Arguing for that, and I have created a couple of TV shows, and
I do a lot of comedy and film analysis. All right, excellent,
looking forward to this JA. And on the other side of the table tonight,
along with or perhaps versus, he's the president of the Atheist Community of
Austin and he hosts a show called The Atheist Debates for his lovely patrons over
at patreon dot com. Forward slashed Atheist Debates. Name is mister Matt Dilla.
Honey, Matt, go ahead and introduce yourself to the audience. Pretty
sure you just did. I'm Att Delania. I've been hosting The Atheist Experienced
show for around fifteen years or something. I was president for seven years then
I wasn't. Now I am again. I do lectures, debates and magic
shows. And I completely forgot because in that closet back there is this massive
stack of DVDs, including my Dario or Agento collection, which I was going
to have where you could, but it would be a distraction. We can
talk about that one another time. I didn't know. It's funny you said
that. It's yeah, it's actually not my favorite, but I understand it's
probably his most popular and uh, yeah, okay, Yeah, it's probably
my favorite. Go ahead, all right, excellent, all right, well,
looking forward to it. Okay, as far as the show format goes,
Jay, go ahead and jump in if I don't have anything right here.
But it looks like we're gonna do ten minutes segments and I'll give you
Fellas a thirty second warning before a segment ends, so those will be Uh
are those uninterrupted segments? Jay? Is that how we're going to work this?
Yeah? Yeah, ten minute uninterrupted segments and then for the first hour,
and then if Matt, Matt wants to do a crossfire or whatever conversation
style, we can. Okay, great, So perhaps a crossfire round in
the second hour if we're gonna go that far. And I believe we will
be taking a super chat Q and A at the end of the show,
so uh, Fellas helped me make sure, I know, like a few
minutes before everybody anyone has to leave or anything like that, so we can
shrink get that in there, and uh, okay, I guess that's it.
So Matt, I think we'll we'll give it to you. Do you
want to go first or do you want to go second? Oh? I
guess I'll go second, because I'm not the one that's presenting an argument for
something, so it's more of a response thing and and the whole thing,
you know, ten interrupted minutes. I don't even know if I'll end up
using that because I'm much more interested in than back and forth. But we'll
work it. How are you neique to okay? Okay? So that to
be safe? So whatever, I didn't know, what, how do we
want to do it? All right, I'll go I'll go ahead and say
that. Um, so basically my argument will be presented like this. I
think that worldviews are what we all have. We all function on the basis
of three basic philosophic approaches to life that are usually boiled down to metaphysics,
ethics, and epistemology. So these three branches of philosophy historically have been what
makes it what we could we could call a worldview, at least in Western
phil I would say that I believe, and I would argue that each one
of these branches is intertwined with the other. So, for example, if
I argue for something in the realm of epistemology, if I argue that a
belief is true, typically what goes along with that is also an assumption about
ethics and moral claims moral judgments that one ought to follow what is true.
Now one could disagree with that conceivably, but I'm going to argue that I
think they're all intertwined. Similarly, if I were to say that we know
that something is the case, it also tends to imply or necessitate certain beliefs
about metaphysics, claims about what's real, what's not real, what can be
or what can't be. So these three aspects of a worldview I would say,
are in a sense transcendental categories, or they at least utilize a lot
of transcendental categories. Transitial categories would be things like the principle of induction,
the laws of logic, the past, identity over time, the self,
the regularity that we find in nature. These are not subjects that are the
immediate purview of empirical sense data or empirical science. They're related to empirical science,
for example, the principle of abduction that the future will be like the
past, that there's regularity in logic, there's regularity, and there's a flow.
You could say to the scientific method. For example, if you study
philosophy, of science. You'll know that there's actually a logical process that's assumed
in the process of doing the scientific method So from reasoning on the basis of
hypothesis to what the data supports towards a conclusion. For example, it presupposes
that one ought to be true in this process if one wants to obtain the
most true conclusions in this process. It presupposes the logic that one process,
one step in this process should follow another step. And it also presupposes all
kinds of other things, like that words have meaning, regularity, etc.
That objects have a sort of uniformity to them over time. That's I would
say, is all presupposed in the scientific process itself. Numbers would be presupposed
in this process. And these are all I think things that are immaterial,
invariant, they're conceptual, and they're abstract. Now, I think that because
something is presupposed in the scientific methodology doesn't necessarily mean that. In other words,
what I'm saying we don't necessarily prove everything in the same way. Right,
So, in other words, something that is assumed, it's a category
like that a law of logic, or something that's utilized in the scientific method
is in in a way more properly basic, more fundamental than even the scientific
method itself. So, even though the scientific method is not doesn't have the
laws of logic under its immediate purview, it still assumes laws of logic and
that regularity that cannot be proven in terms of empirical sense data. So if
one we're to adopt a kind of naive impurisist view, a kind of logical
positivism, what we end up with is the inability to understand or to justified
the belief in the principle of induction, the regularity of nature that the future
will be like the past. Now, one could say conceivably that they don't
think that we have to justify it, or that we can't justify it.
But I think that at that point we would be being arbitrary, and we
would be believing in and admitting things that we don't have any sort of justification
for. And I'm speaking here of a kind of specific philosophic justification here in
terms of warranted beliefs, in terms of justifying true beliefs, etc. The
way history of philosophy in the West has typically justified propositions and beliefs. I
would say that we would be relying on things that are immaterial that we can't
justify. And so the way that I move from that to God is to
say that there are actually a whole bunch of things in all of our lives
that we assume that are not strictly speaking physical, not strictly speaking quote pragmatic,
because from what I gather from Matt's worldview, he tends to have a
very sort of pragmatic approach. There's all these types of things that are not
immediately justified or known by sense data or basic empiricism, or in what's in
history philosophy called naive empiricism. So what I would say is that if I
were Matt, if I wanted to be a consistent skeptic, I would go
the route of David Human be a skeptic all the way, And to be
a skeptic all the way would be to admit ultimately that no, there's not
a justification for induction for the regularity that we see in nature, and thus
there's no justification epistemically logically, in terms of rationality, reason logic, etc.
For the scientific method itself. Now we can fast forward all the way
up to modern logicians like Bertrand Russell or William van ormand Quine. Russell and
Quine also continue this idea of saying that there's not really a justification if you're
a basic empiricist for these ideas. They just have to be kind of a
given. We can treat them like they are, but we can't coherently give
a basis or justification for them. So to me, that's kind of an
emission of the intellectual bankruptcy of this kind of logical positivist position. So you
have all these kinds of things that are different from just physical material physicalism,
like laws of logic, like numbers, like number theory like Mandel brought sets
right, very very elaborate mathematical sort of equations that many philosophers and mathematicians somebody
like Roger Penrose, and I'm just bringing this forth as a testament, not
a proof, just as an expert testament. You know. Penrose says that
when I looked into the advanced mathematics of Penrose Tiling, he said, it
looked to me like we're actually discovering these mathematical principles, not socially constructing them.
So if you know about fractals, you know about mandelbrought sets. You
know, they're very elaborate, right, They're not something that could just be
a social construct, their actual mental discoveries. So the point is that if
that's the case, then I don't think it's at all irrational to believe that
all of these different kinds of categories are transcendental preconditions could be explained perfect in
a worldview where God exists, and particularly the Christian view. So I'm here
to defend Orthodox Christianity, not Southern Baptist theology, not the fundamentalist stuff,
not Roman Catholicism or any of the other views. I have a very specific
view in argument from Orthodox Christology and theology. So when we have that conception
of God, God as a divine mind, omnipotent, omnipresent, etcetera,
etce. What we then see is that reality has its grounding in its basis
in the mind of God. So quite literally, everything that exists has a
logo or a logi and exemplar, as it's called in the West. This
is kind of like Platonism, but I want to be very precise because we're
not Platonist, but we do believe that the essences and the universals that exist
are ultimately grounded in the mind of God. And that makes perfect sense.
That makes sense why there's regularity in nature because of divine providence, because everything
that exists is in a sense grounded in the mind of God. Thus,
truth has more than just a pragmatic function and actually is a trans send in
quality. Truth is actually objective. It's not just a social construct. It's
actually a reflection of the mind of God. And specifically, I would argue
that if we got into the nitty gritty of it, it would be a
defense of the orthodox view of God. Right getting down to the point of
the one in the Mini for example, this is a classic problem in the
history of Western philosophy. The one of the Mini problem is solved by our
doctrine of the Trinity, and more specifically by the logos Christ and the logi
right, the rational principles that are operant in nature. Now, it's true
that we could remove all that, we could just say, well, none
of that's true. I don't buy any of that. Those are a bunch
of logical crazy leaps, and I just think that what exists out there is
matter in motion. I don't know Matt's heard this argument many times. I'm
not going to rehash all the sort of classic presubsitionalists quote unquote that he's debated,
because I think my argument is a little more precise, a little more
fleshed out, better argued hopefully. And then that as that all of these
different transcend old categories, if you were to sort of bundle them into a
big pile, they make perfect sense in a world created by God, in
a world that unfortunately is fallen but nevertheless still reflects to a degree the truth
about God. If we're made in the image of God, we understand how
there's dignity. If we are made in the image of God, we have
the ability to know objective truth. Right, God's world is regular, it
operates on principles of regularity. If the mind of God is the basis of
all reality, we have a basis for these really abstract and obtuse mathematical principles
that we know are real that are not strictly speaking physical. So all of
these kinds of things right, ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, they make perfect
sense in a worldview where our God exists and the kind of God that we
argued for, in a worldview where we have pure materialism, pure pragmatism,
random chance, random chaos. There's nothing like invariant, immaterial conceptual law like
things. Where are they? What are they? They're just social constructs.
Now. I don't know if that's Matt's opinion or view, but I have
heard him say in previous discussions and talks that he doesn't think that there is
a justification, so to speak, for logical laws, mathematical principles. He's
sort of abstract conceptual things. He thinks that they're just kind of things that
we just use and they work. But that would be, I would say,
to be arbitrary, and when it comes to debate, we're presupposing universal
categories and laws, and that doesn't allow us to be arbitrary. All right,
thank you Jay, excellent, well done, It was right on time.
And over to Matt. Now let me reset our timer here, okay,
Matt, over to you, Hi Hi, Yeah, yeah, So,
first of all, thanks for having me. I will say I'm not
convinced that I actually heard an argument in all of that. One of the
things is is that, yeah, I'm not necessarily requiring that we have you
know, fully constructed syllogism, but if we can get close to that,
because you seem to be arguing for in this is Hey, we all have
a worldview and it includes all these things and they're intertwined. I agree.
But what I'm getting to is to whether or not the things in our worldview
are true. I mean, there probably needs to be a side discussion about
truth and whether or not we can actually whether that we can attain it,
because when you say that it's essentially arbitrary to decide that we can't justify the
things that we presuppose. I disagree. When we have, for example,
the laws of logic, which I would argue presupposes truth or presupposes reality,
and so there's a number of things that we're going to presuppose just to get
work done, and but they're not. It's not just arbitrary. It's not
like we decided, oh, a thing is what it isn't and we'll just
arbitrary accept that there are reasons why we have justification to think that that's reasonable.
But the recognition that we don't necessarily know what guarantees that is not arbitrary.
It's an acknowledgement that throughout all of the time that we've been kind of
pouring over these things. In philosophical context, we haven't been able to come
up with something that is demonstrably a guaranteer of logic or a guaranteur of human
dignity, or any of the things that you might list, And so it's
completely unsurprising to me that, and I think it's true a worldview that includes
a belief in a god that could serve as a guaranteer for all of those
things makes the world makes sense. But that's about a belief in a god
that does that. And you can substitute the word god with anything. Belief
that there is a justifiable foundation serves as a justifiable foundation. It's virtually circular
there. The problem here is that you're assuming that, in fact, there
is some sort of foundation, and I don't know if you're doing it in
a sort of causal sense, which I would argue might be a mistake because
causality, primarily, I think, would deal with like physical physicality, and
causality may not apply to the abstract, at least not without there being some
physical thing. Like you know, you have an abstract thought, you convey
it to me, and that leads to this, But that's still a physical
process of what's happening in the brain, and that there may not be causality
with regard to the abstract. And so when I when I look at things
like truth, yeah, I'm fine with the you know, truth is that
which comports with reality. But I don't see any path to absolute certainty.
I don't see any way to guarantee or or point is something that says this
guarantees that identity, non contradiction excluded, middle are always universally correct. They
appear to be they are. Reliance on them is because they continually demonstrate their
reliability in the sense that we're not all dead. If I, if I
have a worldview that says that buses are imaginary, all of a sudden becomes
crossing the street becomes far more dangerous. And so the only thing that I
can do is interact with the reality that I have. And so I'm I'm
a big proponent of Ockham's razor don't multiply entity is unnecessarily And so I presuppose
that there's a reality which I share which I can't prove or justify. I
do find I think there are some potential arguments against hard solive sism, but
only in the sense that they seem satisfying us. There's there's no way to
demonstrate, Like the one I've used before is that I find it patently absurd
that I've both written every wonderful song that I've enjoyed, which I don't understand
and it don't know the key of or anything else but h and also the
ones that I despise, or I've been every caller who's called into this show
with good points and all the callers that have called in with bad points.
That level of I am the only thing I think, perhaps intuitively, if
if no other justification, appears to be far more absurd than the likelihood that
Jay and I are sharing a reality. And so when I look through the
opening here, I agree we have worldview. I notice that among the abstract
transitory items he didn't list truth. Whether or not it's in there on his
view is up to him. But oh, there's a nope popped up there.
Um. But so when it was interesting because when Jay said, here's
how I get from there to God, and we've gone through a long list
of things, and it's here's how I get from there to God, and
then we heard about Russell and Quine and just on and on and on about
how uh, and some items about mathematics, and the only thing that came
close to how we get to a God, as far as I can tell,
is sort of I'm not gonna I'm not gonna remember the right term,
but essentially it's an it's it was an expression that a worldview without a god
leaves us without answers to this, but a world view with a god gives
us answers to this. And that presupposes that the type of answers that you're
getting from a god are actually answers, that there is some explanation the questions
that I would have is tons of them, which will get to at different
points throughout this. But is it possible for something to just be the way
it is, that something X is true without some sort of external justification,
guaranteer or prescriber. Because if if that's the case, and there's a whole
bunch of philosophy about what truth is and whether or not it's accessible, And
you know, if I'd known we were going to spend as much time as
we likely are today, I probably would have gotten high beforehand, because that
makes those conversations at least a little more fun, Except that I don't like
to be high and certainly not in a debate. But the question about truth,
you could argue, for example, let's take identity noncontradiction exclude the middle,
which I used to say was the only thing that I suppose, and
then I realized, no, I have to presuppose truth in order to be
able to presuppose those The problem is is that there's a little loop there automatically,
which is, if I want to justify that there is truth, that
there is a reality, if I'm using a compatiblest model of truth, I
still have to exercise reason to reach that conclusion. So we're back to the
essentials of identity, non contradiction, etc. And so when we talk about
whether or not something is true, we quite often is there must be some
explanation for this, because we run around the world and we see things and
we look at it and say, why is that the way it is?
