The NEW Case for God’s Existence

Hey everyone. In today’s episode I wanted to share with you the talk that I gave at last year’s Catholic Answers Conference. The theme was, I believe in God and I talked about how the arguments for the existence of God can really be improved and what we can do and all the great research and books that have been written by faithful Christians on this subject. So I’m excited to share that with you. And by the way, if you want to attend this year’s conference, we still have tickets left for sale. It’s in the last weekend of September being hosted in San Diego, California. And if you go, you can hang out with myself, Jimmy Aiken, Tim Staples, all the Catholic Answers, apologists and other special guests. So if you want to do that, check out the link in the description below and here’s the talk that I gave at last year’s Catholic Answers Conference.

Alright, so I was asked to give a presentation on the new case for God and what I wanted to focus on are developments in philosophy of religion and defense of theism, of the existence of God that we have in the last 20 or 30 years. And I do want to give a caveat that this talk, I don’t want to run you through. Here’s the entire argument and here’s every premise and here’s how to answer the objection and by the end of the 45 minutes, okay, you understand everything, right? No, I don’t. Just kick back, enjoy. This is an appetizer sampler platter. We’re going to have some spinach, arctic choke dip from ethics, some jalapeno poppers from metaphysics. Try a little bit of each one and for you to see what’s out there and see the resources and then hopefully go and check them out yourself if you want to go deeper in that.

And we have really seen a renaissance in philosophy of religion from a Christian perspective back in 1966. Actually April, I remember the day it was right here, April 8th, 1966, time Magazine released this very famous image for its cover is God dead. It was very emblematic of where philosophy of religion had been going since the early 20th century, which had really been poisoned with philosophies like verification saying that theology and religion isn’t just false, it’s meaningless it if you can’t empirically verify the terms that you’re discussing. Of course, people then pointed out that verification itself would be refuting. Since you can’t empirically define what it means to verify and other things like that, it becomes incoherent. But there was going out of the early 20th century, sort of in the academic world, this feeling that, oh, well God is just something for the common folk. Academics have nothing to do with it.

But it turns out then after that period in these 60 years since then, we’ve seen a wonderful growth in the Christian philosophy of religion. Even within a year after this time magazine cover was published, so much so that a few years later people know about this picture. It’s very famous time, had to admit a few years later in 1969, is God coming back to life? Oops. People hear about, they see the former one, but they don’t actually know. Time did publish a semi bit of a retraction, and one of the reasons for that was you started to have work from Christian philosophers like Alvin Plantinga, who is at the University of Notre Dame, a protestant philosopher, very smart guy. If you want to watch a funny, he’s like one of the smartest guy’s philosophers I’ve ever read. And there’s a hilarious video of him. He lives at Notre Dame or he was at Notre Dame.

It was a news report talking about a record heat wave where people’s air conditioning don’t work and then they’re just interviewing. And here’s Alvin talking about his air conditioner and the smartest guy, I just can’t seem to make it work exactly. This guy who can have 85 premise arguments and he can’t get his air. So look up Alvin planting an air conditioner. It’s funny, Richard Swinburne, the existence of God in 2001, an atheist philosopher who actually passed away in 2020, Quentin Smith, he wrote this, this is in the early two thousands talking about the change he had seen in academia, and I’ll read it to you. He said The secularization of mainstream academia began to quickly unravel upon the publication of planting his book God and other minds. In 1967, it became apparent to the philosophical profession. This book displayed the realist theists were not outmatched by naturalists in terms of the most valued standards of analytic philosophy, conceptual precision, rigor of argumentation, and in-depth defense of an original worldview in philosophy. It became almost overnight, academically respectable to argue for theism belief in God making philosophy, a favored field of entry for theism field of entry for intelligent and talented theists entering academia today. And it was really neat for me to read this in 2001 because that’s when I started my investigation into religion, going to websites, listening to debates. YouTube wouldn’t show up for about four years. So I was downloading every MP three. You could fit one debate on a floppy disc. It was a time to be alive, it was a time to be alive.

So these are some of the arguments that I’m going to go through and as I said, this is our appetizer sampler. So the different arguments I want to talk about if you don’t like quesadillas, once again, there are mozzarella sticks. There’s some for everybody here. So I just want to go through a few of them and some of them will seem familiar too. I’ll talk about the argument its roots and how it’s been developed and how philosophers are expanding upon it. In the past 2030, even the past 10 years, people are still working to improve on the different subjects that they encounter. So the first one would be the argument for motion pop quiz. I’m sure you all know this argument because Tim explained it to you. You don’t need me to re-explain it to you, you understand that. But if I had to give a little bit of a summary of it, Aquinas is saying that even if the universe existed for all time, we see motion, motion is just when something potential becomes actual.

