In this episode Trent sits down with agnostic philosopher Joe Schmid to discuss the arguments against atheism as well as an argument for God that intrigues Joe.
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone, welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers Apologist and speaker Trent Horn. I’m very excited for today’s interview. The guests who we are having on, I think he’s done a lot of great work when it comes to the philosophy of religion. And even though we come to dramatically different conclusions when it comes to the philosophy of religion, we have a lot in common when it comes to how we should engage this subject matter. So, I’m very excited to introduce him, our guest today is Mr. Joe Schmid, he is a undergrad in philosophy at Purdue University. He also has his own YouTube channel Majesty of Reason, where he takes a, I would say, a higher level approach to engaging arguments for and against the existence of God. And today, we’re going to talk about the agnostic case against atheism. What do we mean by that? Joe will help us learn a bit more about that. But, Joe, welcome to the Council of Trent podcast.
Joe Schmid:
Thank you for having me. I’m really excited for this. And yeah, I definitely see a kind of unity in our approach, which is wonderful.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, so if anyone’s seen the previous channel, Joe has offered some reflections on my previous statements that I’ve given in my debates with Alex O’Connor and Ben Watkins. I’ve offered some replies to Joe, he has replies to me. The replies are currently being stirred up in a kind of Hilbert’s Hotel of replies back and forth. Hopefully, Joe and I will be able to engage each other. I’m not sure the forum, it might be debate, dialogue, it could be YouTube, maybe even a written length treatment, because I think, Joe and I go deeper into some of these issues and other people in writing might be helpful. But also dialoguing about it. And I like to begin dialogue about it because you take unlike many people who are non-theistic to describe them. So you are a non-theist, you do not believe that God exists, but you don’t use many of the same terminology or even beliefs, as many other non theists like identifying themselves as atheists, or people who are very confident God does not exist, things like that. How would you describe yourself? I’ve seen you describe yourself more as an agnostic.
Joe Schmid:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. So, I have this term that I use, I call myself an epistemic agnostic. And there are different kinds of agnostic, but I guess we should probably just start with agnostic, what that is. So whenever we have some proposition or statement, we can take a bunch of different attitudes towards it. So let’s just consider the proposition extra terrestrial life exists.
Trent Horn:
Sure.
Joe Schmid:
Okay? So one attitude you can take to that is believe that it’s false. You can offer the negation of that proposition. You could say that inaccurately describes reality. Reality is not like that. So, that’s the kind of positive claim you’re saying it’s not like that. Reality is not like that. So, that’s believing that it’s false. You can also believe that it’s true. So you can affirm the proposition. You take it to accurately represent reality. But a third main attitude that you can have, is to just suspend or withhold belief or judgment about it. You neither believe it’s true, nor you believe it’s false. And in that case, you would be agnostic toward the proposition.
Joe Schmid:
Now, there are a bunch of other attitudes you can take. But those are like the three main ones, belief, disbelief, which is belief in the negation. And then finally, suspension of judgment, which is agnosticism. So, that’s just the general term agnostic. But of course, what we’re interested in here is applying it to the context of God’s existence. So the relevant proposition here would be God exists. And by God, we could just use a kind of generic term for the ultimate foundation that created everything else necessarily exists, and that’s perfect, something like that. That’s the kind of pretty neutral definition of God.
Joe Schmid:
And so with that definition out of the way and agnostic in this context, it would just be someone who withholds judgment on that proposition. They don’t believe it to be true, but they also do not believe it to be false. And so now we’re getting to that kind of more specific kinds of agnostics. So, this is my own terminology, I think it’s helpful.
Trent Horn:
Because… Before you continue, to me there could be two types of agnostics. One who would say, personally, they don’t know whether God exists or not, a personal agnostic. And the other might be a global agnostic, who would say, I don’t know if God exists and nobody else knows if he exists or doesn’t exist either. So one’s making a broader claim, one’s making a narrower claim. So how would your view slide into that?
Joe Schmid:
Yeah. So, mine would probably fit into the more personal one because I think that we all have access to different evidence bases, we all have different testimonial evidence. We all have different books that we’ve read, papers that we’ve read, classes that we’ve attended and experiences that we’ve had living in the world, being in the world, we all have our own kind of evidence base. And sure a lot of that is inter subjectively available, but other aspects of it are private, that you only yourself experience. So I would go to a more personal from your distinction. And that’s actually similar to the distinction I was going to make.
Joe Schmid:
The distinction I was going to make is between an in principle agnostic and epistemic agnostic. So, an in-principle agnostic is kind of similar to your global agnostic. An in principle agnostic says it’s impossible in principle to know or have justified beliefs about whether or not God exists. I don’t know, you don’t know because no one can know. That’s what the in principle-
Trent Horn:
What’s funny is that that’s kind of what Michael Shermer says. Michael Shermer is the former editor of Skeptic Magazine, and he has this little famous line he says, “I don’t know if God exists, and you don’t either.”
Joe Schmid:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
This is his little slogan. So that might be the global or the in principle, what’s the other word that you… Or the in principles. Is that the word that you used?
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. That sounds like… That’s like exactly what I was filling out. So, that’s a good example. And then on the other hand, we can have an epistemic agnostic, which is what I call myself. And they just hold that, while it might be possible in principle to know or have justified beliefs of one way or the other, the weight of the reasons on either side roughly counterbalance one another for themselves. They think that their research, the weight of the evidence roughly counterbalances one another. So, that’s kind of… I guess that’s what I mean and-
Trent Horn:
But I think that that’s really helpful because a lot of atheists define themselves in a way that I think is a very poor sort of definition. You’ve been interviewed about this before, something we might call lacktheism. They define atheism as just the lack of belief in the existence of God, which is a description of a psychological state, not a description about the way the world is. So it’s similar what you said about aliens. That’s kind of an example I’ve also used with atheists, when I’ve engaged them that sometimes for me when I’m engaging an atheist, I would say, “Well, I would be really happy if you just went from the probability of God’s existence is like 0.1%. If I could get that to 50%, I would be having a real great day to even get you that far.” Because sometimes they’ll say this. “Well, I’m an atheist, because there’s no evidence for God.”
Trent Horn:
And I would say, “Well, that’s an odd position to make.” That’d be like me saying, “I believe there are no extraterrestrial beings in the universe, because there is no evidence for them.” And that may be the case there is no evidence for them. But it doesn’t follow that I could then make the next claim ET is not out there somewhere by Alpha Centauri, or somewhere else. At most, it would just get me to the agnostic position.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
So do you sometimes get frustrated by atheists? Because the question about belief, disbelief and withholding, because sometimes I ask people, look, the atheism, theism… I’ll make it to this way. There’s the question, does God exist? You can either say yes, no, or I don’t know. And so I don’t know… Yes is theism, no is atheism, I don’t know is agnosticism. But then it gets hopelessly confusing when you have people saying they’re agnostic, atheists, and I just have a hard time following that.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, as do I. At least in philosophy, agnosticism is the suspension of judgment concerning God’s existence. And so an agnostic is someone who neither believes nor disbelieves in God. And by contrast, an atheist is someone who believes that God doesn’t exist. That’s at least in philosophy. Now, don’t get me wrong, right? People, their words, people can define terms a lot, I do think that some ways of defining things are at least better than others. And so what really matters is that whenever you’re talking with someone individually, what really matters is getting clear on the concept. So if they’re going to stick to their guns with lacktheism, it’s better just to move on to the issues and talk about the evidence and so on. But if we’re going to… Yeah, go on.
Trent Horn:
Well, what I would say is then, unlike many people who are kind of products of the new atheists, people like Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, these individuals from the early 2000s. When we call them new atheists, I don’t think we mean… They don’t really have new arguments, many of the arguments are kind of old hat. What was new was sort of their attitude of saying, well, previously in the 20th century, atheists would critique religion, but still give it a kind of deference. We’d be gentlemen about it like Bertrand Russell and Father Frederick Copleston and their little chat about the existence of God. And the new atheists are saying, “No, we shouldn’t even give religion respect, religion… Science flies people to the moon, religion flies airplanes in the buildings,” 911 being one of the precursors of the new atheism.
