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In this episode, Trent takes on a viral video that claims it has proven God does not exist.
Narrator:
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 Answers Apologist and Speaker, Trent Horn, and today I’m going to be rebutting a video on YouTube from an atheist YouTuber. I don’t know his name, so I’m just going to call him the Narrator in this episode, that seeks to show that God does not exist. Now, I’m just going to be completely upfront with you. This is more on the low hanging fruit. In fact, this fruit is hanging so low you could scoop it off of the ground, but the thing is, because it’s so low hanging and accessible to people, it’s really popular.
The video has hundreds of thousands of views, so I think it merits giving a reply to it because you hear these arguments are so common, it’s good to have a general retort to them. Also, when I do these rebuttals, I try to oscillate between, like I’ve done some rebuttals recently, like my one dealing with icons that were extremely intensive, a lot of research, so we have stuff that’s very intensive research, the high hanging fruit if you will, and then we can kind of go down to more of the common stuff that you’ll see out there everywhere. Both of them require replies. I’m excited to do that for today’s episode. Let’s jump right into it.
Narrator:
In this video, we will discuss whether or not the existence of a transcendent God is probable. And the reason why I use the word probable is because you can’t prove a negative. This means that you can’t disprove statements or claims that we in practice are unable to observe. For instance, you can’t prove to me that Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy or Leprechauns doesn’t exist.
Trent Horn:
Actually, we can prove negative unobservable claims. There are no married bachelors, for example. We can also say things like Santa Claus does not exist because if he did, the world would be different. For example, parents like me wouldn’t have to buy presents because if Santa Claus existed, the presents would appear magically under the tree. Since they don’t, we know Santa Claus isn’t real, and if you wanted to disprove God, you have to make a similar kind of argument.
Narrator:
You also can’t disprove that there is a five headed dragon orbiting some random planet in the galaxy of Andromeda, or perhaps a flying spaghetti monster or a teapot hovering around in space. Neither is it possible to prove the non-existence of God, whether it is Yahweh, Thor, Zeus, Poseidon, Kali, Hades, [inaudible 00:02:37], Vishnu, Aphrodite, Apollo, Ganesha, or any of the countless examples of manmade deities.
Trent Horn:
If you can’t prove their non-existence, what are we doing here? At best, you’d have to be agnostic or say you don’t know if they exist. I would say in many of these cases what we do know about spaghetti or animals shows certain beings cannot exist or do not exist like the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but there’s nothing we know about God from which we could make a similar claim.
Narrator:
How can we examine claims like these? How can we examine the existence of God? Well, we can use two simple methods. First, we can look at the evidence at hand. Now usually it’s whomever that makes a claim that has the burden of proof, but since theists haven’t provided any such evidence for the existence of God, we won’t be able to take use of this first method. Now, if you’re sitting at home yelling at your computer and at the sound of my voice, because you most definitely have good evidence for the existence of God, you shouldn’t write it in the comments section of this video. No, you should finish up that scientific article of yours, publish it and take a flight straight to Norway to receive your Nobel Peace Prize for finally revealing to humanity how the world actually works.
Trent Horn:
First, the question of whether God exists is like the question of whether morality or moral facts, minds or free will exists. It’s a philosophical question. It’s not a scientific one. Second, the narrator is confusing proof and evidence. You can have evidence to support a view without being able to prove the view is true. There is evidence for each of the different interpretations of quantum mechanics or there’s evidence for each of the models of the universe before the big bang. But all of these scientific interpretations and models, they can’t all be true. Evidence is just anything that would make something more likely to be true even if it’s not proof.
Your fingerprints in a friend’s house is evidence that you stole something if your friend reported a theft, but it’s not proof you did it since there’s other explanations for your fingerprints being there beyond you stealing something, but video footage of you taking the stolen item from your friend’s house is stronger evidence because it’s harder to explain away. When it comes to God, strong evidence for God would be something we observe like the existence of causal chains, for example, that is not easily explained by something else like a natural phenomenon, but can only be explained by a supernatural reality or a first cause.
Narrator:
But in terms of the list of Gods, depending on whether you are an atheist, monotheist or polytheist, you only subscribe to that God or those Gods that your religion claims to be true, or perhaps you are a believer in a non-personal God or some other version of a God in which there are also numerous examples of. Either way you are perfectly capable of figuring out on your own that all those other Gods that you don’t believe in are so unlikely to exist, that you once again inside your head deem them not to be true. But your logic reaches bedrock the second your own religion gets inserted into the equation. With the use of logic, I will therefore imply that you think critically about your own God or Gods just like you do with all the other Gods that you don’t believe in.
Trent Horn:
This is the I believe in one less God than you objection, and it’s silly. It’s like Bob’s defense lawyer at a trial saying, “I know Bob is a suspect for the murder, but you all think Mary is innocent and you all think Frank is innocent of the murder. I just believe in one more innocent person than you do. Bob is also innocent like Frank and Mary.” That’s silly just because there’s a lot of people who don’t fit the profile of the murderer, it doesn’t mean there isn’t one person who does fit that profile based on the evidence. Likewise, just because there are many false Gods that don’t fit the profile of the ultimate creator of reality, it doesn’t follow that there isn’t a true God who does.