So the water here it is potentially solid, can’t become ice on its own. It needs something to actualize it. Cold air. Air doesn’t become cold on its own. Something has to actualize that there’s a chain. The chain is kind of like this little choo train here. Imagine you had a box car going by you, it’s being pulled by another box car and it’s okay. What’s pulling that box car, another box car. What’s pulling that one? Let’s say you have a friend who says, I think there’s just an infinite number of box cars each pulling the one before it. That’s not an explanation because you could have an infinitely long train of box cars that stand still. Why do you have an infinitely long train of box cars that’s moving rather than standing still? The answer is there is a car that gives motion to the train without receiving motion from anything else, A prime mover and purely actual actualizer of potential.

The argument from motion, this is also a great, I like this analogy and people say, well, if God created the universe who created God, I say to someone who says that your question is like asking if a locomotive pulls a train. What pulls the locomotive? You don’t understand just as a locomotive is not another car on a train. God is not another being within the universe that he created. The argument for promotional of course has been criticized by people, philosophers in the early 20th century. It was dismissed a lot of it, the dismissal. When I look at philosophers Mackey, for example, in his book, the Miracle of Theism, he thought it was a miracle anybody could be a theist. Nowadays, when I look at him and William Rowe and others, they oftentimes will go back to Anthony Kenny’s 1969 essay on the Five Ways saying that Kenny refuted Aquinas Aquinas uses Aristotelian physics, that his arguments don’t work.

Saying that in order to become actual something potentially hot needs to be actualized by something that is hot. So something that can potentially be on fire has to be actualized by something that is on fire. And so you can only light wood on fire with other fire. And then Kenny says, well, I mean you can rub two sticks together. They’re both potentials and they actualize themselves. But of course other philosophers have answered these arguments and answered these criticisms and expanded the argument. One of them is the Catholic philosopher Edward Faser, who teaches at Pasadena City College in his book, five Proofs of the Existence of God. Faser answers this objection saying that the critic has misconstrued Aquinas. Aquinas is not saying a potential can only be actualized by something that is the actual of that type. Like wood only becomes fire by actual fire. It’s just potentials can only be actualized by something that is actual to actual pieces of wood being rubbed together.

Aquinas is not saying that whatever causes something actually to be F, like fire must itself be fire in some way, but rather that whatever causes something must itself be actual. Nothing merely potential can cause anything. There are other arguments that come forward actually to bring this here. We had people like Graham Oppy who’s a very intelligent atheist. He has a book 2006 book called Arguing About Gods. He has other objections to Aquinas saying, well, all Aquinas is proved is that there is a purely actual cause of one thing. So maybe there’s a purely motion based cause that gives motion. Maybe all light comes from something that’s pure light. Maybe all heat comes from something that’s pure heat. Those are the actual causes of things. You don’t need one purely actual Actualizer or God. And what Faser has done, he has a 50 premise argument for the existence of God in five proofs. But the most interesting part is probably the first 14 premises where Faser breaks down the argument more into systematic premises. And this is helpful because the five ways, when Aquinas presented them, they were just notes for novice theology students.

They were not meant Aquinas would be aghast if he thought people read the five ways and thought this was his definitive defense of the existence of God. These were notes to catch people up. When you read the Summa Theolog and it says that this is designed for beginners, you feel really dumb like because we need a useful textbook for those who are beginners. I shall write this like, yeah, losers wouldn’t understand any of this stuff. So what Phasers done is taking the argument, extrapolated, adding more premises, including this very important premise here, premise nine talking about how even if you did have pure light, pure motion, pure heat, the potential for those pure things to exist at all would have to be actualized by something that is pure existence itself. And this is an important premise that he has defended at length, engaging API on the criticism that things can exist and just persistent existence, what’s called existential inertia.

So when it comes to argument for motion phase is not the only one. There are others who have published in Blackwell and in other journals, other variants of the argument from motion. But I like the one that’s here in five proofs of the existence of God. And Faser has a good response to general objections from atheists at the end of the book, but he has that argument from motion there. Let’s move on to a fun one. You might remember this from yesterday. I had my dialogue with Jimmy Aiken. This would be the Klum cosmological argument. Alright, so Aquinas and Bonaventure disagreed on a particular issue in their time. And if you were at the dialogue with Jimmy, you may remember some of this. If not, here’s your presentation for others a little bit of a refresher. And the question is, can we know from reason alone that the universe began to exist, that its past is finite.

We know from faith we know that God created the universe he told us. So the church teaches us that from nothing in the finite past. But could you prove that a finite past is impossible? Reason shows the past cannot be infinite. Aquinas did not think so. St. Bonaventure did think. So both are doctors of the church. So there are two positions you were allowed to hold as a Catholic. The argument though, because Aquinas is kind of a heavy hitter because he didn’t like it. Well, I’m not going to like it either. So a lot of people weren’t big fans of it after that, even for the next 700 years until a evangelical philosopher and theologian named William Lane, Craig published a dissertation on the argument called the Kal cosmological argument. Kal is an Arabic word, it means speech and others have worked to improve on the argument since then.

