Trent sits down with Ben Watkins of Real Atheology to talk about why most Internet atheism is garbage and how the “Real atheologians” are taking on the best cases for the existence of God.
Welcome to The Council of Trent Podcast. A production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Social media can be a dark, unfriendly, toxic place, but every now and then you find elements of social media that are bright spots, that are people you actually enjoy talking to, including people who hold worldviews that are very different from your own. So on today’s show, I want to talk to, I’m interviewing actually, one of the atheists behind my favorite atheist Twitter account. This is The Council of Trent Podcast, I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn. And today we’re talking with Ben Watkins of The Real Atheology Podcast. So they have a Twitter account with a little over 10000 followers, and what’s interesting is if you go to my Twitter account, I only follow two people. I follow Catholic Answers and the Pope, and that’s it, what do you expect, right? But there are other accounts that I enjoy looking at, so I don’t follow them, but my search bar on Twitter does have them kind of as favorites that I go and I click down to see what’s happening.
And so one of these that pops up is Real Atheology. I really enjoy their takes on atheism and arguments for and against the existence of God, because I find it thoughtful. Now then here’s another thing just to put out there why I enjoy this Twitter account so much and why I think we’re going to have a great conversation today. A lot of times I’ll go on social media and I will see people discussing issues who disagree with me. And I have a temptation, I want to weigh in and say, “Yeah, but what about this?” Or, “Have you thought about this?” But then I immediately tell myself it’s not worth the trouble. There’s an old expression, don’t kick the tar baby. I think it comes from a Brer Rabbit tale where if you’re a fan of Disney and Splash Mountain, you know there’s Brer Fox and Brer Bear and Brer Rabbit. And the fox and the bear are always trying to get Brer Rabbit.
And so they trick him one day by making a little rabbit baby out of tar. When Brer Rabbit goes along and kicks this baby fashioned out of tar, his feet get stuck in it and he gets covered in tar and he gets stuck there. And that’s where the expression, don’t kick the tar baby comes from. The idea here is sometimes you want to just avoid messes before you get into them. So I’ll see discussions on social media, including with people I disagree with and I want to correct them or add my thoughts, but I realize you know what? Don’t kick the tar baby. And that’s some advice for you that you see things on social media, sometimes it’s better to not engage.
But there are other people that I talk to on social media that I will add my two cents and we actually have a really nice back and forth, and Real Atheology is one of those places where I am able to do that. Arguments for the existence of God, arguments against, one of their contributors is actually really interested in Eastern Catholicism. He looked at all the denominations of Christianity and he thinks that Eastern Orthodoxy and Eastern Catholicism is probably, if there was a denomination of Christianity that was correct, he’s reached the conclusion it’s either Eastern Orthodoxy or Eastern Catholicism, like the Byzantine church that I attend. So without further ado, let me bring on one of the representatives to tell us more about Real Atheology, and then we’ll have a discussion about how to raise the level of discourse between Catholics and Christians and atheists and non-believers. So he is Ben Watkins, Ben, welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast.
Ben Watkins:
Thank you so much for having me.
Trent Horn:
So Ben, why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit more about Real Atheology, and about yourself and how you got involved in it?
Ben Watkins:
Yeah, so Real Atheology, a philosophy of religion podcast started off as a YouTube channel by one of my friends, Justin Schieber. And so he and I met several years ago and really hit it off, and eventually he had me come on to the project. And so when it was time for him to step away from the project to pursue higher education, he asked me if I would take over the project for him. And so I obviously jumped at the opportunity because it was a way for me to get my writing out there, explore some ideas, have some fun, it’s a great hobby to have. And I really wanted to dedicate time and energy to exploring what our concept of religion could look like after we’ve rejected something like perfect being theism or classical theism. What is still salvageable as far as our religious concepts and what could religion in the future look like?
And that was one of those questions that I really didn’t want to just tackle for a couple of months and then set it aside and keep returning to it, I really, really wanted to dig into that. And so it’s really kind of encompassed the scope of a lot of my projects now.
