn:
All right. And thank you guys for listening, and I hope you all have just a really great day. And if you want to keep helping us create more episodes like this, definitely visit trenthornpodcast.com.
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PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [01:36:38]