Very simple argument. Whatever begins to exist as a cause, the universe began to exist, therefore the universe has a cause. This is his 1978 dissertation and he’s now since then, what’s interesting, one of the objections to the argument is that it relies on particular views of things like the philosophy of time. We talk about a past infinite, well, what is time itself at all? We have to settle that. So in the meantime, Craig had updated his argument in 2009. He published a very lengthy defense of it in the Blackwell companion to natural theology. And he uses two different kinds of arguments to prove the second premise here. So whatever the universe began to exist, you see that here, whatever begins to exist as a cause. Well, how do we know the universe began to exist so that it has a cause? How do we know that?

He uses two forms of argument. One would be scientific evidence saying, look, we look at evidence from the Big Bang, look at evidence from cosmology. And it seems that the universe had a particular point of beginning though Jimmy was very careful and I agree with him in the dialogue we had yesterday. This is more suggestive than completely demonstrative. Science is tentative. Maybe it’ll find a beginning even before this point here in the Big Bang. But many people look at this evidence and it seems that the universe, they say, okay, I could see the universe comes from nothing. That’s the scientific evidence. Craig uses arguments from philosophies saying that, well, no, the past cannot be infinite because that would lead to contradictions. Actual infinites cannot exist. And he uses examples like Hilbert’s Hotel developed by the German mathematician, David Hilbert, late 19th, early 20th century. Hilbert’s Hotel says, look, if Hilbert said that the infinite exists as an idea because when you have it in reality, you get all kinds of weird contradictions.

You could have everybody in the hotel and you could continue to check in an infinite number of people by shifting them around in the rooms if you subtract identical quantities. So if you subtract all the odd numbered guests from Hilbert’s Hotel, how many are left an infinite number? Everyone in the even rooms, if everybody after room four checks out from the hotel, you remove an infinite number of guests. How many are left? Four. Infinity minus infinity in one case equals infinity. In another case, infinity minus infinity equals four. It’s a contradiction. That’s why in trans finite arithmetic, it’s prohibited to subtract infinite sets. But you can’t stop these people from leaving Hilbert’s hotel or can you? So that’s the argument that Craig had made since the late seventies, early eighties, though there are particular objections that are leveled at it. And I actually do agree with these objections.

It is humbling as an apologist or a philosopher or theologian, anyone who puts forward an argument in the public square, you’ll receive criticism of your argument, you’ll receive, and I think it’s quite a mark of intellectual integrity if you can receive criticism and then modify your argument in the face of the criticism instead of just bluntly ignoring it. And that’s what all of us try to do as apologists. Whether it doesn’t have to be the existence of God, it could be anything. It’s about the New Testament, the church fathers, we will go out, I’ll put forward an argument in a debate. Some will do well, other arguments that one didn’t do so hot, I need to change it or drop it. And it’s hard because we’re not our own worst critic sometimes, but we can learn from how others criticize it and it’s great. That’s why I love the dialoguing with Jimmy yesterday here at the conference, because the best people, I love to cherrypoint, my arguments are my smart apologist friends.

We all have goodwill in our hearts. We’re not going to be mean to each other, but we can point out problems that we see. And so that’s why the book of Proverbs says that iron sharpens iron. So man sharpens his fellow man. That’s what we do a lot at Catholic answers. So there’s a few different criticisms of the argument. One is that it relies on a theory of time that is not super popular with physicists and philosophers not going to get into all this because it’s kind of complicated. What does the past and future, do they exist or does only the present exist? That’s presentism. This is kind of a goofy model that I like because I’m a goofy guy called the growing block. The past is real. Only the present though for me is where consciousness is and the future is still open. Many physicists hold to this block view, past, present, and future are equally real.

So if that is the case, you have to be careful. As Jimmy pointed out in our argument, sorry, our discussion yesterday, because we as Christians believe that the future is endless. If your argument for a beginningless past, if you say yeah, the past cannot be infinite, you better be careful. You don’t want to have an argument that shows that the future cannot be infinite because you have a problem. God told us the future is infinite. He promised us that in the book of Revelation we have endless life. It’s infinite. So since we know the future is infinite, any argument that would show the past and the future are finite. That’s just, that’s not going to work. So one is to take that into account. The other problem is that impossible actual infinites, even if something like Hilbert’s hotel can’t exist, say yeah, you can’t have hotel with infinite rooms.