Trent Horn:
And what I love about what you and the other individuals involved at Real Atheology do is that you engage religion, but you engage it in a way that’s very different from the so-called new atheists. So I guess we have new atheism: Dawkins, Harris, Hitchins, and their kind of, acolytes. And then the new, new atheisms, I want to call it is now I feel like Dawkins and Hitchens are fading into history and the face of atheism are kind of more popular YouTube commenters and channels. But I think a lot of them take theism as something to kind of be at war with and to ridicule and to engage just very surface level treatments of.
Though, I will say, in fairness to them, a lot of Christians engage atheism, they only take on surface level treatments of atheism, and something to go at war at there as well. So I understand where they’re coming from, but what you guys are doing, and you could comment more on this is rather than a lot of quote unquote, new atheist kind of making an assault on religion. You guys really want to practice philosophy of religion, which is something that a lot of atheists actually kind of criticize or laugh at, even the concept of philosophy of religion.
Ben Watkins:
Yes. I think you hit that nail right on the head. So I certainly will identify as an atheist, but first and foremost, I’m a philosopher. So I really enjoy philosophy and I really believe in a dialectic or Socratic method of trying to get at the truth. I think these questions are super interesting, that they’re worth trying to answer on their own. And there’s something about the perennial questions of philosophy, those so-called questions that keep you up at night, that there’s a wonder, there’s a mystery that I know plenty of people on all sides can appreciate.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Ben Watkins:
So if I can use the philosophy of religion to help bring people into a deeper appreciation of philosophy itself, more power to them. I think we have everything to gain and nothing to lose from an honest pursuit of truth.
Trent Horn:
Well then let’s look at that. So what are some things, and I believe you actually responded to this, or one of your members of the Real Atheology team responded to this on your Twitter handle, I think a week or two ago about things that atheists do, the worst arguments against God or the worst arguments that atheists put out there. What are some things that your fellow atheists, you would advise them to do to kind of raise the level of discourse between believers and nonbelievers, between Christians and atheists? What are some things you see atheists do that you’re like, “Oh, please don’t do that.”?
Ben Watkins:
So there’s certainly several, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll mention two, the two that I think are at least my favorite to pick on.
Trent Horn:
Sure.
Ben Watkins:
So the first one, a fight that I always like to pick with my atheist peers is the idea of this lack of belief definition of atheism. Which often enables some atheists to just play a pure, skeptical role in a dialectic, and to not really contribute in substantive ways to a conversation about the existence of God. And so that one really annoys me. I wish atheists would concede ground to theists such that we could move past the labels that we’re taking on, and actually engage the question.
Trent Horn:
Right. Sure, and this one bugs me as well. When I’m speaking with atheist that I think there’s two things that are hotly debated with the atheism debate, does God exist and what is an atheist? And I try not to get sidetracked too much in the what does atheism mean category? Because I do want to talk about the existence of God. But when some atheists, I remember actually seeing not too long ago, Aron Ra, who would be the exact opposite of Real Atheology. I would say when it comes to temperament and approach and ways of valuing the issues, he is your photo negative basically. But he’s a very popular atheist Youtuber, he’s mostly known actually, and this is what’s unfortunate, I think a lot of times, because before I was religious, I was not always Christian. I was always, when I was a kid, when I was a teenager, I was a deist I believed in a God out there, but I wasn’t religious.
And then I eventually became Christian. But one of the things that held me back from being Christian was identifying Christianity with young earth creationism as if the two were synonymous. And so Aron Ra and others do a good job of debunking Christianity that’s tied to young earth creationism, because I don’t believe young earth creationism is true. So he’s good on some of those issues, but then when he tries to do philosophy, it’s just off. So for example, I retweeted not too long ago, Aron Ra just in a reply to someone said, “Rocks are atheists.” So, saying that stones and rocks, if you define atheism is just a lack of belief then there’s a near infinite number of things that count as atheists. Whereas for me, if rocks and babies and pickup trucks are atheists, if that’s your worldview, it’s just not interesting to me.
So I feel like when it comes to the burden of proof as an atheist, it’s either you got to show, there is no God, or you need to show that the reasons that are put forward for God, the best reasons I would say, don’t work. Which is something that, and you guys are always touting the best academic atheists, people like Mackey, Sobell, Graham Oppy, have made efforts to do. So do you think that some atheists, when they play this super skeptical game, they’re just absolving themselves of the academic responsibility of looking at the best arguments and then saying here’s what’s wrong with them?