And I've said before that, you know, people would argue that, well,
science offers how questions, not why questions. But that's that's semantics,
because I can reward any question we have as a how or why how did
this come to be? Is essentially the same as why does this exist as
long as you're being content sextual. And so this and this admission that I
don't have an explanation for why there is truth or is there truth, or
why are the logical laws apparently absolute and in viable isn't an admission of intellectual
bankruptcy. It is an admission of what appears to be the facts of the
case, which is why you know you've got the transcendental arguments for the existence
of God, which I would argue, and you might have other arguments,
I mean, planetics, modo, logic, ontological, et cetera. And
these are kind of held up amongst incredibly smart and well read people as some
of the best arguments for the existence of God, and that may or may
not be the case. I've been asked many times what's the best argument for
God? And I don't know, but that they're being held up is this
seems to be based on an idea that there is in fact the next eplanation.
And I have seen no argument or evidence that there is in fact that
sort of an explanation. And so, while you can phrase it is I'm
admitting intellectual bankruptcy, I prefer to view it as being intellectually honest that I'm
not going to make more presuppositions than necessary. I'm not going to say,
you know what would be really nice if there was something that could serve as
a foundation for logic, And it would also be really nice if there was
something could serve as a foundation for morality. There would also be something very
nice if they could serve as a foundation for human dignity, etc. That'd
be really cool, except that I don't know that there are foundations for those
I don't know that it's impossible that they couldn't. Just well, first of
all, they may not all be true, but I don't see that it's
impossible. There's been no demonstration that there must be some foundation beyond the laws
of logic. And the curious thing is, I think that even if you
are that a God solves that problem, the only reason that it does is
because modern theological definitions of God include this thing that God doesn't need a justification
as a bald assertion. So we have these things that may or may not
have a justification, we're not aware of what that justification would be, and
then we argue for something that hypothetically could serve as that justification. And maybe
even just believing it exists serves as a satisfier but not a guarantee. And
in spite of that, we're stuck with how did we come up with this
thing that serves as an exploitation for nothing and needs no explanation of itself?
Okay, times a good one, going all right? Yeah, great comments
there in questions from Matt. So first he asked for a syllogism. So
I think I can oblige this to a degree and say that, yeah,
I could state it like this. There are many transcendental categories. List some
of the ones that I think are strong. And I don't mind that Matt
included the idea of truth. I don't have a problem including truth. There's
there's plenty. Actually, it's just that I was just kind of going off
the top of my head and listening some. But you could say something like
identity of objects over time. You could say value judgments. You could say
interpretive frameworks. You could say the problem of the one in the minute.
You could say meaning in language. You could say words themselves. You could
say temporal spatial relations. You could say the past. You could say numbers.
You could say the idea of causality. You could say that the idea
of t los rights, freedom, all of these could be buddled together if
we were to discuss those things. They are presupposed not just in the process
of scientific methodology, which I was kind of focusing on in the opening statement,
but in life in general. Right, I mean throughout life we assume
these kinds of things. All throughout we assumed the existence of a self.
Right. This self, however, is not something obviously that is empirically verifiable.
We kind of assume it in the process of our for it or against
it. Now, I'm not saying that people that argue about it or that
there might not be in you know, some attempt to scientifically investigate the notion
of a self. But even if you were to find a pineal gland where
you thought something like Descartes, where the soul or the self or mind or
whatever was howelsed or whatever, there's still a distinction I would argue between brain
and mind in my view. Now, that's why I'm saying that when we
talk about reasoning, when we talk about logic, when we talk about all
these different categories, I think we're talking about things that are outside the purview
of mere sense, data, and sense experience. That does it mean that
they don't have any connection to material sense data, and sense experience. They're
interrelated, but they're not identical. So I want to say that I don't
think we have to fall into like an either or unless we presuppose materialism.
I think if we did presuppose materialism, it would be self contradictory. So
the argument, specifically in terms of sollogism is that all of these transcendental categories,
if they are to be made coherent and sensible, and I do believe
in a coherentist view of truth and justifying claims, not a classical foundationalist type
of view in terms of epistemology, So I'm gonna be arguing for that school
of thought. I would say that that we would justify them in terms of
their coherence in the worldview in which there is a God that's presented according to
orthodox Christianity. So that's the syllogism, if you want to boil down version
of it, And that's a positive statement of the argument that he's justified on
the basis of being the grounds and the coherence, if you will, what
strings all these many pearls of transcendentals together on a golden string, if you
will, a pearl necklace is God himself. God is the personal one who
does this. And because he's personal, not an immaterial abstract force like a
law of logic or gravity, or the way the Greeks thought of God has
thought thing in itself or its impersonal force. He's actually personal. That then
makes reality at a fundamental level personal and not dead matter. It's not a
meaningless matter out there. It's actually fundamentally at the very fabric and structure,
at subatomic level. I would argue a personal God that's there, that's present,
that's staring us at the face in the face in every action or predication,
in every act in the world, even in the midst of evil actions.
If we think about the problem of evil, I would argue that that
presupposes some standard by which we had judge good and evil. Now That's response
was that can we even attain to this truth? He's not convinced that we
can. And so he went on to sort of explicate that. As I
wrote down what he was saying, I don't want to misrepresent him that just
because we believe that we sort of constructed justifications for things in an abstract way
doesn't necessarily mean that it perhaps matches up to the external world. Maybe that
we just believe that we've attained justifications, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it
is right that we can't move to this, this abstracted realm into the realm
of the here and the now out there in the world. I could,
to a degree concede that, except that I don't think that that's what my
argument was, or was intended to be. I wasn't trying to argue that
just because we can find a rational justification that it necessarily means that everything in
the world conforms to a purely mental structure, because I'm not just trying to
map the external world with mathematics or something like that. I'm actually looking at
something that's even more fundamental, in my view than numbers or mathematics. I
would argue that in our system, yes, God is the ultimate presupposition.
So Matt was correct to say that it sounds like Jay's presupposing the existence of
God, and yes I am, and I know that Matt's debated presubsition before.
I don't think they were very good presenters of that argument. But yes,
in effact, because I believe in that sort of coherentist view of truth
and of the world. It's impossible for me not to have some final circular
authority that I appealed to in my belief, in my system, my worldview,
it is ultimately going to be God. And that's not inconsistent with the
system or the philosophy that I'm promoting. Right, coherentism, not classical foundationalism,
which out of the Enlightenment actually leads to that kind of atheist materialist perspective.
Say, but in fact, there's nothing logically wrong or incoherent by saying
that God is the ultimate foundation in my worldview and that I am presupposing it,
and that I'm comparing what I presuppose to Matt's presupositions. Mass presuppositions are
very pragmatic. As I said, they're very They're skeptical, and they're pragmatic,
and I understand that I don't necessarily have a problem with it. I
would just enjoy Matt to be more consistent if he's going to go that route
and go the route of hum and go ahead and say that truth can't be
justified, induction can't be justified, and not only can it not be justified.
We have to utilize all these things that don't make sense on our worldview.
So I wasn't just throwing out names of Russell and williament or in Quine
to be fancier or whatever. But I'm actually making a specific point about the
fact that Russell and Quine all the way back to hum there's been a consistent
pattern amongst the empiricists, the pragmatic tradition to say, there's not a rational
logical justification for these things that we use in an empiricist worldview. And if
there's not, then then we don't really have a reason or a basis to
go into debate. I'm not saying that you can't debate. I'm glad that
you did, but on the grounds of logic, on the grounds of debate,
which I think presupposes logic and truth, As you talked about, we
don't really have the grounds to debate itself, right, So debate presupposes some
common notion of truth. It presupposes the ability to communicate truths that are not
merely material. I mean, I'm speaking words that have meaning, that are
conceptual in some way that go beyond just the vocal chords. And just the
electricity that actually convey information. We look at information science, information science to
suggest that we don't find information meaningful information being transferred anywhere in the world that's
not from a mind. So the argument that I made was that even more
fundamental than numbers or the concept of information or words is all of these transcendal
categories that are presupposed in communication, in life and logic and ethics and whatever,
and they make sense in a paradigm and a complete worldview where we have
the kind of God that we believe in. That is the argument. Now
one could conceivably say I don't accept transcenental arguments, I don't believe that they're
a valid form of logic. Well, one could do that, but I
think that that would lead to again more fundamental, self contradictory positions that are
ultimately sort of destructive to philosophy as a whole. I mean, I kind
of appreciate that Matt was almost hinting maybe that, well, maybe there could
be some sort of sellipsism or something like that. And I think that if
one were to go down the logical positivist Humian route, that would be the
consistent way to go. You would kind of be led to that whoa,
you know, we live in the matrix kind of view, like Neo or
something, right, that this is just sort of a projection of my subconscious
of my mind. Because many in the empiricist tradition actually did go down that
way. They went down that route by saying that, you know, if
we're going to talk about justifying our beliefs, being rational, giving a coherent
account of our beliefs, we can't really prove the existence of the past.
Not only can we not do that, we can justify induction, the principle
belief that the future will be like the past. We can't really justify the
self. I mean, we have a suck maybe a bundle of memories,
but that doesn't necessarily equate to a quote self that there's a transcendental unity of
a self, that that sort of is underlying all these perceptions, right,
all these these the sense data that comes to us from our from empirical experiences.
If we can't justify those things, then some of them went in this
route of a kind of radical sallipsism, and they said, yeah, the
only thing that we can know is what's immediately presented to our senses and even
that we can't even know if that's coming to us from an external world.
It's just perhaps something that our mind is presenting to our senses. Right,
This would be eventually the debate that's called indirect realism. And if you go
the route of indirect realism, then you don't even have a basis for an
external world, and belief in the external world actually as a transcendental category of
transcenal truth, I would argue, as all these other things that I listed
are now if we're at that point in our philosophy. And I don't fault
Matt for going perhaps into and exploring the realms of where these ideas lead.
I think what they show us is that when we don't have the presupposition of
God, and when we don't start with that, we're inevitably led down these
paths to dead ends in philosophy, total contradictions. And for example, if
one would say, well, maybe sillipsism isn't a contradiction, maybe everything is
just a phenomena of my mind. If we were to go to that route,
then we would be led to the conclusion that everything that's happening, everything's
happening is essentially in some sense illusory or just a figment, a phenomena of
passing ghost, you could say. And if that was the case, then
my coming to know the truth of sullipsism would also be part of the sullipsist
maze and mirror, and it would be self contradictory. All right, all
right, and time. Thank you, Jay, very good, Very good
everybody. If you're just joining us, you're at the Jay Dire YouTube channel,
and we're having a friendly discussion slash debate tonight between Jay Dire and Matt
dillahunty. I am your co host, your guest host, your moderator,
your timekeeper, my call sign as Asher. Thank you for joining us for
the show tonight, and all right, Matt, we'll pass it back over
to you. The mic is yours. Yeah. So I'm a huge fan
of Hume. Doesn't mean I agree with my everything. I'm definitely not a
logical positivist, but I think hum on the foundations of epistemology is probably where
most of my views either formed or began and and for longest time. And
I don't really go with labels when we talk about a lot of things,
like I'm fine with truth, is that which comports the reality largely as opposed
to a coherence view of truth. When it comes to the foundations, I
think probably one of my favorite ones, it comes closest to being a label
that I could apply to myself, is actually found hereintism, which is something
that's Susan Hawk but forth I don't know, somewhere in the last twenty years
or so. Maybe it's a combination of foundationalism and coherentism, and yet none
of it actually works because I don't think we've completely cracked the problem, or
it would be ridiculous of us to pretend that we are all in agreement on
the best epistemology. As a matter of fact, I'm in an argument or
about to be in an argument with somebody else who argued for intuition as an
epistemology, and I find that patently absurd, especially when you say, oh,
yeah, intuitions and epistemology, but you can't really trust it. You
have to go and test it, and that means that testing is now your
epistemology, and intuition is the process by which you apply the results. But
to say that my view means I have no grounds to debate, because you
know, we don't have a common ground. We do have a common ground,
we are in fact doing it. We're debating concepts beyond what we already
agree with. As far as I can tell, Jay and I agree that
we share a reality. Whether or not we can justify that as independent of
the fact that we agree that we do. We seem to share the notion
that identity, non contradiction, excluded, middle are as absolute as anything I
can imagine. We begin with that common ground and then we debate the things
that aren't common And one of those things is is there a foundation behind this?
Is there some justification for thinking there's a foundation or is this circular appeal
to the God presupposition that Jay talked about. Is that really something that we
use to ease our discomfort Because one of the one of the cool things that's
happened over the years, and when I've mentioned Akham's razor before, Akham's Razors
often misrepresented is the simplest explanation is often the best, and literally the formal
phrasing of that is what I mentioned earlier, which is don't multiply entities unnecessarily.
The problem is is that when you say God did it, that feels
simple to people and so they think they're consistent with God, with with Akham's
razor, and so they're saying, ah, well, you presuppose logic and
dignity and morality and all these other things, which isn't necessarily true. I'm
just using those all as examples. I find I think that some of them
are derivative. But you presuppose all those things, and all I have to
do is presuppose God, so I have fewer entities. And it's simple,
except that that God presumption comes with a load of baggage and a lot of
manipulation, including getting it to be the thing that does not require an additional
justification. And there are questions, well, let me let me finish this
part. We're debating the part that's not common now, whether or not we
can justify those things that we agree on. I don't. I'm not convinced
that we can. Otherwise there wouldn't be this debate. We just agree,
Yep, we can or we can't. So I think what we're starting to
talk to is about and this may be a bit of a cheat on my
part, but about certainty, because that's the thing that seems to pervade this
in the well, what is your confidence level or what is your like if
you were to try to quantify your rational justification in X, and if you
begin with a presupposition, nothing that is derived from a standard can be more
accurate than the standard. So if I have a watch that doesn't keep good
time, or I have a ruler that isn't to a standard, all of
my measurement, none of my measurements with that can be more accurate than the
standard that I'm going with. And so we have this grand unknown about logic
and whether or not it is in fact absolute and inviable as it seems to
appear. And even in pure pure reasoning terms, you're automatically led to presuppositions.
You would have to assume they were true. In order to prove they
weren't true, you would have to And that gets us to the assumptions about
truth. For me, what I often see is this assertion that your worldview
can't justify this, and therefore you have no grounds to say anything or do
anything else. And when I hear that, it seems to me that somebody's
saying you can't be absolutely certain, even if you could be reasonably certain,
And so what I don't think you can be absolutely certain about anything. And
I've in the past talked about what I described as I'm fully acknowledge that I
am adela times and not a degree or credentialed person in this field at all,
So I work things out on my own based on others. But it's
what I described as maximal certainty. If I begin with there is a reality,
and the laws of logic appear to be inviolate, and I will revise
that the second somebody demonstrates that the laws of logic can be violated or don't
always apply, I don't know how they could do that. But then everything
that is deductively arrived from those like mathematics, I would say you can be
maximally certain about because the deduction from logic leads to essentially the same level of
certainty, not in your actual results, because we can always forget to carry
the one or something, but mathematics itself is deductively derived from that, and
so we can be maximally certain. Other things are inductively derived, and so
there's a lower standard of certain certainty that doesn't approach to maximal, and maximal
could be absolute. If the laws of logical absolute, then maximal becomes absolute.