All kinds of crazy stuff happens there that might not apply to the past because past events they don’t exist. Like all of this stuff. If you, Craig, William Lane Craig, he holds to this presentist view where the past does not exist anymore and the past don’t longer exist, the future doesn’t exist yet. So there is no actual infinite events here all together like at Hilbert’s Hotel for the contradictions to arise. So that creates a lot of problems to the argument. Are there ways to, so that’s why in my dialogue with Jimmy, I’ve sought to try to rework the argument and deriving, and I’m drawing from other people who looked at the argument to say, maybe we can rework it a little bit. I like the work of Andrew Looch, for example. He teaches, I think at Hong Kong Baptist University, very smart guy. He’s written a number of books.

In fact, I have two of them in this presentation refer you to, he has another book on the cosmological argument. This one’s good, the teleological and cosmological arguments revisited. This is not in his book, but it’s based on stuff that is in here. I would put an argument like this, if the past were infinite, then contradictions would generally be possible. This might, this is not my correct version of the talk that is not helpful. What if we just cut this point out of the presentation right now? Let’s see if I can, all right, no one. Look at my desktop. It’s just as messy as my room. How can look? Can that not be my correct one? All right, lemme try this. All right, hold on. Alright, let’s try this. Yes, I did work on my presentation like 20 minutes before I came up here. It’s how I roll people.

The spirit just moves me. All right, there we go. Let’s see. There we are. I know that’s correct. I still didn’t fix this part. If the past were infinite, then contradictions would be possible. Contradictions are not possible. Therefore, the past is not infinite. I do fix this later, but for me, what I’m trying to say in the argument is not that an infinite past is a contradiction that can’t exist, but an infinite past leads to contradictions. So for Craig’s argument saying that, okay, well Hilbert’s hotel and past events aren’t the same thing, you’re right. But if the past were beginningless, you could build one hotel room at a time, or you could have one indestructible object come into existence every 10 gazillion years. If you had one indestructible object pop into existence every 10 gazillion years or two particles hit, two more particles come into existence.

It doesn’t matter how, even if the space between the events is huge, a Google years one in a hundred zeros, it would still have an actual infinite number of things in the present moment. An infinite past would yield these kinds of contradictions. You would have a Hilbert’s hotel today. You would not have that if you started building Hilbert’s hotel into an endless future. The contradictory hotel will not exist, but you would in an infinite past. So that shows there can be problems with an infinite past. Another thing that we’ve seen in the past few years in the 2010s, Alex Press, who is a Catholic philosopher at Baylor University, along with Rob Koons, who is a Lutheran convert to Catholicism, have worked on a theory called causal fism. And this is the argument that causal chains must be finite, or at least there can be infinite causal chains that are paradoxical and cannot exist.

Alright? So we have to be careful. They’ll make an argument based on this saying that look, even if the past is infinite, let’s say you could have hilbert’s Soel, let’s say. You could have that. You could have all of these causal ISTs paradoxes that arise. And I shared one with Jimmy yesterday at our dialogue, suppose you had an infinite, suppose God made an infinite number of immortal people and they’ve always existed and every year they have a task to do. They pass a paper into the future, for example. That seems fine. But the problem is if you had an infinite past, you could have the same number of people do paradoxical things that can’t actually happen. So you imagine you have Mr Zero, Mr one, mr two, mr three, mr four. They have all of these names for each year that they act. And this is Rob Koon’s paper passer experiment.

I explained with Jimmy suppose here’s the rule. Each person here is named after a number, one of the natural numbers. And so there’s an infinite number of them. There’s an infinite number of natural numbers. They have a rule, they receive a paper from the guy to their left. If the paper is blank, they write their name on it. If the paper already has a name on it, IEA number, they pass it to the right. Alright? So they just go and Mr five gets it. If it’s blank, he writes his name. It won’t be blank. I’m sure six wrote something and they pass it along. Now, the paradox that arises is this, what name is on Mr. Zero’s paper because it can’t be one. He couldn’t get a one because we got a one. It would’ve been blank here. And if it was sorry, it would be blank when one got it, if it were blank, well two would’ve written his name and it couldn’t have been blank when two got it because three would’ve written his name.

And so we have this sort of paradox that arises that if every person in this infinite chain follows this rule, a Bernadette rule named after the mathematician, Jose Bernadette, you get a paradox. A paper arrives in the present. It needs to have a number, a name on it, but it can’t have any particular number. You could also have all other kinds of crazy stuff like an actual infinite number of papers if they were copying papers from one another. Variant of the paradox is the grim Reaper paradox. This wasn’t the right why can’t believe it’s not the right one. I changed, someone came up to me and said, are you going to kill Cy? I’m like, yeah. And I went back in and I changed Bob’s name to Cy. So just imagine you’re right. I was like, I’m not going to kill S, that’d be gratuitous.