Trent Horn:
So not only are religious people wrong, but they’re irrationally wrong. They are, to quote Dawkins, they’re deluded that not only are they wrong, because you could be mistaken about something. If I think that it’s 5:45, and right now it’s actually 5:38, I’m mistaken. If I thought it was three in the morning, I would be diluted because I see sunshine coming in. It’s completely contradicted by other evidence. And so I think that the position you would take on the existence of God, is not that believers are diluted, but rather you as an agnostic, you could say a person could be a rational atheist, and they could be a rational theist.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, absolutely. And what’s so ironic about the whole, “Oh, religion is delusional, oh, belief in God is irrational.” What’s so ironic about that, is that then they’ll go on to be like, “Oh no, I just lack of belief in God by the way. Right.” But believing in God is irrational and delusional and yeah, it’s like, “Come on, you guys are obviously being inconsistent.” You’re treating God’s existence as like fairies and Santa Claus, these things that we obviously believe don’t exist that we are ludicrous to believe in. And your attitude certainly reveals that you think that it’s ludicrous to believe in. But when pressed, “Oh, no, I just lack of belief. I’m not making any claims.” So there’s certainly an inconsistency there.
Trent Horn:
Let’s jump into… So we’ve got some terms on here. So agnosticism, atheism. So you hold that a person could rationally believe God exists, they could also rationally believe God does not exist. You’re not convinced of either of those propositions. I’ve engaged a lot of your work so far on why you’re not convinced of theism. So I thought it’d be fun for you and I to sit down on something we agree on, I’m not rationally convinced of atheism, and neither you. So maybe we could talk about some of those arguments and why they don’t convince you. And they might not convince us for different reasons. So, let’s… Yeah, go ahead.
Joe Schmid:
One thing we can distinguish between is there’s an agnostic who thinks… This is a different kind of dichotomy. There might be an agnostic who doesn’t see any reasons on either side, versus an agnostic who sees no reasons on both sides and sees that there are significant considerations counting in favor of either. And I would fall in that latter camp, I do think that there are significant considerations that count in favor of naturalism say, a version of atheism and theism on the other hand, I think that there are considerations that weigh quite significantly on each side.
Trent Horn:
So you think… So you don’t agree with atheists when they say there’s no evidence for God?
Joe Schmid:
Yeah. I was just going to say, yeah, we’re going to see later on that I definitely-
Trent Horn:
And I think what’s-
Joe Schmid:
But yeah, go on.
Trent Horn:
… what’s hard with that is, sometimes some atheists have become a bit more shrewd about that. So they’ll say, “Oh, I’m saying there’s no good evidence for God.” And then I want to say, “Well, what do you mean by good evidence?” I think sometimes some people in this debate and especially about the existence of God, think some evidence is that which indisputably proves that something is true. And I would say you’ve got a very high view of evidence my friend. My understanding was that evidence is just something that makes a proposition more likely true than false. And so there’s this idea, they think, “Oh, well, if there were good evidence for X, God’s existence, whatever, then everybody would believe it.” But that’s silly, because there’s many things people disagree about. And we acknowledge there’s good evidence on either side, even among atheists.
Trent Horn:
Atheist disagree. Here’s an example. So Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett disagree about whether freewill and determinism are compatible. So could you have freewill if the world is determined? Dennett says yes, Harris says no, they disagree. And there’s good evidence for both of their views. But it doesn’t mean they’re both equally right, it’s just hard for me when people… Do you see that they have that truncated view of what evidence is?
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this just goes back to asking people what precisely do you mean by evidence? Or if they change it to good evidence, what do you mean by that? I mean, I’ve often found… And again, this is just engaging with more kind of new atheist types. Everyone’s different, we don’t want to try to categorize people automatically from the get go. But people that generally fall into this kind of new atheist side, they tend to say when I ask, “What do you mean by evidence?” And then they’re getting into something like, “Oh, empirical evidence.” Or something like scientific evidence. I’m like, come on. So yeah, then it gets into scientism, and then…
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Schmid:
But, yeah.
Trent Horn:
And then just a dismissal of other questions. Because when I try to get people to see as, all right, well, the existence of God, it’s not a scientific question. I feel like I have to start at the basement and say, are there non scientific questions that are worth us discussing?
Joe Schmid:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
And I feel like a lot of them will say no. It reminds me in Mlodinow and Hawking’s book, The Grand Design. So the late physicist Stephen Hawking and his co author Leonard Mlodinow, they wrote a book, Grand Design. And I think at the beginning of the book, it says something… I remember being really I don’t know if you read it or not, it was very arrogant saying that scientists are the torchbearers of investigation. It’s like they’re ridding the train and the philosopher is just running alongside waving the papers. And I thought that was such a snooty, arrogant way to talk about an important field.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah. I think, who was it? Was it Hawking who said that philosophy is dead or something like that? Someone said that.
Trent Horn:
I think he might have said that in Grand Design.
Joe Schmid:
I think that’s where it’s quoted from and I’m like, “Bada bing, give me some argument for that. You’re doing philosophy.” Okay.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. All right. Well, let’s talk about some of the arguments for atheism. First one would be just a presumption of atheism. So you have the lazy lacktheism, but then you have people like Anthony Flew, who say, “Well, we should just start with the presumption of atheism, and if the theist can’t make his case, atheism kind of wins by default. Your thoughts.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah. So I guess the notion of presumed here is something like if I presumed something is or is not the case, well, then we’re saying that a particular proposition, the thing that we’re presuming that’s to be believed, unless and until sufficiently strong considerations to the contrary are coming to light. So, that’s probably… I mean, that’s the key notion of presumption here. And I guess I don’t quite buy… I don’t see any reason to think that atheism is the position that should be believed positively, unless and until some positive considerations are [inaudible 00:16:18] against it. It seems to me that making claims about the way the world is, is what bears the justification, is what bears a burden of justification.
Joe Schmid:
And since both atheism and theism make claims of what the world is, both of them are saying, “Hey, I know that reality is such in such a way, or I have a justified belief about the way reality is. There isn’t such a thing as this perfect foundation, or there is such a thing as this perfect foundation, you’re making a claim about the way that reality is. And so you need to bear a burden of justification for that to think that. And so there’s no presumption of atheism or theism here because both of them precisely have this onus of justification. And I think they’re going to try to push back on this, they’re going to try to say, “Oh, well…” Well, one way they might say, “Oh, no, atheism isn’t making a positive claim about the way the world is, that would be the lacktheism.” We’ve already seen that that’s… Well, that-
Trent Horn:
Well, [crosstalk 00:17:07]. But lacktheism… Yeah. The problem with lacktheism is just if all you’re saying the statement is, I lack a belief in God, my follow up question is, why do you lack a belief in God? Why should I take your lack of belief in God seriously? My one year old lacks a belief in God, but he lacks a belief in many, many things that are true. So the mere fact that you lack a belief in something, who cares? Sometimes I get so fed up with this, I say, your lack of belief in God is just not very interesting to me. I want to figure out how the world works. Do you have any view of that that is helpful to me?
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, I agree with that. I guess we can imagine someone just who pronounces there is no God. And now imagine that we had someone that comes up and I say, “Well, hey, you made that claim, why do you think that?” And then they’re like, “Oh, the burden isn’t on me to justify that claim, the burden is on you to prove that I’m wrong.”
Trent Horn:
And this is where the agnostic, Joe, this is why I like to keep you around in my pocket on Twitter, because I have people… Well, I have people who will say, “There’s no good evidence for God.” Which is another claim is sort of related to that. And I would say, “All right, well, why should I believe that?” Then the reply is, “Well, give me some good evidence.” As if… Okay. But imagine I had my agnostic friend here. And let’s say he’s not like you, he’s not well read. He’s agnostic because you just found out about God five minutes ago, he just found out about the debate. And he’s saying, “Oh, this God character of yours, you say there’s no good evidence, I just found out about this whole thing. Why should I believe that?” What are you going to tell him? Is kind of the reply that I give.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. The other thing I worry about the presumption of atheism argument is I think a lot of atheists who make it think that there’s nothing wrong, they’re so worried about falsely believing things do exist. They’re not worried about falsely believing the non existence of things. Let me say, I get my head around that. That they would rather… They would say, “Well, we should start with the presumption a thing does not exist until we have proof for it. Now that will keep you… That’s a good way to keep you from falsely believing in things, believing things that don’t exist. But then you have a lot of other harms, that you will still end up having untold numbers of false beliefs if you start with the presumption a thing does not exist until there’s evidence for it.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Does that follow with you?
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, exactly. And that kind of gets me to what I tend to think. I guess the presumption is just not making some claim about the way the world is. I mean, that’s where you kind of start off with.
Trent Horn:
It would be like if I said with you, oh, there’s no dog in your room because I haven’t seen evidence for it. Well, he could be asleep right in front of you.