It's just that I don't have any way to demonstrate that. For everything
else, we have a lower confidence level, and I'll ah hume. The
wise Man proportions is belief to the evidence, and so recognizing that I live
in a world and I don't think I can be absolutely certain about anything,
but that doesn't mean that I'm in a state of chaos and can't determine anything.
I live in a world that is apparently reasonable, where we have scientific
methods, which, by the way, science doesn't make any proclamations about truth
or claim any sort of certainty. Science is always about this is our tentative
conclusions based on the best current evidence. It's always subject to revision. Nobody's
claiming that you know the moon absolutely well. All right, I was going
to go with green cheese. But there is the thing where you can you
may not know what something is, but you can still demonstrate what it Isn't
you know that this doesn't apply. So I have a belief in an external
world. I agree that that is a transcendental view. But as long as
you and I agree that we share the same reality, which we must do,
Otherwise we wouldn't have agreed to reschedule this debate and come on here and
talk there. Then that's all we need to then begin to have a discussion
about whether or not we have foundations beyond that. So there's a problem that
was stated very early in the last ten minutes or so, where you were
going to try to put it in some sort of syllogistic form. I don't
think we really got there, but I think I might have a better understanding,
which is, there's a whole bunch of transcendental categories, and if those
categories are to be made coherent and sensible, then they require justification. And
you believe that you've found that justification. This is a problem that I have
with the coherent model of truth, and that is you're absolutely right, Jay,
as long because the coherent model of truth is one where you truth is
coherent with a set of propositions. And one of the propositions that you're including
is these things have a foundation. That is the proposition that I reject.
I'm not saying it's false. I can't demonstrate that they don't have a foundation.
I'm just saying there's been no demonstration that they do. I don't see
any reason why these things aren't true in and of themselves, in much the
same way that people would argue that God doesn't need a foundation in and of
itself. To me, if there's no demonstration, there's no way to demonstrate
that this could have been any other way, then we're on pretty good ground
and saying the laws of logic have to be absolute, or at least it's
a reasonable not quite maximally certain inference from the direct observations and the fact that
these tools keep providing us with what appears to be consistent understandings of reality.
Now you can construct a justification for anything. And this is why. If
we're sitting at a card table full disclosure, I'm a magician. I can
cheat at cards, and I deal out the cards and you get We're playing
bridge and you get thirteen spage, you get the perfect bridge Chand now,
within the context of our understanding of the world, you could make a reasonable
conclusion that perhaps I cheated, especially if you know you're sitting there with someone
who's capable of dealing out pretty much whatever they want, or seemingly dealing out
whatever whatever they want, And it would be easily argued that the worldview that
includes Matt cheated would offer the best explanation, the most likely explanation for how
you wound up with all thirteen spades, But that doesn't tell us whether or
not that's actually true at all. Because we know at least a couple of
times in actual bridge tournaments the perfect bridge hand has been dealt and there's no
evidence of any cheating. We also know that it is possible as one of
the many random outcomes of a shuffle deck of cards. It's more comforting to
say I don't know if he cheated or not, but boy, sure would
make a lot more sense if he cheated. That's completely independent from whether it's
true, which gets us back to what I was saying earlier, that the
belief that there's a God that serves as a foundation may be comforting, but
I see no demonstration that it's necessary or true. Really good statements there,
um. The first thing I would point out is that when you said that
we appeal to God to ease our discomfort, my first argument would be that
that is an appeal to motion. That's not a valid argument. That's actually
a fallacy to appeal to the fact that the people that believe this or go
down this route are doing it because of psychological motivation. So I don't think
that's a valid argument. I would say next that the idea that you have
the ability to distinguish between the categories that are maximally certain, such as abstract
numbers, etc. Versus the things that are derived from induction, scientific experimentation,
empiricism, the ability to make that distinction itself presupposes some true category.
Once again, So while I recognize that you wanted to sort of qualify by
moving into the category of maximally certain and not absolutely certain, that's fine.
You can use whichever terms you want to use. From my perspective, it
doesn't matter to me because I don't believe that you would be able to have,
in the pragmatic perspective a justification for any kind of truth whatsoever. In
fact, the whole system quite literally should lead directly into syllipsism and total relativism.
Now, I know that you don't necessarily accept total relativism, because,
as you said, we have a common world, a something area where we
can dialogue about these things and have the debate, So we don't believe in
total relativism. However, in order to not believe in total word relativism,
again, assumes these categories, assumes these things that you seem to admit,
but don't think that they necessarily presuppose or lead to any kind of a personal
God. And I understand why you're saying that, So I want to stress
that I don't think the appeal to discomfort is a valid argument. I don't
think that you have the ability to have even maximal certainty, And I don't
believe that you can construct a justification for anything. So the example that you
gay was a case where you could you know, you cheated at cards,
et cetera, et cetera, and somebody could build a case or whatever.
When it comes to normative day to day kinds of activities or what you could
call normative logic, that could be true. Yes, there's a lot of
situations where we would have, through induction, limited amounts of certainty. But
the strength of the transcendental argument, the strength of the argument that's being presented
here, is that there are some things that are so fundamental that to deny
them or doubt them, which theoretically one could doubt them, but to actually
live or to actually consistently try to doubt them and not live according to them
or not debate, according to them, would lead to such a fundamental breakdown
of the coherence of one's belief system or even the possibility of knowledge, the
possibility of operating in the world, predicating about objects in the world, of
knowing things in the world, or doing science at all. Those types of
things are so fundamental that they're I'm arguing even stronger as an argument, they're
maximally certain to whatever degree you want to pause it there. If you want
to say absolute or not absolute, that's fine, it doesn't matter to me.
I don't have a problem using the terms of warranted beliefs or highly warranted
or maximally or whatever, because that really those are just humanly derived terms that
are trying to describe the strongest level of certainty possible. So I believe that
those kinds of transcendal categories are not only maximally certain or necessary, but that
they don't operate independently. They actually presuppose and interact with one another, which
is kind of why I started the debate talking about the three branches of philosophy
which make up a worldview. These things all I believe cohere and kind of
presuppose and are tied together with one another. For example, it wouldn't make
any sense to talk about the past experiences, and can I have a rational
belief in past experiences if I didn't believe that there was a self that had
those experiences. It seems that these two things kind of go together. Being
able to predicate about objects in the external world, right, kind of assumes
that objects in the external world have identity over time. Right, that I
can pick out one object amongst many objects, and so that's the problem of
the one in the many. Right, So any any kinds of examples like
this tend to I would say, kind of assume all these transcendental categories together,
even if we're only focusing on maybe one area here or there. Maybe
we're only talking about linguistics. A lot of modern philosophers P. F.
Strawson call auto apple. They've done a lot of work in transcendent arguments as
they apply to language. In linguistics. How many things, It's kind of
amazing, how many things we presuppose just in communication, just in subject predicate
relations and sentences, just in trying to communicate that information to another bunch of
gray matter. The intricacy, the complexity in this is fascinating. It's it's
phenomenal actually, And so what I think is so strong about this argumentation is
that we're not just arguing that it's a kind of a model up here in
the abstract that's pretty cool, like some big world of warcraft scheme that we've
we've invented that really doesn't have anything to do with the external world. I'm
saying that, No, when when I have a friend who's a rocket scientist.
He's done contract word for NASA, he designs black hawks, right,
he talks about the amazing complexity of the algorithms that he works with. Now,
I'm not a mathematician, right. I know about math theory in terms
of philosophy, but I don't do the abstract, you know, calculus that
he does to how to build you know, black hawks. Right. But
to him, at least in his mind as an engineer and many other engineers
and mathematicians who utilize math and engineering, is that they see the practical application
of this very abstract realm into the here and the now. And if something's
wrong in the equation, the black Hawk's not gonna fly, it's gonna crash.
Right, So he has to be very precise. He has to be
very clear in the way that he gets it all perfectly right. And so
it's not just in the realm of the abstract. It's also very present in
the here and the now, and that's just mathematics. So what I think
if we reorient our perspective when we look at the power and possibility of transcendental
arguments, we're not just saying something theoretical. We're actually mapping us onto reality
and saying that all of reality kind of presupposes this kind of a god,
and that itself is the argument. So again, one could conceivably say I
don't accept transidental arguments, but I think that that would lead to a bunch
of dead ends and a reductive who is a valid argument if we're led to
dead ends when we deny this thing over here? To me, I think
that's one of the strongest possible arguments. A couple other last points on Matt's
last statements there is that I think when he says that coherentism. When he
was listing coherentism, he talked about how your beliefs don't have a foundation.
Well, I'm not trying to fault Matt as if he necessarily doesn't understand this.
Maybe misspoke. But the coherentism is not about foundations. It's actually about
the coherence of the web of beliefs. Right. So there's two models.
The foundationalist model is like self evident maxims and then beliefs on top of the
self evident maxims, and then beliefs that lead to further believes that lead to
further beliefs. Right. So that's foundationalism, and it has foundations. We
don't have that model right when it comes to webs of beliefs and when it
comes to paradigms and worldviews that are justified in terms of coherentism. So that's
because if I'm thinking about logic over here in this arena, maybe I'm talking
about the laws of logic. That's not disconnected from who I am. That's
not disconnected from my belief in God. It's not disconnected from ethics that we
ought to be logical, that we ought to reason from premise to valid conclusion.
Right, So it's all connected in our view, And I think that's
a better method, a better way of understanding truth propositions, beliefs, claims,
etc. So I would say that I think Matt's position, while he
did ask some good questions kind of misunderstood and made a couple of logical violations
there, and the response that what if there's no explanation, Well, I
would say that if we're here to debate, and if we want to to
theism, I would say that if Matt wants to say that there's all these
things that he utilizes but doesn't necessarily think that they're true in the external world,
per se laws of logic and all that truth with a capitalty or whatever,
I would say that Matt's being arbitrary. And if Matt can be arbitrary,
then I can say God just is right. So if arbitrary is allowed,
if we can be at hawk, then I think that the debate is
over, because that would be a violation of the laws of debate. But
of course we don't believe that we can be arbitrary or at hawk, and
so therefore we can't just say, well, the laws of lodging just are
I forget Matt's phrase. He said that truth is what maps up to reality
or belief that conforms to reality. That's a metaphysical claim, right, That's
a metaphysical statement about the external world. Right now, I'm not I know
Matt's would only say that, well, that's maximally certain in a pragmatic sort
of sense. Okay, fair enough, but it still doesn't work to say
it just is, because once we've admitted it just is, then that's being
arbitrary in at hoc. Right, All right, Jay, good one,
you're right down there. I was just about to give you a thirty second
warning. So let's see where are we at. That was your third one,
Matt, this will be your third one coming up? Am I right?
Am? I on track here? Folks? All right, I don't
think this one will take the whole ten minutes. All right, Well,
feel free, the mic is yours, and then we'll switch gears into something
else. Sure. So Jay's basically just saying that if I can arbitrarily say
the laws of logic just are, then he can just arbitrarily say that God
is. He's completely right. Except that's not what's happening. I'm not arbitrarily
saying the laws of logic just are. I'm not even asserting that they just
are. I am recognizing that I have no reason to think that they could
be anything other than what they appear to be, which is in violent and
absolute. I'm not they are absolute. I'm saying it's my presupposition, and
that presupposition is supported by the continued reliability of these things. And yes,
there's something in there that's always going to be circular, which is why we
call him a presupposition. But what but when, Jay, what he's really
doing is admitting that he's presupposing a foundation to the thing that I'm presupposing.
And okay, you can call it an arbitrary you can call whatever I'm saying.
The whole point of this discussion is we both agree on the absolutes,
and my view is I'm not aware of any way that they can have a
foundation. I'm not sure that there's any way to demonstrate that they have a
foundation, and presupposing a foundation, you can say it's an emotional appeal.
I don't what other reason would somebody have to presuppose a foundation to something that
can't be demonstrated or hasn't been demonstrated to have a foundation, other than their
discomfort with the lack of a foundation. Because I'm not convinced that even the
foundation that they're resupposing can do what they think of to do. And I'll
get to that in just a second. He said, all of reality priests
supposes a God. That's just a bald assertion. I'm part of reality as
far as I can tell, I don't presuppose a god. So that's clearly
false. But in the context of what he was actually saying, he seems
to be claiming that all of this necessitates a god. And when he refers
to you know, the use of a reductio ad absurd him. I agree.
I got no problem with a reductio, but no, finding a dead
end in your constructed reductio doesn't mean that your other proposition is correct. There
are two things that need to happen in order for that reductio it to be
of any use. The first is that you have to demonstrate that there is
a necessity of an explanation for X, and then all other possible explanations for
X fail, and that neither of those has been has been done by any
stretch of the imagination. I'm you know, where's the demonstration that there must
be an explanation that it couldn't just be so. I'm not saying it is
just so, which I was kind of accused of, but I'm just going
to say that was talking quickly and that there was no malice misrepresenting it.
I'm not saying it has to be so. I'm saying, where's the demonstration
that it that it is necessary? That it can't be so? And we
haven't gone through all other possibilities to show that they lead to a dead end.
We haven't even gone through the raw theism versus non theism view to show
that this doesn't have an explanation. Because just because we don't have an explanation
for something today that is consistent with a worldview that doesn't include a god,
doesn't mean that that's not going to happen at a later time. This is
the thing about skepticism. There may be some things for which we will never
have an explanation. That's incredibly we're all uncomfortable with not knowing. I wasn't
trying to make an emotional appeal. I think that's how humans operate. Our
discomfort with not knowing is what makes us seek answers. It's the reason we're
having this potential discussion today because if Jay can successfully present something that convinces me,
well, now there's another person ostensibly on his side, and if I
can, if I can show the word Jay has made a mistake in assuming
something that isn't necessary and can't be demonstrated. Well, then maybe I have
an ally on my side. I don't think either one of us came into
day thinking that we were going to change the other person's mind. I don't
do this. I mean, I'd be happy if Jay and I wound up
agreeing on stuff, But I do it for the people who are listening so
that they can hear a discussion about this, and especially in areas like you
know, deep philosophical concepts where I'm not remotely an expert. I just think
what I think and for my reasons, but I can do my best to
explain it. I'm not as you know, you talked about language. I
would never assume that Jay and I have the exact same understanding of word usage.
As a matter of fact, I would assume the exact opposite, that
there are things where we're going to have a different understanding of a word,
a different understanding of a concept. But my presumption coming in here is that
we both speak English and have an understanding of usage that is sufficient for us
to be able to discuss things, to find the areas where we agree,
like, Hey, what do you mean by this word mean by God.