Ben Watkins:
So I would be hesitant to paint it in broad strokes.
Trent Horn:
Sure.
Ben Watkins:
Just because I don’t know, but I certainly have my suspicions. I think a lot of it, at least in my experience is really just an unwillingness to want to take on a burden of proof or burden of justification is probably the less intimidating way of saying it.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Ben Watkins:
It’s this idea that there’s this naive intuition of well, unless there’s good reason to doubt something or some epistemic principles such as this, or some reason to believe in something, we can just say it doesn’t exist and that’s the default.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Ben Watkins:
And they almost get offended if you then try to press them to give some sort of positive justification for a negative belief.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Ben Watkins:
And so I think because people haven’t thought about the question deep enough, they’ve just kind of stayed in that mode, that kind of defensive mode where they would rather spend any dialectic just denying whatever the theist is saying. Playing the part of the skeptic is easy in that sense because it then puts all the work on the theist. And so it no longer, the question should be a back and forth.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Ben Watkins:
But the atheists in my experience at least have been hesitant to do that back and forth. They think that they shouldn’t even have to and that to suggest that they have to is to just completely misunderstand their view as an atheist.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Ben Watkins:
Which is to just merely lack a belief.
Trent Horn:
Right. What was the other thing that bothers you with modern atheism, new atheism, things like that?
Ben Watkins:
So the argument that makes me roll my eyes is the, “Well, you’re an atheist about any number of gods that you may like to throw out there. I just go one God further than you.”
Trent Horn:
Oh. Yeah.
Ben Watkins:
Which I just think that’s just a horrible argument that, can you imagine an anarchist being like, “Well, you just don’t believe in any form of government, I just go one form of government less than you.” And that that’s somehow supposed to justify anarchy. No, and I think it’s the same kind of argument that it doesn’t even stand up to the slightest bit of philosophical scrutiny.
Trent Horn:
Right. Well, I think part of what that’s rooted in is this idea that Christians arbitrarily pick one God, it’s kind of like the old game Guess Who. Is your guy wearing glasses? Does he have curly hair? Thought now it’s probably not politically correct to say, “Guess who,” based on ethnicity, things like that. But imagine you have the Guess Who board and I feel like a lot of these atheist things like, “Oh, Christians have their God on the Guess Who board and they just arbitrarily pick this God, instead of all these other gods that are basically identical.” So I feel like atheists would say, “Well, the God of St. Thomas Aquinas is basically identical to Zeus or Thor or these other gods of mythology.
And so you Christians are arbitrarily picking one God over the others, which then if you had Christians, especially those in the classical theist tradition, but even just Christians in general, people like William Lane Craig or others would say, “No, what we believe in as God, capital G, is infinite, necessary, the ground of all being. These other deities you talk about like Zeus or Thor, for me, I would say that they couldn’t be God, they’re gods were the lowercase G, but they’re just X-Men in the sky. They are beings with powers, but they don’t have maximal powers, which is what you would say is related to God.” So I agree with you, that is one that has always frustrated me as well.
But I want to jump ahead to another question related to this because I think this gets to the crux of why I enjoyed speaking with you guys about the existence of God versus other atheists. And it would be this, I find that the most pleasant atheists to talk to about atheism are those who will conclude that the existence of God is a philosophical question, not a scientific one. And because it’s philosophical, it’s going to be really difficult to resolve, or impossible to resolve in a way that everybody agrees on the answer. And I think that’s a perennial feature of philosophy that you have these good arguments, but on philosophical questions, you’re not going to get a hundred percent agreement because you can’t use the scientific method. Whereas I think a lot of atheists demand that Christians be able to get everybody to that kind of agreement when it’s just not that kind of question. What do you think of that?
Ben Watkins:
So I think that Christian apologists have done a fair job of pushing back on this idea of what’s widely called scientism. And it’s this idea that our methods of science are our only valid methods to knowledge or that scientific methods can settle any disputes that we might have about the world. \.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Ben Watkins:
And so that view is just obviously false. I mean it’s again, one of those sorts of views that might seem intuitively attractive at first blush.