And I was like, wait, I had the grim reaper slide. So this is what I get. I did save the right one. It doesn’t. It doesn’t. Doesn’t matter. It does not matter. Alrighty, so the point is, it’s similar to the paper passer thought experiment. Every grim reaper in immortal sigh is alive. A grim reaper kills him. Number zero, he couldn’t, one would’ve killed him. Well, two would’ve immortal except grim. Reapers can kill him. And you have that paradox that si must be dead. But no individual reaper could have killed him in this infinite chain at this point. Some you might be thinking to yourself, that of course is Tom Hanks in the movie Big, a wonderful classic where a 12-year-old gets to be 35 and doesn’t realize how lucky he had it as a kid, at least at first.

I don’t get it. The point is just look, these causal chains can create these sorts of paradoxes, and as I talked about in my dialogue with Jimmy, I think that time travel can’t happen. You could have all kinds of paradoxes. You could go back in time and kill your grandfather, but then you would never exist to go back in time and kill him. So I would say that you can’t go back in time because otherwise those kinds of paradoxes would easily happen. Or if you could go back in time, God wouldn’t let you do that stuff. Alright, in press’s book, infinity Causation and Paradox, he says, some people tell him with the grim Reaper experiment and the paper passer, they say, look, something will happen where someone will drop their paper and not do it, or a grim reaper won’t show up to work that day.

So there won’t be a paradox. And I think really why? How do we know that’s going to happen? Well, it just has to. So there’s no paradox. There’s going to be some strange metaphysical force that will stop it from happening. So I would say that if the past is infinite, it could only be infinite if God exists to present to prevent these paradoxes. So as an atheist, the only way you can get in, normally you want an infinite past because you would say God didn’t make the world. It’s always been here. You still have other arguments. Why is there something rather than nothing? But even if you had an infinite past, you have these other finitude paradoxes that arise that only the existence of God can explain why we don’t have them. So I think that this is a very promising avenue of research that people are working towards.

Alright, let’s talk about a few more here. This is going to get even more heady, but you can have fun. We’ll have fun here. The contingency argument, why is this something rather than nothing? Something doesn’t have to exist, it needs a necessary being to keep it in existence. This is Father Copleston and Bertrand Russell. They had a very polite British debate about it in 1948. You can find it online, it’s super fun just to, but it seems to me the problem with your argument is that, and they have a great exchange one another saying, well, how do we know that the universe just isn’t necessary? It exists. How do we know the universe is contingent? Those doubts from Russell kind of undercut the argument. So in order to get around it, we use something called there are people using modal contingency, ontological arguments. I promise this won’t be painful, okay?

I’m going to talk about possible worlds. A possible world is not a parallel dimension where evil, Dr. Strange is doing something. A possible world is kind of like a book. It’s a description of how the world could have been if it were a little different. If it’s possible, it’d be in one of these books. If it’s impossible, it’s not in a book like a Married Bachelor. So there’s possible worlds, there’s ways the world could have been. So a modal ontological argument would say that it goes like this. This is a real argument. Philosophers do respect this. This is not a joke. It’s really interesting. It’s possible that God, a necessary being exists. If it is possible, God exists. God exists in a possible world, right? If something’s possible, it’s in a possible world. If God exists in one possible world, he exists in every possible world because he is necessary.

Two plus two equals four is true in every single possible world. It’s in every description of any world. Well, the actual world is a possible world. Therefore God exists in the actual world and we’re done. We’re good. We can go home and we’re done. No, it’s never that simple. Honestly, the only premise that philosophers have a lot of trouble with before they sign onto this argument is the first premise. Is it possible not just epistemically like oh, we talk about it, but it’s something that could really happen because there’s a huge problem here is that if you have a really powerful tool, you don’t want it used against you because you could run a reverse ontological argument. Know what I just did here instead of changing to exist. I change it to is it possible God does not exist? I’m sure obviously people say Yeah, it’s possible.

That’s why we’re debating it. Well then if it’s possible he doesn’t exist, there’s a possible world then he doesn not exist in. And if God doesn’t exist in one possible world, he doesn’t exist in every one. If he’s necessary, he’s got to be in all of ’em. The actual world’s a possible world, but it doesn’t matter. God doesn’t exist in the actual world. The point is you can take this argument. If you can just change one word in the whole thing and get the opposite conclusion, it’s not a good argument. You need a symmetry breaker, need something to show. There’s a difference between why this argument doesn’t work and this one does. So my friend Josh Rasmussen, who’s a protestant philosopher, has done a lot of work on this area. He’s worked on contingency arguments and making really cool ones. He has a great book, God sorry, how reason can lead to God? This is America, Josh. It’s up to down. Okay? But I guess we’re going up to God. God to lead can Reason How by Joshua Rasmussen.