Okay, well, now we can have this secondary discussion. I think you
know that's the only assumption I'm making is that there's a likelihood that we can
come to an agreement on terms and communicate ideas. And I think that it's
evident that we're actually succeeding at that. But the notion that a God could
serve as a foundation for the laws of logic, in addition to no demonstration
of necessity, and I'm not sure what the warrant is apart from an assertion
that there is a need and atheism or a nontheistic view of the world doesn't
fill that is this, can God change, alter, or violate the laws
of logic? Because if so, then they're not guaranteed, and if not,
then he's not the guaranteer. He is now subject to those same laws.
And the second problem is that we all recognize I would hope that each
of us is a flawed thinker, that we not only have varying IQs and
varying understandings and various biases that come in and the process by which we learn,
every single one of us makes mistakes, and we can't even guarantee that
we're that the model of reality that is in our head actually maps to an
actual reality. That's a kind of an assumption we're making as well when we
were talking about solid system. And so if we are flawed in our thinking,
how can a god, even a perfect God, make your flawed mind
correct and warranted without making your mind unflawed. It is like pouring clean water
through a dirty filter. And so the fact that you are convinced that there's
a God out there that serves as a foundation for logic doesn't mean there is
one. And even if that God does exist and does serve as the foundation
for logic, there's no way for that God to demonstrate that to you and
to the point where you would have the essentially absolute or maximal epistemic warrant,
unless that God makes your mind completely not flawed, at which case there would
be no more debate or discussion. It would just be hey, this is
the way it works, and we go Gosh, because we would have godlike
mentality. And so I don't know how, even you know, I don't
know how to overcome those problems. The laws of logic are our descriptions of
abstract truths, which, okay, I'll set aside the presupposing of truth or
discussions about truth. And I don't know that it's not the case that something
can't simply be true, that this is the way it is, and in
fact it could not have been any other way. If we look at the
laws of logic and they could not have been any other way, which is
what it appears to be, even though we can't be absolutely confident about that,
then it would seem to me patently absurd to suggest that there's something that
must exist that serves as a guarantee that it couldn't be any other way,
if in fact it couldn't have been any other way. All right, excellent,
great discussion you guys. That concludes the first hour of our talk here.
So Jay over to you for you know what you want to do next?
Do we want to do like a conversational now whatever, I'm up for
whatever. I mean, if there's questions from from the chat or super chat,
we can do those if you have questions for me. I mean,
I asked a few questions there at the at the end of dress so I'm
sure we'll get to the super chats here towards the last section. So,
um, the first thing I would say is that you talked about um.
What what I was saying was that when it comes to the domain of philosophy
where we do debates, where we do argumentation, to say, I mean,
it's fine to say that you believe that we seek justification for a beliefs,
perhaps at times out of psychological motivations for comfort, but that doesn't translate
into an argument in a debate. So just because and it could be entirely
the case. It could be the case that maybe maybe a person is only
arguing for or the existence of God because of psychological motivations, and they're weak
people and they want they want to have comfort. But I still think that
that's a fallacious argument in terms of strict logic, it's not valid to the
truth or falsity of God's existence. So when we're talking about logical necessity,
we're talking about something that's a little more forceful and it's a little more strict.
And again, it doesn't matter if we limit the certitude or the trueness
to maximal certainty. It really doesn't matter, because I think the argument that
I'm trying to present is that if we had the system of truth that you
had, if we had your worldview, it would and should lead us down
a certain path, a consistent path of sallipsism, of total skepticism if we
were to follow through with those conclusions. But that the point is that you're
not really doing that. You're still utilizing things that wouldn't make sense given your
presuppositions, and that is itself the argument. So, as a skeptic and
somebody who essentially teaches about skepticism, I often get asked this thing about can
you be too skeptical? And of course my answer is no, because what
they're generally be talking about there is not skepticism and cynicism. Skepticism is an
ideology in an ideological sense. Is I want my internal model of reality to
match the reality I experience as best as possible. And so you have a
couple times now suggested that my worldview should lead me down a path of total
skepticism. Well, I am a total skeptic in the sense that I have
doubts about everything. I am not absolutely certain about anything, But that doesn't
mean that I don't have reasonable confidence in things that are based on the foundation
of logic. Now, if we're gonna have the conversation about what's beyond logic,
which is apparently what we're trying to do. Criticizing the view is just
one more attempt to say, oh, there must be a foundation. Well,
where's the demonstration that there must be a foundation? What are the consequences
if there's not a foundation. Of the argument is that you don't have a
basis or ability consistently to appeal to logic itself, Setting aside the justification of
whether I have the same basis everybody else does. I'm convinced that it is
reliable, as are you. The difference between us is that you are convinced
that you found why it's liable. That's not but but but that was why
I asked that the Prince the question about induction, Right, So induction and
saying that you're convinced about it, it would presumably mean that you think that
it works. Right, it's pragmatic. Yeah, yeah, it works.
We both agree with that. So, just pretty much else in the planets,
something works is a value judgment, right that you're using another category to
try to say that that's why this thing is true. But ultimately that would
be circular. Yes, yes, So the whole thing is I've acknowledged a
presupposition. Why how on earth is it as a counter to me to say,
oh, you're presupposed because on the world view that you have, those
kinds of things shouldn't exists. That's that's absolutely not true. So this is
where we're always going to get in trouble. You make an assertion about my
worldview and about what shouldn't exist my worldview is that I accept to this because
of a demonstration of its continued reliability called induction. I haven't. That's not
a justification. That's just saying that it is right. So in logical justification,
that was why I pointed to Hume. All the way up to Quine,
they still say that this is not a belief or a view that can
be justified. Yes, I agree, yes, and I agree, I
see no justification. You're asserting there is a justification, and when I ask
for what it is, you're just asserting that while my worldview collapses without it,
and you even asserted that these sorts of things shouldn't exist, stopped you
sort of these short of things shouldn't have existed in my worldview. Where's the
demonstration that my worldview should not include things that are just true or better yet
that are reasonably presupposed because of their continued demonstrate of effort, because they would
be that would be being ad hoc and being arbitrary. And I'm saying the
justification is that in a world where there is a god, the doctrine of
providence actually makes sense. Why there's induction and the regularity that's in nature.
I'm not aware of. I'm not aware of a girl where the world where
there is a god. I'm aware of a world where there are people who
are convinced there's a god and who are convinced it serves as a foundation right
here, right right, And so where's the demonstration for that other than in
it's not. No, it's not I mean, if we're just, if
we're just going to make flat out assertions, then you assert your rights.
It's it's not an argument. You haven't presented a single argument for the for
the for the entire thing. You've presented colloquial kind of loose arguments, but
there's not the whole thing is you just you claimed that this shouldn't exist in
my worldview, that logical absolutes could not be true under my worldview. The
fact that I you're presupposing that there is an explanation for why they're absolute,
rather than just recognizing that they are. That would be being arbitrary and being
at hawk, and typically in debates that's not allowed. It's it's wow,
hey, Jade, I'm sorry to interrupt. Um. We are getting some
complaints as you guys are doing the more free form conversations, So if you
can, if you guys can kind of like, I hate to interrupt the
flow, but we are getting some echo on your mike j So, okay,
cool, thanks. It's so it would only be arbitrary if I were
asserting these things are in fact absolute and I viable. That is not my
position at all. My position that's not that's not all that, that's not
all that's required to be arbitrary. Being arbitrary or at hawk is just saying
something simply is, and I can appeal to this thing and I don't have
to justify. I don't have to give any reasons for here. I don't
know how many times I can explain the same thing I'm not saying and have
never said, these are the way things the logic clabslutes are the way things
are, and I don't have to justify it. I've not said that.
I've not implied that or anything else. I'm saying I am convinced that they
are, and I am not convinced that they have or need a justification.
So stop misframing what my position is so that it is a straw man to
knock down. I have never said the logic lab well. I probably have
said fifteen years ago or whatever, but not throughout the course of this debate
that the logic clabslutes are in fact true and don't need justification. I'm saying
I don't see a need or any demonstration that they do need a justification.
There's a huge difference. It's the difference between I am not convinced this person
is guilty and I am, in fact convinced this person is innocent. Those
are different things. So why is that not being at hog or arbitrary.
It's not arbitrary, You've got an echo. Okay, it's not ad hoc
because I'm not offering an explanation for how they are. I'm not even I'm
not even acknowledging that there could be an explanation for how they are. There's
been no demonstration that they require an explanation. So it's not ad hoc in
that sense of because ad hoc would be providing a justification for something. I'm
not providing a justification for it. I'm saying I don't even know that there
could be or that there is a justification for it. Do you see how
that's not ad hoc. Well, I mean, you can say that that's
not ad hoc, but I don't see how it's not. Because typically when
we talk about in the domain of epistemology, justifying beliefs and justifying claims,
it requires some kind of explanation. Now you can do that. I understand
you're doing that. You're saying that, but I don't think that that's a
coherent answer, And I think that you're led to that conclusion because of the
beliefs in the rest of the system, because it would require the admission of
other things that are not compatible with the other beliefs that you have, namely
the atheistic agnostic Tuch views. Make try another way, How could it possibly
be an ad hoc explanation to say I am not aware that there is or
needs to be an explanation, because that's being arbitrary. It doesn't need one
as so let me frame it this way. So there's disciplines that are called
metadisciplines, right, meta ethics, meta mathematics, meta logic. These are
real disciplines that people study. Now, one could say that they're not real
disciplines and dismiss it or whatever. But when we talk about giving a justification
or giving an explanation for things, or explaining how they could be in the
rest of one's worldview, I don't think that that's an invalid question. And
you've said that you don't believe that it needs a justification. Again, you
can say that that's not arbitrary, but to me, it sounds arbitrary.
On the worldview where God exists, there's regularity in nature because of providence,
because God has said the world up to be regular, and that's how we
can do the scientific method, that's how we can do logic, that's how
we can do math. The world operates in a reg other way. But
when we don't have that and we just say that we only have our immediate
sense experience, we only have what's pragmatic, then we're led to these foolish
conclusions. Okay, I'm a fool. No, I'm not saying you're a
fool in terms of a pejorative. I'm saying, no, yes, yes
you are. And this is the problem. I'm not offering any ear echoing.
I'm not offering an explanation, so it can't be an ad hoc explanation
what I and I'm not saying this does not require justification. I'm saying,
where's the demonstration that it does. I'm not aware that. And I you
you at least presuppose one thing that you think does not require a foundation,
right, correct, So you presuppose one thing that you don't think requires a
foundation, and yet you want to criticize my presupposition, which does not say
this does not require a foundation, but instead says I am not yet convinced
that it needs a foundation. I haven't asserted that it doesn't. There could
be. There could be some foundation, as far as I know. You
could be right about the foundation, as far as I know. It's just
there's no demonstration that there is a foundation, or that you have found the
right one. What you've found is one that is consistent and appears to serve
as that. But only because if anything, and I was going to go
aoid doing this, you seem to be making an ad hoc explanation for the
foundation of logic in there's a personal god agent who serves as the guaranteer for
something which we haven't even demonstrated needs a guaranteur or could be guaranteed And sorry
lost it for a second there. So there's an ad hoc explanation there,
which is one step removed from the thing that we both agree on. Yeah.
Well, in a response to that, I would say that when you
say that, down the road, maybe we'll have an answer to these things.
That seems to me to be kind of a leap of faith, the
idea that down the road we can answer these things. Right again, that's
probably the most frustrating thing is because I did not say that you did say
this down. I wrote it down when you were talking down the answer down
the rope. Perhaps we'll have an answer to this justification. So the point
here is that I don't know that we won't have see you seem the point
in my response, well, yes it is, yes, it is saying
okay, here we go. Your your case is that a worldview without a
god cannot offer an explanation for the logical absolutes. We'll just stick with that.
One and not all the other ones. My position is, and I
was talking specifically about your argument about using a reductio essentially saying that you know,
under God there's an exploit or be a screwpt. I'm gonna I'm gonna
skip that because I was looking for the particular so disjunctive illogism, essentially showing
that you know, with God we have an explanation. Without God, we
don't have an explanation there or got what I said was in a reductio,
you have to demonstrate that there is a necessity for an explanation in this case,
and simply getting to a dead end, which was your language which I
went down, does not mean you've demonstrated the truth of the other one.
Because a dead end now does not mean that there won't be an explanation down
the line. I did not say we will find it. I didn't even
say, well, if I said we might find it that I'm talking in
a philosophical sense. I'm not saying that it's true we're likely to find it.
I also acknowledged we may never find it, and I'm fine with that
one, because I don't have any demonstration that there is an explanation well,
I would reply by saying that you claim to be a proponent of the skeptical
tradition, that you're within that tradition of skepticism, and I'm very read in
that tradition, and I respect a lot of areas of the skeptical tradition.
But whether we go back to Descartes and his meditations when he begins to question
things, or whether it's Hume or whether it's the more modern skeptics, they're
very interested in questioning justification, questioning epistemic claims, questioning metal level questions.
They're asking all those metal level questions. They're very interested in how we do
or can't justify laws of logic, numbers, all those different things. So
it's not within it's not unfair to bring those issues up because they're the heart
of the issue, especially in the history of epistemology. I mean, you
can read epistemology textbook that's common bonjour something like this, and you'll find that
the whole of the textbook is debates about coherentism and foundationalism and justifying claims.
Now, one could say I don't really care, or I don't it doesn't
matter to me, or whatever, But in a debate. What's presupposed is
some question or some rule right by which we go by these rules to confirm
or deny the case right. And I think what you've missed or tended to
miss is that the transital argument is not just an argument that's a reductio against
some other position. It's a positive argument that's about all of those transcendental categories.
And if those transcendental categories are actually necessary, and if they're actually very
strong arguments of themselves, then the argument for God itself is also strong.
And it's also a positive argument. It's not just a negative argument about,
well, I can find a flaw in your worldview, therefore mind's true.
That's not the totality of the argument. The totality argument is that this worldview
is coherent because I can look at all those different paradigmatic claims and preconditions and
they make sense. They're coherent. When I look at the system over here,
and you can say I don't have a system. You can say,
I'm not saying you said that, But a person could say, as a
skeptic, I don't have a holistic system. I just have the best that
I can go by with maximal certainty and pragmatic approaches, but that still has
claims that are necessary and implicit about metaphysics, about epistemology, and about ethics.
Even if you don't want to go down any of those specific routes,
it's still has a necessary implication. If I were to say I'm a total
skeptic and I don't think that I know anything is true, that's still a
claim about metaphysics, about ethics, and about epistemology, even if I don't
want it to go there. So you're working. But the issue here is
whether or not there's a God, and you're presenting an argument for the existence
of God based on the necessity of an explanation for logic, among other things,
as a foundation for it. My response is, you haven't demonstrated that
this is a necessity. You've just asserted that the absence of such an explanation
leads to problems. But those problems presupposed that there is an explanation. There's
been no demonstration that the laws of logic could have been in any other way,
or that there's any case that they that they need some sort of guarantee.