Trent Horn:
Sure.
Ben Watkins:
But it really just doesn’t hold up to any philosophical scrutiny. And so the question of God’s existence, if you do any of cursory research into it, you’ll find it is what you said, a perennial question of philosophy. It has this feature that other questions just don’t have, other questions that we might be able to settle with an empirical test where, we might be able to settle with some experiment.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Ben Watkins:
But this isn’t one of those kinds of questions. And so once you start to understand deeper, not just this particular philosophical question, but other philosophically deep questions like what are persons?
Trent Horn:
Right.
Ben Watkins:
How do things matter? What is mind and how does it fit into the world? These are all questions just like in the philosophy of religion, where science might be able to come in and help inform us on some aspect of the question.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Ben Watkins:
But it’s not going to have the final say because it’s at bottom a philosophical question. It’s asking how is the world really in itself? What has primacy, mind or matter? Sort of things like that. One of the beautiful things about the philosophy of religion is it touches on so many different subjects. You’ve got philosophy of mind, you’ve got ethics, you’ve got probability, you’ve got logic, you’ve got cosmology. I mean, it touches on so many different, big questions that you can even then start seeing that deep philosophical landscape and why this question is such a perennial question of philosophy.
Trent Horn:
You know what you guys could do, it would be a lot of fun, you guys should do a book or a podcast series, something like helping atheists become philosophers. And you use the debates in the philosophy of religion to open up these other questions. Because what I find Ben, that’s really frustrating, is I’ll have atheists who sneer about philosophy and they just take certain positions that themselves are philosophically controversial. They’ll endorse scientism, but they basically see, well, the world is just matter, and ethics is just about maximizing well-being. And just assumptions, it’s just an assumption you take, you haven’t thought it through at all to see actually there’s other atheists even, who would disagree with you on those terms. And guess what science cannot resolve the dispute you would have from each other.
So take the advice if you want, but if you could do a series on helping atheists become philosophers, I would 100% endorse and retweet that. And Christians too, actually, and Christians too, because the other question I want to ask is how atheist can raise the level of discourse. A lot of Christians online, I’ll see them doing stuff, it’s that tar baby again, like, “Trent, can you join this comment thread I’m in?” No, I don’t have the time for that and I don’t want to be a part of everything that you’re dragging up here. Where do you think Christians need to up their game?
Ben Watkins:
So I would also emphasize the philosophy of it, in that so they’ve got a leg up in that there’s this whole body of apologetics literature. It’s a very great stepping stone that people in my camp just don’t have to philosophy. So taking advantage of that already puts them ahead, but a lot of apologists will just stop there. And I think that they need to engage with the strongest possible arguments on the other side, that the people that you mentioned earlier, like Tooley and Mackie and Schellenberg or Draper.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Ben Watkins:
Just like I remember a comment, I believe it was from Bishop Barron, who was like, “Atheists need to engage with people like Aquinas and Duns Scotus.” And I remember thinking, he’s right, we need to be engaging with all of these thinkers. And so it should be the same way on the other side, it should be this mutual respect for the other sides’ philosophy, and then trying to resolve disagreements.
So I think both sides could stand to engage with stronger arguments on the other side.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Ben Watkins:
The other piece of advice that I would give is to try to avoid what I call clever maneuvers at all costs. And again, this also applies to atheists as well, but certainly for apologists, the one that I have in mind is to present an argument as a deductive proof. But then when the premises are challenged, to then kind of back off that and say, “Oh, well, there’s this cumulative case for this, this argument we’ll get us a first cause. And this argument will get us a designer and this argument will get us a moral being.” Okay, well, why wasn’t this put up front?
Trent Horn:
Right.
Ben Watkins:
I think that’s a bit of a clever maneuver that, [crosstalk 00:23:12].
Trent Horn:
Well, you run the risk a little bit with arguments. When you present multiple arguments of the leaky bucket problem. That a leaky bucket won’t hold water and even if you stack a bunch of leaky buckets together, the water will still end up leaking. So I think it’s fine to have arguments that can prove different attributes of God, but you should be upfront as to what the argument gets you and what it doesn’t get you. Is that fair?