Joe Schmid:
Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
Trent Horn:
I’m not justified in making that presumption just solely lack evidence. So I think we see that’s a weak one. Let’s kick it up a little-
Joe Schmid:
Well, I can probably try to bluster there… Yeah, let me see if I can try to-
Trent Horn:
All right, steal man away.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, I’ll try to steal man it. So they might turn to something like Russell’s teapot, right? Or something like that. Or maybe the Flying Spaghetti Monster. And so they’ll say, “Hey, the idea is that firstly, there’s a presumption against believing in Russell’s teapot that’s in orbit between Earth and Mars. And there’s also a presumption against believing the Flying Spaghetti Monster. And secondly, God is relevantly similar to such entities. And so there’s a presumption against God. Now, I think the response that I would make to that is that, what is that relevant similarity? Right?
Trent Horn:
That’s the key.
Joe Schmid:
Is it that God’s existence is prima facia implausible, or is it that it’s intrinsically improbable? However you cash it out, we need some positive reason for thinking that God is relevantly similar to such entities. And then once one is doing that, you’re just engaging in a project of giving reasons favoring atheism or theism, which defeats the whole purpose of the presumption of atheism argument. The whole purpose is that it’s the theist, not the atheist that needs to give positive reasons for their view. But in order to establish this very claim, the proponent of the presumption of atheism thesis, as we’ve just seen, has to make real positive arguments, or positive reasons favoring atheism over theism either from considerations of intrinsic probability or considering [inaudible 00:21:19] implausibility and so on.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. So like the Russell’s teapot example is, well, we just kind of know there is no teapot between Earth and Mars. And it’s just the lack of evidence fueling that claim. But you’re right, we already know something about teapots that they don’t have a nature towards doing that that makes it implausible to which sometimes I reply to that is let’s change the example. Is there an interstellar probe orbiting between Earth and Mars that keeps an eye on Earth, and the Earth is essentially a wildlife refuge for extraterrestrials? That’s one of the hypotheses about, if the universe is so fast, why haven’t we encountered extraterrestrial life? And I believe that relates to Fermi paradox. Where are they?
Trent Horn:
And one of the reply says they’re purposely ignoring us because we’re this backwater species, like the prime directive and Star Trek, don’t disturb these crude, primitive creatures. So is there a probe around between Earth and Mars keeping an eye on us? I don’t know. But you see, it’s not like a teapot. I would just start with just pure agnosticism. So I think you’re right that when you have to start with is the thing we’re speculating about, what’s its intrinsic probability? If you say God is like fairies or Santa Claus, you got to offer a little bit more than just the assertion.
Joe Schmid:
Exactly.
Trent Horn:
Let’s go to the next one. So someone might do that. They might say, “Well, God does not exist, because God is logically impossible, or God is a logical contradiction. This is often called the incompatible properties argument. Saying… And there’s two kinds. The next two arguments… Well, really I think any of the arguments for God not existing deal with some kind of incompatibilities. You could either say things within God are incompatible, or there’s incompatibilities between God and what we perceive in the world, which seemed to be the stronger ones. But we’ll start with just the things in God are incompatible, so God does not exist. Right off the bat, one of the problems with this and this would be interesting chapter between two of us, is you might say, it will depend on what you mean by God to see if the properties of what you’re defining really are incompatible. So you can tell us a little more of your thought on these arguments.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah. So incompatible properties arguments are meant to be these kinds of like, a priori from the armchair, deductive demonstrations that God is impossible because they’re trying to tease out some kind of internal contradiction or incompatibilities.
Trent Horn:
Is like a married bachelor.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And so there are at least two kinds of these incompatibility property arguments. One of them you just focus on one property, and you say that that alone is just not a possible property. So maybe omniscience or maybe omnipotence. And then the second kind would be, there are two or more properties of Gods such that taken together, they’re incompatible or impossible.
Trent Horn:
Right? So for the first example might be if God is omnipotence, if God is omnipotent, or all powerful, it’s essential. He has to be omnipotent to be God. And then you ask, well, can God make a rock so big, he can’t lift it? If he can lift the rock, he can’t make the rock, and if he can’t lift it, that’s something he can’t do, ergo he’s not omnipotent, so he can’t exist. That would be a single property argument. But it seems like a lot of these arguments all you have to do is just provide a more… And similar with the multiple property arguments would be like, “Well, if God is all powerful, he can do anything, but if he’s all knowing, he knows everything. So can he change his mind? Either he can’t, or he doesn’t know everything. But it seems like either single or multiple property arguments, all you have to do to get around them is just provide a more coherent description to the properties.
Joe Schmid:
Usually. Yeah, usually that’s the best way to do it. Like for omnipotence, right? It is a little bit difficult to spell out what precisely omnipotence is. Two options you might take that avoid the stone paradox would be, God is omnipotent, just in case… God can do absolutely anything that doesn’t detract from perfection and that doesn’t limit him, doesn’t entail any limitation on his end. So for instance, creating a world that doesn’t entail any limitation on Gods end, creating a multiverse that doesn’t entail… Freeing the Israelites. It’s all like, all these different sorts of things that we want to say that an omnipotent being can do, this definition allows us to get that. But also it allows you to give a principled reason why God for instance, can’t sin. Because that would entail some kind of limitation on God’s part. Sinning is irrational or doing something morally wrong that’s contrary to reason, contrary to goodness. And so God can’t do that because that wouldn’t entail some limitation on his end.
Joe Schmid:
He also can’t digest food, that’s not a power that God can have, he can’t digest food because he doesn’t have a physical digestive system, because having that would entail some kind of limitation. He’d be [inaudible 00:26:05] to a particular spatial location and so on. So I think that that kind of analysis gives some good results. That’s one way to do it.
Trent Horn:
Well, and there’s others too.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, absolutely.
Trent Horn:
You can just try to shrink the notion omnipotence. I like I think it’s Thomas Flint and Alfred Freddoso have an essay on this, with one of the most BA titles for a philosophy essay, which is on omnipotence. It’s called Maximal Power. I’m just like, we should a movie about this, but just the idea that omnipotence just means God has the most power of any being. If power means you can just do things, well, God is just the being that can do more than any being without trying to stipulate all the things you can or can’t do. I would just hold to some kind of logically, or at least metaphysically possible. I don’t think God can do logical impossibilities or metaphysical impossibilities.
Trent Horn:
I don’t think God… And this is for a lot of people, people will say, “Well, what are you talking about? What’s the difference?” A logical impossibility would be something that is impossible in virtue of the logic involved, or if you know the definition of the terms, you’ll know it’s impossible. So a married bachelor is impossible, because all that means is a man who is married and not married at the same time, I’m squiggly line am, am not-
Joe Schmid:
Yes.
Trent Horn:
We just did all our little symbolic logic and such. And we know you can’t have X and not X at the same time. Metaphysical impossibility gets a bit squishier though, as to what which is there’s things that seem to be impossible that you can’t just logically write out. I have two examples in my head that I like to put out. Well, a classic one, I think it comes from Plantinga, is, “The prime minister is not a prime number. The probability for cognitive faculties being reliable.” By the way, everyone, Joe has earned a rep online for doing impersonations of different philosophers. I hear you do a mean, Richard Swinburne.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah. That is to say that God is a being…
Trent Horn:
We’ll see if anything else comes up. I don’t know, have you worked on a Craig yet? Craig, I think is pretty entatainable.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah. That one’s a little difficult because he has just kind of your generic, Midwestern almost. So that’s hard, but it’s a measure, physical measures of time, space less, time less, immaterial, enormously powerful. So…
Trent Horn:
I think he has a very, kind of a debate mode that I think it’d be easy to do impersonate.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
So metaphysical impossibly, another example I think of is an object that has a color but doesn’t have a shape. For me, I would say, at first you think, “Well, could an object have color, but not have shape?” Now, there’s no strict logical contradiction here. But what you know about shape and color is, “Well, wait, if I could identify its color, it would have some kind of shape to contain the color. I don’t see how you could have one without the other.” Other examples might be going back in time, changing the past, returning to the same point in a timeline on the same timeline. Things like that. So for me, then for omnipotence, I would say God can’t do the logical or the metaphysically impossible. And so then you get in a lot of debates about what’s that? You know?
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, exactly.
Trent Horn:
Let’s jump into the next one, two other incompatible properties arguments. The next one would be divine hiddenness. This is an argument made famous by JL Schellenberg, the idea here and Ben actually brought this up in our debate. And there’s two different ways you can run this argument. And when you come to these kinds of arguments against God like theism, you can have arguments that prove God exists or prove he doesn’t exist or arguments that make God really probable or really improbable. So these next two arguments we’ll talk about there are versions that say, “Well, it makes it really, really improbable, or it’s just a flat out proof.” And Ben, in my debate with him, he seemed to run that Schellenberg does kind of a proof argument that basically if God exists, then he desires a relationship with rational creatures. Therefore, there will be no non rational resistant believers, essentially. Sorry, there’s no rational resistant believers.