So how reason can lead to God? He does a modal contingency argument. He says, well look, instead of trying to say against Bertrand Russell, yeah, the universe is contingent. Say to Russell, well it’s possible the universe has an explanation, right? Is it at least possible? The universe is explained by something that not just itself, it has an explanation because nothing in the universe could be that explanation and therefore it’s possible unnecessary being explains the universe. And now we’ve got something. We’ve got stuff that exists and we can run the modal ontological argument, but we can use it with something that’s different from the other one. We actually have things that exist that lead to our modal intuition. There must be a necessary being running this way. I think that’s really fun. I think it’s a fun thing. Alright, next one, the fine tuning argument. We got the laws of physics and they could be different.

This is a book called Just Six Numbers by the astronomer Royal Sir Martin Reeves. And he talks about how the odds of our universe existing are ridiculously low. Illustration I like to use is if you were playing poker with someone and you got a royal, I’ve never seen a, has anyone here seen a royal flush? I’m sorry, in a real game. You saw it in a real game. That’s amazing. But I bet if we ask 500,000 other people, they’d say no. The odds are like one in 600,000. But they do happen. Alright, new question. Has anyone ever seen somebody get 10 royal flushes in a row fairly? That’s the key, right? Because if you’ve seen someone get 20 royal flushes in a row, yeah, my cheating brother-in-law. Now why do you think that? Why can’t you just be lucky? We live in an infinite universe.

Who knows what could happen? We know deep down that that’s so improbable. It’s got to be designed not chance. And that’s the essence of the fine tuning argument that things like the strong nuclear force, the amount of entropy at the beginning of the universe, all the cosmological concept, the strength of gravity and empty space, these things are balanced on a knife’s edge. It would be much more likely if the universe came into existence under atheism, it’d be far more likely. There is no embodied intelligent life. That’s very surprising under atheism. But it’s not surprising at all under theism because God could have good reasons. El least he has reasons like there’s one in 10 to the hundred 20th power odds of getting us without God. I’m sure God has a reason below that probability for creating embodied intelligent life. So this is very interesting and that’s why some atheists, even while there are atheists like Stephen Hawking and others who recognize the fine tuning problem and they try to solve it with things like a multiverse, you have people like the late atheist, Victor Stanger who have tried to say the universe is not really fine tuned at all.

People get this wrong. The odds really aren’t stacked against us. And this is all the rave back in the early 2010s. I remember from my very first debate, major atheism debate against Dan Barker. I was 10 years ago. It was a very well rested young man in the prime of his life. I knew I studied Barker before our debate and I knew he would bring up Stinger’s book against my fine tuning argument. So just for a little bit of rhetorical, I kept the book under my podium and explained what was wrong with it. And to explain what was wrong with the book, I cited a paper by an astronomer named Luke Barnes. Since then, Luke has gone on to write a entire book Refuting Stinger’s thesis and other objections to the fine tuning argument. His co-author, Geraint Lewis is an atheist actually. So the book only says, Hey, this universe, the odds of existing are really low.

We need an explanation. Now Lewis explains to Barnes why he’s not fully sold on God, but he accepts everything else on the fine tuning argument and they dialogue, but they make a very strong case against stinger’s denial of fine tuning and the other elements that people try to debunk in it. Next one, let’s talk about miracles. Does anyone know who this fun guy is? Shout it out. Who knows? This guy is David Hume. David Hume, the poster boy for a theology for the critique of Natural Religion, wrote, he was a Scottish philosopher in the 18th century and had some devastating criticisms of arguments that were not necessarily Catholic or tamis arguments, but the watchmaker argument, the watchmaker analogy, claims on miracles and it’s persisted to this very day that a lot of people think they can just cite Hume. And we say, oh, well we are Christians because we have good evidence that Jesus rose from the dead.

We have the gospels, the witness of Paul, the Apostles and Hume. People will often say extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence. Who’s heard of that one before? Extraordinary events need extraordinary evidence. So Hume said, no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such a kind that it’s falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish. So any evidence you have for a miracle would have to be more miraculous than the miracle itself, or at least it’d be a miracle that the evidence was actually false and that raises the bar so high, almost no miracle could pass it. But we have some newer arguments that really challenge a lot of this. This is a book from I think 2008 by John Airman called Hues Abject Failure, the Argument Against Miracles. And while Airman is not actually very sympathetic towards Christian miracle claims, he does point out the errors that Hume makes in probability theory in calculus, which is something that was still developing during his time in the 18th century and would take time to develop in things like Bay’s Probability theorem, which was developed by a Christian clergyman.