Ben Watkins:
Yeah, absolutely. And again, I’m not trying to paint any broad strokes here.
Trent Horn:
Sure.
Ben Watkins:
But these are just certainly things in my experience, another one is to think of the problem of evil as this singular problem.
Trent Horn:
Right, yes.
Ben Watkins:
When in reality, it’s a family of related problems. And so that if you’ve found some satisfactory response to some particular aspect of the problem of evil, that’s all you would need to do. And I think that you’ll often see this move in the form of, well, unless you accept the key premise of the moral argument, you can’t even run the problem of evil as an atheist.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Ben Watkins:
And I don’t think that-
Trent Horn:
Well the idea that there’s objective evil, because an atheist could run around and say, “All right, I’m just going to take out the word evil and just use suffering or unjustified suffering or suffering without an overriding purpose.” It’s interesting when you say Christians need to be aware, there’s not just one problem of evil, there’s a family of them. And atheists also have kind of a similar thing when I hear atheists say, “The cosmological argument.” Which often they just mean-
Ben Watkins:
Absolutely.
Trent Horn:
They just mean the Kalam cosmological argument and they’ve never heard of any other argument whatsoever.
Ben Watkins:
Yes.
Trent Horn:
So, and the other one with the cosmological argument, the one that bothers me is when people say, especially of the Kalam argument, “Well, the Kalam argument doesn’t work because it doesn’t even prove Christianity is true.” It was never trying to do that, it was just trying to prove there is an uncaused cause of the universe, that would be like saying the Drake Equation doesn’t prove there are extraterrestrial beings in the universe because it doesn’t prove that aliens built the pyramids. It’s like, well, it never tries to do that. It’s just trying to show probabilistically speaking, given the size of the universe, there’s a certain odds there’s other aliens somewhere out there.
I think that goes back to, we treat the arguments for what they’re trying to do. And going after, for Christians, reading the other side that’s strong. I think we’re on the same page here, like when people tell atheists, “You’ve got to read Aquinas.” My parallel to that is then for Christians, you’ve got to read Hume. The modern version would be, if you’re going to read Graham Oppy as an atheist, then you have got to read Oldenberg, Feser, Richard Swinburne, and you guys do a good job of highlighting all of those different elements on your own page.
Which brings to my next question that you all, the Real Atheology team recently over the past year has been investigating Thomism, you kind of have a Thomism project that there’s kind of a revival of Thomistic philosophy and arguing for the existence of God that’s trying to get in the game when it’s been William Lane Craig 24-7 for like 10 years, but you guys are seeing a need to respond to this, and you have been.
Ben Watkins:
Yeah, for sure. So certainly there’s been two motivations for me at least, taking on the Thomas project. So the first is, is so that my philosophy mentor, Dr. William Brenner here at Oldominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, he’s Thomist. So he’s a Vichtenstein scholar and a Thomist.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Ben Watkins:
And so he lit the Vichtenstein fire in me several years ago. And so it was just a matter of time before the Aquinas bug bit me as well.
Trent Horn:
Sure.
Ben Watkins:
And so it was, I had always kind of shelved Aquinas. I’ll get to it when I feel that bug.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Ben Watkins:
And so I had finally started to feel it because like you said, there’s been a resurgence, probably the last 10 years is probably a fair timeline, I would say, with people like Oldenburg and Feser coming onto the scene. Because it has been the William Lane Craig show. And if you go further than William Lane Craig, it’s probably no further than Plantinga or Swinburne.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Ben Watkins:
But now there’s Catholic thinkers on the scene as well as pre-suppositional apologetic people on the scene. So I know a lot of people associate that with figures like Sye Ten Bruggencate. But there is a sophisticated tradition of Van Tillian pre-suppositional apology. Yeah, and so we also think that those are some people that we should be trying to not only understand, but engage with. And so that’s kind of what lit my fire for the Thomism project.