And when I try to point this out, you've on a couple of
occasions completely misframed what I was talking about. The card example, which I
agree is and I know you didn't raise the subjection, but somebody I'm not
watching. I'm sure somebody out there was complaining about you know this analogy that's
within you know the reality, and you can provide evidence, and it doesn't
fit within the transcendental thing. Yes, it's an analogy, I get it.
The thing is, it would be a coherent if you don't know whether
or not how you ended up with thirteen spades, it would be a coherent
explanation to believe that I cheated. Because if you're not sure whether I believe,
and I'm not sure whether or not I cheated or whether somebody they're cheated,
then you're in this state of I don't know. And this is why
I was talking about our discomfort with not knowing. I wasn't using as it
is an emotional fallacy. It's just a fact we are uncomfortable with not knowing.
It's the reason we see answers. It's the reason why we presuppose in
some cases that something may have an answer, when we might be wrong about
whether or not it has an answer. And so the card cheating example.
There, of course, if you across from me at the table and you
get that, almost anybody is going to be tempted to say, Wow,
I bet somebody cheated, because everything makes a lot more sense if in fact
somebody cheated, and that might make you more comfortable rather than not knowing that.
Maybe I'm not saying that is the reason for doing it. You can
convince yourself in a worldview where Matt cheated. Now all of a sudden,
this outcome makes a lot more sense. And you're right, I acknowledge that
at the outset of the debate, at the very beginning, But that has
nothing to do with whether or not I actually cheated. That has everything to
do with your comfort or discomfort with not knowing. And if you're convinced that
I did cheat, then of course that's going to be a satisfying answer,
and it would probably be satisfying for almost anybody there, as long as they
didn't care whether or not it was actually true. And I care whether or
not things are actually true to the best that we can find out, and
so I can't make a leap to oh, there must be a god that
serves as a foundation for logic because I'm not yet convinced that logic needs a
foundation. I see, and I think I see the point of departure now.
So basically, where I would disagree where I think we're talking past,
is about the issue of different types of proofs and different types of things.
So, for example, your your analogy is fine when it comes to matters
of normative daily life, normative discourse, but when it's issues I would argue
that are so fundamental and paradigmatic that they destroy the possibility of knowledge or predication
or logic ethics at all. They're different from the kinds of claims or beliefs
that we have that speak to what you're talking about with your example. So,
for example, if I deny the laws of logic, there's there's something
very fundamental about argumentation, living, speaking, communicating that's completely destroyed, right
if I if I deny them, if I doubt them, I don't think
they have a true existence. If they're not real, if they're just social
constructs, that's a much more damaging thing to doubt. Then if I doubt
that little Wayne has moved in next door to me, right, I might
see a dude with dreads and I think it's little Wayne over there. Therefore,
little Wayne has Now, if I'm wrong about that, it doesn't destroy
my whole worldview to be wrong about that. If I deny basic laws of
logic, it does destroy my whole worldview. And so not everything has proven
the exact same way. And so because those kinds of things are much more
fundamental, much more powerful and paradigmatic, that's why it's such a strong argument,
and that's why they do require a justification. I mean, the argument
that you gave about the cards, you are giving a kind of justification.
You're saying that we can't always go by the appearances of things, and I
would agree with that, but it's different when we're talking about paradigmatic level presuppositions.
And that's why transcendentals are different than normative argumentation and logic. Yeah,
first of all, I don't know how that's special pleading. But going on
about the consequences, oh, you need to mute going on about the consequences
of denying the laws of logic seeming as completely irrelevant because I'm not doing that.
See, you're trying to argue for a foundation behind the laws of logic.
That's the part that I'm denying, but not the laws of logic themselves,
And so I would agree, if you deny the laws of logic,
then we can't have any kind of conversation, we can't do anything. We
are forced essentially to recognize these things, and denial of them would lead to
chaos, except that I'm not doing that at all. I am denying your
bald assertion that there must be a foundation. Yeah. But as a skeptic,
shouldn't we have a justification for things that we believe in. Yes,
And That's why I've been so strong on pointing out the difference between saying I
am convinced of X, I am not convinced of X, and I am
convinced of not X. As a skeptic, I want to believe as many
true things and as few false things as possible, and I proportion my confidence
level in what I believe to the available evidence for it, of which for
the evidence of a foundation for the logic cloud lutes zero evidence. The evidence
that God serves as a foundation zero evidence, as far as I can tell,
for any of these things. My position is not the laws of logic
are in fact absolute and viable other than they appear to be, And we
should operate as if they are until there's such time as as a demonstration when
they're not. These things continually demonstrate we can't have conversations without them. They
are as close to, if they're not absolute, there as close as I
think any of us could possibly imagine. And so my position is not they
don't require a foundation, because that would be an assertion that I would have
to defend it have a burden approof How did you come to the conclusion they
don't need a foundation. I didn't come to that conclusion. I am not
yet convinced that they do, because I have not nobody's demonstrated that, and
you and I would agree, at least within your worldview, there's at least
one thing that does not require a foundation. And so given that you know,
I'm not sure whether or not there's one thing that doesn't require a foundation,
or two things that doesn't require a foundation, or zero things that doesn't
require nation. Those are things that we can't don't seem to be able to
demonstrate. Well at that point, I would say that when it comes to
the question of demonstration and how that's been used in epistemology and philosophy, I
appreciate that admission, because if we're believing in things because they work and they
don't have to be justified, that's not skepticism. Skepticism is interested in asking
those questions. And I understand you're what you're saying, and I appreciate the
attempt to be consistent, but I don't think that it's ultimately consistent because you
can't just say, well, you know, I just I don't see why
they have to be justified, because that is being arbitrary. It's being at
hawk. And you can say it's not being arbitrary because you don't see a
reasoning why it has to be. But that's the whole skeptical truth. That's
why skeptics do what they do is to try to justify claims, to try
to justify beliefs, to try to justify systems and so and so. If
you can say, I don't we're not going to do that. We try,
We try, and if we don't find a justification, we keep trying,
and we're so echo but we yes. So first of all, I'm
sure, please people who watch this later don't beat J up too much for
lecturing me about skepticism while arguing on behind for a god. Skepticism is about
wanting your internal model from an idealistic standpoint, modern scientific scan to match reality.
Modern scientific skepticism is about testing as best we can. But that's that's
within the context of testing fact claims about reality, so that modern scientific skepticism
isn't going to address whether or not logic hows a foundation. You're talking about
almost an ancient Greek knowledge of skepticism that has been discarded because it leads to
they're the very questions that human Quin asked. Yeah. Yeah, that's not
ancient Greece. They ask questions, they did not assert answers. That's the
difference. You're asserting an answer. William van Orman Quine's essay Two Dogmas of
Empiricism. He says that they cannot be logically to fight on empiricis's grounds.
That's why they're called two Dogmas of empiricism. According to Quin's famous essay,
sure psher, yes sir, yes, sir. We want to read some
super chats. We're getting towards the last fifteen twenty minutes. All right,
yeah, all right, yeah, we are into the final segment here.
Great discussion, you guys. Yeah, let's do that. Jay, let's
yeah, I'm I'm really enjoying it over here. And yeah, Jay,
if you have any super chats, I guess now would be a good time
to round those out. Franklin chant, as one last clarification, you can
say whatever you want about quine. I'm not beholding the quin. I'm talking
about my thing and this notion of skepticism. I've already explained it over and
over and over again, and you have yet to demonstrate any sort of problem
with it except to assert that I'm not a skeptic in the same way whoever
the hell you reference is a skeptic. I don't care. Fair enough,
Definitely, one can take a different track. But I'm just interested in the
history of different skeptics and how they talk, and what they consider justification,
and how philosophy and epistemology typically speaks of justifying claims. But so and I'm
not I'm interested in what's actually true and demonstrable, which is why we're stuck.
Okay, so we'll go to Franklin Chan. He says, thanks for
the debate, Thank you, Franklin. Joelene Kay says for the cause,
Thank you, gentlemen, Thank you. Joel Michael Flaherty one hundred dollars.
Thank you, Michael, Finally a real debate. This is all ten or
Terry two dollars says Atheism saved dormant three sixty says Jay, bringing up Hume's
argument about induction being unjustifiable in a materials worldview. Why would the same why
would today be the same tomorrow for no reason? Yeah, I mean that's
essentially the argument. Ten or Terry five dollars to both debaters, what are
are we going to address some of these? Some of the some of these?
I mean, you know when I say I don't, I don't care
what Hume set or client set or anybody else, because you know, I'm
going to take pieces from different things, and I'm certainly not as well versed
on some of those as they are. I'm talking about what my position is
and why when we talk about induction, we live our entire lives by inference
and induction. We begin with this assumption that tomorrow is pretty much going to
be like today, because the entire history of the world has continued to show
that that's going to be the case. But we also do it with the
recognition that tomorrow is not identical to today and that there are trends. So,
yeah, you know, I don't expect that the Earth's going to stop
spinning on its axis in the next ten minutes, but I do it with
the understanding that it's very likely and almost certain that it will stop spinning on
its axis at some point in the future. And so when we talk about
induction, there's a reason. It's it's not deduction. It's an approximation.
It is an estimation. It's an inference about what things are going to be
like. But that is not the same as wild ass guessing. I guess
is probably the best way to put that, and it's the reason why we
rely on science, despite the fact that science is virtually almost entirely an inductive
process. Yeah, and I would agree with everything that Matt just said.
It is just that in the history of this debate that I'm bringing up the
question of justifying the belief in induction the entire history of skepticism and empiricism,
and from what I understand, Matt is an empiricist at least to some degree.
The whole point of Quine's essay. I'm not saying that Matt has to
agree with everything que argues, but that Quine restated the argument from the time
of Hume that it's a belief that can't be justified, and it's a belief
that undergirds science. So the point is that science believes in things it cannot
be logically justified. Therefore, the transmittal argument is the next logical step,
and that's what I've been trying to argue throughout the debate. Tan Ortarry five
dollars to both debaters. What is the consequence of one's epistemology breaking down due
to incoherence with their view of metaphysics and axeology. I don't know that there
is. Well, one of the consequences is that if if I'm wrong,
then oh well, now, actually that's not even it. So if my
pistemology breaks down, I'd have to know in what way it broke down and
know the consequences, because my position is not the large coal absolutes don't have
a foundation. It's that I'm not aware of one or a need for one.
If if it turns out somebody was able to demonstrate that there is a
need for one, that doesn't crush my worldview. All it does is add
something that I have yet to be convinced of I become convinced of something new,
and so my worldview changes all the time every time I become convinced of
something new across the board. And if if there was a further demonstration that,
for example, not only do they have a foundation, but it is
a God, and in particular the God of the Orthodox Christian tradition, well
then I would now be I would no longer be an atheist because I would
have to be convinced that the or Christian model of God was real. It
may not change my view on that, being like I'm never going to worship
as out of an obligation or an expectation, because I think that any being
that would be deserving of worship could never demand it, because that, at
least to my understanding, would would put in a position where we would no
longer be deserving. But that's kind of off the track. But as far
as I was one, I redefined knowledge. And I'm sure I'll get beaten
up for this, but I had so many conversations about the nature of belief
and knowledge and how knowledge is a subset of belief, and there were people
like no, no, no, no, No. Beliefs are a subset
of knowledge, and no, no, you're wrong. Knowledge is a subset
of beliefs. They're the things you believe, and then there's some subset of
that that you count as knowledge. And by and large, in a kloqu
of sense, when people talk about knowledge, not in a philosophical sense,
because there you get to justify true belief and now there's arguments over what's justified
and what's true. In a cloqus sense, when people say I know something,
and they're not just talking about like familiarity or awareness, but they're talking
about knowledge in the sense of apismology, all they're really doing, from my
experience, is expressing a confidence level. They're saying, I really, really,
really really believe it. And so my working definition of knowledge was to
say, belief is anything that you are convinced is true or likely true,
and knowledge are those beliefs that if you were to find out you were wrong,
it would be dramatically worldview altering. You know, if I can claim
to know, I don't know whether or not my phone is turned on.
But what I'm really saying is I'm confident my phone is still turned on because
I haven't turned it off yet, and I know the battery is pretty full,
and there's lots of good reasons, and so I would argue that my
confidence level is really high and I know this, but I'm not saying I
can't be wrong. And that's a fundamental difference, because if in philosophy it's
justified true belief and it turns out it's not true that my phone is on,
then I could never counted as knowledge, and I don't think that's the
way most of us use knowledge when we're talking about it in general. So
I just went with knowledge or those things we believe, so only that if
we were to find out that we're wrong, it would be worldview altering.
And if I don't have a position, like if I'm not convinced that if
I had of you that the laws of logic do not require a foundation,
then yes, that would be world view altering to find out it was wrong.
But that's not my position. My position is not being convinced of something.
It's a sacred for God. I'm depending on God. I may be
convinced that God doesn't just depending on how it's defined, but generally speaking,
I'm just not convinced that there is one right. I would reply to the
question, what are the consequences of ones epistemology of breaking down due to incoherence
in their view of metaphysics and axiology. I would say, it's devastating if
the arguments and the positions that you're stating are so fundamentally unjustifiable, right,
I mean, if I can't give an account for things in a philosophic,
any logical, reasonable sense, which is often what we're required to do.
This was so kind of ironic is in this kind of a debate, Is
that it's always pressed upon the theist, which fair enough, Yeah, we
are making pretty grandiose claims, right, so we ought to be able to
logically give an account, given a justification for those kinds of claims. And
I think that the transmittal argument is the case. It is the argument for
the existence of God, and so it is pretty consistent with a coherent,
coherence type of view in terms of epistemology. So I would say that if
one makes a fundamental paradigmatic flaw in one's epistemology, then their worldview and their
system completely breaks down and it is incoherent. Like, for example, if
I say I don't believe that there's an external world right, or something like
this, This would be so fundamental if I don't believe that there's logic right,
that would be so fundamental that our whole system would collapse. And again,
historically, nobody's had a problem asking can we investigate and justify these kinds
of claims. And I know that Matt's not saying that you can't ask those
things, but he's saying that he's not convinced that there is a need to
justify those kinds of claims and those kinds of positions. And again, I
still think that it's arbitrary to say that I don't know, and they don't
require it, because if you're going to utilize things, if you're gonna believe
in things and act as if those things are the case, there's nothing wrong
with me in a debate asking for the justification for those kinds of things,
because it's the same kind of question that you would ask about atheist. Now,
the argument is that in Matt many times said, but yeah, but
you're saying that God is circular. You don't have to give a justification for
God. I'm saying that God is the justification for God is the transcendential argument,
and all systems ultimately are circular at their root. Yes, absolutely,
because you can never ultimately get past some final authority. Right. But to
say that that's not an argument as I think, I think just flatly incorrect.
It is an argument. It's a transcendental argument, and transit arguments are
valid arguments. Now again, one could deny that, but the fact that
if we deny transcendental arguments leads us to absurdities. That's the reduction, right,
and that would prove that they are valid arguments in a logical sense.
