S s some some woman some s some so sore wave. Our anthropology is
not derived by human psychology or you know, historical data from M I T
or something like this. It's derived from the revealed aspect of what we see
in prosology. And so there's no real way to diagnose man's problem and and
understand man and man's anthropology. As I said, man without the right theology
MS sting, no one stating something you've seen from the singing from the logos
is the icon of Father, and man is the icon of God. We
are the image of Godha dire wave three shut dire wave. The artists reflects
the soul. The spirit of the architecture reflects the soul. Because therefore you
can see the degeneracy. You can see the degradation and the loss of the
sthetics, the loss of the idea of their being carmany border symmetry in esthetics.
It's connected with the loss of a comherence and philosophy. It's this sis
dire wave three y Yeah now have yeah, yeah, there have there have
now throw throw thrown down town narrow there have there have no bas tuna tat
tat tat there there there have dire wave, what's up, nerds? How
y'all doing. Somebody said I'd have a bigger audience if I didn't call people
nerds. I didn't start that. I don't even know where it came from.
But hey, I'm chalked up. I'm ready to go, baby,
And uh, you know, debating can be annoying, it can get old,
but it can also be fun. It has its pros, it has
its cons and uh yeah, I'm looking forward to wanting to have a good
conversation with Trent for a long time. So I think tomorrow is going to
be a lot of fun. We got a lot of cool stuff that we're
going to be bringing to the table, got gigantic tables of papers spread everywhere.
So somebody said, oh, hope you're prepared. Dude, hope you're
prepared. I've been preparing for over a month, so I'm well prepared.
And not to be arrogant, but I mean, it is a topic that
we've debated for twenty years. I mean I've been in the camp of criticism
of this position, even back when I was in undergrad So don't think that
I'm treating it as some sort of willy nilly thing. As everybody knows we've
reviewed Trent in the past. I think Trent is a excellent debater, have
a lot of respect for Trent. We did long review of his review of
his debate with Cosmic Skeptic, and of course we gave him props because you
know, he did really well in the debate that was pretty much an evisceration.
Now this is a little different because I don't this is more of an
evidentialist, you know, attitude towards debate. Not that there's anything wrong with
evidences, right, Evidences themselves aren't problematic. You do have to use evidences
in debate, but this is a little different because it's not a debate about
apologetic methodologies. So one kind of misunderstanding we probably should dispel is the idea
that if you're a presuppositionalist, ever you use a trend of stall army,
you don't believe in evidences, you're against evidences totally not true. Evidences come
into play all the time, and in fact, there's nothing but evidence for
Christianity. That's precisely the point of presubsitionalism is that it's the most extreme evidential's
position that you could have, because there's nothing but evidence for Christianity. So
tomorrow's debate's going to be a lot of fun looking forward to it. I
meant to put the address for this debate in the show description, so I'm
going to add that real quick, put it down the bottom. Now.
I'm a little iffy about playing this debate because if I play the video,
I don't trust that Matt Frad isn't going to try to strike my channel.
So I have it ready to go. But I mean, Matt Frad doesn't
like us at all, which is fine, and I just think he might
use that as a reason to, you know, trying to try to do
a little nasty business, try to do a little some some try to be
a little SaaS. So I'm gonna play the audio at least, but we
just don't know, right, We just don't know what you can't. It
would be nice if we could, you know, speak freely and really technically
under fair use. It would come under fair use, and I don't think
I would lose if we had to dispute that. But it's not even worth
really risking it and going into that, because you know, I think we're
a lot safer if we just play and refute the audio it's just you know,
Trent's face and Matt's face. Anyway, It's it's not like you're missing
you know, beautiful scenery and you know, unless you really want to see,
you know, the glare on Matt's head, We're not really missing much.
But as you know, we've been researching a lot in preparation for this
debate. I just swallowed a ginger chew. Hold on there and shout out
to our good buddy, Father Deacon and an East Norwegian noose. Of course,
he as a specialist in epistemology. You know, he knows a lot
of the current debate trajectory. So actually, not in the I mean not
in the last months, but in the last year, Father Deacon has really
recommended a whole bunch of really useful books shout out to Space Jockey, Energetic
Procession. He's also recommended some really good materials and essays relating to some of
these topics. So you know, we have a whole host of people that
really contribute. So I don't want to make it out like, oh,
I'm just some one person thing that you know. I mean, I'm sure
you know Trent has Catholic answers, so you know, he has people that
I'm sure he works with as well, and he comes out of the Steubenvilleville
Mill you and you know there's various UNI eight professors and people that work at
Steubenville. So you know that's just part of it. And you know,
we want to we want to give our proper props, you know, shout
out to the peeps, the props and uh, you know, I'm not
gonna this. The purpose of this review is not to you know, lay
out all of our cards. You know, we're not going to show all
of our cards and points and arguments that we're gonna bring to the table tomorrow.
So you know, if you came thinking that, you would figure out
what I'm gonna do. And I'll know what he's all know, I'll see
his hand beforehand. Not gonna happen. That's not gonna work. We're gonna
do another fun review like we always do when we analy lies debates, and
it's one of the funnest things. They get a lot of views. Everybody
loves these. I always say, do them over and over and over.
And I didn't even I forgot this debate, not because I don't care for
the people. I like to watch these people debate. But I remembered Lewis
had clipped the clip from this debate right and made a video that was really
funny that kind of showed where Matt really messes up in this debate. And
then I remember I never actually watched this debate. I just watched Lewis's eight
minute video, So it was high time to actually watch the debate. So
let's get this started. Imagine we'll get through a good bit of it.
We ment I do the whole to two hours and eleven minutes. But if
I recall, there's some pretty significant philosophical blunders on Matt's part in this debate.
Hopefully everybody can hear me. Everything good, sound good, And as
you know, we're gonna have to make sure, let's make sure the sound
is good when I play this debate. I'm gonna let it play a little
bit. Mate, fraid, mate's just giving me his introduction. So if
you can hear this all right, Well, I like to think Matt for
hosting this debate, I'm grateful for the other Matt for participating in it.
Tonight, I'm going to defend the statement that it's reasonable to believe Jesus of
Nazareth rose from the dead. Can you hear that Matt has the burden of
defending the negative that it's not reasonable to believe Jesus rose from the dead.
In order for each of us to defend our positions, we each have to
present a standard for what makes a belief reasonable, especially belief in unusual,
unrepeatable events. Now we're being reasonable is not the same as being convincing.
You could fail to be convinced by a belief but still think that the belief
is reasonable. For example, Matt, Matt is not convinced of Alex O'Connor's
ethical veganism, but I doubt Matt would say Alex is unreasonable for being an
ethical vegan. Likewise, Matt's personal doubts about the resurrection are irrelevant to whether
belief in the resurrection is reasonable. Instead, Matt has to defend an objective
standard for what makes beliefs reasonable or Now, this is a great point I
like where Trent has gone here, and it's precisely the approach that I would
go if I was debating Matt. Right And when we did the debate with
Matt, we kind of started out in this arena where we wanted to go
to Matt's presubpositions. Of course, that doesn't mean that Trent is a presuppositionalist.
I'm not saying that, but I like that he's going to the epistemic
question and he's saying, well, first of all, Matt, we've got
to understand that just not being convinced, your psychological state of being unconvinced,
does not mean that a position is necessarily unreasonable. For the very fact that
we can find all kinds of positions that you disagree with but that you still
don't think are unreasonable. So it sounds like Trent's going in the direction of
a like you said, he's going to try to pin Matt into giving an
account of Well, then what is the criteria for something being reasonable in Matt's
worldview? But I don't know for sure. Let's see what Matt's what he
does unreasonable. So let me offer three tests to see if belief in an
unusual event is reasonable. Number one, does the belief contradict well established facts
about the subject in question. If it does, then the belief is unreasonable.
For example, the claim that everyone buried in Arlington National Cemetery physically rose
from the dead would be unreasonable because it contradicts the facts about those bodies still
being in the ground. But claiming Jesus rose from the dead doesn't contradict any
similar fact about Jesus remaining in his tomb. Now, you might say,
the science of biology shows dead people stay dead, and so the resurrection contradicts
this fact. But this isn't a fact about Jesus, it's a fact about
human beings. In general. Atheists like Matt are often skeptical of universal statements
like everything that begins to exist as a cause, So why not be skeptical
of statements like human beings never come back from the dead when we are presented
with a reasonable counterexample. Moreover, the claim that Jesus miraculously rose from the
dead requires that dead people stay dead. That's because a miracle is a supernatural
intervention that serves as a sign of God's revelation, just as an orange life
vest is a sign of a survivor in the ocean. Because it's so unlike
the surrounding blue water. The resurrection can only be a sign from God or
a miracle if it was so unlike our usual experience of people dying and remaining
dead. But does this mean we have to accept every miracle claim that doesn't
contradict a fact about the subject in question. No. Here's test number two.
Is there a lack of evidence we would expect if the event did occur?
If there is, and it's unreasonable to believe the event occurred. For
example, it's unreasonable to believe Jesus appeared to every person in ancient Rome after
his crucifixion, because ancient historians would have written about that. But suppose Jesus
did rise from the dead and appeared to Peter, the Twelve Disciples, James,
Paul, five hundred others, as recorded on Corinthians fifteen. What kind
of evidence would we expect to emerge after these events. The people to whom
Jesus appeared would tell other people about what happened. Some people would believe these
disciples and some wouldn't. This process of oral communication would result in the establishment
of communities of believers or churches. The tiny minority of believers who were literate
might write about the resurrection and non Christians. I liked where this began.
Now I kind of think it's getting into the domain of weak stuff. Like
he had a great point at the beginning. I wish he had. Maybe
he will later on. I don't know, but he could have really pursued
this line of argument about Matt's criteria of reasonableness and rationality itself. What is
reason? But now he's saying, well, if Jesus raised from the dead,
then some of the things that we might expect would be what happened in
Christian history. There would be church, there would be apostles, this kind
of stuff. I don't find that to be a very convincing line of argumentation,
not because it isn't what's in history, but that's the Christian paradigm reading
of history. And if Matt is a sophisticated atheist, hopefully he will call
that out. I don't expect that, but we'll see historians who are aware
of this group my reference or beliefs, but not accept them. And that
is exactly what happened with early Christianity. Now I'm not saying this proves the
resurrection happened. I'm only saying that if Jesus rose from the dead, as
the New Testament describes, then there is no absence of expected evidence that makes
this particular retend. So there's no absence of expected evidence, and so because
this happened, it's evidence that there might have been a resurrection, but it
doesn't prove it. This is again kind of really hitting at the weakness of
starting things with an evidentialist bent, right. I mean, if we're going
to prove the resurrection, we're not going to be able to prove it apart
from a paradigm that gives an account for proofs to themselves. And so it's
really just begging the question to pile up all these supposed evidences and then say
that maybe this possibly might likely perhaps suggest that there was a resurrection. But
I mean, Matt isn't going to merely accept Christianity if there's a resurrection.
I mean, there's Old Testament people who were resurrected, and that doesn't prove
judaism. There are religious claims all over the world about resurrections, and even
if the resurrection happened, none of those things actually establish the truth of the
religion as a whole. That's why Christianity is a paradigm. It's a whole
system of beliefs. It's not a piecemeal thing that you pick and choose from.
You would only think it's a piecemeal thing that you pick and choose from
if you have a tonistic evidentialist bent. But again, if Matt is competent
and coherent in for let's say, accepting the doctrine of one guy resurrecting,
maybe he starts his own cult about one guy who resurrects. Right, Maybe
he thinks Jesus resurrected and that now gives him the impetus to start a the
Matt cult of Jesus. I mean, isn't this what every cult and sect
does. So this whole idea that just merely proving that or arguing that the
resurrection is reasonable, is not good in terms of proving Christianity, because Christianity
is not a piece by piece thing that you stack up. It's a whole
set of beliefs. The Trinity is just as necessary as the resurrection. Creation
x Neilo is just as necessary as the doctrine of the resurrection. Virgin birds
is just as necessary as the inspiration of scriptures. They all go together,
and it's a set of beliefs, and there's not a piecemeal thing by which
you assume that one doctrine is more self evident than the other doctrines. Direction
belief unreasonable but an unusual belief could still be unreasonable even if it passes these
two tests, which brings us to the final test. It's the evidence of
the unusual event just as easily accounted for by a usual And I would add
two and I think Father Deacon would probably agree with this critique, which is
that this approach from the outset kind of already assumes a theory neutral look at
evidence improving things. And so Trent's whole approach is assuming that evidence improving things
isn't theory laden, as if you can do that apart from the system of
your other beliefs that you have. Right, there's not a theory neutral notion
of proof and evidence. I mean by the mere fact that you can convince
atheists of all kinds of things and they don't accept the rest of the doctrines
of Christianity. Even if Matt agrees that it maybe is reasonable that Christ was
raised from the dead, there's a whole host of other sects that he could
choose. There's a whole host of other false religions or again his own cult
that he could make up. So when you grant from the outset that Matt
as an atheist, has the correct paradigm of interpreting the evidences. You're already
surrendering the very thing that's in question, which is Matt's whole paradigm of atheism
and autonomous reasoning. And so that's again the problem with this approach is that
it grants too much to the unbeliever to say that he can properly interpret all
this, all these domains of the natural world. And if we can get
him to agree to enough things, then later down the road we can just
tack on something else. I mean, I like to say that natural theology
and evidentialism is like, let me convince you of a bunch of heresies,
and then down the road, I'll make you a Christian, right, I
mean, if we took, for example, Phaser's approach, where Faser says,
Okay, I've given up trying to argue for creation x nilo. Let
me just argue for an eternal first actualizer. Okay. So when you convince
me of that, you're not making me a Christian. Okay, you're making
me a stupid heretic. So do you want to convince me of twenty heresies
and then a year from now, five years from now, get me to
become a Roman Catholic. Is that what you think apologetics is? I mean,
does Paul do that? In acts? No, they go out and
preach the resurrection, right, they don't. Nobody does in the in the
New Testament, when the apostles go out and preach, does anybody do this
table of evidences and all this kind of not. No, they don't do
that. They don't say, well, that's maybe probably partly kind of reasonable
to believe that maybe a guy rose from that. No, they don't do
that. They say, your wisdom is foolishness. Repent and believe in the
resurrection, because you can't interpret anything right. Nation. If it is,
then it is unreasonable to believe in the unusual event. The claim that the
Muslim prophet Muhammad received poetic recitations from an angel doesn't necessarily contradict anything about Mohammed,
and if an angel only dictated the story in medieval Arabic conventions, we'd
expect the cut on to sound as it does. But Test number three says
there are usual explanations that account for these historical facts. This includes fraud or
even mistakenly attributing one's subconscious thoughts to the voice of God or an angel.
Therefore it's not reasonable to believe in the central miracle of Islam, but the
central miracle of christian So I mean again, this whole line of argumentation acts
as if there's a common notion of what's reasonable. But what's in debate is
the are the very things that are prior to reason. Do these people not
get this? The evidentialists and the natural theologian proponents not understand that actually what's
in debate is not a conclusion of a syllogion or a bunch of argumentation some
God, but the kind of God that is prior to logic, prior to
epistemology, prior to all human argumentation. I mean, that's what you're arguing
for in Christianity, right, a sovereign, all knowing, omniscient personal trinity.
You're not arguing for generic theism. Oh but perhaps you are. But
when you're doing that, oh, sanity is literally a different story. Before
I explain why, I must note that in previous debates Matt has said there
is a difference between claims and evidence. He said, there is no evidence
for the resurrection, only claims about things that happened to Jesus and his apostles.
But most historical evidences, nearly all of them are just claims that something
happened, including unusual things. If I told Matt I wrote an elephant across
the Swiss Alps, he might want extraordinary evidence for such an extraordinary claim.
But the only evidence for the Carthagin in general, Hannibal crossing the Alps with
war elephants in the third century BC. It's just a claim made by a
Roman historian decades after it happened. This is a good point to refute one
of Matt's assumptions, right, which it's correct that I mean in a sense,
is there a difference between making or asserting something and making an argument?
Yes, but Matt is apparently unaware of history. That history isn't a thing
that you prove with empirical evidence. I mean, as an empiricist or a
supposed empiricist. This is really embarrassing. I mean, Matt should know this,
right. You can't empirically observe what Hannibal did. You can't empirically observe
what Plato and Socrates were up to. All you have is claims from history.
So Matt really fumbles on a really stupid point in this debate. And
this is precisely what Lewis clips out, which is correct. What I think
where Trent's going to get him on this major historian doubts this took place,
even though historians don't even agree on basic facts like what route Hannibal took.
So, given this proper understanding of historical evidence, what is the evidence for
the resurrection? The most important evidence would be claims that Jesus appeared in a
bodily form to groups of his disciples after death. So how could we explain
these claims? Well, here are four possibilities. So again, you know,
in this debate with Matt, it's not wrong to give evidences, uh
or evidence. Excuse me, But if the debate is about belief in the
resurrection as reasonable, then the real debate is about the prior question of reason
and the criteria of reason, which Trent hint he started with that, but
now he's gone into Well, let's act like we all have the same criteria
of proof and rationality when the atheist worldview is completely ultimately irrational, and then
let's on those grounds, act as if I'm not debating an atheist, but
I'm debating a person with the same criteria as me. But he'd asked at
the beginning what mats criteria is. And I like that he's critiquing Matt's inconsistency
on historical claims. But the reason that this debate is not going to go
anywhere ultimately is because he's not challenging Matt's presuppositions of autonomy and atheism itself in
terms of worldviews, as if just believing in the resurrection is somehow like a
theory neutral fact. Again, Matt can accept the resurrection and reject Christianity,
right, And that's the whole assumption of the piecemeal foundationalist approach is that,
oh well, if I just you know, come up with a few of
these basic ideas, then maybe maybe it'll be likely problem for Matt to accept
Christianity. But I mean, why does he have to accept Christianity merely because
he accepts some person resurrecting or rising from the dead. You know, there
was a great point Bonson always used to say about this, which is that,
I mean, couldn't the atheists just say, well, crazy things happen,
But why does crazy things happening entail that I should accept Christianity? One
the claims never happened and were invented by later Christians as a legendary development.