The reason I don’t believe in Gods like Zeus or Thor is because they are not God, by definition. The arguments for the existence of God lead to an infinite, purely actual source of being that is unchanging, timeless and infinite in his attributes. The Gods of mythology don’t make that cut so they’re not God. Only the God of classical theism does. We can then examine history to see if the God of classical theism revealed himself, which he did in the person of Jesus Christ. Now I’m going to skip ahead because the narrator rambles about God’s definition and then he tries to disprove God via his attributes.
Narrator:
Now that we have defined what this God character is capable of, we can further examine how probable any such character is, and I will do this by applying logic when examining these abilities or superpowers individually. I will start off with the notion that God is or has the ability to control certain natural phenomena. Gods like these would be Thor, the Norse mythology God of thunder, Ra, the ancient Egyptian God of the sun, Mara the Hindu God of rain and so on and so forth.
What is noticeable about these Gods is that most of these Gods are ancient and bygone, and this is because all of these natural phenomena have been explained without the aid of superstition. They have been observed and studied by scientists who have based on empirical evidence concluded and made theories about the natural world. It is therefore not a coincidence that these Gods tend to flourish in areas and amongst people who have limited access to these facts. There is absolutely no good reason why one should add superstitious beliefs onto a natural occurrence that can be easily and logically explained without these superstitious beliefs because by doing so, it results in infinite explanations which are not even explanations at all.
Trent Horn:
His argument is that some religious explanations were wrong, therefore, all religious explanations are wrong. Well, some scientific explanations for natural phenomena were wrong, but that doesn’t mean all scientific explanations are wrong. Sure, rain is not directly caused by some deity, but that doesn’t mean that God did not create the universe and include the water cycle as part of the thing he created. People once thought that plowing the earth changed the atmosphere and caused rain. That was an incorrect theory, but that doesn’t mean there are no correct natural theories about rain. The same is true for theories about God’s relationship to the natural world. Some are incorrect, doesn’t mean there aren’t correct ones now. You’re going to have to do better than saying ancient people were religious and wrong, therefore, religion is wrong.
Narrator:
For example, the chair you’re sitting in right now, it’s not just any chair. It is the God of all chairs, and if you’re sitting comfortably right now, it is because the God of all chairs has decided that you should, and if you’re sitting uncomfortably, it is because you have displeased the God of all chairs. I suppose this sounds silly to you and hopefully it does, and equally so should a guy swinging a hammer, making thunder and a dude with a bird head controlling the sun.
Trent Horn:
Right. We shouldn’t use God of the gap’s arguments to prove God exists, but I’d ask the narrator what proof he would accept. Under his view there’s no evidence that would be good enough because he can always fall back on his science of the gaps to explain what he doesn’t understand. If a chair explains why I am sitting, then we should not add an unnecessary explanation beyond the chair, but eventually we will need an ultimate explanation for why anything exists at all in the way it does, and we’d have to see if a natural or a supernatural explanation makes better sense of all of the data. In fact, there are many powerful evidences for God, but I doubt the narrator has bothered to look for any of them and none of them are God of the gaps arguments. There are, for example, arguments from motion that show in principle, a universe composed of change can only be explained by an unchanging source of actuality.
There are arguments from causation that show causal chains into the past can’t be infinite, and so there must be an uncaused cause. There are arguments from the fine tuning of the constants of nature that are prerequisites to science even being capable explaining anything at all and so on and so on. These aren’t proofs that every rational person must accept on pain of being irrational, but hardly any argument in philosophy is a proof that you’d be obviously irrational to reject. Instead, they’re powerful evidences and reasons to show that it’s rational to believe that God, the infinite source of being itself, created the universe.
Narrator:
The same logic and way of thinking is just as relevant when discussing the notion of miracles. If you witness or hear from somebody else that some type of remarkable event has happened, ask yourself what is more likely? That some type of divine agency has bent the natural and scientific laws as we know them in order to perform some type of extraordinary act or there is a perfectly logical and natural explanation for the event? And if you still do believe in miracles, what makes you think that it is your court or divine agency that is responsible for the event? The reason why I ask this is because no matter what belief system you are embedded in, there are people on each side claiming to have experienced or witnessed miracles from their Gods, and this is not just one religion against another. These are endless miracles from countless religions opposing one another. This should be a clear indication of what these so-called miracles really are, which is well, not miracles at all.
Trent Horn:
This is evidence for theism, not atheism. All it takes to show God exists is that one miracle happened. How does the narrator know every single miracle claim is false? Some of these events could be caused by evil supernatural forces, or maybe God could be showing his love to people who belong to other religions and still chooses to help them through a miracle even though they don’t know he’s the true God. There are lots of explanations, but the claim that every single miracle is false only works if you already believe God does not exist or you assume the very thing you’re trying to prove.