If something leads to a reduct, you right, Well, if you do
this again, maybe putting tag in a in a syllogism, that can be
addressed. Okay, maybe we can get closer to our But is it for
the third time now, just a second ago, if you rewind you were
saying that that you think there was a problem with saying I don't know and
they don't hang on. When you were talking about whether or not the absolutely
out of foundation, you said, do you think there's a problem with saying
I don't know and they don't require it. I don't see any problem with
saying I don't know. I don't say it's because that's almost always the right
answer. I don't see any problem with asking a question. But at no
point did I say they don't require it, which is once again you're you're
so phrasing, this is it, and I know you weren't necessarily directing at
me that you were talking in general about a problem. I would agree with
you. Anybody who says the laws of logic don't require justification has adopted a
burden of proof that I don't know how they could ever meet, and certainly
nobody's ever done it. Saying they don't require it is a claim. Saying
I'm not convinced they do is not a claim that they don't. Yeah,
but you utilize the things that you say you don't know if any require justification.
Yes, as a pragmatic sense, because they continue to work, and
you utilize the same things. The one thing you utilize that I don't.
You don't utilize the laws of one that when you say that you do it
because it's pragmatic and it works. That's not a coherent response as to how
that's That's not a coherent justification just because something works, whether or not it
works, with how it works or why it works, that you can't saying
that something works. Presuppose is a category of value judgment to say that this
is working, this is not working, this is good, this is bad.
Yeah, And those are metaphysical beliefs and claims and truths. It's truth,
which is what I talked about at the very beginning. That's only that's
the only thing that I'm presupposing here when I talk about using laws of logic,
because it's pragmatic. We both use them, and we are in agreement
that they are the reliable method and apparently seem to be inviolent. That's the
thing that point we agree on. You are now utilizing something that I don't
use, which is a god, as a foundation for them. That's the
point at which we disagree. And what you seem to be saying is that
unless I can provide an explanation for why they work, I cannot have any
reasonable expectation that they are in fact working. And that's a croc because I
can. I don't need to know how my car works to know whether or
not it's working. I don't need to know how we got to the moon
to know whether or not we actually got to the moon. And logic,
the laws of logic or something that all of us, well you and I
at least, let's not speak for everybody on the planet, we're in agreement
of what they are and that they work. And so there's no way to
criticize somebody for using something that works just by saying you don't know how it
works. Well, I'm not against I'm not convinced that you know either.
Yeah, but again, it's a very specific and different question. And I
appreciate the honesty of saying that you don't know that it can be justified,
and I want to phrase it right, So don't I don't miss that you
that you don't know that it's possible and you don't know that it can be
justified. But I think that that that's a weakness in the approach and the
argumentation, because as a skeptic, you ought to be able to be asked
that question. And it's not an unfair question because if if you're going and
I am, I am, and the correct answer is you can ask me
whatever question you want is a skeptic, and you can ask what is your
justification for why the laws of logic are seemed reliable? And my answer is
I don't know, because that is the proper skeptical response. You keep Oh,
as a skeptic, you must do X. And I'm sitting here telling
you, no, that's not what skepticism is in the way that I and
most modern skeptics would use it. Because you can ask me, what's your
justification for this, and my answer is, I don't know. Because if
modern skepticism is about anything, and I'll talk about this in the in the
Magic and Skepticism Show a Dragon conor wherever. It is about recognizing our discomfort
with saying I don't know, and how that is plaguing us to make logical
mistakes and make fallacious leaps, because, as I pointed out before, our
discomfort with not knowing when most of the time I don't know is actually the
right answer, and the fact that that answer isn't satisfying to people, it's
just too damn bad if it's the right answer. The fact that it doesn't
satisfy it's frustrating. I know, because as kids, you know when you
when you ask your parents why and they say, because I said so,
that's a crappy answer. I mean, that's completely dissatisfying. That's that's never
appealing to anybody. And what I see from from Tag and others is basically
a because guy said, so only the eye is God. It doesn't explain
anything to us. The god God has no explant, that god concept has
no explanant touring. And I've been arguing this whole time how it does.
It does because of the fact that there's a whole bunch of transcendental categories.
They are not material that we all presuppose, that we all utilize. You
talk about utilizing the concept of truth as a presupposition, but you don't know,
and you can't say if it's actually out there. That is a fundamental
sophistry and absurdity. You can't utilize these things. You can do it,
but you're doing it because the world view of atheism is not true. That's
the argument. And you could say that's not an argument, that's fine,
but it is an argument, and it's a very powerful argument because all of
these trands and old categories are used and to say that they're not real and
it can't be justified, well, didn't say that they weren't real, and
I didn't say it can't be justified. This is like teenth time you've you've
used that phrasing. It's you don't even understand what skepticism is. Is I
studied it intensely InCred school. I argued what skeptical professors, I know what
skepticism is, and you can keep qualifying it and saying that, well,
I just don't know. I just don't know, And I understand that in
many you know. In a sense, it's fine to take the approach of
being willing to be correct, being willing to say I don't know. But
that's different than being asked about justifying claims. And a debate is about justifying
beliefs and claims, is it not, Well, you're making a claim which
you have to justify, and I'm explaining why I don't accept it. I'm
not making it, but you are. That's something that you don't understand.
You are. No, you are, You're absolute. You can say I'm
not, but you logically necessarily do. That's what you don't get. No.
This is why I explain the difference between saying I'm convinced that you're innocent
versus I'm not convinced that you're guilty. What claim did I make about the
logical absolutes other than I am not convinced that they need a foundation? That
they work and you can use them, but they don't and perhaps cannot be
justified. You don't think, you don't think. I don't know whether or
not they can be justified. But claiming that they work is something that I'm
that you agree with. But is that a metaphetic in any sense? Is
its well under the under the presuppositions that I listed that I'm presupposing truth and
a reality and those absolutes, then yes, those are all entailed in there.
My objection is that you are going, that's what I'm trying to say,
I met what you admit that there's logical entailment in even saying that I
use these things, but I don't know if they can be justified. That's
still claiming things about metaphysics and epistemology. I'm saying they're presuppositions, which by
definition are not justified. If they were justified, we wouldn't freaking presuppose that
that's not true. You can't true. That's that's to say that there's no
such thing as a transcendental argument. That's what the hell is a presupposition?
If if if we have a justification or something, we don't need to presuppose
it. That's not right. That's why you don't understand what a transcendental argument
is. It is a logical form of argumentation. For example, let me
give an example from mathematics. I mean, you can disagree with them,
but the denial of that kind of an argumentation is what leads to the absurdity
by it. I don't know if we should probably go back to the more
super check. You and I are not speaking the same language at all.
I didn't deny that this wasn't an argument or or logical Okay, anyway,
Midwave Productions fifty sek. Question for Matt, is your belief that God doesn't
exist? Rational or determined? Is your response to this question rational or determined?
When did I say so? Wow? This is the frustrating thing,
Matt. Is your belief that God doesn't exist? When did I? When
did I express that? Because I'm not convinced that a god. First of
all, we need to define a god. What God are you talking about?
Which God? Because there are some gods which by virtue of them conflicting
with observations from reality, and I think we can be reasonably confident those gods
don't exist. If you say that you're God makes the sky pink twenty four
to seven. Well, this guy's not pink twenty four to seven. And
so there's a conflict either with whether or not that God exists or whether or
not you're understanding that God is the same thing. My position is, I
am not convinced that God exists. So when you freeme it as if I'm
asserting that there isn't a God and then asking whether or not it's rational,
well, it depends entirely on which God we're talking about, and whether or
not I do actively believe that that God doesn't exist. Yeah, I don't
think that there is such a position as a skeptical neutrality that Matt would like
to have. I know that in an existential sense, Matt takes the position
of skeptical neutrality, but I don't think that he understands that even that position
necessitates logical claims and metaphysical claims and claims about justifying things, whether he wants
it to or not. That's what I think is the disparity here. Jay.
Do you believe I have a thousand dollars in my wallet right now?
I don't know. Do you believe that I don't have a thousand dollars in
my wallet right now believe either claim. Okay, thanks for refuting your own
point from a moment ago. Correct, But that's at the normative level of
interactions and not at the paradimatic level. And that's special things, two different
things. No, that's that's what I've been argued pleading, special pleading,
because the whole time I've been arguing for transcendental categories and arguments, not normative
logical claims. Yeah, it's called special pleading. You're claiming the transcendental arguments
are special so they don't have to apply. You just said a minute ago
that they're in they're presupposed there, and that they're different. I said that
they're presupposed. That's with respect to whether or not they can be justified,
not whether or not there they are fundamentally different, and whether they follow.
Like, if you pres everything is derived from logic. Once you presuppose that
is the thing that there's something there's that if I deny the laws of logic,
that's more fundamental than whether I'm wrong about the thousand dollars in your pocket
or a little way and living next to orgment is it one of those more
fundamentally damaging to a world. Then you at the point, that's the whole
point that I'm making about what a transcendentalism? Why so more fundamentally periodomatic.
I agree that two things are different, I don't agree that your explain I'm
sorry again a time take to trash out. I don't agree that your claim
that because they're different, they're no longer subject to reason or the sort of
episdemic warrant. The fact that we presuppose something is because we can't justify it
currently. Maybe you're you're offering a justification and a justification without any episdemic warrant.
No, I'm not. It does have episdemic warrant. Okay, I
mean the episodemic warrant is the arguments I've been making for the last two hours.
Let's move on. So the next one is Admiral squatbar. He says
two dollars. Jay scoots away from the mic and the speakers. Okay,
I'll try John DeFranco ten bucks, Thank you, John Vitali Chmelski five dollars.
His argument essentially actually proves God every subposition is based on Christian philosophy,
whether he knows it or not. That is the transnt argument in summation.
Correct, that's allD ass assertion. So if that's what the transcendental argument is,
then congratulations. It's not an argument, it's an assertion. Well,
it's a summation of what the transcendent argument is in a proposition. But not
every problem position isn't it's not every assertion it's false or not. Actually,
it's about it's a summation of the argument. It does require fleshing. It's
as certain h this assertion that I'm not aware of it. The number of
times today that it's been suggested that I'm just you know, an ignorant buffoon
today is rather staggering, which is wife's check. Well, I you know,
I think. Uh. The next one is Demetrios. Excuse me,
Tanetary U now we already did that one. Excuse me, Tanertary. Matt,
you say you believe in the laws of logic having a meaningful ontological status,
but you cannot tell us what the grounds are of them in our world.
So how do you know that they have any ontological status. I'm not
sure I understand what you mean by ontological status other than so, what we're
talking about is the difference between whether something works and how how or why it
works, or the ontology of what it is, which i'm I actually took
some notes about this earlier because there's some confusion about whether or not these sorts
of thing, whether abstracts can have an ontology at all, and it's you
know, you can conceptualize anything, but like if you removed every mind from
the universe, I would agree that what we point to by the descriptive laws
of logic have not vanished. You know, something still is what it is
or isn't what isn't, and that I can't demonstrate that nobody ever could,
because we couldn't be there in a universe without a mind. But this is,
this is what is implied by accepting them now, whether or not they
have an ontology unto themselves of some sort of characteristic I don't think that that's
necessarily the case. I think that the language we use to describe these for
me, identity, non contradiction, exclude a middle. Are summed up easiest
in a simple vend diagram with a single circle, and everything is either in
the circle or not in the circle, and that's it. And so these
are these are the sorts of ways that we straight the truth under the assumption
truth of these things. But I don't think they're out there like they're not
prescriptive X must be the case. I think they're just the way things are
and they're not something that exists unto themselves, and so I don't think they
could have an ontology in that sense, but I could be wrong. Yeah,
I think that this would be another weakness in that argument, which is
that this question is specifically about the ontological status of those things, and the
argument that I've been giving is dealing with proving the ontological status of those types
of things. Now Matt is free to disagree with that and not accept the
argumentation, but I think what he's missed is that a transcental argument is a
different type of argument. And that doesn't mean that it's not an argument,
but it's a different type of argument, and it is a little counterintuitive to
the way that we do normative logical than diagrams, as he mentioned, because
it's a meta question. So one could theoretically say I'm not interested and I
don't accept or I don't want meta level questions to be asked or dealt with.
But I don't think that that's a that's I mean, I'm not saying
Matt's necessarily doing that. Matt says he's open to any questions. But if
we take the route of saying that I'm not going to accept transcendental arguments as
valid arguments, then I think that leads us to very absurd conclusions. It
leads us to reductios, and reductios are fallacies. So yeah, yeah,
I'm open to any questions, just as long as the person who's asking the
questions doesn't rule out potential answers like I don't know. And you've once again
said this is a weakness. You think this is a weakness of the argument.
What argument is a weakness out? Yeah, saying I don't know is
not an argument, And that's fine that you don't want it to be an
argument, right, But that's the weakness of it. But that's what debates
are. And so when I give argumentation, you're essentially saying that presuppositions transcendols
can't be justified. You said they can't be You said that we don't justify
them, we assume them. That's not true, they can be justified.
So you are making arguments I did. I'm not aware of any way in
which they can be justified or if they need a justification. You are convinced
that they do need a justification and that you have the justification. But when
you start talking about what debates are, debates are not. One side shows
up and says X is true, and the other side shows up and says
X is not true or X is false. You don't have to have both
two different people asserting something. That's classic debate, affirmation and negation. That's
classic debate. Okay, well, I don't give a rats ask about classic
debate because you can't still have a debate where one person presents their evidence for
their claim and the other person points out flaws and the events for the claim.
It's not a demonstration that they're wrong. It's a demonstration that they are
not warranted in saying that they're correct. And you still have a debate there,
right, Yeah, And that can still be formulated as an affirmation and
negation because I can ask you, I mean, unless you don't want to
deal with those kinds of questions, and that's fine if you don't want to,
but there's nothing wrong with asking those questions back to you and pointing out
that to say that something is I don't know that it's provable. That still
necessitates and implicates you in metaphysical and epistemic claims even if you don't want it
to do. That's what you don't understand, and that's why you don't understand
that a transcental argument is a logical argument. It's valid. Keep it's going
to be fun, all right. Next up torpedo fish five dollars. Atheist
empiricism provides no epistemic justification for universals, but theism does. Therefore, theism
has more explanatory power of reality. I would say, I would phrase it
different, but not more explanatory power, but it does have the explanatory power
correct Yeah, and skeptical positioning of not being aware of whether or not you
cheated does not have the explanatory power of being convinced that I cheated. And
neither of them demonstrate whether or not I anology is I do this ology because
it assumes that normative epistemic logical claims are the same as paradomatic claims, and
they're not. That's what you don't understand. Justin stand im ten bucks.