The problem with this explanation is that we have Paul's writings and he had contact
with the disciples and even makes this claim about himself. We also have accounts
from Luke, who shows himself to be a very reliable historian. Father Deacon
makes a great point in his paper, which is that if I'm going to
grant that the atheist has the correct criteria of reason and the correct epistemology to
investigate and evaluate evidences from the outset, then couldn't the atheist turn around and
you know, point out that could just be and that most dude, he's
not welcome here. He's a liar. He came into the discord under the
auspices that he was an inquirer, but he wasn't. So could you block
him? I've already bock I've already blocked him on other arenas. So if
you're a MOD, I can't see him because I've blocked him on another channel.
So if you're a MOD, just block him. That is a liar.
I mean again, these people act like nothing has happened in the last
five hundred years of philosophy, right, like not aware of the last several
centuries of debates and epistemology. I'm saying, but for both of these parties
here right, And that doesn't mean I think that like Matt wins. No,
I'm sure Matt loses this debate. But the foundationalist approaches to these questions,
they just ignore the questions that we ask. They both documents, these
appearances and Peter's testimony about the resurrection, it acts too. Finally, if
the Disciples never claim Jesus rose from the dead, and we have no explanation
for how church communities based on this belief arose so quickly when other Messianic movements
fell apart after the death of their leaders. This is why scholars universally agree
that an authentic experience motivated the Disciples to make these claims. The Agnostic New
Testament scholar PAULA. Fredrickson says, I know, in their own terms what
they saw was the raise Jesus. That's what they say, and then all
the historical evidence we have afterwards attest to their conviction that that's what they saw.
I wasn't there. I don't know what they saw, but I do
know that as a historian that they must have seen something similarly. The atheistic
historian Richard Carrier says, I think it more probable that Peter and James,
and certainly Paul maybe several others saw something that inspired their faith. I think
it most likely that others had these visions earlier than Paul, and that Paul's
letters give more or less a correct version of his own experiences, such as
his personution of the early believers. The disciples. Maybe they just made the
resurrection claims. They made the claims, but they were lying. But this
doesn't really explain the involvement of outsiders like Paul and James who had no reason
to lie, or the evidence of the disciples' sincerity and their willingness to be
persecuted. Maybe the three Maybe the disciples sincerely believe they saw the reason Jesus,
but they were mistaken. They had some kind of grief induced hallucination.
But this explained. This doesn't explain any other facts related to Jesus's death.
One we should be skeptical of the disciples being grief stricken. It's equally likely
they were angry they wasted. Yeah, but again, even if you do
demonstrate that, why should I on this piecemeal approach. I mean, if
this is if this is the approach that we should take, then shouldn't you
piecemeal convince me of every doctrine of Christianity? I mean, if it's a
piecemeal approach, then you're gonna be bound then to give me piece male evidence
of every every single doctrine within Christianity unless you would just argue for the paradigm
as a whole. I mean, wouldn't that make much more sense? I
mean, the atheist does not have the competent, correct criteria of evidence.
In fact, you can't give an account of evidence at all, much less
reasoning, much less proofs, much less logic, all of which are prior
to the actual doing of evidential analysis. I mean, I don't why can
these people not get this right? There's questions that are prior to logic and
argumentation and evaluation of evidence is namely epistemological questions. Right, if you're going
to make metaphysical assumptions about what exists, the nature of that evidence, you
know, how it relates to other evidences, formulating theories, et cetera.
That's all interpretations of things in the domain of you know, what exists,
metaphysical realities that you're just assuming, right, But you haven't demonstrated on foundationalist
grounds the metaphysical principles and truths that are being used in the evaluation of evidence
that are assumed in this evidence. You're not. You haven't demonstrated the logical
principles, the epistem logical principles that are prior to the metaphysics. You're just
assuming that that's the case. And yeah, you could say, well,
but Matt's assuming the same thing too, So aren't we on the same page?
No or not, Because just because you're doing that doesn't mean that you
have the good, the same good reasons to do that. That's what justification
is about. That's the whole point of why we don't want to grant that
the atheist has the ability to give coherent, justified, meaningful interpretations of the
evidence. It's giving him too much. Years of their life following another failed
messiah. Moreover, Paul and James were not reef stricken over Jesus's death because
they weren't believers when he was crucified. Two. Since ancient Jews believe the
resurrection wouldn't take place until the end of the world, it follows that even
if they had grief induced hallucinations, the disciples would have thought they saw Jesus's
soul in heaven, not as glorified body on earth. Moreover, given their
fierce monotheism, we would expect them to hallucinate Jesus as a man exalted in
heaven and not as the creator. I'm going to take issue with the notion
of fierce monotheism. Again. The New Testament doesn't use and there's there's no
usage of the term monotheism, as doctor Branson has shown anywhere in this period.
That's a much later term. Monotheism isn't really there if you read the
Cappadocians. It's the monarchia of the Father right and the niceing Creed's definition of
the We believe one God, the Father, Almighty, maker of Heaven.
So the identification of the one God begins with the person of the Father and
the Creed. So it is actually not the case that the Apostles and the
Jews believed in and defended a radical monotheism. That's a myth. It doesn't
exist. There's no such thing as an Old Testament unitarianism that gives way to
trinitarian theology, and the New Testament and this is fundamental to our system and
to our theology. Orthodox theology is always insistent that the God of the Old
Testament is the Trinity just as much as the God of the New Testament is
the Trinity. You see, so fundamentally weird mistake on the part of Trent
there. But I think that's just because Trent's in the system of Roman Catholicism,
and you know, it's probably in large degree of Thomas. Maybe he
takes issue with some of Thomas's teachings, I don't know, but you know,
the Thomas doctrine of simplicity usually lends to people arguing that the Old Testament
doctrine of the Unitarian monotheism was just kind of a given right. Abraham believed
in a generic unity, a generic Unitarian God, which is precisely what Muslims
argue. No, in fact, the Old Testament doctrine is the Trinity when
the church fathers in the New Testament are achieving in the post Alphasolic period,
justin Martyr, when they prove the Trinity, when ieron As proves the Trinity,
when the New Testament writers prove their trinity doctrine, even though they don't
use the word trinity. They go to the Old Testament. They go to
the Old Testament. That's the number one starting point for proving the trinity.
When we argue with the Muslims, where do we prove the Trinity the Old
Testament? Which we couldn't do if the Old Testament taught a bear unitarian radical
monotheism. So that's just false. But again, Roman Catholics don't have the
trinity, their heterodox on the Trinity. And I'm not saying that to insult
Trent. I don't have any ill will or call in to question, you
know, trans motives at all. Just factually speaking, the Orthodox position is
that the Roman Catholics do not have the correct trinitarian doctrine. Jesus told them
he used divine power to raise himself from the dead. Three. Paul tells
us Jesus appeared to groups of people, and the closest thing we have to
Group hallucinations or mass hysteria usually involve people psychosomatically experiencing a similar illness, not
individuals claiming to all see the same thing that doesn't exist, especially something that
didn't conform to their previous expectations. Four. The New Testament authors repeatedly make
it clear when someone has a dream of vision where they think they've seen a
ghost or a spirit. The resurrection appearances in the New Testament all point toward
groups of people seeing an embodied, recently deceased individual that would not be the
subject of an illucination. Five. Since the Resurrection was preached in Jerusalem within
a few weeks of the crucifixion, disciples or enemies of the faith could have
checked Jesus' tomb to see if they were hallucinating, and the evidence suggested.
You know, all of these kinds of arguments. The reason that they're I
just don't think they're very good. They're not very convincing is because again,
they all rest on assumptions that aren't being questioned, that aren't going to solve
any of these disputes. It's like, well, if this, then it
seems like this could have been the case, or it seems like they would
have done this, and maybe they could have done that. It's all this
like really hypothetical stuff that is really indeterminate, right, and it's only reasonable
to accept Trent's conclusions on Trent's theory and criteria of reasoning right on Trent's epistemology,
and so I don't think Trent gets the point that you and Matt have
radically different accounts of reasoning, evidence, and epistemology. I mean, I'm
speaking to Trent the Christian here, not Trent the philosopher. Trent the Christian
should agree with me that Matt and he have a completely different account and justification
for the criteria of justification. So again, all of this is just like,
let's tell stories about what could have happened or might have happened, and
let's see in the scales like which one's more reasonable and less reasonable. I
mean, it's just arbitrary, right, more reasonable on whose criteria or theory
of reasoning, which is what Trent first asked Matt. But now he's acting
like I mean, this line of argumentation is as if Matt has the correct
line of argumentation and reasoning. But he had first asked Matt Matt needs to
give a standard of what's reasonable. But now the line of argument is acting
as if they have the same standards. So I just I just find these
these types of arguments, which there might be situations where you would need to
say something like it's more reasonable to believe this you know, in some niche
dispute about the you know, false visions of the apostles, or you know,
they hallucinated the resurrection, and but really, again, this is all
just ignoring the more fundamental questions that neither of these parties in the debate seem
to be grasping women whose testimony was not trusted in the ancient world. The
factor's inclusion makes sense is somebody being a recollection of what actually happened. This
shows that appeals to hallucinations do not easily account for this case because it involves
outsiders, appearances to groups, evident sincerity. Wait a minute, appeals to
hallucination don't easily account for this, so perhaps they do. So. You
see the problem with IF evidential approaches to fundamental dogmas is that it places the
dogmas in the realm of probability. But God's existence, if God is who
he says he is, is prior to and grounds even the notion of evidence
and probability and reasoning itself. But this is what the classical apologists, and
you know, this is what these people just can't grasp. They can't grasp
that if God is who he says he is, then he's prior to any
notions of rationality, reasoning, logic, right, he would be the ground
of those things. And so for Trent to concede to Matt that there's probability
that the Apostles all hallucinated is essentially to concede that there's probability. He may
think it's not that probable, but at least there's some probable, there's some
percentage likelihood that Christianity is a hallucination false. So you see the point here
of what evidentialism is conceding. It's conceding the possibility that Christianity is false,
and man's reasoning, man's logic, man's autonomous reasoning, which hasn't been given
an account for yet, will be the determining factor. We'll put God in
the docs, as C. S. Lewis said, and we'll put him.
We'll judge whether God has given a sufficient evidence. That's what evidentialism is
doing in this bogus move. But again, that's the strength of the transcendental
argument presubpsisitionalism. It's not granting that. It's not granting that you have any
theory, neutral, self evident notion of logic, argumentation, epistemology such that
you can judge God's existence. But that's essentially what Matt is. That's what
Trent is conceding. And if Matt was sophisticated, Matt could say, well,
so you're admitting the probability that Christianity is false and hallucination, and I'll
just go with that, and a general lack of an expectation for the hallucination
in question. Therefore, given that belief in the resurrection doesn't contradict a known
fact about Jesus, it doesn't lack evidence it should have if it did happen,
and no other usual explanation just as easily accounts for the evidence. I
think this is a really weak line of argumentation. There's no lack of contradictory
evidence, so therefore it's probable that there might have been a resurrection. It
follows that it's reasonable to believe Jesus rose from the dead. Now you could
stop there and just say Jesus rose, but you don't know how he did,
And the resolution for the debate with a hold. So the explanations for
Jesus' resurrection. For the same reason, we should be skeptical of natural explanations
for the claims that Jesus rose from the dead. Now, wait a minute.
If we're going to be using standard logic, evidential interpretation and reasoning,
then why would we not accept natural excit explanations for Christ's resurrection? I mean,
on Trent's own argument, those would be more likely because we're in the
domain of probability. Likelihood, that's probability well judged on how evidences typically go
and our normal experience, It's more likely that there's a natural explanation for Christ's
resurrection that we just simply don't know about or haven't seen yet. Right.
I mean, Matt could say all kinds of things. Matt could say,
this is something bonds and always just say like, well, maybe there's a
natural explanation that we just don't know yet, So how does this prove Christianity
to me? Right? I mean, if Matt was sophisticated, that's the
line of argument I would take. I don't think Matt's that's sphisticated. He's
going to say, these are just claims, and claims aren't arguments, and
you can't prove anything from history with these claims, which Matt's not even going
to realize means that you know, all of history was really he knows nothing
of history, right, because as a basic bitch empiricist, Matt's not going
to be able to give an account for anything outside of his empirical sense data,
which is what I raised to Matt multiple times in the debate, which
he never got. If natural causes are behind them, we would expect these
causes to produce many similar resurrection claims. But the resurrection is very unique.
No, that's a non sequitor, Trent. So that's begging the question.
So Trent just said that if there was a natural explanation for the resurrection,
we should expect resurrections to be happening naturally. No, not necessarily. Maybe
this was a one off, just a weird event. There's no necessary connection
or reason that I ought to conclude that because this weird thing happened one time,
and perhaps as a natural explanation that we just don't know about, that
it should be happening all the time. Now, that simply doesn't follow on.
Atheist Anthony flu once said, the evidence for the resurrection is better than
for claim miracles in any other religion. It's outstandingly different in quality and quantity.
However, if supernatural explanations are allowed, then couldn't we propose them for
almost anything and destroy their explanatory things. Now, that is a worthwhile point
that does come into valid use of evidences. So I would say, for
example, yeah, when it comes to evidence for the New Testament, it's
one of the most attested to documents in history, far more evidence for the
veracity of the New Testament, you know, the Bible, the text,
et cetera than for Plato. A lot of people don't know this, but
yeah, I mean there's a lot more evidential evidence for those things which can
help to strengthen and confirm our faith. But I mean again, piling up
a bunch of evidences typically doesn't convinced the more sophisticated atheists, right, because
the way that you're going to interpret the evidence is going to be based on
your theory of evidence as your paradigm. And so you know, it's like,
you know, I like the analogy of the rose color glasses, right
when when we feed a bunch of evidences to the atheist, for example,
let's use the atheists example, Right, the atheist has rose colored glasses to
where the evidence is going to be always reinterpreted according to his naturalistic paradigm.
Oh, a guy that was raised from the dead very possible. Uh,
maybe there's a naturalistic explanation. We just don't know for bodies that pass out
and resuscitate three days later. Uh, you know, and X y Z
continue down the line, for any other so called miracle. Right, the
atheists can just say, okay, again, I interpret that within my naturalistic
framework. So in order to really get to the point, it's not gonna
work to just machine and I'm not saying trances doing this, but just in
principle in general, for the evidentialist approach, for me to just you know,
like pile up look at all these papers that have been written for you
know, intelligent design and for the rational rational belief in the resurrection of Christ,
and look at all these papers that show that it's probably very likely that
the New Testament is authentic in what it describes and records. I mean,
again, the atheist is just going to interpret all that according to his autonomous
paradigm. If you don't challenge the rose colored glasses, it's just a weak
approach. It's not going to do very good, and it's granting him too
much. Or well, first of that, we're true atheists who say the
universe exists without a cause would commit the same fallacy, because having no cause
could explain anything we don't understand. Second, we can rule out many unusual
explanations. I think that's a fair point, though it is it is worth
calling out the atheist usage of things like uh, oh give me the grant
me the Big Bang, which has no cause, and then I can explain
everything else having a cause. Right, So they want they always want that,
like, oh, give me this, grant the exception, right,
don't question my metaphysical presubsence, grant me this right, grant me this a
pismological principle. Then I can show you everything. Right, just grant me
one thing, and I can move the world. God or aliens as unreasonable
because they're ad hoc. There's no reason to appeal to them aside from explanatory
power. For example, in eighteen seventy two, the Mary Celeste was found
a drift at sea in relatively decent condition with ample supplies on board. Now
I'm not sure about that on evidential grounds, why the alien hypothesis would be
less reasonable than Trend's evidentialist approach to the resurrection. Again, you're going to
interpret the evidences according to your presuppositions and your paradigm. Right, your network
of beliefs that you already hold as your core beliefs are going to be the
ones that interpret the incoming evidence. So why and on what grounds would we
think that the alien hypothesis is less rational as an evidentialist than the theist position.
And I'm sure Trent would list a whole bunch of things, But that's
kind of begging the question, right, because I'm asking a question about the
theory of evidences themselves, not your list of evidences. And it's like what
the evidentialists do is say, well, let me give you more evidences,
But I'm saying I'm asking you a question about theory of evidence evidence itself,
what counts as evidence? How do we interpret facts evidences? So for you
to just keep giving me evidences isn't answering the prior epistemic question that I'm asking.
The ten passengers and crew and historians still don't know why they all got
in a lifeboat and left to seaworthy vessel. You could say that God told
them to leave as a test of faith and took them up to heaven,
or aliens abducted them, but there's no evident remotely points in that direction.
Now, the ship's logs said something about heavenly voices or a ship in the
sky. Yeah. The problem that the difference here is that Christianity as a
worldview is not like this example of the boat and the missing people. Christianity
is arguing and has a worldview in a position that gives an account for everything
in the world. Right, it's the grounding of your metaphysics and your epistemology
and your ethic, and the example and the analogy that you gave it doesn't
attempt to do that. So while I understand the analogy, I don't think
the analogy works to match it up to what the religion of Christianity is supposed
to be and is supposed to do in terms of worldviews. You might have
a reason for an extraterrestrial or supernatural explanation, but it didn't. However,
the resurrection is different because we have reasons to believe God was involved based on
the nature of the disciples testimony. Wait, we have reasons to believe God,
so are we still in the of the resurrection here? But again,
if Matt is granted the autonomy to reject as a possibility that Christianity isn't the
explanation for christ resurrection, then you've already lost the debate. The debate needs
to be couched as a you must accept this or else, right. I
mean, there's no logical refuge from God or from Christianity. It's Christianity or
nothing. That's the point and the power of the transcendental argument, and a
pre subsistional apologetics is that precisely that it doesn't grant to Matt or any of
the atheists this refuge, this common ground into the Even if you think of
a small percentile, it doesn't matter, because it's essentially conceding that there's a
possibility that Christianity doesn't account for any of these things. And Islam is true,
or Judaism is true, or Paganism is true, or no religion is
true, any of the other positions might be the case. But when we
look at the New Testament, do we see the writers arguing no of assertitude
that Christ is resurrected? Peter says, does Peter say, know of a
great probability with ninety eight percent Jesus was probably resurrected? Why don't the Apostles
and the New Testament writers and Paul when he goes out and does apologetics,
why does it never look like these people Where was Paul's lists of probable reasons
for the resurrection? Does Paul ever speak like it was probable or likely the
Christ is resurrected? Of course, not no of assertitude that Christ was resurrected.