Joe Schmid:
Non resistant.
Trent Horn:
Non resistant, yes.
Joe Schmid:
There we go.
Trent Horn:
Rational. Not yet… Right. So the idea here is there could be people that just hate God for weirdo reasons. God can’t necessarily whatever. They’re weirdo in all possible worlds, they’re going to show up somewhere. But there are people who are rational, and they’re not resistant to God, they would like God to exist. But they just don’t come to that conclusion. And Schellenberg and Ben in our debate said, those people won’t exist. And those people clearly do exist, therefore, God does not exist. There are these people who don’t believe in God, who are rational, who very much like God to exist. And I would say yourself… Well, I would imagine you’re probably this way. There are some theists, non theists who don’t want God to exist. They don’t like that idea.
Trent Horn:
But Ben seems to very much want at least the God of generic theism to exist. He would think that’d be a very good thing. So, Schellenberg and Ben’s argument is that people like him, if God existed, there wouldn’t be people like him. But people like him do exist. So there’s different ways Christians have responded to this. I’m very against the view, which is popular in some reformed circles that actually, they all secretly believe in God, they’re just sinfully suppressing it or lying to your face. I find that highly implausible I operate under this assumption. Reality is the way it appears. Actually this came up my debate with Matt Dillahunty. I don’t know if you saw that. That was interesting.
Joe Schmid:
I saw portions of it and I was cringing at many points. Not because of you.
Trent Horn:
Well, because I brought up this question with Matt. I said, “Well, Matt, should we just say, we should treat reality as it appears unless evidence suggests otherwise?” And he just… I think he was just in a mode where, “I can’t agree with anything Trent says because they’ll use it to trap me.” I’m like, “Dude, I’m starting with the most basic way of living. And if we can’t believe that, you’re one step away from being schizophrenic.” If you can’t just… I’m not saying we all believe things as they appear, I don’t really think the magician saw the lady in half. But I have evidence to suggest otherwise. Magicians aren’t arrested after that happens. So-
Joe Schmid:
Yeah. You’re probably not going to escape skepticism if you don’t accept something like that.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, just a very basic way of operating. So when I see someone like Ben, who presents himself as a rational, non resistant believer, I don’t have evidence that really does suggest otherwise. Yet, you don’t think this is a slam dunk argument that shows there is no God.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, I also… So one thing I just want to add to your response there to the people and certain maybe the more reformed tradition who says, “Oh, no, they’re all resistant.” I mean, some of these non resistant non believers are non believers because they don’t even have the relevant concepts involved. Go back or maybe even right now go to some isolated Amazonian tribesmen who aren’t even connected to the external world, they’ve never heard of the Bible, they probably don’t… Some of them probably might not even have a concept of God, maybe they have some kind of concept of a pantheistic great spirit maybe, that pervades.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Schmid:
They might… A lot of people, especially in our evolutionary history. So we know humans been around for a long time. And certainly predating certain kind of highfalutin theoretical concepts of God and so on. And a philosopher named Teddy Smith has a paper in the Australasian, he traced out certain beliefs over our history. And actually, animism is more popular as a kind of guiding principle for certain tribes and groups of people versus a kind of more theistic or pantheist, those sorts of things. And so if that’s the case, well, then it seems as though like a lot of people are non resistant non believers in God, because they don’t even have the concept. It’s not as though they’re repressing it in sin. So, yeah, that’s-
Trent Horn:
So why [crosstalk 00:34:28]. So the question is, why do these people exist? And the hard argument from divine hiddenness would just say, well, they exist because God doesn’t exist is the only explanation. But not necessarily so.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah. No, that’s absolutely right. So, one thing that you could probably always say at this juncture is like, especially with the incompatibility argument, where it’s like, “Oh, no, there’s an incompatibility between God’s existence and such people.” Is that, well, hold on a sec, maybe God has some morally sufficient reason for allowing this kind of hiddenness for a given time in the person’s life. Maybe That will allow for certain profound goods to accrue to this individual and their relationship with God in the afterlife, and maybe at some later point in their life, and so on. So, I don’t know, we need to be given some reason to rule out God’s having some morally sufficient reason for allowing certain people to go through these nonresistance spells of non belief. And so unless and until we’re given some reason to think that God couldn’t have such morally sufficient reason, then I think that at least incompatibility version of the divine candesartan just doesn’t work. That’s one response, but I have a few others.
Trent Horn:
Right. You could always share a few others. I have a few thoughts of my own on this. I’m going to bracket actually this in the problem of evil for another one. That’s a response that I would generally agree with, that I think a lot of the replies will mirror some of the replies to the problem of evil. I do think that two things on my mind, one would be similar to the problem of evil, like God gives us moral freedom, I think he also gives us cognitive freedom. And so if we have cognitive freedom, we might make serious cognitive errors in our discerning about reality. And kind of related to that is, I’m not so sure even if God existed or say, “Well, God makes his existence obvious.” It may still be the case people will deny God exists because at least in the modern world, there are people who deny things that I think are patently obvious.
Trent Horn:
So a few examples would be the church lends eliminative materialism. Paul and Patricia Churchland would not say, “I have a headache today.” They’d say, “Oh, my head is experienced inflammation right now.” Denying that there actually is an immaterial self, or denying temporal becoming. Are you still kind of leaning towards a theory of time by the way?
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, I’m a very lukewarm presentist, but yeah.
Trent Horn:
That’s another future-
Joe Schmid:
But I have a lot of respect for eternalism.
Trent Horn:
Oh, sure. Well that’s why I’m kind of in between both camps. I’m kind of black sheep, I sort of lean towards the growing block view, no one would let me… I’m not as… I wouldn’t be as ostracize as the spotlight theory. Those are the kids that can’t get any seat at the lunch table. Growing block has some decent people-
Joe Schmid:
And for good reason.
Trent Horn:
Right. Growing block though, I have an affinity for that. But that’ll be a different conversation with us. But the consciousness or I think even just that I have freewill. I think most people believe they do have freewill until they read a book by Sam Harris or hear about the Libet experiments, but there’s things that just seem really obvious, just totally with us that people still doubt. So I think sometimes… Now you might say, “Well, God, he’s omnipotent after all, he’s going to make his existence obvious in some beatified way.” But I think we would eventually go back to he could still have those good reasons.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, I think probably the most fundamental response is indeed just bottoming out like, they’re the ones giving a positive argument here, the proponents of the hiddenness argument, and so they’re the ones who need to give us good reason to think that God couldn’t have these morally sufficient reasons for being hidden in the way that he is. Now, things get more complicated when you move to the basic and forms of the argument because then although it might be a possibility that God has some morally sufficient reason, we have to ask about how expected is the data hypothesis. But before we move on, I just want to touch on another response to the hiddenness argument that at least as Ben presented it in your guy’s debates, and as Schellenberg puts it, it requires a premise to the effect that a relationship, a meaningful, significant relationship with God, a necessary precondition for that is belief in God.
Trent Horn:
Hmm.
Joe Schmid:
I’m starting to reject that flat out. I think that meaningful, significant relationship does not require an explicit cognitive belief that the other party exists. I mean, one example is just a mundane example. A pregnant lady with her fetus, right? That relationship there, even though the fetus isn’t cognizant of the mom, and even maybe a newborn and so on. I think that that’s a really significant, meaningful relationship, even though one of the parties is not cognizant of the other. Now, someone might say, “Oh, well, that’s not the most significant, that’s not… There’s still a more significant relationship you could have, and God would try to secure that.
Joe Schmid:
But even… I would respond in this way to that. But there are some cases where I think that we could be in a relationship with God, even though we don’t have an explicit belief in God. I think someone who’s trying their utmost to seek beauty, to seek goodness, to seek truth, to try to cultivate the moral virtues, the intellectual virtues. Someone who’s doing that is thereby in a relationship with God. Because God is… He’s perfectly good, he’s perfectly beautiful, he’s perfectly true and so on. You’re thereby in a relationship with God by seeking these sorts of things, by desiring them, by doing your utmost to cultivate those virtues and so on. So I think someone who does that is thereby in relationship with God.
Trent Horn:
This is the other point that it reminds me of. That sometimes I’m concerned. And this is a good segue into the problem of evil a little bit, that I feel like what’s interesting, I’ll comment on both the problem of evil and the divine hiddenness argument. I have a concern that there is a bit of a modern bias in our moral intuitions behind the argument. Now, I think it runs something like this, that we trust our modern moral intuitions because oftentimes in the past people were incorrect about their moral intuitions when they promoted certain barbaric behavior or things like that. Thank goodness, we’ve made moral progress.