Actually, I’ll give you just one example of this is an objection even in Hume’s own time that he kind of glossed over that I think shows the problem. What Hume is basically saying is that, look, people lie, people are mistaken. Nature doesn’t lie. Nature is not mistaken. Nature tells us it’s laws. This is the way it’s always been. Our uniform experience is never broken. What’s more likely the uniform was broken and a miracle happened or somebody told a fib or they had too much wine, alright? But the problem here is that how do you know we have uniform experience? Miracles don’t happen. This kind of assumes that it needs to prove. So I have a picture here of British explorers landing in Tahiti. So imagine you’re a British explorer and you’re in Tahiti, and first you run to a tree and eat some oranges because you probably have scurvy.

That’s why they kept limes with them. They’re limes so they don’t get scurvy vitamin C deficiency. Then after that you tell the natives as best you can, what it’s like in England and say, oh yeah, in winter we go out and we walk on the lake and we skate on the lake. Now, should these people believe this after all their uniform experience in Tahiti for the entire length of their civilization and existence is that you cannot walk on water. That’s impossible. That’s their uniform experience. Maybe their uniform experience though is truncated. Maybe it’s missing some aspects of the world. And so that’s one of the flaws here. We have more philosophical retorts that are involved to these objections to miracles. I really like this book. This is the other Andrew Looch book. I think he’s a great scholar. I’m really happy to see the work that he’s doing.

This is probably one of my favorite new books on the Resurrection. You can tell it’s an academic book because it just has geometric shapes on the front. Academic publishers are like, don’t worry. 18 people will read this. We’re just going to go with miscellaneous shapes. Five back in the, I’m throwing, at least though, back in the nineties our book covers the Catholic answers were like it was clouds or whirlpools. It was always water. Go back and look, go back and look answering Jehovah’s Witnesses. It’s a whirlpool of water. I don’t know why, but Looch does a good job answering these philosophical arguments and rigorously cataloging the historical evidence and replying to modern skeptics against the resurrection. And it’s not just that. There’s also, I think there’s other miracles that we should appeal to show God acting in history. One of my favorites is the miracle of Fatima.

For example, 30,000 people after the apparition, the appearance of Marriot Fatima witnessed the miracle, the sun dancing moving in the sky, it had just rained and people’s clothes were dried in an instant and it was reported on by newspapers very soon to the event. It has a lot of eyewitnesses. You can probably find people maybe survivors of it, at least you could find people who immediately knew these people, children, grandchildren. So how do we explain this? I think this is good evidence, not just for God acting in history, but also for the Catholic faith itself. There’s an excellent article published in 2020 by two Catholic philosophers, Tyler McNabb and Joseph Blotto called Mary and Fatima, a modest C inductive argument. Catholicism, I love philosophy and the argument here is, hey, we’re not trying to prove Catholicism, but if you were adding up the evidence, well it tips the scale towards Catholicism.

What McNabb and Blotto say is that, look, if Martin Luther appeared in an apparition with a message from God, that’d probably be evidence for Protestantism. If John Calvin showed up with a message from God, this would be evidence for reform Protestant tradition. The fact that God chose Mary to reveal a message in a Roman Catholic context like at Fatima where heavy Mary and devotion is common and seen as biblical. This gives us evidence that the Roman Catholic tradition is correct. So we have philosophers taking things that are near and dear to us as devotions using rigorous philosophical analysis to present it as arguments both for belief in God and belief in the Catholic faith itself. The last one I want to discuss is the moral argument. This is William Lane, Craig’s version of it. Similar ones of Cs Lewis. If God did not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist, but there are objective moral values and duties.

Objective morality. Therefore God exists. One of the weaknesses of this argument is that you have to cover a lot of ground in order to make a successful moral argument for the existence of God. You’d have to show other secular moral theories cannot account for objective morality. So you have Eric Weinberg for example. This is his platonic objective, morality, value and virtue in a godless universe. Walter Sin Armstrong has a whole book Morality without God to make it. And I think you can do this, but it’s a lot of work to try to show, hey, these secular systems can’t account for objective morality. Like I said in my dialogue with Jimmy, it’s easier to defend a modest conclusion than a very strong one. So one thing that we can do that philosophers of religion are looking into our abductive moral arguments. Inference is the best explanation.

So saying, look, even if you could have objective morality without God, God is the best explanation for interesting features of morality. The fact that we can have moral knowledge at all. We don’t see taste touch here or smell objective morals and yet we have knowledge of them. How do we do that? Perhaps a divine explanation. Best accounts for that. It best explains moral responsibility even if you have objective moral values. If atheism were true, aren’t we just molecules in motion? Do we imprison lightning for setting houses on fire? Do we morally blame lightning? Do we do sad Dateline episodes with the Done Done Music about the lightning that we should have known better faded black and white photographs. Come see no lightning. We should have known better. Whenever I watch that, it’s always like it was the eighties, it was a high time, but for some it wasn’t enough.