Peter says, that means if you're a non Christian who believe God exists,
which is half of religiously unaffiliated Americans. I mean, that's another point
I want to stress too, is that the approach of evidentialism is like I
can do apologetics divorced from my fol Now, how is that that make any
sense? I mean, the apologetics is supposed to direct people to the theology.
If the apologetics leads to bad theology, it's bad apologetics. And that's
precisely what this stuff does. It doesn't point to the type of God that
we're trying to argue for in the Trinity, in Trinitarian theology, fiercely trinitarian.
Even our enemies James White, even James White who hates everything that we
stand for and what we talk about, what we do, even he admits
Orthodox Christianity outside of all the other groups is fiercely trinitarian. Yeah, exactly,
and we take pride in that because we're the only religion that has the
correct trinitarian doctrine, and the whole of our theology is literally grounded in that,
including get this revolutionary idea apologetics, what you mean the Trinity affects are
apologetics. Yes, absolutely. I'm interested in improving and defending and convincing the
atheist, the Muslim, the cult member of the Trinity as much as I
am any of the other doctrines. And we'll get that into that, I'm
sure tomorrow when we get into generic theism and how this is a bogus,
ridiculous idea. There's no such thing as generic theism, and that's precisely what
natural theology is predicated on. You could consider the resurrection within your own current
worldview. What if you don't believe God exists and so it seems like there's
nothing to cause Jesus rise from the dead, Well, the resurrection could make
you rethink that idea. But I might also argue an argument for the existence
of God this one. So here he's addressing the challenge that I said earlier,
like, okay, well, maybe Christ was raised in the dead,
but weird things happen, and there's no reason that I should accept Christianity.
And now he's going to go into the you know, classical arguments, which
all the argument from change. I like it. It goes like this change
occurs when a potential X becomes an actual Why we see change all the time.
It could be like growth or movement, but no potential X can become
an actual Y on its own more than water can freeze itself or a train
car can propel. Okay, so again right away, I mean this is
terrible argumentation. I mean we if Matt was savvy, of course, Matt's
not, does it can't do philosophy? I mean admitted. I'm not trying
to be mean to Matt. I mean I think it was evident in our
debate when he called in Aussie and malpass or whoever did the review where they
tried to cope and help him out after our debate. I mean that was
evident that Matt was out of it. He didn't always something about like I
don't know what's going on in the philosophy stuff, right, give me the
simple sort of Reddit arguments and claims. But we get into this epistemology,
style of justification, circularity, induction, all the things that I brought up
to Matt he was he was lost. So don't we shouldn't expect that Matt
is going to be too swift in responding to these things. But if it's
the case that that trend's going to begin with the self supposedly self evident notions
like change and causation and potentiality and actuality, I mean, dude, that's
assuming the Aristotelian metaphysic. Okay, I'm not saying that I out of hand
reject everything to do with Ariozol's metaphysics, but in a debate, okay,
the first thing I would do if I was Matt is I would say,
Okay, on your basis as a thomist or foundationalist or whatever you want to
call yourself classical theists, I'm not going to grant you that all of that
metaphysical baggage is the case. You're gonna need to demonstrate to me the prior
questions of epistemology before you can start making all these metaphysical claims. This is
the same thing I would say to an atheist. Do you remember the stef
On Molinu debate. In the Stuff on Monitoring debate, I asked a lot
of the same questions in different ways that I asked to Azra Rashid. Why
would I ask the same questions to Azra Rashid that I do to Stephan Moloney.
The answer is that both of those positions come from a parapatetic axiom kind
of star point. There's nothing in the intellect that's not first in the senses,
So they're both empirically oriented in their starting points. And when you do
that, you kind of lock yourself into a specific, very limited type of
epistemology. So the problem with that, though, is that I can critique
the presubpositions of that epistemology that will cut you off from being able to make
any of the metaphysical claims that you make that underlie the arguments you're making.
So if you can't get to the external world and all that stuff, then
none of this change argument is going to get you anywhere, because you need
to demonstrate the stuff prior to that that you know about the external world that
you're actually seeing causation, et cetera, et cetera. Right, all the
human and contient type questions so I'm not going to grant you that anymore than
I granted it to stuff on Molonu or Azrah Rashid. And why is that?
Because Azra Rashid and Trent and Stefan Malini all have this same empiricist starting
point. I'm not saying they're empiricists strictly, they're not the starting point of
their worldview and knowledge and metaphysical claims is going to be basically what Aristotle says
in imposteri analytics, in the metaphysics and in a couple other places, Right,
the distinction between what is better known in itself and what is better known
by us, and the peraopthetic axiom. Right, there's nothing in the intellect
that's not first in the census. Now, if Matt was Swoft, that's
right where Matt would go he should, right, I don't think Matt's going
to do that, right, I would don't expect Matt to go there,
Matt. This is all going to fly over Matt's head. And what that's
gonna do, I'm guessing is he's going to say everything from history is claims,
and I don't find them personally convincing. And Trent's correctly going to say,
that's a psychological descriptor. Right, that's a description of your psychological states,
not an argument, right, one of the famous one of the classic
things Matt loves to say, not an argument. Yeah, Matt, that's
not an argument. Did you know that? And it's very easy to show
that the fact that you find something unconvincing isn't an argument self. Instead,
something like a freezer or a locomotive has to actualize the potential for change.
But then these actualizers only change because other things actualize them. So could an
infinite series explain why we have changed at all? Well no, just as
an infinitely long train of box cars would sit motionless without a locomotive, an
infinite number of things that must be actualized by something else would be changeless.
Unless again, that's all assuming a host of metaphysical baggage that if Matt's a
good debater, he will go right to the epistemic presuppositions there. So wait
a minute, before you do this metaphysics, demonstrate to mesod on empiricist grounds
that you're justified in saying all these things. The cause of the series is
just pure actuality. So just as a locomotive pulls without being pulled. This
uncaused cause for the series would actualize everything without being actualized by anything else.
It'd be pure actuality. And since the universe contains a mixture of potential and
actual, it can't be that uncaused cause. If there's a cause of the
universe that's purely actual, what would it be like, Well, if it
has no potential, it can't change because change is potentially going to actual If
it's changeless, it would have to be immaterial and timeless because material temporalize it.
So, I mean, Matt doesn't know any of this Aristotelian philosophy that
Trent's relying on, so he's not going to be able to deal with any
of this. But if again, if he was swift, he would not
accept all of Trent's metaphysical claims. Because it's like everybody thinks you can just
do philosophy and make claims without addressing the questions that have been asked for the
last five hundred years. I'm sorry, you can't, Okay, so we're
gonna have to deal with the last four hundred years of philosophy. We'll say
where people have questioned, what's prior to doing metaphysics epistemology, and it doesn't
work to just say, like Phaser and the people in Trents can't typically do
well, the starting points are all just properly basic. Phaser says, well,
all these things are true because they're commonly general, commonly general. You
think that counts as a justification for your first principles. I mean, I
was just reading Skotis by the way, who says there's not an argument for
the first principles. They're not provable. He thinks that they're rational and you
should believe them, but they're not provable. Well, yeah, I mean,
if you believe in autwal theology and you think that you have to demonstrate
right every proposition and thing that you believe in, it seems to follow that
you should demonstrate why you should believe in the first principles. But they're not
proven. That grant me those please, right? And oh I don't have
to give a justification for them because they're just they're properly basic. Okay,
Yeah, that's begging the question, and I'm not going to grant that you
have the right criteria of justification to say that that's properly basic, right,
I mean, that's what philosophy is, is that we question our assumptions.
This is the whole history philosophy back to Socrates. The apology goes around questioning
everybody, and Trent loves to do cross examination and question people. So we'll
be interesting to see what happens with that tomorrow. It's always changed. The
cause couldn't be limited in power, knowledge, or existence because these imply potentials
and doesn't have any potential. The cause would be omnipotent omnission had necessary existence.
Again, this is just throwing out all the you know, Swinburn style,
like basic bitch assumptions about natural theology, which I hope Trent brings all
that tomorrow because that's going to be fun. But I mean, if you're
watching this right now and you want to get a little bit of a teaser,
go read the Russ Manion paper Contingency of Knowledge, because the section where
doctor Mannion goes into foundationalism and goes into all of these you know, classic
problems in the history of philosophy and especially in Western philosophy the last five hundred
years. Everything Trent's saying is is acting like none of those questions have been
asked so before you say all this, if you're going to have to give
an account for things prior to these things. And again I wish I was
atheist, Matt, I could ask those questions. Right, I will get
to tomorrow. I'm joking. I'm not atheist, Matt, but you know
what I'm saying. Like if I was, as I hear this, I
know all this stuff, I would say, and I can't wait for the
disaster, right the Matt, the Dilla Dila does the disaster that will be
the response because that had no potential for non existence. Would also be all
good because evil is a lack of goodness and this cause lacks nothing. This
is like all of this stuff that he's saying right from the change he went
from the thing that is the first cause supposed to be changeless, to now
all this list of divine attributes. Right, and uh yeah, I think
everybody who knows about Garabie, Right. I hope that this comes up tomorrow
has no potentiality. Also, the cause would be personal and not a mere
force. Is the only immaterial things that exist are minds and abstract entities like
numbers, but personal. I wonder where the concept of personhood comes from is
that in theology. Where does that come from? I wonder the trinity?
Maybe fact entities can't cause anything, they're causally a feat So this means the
ultimate cause of the universe causally impotent. I should say much. I may
bring this up tomorrow actually in my opening statement, so you know, the
people, A lot of times people think I'm not saying Trent thought this,
but a lot of people think that there's an advantage to going second in the
debate, which is kind of a Nube view of debates, because actually there's
quite a few advantages to going first, because the person that goes first can
potentially diffuse a lot of the argument in his opponent's opening statement if he has
a good idea of the types of things that his opponents are going to say.
Right, So, if I diffuse enough of Trent's opening line of argumentation,
you see the advantage that I can have if I go first. Right,
So it's not always an advantage for people to to have the second,
you know, position in the debate be something that's similar to a mind that
exists in an unlimited way. And so for a lot of people that's what
they mean by the word God finally, is the debate continued. Oh,
yes, he did it. That's what we were looking for right now.
In the cosmic skeptic debate where we gave Trent, you know, props,
he definitely won that debate, and I feel sure that he wins this debate
too. What we were really looking for was that right there. So now
we have Trent kind of on record saying it. I don't think tomorrow he's
going to shift his busies or take a different approach. But that's really what
we were looking for in terms of what we want to lock down in terms
of Trent's argumentation for natural theology. Uh so that means right there that again,
I think it'll be difficult for Trent to go in a different direction,
uh given what he just said right there. And this this was April.
This was this was six months ago. So I doubt Dren's changed his position
in six months. And again I don't see how as a Roman Catholic he
really could change his position. I mean, they're kind of locked into the
view that they have on natural theology. So tomorrow yeah, so people are
asking, right so tomorrow night the debate is Uh. I shared it on
my community tab it's on my websites in the discord right tomorrow night, it's
on Twitter, Trent and I will be debating natural theology, the very thing
that Trent just kind of got into right there on Sue and Soon a channel
tomorrow, So that's tomorrow night is six pm Central, So look for that
tonight. We're just having fun doing another review of one of the debates that
I meant to watch but I forgot about, which is Matt and Trent on
the Resurrection. Don't forget about Matt's burden of proof. He actually unreasonable to
believe Jesus rows from the dead. So keep asking this question. As you
hear his opening statement, Matt says belief in the resurrection is unreasonable because fill
in the blank. So as the debate that can use, I think you'll
see that Matt reason his reasons that fill in the blank are flawed because they
either lead us to one rejecting many facts of history we already know to be
reasonable. This is a good point to they make that point, I think
is killer, And that's really what's going to be a stickler for Matt.
Given the fact that I've seen Lewis's clipped out video. So that we agree
with. I think that's a great point. So I give Trent props for
that argument. And that's what's really going to trip up Matt. I don't
think Matt ever even gets it right. Like if you watch the Lewis's clipped
out video of this, it's like Matt doesn't even get it. Arbitrary judgments
about reality based on Matt's assumptions about the world instead of keeping an open mind
about how the world works. Yes, that is a great point, So
props to Trent for that. So instead of that particular epistemology or way of
not that term will show up a lot of pistemology that just means the study
of knowing, like how do we know about the world? How do we
figure out what's really going on? Okay, so I have a way of
figuring out what's going on when it comes to unusual events. I gave a
three pronged test for it, and I hope Matt proposes a way of figuring
out how to this is good to discern unusual events and claims of unusual I
wish Trent had gone more into epistemology, although he might have got called out
for if he went too far into a pistemology, because Matt would have been,
well, that's not the topic of the debate. Topic of this debate
is a resurrection, not pristomology. Right, But I wouldn't have done the
debate this way, of course, but you know whatever, So but that's
that is a good point. So I'm glad that he did at least lead
off and kind of conclude with questioning mats presubpositions of evidence and criteria and epistemology.
But that middle part there, I would have to disagree with events,
and as I said, he'll try to show that this unusual event, the
resurrection, is unreasonable because fill in the blank, why does he think it's
unreasonable? And then you'll see those reasons either lead to rejecting other reasonable beliefs
or they end up being arbitrary. Instead, I would argue that you should
accept the standard that I've offered and then seriously consider the truth and meaning one
thing. I will say that right there, from a tactical standpoint, that
was a good move on Trent's part, because what he did there at the
end was kind of frame the debate. So what Trent was doing wasn't just
giving his case. He was also kind of trying to get Matt to be
on the defensive and kind of go down the trail of answering Trent's questions due
to Trent's opening statement and questions in the opening statement, which nothing wrong with
doing that. It's it's a you know, a rhetorical strategy at a tactic
in debate. There's nothing wrong with tactics per se. I'm not saying debate
debates involved tactics, right, but it's not all tactics. Obviously. If
it's just tactics, then you're you're never gonna win. You're just going to
be seen as a douchebag. Right, But that's that's a useful tactic to
to again in the opening statement, try to frame the debate. Everybody tries
to do this, right, It's not like a secret. Anybody who does
the opening statement will try to frame the debate and kind of form the guy
who goes second, h to answer his challenges, his questions, and you
know, try to defuse the guy who goes second. The opening statement wants
to defuse the the guns, right, the big guns that the guy who
goes second brings, and Jesus Christ having risen from the dead and consequently demonstrating
the truth of the Christian faith. Again, this is where we see two
different Trents, right. We see Trent the Christian apologist who's trying to I
think, genuinely and with sincere motives bring people to Christianity, but then doing
a Trent the philosopher apologist who grants too much and doesn't do it, gets
too much into probabilities and things that grant the autonomous atheist unbeliever way too much.
All right, thanks Trent, Matt. Whenever you want to stop,
we will all quick. Fifteen minute time rush all right, thank you,
all right, So, first of all, thanks for having here. I
appreciate it's nice to meet Trent virtually for the first time and to hang out
with the Flints with aquinas crew and fans. Thanks everybody for showing up to
this, especially because I didn't do too much to promote it as I had
weird technical issues this week. So let's get started. First of all,
it is not my intent ever to offend people, but the nature of these
discussions about topics that are at the heart of people's deeply held beliefs often offends.
I once believed many of the things that many of you. I mean,
I don't. I guess it's wrong in principle to say this at the
beginning of your opening statement, But I mean, this is really irrelevant to
the debate like that. I mean, I guess you could say this is
part of the rhetoric, like he wants to frame it like, Hey,
you know, I'm trying to make you guys mad cool, We're all cool.
Not really that relevant to the topic. I mean believe, I believe
many of the things that Trent believed, including a belief in the bodily resurrection.
It's difficult to state something like that without someone interpreting it is, Oh,
now he thinks he's better than us. I don't necessarily think I'm better
than any of you as people, but I do believe that my position is
more rational, and if that bothers you, I'd ask you to consider whether
you think your position is more rational. So I think Matt is kind of
actually accidentally stumbling upon the type of argument that I would say. But I
would again point out that this whole debate is assuming that both of the parties
have a correct common ground of what's rational. They don't, in fact at
all. They're gonna have completely different accounts of what is rational, what reason
is, what logic is right? So I don't think I think that's actually
an interesting statement, but it's not the way that Matt actually meant it to
be understood, and it makes it interesting, right. That's the funny part
of this, because if your answer is yes, then we're in the same
boat and we can argue it out. And if your answer is no,
then you need to consider why you are willingly, knowingly holding a view that
you consider less rational than the alternative. So how do we go about telling
me again like more rational, less rational, probable, less probable. This
all rests on a prior question and consideration of what rationality, probability evidence has
proved justifications are, and that has not been raised except by Trent, but
he didn't really press it. Maybe later on he will. But again,
Matt doesn't grasp this. He's never grasped us. It's reasonable to believe a
claim, and then it's worth noting this is separate from whether or not the
claim is in fact true. The claim could be false, and yet you
could still have a reasonable belief in it. For once upon a time,
it was reasonable to believe that the sun went around the Earth because that's what
we saw when we looked up in the sky. It was it would have
been absurd to think that the Earth was spinning at an unbelievable rate. Again,
Matt seems to be equating reasonable with what's commonly accepted, and maybe some
people do that, but that's not actually what's in debate here, right,
It really doesn't matter, Like the number of people that accept something has nothing
to do with whether it's even rational or not. I mean, I could
give an easy defeater for that just by pointing out that, isn't it possible
that a large portion of the world believes something irrational? Exactly? Yeah,
so this is just like really low level stuff here the reasons why I would
call it unbelievable, and yet that was the truth. So what's I mean
Matt's own bos is that most of the world believes in some kind of God
or deity, and he thinks that's irrational. So the numbers of people that
believe something has nothing to do with whether, in fact the belief itself is
rational or irrational. It's totally irrelevant. Reasonable to believe in what's true are
separate. But we're stuck because we may not actually ever have access to the
truth, So all we can hope for is what's reasonable. So how do
you think we may not ever have access to the truth I mean of empirical
claims or truth at all. I mean, I don't think Matt even gets
the distinctions between these types of claims and types of truths and types of I
mean, if you remember in our debate, Matt literally acts like everything has
proven the same way, and when I questioned his principles of proof and evidences
from the outset, he had no idea what I was arguing. He was
lost, Oh, what's reasonable? Well, there's many answers to that,
and they are all problemat because at the end the end of the day,
each individual is going to be responsible for determining what's reasonable to them, and
the rest of society is going to say, ah, you're unreasonable. So
again, this is so like mind blowingly dumb that Matt thinks that rationality and
what's reasonable is a social construct. I mean, that's essentially what he just
said, Like everybody's responsible as individuals, So he's got a relativistic account of
what is reasonable. I mean, reasonable beliefs means reasons for the beliefs,
right, the beliefs that you think you have good reasons for what you believe,
and Matt's basically saying that that's all determined by the subjective tastes or states
of the individual. I mean, that's completely ludicrous, right, just just
philosophical garbage, nonsense, like so easy to refute, and I'm sure Trent
will do that, but I mean, does Matt really think that. I
mean, it's it's it's hard to actually believe that he thinks this right.