Trent Horn:
So sometimes we think that either moral intuitions have improved, or they’ve remained stagnant. We’re less likely to think that as time has gone on, certain moral intuitions have gotten worse. But I’m not sure that’s the case. Look at any of the comment fields on YouTube. I think that the case, actually, that many people’s moral intuitions about how to treat others have gotten worse over time, because of certain things in the modern world. So, because of that, I think, some moral intuitions that we have about the kind of relationship I am owed by another person who loves me, or if someone creates a world the kind of life they ought to give me, we might have the wrong… We might have kind of a modern, I don’t want to say spoiled, because there are some horrendous evils that have their own theodicy we have to talk about. But we have for example, I’ll know people who will give up belief in God because they see people who are handicapped, or who are starving in Africa.
Trent Horn:
And yet, what’s ironic is that the starving people in Africa or the handicapped person, often do believe in God. And so it seems odd to me that for some people observing evil makes them doubt, or hiddenness makes them doubt God, but some people in the midst of it, they don’t. Do you see where I’m coming from with that observation?
Joe Schmid:
Yeah. I’m just thinking, because there are so many different complex psychological factors that are at play here too, on both parties. So, I’ll refrain from speculating on that. But I do think it’s an interesting-
Trent Horn:
Well, I do think because I think okay, a rejoinder is that the starving people in Africa, Trent, they got to believe in God because without it, they’ll just snap. And they This is essentially something that keeps their boat afloat. And so the reason people throughout history who suffered more still believed in God, is because they needed to keep the boat afloat. And we don’t have to. I’m not necessarily convinced by that response either, because I feel like, let’s say you have a friend who constantly lets you down. It’s not like your response is, “I have to believe my friend is actually pulling through. Because I couldn’t imagine being so friendless and awful.” I think when some entity or institution continually lets us down, eventually it gets such a bad reputation over time. We do discard it. And I would think something similar would happen with God. Obviously, we’re treading into psychological explanations. I don’t necessarily want to do that.
Trent Horn:
But I think that when we think about how God going back to the divine hiddenness argument, we think, “Oh, well, if God loved me, I could pray and it almost be like I’m having…” And this might be because of American evangelicalism. I could just… He’d be right there on the prayer phone, and I can always get a hold of him. But when you read the writings of the saints throughout history, they a lot of them, St. John of the cross, even saint-
Joe Schmid:
I was reading I was… If I could interject-
Trent Horn:
Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead, yes.
Joe Schmid:
I was reading Anselm last night. And he was saying, at the beginning of one of his meditations and philosophical explorations, it’s like he was asking God, why are you so hidden from me? Why when I seek, I do not find you? And why… And he was saying that, and he’s like, it was really interesting to read what he’s saying. And he goes on to talk about faith seeking understanding, and all these other sorts of things in Anselm. But I just wanted to add that that’s in Anselm-
Trent Horn:
And this is the guy who says God is the being that which no greater can be fought.
Joe Schmid:
Exactly.
Trent Horn:
He is the maximal theism, and yet, for Anselm’s definition, God is not lesser in his being merely because he has less… I don’t know if I’m using the vocabulary right, epistemology. Doxastic type of relationship, that conscious awareness of the relationship where it might be something more fundamental. And I liked your analogy of, “Well, maybe God is relating to people giving them what they need, and he’s all knowing, then he knows what they need, even if they don’t.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah. If I can add to this, this is not like some sort of ad hoc maneuver to try to get out of it. I might take Matthew 25 for instance. So I actually prepared, I prepared two quotations. So one of them is from Matthew 25 and I’d like to read it because I think it’s beautiful, pertains to divine hiddenness. So then the king will say to those on his right, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you invited me in. I needed clothes and you clothed me. I was sick and you looked after me. I was in prison and you came to visit me.”
Joe Schmid:
Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you? Or thirsty and gave you something to drink? When did we see you as a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothed you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?” The king will reply, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.” I just think that’s showing that by loving our neighbor, by seeking truth, by seeking beauty, by seeking goodness, by trying to cultivate the virtue, you’re thereby in a relationship with God and a relationship with God. And perhaps, perhaps there are some unique goods that can accrue from that from someone who doesn’t have that doxastic explicit belief.
Joe Schmid:
It’s like, precisely in spite of not being certain of God’s existence, in spite of that, they still seek, they still seek, they still desire, they have that flaming desire, they have, they’re still looking at these issues. They’re still trying to cultivate their virtue and their character, even though they don’t know if they’re going to be rewarded for it. They don’t know if God exists and is there… There’s something beautiful about that. There’s something so valuable about that. So, that’s one quote. And then the second one is deeply related. And you can totally tell that CS Lewis was just totally plagiarizing here from Matthew 25. So-
Trent Horn:
It’s in the public domain.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, exactly.
Trent Horn:
I put in a public domain.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, exactly. So, CS Lewis in the last battle says this, background to this, but people can understand it without understanding-
Trent Horn:
It’s the last book in the Narnia series.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, here’s the quote, “Then I fell at his feet…” So we’re talking about Aslan here. “So, then I fell at his feet and thought, surely this is the hour of death, for the lion who is worthy of all honor will know that I’ve served Tash… Which is the evil character. ‘Will know that I’ve served Tash all my days and not him. Nevertheless, it is better to see the lion and die than to live and not to I’ve seen him. But the glorious one bent down his golden head and touched my forehead and said, ‘Son, thou art welcome.’ But I said, ‘Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine, but the servant of Tash.’ He answered, ‘Child, all the service thou has done to Tash, I account as service done to me.’ Then, by reasons of my great desire for wisdom then I overcame my fear and questioned the glorious one and said, ‘Lord, is it that true as the ape said that thou and Tash are one?’
Joe Schmid:
The lion growled Earth shook, but his wrath was not against me and said, ‘It is false, not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites. I take to me the services which thou has done to him, for I and he have such different kinds, but no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore, if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he is truly sworn, though he know it not. And it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then though he says the name Aslan, it is Tasha whom he serves, and by Tash, his deed is accepted. Dost thou understand, child understand child?’ I said, ‘Lord, thou knowest how much I understand.’
Joe Schmid:
But I said also for the truth constrain me yet I’ve been seeking Tash all my days, beloved said that unless that desire had been for me, that was not have sought so long and so truly, for all find what they truly seek.” So I’m like, this is so related divine hiddenness. It’s precisely in seeking and cultivating these things that you’re in a relationship with Aslan with God. And even if you don’t have that kind of explicit doxastic cognitive component there. So, anyway.
Trent Horn:
I think what’s funny, I think you’ve given better advice to people who struggle with their relationship with God than a lot of other people who do believe in God, actually right now. So, kudos to you my friend. Yeah, that you could be in relationship with God by [inaudible 00:48:37], God is the good, you’re having trouble seeking God, seek the good. They’re convertible things, goodness and being asked a little bit about that here in a sec. Let’s just talk about evil, because that’s the stock most potent argument, both philosophically and also, personally, for many people. That’s two forms one that make God very unlikely, but then the stronger one is it’s impossible. God and evil would definitely prove atheism. And it seems like we kind of run a similar parallel argument to hiddenness. Well, how do we know God does not have good reasons for evil? It seems like it might count against God. Sure, but not necessarily enough to decisively refute the case. What do you think?
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, like you said, there are so many different versions of the problem of evil. The kind of evil that you’re focused on, you could focus on human evil, you could focus on human suffering, non human animal suffering. You could focus on certain social evil that Ted Poston, I think that’s how you pronounce it.
Trent Horn:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe Schmid:
It might be Poston, but I think it’s Poston. Social evil that arises from certain game theoretic interactions, there’re so many different versions, and there’re Bayesian forms, inductive forms, abductive forms, deductive logical forms. So it’s like, we can’t hope for the audience, we can’t hope this scratch the surface here. But for like the logical version, it traditionally goes back to Mackie, he said, “Hey, God’s omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. And if he’s omnipotent, well then an omnipotent, there are no limits to what an omnipotent being could do. And so God could eradicate all evil.”
Joe Schmid:
Moreover, he knows about it because he’s omniscient. And because he’s perfectly good, something is good to the extent that it eliminates evil as far as it can. And so given all of it, there’s simply no evil, but yet, there’s evil look around us. So God does not exist. And that’s the kind of logical argument, because we’re starting from these concepts of goodness and so on. Now, most philosophers these days, don’t think that that argument succeeds. I don’t think it succeeds either. Firstly, there are limits on what an omnipotent being can do. There are certain metaphysical and logical necessities. So there might be certain goods that are necessarily tied to certain evils, such that you couldn’t get a profound good without having some evil first, like courage in the face of threats and overcoming temptation, other sorts of things, forgiveness and these other sorts of great goods.