Trent Horn:
Well it was interesting, I think you guys shared on your social media not too long ago, retweets from people saying that it was reading the works of Feser, Oldenberg, Brian Davies, and other popular apologists online who are Catholic, who are Thomistic, and use these arguments to great effect that many atheists get the bug and they convert at least to theism because see the strength of these arguments, and they’ve looked in the world of atheism and haven’t found a strong reply.
Ben Watkins:
For sure.
Trent Horn:
I mean, you go online to YouTube and you type out Kalam cosmological argument, and there must be like 80 million videos. “Why William Lane Craig is wrong about the Kalam.” Well, I know why you guys are picking on it. It’s an argument that only has 20 words in it or something, it’s easy to wrap your head around and start going at it.
But then when you do a contingency argument or a sophisticated argument for motion, people’s eyes start to glaze over, and I would go on YouTube and I can find maybe four videos responding to it. One of them being Mr. Atheist, I forget the name of that one guy, but it was a completely asinine video where he says, “Aquinas’s argument doesn’t work. It could prove a blueberry muffin made the universe.” And I’m like this argument is doing well. And you guys are probably seeing like, we need to make a response. And I give you a lot of props actually for recently you were on Matt Fradd’s podcast and you debated Father Gregory Pine on the existence of God. And there was high level Thomistic back and forth there that I think greatly benefited everyone. How did you prepare for that debate?
Ben Watkins:
So my team and I got the offer from Matt Fradd, and we knew a once in a lifetime philosophical opportunity when we saw one.
Trent Horn:
Sure.
Ben Watkins:
So we jumped at it. So to help prepare for it, we all had been working on our own respective Thomist projects for things like blog posts, and I had been making discussion briefs. And so I had this whole body of Thomistic work, plus some discussion briefs that I was like, “Hey, let’s test this out. It’s going to be an actual debate format. So let’s run it like a debate.” And so I had in my mind three arguments and I knew that one of them was going to be an argument from evil.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Ben Watkins:
To try to, but then I wanted to give two arguments specific towards Thomism itself because one of my goals for the debate was to articulate the difference between theistic personalism and classical theism. So I think a lot of discussions end up talking past one another because the atheist just doesn’t appreciate this distinction and thinks of God as one being among many or, rather than as thinking of him as the ground of being.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Ben Watkins:
So I wanted to give two uniquely specific Thomistic arguments. And so the one that was sort of, of my formulation, the one that I had been working with was my version of a modal collapse argument. And then I got with my good friend, Joe Schmidt of Majesty of Reason.
Trent Horn:
Yes.
Ben Watkins:
Who had been working with the argument from changing knowledge. And so he and I bounced ideas off of that, and so those ended up being the three arguments that I ended up going up with. And then from there I just made discussion briefs so that I could then try to in the debate, see how they played out and we wanted to say as much as we could in the time given that would be useful to both theists and atheists trying to understand the material. So we wanted it to run like a lecture in one way, but clear and interesting enough to keep people’s attention in a debate.
Trent Horn:
Was this your first debate ever taking part in a formal one?
Ben Watkins:
No, I’ve done a couple others.
Trent Horn:
Oh, good.
Ben Watkins:
So yeah, so I did one with Tyler Vela several years ago. I’ve done a couple speaking engagements where I gave like lecture style things. And then obviously I’ve done internet debates of a similar format that I did with Matt Fradd and Friar Gregory.
Trent Horn:
Oh, I thought it was great. And I really loved that both of you had a lot of substance to what you were offering, and it just shows people a way that we can talk about the existence of God and really embrace these tough challenges and to think deeply. I was just super happy that Matt picked my question to be the first question in the Q and A. First, it was just fun for me. Actually, of all the live debates I’ve seen, I’ve been in, I don’t usually watch live debates. So it was just fun watching a live debate and not having to be in it. Because I had just debated Alex O’Connor, The Cosmic Skeptic, not too long before this debate. So it was really fun just to watch this and ask my question.
I don’t want to talk your head off too much or get too deep into it, but I was curious about, I’m glad you focused on the fact that God is the ground of being in classical theism, he does not change. He’s pure act, has no potency. So one of the arguments I guess, this comes from Schmidt, AKA the Doogie Howser of atheism he’s 19, he’s smart. I’m excited maybe in the future to debate him. So is this idea, if knowledge, if facts, truths change in the world, as the world changes, does that mean God’s knowledge changes and that would seem to contradict the idea of God being immutable. Was that the essence of the changing knowledge argument you were making?