I mean most atheists do. I'm not doubting it. But it's like,
do you even grasp that when you come to a debate, your presupposing objective
rules of logic and argumentation, do you do you get? I mean,
debate wouldn't be possible if you didn't assume that, right, the two parties
couldn't be appealing to the rules and laws of logic and debate, or you're
incredibly We often use the example in discord, right when the atheists come of
chess. I mean, when you come and play chess, you're agreeing when
you come to the table to the rules of chess, like you don't have
the right. You don't get to like, oh, I'm going to play
my chess, okay, right, and what is your chess? Well,
my rules for chess are I bring my checker pieces and I thump them at
your pieces, and when I knock you piece is off. I win.
And that's what I think chess is. Because that's not chess. Okay,
you're not. You're playing a different game. That's not the rules of chess.
And that's the point here, right. If you come to debate,
there are laws of logic, laws and rules of debate that are the case
and that you are submitting to by virtue of coming to the debate. And
if you don't believe that and reject that, then you're going to lose the
debate because you're debating, you're refuting yourself. Remember the JF debate. This
is what happened, right, But I don't Matt just doesn't even seem to
have a clue about this, and so we try to work together. This
is one of the reasons why we have scientific methods that remove as much of
the bias inside. I mean, imagine being so low tier scientism, basic
bitch empiricism that you think the scientific method is going to tell you what reason
is rationality is and what's I mean It's like the questions of a pistemology,
Matt are prior to the doing of science, the making of claims, the
making of arguments claiming how the world is or isn't right. And you can't
just like I'm going to critique Trent likewise, you can't just start saying things
without prior consideration. And this is what we keep having to remind the atheists
and the people in the domain of internet philosophy who haven't studied philosophy at the
academic level. They don't seem to be aware of the state of the question
in academia. I mean, atheists, do you realize that they don't do
a pistemology anymore? Typically speaking, this has been surrendered, right, What
does KWin say It's time to give up a pistemology as a classical enterprise of
justification and rational belief. It's just psychology now. That's the state of the
question after Quine, And as doctor Mannion points out in his paper, the
debate hasn't changed from Hume. The debate on epistemology at the academic level is
basically still debating conton Hume questions. It hasn't progressed since then. The notable
paper The Two Dogmas reduces epistemology to psychology. That's a surrendering of the discipline.
We don't do it anymore if Hume and cont are correct. That's why
I kept raising in the debate with Matt human Cont over and over, and
Matt had no idea what I was raising, never got or grasped what my
objections were, and just ignored it. Activity as possible even though we can't
completely remove I'd argue in simplest terms, it claims reasonable if the claim is
consistent with what we know to be true and possible within reality. So somebody
asked a good question there, break down the scientific method. That would be
a good video, because you know, if you look at somebody like Kuserlehustoral
had a great breakdown in the logical investigations of the logic and math that the
scientific method relies on, and other things such as induction. Right, you
inductively approach questions and you deduce things. You then make deductive approximations of what's
going on in these different cases, right, and so point there is that
you can't do this stuff right. If Hume and Kant were correct, there's
no basis for science. I mean, this is Kant's whole point, right.
Kant saw that if Hume was right, then we're science is done.
We can't. It has no basis because epistemology is gone. And I'm not
contient. We're not saying Kant is correct in total right, The kantient system
is goofy right, it's silly, But Kant raised good questions, and he
correctly saw that if human was right, then this stuff's done. We don't
have a basis for this stuff. Now, after Kant, some people do
come along and raise good questions and make good points, like Kussrel says in
the logical investigations, that's the scientific method proceeds on the basis of logical mathematical
principles, so they're prior to the scientific method. They're presupposed in the scientific
method. So, Matt, you can't do those things justifiably without giving an
account for the things that are prior to the doing of science. And never
got that, and has never gotten that, and probably never will get that.
Right short of a miracle, it simply does no good to argue that
it's reasonable because it's internally consistent, because that's true for many sci fi fantasy
stories, or at least some of the best ones. Uh, that's an
objection to coherentism, which I don't think Trent made any argument about coherentism.
So I don't know where's Matt getting this argument of coherentism and how you reply
to a coherence theory of truth a knowledge when Trent is not a coherentist and
didn't make that argument. So what does the physical evidence about the resurrection tell
us? Well, as far as I'm aware, there is no physical evidence.
There's only a story and testimonials, testimonials about you know, hey,
so and so, so I'm anticipating. I think if I remember from the
Lewis clip where Trent goes with this and it's like, Matt, do you
not understand that what you're saying is like makes the discipline of history impossible?
Now, I don't think Matt is going to be so absurd as to think
that there's no such thing as the discipline of history. But Matt doesn't understand
that the arguments that he's making actually make history impossible. There's not anything like
history. And Trent already kind of brought that up and anticipated that in his
opening statement. Right, But it's like Matt. It's like Matt prepared an
opening statement that wasn't interested in Trent's opening statement, which sometimes debaters do because
you know, they want to stick to their notes or whatever and they can't
do improv or they can't you know, think on the fly. And I
mean, if you go second, that's what you have to do, right,
You're going to be bound to you know, if the guy who went
first diffused half of your you know, big guns that you brought in your
opening statement, then you're gonna have to think I'm a fly and like,
you know, come up with something better, Like it's not gonna work to
give your opening statement half of which was already addressed in the other guy's opening
statement. Oh this or this is what happens. If Christianity is true,
then the resurrection of Jesus must be the single most important fact in history.
And for that fact, we have nothing but hearsay. Now Matt's criteria what
hearsay is and no historical evidence is actually flatly contradicted by the way all historical
evidences and attestation actually works, right, I mean, what's the historical attestation
to the existence of Plato. Oh, these medieval manuscripts that are the earliest
translations of Plato? Literally, did you know that the oldest translations of Plato
or the Middle Ages? Oh? Okay, so, Matt, do we
also now have no reason to believe in Plato? Do we have no reason
to believe in Heroditus? Do we have no reason to believe in you know,
Alexander the Great? Because the things that will qualify as historical evidences for
Alexander, you know, Aristotle, Socrates will not meet Matt's criterion for what
is evidence of historical things. So this is so dumb on Matt's part that
Matt literally is completely destroying not only himself but the possibility of history at all.
And he never gets this was kind of amazing now that here's it wouldn't
be admissible in a court, and certainly the standard I would think for adopting
the foundation of a religion is true to the extent that one is willing to
conform one's life to it, should at least rise to the level of surviving
courtroom evidentary. Stand But Matt, again, you just said that it's hearsay,
Right, It's not hearsay, it's multiple testimonies, multiple examples of attestation
that far exceed Plato. One might wonder, as I do, if this
event actually happened, and there's a good and wise God behind it, why
did he leave us with such a paucity of anecdotal evidence and place this event
in a such a temporal situation as to make it unverifiable. So I love
to bring in the point about Jesus's approach to evidences. Here in the Gospels,
there's a fascinating instance right where the guy goes to Abraham's bosom, he
dies, and he goes to excuse me. He goes to Hades, but
he's not in Abraham's bosom, and he's in the section of the dead,
which is torment, and he can see the poor man ride the story of
the rich Man of the poor Man. He sees the poor man who went
to Abraham's bosom, which is the abode of the righteous in the intermediate state
in the Old Testament, and he says, you know, I can see
the poor guy over there, and he says that he's in Abraham's bosom and
he's blessed, and he says, Lord, yeah, the poor man allows.
He says, Lord, let me compack, go back to life from
the dead and warn my brothers, because if my brothers see me rise from
the dead, they'll believe and they won't come to this terrible place of torment.
What does Jesus say. Does Jesus say, Oh, dude, yes,
all we have to do is pile up a bunch of probabilities about how
it's possible that someone rose from the dead, and maybe they'll believe. Uh
No, Actually, Jesus says, the very op sit of everything Trent is
arguing is apologetic. Even though one rise from the dead, they will not
believe. Let me repeat that, Trent, even though one rise from the
dead, they will not believe. Why because evidences are interpreted according to a
paradigm, and the amount of evidences that you throw at an unbeliever is not
going to really work or do anything until you change his paradigm of evidences challenging
his presuppositions. You see, because as Jesus points out in that story in
the parable, he says, if they wanted to believe, and if they
were actually open to the truth, they have Moses and the prophets. So
Jesus is basically saying, if you want evidences one of the greatest, clearest
evidences is to go to the prophets, understand the mountains of Messianic prophecies in
the Old Testament, how they're fulfilled in Christ, and you would have the
very thing Matt is asking for, the giant pile of historical attestation they have
Moses and the prophets. If they're not going to investigate Moses and the Prophets
with an open heart and mind to see this pile of evidence, then they're
not going to believe even though one rise from the dead and unfalsifiable, because
I'd argue that an untestable claim of a matter of fact such as this event
occurred, no matter what the event is, can never be reasonably believed unless
that matter of fact is wholly mundane and when the risk of being wrong is
minimized. So matd just gave an arbitrary, absurd criteria of what counts as
a reasonable belief and what counts as justification for that belief. And there's absolutely
no way that mad could could make good on what he just said. And
what this shows again is that this debate isn't about evidences. The debate is
actually about the prior question of justification our criteria of evidences, which Trent did
bring up at the beginning, But Mats just like blowing past that, acting
like, well, we all know what evidences are, and we all know
what a courtroom does, and we're all just doing the same thing and it's
all the same. So if somebody would say George Washington had a dog named
Piggy, the risk of accepting that claim being wrong is fairly trivial. We
don't have any way to verify it as far as I can tell, and
it's also not falsifiable because we don't have a time machine. We don't have
they would exhaustively explore the aspect of it, But the risk of being wrong
is trivial. Oops, I thought George Washington had a dog named Piggy.
Turned. I mean, Matt just doesn't even have a conception of the fundamental
problems to empiricism, right, I mean, there's so many, and it's
it's if you had an epistemology one on one class, or if you had,
you know, some classes in modern philosophy, you would take the classes
on the empiricists, you would study Locke, Barkley, Hume. You would
get into the questions that they raise, ask and debate, and then you
would have at least a basic knowledge of what the problems of skepticism and empiricism
are. Matt does not know that. He will probably never know that because
he thinks he knows what he's talking about, and he doesn't. And if
he did, he would know about the myth of the given, the underdetermination
of data. He would know about the external world, he would know about
the self, he would know about the problem of universals right plaguing questions for
skeptical empiricists, which Matt does not know about, does not care about,
and we'll never talk about that. I wasn't right. I guess that's not
a big deal, unless maybe you're on a quiz show in front of millions
of people and then you suffer terrible embarrassment and a harm to your reputation.
Well, remember this is the guy who thinks that when Jordan Peterson asked him
about why life has value, he literally replied because a monkey ancestor thought he
had value. That was his actual I'm not joking. It wasn't a joke.
It was literally what he thought was a good reply. And I mean,
I can kind of see on Trent's face. I'll just show you a
little a little uh. I mean, look at Trent's face here. It's
like Trent's like, are you really arguing this with me right now? Like,
dude, seriously, It's like I got this in the bag, bro,
right. I mean, Matt, this is just so goofy dude.
It's like, I'm not trying to be mean, it's just bro come on.
And then all of a sudden, believing something like that is a problem.
It's important for people to recognize that there's a difference between verification and falsification.
Matt does he does he not even know that the verificationists and the falsificationists,
Like this is all like people don't do this anymore. Like it's like
Matt read a couple introductory books and then just ran with it and ignores like
dispensed archaic epistemological attempts of justification and theories of evidences and proofs and knowledge that
people don't really hold anymore. But I think maybe the normy audiences that follow
Matt. I mean, if you read the comments under the debate that I
have with Matt on his channel and on my channel, like the especially on
his channel like the tier of people, the reddit tier of the audience that
follows Matt, you know, the people that come into the discord, the
atheist crowd, the people that I was arguing with for five hours the other
night on the Politics and Religion Server, Like, they don't know what an
argument is, they don't know what justification is, they don't know what empiricism
is, they don't know what Barkley said, what humans, They have no
idea about any of this stuff. So what appeals to them is really these
really these these low tier analogies, right, these naive assumptions and really naive
positions, And Trent is enough of a philosopher and enough of a good thinker
and critical thinker to be way tiers way above this. So, I mean,
Matt is so out of his element in these kinds of debates that he
doesn't even realize it. That's the sad part here. And because he at
least is a good talker, he's at least able to dupe a lot of
people who literally know nothing about philosophy one on one. And that's really the
only way that he could be successful at this is that kind of a game.
Verification is the notice the note the note verification is the concept that we
should produce the thing. If we were to say all intelligent beings are on
planet Earth verification, you could run around, hey, there's an intelligent being
on Earth, and there's one on Earth in there again. I mean,
do anybody who has had like a few philosophy classes will like they know the
ways that you could critique verificationism right or falsification, like people don't hold this
stuff anymore. One on Earth and there's one on Earth, But verifying it
exhaustively could be completely impractical because you would have to search. He doesn't understand
that the verification and these they don't actually solve the dilemmas that Hume raised.
Do you remember in the debate with Matt where I just kept going back to
David Hume and saying, Matt, everything that you're saying assumes the principles that
Hume called into question. Do you have an account for that? And Matt
literally just kept saying, I don't care what David Hume said, like he
thought I was appealing to David Hume as an appeal to authority. Matt,
I'm not appealing to David Hume as an authority. I'm appealing to his argument,
dude, really, are you that slow? Yes, he is replanet
at all the time in order to determine that, in fact, whole intelligent
beings are in fact on planet Earth. But falsification is a separate issue.
Falsification is whether or not it is theoretically able to be shown to be false.
And so while we may never be able to Matt will never grasp that.
It's the people in his camp in academia that ask and repeat the very
questions that Matt doesn't understand that skepticism can't answer. Do you understand that?
And the comments I mean, just dude, the mindlessness of the comments in
Matt's on MAT's channel under our debate. None of them. I'm not none
of them because a lot you've actually seen a lot of people convert. But
I mean the comments that are there, the thousands of comments, are like
not even grasping this. Do you remember the debate with stuff on Molineux?
Do you guys see this? From my vantage point, the debate is the
same, from Matt to Trent to Asrah Rashid to stuff on Molineux. I'm
asking the same questions to all of these people because all of those people share
an empiricist starting point, and so anytime they start saying all these things,
I'm like, whoha, who whoa whoa bro, Let's dial back, dude,
whoa the dollar is back, because I want to know about these starting
point positions in epistemology that you need to deal with first, that human con
raised before you start doing all this postulating and pontificating. Maybe all of your
postulations and pontifications are correct, but you're going to have to answer those prior
questions before you go down this long rabbit trail here. And that's what philosophy
does. I mean, guys, hello, the last five hundred years,
the last four or five hundred years of philosophy is asking and repeating what I'm
saying. Remember what doctor Manion says, epistemology and its questions have not significantly
progressed or changed sense Hume and cont they're still debating this. So from human
Kant to Qwine, it's the same questions. Matt doesn't even know those questions.
That's how lame and silly this is. I mean, Matt should be
laughed off of the stage as as a stage magician. He's not a philosopher.
He doesn't know the first thing about philosophy, So the stuff he's talking
about is like totally divorced from what's actually going on in the last five inentred
years of philosophy to pistemology, and most of the reddit, you know,
internet sphere atheists are that same way, right, Like they're just repeating things
that, like somebody said in the seventeen hundreds, just as much as Trent
and the classical apologists are repeating bad arguments from the thirteen hundreds. By that
all intelligent beings are in fact on planet Earth, we could, at least
in theory, falsify it, because if we produced an intelligent being that wasn't
on Earth, that would falsify the claim. Now, that would show that
the claim is wrong. But if we had, if Matt had, if
Matt took if Matt took uh modern philosophy one on one and then took modern
epistemology or epistemology one on one, he would be at least aware of the
critiques of the verification thesis. Claim that is unverifiable, unfalsifiable, it is
essentially untestable. And my foundation is that if you have an untestable claim,
it had better be mundane, trivial, and consistent with the facts of reality.
Before excuse me, what does it mean for something to be mundane?
What does it mean for objects to exist in some kind of consistent, meaningful
way with your thoughts? What does it mean for you to know that there's
an external world? What does it mean for you to know that these objects
have identity over time? I mean Matt's It is so easy to just destroy
Matt. And if you watch go back and watch the debate that I have
with Matt, And all I did was pick a couple of those kinds of
basic questions to keep asking Matt, and he never even note knew what I
was asking. You should ever risk believing that it's in fact the case?
Well, we can't really believe, or we can't argue that it's rational to
believe something that we can't test at all, And so we do the best
we can. When it comes to history and Matt, why should we believe
that it's rational to believe in rational things? Why should we believe in your
theory of reasoning? Why should we believe in the verification thesis? Why should
we believe in falsifying things? Right? In other words, these are all
assumptions that Matt is using as his starting point, right, that Matt is
not going to be able to justify. Let's give an easy example. Matt
is a basic bitch empiricist, literally, right, And we saw that in
our debate. There's no question about that. That's not a false, falsely
attributing to him a position he doesn't have. And if you remember in the
debate, I said, Matt, I heard in previous debates you say,
quote, you should never believe anything without good empirical evidence to support it.
Right, Yes, I agree, Matt. Matt said that it's a basic
Matt one oh one principle, right, that's Matt delahunty epistemology one on one,
Matt, do you think that proposition itself is part of your sense data?
No, it's not, and so over and over. I hammered at
these kinds of points, Matt. Everything that you're saying about science presupposes induction.
What is the justification for believing in the principle of induction? It just
is, so Matt says, it just is that. I'm not joking.
That's his argument. It just is. That's arbitrary, that's at hoc.
That's not a justification. It's not an argument. It's circular on Matt's own
theory of circularity and argumentation. Right, And Matt says, you can't give
an account or a justification for presuppositions they just are, which is not true.