Joe Schmid:
And moreover, it seems to me that it’s all that a good thing eliminates evil as far as it can, because there’s a balance between promoting good and eliminating evil.
Trent Horn:
And to add a reply, I think some of these people might say, “Well, God could create courage and forgiveness and something that’s akin to a simulation, where it looks like danger, but it isn’t, it seems like people have been wronged but they haven’t. And I just don’t see that that’s plausible, because I would say they aren’t actually… It’s the appearance of the goods, but they’re not good themselves. It reminds me of a thought experiment from the philosopher-
Joe Schmid:
Oh, yeah the experience machine.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, by Robert Nozick, which you task people, and then I could ask the audience. I want to turn this into some kind of meme. But I feel like the two people that play the game, would you rather the most are like drunk college students and philosophers. All right. Would you rather live in a world which is the experience machine? Would you rather live in the world as it is now, or would you rather be plugged into the matrix and have everything you ever wanted? And I think most people, not necessarily all, but I think most people would not want the matrix. I would not want that. Because there is something good beyond just the appearance of good, the actual goodness itself is more valuable. And as you said, some of those goods are concomitant, that go along with evils and you can’t have one without the other. But you’re right, we could do a whole thing just on the problem of evil. And there’s different replies to Mackie.
Trent Horn:
Some people think. I think it’s hard. Some people will listen to William Lane Craig and think there’s only one reply, which would be Plantinga. Well, the problem is there are counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, that you say, well, there’s… Joe has… Just debrief our audience, a counterfactual creaturely freedom is this, if Joe is free, then if Joe meets Sue’s mother in law, he’s going to be rude. That’s just something about Joe, God can’t change. So if God makes Joe or other versions of Joe, they’ll have different counterfactuals, and there is… And so Plantinga says, “Well, there just is no world whether there are creatures that don’t have… At least there might not be a world where creatures don’t have these propensities. And this gets us into trans world depravity and these kinds of things.
Trent Horn:
I just like the simpler thing, like what you uttered, as I say, kind of my debate with Ben, I just think God, he’s within his… He’s justified to allow evil if he brings these greater goods. And some evils I prefer, I think it’s better to have a world that goes from imperfect to perfect than one that’s just flat out perfect. But there’s always a lot more. But let’s get to some-
Joe Schmid:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Go ahead, go ahead.
Joe Schmid:
For the audience, I did just want to say really briefly that again, there are so many different versions-
Trent Horn:
So many.
Joe Schmid:
… and we’ve mainly focused on the logical one. And there are certain Bayesian ones that I think are much more powerful than the logical one. But we don’t have 30 hours. So-
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Now, the Bayesian to get to our listeners. And this is always I feel like the concern when philosophers and other people discuss amongst themselves. I never want to leave people behind. The idea here is, all right, maybe the arguments from evil or divine hiddenness, it doesn’t disprove God, but it just… I’ll give you an example I think I wrote a book a while ago. I once went to a football game with my wife. I went… It was a somebody, maybe it wasn’t my wife, it was somebody. And I got home and they said, “Oh, what happened?” And I said, “Oh, our team got destroyed.” And they said, “Oh, what was the final score?” And I said, “I don’t know.” I imagine it was probably something close to like 37 to seven. There’s only two minutes left. They said, “Well, how do you…”
Trent Horn:
I said it was so depressing I didn’t stay to the end of the game.” And they said, “How do you know that they lost?” All right, fine, I’m not 100% certain they lost but if you know how football runs, it’s pretty much impossible. That’s how these other for our listeners, these probabilistic arguments against God, evil, hiddenness, I don’t want to explore that, because it’ll take us too long. I just want to share one thing that concerns me a little when the probabilistic arguments enter the table. I feel like sometimes if you… I just don’t know how valuable it is to discuss single probabilistic arguments, because it seems like if we’re discussing whether God exists and it’s a probabilistic thing, then we’ve got to put all of the things on the table, right? You can have evil, divine hiddenness, but then what about the contingency of the universe, moral awareness? Do you think… And I think sometimes Christians can do this too. If you focus on just one probabilistic argument, I feel like it’s only fair to put it all on the table in one thing like what Richard Swinburne does in existence of God.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, I think that’s the correct… the absolutely correct approach that we need to have a kind of holistic assessment and you can’t just focus on just one Bayesian argument and say you need to focus on the whole range of evidence and see which hypothesis does the best in terms of its intrinsic probability and then in terms of predicting or explaining how the data-
Trent Horn:
The other thing that concerns me is… And I guess I’m of the school I’m just… I kind of more like deductive arguments and things like that. I understand the problem… And some people really like these inductive Bayesian arguments. I get a little bit concerned especially if we’re… Let’s say we have 10 or 12 variables like all the fine tuning, animals suffering, human suffering, divine hiddenness, religious experience, I feel… I understand, so Bayesian arguments work well when you’re dealing with let’s say, in medicine, what are the odds that Frank will develop prostate cancer? Well, you have his family history is this percentage, and this is this percentage, that percentage. You put it in a little math formula. But I kind of worry that if we do all this for something like proofs for God, we’re really shooting from the hip to try to assign the numerical values to everything. Maybe we could do more than 50% or less than 50%. But I don’t know, that’s a concern I have. I don’t know what you think of that.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, definitely. It’s certainly going to be difficult, if not impossible in many cases to give some kind of precise numerical value. But what’s nice about Bayesianism is that if you use the… Well, sorry for the audience, but if you use the odds form of Bayesian theorem, what really matters is comparing or likely certain data is on the theory. So as long as you don’t need to assign specific numerical values, but as long as one hypothesis, you can argue that it makes much better sense to do. It predicts the data much, much better than another hypothesis. Even if you don’t have some kind of numerical value, that’s actually all you need to say that the relevant data gives evidence for one hypothesis over the other. Sometimes you can actually get more quantitative. So in the fine tuning arguments, you might be able to give certain quantitative values and so on. But I do think that there are ways around worries like that. But the general worry is correct, that we don’t have these kind of very precise values that we can assign. So I think that’s in general correct.
Trent Horn:
Let’s go then to last question for you. Because you say even though you’re not convinced by arguments for atheism, there can be rational atheists or some strong arguments there, even if they don’t convince you. Flipping it around for theism, what are some arguments for theism, and you stipulated to me that are fun and plausible? There could be an argument that’s fun… I think the general ontological argument is fun. The general ontological argument I just don’t find it quite plausible. Then there’s others… And I guess this will get into ontological arguments a lot that are plausible. Who is the guy? It’s Hart Sean or someone had an 80 step ontological argument.
Joe Schmid:
Yes. Someone published the book somewhat recently, where they were formalizing Anselm’s version, and it was over 230 premises.
Trent Horn:
And so yes. It could be plausible, but it’s not fun to get through. So arguments for theism you find to be fun and plausible, because they don’t convince you they could point in that direction.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah. For the audience, I stipulated that we have to make it fun and plausible by my [inaudible 00:59:22]. So, I’ve just put down two that I think are fun and plausible that I think weigh in favor of theism. Like I said, I’m firstly an epistemic agnostic, but also a gnostic who thinks that there are significant evidential considerations that do in fact favor both theism and naturalism. So these are just two things. One of them, is I put an explanatory [inaudible 00:59:39] for the modal ontological argument. So, a lot of… Some people in the audience might know that I went on capturing Christianity with Alex O’Connor of Cosmic Skeptic to discuss this symmetry breaker. It’s in a paper mine that’s currently under review.
Joe Schmid:
And let me just explain the general… I’ll be brief, I won’t be too long. So, the modal ontological argument just says possibly God exists. Possibly a perfect being exists where again, perfect being is just necessarily existing perfect being that has all perfections essentially and lacks imperfections essentially. So, possibly there is such a thing as this. And therefore actually there is such a thing as that. Now it sounds like a [inaudible 01:00:15], but actually, there’s a system of modal logic that is pretty much taken to be the right one by most philosophers and metaphysicians. It’s called S5. And by S5, you can actually go from the possible necessity of something to it’s just necessity to kind of shave off that possibility.