No, because it’s molecules in motion, there’s no moral responsibility there. It just acts. It’s determined. It’s determined by molecular forces. It have been any other way. But if that’s what we are, then we are molecules in motion. Why do human beings have moral responsibility? Unless there is something about us beyond just molecules in motion that we can be held responsible for what we do. This girl and should not be held responsible. This is a meme called Disaster Girl. Her dad wanted to take a picture and thought it was interesting and she happened to turn her head at just the right perfect moment and now she’s forever on the internet.

So moral responsibility that if you were to say that she started that fire, that would be calendy. You would be held morally responsible because you can do otherwise because we’re not just molecules in motion. Finally, God best explains moral value. God explains moral value that I remember I had a dialogue with Alex O’Connor last year. He’s called cosmic skeptic on YouTube. Very bright, very British. I’m very envious of his and others accents. Seven when I show up. Hi, everybody just can’t have that erudite expression, but we had a dialogue about this, the issues of moral values. And he gave me an interesting argument. He said, well, I don’t think humans, he’s also, he was an ethical vegan. He’s on a journey there. But he said, I can’t see how humans have this special intrinsic value that other species don’t. Because if atheism is true, we evolved over time.

And so there’s no in evolution, it’s always slight change, slight change, slight change. There can’t be one mark where you say, ah, here’s humanity and it’s special. It’s always the change is very slight among hominids and primates. There is no point where you can say, ah, it’s special. There’s human specialness there. So if atheism is true, human exceptionalism and dignity is false. And Alex told me, well, atheism is true, so exceptionalism is false. So I said, why don’t we run it in the other direction? I think it’s just obvious humans are exceptional and special that we would care even for permanently disabled humans that are not rational. We recognize we have a moral duty towards them that we don’t have to smarter non-human animals. But why? If you’re out, if you’re lost in the woods, you kill the dog, your pet dog to save the child, you don’t kill the child to save the dog, even if it’s a beloved dog.

Why do humans have that? They do have that dignity. So I’d run the argument backwards. If atheism is true, human exceptionalism and dignity is false. Atheism, true dignity, false. I’d say run it backwards. If atheism is true, human dignity and exceptional, sorry, human dignity and exceptionalism false. Now it’s true. We have this intrinsic dignity. So atheism must be false. And he said, oh, I see I’ve made a biological argument forwards. You’ve made a theological argument backwards. That’s very interesting. So in philosophy we say one man’s modus pons is another man’s modus. Tollens would be the nerdy way to put that. But he found it interesting. And Jimmy at the end of our dialogue yesterday said that my reformulation of the Kal argument was interesting and he wanted to pursue it more. And I was like, jackpot. Because that’s what we’re trying to do, that we present an argument.

It’s not going to always be foolproof right off the bat, but to say, oh, that’s very interesting. Let’s explore that more and refine it. That’s what we are all trying to do as iron sharpens iron. So that’s why these are the books. You can pick them up at your local bookstore and there’s others out there papers. My point, as I said with this, here’s the appetizer sampler. We got a lot of the other great stuff in the kitchen I didn’t even bring out to you. And it’s good. It’s not just microwave stuff, it is freshly cooked and delightful. But it makes me very excited to explore and pursue, not just for bringing people to knowledge of God, but I was really happy to engage my friend Ben Watkins from Your Real A Theology at the Caption Christianity conference a few years ago on the question, does God exist that conference?

The attendees are probably 95% Protestant, but I had many come up to me with my book, the case for Catholicism, asking me to sign it, saying, you really were fascinated by the arguments for God. I’d presented in the debate and some of my other work. They thought, oh, what’s your case for Catholicism? Then? So it gets for us to, you might be thinking, oh, there’s atheism stuff. It’s over our head. We just do another conference on Mary or the Eucharist. I feel bad. I think we’re doing the Eucharist next year, but can’t we be in the place we’re used to our comfort zone? But I will tell you, I think that there are a lot of Protestants who can get very annoyed when they do a lot of work to show someone God exists historical knowledge and argument that Jesus rose from the dead, bring this person to a full knowledge of Christianity, and we just come along and poach.

And what about Catholicism? Now, that’s not wrong. It’s not wrong to show someone the truth, but that person, here’s this guy that’s come along, Hey, be in my church. They’ve already got an attachment to the person who led them to Christ, who led them to the true God. How much more effective would it be that if we can be the ones who lead people to God, who lead people to Jesus, how much more natural and needs it would be to follow us to be led to the church that he established? So that’s why I hope you’ll take the Catholic presentation and case for God very seriously and take the best arguments and go out there and make disciples of all nations. So thank you very much. Meet your favorite apologists, listen to great talks, hang out with your fellow Catholics and more. Sign up today for our 10th annual conference. Learn from me the parables, sermons, and conversations of Jesus Christ.