But that's that was his reply. So wait a minute. So Matt,
you're saying we should believe in things that we don't have empirical data and
justification for. But you earlier said don't believe anything without good empirical evidence and
justification. Oh yeah, total contradiction. When we take a look at history,
all we have are reports. Somebody said they saw this, somebody said
they knew this person, somebody said this other thing. That's all well and
good when we're trying to put together the best understanding of history we can,
but we shouldn't be proclaiming it is truth. And we shouldn't necessarily be saying
that this particular version of history is particular reasonable because history tends to be written
by the victors, and so history is always suspect. And there are two
quotes from David Hume that are the I mean, this goober doesn't even know
David Hume's argumentation. I mean he's just quote mining. I guarantee you he's
not ever read that. He wouldn't be able to understand David Hume if you
read it, because I asked him multiple times arguments that Hume makes, and
he acted like it doesn't matter. David Hume is not an authority for me.
Dude. I'm not appealing to David Hume as an authority. I explicitly
said multiple times his argument. But this obtuse dude acted like that that's not
what I was doing. And he probably knew better, right, but he
got flustered in that debate and was just demolished cornerstone of how and why I
go by determining if something is or should be considered reasonable. The first one
is that he said the wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. And
all he's really saying is your confidence level in the truth of a claim should
be proportional to the evidence that is there to support it. You barely have
any evidence for And similarly, if there's mountains of evidence or something and you're
just like, well, you know, then you're not proportioning your confidence to
the belief. It's just so like, I mean, how does anybody follow
this dude, Like, this is like embarrassing level opening statement. I hope
Trent really just demolishing the evidence. Sorry, the second quote from you,
which I'll go ahead and read because it's lengthy. When anyone tells me that
he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether
it be more probable that this person should either deceive. So again, if
Christianity is true, then it's not probable. It's the only rational position to
say that Jesus rose from the dead, right, because the beliefs in the
set of beliefs in our system all relate to and determine one another. There's
no belief within the Christian system that is somehow more self evident or more obvious
per se than the other beliefs. Considered as a set of beliefs, they
all go together. This is why you can't like take one belief out and
be like, oh, well, I believe in Christianity, but not God's
omnistions. Well that's not christianitymore right, that's some other thing, some heresy.
Because Christianity is the set of orthodox beliefs. I mean, it's not
reduced to that. But I'm saying in terms of the system. That's what
it is expressed as. So are we starting to see the point here that,
like, it's not a debate about this fact versus that fact. The
debate is too paradigm. Two worldviews that are in commensurate. So wait a
minute, if they're in commensurate, how would we determine between the two?
Ah, exactly which of these paradigms gives an account for not just evidences,
but the theory of evidence at all, the possibility of evidence at all,
possibility of logic at all, the possibility of ethics at all, the possibility
of meaning at all. Which are prior questions to metaphysics, or be deceived
or that the fact which hin he relates should have actually happened. I weigh
the one miracle against the other, and according to the superiority which I discover,
I pronounce my decision and always reject the greater miracle. Now, what
human is essentially saying there is is it more probable that someone has either been
deceived or is intending to deceive me? Then it sounds like after our debate,
Matt went and tried to learn David Hume, right, I mean,
you can tell that after our debate. Matt was shook up because he had
to call in Ozzy and doctor Malpass to help him out and to help him
feel better and to help him understand my argument. Literally, like he didn't
understand it, and so he called them in as backup to save you know,
him, because they had actually no philosophy, and so it sounds like
since then Matt was like, maybe I should go read this David Hume guy,
because he's supposed to be like, you know, the guru daddy of
my skepticism. But Matt still doesn't understand David Hume, which is the hilarious
part, right. I mean, this guy is just like a self owning
meme generator. The claim is true, and when he says reject the greater
miracle that is Remember Matt's greatest argument, my life has value because monkey thought
it have value. There's a monkey ancestor who decided life has value. That
was Matt's reply, did you or Peter, this is the most well known
Internet atheist person. His argument, I'm not kidding. Go listen to the
Jordan Peterson del Hunty debate. Jordan Pierre, why does life have value?
Why do you think it has value? Why does your life have value.
My life has value because monkey ancestors thought it had value. He's not joking,
that's what he says. Dude. If if you, as an atheist,
believe that you are a monkey, that is incredibly important and significant to
understand. That's actually the best argument for the lesser miracle atheism. Like somebody
asked me of the day, what's the best argument for atheism. The atheist
arguments are so bad that they almost convinced me were monkeys or their monkeys at
least, and so therefore evolution atheism might be true. Because those dudes are
so bad, that's the best. The best argument for atheism is the stupidity
of the atheists, which make me think that humanity is completely stupid. That
is not it at all. It is reject to the greater miracle. It
doesn't just say, oh, here's two potential candidate explanations that we have at
this particular moment in time. Throw the one out that's more ridiculous and accept
the other one. No, it's just you should throw out the one that's
more ridiculous. And so if we're hearing a claim that someone rose from the
dead when we have no evidence that this sort of thing is possible or probable,
then the greater miracle is that someone rose. Well no, wait a
minute, no evidence that it is possible or probable. Again, Actually,
Trent did give some considerations as to how it might be possible or probable.
So now I'm not going to go down this evidentialist, goofy line of argumentation.
But I mean, Matt, you should at least maybe there's rebuttals coming
where Matt will respond. I don't know, but I mean that's not really
what I mean. Trent did at least give some examples or cases which I
think would at least somewhat respond to what Matt's asking for here, the dead
versus that someone was deceived or that someone was intense. I mean, Matt
does this thing where it's like you give your statement, you say a bunch
of stuff, Matt asked a bunch of questions and acts like you never said
anything and just kind of ignores all the stuff that you said. That's like
a classic math thing, needing to deceive that someone was mistaken. Nobody has
to lie for any of this. They can just be wrong, or we
can just have stories that don't accurately represent the facts. At the time.
So if a claim isn't false, falsifiable, and there's no way to show
it's wrong, we can't reasonably accept it as correct. And if we're left
with no physical evidence about the existence of Jesus, or the interactions of Jesus,
or his death and resurrection, what we're left with. By the way,
I highly recommend, as I posted this week, if you read the
russ Manion paper Contingency of Knowledge, which I posted as a kind of a
classic presentation of tag, then you know that Russ doctor Manyua had a good
section responding to the nonsense that Matt's talking about right here, and he points
out the inadequacy of verification and falsification testimony. Now, I'm not willing to
dig in on whether or not the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses. I don't
think they were. I don't think that most reasonable scholars aren't going to say
these are our witnesses. But it doesn't matter to me because even if they
were all eyewitnesses, we already know that eywitness testimony is unreliable under the best
circumstances. In this case, we don't know who's testimony I witnessed second or
third hand we can't investigate it at all. The things that they say happened
don't have corroborating evidence. They don't have supporting physical evidence we don't have,
so again, not true. There are multiple extra biblical attestations to all kinds
of events in the New Testament. For example, Josephus's writings about the destruction
of Jerusalem. I mean, those aren't corroborations of everything in the Bible,
but they are extra canonical corroborations of things in the Bible. So this is
just patently false on a basic level in terms of just historical claims. Any
way to question them about their reliability. We don't have any way to talk
to them to determine, you know, are these stories accurate? You know,
do they overlap. What we do know is that the Eastern narrative from
the different conspoels does not line up and cannot be reconciled with the different accounts
of it. But in the absence of any physical evidence, we're left with
assessing the nature of the claim and the nature of the reports. If it's
an extraordinary claim, and it needs to be an extraordinary claim, as it
would be really remarkable to I mean, if Christianity is true, the resurrection
isn't an extraordinary claim. I mean, what you consider extraordinary or mundane is
actually going to be determined by your worldview and criteria as a whole. So
this is just begging the question, Matt, because what's in dispute is actually
the truth or falsity of Christianity, which both of these parties don't seem to
realize that. They think it's a debate over a fact of the resurrection.
No, what's in dispute is world views as a whole. So no,
Matt is begging the question to say that it's an extraordinary claim when that's the
thing that's in question. Right, If Christianity is true, it's not extraordinary.
It's a fundamental fact of reality. The resurrection is the most fundamental fact
of all of reality. I mean some Maximus even says that right, all
of reality is basically unified and transfigured in the cross, right and its cosmological
recapitulatory significance. So I mean, again, they don't understand that this debate
is actually prior to the question of evidences. Jesus eight Figs. For our
salvation. The claim needs to be extraordinary because of the narrative, So you
know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Oh wait a minute, is that
actually true? Everybody's heard that. I've said it, other people said it.
I accept that aphorism for what it means, but not as it's written,
because all claims require sufficient evidence? And what all claims require sufficient evidence?
Matt? Is it true that that claim requires sufficient evidence? And what
is the sufficient evidence? From you, as a basic bitch empiricist that all
claims require sufficient evidence? Oh, that's right, that's David Hume one on
one, and you can't do that. It's a sufficient evidence to believe a
claim is going to differ based on how consistent that claim is with reality.
Monday's begging the question as if you have some a priori, easy, self
evident, clear access to reality. Does this guber not understand that to say
that claims have to match up to reality is a gigantic metaphysical claim. And
this goober doesn't even believe in metaphysics in claims benefit from having a common pool
of knowledge and evidence within reality. This is so mindless, dude, I
mean, I don't think he could actually make it. This dude could not
pass a metaphysics class. So he doesn't even know what he's talking about.
Like, he's trying to argue about claims as if they don't have metaphysical content,
saying that facts have to match up to reality. Dude, do you
understand that when you say reality, you have entered into the domain of metaphysics.
Matt doesn't even know what metaphysics is, right, he doesn't even realize
he's in the domain of metaphysics. And to do this, you have a
whole lot of work to do, because you're an empiricist, Bro, a
skeptic, an empiricist skeptic, and now you're making grand claims about facts matching
reality. Again, totally ignorant of the last four or five hundred years of
philosophy, which would laugh at him. Precisely at that very point, you
don't have You don't get a privileged access to reality, Bro, until you
answer the claim the challenges of Humankan, Well, that figs exist. We
know that dogs exist, we know that people name their dog. No,
that's precisely what you don't know. You don't know that figs exist, dogs
exist, that these claims have any meaning or import or connect to anything in
the external world. Matt. That's what David Hume points out, which you
tried to quote. David Hume, you don't even get the dude you're quoting.
He's quote. He's critiquing you, Matt. Don't you understand David Hume
is the consistent skeptic who's critiquing you. Guber, these funny things, and
it's not extraordinary to think that somebody might name their dog Piggy. We know
that figs exist and they're eaten, so it's not extraordinary to claim that Jesus
had a fig unless Jesus didn't exist or figs weren't around at that time.
Although we have a strange claim of Jesus cursing a fig tree for not producing
figs when it wasn't in season, which I would argue isn't something that a
divine entity knowledgeable about figs and fruit seasons would do. And it seems bizarre
this Guber doesn't understand the fig tree represents Israel. I mean, wow,
this guy is like he did he really just argue that God wouldn't curse a
fig tree because he should know as a divine being that figs don't bloom.
So he thinks that Jesus cursed the fig tree because there weren't. He doesn't
even understand the fig tree represents his rule and the curses. Oh wow,
man, this guy is something else, a curse a fig tree. But
I can't say whether or not that actually happened. Maybe it didn't happen,
and it's just there to teach another lesson. I have a hard time going
through some of these things and saying, yes, that's being reported as this
actually happened. That is a big problem. I have a hard time.
I don't see. I have a hard time, Matt. That is a
descriptor of a psychological state. You're reporting to us psychological states of affairs.
That's cool, brot. Nothing to do with a debate or an argument.
So what evidence do we have? Copies of copies of translations, of copies
from unknown sources that may have been but probably weren't eyewitnesses, And even if
they had been eyewitnesses, it wouldn't be sufficient to confirm that someone actually rose
from the dead. What sort of evidence would we expect for a claim or
someone rose from the dead depends on the timeframe, sure, back in first
century Judea, probably not a lot. You don't have a way to test
for sure. That somebody is dead. You don't have like X rays,
you don't have DNA. Well, but the question is, if this story
is true, then Jesus was divine and God exists, and what sort of
evidence could a God provide? Well, God could provide the best evidence possible
such that there would be no reasonable debate to be had at all. Well,
this is just assuming that there's no fall and that all men are rational
and they just believe whatever the best evidences are presented. No, that's not
true, right, I mean, if the Christian story is true, then
part of that doctrine is the fall. And a corollary of the doctrine of
the fall is that men don't believe what is true just willy nilly because they
should. They in fact rebel against the truth, right, They suppress the
truth in unrighteousness, and they don't come to the light lest there needs be
exposed Romans one, John three. So no, it does doesn't follow from
the fact that just because God exists, he should and ought to and would
therefore make everybody just clearly believe on the basis of clear public evidence. There
is clear public evidence. That was Jesus's point in the parable. But even
though one rides from the dead, they still won't believe. Trent. Hello,
you hear this. Even though one rides from the dead, they still
won't believe. Even though you convince Matt of the resurrection of the dead,
he still won't believe. Theas often claimed that it's more believable because it's a
miracle. It's more believable because the first people to the tomb were women,
and women weren't trusted Matt, that's not what Trent's argument was. Theis often
argued that wasn't Trent's argument. Why that straw man, Dude, are you
replying to Trent or are you replying to a bunch of other people who aren't
there. Nobody would put these details in, so therefore they must be true.
But that's like saying, you know, that's exactly what the butler that's
Trent didn't make this argument. So Matt does this all the time too,
where he responds to straw men that his opponent isn't making. Say if he
did do it, if it's on par or worse than the evidence offered by
someone trying to sell me a bridge, someone trying to get me started in
there as their underling in a multi level marketing campaign or the money that my
Nigerian prince has set aside for me. Then the evidence isn't strong and no
amount of pretending will change that. It is. So another problem here,
Crackers in the pantry fallacy, right, this is the assumption that all things
are proven and known in the same way. I immediately called this out with
Matt. He didn't understand what I was saying. He still doesn't understand this.
I even asked Matt if he agreed that everything is proven in the same
way, and he said, no, some things are proven in different ways.
And yet here is Matt going back to the same stupid argument as if
everything is proven in the same way, just put some empirical evidence in front
of me and then it will be probable or improbable. But Matt, I
pointed out that there's all kinds of things that we believe in that are not
demonstrable empirically, that you believe in, such as presuppositions, And Matt said,
there's no argument for presubgens. They just are okay. But Matt,
you said, don't believe in anything less there's empirical evidence for it. Matt's
philosophy is garbage. And nonsense. It is total, incoherent, make it
up on the spot, bullshit, unreasonable to believe it because there isn't sufficient
evidence, no physical evidence, nothing about this claim with pass muster today there's
no body, no tomb, no blood, no sword, no cross,
no DNA, no burial reps. Matt, I don't I'm not going to
grant you any of that because you don't have a theory of evidences at all.
You don't have a coherent theory or justification for proof at all, for
knowledge at all, for evidence at all, for meaning at all, for
sentences at all. It's despite the fake strouducture and no witnesses to question currently,
no prime scene investigators, no findings of fact at all. I understand
and appreciate, as I'm imagine, being so philosophically naive that you think that
there's just this thing called facts. It's like there's just like uninterpreted brute data
and you just go look at it and then it's the Ah, it's the
fact, right, Like I look over here at the chalk dot Com and
like, look at the fact, right, The fact, the fact,
the fact, that fact, that fact, the fact, that fact,
the fact, the fact that fact, that fact, right, like the
like the the ask yourself level stuff here, right, this is the level
of they're all on the same level, these people, like that's how they
all think. Uh, And I want to remind you that if you don't
want to think at that low level, right, what do we what we
what do we be doing around these parts? We be doing the daily we
be doing the seven Wonders now, so it's a wonder of the seven wonders.
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dudes. Former believer that there are testimonies here that people find compelling, and
I could probably speculate as to what it is that convinces people, and the
fact that Matt is a former believer and the fact that Matt doesn't find things
convincing is totally irrelevant to a debate. Do you remember this? The great
example of this is the Boston Tabash debate. Right, this, It's a
classic because Tabosh keeps doing this as if it's an argument. Right, He
keeps saying, I find it hard to believe that a God would do this.
I find it hard to believe that God made it the case that this
is how it is. And what does Bonson constantly say, that's just a
reporting of a psychological state. It's not an argument, doctor Deboche. That's
not an argument, Doctor Deboche, that isn't an argument. Matt doesn't understand
that reporting psychologically descriptive states about what he finds convincing and doesn't find convincing isn't
an argument, and that shows that Matt doesn't really know what arguments are.
Is that keeps people in belief, but it is not the physical evidence.
It is not what is reasonable. The psychological motivations for why people believe or
don't do not believe this or that is also isn't an argument. It is
probably the extraordinary narrative, the emotive, the emotion that people feel and connect
with it. I mean, I could have a psychological motivation to believe something
that happens to be true, and I can have a psychological motivation to believe
something that actually happens to be false. So psychological motivations don't have anything to
do with what's true or false. Fear of finding out you were wrong,
fear of dying and not going on to an eternal paradise, fear of being
the odd one out when everybody around you believes. I have experienced those same
concerns for the Christians out there. Again, Matt doesn't matter, Like,
none of this is an argument. So does Matt understand what a debate is?
Like It's like he's doing the reverse version of an evangelical testimony, right,
Like the evangelical I just want to talk about how my life was in
shambles, and like I prayed and Jesus came to me, and like,
if you're out there, if you're hurting. This is the reverse version of
that where Matt thinks that giving his atheist testimony and deconversion story counts as an
argument. No, it doesn't. Who believed this? And you believe all
kinds of super natural things, and many of you believe in demons and angels
and all of the things that go along with this, because you've accepted the
supernatural. The only reason this feels reasonable to people is because they've already accepted
other things that aren't reasonable to accept. We have no way currently to investigate
or confirm the supernatural at all. We can't confirm, so this again relies
on a specific presupposition and rabid doctrine of what counts as investigation, proof and
evidences. And until Matt shows us that we should believe that everything should be
believed on the basis of empirical sense data, then we're not going to listen
to Matt. But Matt can't prove that everything has to be demonstrable by sense
data, because that's impossible, and it's a contradiction that anything supernatural exists.