Ben Watkins:
Yeah. More or less.
Trent Horn:
And so my question was, now for me, I could see how this argument would be hard to get around if you endorse a view of time that that says past, present and future are dynamic and that the past no longer exists and the future doesn’t exist yet. And there are these tensed truths and things like that.
But for me, I don’t know if it’s that much of a problem. This was the essence of my question I asked you in the debate, which is if all of moments in time are equally real and all truths, if knowledge is about knowing truths and if all truths can be written in a kind of tenseless way, you can rewrite instead of Trent and Ben are having an interview, it’s just Trent and Ben interview on this date. If they’re all tenseness truths, it seems like God could know them all tenselessly without any change. That was the essence of the question I asked the debate. Do you have any more thoughts on that?
Ben Watkins:
So, yeah. First off, I thought it was a great question and it was one that had gotten me thinking, because again, this is one of those arguments that I was that I’m still myself working through.
Trent Horn:
Sure.
Ben Watkins:
And so I hadn’t taken careful enough notice of how explicitly my example of their, because the idea is that if change is a real feature in the world, which is something that was a premise that I thought both myself and a Thomist could both concede.
Trent Horn:
Oh no, I agree.
Ben Watkins:
Because there’s the argument [crosstalk 00:36:30] change.
Trent Horn:
Totally.
Ben Watkins:
And so, but when I cashed it out in those tensed terms, past, present future, it’s one of those I hadn’t considered. I was like, okay, well, does that mean that change then is not a real feature of the world if there’s this B theory of time and what are the implications of that for Thomism?
Trent Horn:
Right.
Ben Watkins:
And I’m still working through that. I don’t know. I thought it was a really good question.
Trent Horn:
Because I agree with you. I lean towards, I feel like my theology would work fine. And for the listeners, by the way, who want to go deeper into this, you can go back a few episodes. I have an episode on philosophy of time and what we’re talking about here. I won’t belabor the, actually go back and check out the philosophy of time episode.
Trent Horn:
But it sounds like, and for me, I’m trying to think it through too, because I’m okay with there being this kind of B theory of time, although I’m more off for a hybrid view. But well, I tell you what, we’re nearing the end of our time and I don’t want to derail too much with philosophy, but here’s the thing, this what we’re doing right now here, what we’re doing right here, this dialectic, that is why I like following you guys on Twitter. This is the role model, what we’re doing right now is the role model for Christians and atheists to say, “Okay, there’s tough questions here. Let’s think it through. And we’ll learn something along the way. Even though we disagree about fundamental elements. We’re both United in that pursuit of truth.” That’s what should matter most.
Ben Watkins:
I agree.
Trent Horn:
So yeah, I’ll throw it back to you then. Where can people learn more about what you guys are doing to follow your work and then I’ll let you have any closing thoughts?
Ben Watkins:
So like you said, we’ve got a Twitter account, we’ve got a Facebook, we’ve got an Instagram, we’ve got a YouTube channel. And then obviously we’ve got a podcast on Apple and Spotify and Podbean, anywhere you like to get your podcasts from, we are on it. And so we try to come out with material on a semi-regular basis, but because this type of material, it takes so much back work, it takes so much legwork we don’t have a regular stream yet. I’m hoping to grow my team over the next little bit and so that we can get content that comes out more regularly that’s of the same quality.
Trent Horn:
Absolutely. Well, great, we’ll definitely go check it out. I’ll leave links in the show description for everyone. This has been Ben Watkins with the Real Atheology Podcast. Be sure to go and check that out. Check the links in the show description at Trenthornpodcast.com where you can leave a discussion post, comment on the episode, message me for ideas for future guests and have access to great bonus content. If you choose to become a premium subscriber at Trenthornpodcast.com. Ben, thank you so much for being on The Council of Trent today.
Ben Watkins:
Thank you so much for having me.
Trent Horn:
All right. And thank you guys for listening and I hope that you all have a very blessed day.
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