Excellent display of logic of atheists presubpositions, But again, we see outside the
format of a control setting in university, atheists lose the argumentation. I'm sure,
I'm sure Matto was cool that Randy Churchill twenty bucks. Thank you,
Randy, Orthodox pilgrim fifty bucks, Matt dillahuney. Why does some many atheists
go after Christians and not other religious beliefs? Is there something about Christianity that
is infuriating to atheists? Look at Orthodox Christianity. It is a better It
is better than watered down Southern Baptist views. Well, why does some many
atheists go after Christianity? Well, I do a call in show, so
I take whatever God claims people present when they call in, and when I'm
doing debate, so I debate whatever they're actually presenting. If you're an English
speaking person somewhere in the West. Probably the reason you see atheists going off,
especially in the United States, why you would see atheists going after Christians
and versions of Christianity more often, is because that's the predominant religion that has
a privileged position that most people adhere to. In some sense, it would
make I mean, I've I've gone after Scientology, Islam, you name it.
But the it's kind of like saying, if where you live, seventy
people are dying from cancer, why aren't you guys studying athletes foot Now?
Is Christianity the biggest religious problem worldwide? No? And actually what I go
after isn't necessarily Christianity unless that's what the person's presenting or whatever version of theres
is. My My thing here is to constantly go after whether or not a
belief's warranted. And this is where one of the confusions, or in Jay's
case, I just don't understand you. I'm not when you show up and
say I'm convinced God exists for these reasons. My response is not you're wrong,
God doesn't exist. It's you're wrong. Those reasons don't provide the evidentiary
warrant that you think it does. I'm not challenging your conclusion. I'm challenging
your argument and evidence. And if I'm not presented with an argument and evidence,
if I'm just presented with assertions, then we just keep going back and
forth. And this is why when people say, oh, well you're saying
this, No, I'm actually not saying that. And it happens all the
time. Yes, and I understand what you're saying. There Matt is just
that the claim for the transcendental argument is different than most argumentation. It's a
different type of argument, and it's an analysis of two different paradigms. So
one can say I don't want to do that, and that's fine, but
that's part of my argument. My argument necessitates doing that as well. So
that's why it's unique. And it's unique because transcendental categories and preconditions themselves are
unique. They're a different type of argument. Let me give you one example,
Gridell. Gridell famously did this type of argument with mathematics when he argues
with Merchant Russell overset theory and he does the incompleteness theorems. That's a mathematical
form of a transcendental argument. So one could theoretically say that it's not valid
or they don't accept it, but we use it in mathematics. It actually
does come into play in different disciplines. So I think their valid argumentation.
And I would say that if one is at the I'm not saying you're saying
this, but if one is at the point of saying that they're not justifiable,
they can't be justified. I don't see why they would be justified.
I think that that is not a solid critique, not a solid response to
the argument itself. And my concern isn't whether or not the argument is valid.
Is so much is whether or not it's sound. And if I'm not
presented with something some sort of syllogistic form, I can't even in a conversational
thing. It is almost impossible the way we speak and communicate to say that's
an invalid argument, because validity goes to the structure, and in a colloquial
sense where we're using shorthand and we haven't actually put things in premises, it's
really hard. You can easily hide whether or not a structure is valid or
not. And that's why we prefer to do things in syllogistic form. It's
also the reason that when we're evaluating a claim and propositional logic, there's a
proposition and not two propositions. We evaluate a single proposition. That's how you
get to reduct you premise one is the thing that you're potentially going to show
is absurd. It's not premise one, is this premise two is the opposite
of it would happen. That's the reason we do logic the way we do,
and that's almost always true, except in the cases where we're asking questions
of metallogic. And the whole argument about transcendental arguments is a metallogical question.
So you can say that we don't want to go there, but I'm going
there, and that's what the argument is. It's a question of meta logic,
all right. Next up is a Doorman twenty bucks. Assuming the skeptics
that preceded us weren't interested in truth displays a bit of conceit and bad faith,
especially when they tackled metaphysical questions so profound that it threatened to destroy their
own worldview. I don't I'm not saying that Hume or even Kant, or
people who were skeptical. I mean, Kant was events of Hume's argumentation.
I'm not saying that that they're in bad faith. I'm saying that they were
consistent and they led. Hume went to a certain degree of skepticism where he
admitted a lot of things that most skeptics, maybe not with Matt, but
most skeptics won't admit. For example, Hume says there's no basis for causality,
there's no basis that you're not observing causal relations. You're observing event a
event, be their discrete operations events, and you're just calling them causality.
I think that causality is real. I think that's a transcendental category. Just
like t loas and the other things that I've listed. The question about meta
issues is can they be justified? And one can say I don't think so,
I don't know mass position. I think they can. I think because
they point us to God is why it's such a strong argument. And again,
Matt, I understand Matt doesn't buy that argue that the way that was
phrased, I'm not sure that was directed at you or me. But if
I gave in an impression that that skeptics don't care about truth, that's that's
not remotely what I'm talking about. There is the question of do we have
access to truth? And you know, the Salasism and all the other little
things we talked about planned to whether or not we actually have access to truth.
And so when I look at the world, I'm not I don't make
proclamations about absolutely certainty or truth in anything other than a kind of compatibles or
I'm not compatables. But I think I don't want to go down and get
people confusing free will. So if I roll a diet and it comes up
before, I can look at that, and I can say, ah,
it's true that that die is rolled afore, and if the population agree with
me, now I've got this independent confirmation that we rely on, you know,
for testing epistemic claims and stuff like that. But the fact that there's
one percent of the population that points of that die and says no, no,
no, it's true that it's the die roll to seventeen doesn't mean that
we're on any sort of shaky ground in what we're talking about. But that
is truth at kind of this level. And the question is, oh,
how do you know that you're you know, reality, your experience of reality
is true. How do you know that the reality that you think you experience
is actually the true reality? And I don't know that there's any solution to
those problems, And so rather than pretending that there is, I'm just going
to say, Wow, that's an incredibly intriguing, you know, question that
philosophers have toiled over for ages, and I'm not convinced that anybody's come up
with the right answer yet. Benny Redpill five Canadian Matt, would you why
do you refuse debate? To debate Skeptico? He has an empirical he has
empirical data that destroys materialistic dogma. I don't know that I'm aware of who
Skeptico is or that I've ever refused to debate. I don't where did you
hear that I refuse to debate. I'll tell you who I've refused debate.
I won't debate Sigh again, and I won't debate Ray Comfort again, even
though I've debated both of them, because Ray has expressed that he's not interested
in debate. He just wants to come on and witness. And you know,
okay, if you're not going to present an argument and you just want
to tell me that Jesus loves me, cool that you can do that anytime
and it's not a debate. And Si is a genuinely terrible person who mistreated
somebody who was a friend of mine. Apart from that, I don't know
if there's anybody who I've refused to debate. You could probably you can find
some people who refuse debate me, like Bill Craig, But I take pretty
much any debate. Somebody wants to do so. I don't know who the
skeptico is or anything. Maybe I do, maybe in the course of the
years, once upon a time I knew who it was. I don't know.
I debated Skeptico. You can find my debate with him. It's pretty
amusing if anybody wants some entertainment. But Demetrios Clado's twenty Jay as a scientist
and orthodox, I stopped debating with an atheists a while back. Now I
just pray for them. However, I appreciate watching your attempt to reason with
spiritually dead and the unreasonable God bless that's thank you. I'm getting out spiritually
dead and unreasonable. That's getting on a T shirt. I'm not going to
read the next one for gone. That's not going to any rude comments.
Ten or Terry five bucks to both debaters, How does your worldview deal with
ground types and classes of things? I don't know what ground types are.
Well, that's two of us that don't know classes of things. If you
mean like Aristotle's classes of kingdom hylum, I mean I don't have any problem
admitting the reality of classes of things. So Franklin Chan nine, thank you
for all your work. We do a lot of categorizing, which we've done
in here. There's a difference between something that's physical and something that's abstract,
something that's you know, you don't want to confuse the map for the place
sort of thing, so we can put things in. If that's what you're
talking about, I don't know how much time I spend doing that. Franklin
Chan ten bucks. Thanks for all the work you guys. Hans Laga five
bucks support for Jay. Thank you Front, Hans hans Laga. Michael Flaherty
one hundred and fifty dollars. Matt, you have been a gentleman and the
best that we've seen with Jay. Let's get off of the inter and onto
a stage with your buddy Sam Harris. I guess are you saying me or
are you saying Matt. Matt's been on stage with Sam Harris must be you.
I've done quite a few events with Sam. Now, yeah, I
would always. I don't turn down debates either. I'm a like Matt,
I'm a debate hound, so I would say yes to most debates. Seraph
m s five dollars. Matt said that we should follow laws of logic.
This is an ethical claim. Why should we follow the laws of logic in
his worldview, since this is a question of metathic, Well, I don't
recall I don't recall making a statement that we ought to but or at least
not in the context that you're saying. But you know, I talked about
it being a This is useful, it's it provides truth. There's a presupposition
in order to say that you ought to follow the laws of logic, and
that is that you ought to do the thing. Well, it becomes circular,
right then, because you ought to care about the truth and you ought
to work to be consistent with that. Any argument that I make for why
we should care about the laws of logic necessarily depends upon them. You can't
have any sort of argument or reason without beginning to assume them. And the
fact that we must do that. Even this is why, this is why
I'm convinced to the highest confidence that I can that they're absolute, is that
you would have to assume that they're true to try to demonstrate that they're not
true. And my thing isn't so logic tells you nothing. Logic itself tells
you nothing about the facts of reality. It is the tool that we use
to then categorize things to say this is a and this is not a.
I mean, that's the nuts and bolts of it. Why should we do
that? I would argue that the evidence shows that remaining consistent with logic and
constructing logical arguments makes you avoid being wrong or limiting your risk of being wrong,
and that if you stopped doing that, if you tossed out the laws
of logic, you would be dead. The world would descend into chaos.
As Ja was pointing out earlier, that this is not only absurdity, but
as I would say, it's incredibly dangerous. But now you're at a point
where the question becomes, oh, well, what makes you think I need
to care about whether or not I keep living. Well, that's entirely up
to you as to whether or not you want to keep living. But if
you toss the laws of logic out, I think you probably will find out
you're probably not going to live that long. Okay, yeah, I would
The one point where I would disagree with Matt there is the claim that the
laws of logic don't tell us anything about the reality or the real world.
I think that they do, and I think that the meta level questions and
math related questions, questions that relate to engineering, those kinds of things I
actually do teach us and tell us things about the world, especially when we
actually go and test them. Taylor Terry five bucks to both do we know
when something is convincing or has been properly demonstrated? Is there some standard?
And if not, can anything be convincing? I would say that we have
to assume that there is some intuitive sense that humans are so constituted such that
they can recognize when something is coherent, when something is demonstrated and demonstrable,
and they can recognize those standards. So it would be another one of those
kind of things that are assumed in the process of learning, the process of
science, the process of truth and mathematics, so the coherence between propositions and
truths, between words and concepts, meanings, etc. That would be another
transcendental category that would be assumed in the process and something that I don't think
you could empirically justify. But just because something's not empirically justifiable, in my
view, does not mean that it can't be argued for or justified. Hence
the meta questions. I don't know. This is the whole reason that there's
a debate is kind of what you're asking is what quality and quantity of evidence
should be convinced. It should be sufficient to know that you have a warranted
belief. And as saying, another's pointed out, you know or Hume proportioned
your confidence to the evidence, and Sagan would point out that extraordinary claims require
extordinary evidence. They answer to your question is incredibly complicated. But the shortest
version is each claim is going to have its own bar, and the quality
and quantity of evidence would have to rise above that bar for that claim.
That the sort of evidence I would need to believe that you just got a
new puppy is different from the sort of evidence that might convince me you just
got a Bugatti Veyron, or even worse, you have a pet unicorn.
Those three claims are of a slightly different nature. But at the end of
the day, this is the terrible dirty secret. It's up to each individual.
You're not in control of your beliefs. You're not in control. You
are either convinced or you're not. And for many people there are roadblocks with
regard to biases and other things that are hidden that you may not see.
And for others they may be far more open when there are people we know
who are gullible and easily vinced of things, or we would describe it that
way. Doesn't mean they're wrong, but they can be easily convinced. And
so no, there's not any pick any claim. There's not a set standard
of when we have this much evidence of this type. Now we're on firm
ground, which is why we've always had these arguments and debates about how much
and what quality of evidence is enough and what Jay thinks is enough to warrant
belief is fundamentally different than I do on some things, and yet we would
probably agree on lots of other things. Yeah, the one thing I would
say about the argument that Matt just gave itself is a form of a universal
claim. Is a statement about a universal state of affairs that relates to what
is universally the case about how we can and can't know and what we can
and can't prove. And I would say that that itself is inconsistent with a
pragmatic empiricism. But I don't know, we may not want to go down
that route. I don't know. Anthony Magnavos two dollars, who is making
the most presuppositions. I would say we both make all the same presuppositions because
the presuppose God and I don't. So clearly that's not true. Well,
that's true in the case of the normal transcendental categories of the past. The
self laws of logic numbers. That's what I mean, we all have the
same presuppositions. I think that those meta questions are solved by a God who's
a metaphysical being. It's a meta question to talk about God. Metaphysics and
meta ethics and meta logic are very similar in the way that they're demonstrated,
And of course one can refuse that, but I think it's a valid argument,
and that's what I've been trying to present. I think it's kind of
strange because I would expected to say that you make exactly one presupposition and that's
God, and everything else is derived from that, because when you use God
as a foundation, you're no longer presupposing logic, you are presupposing the foundation
for logic. No, I mean, I wouldn't say that those things are
either or. I mean, I believe in all of those categories that we've
talked about. I think they're they're very real, and I think that they
have a logical justification. And that's what a transcendental argument is is a form
of logic. It's a logical argument. It's a logical it's a different type
of logic, but it is a logical argument. Now one could again,
one could disagree with that and not accept that. But I think then I'm
genuinely trying to understand this. I presuppose the laws of logic. Would you
say that you presuppose the laws of logic? Sure, and yet you think
you have a foundation for those, which means that no supposition is required If
I have the argument, the argument is not that a presupposition doesn't require a
justification. Wow, so there's a word that perhaps I've been wrong about my
entire life, a thing tacitly assumed beforehand, at the beginning of a line
of argument or course of action, the action or state of presupposing or being
proposed. When I look at a presupposition, when people talk about what they're
presupposing, if you have an explanation for something, then I'm not presupposing it.
It is derived from that explanation. I could because then I could just
argue, um, well, I presuppose that I did not spontaneously come into
existence because my parents had sex and I share genetic traits with them. Now,
I don't presuppose that. I just pot that I didn't just pop into
existence. I'm convinced of that for an actual reason. Now, I might
presuppose that my parents had sex and the evidence shows genetics. But to me,
a presupposition to something for which you presuppose it because you don't have an
evidentiary foundational warrant behind it, because if you do, it's no longer press
presupposition. It is derived from that. No, That's why I was saying
that different things are proven in different ways. So the way that we would
go about proving things that relate to the natural world, what temperature to water
boil, the way that we prove that is different than the way that we
prove things that are fundamentally different in nature. Now, one could say that
I don't accept anything that's not material. But if I believe in things that
are immaterial, it stands to reason that the way that I would prove them
would be different than the way that I prove the material things. Because the
thing that we're talking about is immaterial. It's invariant, it's conceptual. It's
not going to be proven in the same way that things that are material are
proven. Hence the transcendental argmentation and transcendental arguments are arguments. That's the whole
point. Now again, you could say I don't accept transcendent arguments. They're
not valid arguments, and the response to why you don't know why you keep
going there, I never say it's not valid. I didn't say I'm not
going to accept transcendental arguments. I'm talking So this is only this little subtext
is only about presuppositions. It doesn't matter that it's abstract. I don't presuppose
love. Well, that's I mean, you could say that. But but
again, all I'm trying to say is that this is a branch of logic,
and it's a branch of argumentation that deals with justifying presuppositions and preconditions for
things. Now, again, maybe you're not saying that you don't accept them.