We can't confirm that anything supernatural interacts with reality. And to say that,
well, we've seen the of these people who we don't know, we can't
investigate from a long time ago, and it's just so darn extraordinary and we
can't think of a better explanation, then it likely happened. Therefore it's reasonable
to believe it. I cannot get on board with that, and it frustrates
me. That's the only little area where I will give Matt a point,
because I do agree that really the weakness in Trent's you know, evidential spiel
throughout the middle of his opening statement, it doesn't lead me to think that
I there's any necessary reason to connect this to Christianity, or that if even
if Jesus rose in the dead, that that's supposed to on your already existing
evidential as bases, why is that supposed to get me to accept Christianity.
It's a non sequitur. It's only a sequitur. It only follows if Christianity
is true. But that's the thing that's in question. So I'll give Matt
one point, just at this point, that other people can't see this,
because if I were to come to you with the story like this today,
if it didn't have the history and the baggage not of actually being true,
but of being convincing enough to foster a bunch of followers, nobody would reasonably
all right, let me take that back, almost nobody would argue that they
could reasonably accept it today. And when ney of the people who are accepting
these sorts of claims are also at odds with science, and it frustrates me
that someone could, I don't know, fear getting a vaccine. Oh here
we go. So Matt's account of science and disagreeing with science and disagreeing with
what he takes to be the majority of view, which is how he began
remembers like what's reasonable believe Matts seemed to connect to the majority of what is
considered reasonable, which that itself is absurd and arbitrary and incoherent. There's no
reason there's no way that we know prima fascia what the majority position necessarily is.
That begs the question why should we accept the majority position? There have
been many cases where the majority of people believe something completely ridiculous. Matt himself
admits this when he thinks, admits that most people in the world have some
view of theism or the supernatural, so most people consider it rational to believe
in the supernatural. Therefore, on Matt's own grounds, it should be reasonable
to believe in this. This is just so silly, Like Matt is just
totally Matt has no self awareness, Like he's not totally incapable of self reflection
and understanding the pure garbage nonsense that he spits out for fear of being microchipped
or it being the mark of the beast. Well, they accept claims that
don't have good evidence. He threw in his little scientism affirmation, and I
guess he's gonna learn the hard way. But yeah, that was interesting that
he threw that in at the end there. But yeah, I mean,
does Matt know anything about the history of science and scientific abuse and the countless
instances and examples where science was rife with fraud, with experimentation. No,
but those things are historical facts, even in Matt's own admission they would be
recent, recent history. Well, he's not interested in that. He's interested
in a pragmatic, low iq basic bitch idea that if you just follow the
majority of science, like the t dump stuff, like the level of stuff
that t dump says right where it's true because most scientists say it, Are
you serious? Number one? That's a that's a fallacy, dummy, like
it's nothing is true because a bunch of people think it. All right,
Thank you Matt, Thank you Trent. Those are two excellent opening statements.
I'm going I'm gonna make it an executive decision here, if that's okay.
We kind of did agree upon it before the debate began, even though there
was I will admit that really that's all atheists have is rhetoric and storytelling,
the appeal to emotion. I mean, the master of that is uh freaking
what's his name? Sam Harris? Right when we did multiple deconstructions of Sam
Harris's I mean literally, the whole presentation of Sam Harris is emotional appeals.
Like that's it. These people don't, like, do they not know what
fallacies. I don't think they do. I really don't think that they understand
that you can't do fallacies in a debate, and a skilled debater will just
call them out. Trent's a pretty skilled debater, so I really hope that
he calls out a lot of this just nonsense from Matt confusion. What I'd
like to do is do two eight minute cross examinations. This should open it
up to just kind of twenty minute general chat between the two of you,
because I, well, man, I remember, well, this is going
to get confusing, frad. I remember Dilla Hunty sounds weird to do that,
like I'm a sergeant or something. I remember Dilla Hunty saying that the
original email only said just thirty to forty five minutes discussion, which I don't
know. I guess you're you're in charge, but I'm fine whatever the original
said. You're the host. The reason I like the idea of you guys
beginning with eight minute cross examinations. It'll put one of you in the driver's
seat to kind of drill into the points the other was making, and you
can be rude during that time. You can you can cut them off,
you can press them. Oh, wait what whoa whoa, whoa, whoa
whoa. Matt Frad says, you're allowed to interrupt, be rude, cut
them off. Whoa Wait a minute. I thought that was the reason I'm
a bad guy, so pines with a quietness, Matt Frad. It's a
double standard. So if I do those things, I'm bad. When Matt
allows it on his channel for his people, No, nothing wrong with that.
Totally cool, have at it, bro. Do you see the constant,
just total double standard of the Roman Catholics, Like how long can they
milk this and keep this up? Right? I mean, Lofton and his
goober crew are three years into whining and crying about me being mean three years
ago. These are the Crusaders, right, the suns of the Crusading Knights
are three years into whining and crying about me being mean three years ago.
And here's Matt Frad, who, of course said what a year ago?
Which I don't give a crap about his channel. I don't, I don't
even I wouldn't even go on there. But he made it explicit that he
would never host someone like me on his channel. So I'm a toxic person.
But here's Matt saying in the cross examination, you can be rude,
you can cut them off. Dude. This is such just lame hypocrisy.
I mean, these guys are like paper tigers. Dude. It's just it's
so fake and gray. Then maybe you're trying to give me a little give
me a little eway here. I come in with a reputation. Well see,
it'll be good. Well you'll have eight minutes to just sort of be
full Matt, dilla hunt Matt, how is it that it's cool to be
rude and cut people off when it's like an atheist? But if I do
it, i' I'm a bad person. Literally, this guy thinks I'm a
toxic person because of the very things that he just said Matt can do.
I mean, this guy is a total hypocrite. Dude. It'll be great.
I'm fine with whatever. Tear me up, Trent, Okay, well
i'd like to I think we do. We'll do that if and then we'll
go into twenty minutes just the two of you can chat and we'll see how
civil and logical we can both be. But before we do that, I
want to say Jay Die would never come on my channel. I would never
host a toxic personality I feel hurt and ashamed. I wept many nights,
many years. I filled my whole beast ie full of me tears because Jay
Dyer hurt me feelings. I would never ever allow any of their toxic personality
to toxify my channel. My channel is a place of love, a place
of honor, a place of healing, a place of me sucking on fat
cigars, drinking cake icing directly out of a beer stein, giving that over
to Ibarra, sharing beer steins full of cake icing with Eric Ebara. And
I would just never, ever, ever, ever ev allowed Jake Dyer here
because the goal of points of a quitas is to fill those points full of
cake icing and to build back better, build back better. By the way,
Matt, if you'd like to get rude, if you'd like to maybe
even say a no, no, knotty word, perhaps even the S word,
feel free, a big thank you to our sponsor. I'm going to
skip past this priod. The one who is doing the cross examining is welcome
to interrupt the other debater, to press them, to cut them off.
And the dude, what are you sure? I mean? We might have
a hurt feeling if we allow this toxicity on our channels. Matt, are
you sure you want to do that? I mean, this could lead to
tears, It could lead to people going on eating binges. Perhaps a borrow
did this many times after our I heard is. I was so mean,
I mean, are you sure you want to allow this toxicity? Matt?
I mean, this is like we're in dangerous territory. We're in the freaking
danger zone right when to the dangersone, Matt is literally getting like edge lord
danger zone here. I mean we might even have like we literally might have
hurt feelings. I've got feelings. Use I mean, whoa dude? Whoa
dial it back here? Right? Dial it back? This isn't considered being
rude. This is just so that the debates can ask questions regarding the opening
statements. I suppose that we just made and so we'll start with yeah.
But if I do that, I'm so evil. I mean, it's just
unbelievable the level of just the depths of evil that I would that I would
resort to eight minutes for Trent to cross examine Matt, and then Matt will
have eight minutes. So Trent, whenever you're ready, sure, and Matt,
just for common ground. I also am irked by Christians who deny basic
aspects of science. I am very urket at those those who deny the efficacy
of vaccines, the fact the universe is billions of years old. So for
find common Graundy, I share your frustration. I want to ooh mm,
Trent, you just you went down a few notches in my respect for you,
because this is, uh, this is this is getting into the really
norm et your stuff. And I mean, I know that this is not
tomorrow's top, but yeah, you know, there's a whole other domain that
everybody here knows I cover, which I cover on Lord Voldemort's show once every
week or so, the fourth Hour, and you know that's going on for
a year now, and as I'm sure everybody over here knows, when we
do that, we get to speak to millions of people. And that's a
great, awesome, blessing thing. I love it. I'm very honored.
I'm so happy to be able to speak to millions of people. And the
other thing that that domain allows is that I get to talk to and interact
with a lot of very intelligent, very professional people too, in a lot
of different domains. And so this lame nor mey like Bro, Buddy fest
of please Matt, I hope you don't think I'm a fundamentalist. I love
science too, Bro, and I shun anyone who would be so brazen as
to embrace conspiracy theory. I would never do that. I would never do
that. You know. A big point, A big part of why that
sphere of Matt Fraud and his crew won't don't want to have anything to do
with me is actually over those issues. So let's remember it's not just an
issue of debates about theology and philosophy. There's geopolitical things that play into this.
And the irony here is that some of those people in that crew have
actually had people on that wrote the books that I cover, like David Wimhoff.
Now I'm just saying that, Okay, if we're going to have a
bridge of common ground, a lot of the people from your Goober crew have
interviewed David Wimhoff. I've lectured through and talked about the totality of that gigantic
book, and it's part of my Global Elite book series. Now I have
been and lectured through over fifty of these writings. I speak to millions of
people a week about these writings. The people that I speak to include people
at the White House, people in intelligence agencies, people in foreign governments who
listen to you know who. So for you goobers to act like you are
in some privileged, normy position, you're not and you don't know what you're
talking about. And I would decimate and demolish and destroy every one of you
on any of these other topics too, So let's get that very clear.
I oh, I would love one of you goobers to step up and debate
me on the geopolitical stuff. I will demolish you, now. Father.
Damn it says don't say demolish a person in a debate. I'm not literally
saying I'm going to beat them up, dude, I'm not literally being mean.
That's called rhetoric. Rhetoric is part of debate. But I just want
to tell these guys who are so full of themselves, they think they're so
intellectual and they're so superior or so sophisticated, you don't even know what you
don't know. And I really wish one of you guys would step up and
debate on something other than the theology, because when it comes to the topic
of the geopolitical issues that all of these three goobers right here just touched on.
I will demolish you. I will destroy you. You won't last five
minutes in a debate with me over the geopolitical stuff. Now I'm happy,
and it's great. We're gonna have a good time tomorrow night. Definitely,
it's gonna be civil. We're gonna get on the topics of you know,
natural theology, epistemology. That's great, dude. None of you would last
five minutes. I will make you look ridiculous because I know for a fact
from what I've already heard, not only are the people in this discussion totally
ignorant of philosophy except for Trent. Trent is not ignorant philosophy when it comes
to geopolitics. These dudes would cry. I will make them cry. If
they debated me on this topic, they wouldn't last five minutes, guaranteed.
Please please, Matt, please, Trent, please, other Matt, please,
any of your Roman Catholic goobers, I will debate you on the geopolitics.
In fact, guess what I could probably get you to come debate on
Lord Baldemort's channel. Millions of people will watch the debate. I can set
that up. I please, any of you goobers please come debate me and
you can have an audience of millions. Matt Frad thinks that he's like this
snobby, like so superior. You know, guy, dude, when I
go on Lord Baltimore's show, I talk to ten times. What you have,
Matt? Would you please come discuss on Lord Baltimore's show with me?
Would you like to have a debate. I'm talking about Matt Frad here or
Matt Dill, Hunty or Trent because you guys are you guys are stepping over
into another domain where I will get fearce. I'm ready to debolish here and
that would go for anybody, any of you normy supporters of the norminess please
please come debate me on the fourth hour. The reasonable I believe so frankly,
there are Catholic Stephen who believe things about the Catholic faith that I don't
share because I believe they're being unreasonable. So okay, if you questions I
have, okay, But uh, I mean Matt doesn't care about this right,
Like the more that we try to placate and try to Oh, Matt,
please please I believe in theistic evolution, I believe in Big Bang,
but please, I believe in the stabbes. Please don't think I'm irrational,
Matt, Please don't think I'm a fundamental Who cares what this guober thinks?
Do you know? I mean the whole posture of this debate is like cucking
to the atheist. That's the point here, right, like, who cares
what this guober thinks? This guber can't give an account for anything. You
said something really interesting, you said two thousand years ago. It could be
reasonable for someone to believe in geocentrism because that's just how the world appeared.
That's the way the evidence was. Did I hear that right? Well,
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if I tied that
to two thousand years ago at some point when it passed it was reasonable.
All of the best evidence, the most reasonable conclusion was that the Earth orbit
did the Sun. Yes, I'm just saying because like five hundred years ago,
people believe that's when we two thousand years ago is pretty pretty uniform.
Okay, So if that's the case, then is it reasonable for people to
live according to this motto? Things are as they appear unless evidence shows otherwise.
No, what would you consider faulty about that kind of way of approaching
the world. It is, It's one of those things that I would say
is probably generally true. And by the way, thanks thanks for the comment
earlier. I'm not I don't want to take any any of your time up,
but it's been frustrating to me to watch people who deny vaccines and COVID
and all that stuff. But so Matt, we're so worried about the frustrations
and the Dane and the and the and how much it pained you to see
people be anti science. I mean, uh, I better stop or else
I'm gonna I am gonna actually get mean if I don't stop now. Right,
So, like Matt Frad doesn't want any ball a team, don't being
main only channel, be main fosters. We may have a Falster's don't be
main. But I'm about to get mean, So we better stop to say
things are as they appear in less evidence shows otherwise. Is the sort of
truism that feels right and maybe a good kind of starting rule. But we
already have, at this point in human history a good understanding of how how
we can be fooled optical illusions, let's say, and mirages. We know
those sorts of things exist, and so now I would say that while generally
speaking, we should lost. So this is cross examination. I'm detecting filibustering
here, right. Matt wants to blab and like, you know, not
let Trent corner him. Which I don't blame him because I'm sure Trent will
demolish him. But Mats is blabbing, which I think he's just filibustering.
Utually, trust our senses and how things first appear. We have to do
so tentatively with the knowledge that we unless evidence shows us as things appear,
that's not the way they are. Well the It's one thing to say I'm
convinced that this is likely to be the case, and it's another thing to
say I think this is the case. And what I worry about is that
this statement would be like, oh, I'm right and rationally justified until you
prove me wrong. Let's go to the meat of this. I've filled the
blank. The belief in Jesus' resurrection is unreasonable because and I tried to I
think you put down multiple things at the very beginning. He says something like,
it's unreasonable because it's not consistent with what we know to be true or
in accord with reality. Is there a way you could give me, like
a one or two sentence if that's correct, or more needs to be added
on? Belief in the resurrection is unreasonable because I kind of at the beginning
not consistent with what we know to be true. A reasonable belief has to
be consistent of what we know to be true. This is what you said
earlier, at the closing of my opening. It was it's not reasonably because
there isn't sufficient evidence. There isn't physical evidence, there's you can not so
I don't know if this we just cetimonial accounts me okay, but part of
it is looks like there's some Internet slippage going on here, So let me
refresh the page thirty eight in. I don't think we're going to make it
this whole debate, but I don't think this is this debate doesn't isn't going
to go that long. I mean this is going to be over pretty quick
because I think Matt's about to get rent rent pretty bad. So direction clip
for some reason, the video keeps freezing, so I don't know what's going
on here? Is am I still coming through to you guys? Or is
the is it getting choppy? Have you investigated here? We go reasonably because
there isn't sufficient evidence. There isn't physical evidence, there's none of this.
We just have testimonial accounts. Okay, But part of it is you also
said that it's like it's an extraordinary event, because resurrections don't happen. They've
ever been confirmed. Right, Okay, how many resurrection claims have you investigated?
Well, just from the Bible, we have Jesus' lazaruses, and then
all of the saints who rose up out of their graves and marched on Jerusalem
in the middle of it. I find no compelling evidence for any of those.
There was a I'm sorry, right, were you eluding? I'm curious
if you have how many? How just I'm the question is just how many
resurrection claims outside of the Bible have you investigated to see if this does happen?
Well, I don't know what we're going to call investigating. I saw
a YouTube video that purported to be of a resurrection, but it it there
was no way to investigate it. If there's no way to look into the
details of the claim beyond the claim itself. I don't know what investigation can
happen. I don't know how to investigate something that to supposedly well. In
Craig Keener's two volume work on Miracles, he lists about six hundred resurrection claims.
I think about five hundred of them. Are you know at least more
than five hundred or none are outside of the Bible. Let's say only five
percent of them, you know, you thirty of them? You could contact
witnesses or things like that. It seems like I don't know who Craig Keener
is, but I don't. If I was Matt, I would be like,
I don't. I mean, as a skeptic, I don't care that
some guy has a book that claims to have five hundred resurrections, right,
I mean, why would I accept this over any other book that has claims
of resurrection. So I'm not saying that I necessarily disagree with where I'm waiting
to see where Trent's going with this. But I know if I was Matt,
what I would say. There are these claims of resurrection out there,
so is your answer the question how many resurrection claims outside of the Bible.
Have you investigated The answer is one by watching a YouTube video. So I
don't know how this is remotely relevant because what I say is, I'm well,
it's relevant, Matt, because you're saying that the resurrect like resurrections don't
happen. It's an extraordinary event. It's not consistent with reality, and that's
a shame and you. But I'm wondering, what's the evidence for that claim?
Now, this is a good point. I like where he's going because
I mean, obviously Trent's not a presopositionalist, but it's kind of in the
vein of, you know, of that type of critique. So he's trying
to pin Matt on Matt's own criteria, which is great and that this is
probably where Matt's going to fold and get mad. And you already see Matt's
a little uncomfortable there in his gamer chair where he's like, how's is relevant?
Well, it's relevant because it's the very thing that you're doing, dude,
it's the most relevant thing. What is the evidence for that claim?