Narrator:
Once again, I will imply that we use the same way of thinking about the notion of prayers in scripture. Isn’t it weird that there are billions of people who are praying and who are in dialogue with their God or Gods that are contrary to one another? I mean, they can’t all be in dialogue with God because they’re not referring to the same God. This is something even theists can agree upon, and at best, only one of them can be true, right? What is really going on here? Are some of them just lucky enough to have been born into the right family at the right place and at the right time so that they’ve prayed or even spoken to the right God and all those other people are just misled and deluded?
Not only did God create the entire cosmos with billions upon billions of galaxies and within each galaxy billions upon billions of stars and planets, but that same God is also extremely invested in what each and every one of us human beings on planet earth is thinking. Or is it perhaps more likely that all prayer and so-called dialogue with the divine is a symptom of delusion?
Trent Horn:
Imagine 100 people are at a party and 99 of them report hearing a loud noise at midnight. They disagree about whether it was a voice or if it said a sentence or if it was just a generic kind of sound or what kind of sound it was, but should you conclude there was a sound and they just can’t agree because they were at different vantage points when they were hearing it? Should you believe that or should you just believe they were all deluded and only one person is correct who didn’t hear a sound at all? The same is true of experiencing God. It makes more sense to say 99% of human beings have experienced some supernatural reality, even if they can’t agree on what it is, than to say that 99% of every human being who ever lived was simply deluded.
Narrator:
Let’s say that there is an all powerful God who intends to write a book. I’m pretty sure that book would be a little more interesting than what we’ve got so far because there is absolutely no new information in any holy book. Neither are there anything that resembles a powerful all-knowing mind. All there is is myths and statements that can be scientifically and logically disproven.
Trent Horn:
I agree there can’t be multiple holy books in different religions, but that doesn’t mean one of these books is not true. One reason I start with the Bible is that the resurrection of Jesus Christ has the best evidence for it in comparison to the miracles of other ancient cultures. For example, Antony Flew was at one time one of the most famous atheists in the western world. His essay, Theology and Falsification, is still one of the most widely printed essays in the history of 20th century philosophy. That’s why it’s remarkable that even Flew admitted in a debate with a Christian that, “The evidence for the resurrection is better than proclaimed miracles in any other religion. It’s astoundingly different in quality and quantity.”
Narrator:
I mentioned that some Gods, namely the ones that control certain aspects of nature are ancient and bygone, because of the progression of science, we now have a much broader understanding about the world we live in. We don’t need these Gods because they add nothing. Thus, there are still some questions about the world that science haven’t yet been able to answer. This is questions such as how did it all begin? How did life come about and what happens when we die? These are the questions that have not yet been answered, and so these are the areas in which the God of the gaps still has wriggle room. As science has progressed, God’s so-called room for maneuver has shrunken. What people used to believe God was responsible for. Now have shrunken into these last few questions. The God of the gaps is the result of all the things science has answered and what is yet to be answered.
Trent Horn:
Once again, this is science of the gaps, a blind faith that science will be able to answer every single question we have. I would ask the narrator, are there objective factual questions science cannot answer in principle Of course there are. For example, science just involves applying physical laws to matter and energy. That’s what every scientific explanation ends up being. But if the universe began to exist from nothing or if the chain of cause is going back in time as finite, then the first cause cannot be a scientific explanation because in a state of nothingness, there is no matter, there is no energy and there are no laws for any scientific explanation to use. Instead, there could only be a metaphysical explanation grounded in God who just is infinite being itself.
Narrator:
We can think logically about this divine God of the gaps being. If you invoke a supernatural being to explain how everything started, then you have still answered absolutely nothing because you are left without an explanation for that supernatural being itself. We can all agree that the world we live in is rather complex and so are we as biological creatures. If something were to create us and the world we live in, then that creator must be just as or even more complex than what it is creating. When theists try and provide answers for the last few questions science has yet to answer with the use of a God, they’re not just doing so with the lack of evidence, but the answers they provide are also illogical and give rise to even more questions which are totally irrelevant. Questions such as who or what created God? Who or what created the thing that created God? Who or what created the thing that created the other thing that created God? And we can ask these questions endlessly.
Trent Horn:
That means you could never have an ultimate explanation for anything. You could always ask, “But what caused that? But what caused that?” The objection assumes there can’t be uncaused causes, which once again assumes the very thing the narrator is trying to prove. The narrator is also using Richard Dawkins’ argument that says A designer would have to be more complex than what it designs, but that’s false. Simple physics equations explain complex patterns in Mandelbrot sets or snowflakes. If God just means super-powered being, then the objection has some weight because you can ask what caused this being, what makes it complex? But if the term God just means the infinite uncaused act of being itself, then asking what caused God is like asking what pulls the locomotive on a train?
It’s a silly question. It doesn’t understand that the cause of an entire system is going to be radically different than the effect it explains. In any case, I hope this episode was helpful for you all today. And if you like a book that does a good job at engaging this kind of common atheist rhetoric, then I’d recommend John DeRosa’s book, One Less God Than You, published by Catholic Answers Press. Thank you guys so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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