I don't understand that you're saying that they make sense in a logical way.
But I'm saying it's not wrong to ask the meta level, meta logic
question of can they be justified? And how do we make sense of them.
In fact, it's the why are you talking about the exact? This
has nothing to do what we're actually talking about. By argument, you're saying
that I'm arguing for a thing that's immaterial and invariant. I'm talking about what
is a pre subposition and whether or not it's justified. So I could say
I presuppose logic, but here's the reason why I think logic is real,
and here's my evidence for the thing I think is that. Sorry, I
love here's you know, if I then provide a foundation for it, I'm
no longer presupposing it. It is now a warranted position based on my artre
subpositions of our presubpositions are not things for which you have no warrant. They're
different types of arguments and different types of things. They're just proven in a
different way, That's all we're saying. Then, a good junk of this
is going to be incredibly confusing, because we mean two entirely different things by
presuppositions. For me, when I say I presuppose something, this is something
that I am convinced is true, but I cannot justify, and I'm not
convinced anybody else can justify or I would have a justification and I would no
longer presuppose it. And I don't ever say I presuppose love or any other
abstract and so I don't know what the justification is for saying, oh,
I presuppose something, but here's its evidential warrant. Right, So evidences can
be given and proven or demonstrated for different types of things in different ways.
Again, the way that we would do a courtroom drama and settle a dispute
over who was murdered so and so did Bill Cosby do x y Z,
that's different than the way that we would solve an abstract complex math problem.
Right, Two different types of things, two different types of arguments. One
is more abstract, more a priori, more immaterial and invariant in its nature.
The other one is more solid, empirical, physical, Right, But
that doesn't mean that what we're arguing for it in terms of transcendental categories aren't
arguable and aren't provable and aren't it's just that they're proven in a different type
of way. So, for example, and I know that doctor Malpass disagrees,
but action and I'll make one last point about this, this transcendental will
move on. But if you look at John Damascus, a famous eighth century
Christian theologian, he wrote a book called Fount of Knowledge, and he looked
back at Aristotle. I'm not saying that true, because Arisota said, I'm
just giving an example from Aristotle. M Aristotle argued with the sofis, and
the sofist said that if we deny the law of noncontradiction, you can't prove
that. Aristotle, what if I come along and I deny the law of
non contradiction. Aristotle responds with a transcendental argument, and John Damascus backs us
up. And I hope that doctor Malpass is watching, because that's a response
to his last essay that he wrote about me. But he saw John Damatt.
John Damascus saw Aristotle as giving a transcendental argument. And the argument is
that when you deny something that it's fundamental and paradigmatic, the proof for that
thing is in the fact that it's assumed in its denial. That is a
transcendental argument. That's it's that simple, and it is a positive proof.
It's just a different type of proof than normal empirical claims or even normal logical
claims. And that's why because the nature of the thing is unique due to
its paradigmatic level. The three of you on stage, public forum. Can
Jordan come, Michael Flaherty, that's out of my out of my range.
That's not up to me. I can't read Arabic. Two dollars, Matt,
would you debate Steve McCray. Oh, that's a really good question.
Uh no, Zach, Zach, two dollars, get it going, Jordan
Peterson Dyer Harris. Uh, you know we're not gonna read any insults,
mister an Arctica twenty or one dollar, thank you, Nemo Utopian two dollars,
Jade. Does God generate logic or obey it? That's actually one quick
thing I did want to touch on, which was if you know that,
like the transport argument for the non existence of God from Michael Martin Tang,
what this does is that it basically says that it assumes that the laws of
logic or arbitrary categories that God sort of can change or play with it will
or whatever. We wouldn't say that, We would say that the laws of
logic, truth, etc. Are reflections of God, the reflections of the
divine mind. So no, God does not change the laws of logic,
and that's not a denial of his omnipotence because within our paradigm, within our
worldview, the meaning of omnipotence would be determined by the highest absolute metaphysical category
within the world view, which has God himself. So omnipotence is not determined
by the guy who says, well, I think omnipotence must mean that you
can make truth into a lot. We would reject that whole, that whole
definition of what omnipotence is. So that's why we don't believe in the Tang
view Tan or Tarry five dollars. Matt, would you agree that meta level
discourse deals with justifying presuppositions or while normative level discourse does not. I don't
know. I I'm sorry, I'm getting the echo thinking and um. Metal
level discussions are about understanding and attempting to justify whatever the normative level is.
I mean, that's that's or the metal level themselves. Okay, Lucid Locomotive
one ninety nine, and thank you, mister Antarctica. Are you bread though
on all? Right? Well? Um wait, Matt Catholicism orthodox, Matt
is Catholicism. I don't know. Why. I mean, all right,
it doesn't make any sense, Matt, is Catholicism or Orthodoxy more biblical or
Protestantism? Um? Well, I would I would argue, first of all,
it depends on which Bible you're going to point Tom, I think I
think the easiest way for me to do this, And yes, I was
a Southern Baptist, but I've also debated orthodox in Catholics as well. Catholics
have extra books that don't exist in the Protestant Bible. So if you're going
to say which one's more Biblical, then it depends on which books you're going
to include in your you know, your liturgy there to say, oh,
this is what it's based on. Um. I think there are Catholic beliefs
that fly in the face of what is in, of course, the Protestant
Bible. Um. I think they've added to it. Whether or not that's
justified or whatever, I don't know. It's I I remember growing up as
a Baptist, we were taught that the Catholics were married, worshiping idol,
worshiping heretics who probably weren't going to heaven. But that was obviously a Protestant
view, and so one of the things is that occult is uh or the
it's the religion that's not yours and perhaps not as popular. And so there's
been this constant conflict between you know, Protestants and Catholics, and I can't
tell you which one is more biblical until we know what the Bible is and
what it's supposed to be, because you know, I would argue that the
fact that there's a thousand or more denominations that all identify as Christian and disagree
on every single point of doctrine is probably one of the many potential death knells
for Christianity in general. But then now we're into an argument basically from divine
hiddeness, and that's outside the scope of this. Well, I would definitely
say Orthodox, he's more biblical, And like Matt, I was raised Baptist,
so I can definitely understand Matt in terms of where he's coming from.
Super Chat ten Bucks. To be fair, I'm not as familiar with just
by having debated Orthodox people before, I'm not as familiar with Orthodox doctrine how
how it differentiates from Prosestism or Catholicism. So I'm not the right guy to
ask super Chat ten Bucks Matt, if you're a materialist, what makes you
believe that your brain's neural firings have anything to do with truth on a metaphysical
level. I don't think I claim that mister Antarctica to Z's Jay without God
is knowledge impossible if by knowledge you mean justified true belief or giving a coherent
account for our beliefs. Um, yes, I believe that it would lead
to absurdity. And ultimately that's kind of what the argument is in summation.
Um, that's all the super chats. Great debate, two and a half
hours. Thank you very much, Matt. Appreciate that I've got I've got
Matt's uh link there if anybody wants to check out his channel there in the
description and a gentleman scholar. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I enjoyed it. Oh I'm getting the ax yep. Oh uh yeah.
I just want to say, and we'll get this posted, and I'm sure
we'll both get feedback from lots of people, and I'm sure i'll be pointed
out, oh, you should have said this, or you didn't say this,
or you were wrong here or whatever else. And that's honestly one of
the biggest reasons I do this. When I talked about before how I didn't
walk in here with any notion that I'm likely to change Jay's mind about the
big issues. There's also this notion that, you know, I perhaps might
change Jay's mind on some other issue, or that Jay might change my mind,
or by having the discussion, somebody else might change both of our minds.
And so I liked the discussions. I just I kind of wish every
single time. And there are people who I know are very frustrated with debates.
I mean, I do people calling to the show all the time.
I have my Atheist Debates Channel. I talk about debates and debating and everything
else. I know there people who frustrated because they don't think any good comes
of any of this. And despite that, I have a number of friends
who agree and disagree about the God thing, who engage in conversations, and
I have of thousands upon thousands of emails from people who have benefited from those
conversations. A good chunk of them have found their way out of one particular
religious belief or another, or gained a better understanding of skepticism. And a
few of them have just said, you know what, I listened to you,
and I walked away more confident and firm in my beliefs than ever.
And while I don't know you, I'm thankful that they at least listened and
considered, because I think that's probably more than most people do in their lifetime.
I know that one of the reasons it took me forever to kind of
find my way out of Christianity is because there was no reason to consider it.
Everybody around me believed and it made sense. And like I was saying
with Jay at the outset, yeah, if you want to be confident that
logic is reliable, then being convinced that there's a God who guarantees that logic
is inviolate, that's very satisfying. And it may be exactly the sort of
thing that but he needs to be comfortable continuing to use logic. I don't
need that extra step because I haven't seen a demonstration that it's necessary. And
I'm pretty much convinced that while Jay and I agree that while as of logic
are absolute and viable or in violent or as close to that as possible,
I'm not convinced that there is an explanation or that there needs to be one
but I'm open to the possibility that it might be the last couple of ones.
Grombeard. Thank you Matt and Jay for courageously expressing beliefs. I enjoyed
the debate. I hope you get back together for another session. Super curious
to twenty nine, what method do you use to determine truth? I think
we've we've talked about that the whole time. So he just said, you
know, Matt just gave a good description of areas where we degree in terms
of laws of logic. Mister Antarctica again, are aren't certain things self evident?
I don't believe in self evident maxims in terms of foundationalism? Matt as
a question on that, Oh, I'm sorry, I mean I thought you
were done there. Now the question that what's your view on properly basic beliefs?
Because that to me feels a lot like self evident but I wanted to
check. Yeah, No, I would say that that's pretty much. Um.
The main attempt of classical foundationalism to justify how they don't fall into a
circular regress is that they'll say that there are beliefs that are just properly basic.
Um. I don't find that to be a coherent answer when in the
history of philosophy, people actually, especially after Descartes, they really started trying
to question things at the most fundamental levels. So if you read the meditations,
um, you know, Descartes looking for a way to find that certainty
that we've been kind of talking about, is it possible? And he questions
everything down to what he thinks is the most basic thing. But and I
would agree with Burch and Russell on this, that the very thing that Descartes
thinks is the most foundationally basic thing to doubt his own existence in his own
consciousness. He actually doesn't go deep enough, all right, So he says,
I think therefore I am, And I think Russell is actually correct to
point out that that's that was logically a non sequitor, because all Descartes claim
shows is that thinking is occurring. I think that's true. And as many
philosophers afterwards have pointed out, Descartes didn't think yet to doubt things like language,
like words having meaning. And that's because that comes later in the in
the discourse of Western philosophy, after Jean Patissa Vico, when people start doubting
linguistic philosophy, which all I think is great, and that actually led people
into doing trans antal argumentation. Po Strawson people like this have done a lot
of transcendental argumentation relation in relation to language. So I would say that no,
I don't think the properly basic beliefs can be coherently made sense of outside.
That's why it's one of the reasons why coherentism, as I think,
a better view of truth than classical foundationalism, is because my view, just
saying that some beliefs are properly basic is just another restatement of circularity in the
classical foundationalist paradigm. That's incredible. See, that's incredibly interesting that after two
and a half hours we get to this, because I think you and I
are pretty much in agreement on that. I've a matter of fact, even
a week or so ago in the show, somebody called in to ask me
about properly basic beliefs, and I gave a kind of quick, glib answer
that I think it is a way to obfuscate that there isn't a justification,
to just assert that we don't need one, although I'd be interested in in
uh, Russell, you were for everything. Russell pointing out the problem with
Descartes, but I thought it was Hobbes that pointed out that that Descartes cogito
was contingent on logic and therefore was not you know, I used to I
used to say, well, Descartes, you know, got all kinds of
stuff wrong, but at least it got the one thing right. And then
I find out, you know, after I think it was that he didn't
I mean to actually get that one right. That it's basically you know,
I think therefore I am doesn't actually demonstrate the thing. Yeah, I agree
with that, and you may be right that it could have been housed before
Russell that made that point. Yeah, so that next question is about Descartes
Kogi tho. We just covered that Compillow like, so yeah, good debate
from all sides. Thank you for that dirty name, you filthy name,
Nemo Utopian ten bucks, How does God explain the laws of logic if it's
simply if it is simply the fact that God exists and has a logical nature
that makes laws sound descriptive of God, and it fails to explain why he
is logical. Actually, I would agree with you, Utopian, and that's
one of the reasons why Orthodox theology is unique. It's because we believe in
the essence energy distinction. So we would not say that the laws of logic
are descriptors of the divine nature. They would be descriptors of the energies the
actions the logi, as I mentioned at the beginning from Saint Maximus. So,
yeah, are onto a good point there, Nemo, that we don't
believe that they literally describe the divine nature. That would be the Western doctrine
of divine simplicity. Mitchell day two dollars. Congrats on winning, Matt.
I guess that's up for the audience to decide. Well, maybe if this
is really bad English, what they mean by winning, Matt is you beating
Matt, So you go either way. I guess we don't know what.
I don't know what Mitchell. I don't know what Mitchell's view is. But
the ambiguity of that language there is great doormat. It's funny for me because
legitimately I've said this a bunch of times, and I know that there's people
who don't believe it, But there's people who don't believe that I don't believe
in God, and they assert all the time, Oh no, no,
no, you really know there's a you know there's a God, and you're
denying it. And I'm just like, every time you say that, you
demonstrate to me conclusively that you're far more about projection and telling me who you
are. And so this this notion. Um oh and I just completely lost
track of what he'd said. Um crap, never mind sixty best debate on
the channel. Good job, Thank you, Um, Hans Laga, five
bucks, Matt, You're a good sport. Thank you for coming on.
Mister an article. Mister an article again. Is God self evidence? Um?
In a sense? Yes, um, if you mean by self evident
classical foundationalism no. Um, all right, I don't see any more super
chats, Great night. Uh. I don't want to want to keep Matt
too long. Thank you for coming on, Matt. And maybe in the
future we can have another chat on some philosophy topics if you want to.
Yeah, yeah, and and not necessarily in debate format, because I mean,
if you're there are certainly curiosities about orthodox theology. Uh that I have
more than a passing interest that one of the first, if not the first
public debate I did live in front of a big audience was against father Hans
Jacobs, who's an orthodox priest about morality, and while everybody's welcome to go
watch that, so that they don't just trust my assessment,