If resurrections were known and we would have sign No, Matt, he didn't
ask you the evidence for the claim of resurrections. He asked you about how
you go about investigating, on your view of empiricism, claims of resurrections and
how you disprove them. If he journals on them, people would be getting
Nobel prizes for demonstrating resurrections. People would be coming on the news to say,
hey, here's a resurrection, which is what happened with the YouTube video
that was purportedly a resurrection. I'm not a resurrection investigator, but of the
ones Craig Keener investigated. But Matt, you were making claims about the status
of resurrections. So if you're not a resurrection investigator, as an empiricist,
how do you know, Because as an empiricist, you're going to be bound
to empirical sentence data, and to deny resurrections requires that you know and investigate
and disprove these cases on empiricist grounds. How many resurrections did he confirm actually
happened. Well, he's providing the evidence there for other people to look at.
So I'm just curious. You know, you don't you say it doesn't
happen, But there are claims out there even today, but they're not investigating,
So let me do you believe those? Do you believe you can ask
me in your cross examination, Matt. That's fine. Uh, okay,
here's the next one. You say that we don't have sufficient evidence for the
resurrection. So that's why it's unreasonable to believe that what would what would sufficient
evidence for Jesus resurrection look like? I listed this is a good question because
this is getting to the question of Matt's criteria of evidence, which Trent did
bring up at the beginning, and so this is a good question. The
thing, it would be nice to be able to show that we have good
reason to think that a person existed, that they died, and that they
rose afterwards, something other than just a story and claims. So he asked
them for what would count, and Matt said evidence. Well, Trent's asking,
in your view, what would count as good evidence, and Matt's saying
good evidence, that is there physical evidence for this? Okay, So what
is the physical evidence for an event in the past, Matt, that you
would accept? I mean, Matt's just kind of moving the question back like
every time, Well, I'll believe it on good evidence. What's good evidence?
Well, physical evidence? Okay, what's physical evidence that's good of something
in the past. Matt, is it refine? Is it reasonable to believe
that Jesus was crucified under ponscious pilot? I don't know where Trent's going with
that, but I would have continued pressing Matt on what he's not answering already.
I don't think so. Okay, So do you think that all historians
in the world that teach at major universities it's unreasonable for them that they believe
Jesus was crucified? There this is a good point. This is where Matt's
going to slip up, because this is something that Trent raised at the very
beginning, which is that the fact that you don't think that it's reasonable doesn't
count as a defeater for someone else believing something, right, because Matt believes
that, you know, other people can believe things that he disagrees with for
good reasons. Right. So Trent's going to ask him, this is the
part I think that Lewis clipped out. Trent's going to ask him that,
you know, do you believe that all of this scholars in all the universities
who do believe in the death of Christ, that they all believe something unreasonable
because you disagree with it. For them to believe it, perhaps perhaps it's
not reasonable for them to believe it, For them to teach it as this
is what is believed is not problematic. No, I'm saying that. So
you're saying it's unreasonable to affirm that Jesus was crucified under ponscious pilot. This
is what I'm saying that. I am not convinced. I am not personally
convinced that that's the case. But that's not what we're I'm not interested in
what you're convinced by exactly bingo. Right, So Trent nailed him right there,
that that is the very thing Bonton hits on in the Bonton Tabash debate.
Right, We're not interested in your reporting of psychological states. That's a
psychological report. We are interested in the argument, Matt, And what's the
argument for or against these criteria of evidence. What's the argument for or against
believing that it's irrational to think Jesus rose from the dead. So this is
the spot, This is exactly where Lewis clipped it. This is where Trent
really nails Matt, and Matt just falls apart here because you agree, there's
a difference between what would convince you and what is reasonable to believe. Are
there any things out there are? Well, let me ask you a question.
Are there any things? Yes? That was actually admitted at the beginning.
So Matt just contradicted himself. You don't believe, but you think it's
reasonable for other people to believe. Yeah, exactly, other people at different
times. Yes, as I already alluded to. But no, of course
I think I'm reasonable. Okay, So I'm not saying you're not reasonable.
I'm saying there are other Sorry, we might be running out of That was
to me on track. Did you want to finish that question? Have Matt
responded and all that him go? No, Like I gave an example in
my opening statement, like, at least from what I saw with your engagement
with Alex O'Connor, you do not believe in person? What's wrong? What
the hell does Alex O'Connor have to do with this? You've mentioned him twice
he's an atheist. What the discussion wasn't about? Uh, Matt, why
are you getting mad? Brouh? It perfectly relates to the question because it's
an example of a situation where you disagreed with cosmic skeptics veganism, but you
don't think that it's unreasonable for him to have the position. So Matt realizes
he's caught, and that's why he says that, Okay, what I'm trying
to find is that there is a belief you're not convinced of, but you
wouldn't say is unreasonable. Do you think article veganism that Alex endorse is unreasonable?
Right? Yes? And I was getting ready to get that to that
in my response. So but yeah, all I wondered was because there are
things I reasonly disagree with others. I don't know if you do, but
it's your turn, all right. So I mean, does everybody see the
stupid thing that Matt just did there? I mean, that's a huge problem
what he just did, Matt. I'll give you nine minutes stuck whenever.
And this is that This means that basically Trent won this debate precisely because Matt's
whole argument hinges on this reporting of psychological states being an argument. And if
that's not an argument, then Matt hasn't really provided any example, justification or
criteria for why he doesn't accept the testimonies of people about resurrections. Now,
maybe the resurrection testimons are false, but the point is that Matt's got to
give an account for evidences, proofs, and reasons on his worldview that can't
rely on descriptors of what Matt finds unconvincing, right, which is reporting his
own psychological state. Reporting your own psychological state is not an argument for why
it's unreasonable to believe in a resurrection. So, yeah, the first time
I've had an advertisement in mid debate, especially one for a debating a dating
site, and since I'm neither catholic nor single, I'll just skip it.
But that was kind of cool. But nobody asked you about the ad,
so you'll skip it. I mean, it certainly wasn't an offer, Like
what are you talking about? So I wanted to thank Trent from the start
because he said something that was incredibly true and that other people frequently get wrong.
He's like, I'm on a channel where they're advertising stuff. I'll skip
it. It didn't relate to you, dude, what are you talking about?
Opening, Which is my position is is not to show that it's not
reason or that it's not reasonable believe it. That it did happen, and
not to show that it's reasonably that it did not happen. I don't have
to be convinced that it didn't happen. I just am unconvinced that it did.
And so on the issue of Alex So Matt doesn't understand the difference between
reporting psychological states and making arguments. I mean, that's really what we conclude
from those, whether or not his ethical veganism is reasonable. No, I
don't think it's reasonable. Of the claims that Craig Keener, Since you referenced
him found about resurrections, how many of them was he able to confirm actually
occurred? Well, I don't know, because I haven't spoke with him about
how many he believes happened. I think, how many do you believe happen?
I don't know. I've heard a claim. Well, there's one by
a guy named Simon Kimbongu in nineteenth century and Africa, who had a reputation
for raising people from the dead that Robert Price cited as an example of having
evidence similar or less than to Jesus. And that's possibility. But I'll be
frank, I haven't investigated them thoroughly because I'm not setting out to debunk them.
They could have happened, they couldn't have happened. It doesn't really change
my major views on things. No, wait a minute, now, I
agree in principle with Trent's point there, But what Trent just conceded there kind
of concedes the whole point of this debate. If it doesn't really matter that
these people were resurrected, then doesn't that presuppose that Jesus's resurrection is something unique
and different. So if jesus resurrection is something unique and different, it's unique
and different than these other resurrections that Trent doesn't really care about confirming or denying
because the system of Christianity is true. So it's not actually a debate or
an argument about the fact of the resurrection. It's actually an argument about the
systems themselves. Atheism as a worldview, Christianity as a whole world being paradigm.
So I haven't really set out to say they don't happen, but I'm
open to them having happened. It's quite possible. Okay, if I was
mad, I would at least likely happening now or that resurrection. Sorry,
so you notice that Matt wasn't sophisticated enough at all to basically do anything.
I mean, Matt hasn't given any argument other than to state his own status
of unbelief. Okay, yeah, we know, Matt, like you're here
as an atheist. We know you don't find all this stuff convincing, or
else you wouldn't be an atheist. So where's the argument? Still waiting?
But again, Matt doesn't know the difference between reporting psychological states and arguments,
which some stories it's it's possible, but I think that it would be very
infrequent. How do you know it's possible because because Jesus rose from the dead,
And now Matt is not intentionally swift enough to see that he's actually hit
on a good point. But the point you can, you guys can see
the point I would make here, right, So, the only reason Trent
believes that resurrections are possible is because he believes in the resurrection of Christ.
In other words, because he's a Christian. So the Christian paradigm determines Trent's
belief system in terms of what is and is impossible. But if Trent understood
that, then he would be a presuppositionalist, and he would admit what we
think, he wouldn't be doing this type of argumentation, and you know,
just sort of assuming that things aren't theory laden and whatnot, because the very
things he's saying basically admit that beliefs and belief systems are part of a web,
and that the the individual beliefs and words and meanings are theory laden.
And if they're theory laden, then it's a comparison of worldviews. Oh,
I mean, that's the thing we're debating. You don't get to assume that.
How do you if you're if you hang on, if your belief that
that resurrections are happening now is based on the fact that you think now,
I will actually get mad a point here. This is actually a good point,
right, because Trent is presupposing that resurrections are possible, and they're possible
because of the supposed stack of evidence that makes it plausible or possible that Jesus
resurrected. But the meaning of resurrection isn't independent of the rest of Christianity.
So if Matt swift enough, he should call him out and say, well,
the resurrection only has the meaning that you think it has in the Christian
paradigm. There's no brute factuality about resurrections, like having some significance outside of
the Christian parent or not. This is resurrected. That doesn't mean that your
belief is reasonable. That just is a cascading unreasonableness. Well, no,
because I gave an argument for why it's reasonable to believe Jesus rows from the
dead based on the evidence provided, and so if he rose from the dead
and he's divine, he could have power to work miracles today or throughout history.
So you're basically saying that you're willing to accept a claim of a resurrection
as reasonable without any physical evidence. Well, what what kind of physical evidence
would a resurrection have, especially one in the past. We would just be
trying when it comes to a claims are in the past. Everything is in
the past, right, I'm asking you, well, are you willing to
accept a claim of resurrection is reasonable in the absence of any physical evidence.
Here's where Matt's messing up, because Matt doesn't understand that altern has to do
is keep turning the question back on him about the criteria of proof and evidences.
Right, That's what Trent already did. And I'm SU's going to continue
to do it because Matt is missing the whole point. Mean by physical evidence,
well do we have you know, I mean the criteria that Matt is
going to demand for physical evidence of things in the past is literally going to
undercut the possibility of all history. That's so dumb, and Matt can't grass
this doctor's reports on the cause of illness and death and then a period of
time where they were confirmed to be dead, and then a period of time
where they were confirmed to be living again after that, And this is so
low IQ like, So we should doubt all people's deaths until we have doctor's
reports that confirm the time of death and a period in which they can be
watched to see for sure that they're dead. I mean, on Matt's grounds,
we don't have any good reason to believe in anyone's death without that.
This is so silly with medical examinations, and how do you know you're not
just being can Okay, So you're saying to be reasonable, I think I
see your tracking here. For it to be reasonable to believe in resurrection,
you'd have to affirm a person did exist and they died and they were seen
alive after their death in some cases. The important points there I was I
was specifically asking about with a lack of physical evidence, and the physical evidence
that I would be talking about is medical scientific evidence. About that in picture,
it's not that you know, that wouldn't be physical evidence. That would
be another kind of testimonial evidence from someone like a doctor who says, Yep,
this person is dead, because I'm very familiar with what you know,
what, Matt doesn't really have a coherent account of what would actually constitute physical
evidence, and he doesn't understand that again, that's all going to be like
based on presubpositions, right, and assumptions that this is a reliable piece of
physical evidence, that a doctor really wrote this, right, and he just
admitted that you could be conned. Well, yeah, but so could you.
So your own criteria of what counts as physical evidence can't give an account
for physical evidence, right. It's begging the question, and it would undercut
its own self. It's a dead person. Now, modern medicine is fairly
new, so in older resurrection accounts like the one we're currently debating, we
would have to rely on other kinds of testimony. And I think it's very
likely, Well, basically, what happened is that Jesus did die from crucifixion
based on all the details and all the accounts related there. So you're willing
to accept that an individual rose in the dead with nothing more than just testimonial
evidence. It's amazing to me that this debate is progressing like this without actually
just getting into epistemology. I mean, that's what's at root here. Maybe
Trent thinks that if he went into that route, Matt would like, you
know, skip out, because he would be like, I'm not here to
debate of postemology. I'm here to debate the rose reduction. You know.
Maybe that's why he doesn't kind of push on that domain, or maybe he
will later. I don't know, but I mean it should be evident by
now that, like, isn't it obvious that these two people have totally different
criteria of truth and evidence and that that's a prior question to arguing about the
resurrection itself, because Matt doesn't have he seemed, I mean, at least
Trent has some ideas of what would count as evidence and that kind of a
coherent presentation of how we would go about that and what that would entail.
Matt doesn't even seem to have any clear idea about distinguishing evidence, what counts
as evidence, the criteria of evidence, and his own psychological descriptive state of
unbelief, like he doesn't know the difference. Well, how do we know
that anything happened in the past? I don't know why you won't answer the
question I'm asking. He's asking you. He's answering your question on the basis
of what you're saying. If what you're saying is true, Matt, then
really we wouldn't know anything about the past. And so Matt doesn't actually adhere
to the empiricism that he claims to adhere to. He's not really a skeptic.
He's a skeptic when he wants to be a skeptic, and then a
dogmatist when he wants to be, you know, making an argument or trying
to refute people, or trying to argue for evidences. Are you're saying you're
willing? Are you saying you're willing to believe a resurrection with nothing more than
testimonial evidence. I am willing to believe that Jesus Christ died by crucifixion under
conscious pilot. It is not the question I asked, why is it any
time I asked a question to go back to something that's not the answer.
Is it my time to ask questions or not? I thought this whole thing.
You can ask to be able to interrupt, to read direct. I'm
willing to let you answer if you will answer the question objection your honor non
responsive? Are you saying you are are you saying are you going to keep
trying to talk over me while I'm asking the question again? Are you saying
that you are willing to believe that a resurrection occurred based only on testimonial evidence.
Will you allow me to answer the question sufficiently? I promise I can
do it in less than thirty seconds. It's a yes or no question,
Trent, Well, it may not be, Matt, because you might be
setting up a false either or, so you don't. You can't force a
person to answer in an either or or a yes or no if it's a
loaded question. Right, So Matt is acting like there's no such thing as
loaded questions, and Matt's getting nervous because he's he's losing, all right,
And the same this exact same thing happened in the debate with me, where
when Matt wasn't able to either understand or apply to the arguments I was giving.
He starts getting like this, right, and this is a way to
filibuster and deflect and get away from the actual meat of the matter. Right.
So there's multiple reasons why people do this. Some debate, but I
think that if you look at the body language and look at Matt's kind of
shifting around and moving around in his gamer chair, you can tell he's getting
mad because it's not that Trent isn't answering his question. It's that Matt doesn't
like the answer that he's getting and it's causing him to be a little you
know, he's getting a little nervous. Yes, I believe that people can
testify to things that happen, not what I asked. I said, are
you will fine? Yes? Yes, yes, If you only want to
answer know, then yes, it's not interesting. I wouldn't have conceded that.
I would have said, you just because you're the interlocutor, you don't
get to ask loaded questions, right, So that's the way I would have
responded to that. I'm not saying that he's necessarily making a bad move in
conceding that to Matt. Uh we'll have to see where it goes. I'm
I'm not here for interesting. I'm here to find out what's reasonable. And
here's the crux of it, which we have this discussion. Well, Matt,
actually he asked you multiple times what counts is reasonable and what counts as
proof and evidence? And your attempt to explain that was garbage gibberish because I
don't I don't have any follow up questions after this. And that is this,
You are willing to accept that are an extraordinary, miraculous event occurred based
only on testimony, and I am not. That's it. That is the
foundational difference between our epistemology. I will. Well, the problem with this
is that now now he's Matt's using big words which he doesn't know epistemology.
I mean again, if Jesus was raised from the dead, then it's not
extraordinary that people rise from the dead, Right, So Matt keeps just saying
that it's extraordinary, it's extraordinary extraordinary, which Matt hasn't shown that it's actually
extraordinary, because it's only extraordinary if Christianity isn't true or Matt's view is correct.
Right, Matt's skepticism and atheism is the case, then it is.
But I mean that's what's in debate here. So both sides kind of keep
making arguments as if their positions are true. So we've seen this from Trent
and we've seen it from Matt. But Matt is really kind of unraveling here.
Not except that the physical understanding of the universe was suspended for an individual
based only on testimonial accounts. It is unreasonable, Matt. You don't have
an account for the physical understanding of the universe. And I drilled this home
in our debate about ten times in a row, where I kept asking you
for an account for the principle of induction, which underlies science and your supposed
naturalistic understanding of the universe. Right, so you think that there's a scientific
materialist account for the universe which rests upon the principle of induction. I said,
can you please give an account for the principle of induction? You didn't
know what that was or how to do that, and you said there is
no account for it. So, actually, Matt, it's you that is
the dogmatist and the arbitrary person here. Well, that is how you get
conned, is how magicians us no, I didn't. But it's my time,
isn't it. If you want to pontificate, go ahead. I did,
and now I'm done. Why is the acting like this? I mean,
this guy like can't debate right, like he when he does this,
he shows that it's and it's not because you can't get heated in a debate.
It's not like if you get heated, oh you're losing because you get
no debates get heated. They get you know, they're passionate. They you
know that that's part of debate, right, and so there's nothing like it's
talksic masculinity if you get here. I mean, what did Matt Frad say?
You can interrupt, you can get heated, you can you know,
be rude. But really, Matt again, I thought I thought that I
was toxic for being that way in a couple of debates, and here you
are saying you can do that. They're getting heated. By the way,
where's Matt like getting hurt and telling other Matt to leave? Right? Shouldn't
Matt Frid be telling Matt d to leave because he's being toxic here? I
mean, I don't know if if Matt thinks that that was some kind of
own like he's he's popping you know, like raisinets or like milk duds in
his mouth, like that was some big self owned there. You should have
let me show you this, because this is what he did was funny.
He's like popping milk duds in his mouth after that kind of heated little band
there. Look at this. Watch this accept that are an extraordinary, miraculous
event occurred based only on testimony, and I am not. That's it.
That is the foundational difference between our epistemology. I will not accept that the
physical understanding of the universe was suspended for an individual based only on testimonial accounts.