Joe Schmid:
So if you say that it’s possibly necessary that God exists, well, then you can actually just shave off that possible and say, “Hey, necessarily God exists.” The idea is basically a necessary being exists no matter what, in all ways that reality could be in all possible worlds. And so if this being exists in one world, well, then how could it necessarily exist in our world if it didn’t exist in all the worlds? Because to be a necessary being is to exist in all possible worlds. And so if there were some world that it failed to exist in or that it wouldn’t actually be necessary in this one other world? So for saying it’s possible that there’s a necessary being in some other world, well, then actually a being populates all the world.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. And so that… Let me set you up for the tea. And hopefully I’ve set you up for the tea, where I’m running with my thinking with this, is that the premise that philosophers dispute in the first premise of the modal ontological argument, is that first premise, it’s actually the one that most lay people would think is the least controversial, but actually it’s the most controversial. Namely, it is possible God exists because they’ll say, “Guys, you’ve been talking about that this whole time. Of course, it’s possible.” Well, there’s two kinds of possibility, there’s epistemic, for all we know there’s a God, and then there’s metaphysical, God, he either exists or he doesn’t exist. It’s sort of like on a roulette table. It’s possible the ball will be black. But I guess I could think about this. It’s possible there’s a roulette table that is pink and black.
Trent Horn:
I don’t know, somebody could have made it out there. I don’t know. That’s epistemic. Metaphysical would be when you play roulette, it is possible the ball will bounce in black. We know what roulette is. And so we know it’s going to be red, or it’s going to be black, it has to be one of the two. The problem is not everyone’s convinced that God is that metaphysically possible either, it is possible or he isn’t. And so the biggest critique of the modal ontological argument is that you can run a parody or an inverted argument. The old argument, the old parody of it is, Oh, there’s this great being, there’s also a great Island or whatever. But the modal ontological argument tries to get around that. And the anti modal ontological argument will say, “Well, look, if it’s metaphysically possible that God does not exist, if there’s a possible world where there is no God, and if the absence of God is a necessary truth, by S5, well, then in every world, there is no God.”
Trent Horn:
So, that’s the biggest objection to the modal ontological argument that there is a symmetry. Like, “Look, if you could use this, that the problem is, if the logic proves there is a God, it also equally proves there isn’t a God, so the argument is useless unless somebody could come up with a symmetry breaker to show that no, no, there’s something different about how it shows there is a God versus that there isn’t. And you think people are… There’s interesting ways people try to do that.
Joe Schmid:
Absolutely yea. So, that was perfect. So yeah, you have these two competing possibility premises. One, possibly there is a perfect being and the other one, possibly there is no perfect being, these seem like roughly a priori on epistemic perhaps, it would be [inaudible 01:03:32] arbitrary to just, let’s storm them, one of them is true, the other one isn’t without some kind of other reasons to induce. So you need some kind of… If you want to privilege one over the other, especially if you want to do one over the other in an argument, then you need to give some kind of reason for that, you need to break that symmetry.
Joe Schmid:
And so yeah, so I think they’re interesting symmetry breakers, I think they’re all really fun to think about. I have reservations for most of them. But one of them I think, succeed. It doesn’t succeed in proving deductively that the theistic possibility premise is true. But I think it gives you some… What philosophers call defeasible reason, which is, all else being equal, it gives you some reason to prefer this possibility premise over that one. So it’s not saying it’s not like a deductive demonstration like one plus one equals two, not that that this one is to be preferred-
Trent Horn:
Which was then.
Joe Schmid:
It starts with a defeasible rule of thumb that gets our gears turning. It’s like just in general things generally have explanations in terms of other things. So, that’s just a general principle, things generally have explanations in terms of other things. So, take the fact that there are turtles. Well, this fact has an explanation. We can cite certain selection pressures and ancestral organisms that brought it about or planets, right? Planets aren’t some kind of inexplicable thing. Planets come from prior accretion disks and other sorts of dust and gravel effects and so on.
Joe Schmid:
So in general, we see an explanatory order around this, we see that things are explained in general by other things. So, that’s a kind of defeasible rule of thumb. I’m not saying everything has to happen outside explanation, I’m not saying a certain class of things have to have an outside explanation. I’m saying in general, we expect there to be an explanation. And there’s a kind of presumption in favor of there being an explanation. Explanation is the guide. It’s-
Trent Horn:
Sounds like you’re putting forward a relaxed principle of sufficient reason.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, absolutely. So this allows there… For all this principle says, there could be unexplicable things that could be uncaused beginnings, unexplained to get, all it’s saying is that there’s a presumption in favor of there being an explanation. Science relies on that I think, our ordinary common sense reasoning relies on that. If you hear pitter pattering at midnight, and some of the cheese is gone, and there’s a little hole in your wall, you’re probably not going to take seriously-
Trent Horn:
That’s kind of what I said earlier with you what I said with Dillahunty, the way you should live. Things are as they appear unless evidence suggests otherwise. And that’s rooted on the fact that if certain things happen, they seem to be routed to explanations. They seem to go together.
Joe Schmid:
Exactly. That’s it. Exactly. The principle that you just said, that is precisely the kind of defeasible principle that I’m saying. It’s generally such as a case unless you’re given some positive reason to disrupt that. So, generally things have explanations. So, what I want to do is, let’s weaken that even further. So generally, things possibly have explanations. Okay? So I’m not even saying that general things actually an explanation. It’s just in general, there’s a presumption in favor of at least the possibility of an explanation. Okay? I think all the reasons that favor the slightly stronger version favor this, because it’s entailed by the first one. Moreover, I think that there are certain modal principles that favor this. So, whenever we’re presented with something that we don’t have positive reason to think must be inexplicable, well, we can at least conceive of there being an explanation. Typically, we can conceive of something that produced it. I don’t think conceivability entails possibility. I think that’s false. But I think it gives us at least some reason to think that something is possible if it’s conceivable.
Joe Schmid:
And there are other modal epistemological tools. So, tools for probing possibility and necessity. So, once we have that principle on a table, we’ll now take the fact that there are imperfect things. And by an imperfect thing, I mean something that’s not perfect. So something that’s perfect, as I defined it earlier, is just a kind of like necessary being that has all perfections, essentially, and lacks all perfections. It lacks all imperfections, essentially. And so now we can focus on imperfect things. I focused on [inaudible 01:07:22] earlier, [inaudible 01:07:24] earlier. But now let’s apply this principle to imperfect things, given our principle that in general things possibly have explanations in terms of other things. Well, we can apply that to the fact that there are imperfect things. And so there’s a defeasible presumption in favor of the possibility of an outside explanation of imperfect things. And of course, the only thing that could explain imperfect things is something that’s perfect, you can’t explain imperfect things in terms of something that’s imperfect, that’s just fighting the… Just like you can’t explain why there are any turtles by sighting a turtle. So-
Trent Horn:
Right. Here is something else.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, that would deliver us the possibility of a perfect meaning. Because the fact that there are imperfect things, we have a general reason to think that that’s possibly explained. And the only possible explanation is a perfect thing. And so there’s some possible world, I’m not saying that’s actually it, there’s some possible world in which there’s a perfect thing. And by S5, you get that there is actually a perfect thing, because this thing is a necessary thing. That’s by definition, as I kind of spelling out what it is. And so I think this is interesting. I think it’s fun, I think it gives a defeasible reason that favors the theistic possibility premise. And yeah, I find it really plausible. I address many different objections in my paper, but yeah, that’s one of them, that’s the first one that I want to talk about.
Trent Horn:
Well, it reminds me a little bit of the symmetry breaker on the question, there’s a classic question, why is there something rather than nothing? And one reply to that is to say, “Well, we could… If there were nothing, we could ask the similar question, why is there nothing rather than something? So it’s just not an interesting fact to support theism, why is there something rather than nothing? Because if there were nothing we would ask the same question. But it seems like there’s a symmetry breaker to say no, something requires explanation, the absence of things don’t require an explanation unless there’s other positive evidence to assume they would be there. For example, if I’m walking down this… If I’m going in my house, I don’t say why isn’t there a dog barking? Because we don’t own a dog. Now if there were a dog barking, I’d say why is their dog barking? So, I don’t ask why there isn’t a dog barking because there’s nothing positive to require an explanation for that negative state of affairs.
Trent Horn:
But if I were walking and I saw a dog house and a leash and the Kibble freshly poured and sirens going off, I might say why isn’t the dog barking with all of this? Or let’s say I had a dog And someone breaks in there getting in the house, why didn’t the dog bark to let me know what’s going on? So it kind of reminds me of trying to sort out that there’s a different kind of explanation that we ask for in the symmetry. So, that’s an interesting one. I’ll be excited to read the paper.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah. I just want to say-
Trent Horn:
Go ahead.
Joe Schmid:
… it does connect to a lot of other… It’s similar to a lot of different arguments that other people develop. I think what I try to do is I just apply it in a new context of symmetry breaking and the modal ontological argument. So unlike some people like Alex Proust and Richard Gale for instance, they have what we might call a mobilized contingency argument so they use a kind of PSR and it’s different than the one that I was explaining. But they try to argue that it’s possible there’s an necessary being because they have this modal PSR where contingent things are possibly explained and so it’s somewhat similar to other moves that have been made. But what I argue in the paper is that there are certain unique benefits that accrue from mine that derive from the feasibility that derive from the type of fact that I want to explain so I don’t say that every fact whatsoever has an explanation. Remember what I said, I said generally things have an explanation.
Trent Horn:
Then the big conjunctive contingent-
Joe Schmid:
Yeah. Exactly. That thing is-
Trent Horn:
Demanding an explanation.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah. And also… Yeah, well anyway, yeah.
Trent Horn:
I’m sorry folks we’re geeking out of it, but it’s really fun for me to… It’s fun to do that with anyone frankly whether they agree or disagree. That’s why actually, we got to have you come down to capturing Christianity V2, because I had a blast, this is the debate I do with Ben Watkins everyone, this is in Houston. I was at the Capturing Christianity conference. And I will tell you it was a blast to sit around with Ben and Josh Rasmussen and just like chat about stuff like this. So, maybe Kim will bring you in and you’ll have to-
Joe Schmid:
I believe I’m going to come.
Trent Horn:
Oh, really? I hope. We’ll see. Oh yeah, we’ll see. One of the [crosstalk 01:11:58] bag, but I think [crosstalk 01:11:58] I’ll head down to Houston definitely if you’re there, especially if he has you do the, I think the debate is something he wants to do is like a tradition. So that would be super fun if… And it’s interesting notice what people how you and I are relating to one another even though we disagree about these profoundly important issues. At the end of the day, that’s what I like about really theology, you, Ben and other YouTubers I’m coming across more now. And even just kind of tired of the new atheist stick. It’s like, no, let’s raise a dialogue and talk about… I have hope for this one person I have hoped for. And that Stephen Woodford from Rationality Rules. You’ve been doing some stuff with him actually. You’re doing some Kalam video.
Joe Schmid:
He’s 1,000%… Yeah, and we’re actually working on our second Kalam video, it’s going to be so epic. We’re drawing on so much research, drawing on the best stuff like papers published in 2021 forthcoming papers and so on.
Trent Horn:
And it’s just so different from his earlier work.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, it is.
Trent Horn:
And I think he recognizes that and he’s-
Joe Schmid:
He does.
Trent Horn:
… trying to kind of grow in that area.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah. He’s noticed the same thing. He’s told me that, because he and I are friends now and so, he’s told me that. He’s like… He sees the increase in quality and he’s now before he’s doing videos, he’s starting to read papers, and so on. He’s asking me for recommendations about certain philosophical videos and topics and papers before he makes videos on them. So there’s definitely improvement there. So…
Trent Horn:
And that’s what we should see. And I feel the same way. I get super excited when I see Christians who want to read the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, and also read atheists, read Graham Oppy, read Mackie. And-
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, not like Dawkins or something.
Trent Horn:
Right. Yeah. And I will say this. So there is a place for Christians to respond to Dawkins, just like there is a place for atheists to respond to Ken Ham. Because it is just, that is the perennial problem, each of us will have an understanding, both of us can equally sympathize with this problem. The most interesting objections we want to address are the least interesting to our general [inaudible 01:14:17].
Joe Schmid:
Yes, yes.
Trent Horn:
So, that’s the balance. That’s why I-
Joe Schmid:
Exactly.
Trent Horn:
When I do the rebuttal videos, yours was the more sophisticated one I had earned after doing a few on the Antichrist. Basically-
Joe Schmid:
That’s funny.
Trent Horn:
… it’s just like I have to… And I’m excited to go through your reply to that. And then we can more, not necessarily on YouTube, but we might have it in another forum more back and forth. Because I am hoping in the future to do a… It’s called… Previous, I did a book, The Case for Catholicism with Ignatius Press. And the President of that Mark Brumley described the book I wrote for him as middlebrow. It’s something between academic and popular. So he called it middle brow. I would like to write something like that for Christian theism, because I think it’s actually quite lacking, You have generic apologetic book and then you have something from Blackwell, Oxford, Baker Academic, or if you want to be real fancy Penns, it’s funny when you write enough papers, you probably get this way you have all the presses memorized when you’re citing things and then you know, oh, it’s [inaudible 01:15:28] press, it’s a German probably-
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, exactly.
Trent Horn:
… I have to spend 150 bucks to get it, or hope that the author put it for free on his own web page somewhere.
Joe Schmid:
The only book that you’re describing that I think falls under middlebrow that I’m aware of, is, How Reason Can Lead to God by Josh Rasmussen.
Trent Horn:
Josh’s book. Yes.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah. I think that’s the only one really that I know of. So, it’s sitting right behind me.
Trent Horn:
And that’s the gap that I’ve seen, because I would also put Swinburne’s Existence of God, it’s academic, or at least one rung below. It’s not a monograph, it’s academic. So, that’s why… And I think what’s really neat to see with you and where Woodford is going and really theology, is this level here, which I call middlebrow, which is like, “Look, we are aware what philosophers are publishing, these are not academic monographs, but a lay person who applies themselves can read this.” That would be the goal, I guess.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah. Sometimes people have told me that I go to highbrow, but yeah, middlebrow is definitely the best because it tries to reach as many people as you can. And I try to simplify things, but some of them it’s really difficult. But I try.
Trent Horn:
And that’s what we have to do. And so that’s what I’m excited to see. So in any case, we went longer than I expected, but this is super fun. So I’m okay with that. It’s my podcast. I can go as long as I want. Is there anything else you’d like to share with our listeners where they can learn more about the work you’re doing, anything I might have left out or forgot?
Joe Schmid:
No. I guess people can check out like you said, YouTube Channel Majesty of Reason. I’ve got a lot of fun stuff on there, conversations with philosophers like Josh Rasmussen, Rob Coons, Trent Merricks, and others. Most of my… I also looked at a different lecture videos on arguments for and against God’s existence. A lot of really fun philosophy religion stuff for fun but I [inaudible 01:17:13], extremely fun. And then on the scholarly level, they can check out my papers and as well as my book, which is let’s see if I can point, oh, yes, The Majesty of Reason: A Short Guide to Critical Thinking in Philosophy. They can check that out on Amazon. But there’s one central place where I finally got a new website, just, Josephschmid.com. S-C-H-M-I-D, so it has all my papers on there, you access, you can read my papers I published and as well as link to my book and other sort of things.
Trent Horn:
Very good. Well, I’m super impressed. This is actually really a lot of fun. And I’m excited for people to listen to it. I’ll leave you by the way with one last parting thought, because I didn’t bring this up beginning and I didn’t want to because some people could be sick of hearing it. A lot of people will comment on your age, you’re an undergrad at Purdue, but you know a lot about philosophy and really engaged people well on the subject. And although the thing is people used to say to me, “You’re so young.” And at first to be flattering, other times get kind of annoying. It’s like, “Look, my age shouldn’t have anything to do with arguments that I’m presenting.” And I might say that I can understand being annoyed if people make a big deal about your age. I was annoyed. But here’s the thing. One day, they will stop and they won’t say you look so young and they’ll start saying, “Wow, you look really tired.”
Trent Horn:
And so you’ll pine for the days when people said you looked young instead of saying, “You look really tired.” So if it annoys you now, if people go on about your age, which I don’t think they should, it doesn’t affect your arguments. Just remember one day it’ll pass and you’ll miss it. I’m just putting it out there. So…
Joe Schmid:
Very true. And all the back problems and knee problems and-
Trent Horn:
Oh, yeah. Totally. All right, Joe Schmid, Majesty of Reason available at Josephschmid.com. He’s professional philosophy website, not Joe Schmid, it’s Joseph Schmid.
Joe Schmid:
Yes, exactly. My publishing name.
Trent Horn:
Yes, you have to be… You know what’s funny actually, so my colleague, Jimmy Akin, he used to go by James Akin in his articles and his books. And then when he got older, he didn’t feel like he needed to really go by that. So he switched back. So maybe when you’re 40, or 50, you might go back to Joe Schmid for your publishing. You might end up doing that, you never know.
Joe Schmid:
Joey, Joebab, who knows?
Trent Horn:
I don’t know. Some people who are Joe, they hate being called like Joey, or things like that. Cool beans, Josephschmid.com, Majesty of Reason on YouTube, check him out. And then hopefully you and I will be able to engage a few other topics in the future. But thanks for being on the podcast today.
Joe Schmid:
Thanks for having me.
Trent Horn:
Absolutely. Thank you guys for listening and I hope that you all have a very blessed day.
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