It is unreasonable. That is how you get conned. That is how
magicians question. No, I didn't. But it's my time, isn't it.
Yeah, Matt, it's your time to do cross examination. Gibber does
he not know? I mean, this guy doesn't even know what he's doing
in the debate to the extent of what you do in debate, right like
you do opening statements and then you cross examine. And Matt's just ranting about,
yeah I did, and now I'm done. Watchn't pop up milk butt
in his mouth? Here, it's like, I mean, dude, like,
did you think that was some kind of own by ranting pontificating? So
you just wasted your cross examination with with that? Yeah, good job,
dude, really good job. Okay, now I'm looking forward to this part,
and I think we'll get the super chats right over this because the next
part Trent's gonna cross examine Matt and the Wow. Right, Like, I'm
it was already kind of heated. So I'm gonna bet that Matt's gonna get
pretty uncomfortable now. But Trent might back off and not want to get into
agitated. I would I would go full in. I'll be like, just
drill into that dude and pin him. Matt, how would you like to
proceed? All right? Let me is a discussion time? But I just
try wait, just discussion time. So two so opening statements and then cross
examinations and nothing else. I thought you were doing a formal debate. Now
it's discussion time. Come on, dude. This would have been perfect for
Trent to just nail him. Yeah. Well we'll move into twenty minutes of
discussion. I want to kind of maybe kick it off by asking each of
you a question. Would that be okay, Trent, do you think that
uniformity of the laws of nature provide evidence against miracles? I think, well,
actually, no, the uniformity of the laws of nature are necessary for
something to be a miracle. In my opening statement, I gave the example
of a life jacket, like you notice an orange life jacket because the water
around it is totally this is you know, really it really would have been
so much better if they had done another like rebuttal or cross examination, because
I mean he could have just like bodied Matt right, like he could he
could have just like demolished this this guber And I mean Matt is a you
know, kind of the king of self owns, So I don't guess that's
absolutely nests area. But it looks like in the description of the show they
go for open discussion, which I'm going to skip past a lot of this
and I'm just going to go to the closing statement. So let's see if
Trent kind of nails him in that, we'll listen to the question that's asked
to Matt, but then we may have to skip copte different So if you
didn't have uniform laws of nature, we wouldn't have any way The word miracle
actually comes from a Greek word that means sign. So if God were to
make a sign of his intervention in the world, it have to be different
from the natural world around us. Otherwise we just say, oh, well,
that's like how everything goes. We wouldn't we wouldn't notice it. So
I don't think that it's evidence against it. I think rather that we have
to think, Okay, well, I agree with Matt. We should try
to figure out how the world is. But the world is a strange place,
and so there are things that upset the apple card it and this may
be one of them. And so I say, is this an exception to
a general rule we have just like we have discovered other exceptions. For example,
for fifteen hundred and I promised to be done for fifteen hundred years.
In Europe, people thought swans were always white. That was their uniform experience.
But then there was testimony in sixteen ninety seven that black swans have been
found in Australia. But it wasn't like, oh, we can't possibly believe
that. It's like, oh, it might need a little bit more.
But if it's sincere reliable testimony that actually shows the world's very different from what
we know, and I think the same can be done for the resurrection.
Matt, why don't you respond to that question? Then I'll ask you a
question and I have Trent respond and then you guys can get into it is
just how you want to do it. Well, this is I just want
to ask each of you one question and give you Tom both time to respond,
and then I'll let the two of you go at it. So I
just wanted to give Matt a chance to respond to you. There. So
yeah, Actually, I'm in agreement with Trent. I the law and in
order for something to be considered a miracle, it must violate the laws of
nature. There needs to be ordered. So, Matt, on what basis
do you believe that there are laws of nature? As a supposed skeptic who
is now citing David Hume, I mean, David Hume points out that you
can't justify belief in the laws of nature because you don't have a justification for
induction, and you're trying to cite David Hume, and now you're what not
following David Hume. I mean, again, if you're going to say that
there are these things, you're going to have to give an account for them,
because on Matt's own standard of justification, his own standard of what's rational
to believe, it's only believe things that you have sufficient strong empirical evidence for.
But what is the empirical evidence for a law of nature, a universal
state of affairs? Matt as an empiricist, Oh, you don't have a
basis to believe that, And if you read David Hume you would know that.
Or to recognize the thing that's different. That's not controversial at all.
I think it's absolutely hilarious though, at all the people in chat who are
claiming that I'm angry and rude when during my questioning time, I'm just trying
to get a question across. Uh oh, Matt's butt her that the audience
is laughing at his emotional outburst where he's obviously butt her. I mean,
yeah, Matt, you are losing, and I would say you pretty much
already lost. If Trent can really kind of drill into the nonsense that you
you've been saying for the last hour. Funny, oh my message everywhere in
the chat. That's that, That's just how it goes. Actually, I
mean I could drive that. I wish I could drive. I wish I
could drive to Austin. I'm only three hours away from you. We could
grab a beer or whatnot. It's it's just folks. Once the quarantines over
do it, I will when this quarantine's over, I'm up for my second
inoculation in like two weeks. I think, what is this? Like,
what's this? This the sacrament of the stabb's here? This is ridiculous.
They're like, uh, I mean, what's in these pints that Frad is
serving up? Is it like pints of pure soul? I mean if you
look at the rotond appearance of aquinas, probably is right. I mean,
like, uh, you know, I think I'll pass on the soy pints
with with Frad and and del Hunty, there we can do in the studio
atment. Well, I'm older, so I'm older and diabetic, so I
got my appointment. All right, here's a question for Matt. I'll let
you cringe, is right? Dude? What what are they even talking about?
Let's go get oh, I can't have diabetes, like dude. Wilford
Brinley respond and then Trent you can respond to him, and then I'll let
the two of you feel free to have a conversation. How does Matt have
an audience? I literally don't, like, they're just mean a giant horde
of like just the most low IQ Internet people, like, how does this
guy still have followers after like dozens of self owns that are mean material that
should be viral? I mean, I just don't get it. Matt can
testimonial evidence alone make a belief reasonable on his own note, But the testimonial
evidence is always viewed within the pool of things we already understand. If you
say I got a new puppy last night, that is reasonable for me to
accept because I know that puppies exist and people get them for pets, and
there's nothing extraordinary that everything about that your claim is consistent with what I already
know and understand to be true about reality. Okay, So Matt, like,
dude, do you understand how many times you've contradicted yourself? Because you
just asked if testimonial evidence was enough to believe in a claim of Trent about
five minutes ago, and when Trent said yes, you laughed. So,
Matt Frod just asked you basically the same type of question and you said yes.
Because if somebody says they got a puppy, it's reasonable to believe that.
So you do believe that it's reasonable to believe in testimonial evidence alone.
But you laughed at Trent for saying that it's reasonable to believe in testimonial evidence
alone. Dude, Matt, you're a joke why experience and evidence, So
it's not you could view that as, oh, I'm your testimony alone is
enough, But that's a colloquial thing. That is us saying I will take
you at your word. But the truth is when I say that, I'm
saying I will take you at your word considering all the mountains of evidence I
have about how the universe already works. Yeah, but that's begging the question
because the debate is about resurrections and whether they're reasonable, and you're basically saying
that I will only accept resurrections if they're reasonable. And then when you say
what's reasonable is testimonial evidence, and you say testimonial evidence plus physical evidence,
But there's no physical evidence of things in the past, so it is reasonable
for testimonial evidence only in my criteria what counts as evidence, which is physical
evidence. But Matt, you're just you're just you just admitted that the very
thing that you called out Trent for is something that you can accept for you
when it fits your presuppositions of what's rational and reasonable. So it's it's a
circle here, right. So Matt believes that resurrections can only be known or
proven through the very things that undercut the possibility of anything from history being true.
Matt doesn't understand that his criteria are undercutting the possibility of Matt knowing anything
about history. Trent, Okay, Uh Yeah. What I would say is
that in the vast majority of cases, testimony is sufficient. MAT's got a
giant pizza hut glass, like like he's got a pizza hut glass that he
what did he take to e from pizza hut like full of like mountain dew
or like what's what is? What is? I bet Matt is a doctor
Pepper kind of guy, right, I mean, he's got a giant pizza
hut glass full of doctors. But in some cases we we might need a
little bit more. So I think, for example, the resurrection, I
think we have very good testimony. So we have we have testimony going back
to Saint Paul, who was an eyewitness of the Original Disciples, so we
have good evidence to believe, and even atheistic scholars, as I said,
like Paula. Fredericks and Richard Carrier and on this would say that the original
disciples claim Jesus rose from the dead and this was motivated by a genuine experience
that they sincerely thought this had happened. So yeah, I agree, Like
that testimonial is something one person's testimony for the mundane. For something that's extra
mundane, I might need more testimony if it's a group of people and they're
willing to suffer costly punishment for a firm. Yeah. This is where all
of this evidentialist resurrection stuff is terrible, Like it just falls apart, Like
I mean, it's not it's a non sequitor from the fact that the apostles
went from being scared to being willing to die that the system of Christianity is
true, right, because it's that's only a good argument if Christianity is true.
But that's what's in question. I mean, aren't there countless people who
die for false religions? So the fact that a person is willing to die
for the for the position has nothing to do with its truth or falsity.
Ultimately, so, uh, this is just piss poor, just terrible classical
evidentialist arguments that always fail and will never convince the atheists because they're not challenging
its presuppositions. This belief, then, that starts to raise the likelihood the
belief is true most things we believe about. Nearly everything we believe the world,
for example, is based on testimony. Like, yeah, this is
a great point, right, I mean, Matt believes all kinds of things
merely on the basis of testimony. And I even had one of my friends
a long time ago he called into Matt's show back when he did the local
Austin show and ask Matt on what basis he believes in all of his scientific
research that he claims to believe in. In other words, Matt, did
you go verify the papers independently and all the scientists that write those papers?
Well, of course, Matt, No, I haven't done that. Oh
so you believe on testimony of what's reported about science papers and scientific peer reviewed
research studies that those are true, but you haven't investigated any of those studies
empirically on your own. And Matt was like no, and then he hung
up on the guy, because Matt doesn't want to go in the areas where
he's trapped. In my opening statement, if you went on Matt's conclusion and
he even said it was not reasonable to believe Jesus was crucified, you're going
to abandon ancient history and scholarship. Yes, this is a great point.
That was what I was just saying. Everything Matt's saying, Matt doesn't even
realize is going to undercut all of historical research. It's not reasonable. So
now all historical claims are unreasonable on Matt's system. I said I wasn't convinced
it was reasonable. I didn't say it was not reasonable. Yeah, it
doesn't matter Matt that you're not convinced, because that's a reporting of psychological states
and that's irrelevant to a debate and not an argument. All right, we
have eighteen minutes. Trent should have pressed him again on that, because Matt
just again made a serious no. No, you guys have a conversation and
then we'll take thirty minutes of Q and A after that. So if you're
in the livestream right now, just this doesn't go anywhere. If if Trent
doesn't boiled out, drill down, and just kind of just in the whole
Matt thing. Then what we're going to move on to the super chats?
All right, well, how do we do this without? I enjoy talking
with you at your fuck I do too, And and that's gosh. I
wish people could understand that more than just because you know there might be a
minute of rar doesn't mean that we're you know, so you talked about all
Matt cares about as how he's perceived by the audience who we're all just kind
of mocking him and making funny of it. He's like, it's funny that
he's all but her and bothered by this. Uh, and he's trying to
like dial it back and dial it down because he realized he looks ridiculous having
more testimony. And I'm on record as saying the plural of anecdote doesn't datus.
So it doesn't matter how many testimonials you have, that alone is not
going to be enough. And unless you hear that in the broader stream of
things and the way I've ex wait a minute, Matt, So now it
doesn't matter how many people attest to something you said at the very beginning of
your whole thing that it's reasonable to believe whatever most people believe. How do
people follow this guy? Like? This is like? What in this is
that? Like my mom? Okay, this dude is like a walking like
mean like just spits out like from minute to minute. It's just like another
contradiction. I don't like doing this, but my mom is a fundamentalist Southern
Baptist Christian who believes. Oh well, if we're going to get in the
domain of uh like psychological motivations, which you know, Matt seems to like
to play psychoanalysts and figure out the motivations existentially why people believe things. Maybe
now we're beginning to see that Matt's still an edgy seventeen year old rebelling against
his mom has seen demons. Okay, now, I'm happy to believe that
my mom thinks that she has seen something, but that doesn't mean that I'm
I'm justified in accepting that what she's actually that she's correct about what she's seen.
Same with people who are abducted by aliens or claim custory people who claim
their abduct by So it sounds like you're epistemology because if you noticed my opening,
here we go finally yes, try go into his epistemology, which is
garbage. It's nonsense. Oops, I hit the pause buttony man, I
didn't use like natural quick question? Would you set through a free twelve minute
video if I promise to share how I've helped stupid? Hold on, let
me get transformed. The mediocre lives as a result of it. So the
screen is frozen, So hold on a second. I think that the belief
is reasonable. For example, Matt Matt is not convinced of Alex O'Connor's ethical
veganism, but I doubt Matt would say Alex is unreasonable for being an ethical
vegan. Likewise, Matt's personal doubts about the resurrection are irrelevant to whether belief
in the resurrection is reasonable. Instead, Matt has to defend an objective standard
for what makes beliefs reasonable or unreasonable. So let me offer three tests to
see all right? Reason? For example, Matt Matt is not convinced of
Alex O'Connor's ethical veganism, but I doubt Matt would say out, all right,
we're gonna have to go to the super chest because my computer frozen out
there. I might be able to pull it back up. We were just
getting to the good point. I want to see if Trench I think that
the belief is reason goes after it. For example, Matt Matt is not
convinced to Alex O'Connor. Here you are fifty eight. That's a wide spectrum
to go from, Hey, it's unusual for somebody to win the lottery even
though it happens all the time. About what she's seen. So give me
just one second, I'm gonna pull it back up because the window kind of
collapsed there. Same with people who are abducted by it? Can you guys
hear that? Is that kind of the right or claims people who claim their
abduct by So it sounds like EU epistemology because if you notice in my opening
statement, I didn't use like natural supernatural, use unusual because like alien abduction,
that's a natural occurrence. Well, what's the difference between, Like,
there are plenty of things that are unusual in my life, but usual and
unusual unusual is Like, that's a wide spectrum to go from, Hey,
it's unusual for somebody to win the lottery even though it happens all the time.
I guess, like, what do alien abductions, resurrection claims. It
seems like what they have in common is they're disputed h and it don't happen
very often. That seems to be like just basically what they have in common.
So, like what would we use to determine, Like, like,
when would it be reasonable for someone to think they had an encounter with an
extra terrestrial being? I guess I don't. I don't know what it would
take. See, here's the thing. We're talking about two different things.
I don't know what what would it take for you? Like if I had
an experience that I was convinced was being abducted by aliens, that is independent
from what it would take for you to believe that I actually was abducted by
aliens. Okay, what if you you told told me you had been abducted
by aliens and you called me, and like I talked to you at nine
o'clock at night and you're in Texas, and then you call me at three
am and you said I was abducted by aliens and they dropped me off in
Tokyo, And like, hang on, you just invented something that has potential
physical evidence that's completely different. You added something to the story. Well,
I'd be adding more testimony, Like there'd be people who would say, like
I saw You're Japanese fans be like I saw Matt del hunting in Tokyo.
And you know it's not just oh I saw Matt in Tokyo. We could
prove that I was in Tokyo. Okay. So this whole debate is over
the nature of evidence and proofs ultimately, So that's where they're just kind of
going in circles, and that if trend doesn't really get to a point here,
we're gonna have to call it a night because sorry, two, I'm
having a lot of fun. I mean, I'm still ready to go.
I'm still in energize and I will be energized ready to go tomorrow lord willing.
But I'm gonna have to get some sleep. And I don't think Matt's
going to recover from this very well. So if that, but if that,
hell, okay, let's just say we have the physical evidence there,
would you then be allowed to go through this reasoning process. I can't provide
explanation for how I got to Tokyo, so it must be an extra terrestrial
explanation. No, no, no, that's a fallacy. Well then how
would you would that circumstance with the physical evidence convince you you'd been abducted.
No, it wouldn't. No. If my position is I don't have an
explanation for how this happened, I don't get to invent one, and I
don't get to claim it's aliens or angels or gods or demons or anything.
If I don't have an explanation, then I don't have an explanation. As
much as that sucks, that's the truth. So even if like there was
like Independence Day spaceships over the earth, would that I mean, I'm picking
aliens as I'm just saying, this isn't a natural, supernatural question. I'm
trying to figure out, Like you say, we don't have sufficient evidence for
the resurrection. But if you can't tell me what the sufficient evidence is like,
what would be sufficient evidence like? If I guess here, I'll ask
this question and you can rip it apart if you want. Is your position
that you have no idea what sufficient evidence for the resurrection looks like, but
you're confident you haven't seen such evidence. Correct? In the same way that
this has asked me quite often about you know, what would change your mind
about God and my answer. My answer is I don't know what would change
my mind, because it would be arrogant of me to presume that I have
the understanding of reality to be able to tell the difference between a real God
and a fake God. Or this is the feigned humility that they always try
to appeal to, like that their position is the you know, measured,
you know, skeptical one. And oh, I'm not arrogance, so I'm
not going to try to claim. But Matt doesn't understand that the dogmatism that
he propounds actually assumes and makes all kinds of metaphysical dogmatic claims and basically weighs
it, basically slants the evidence such that there is no evidence that Matt would
accept. Is what this amounts to. And so Trent's inadvertently, i think,
getting to the point of presuppositionalism, which is that the problem of the
atheist is not a lack of evidence, it's a bad will. And that's
what romans One says. Men aren't lacking in facts and evidence. In fact,
they misinterpret the facts and evidence willfully. According to romans One, some
being this just powerful enough, or a strong delusion, or an evil demon
or whatever else. But if there is a God, that God absolutely knows
what would convince me and has not provided that evidence yet. Okay, but
then here's my follow up question. If you don't know what the sufficient evidence
looks like, you have no idea what it looks like, how can you
be convinced you haven't seen it? Because what if you've failed to recognize it?
And be like if I this is actually a good point, right,
because Matt has not ever given a consistent, coherent theory of evidences and proofs
and what is the sufficient evidence in proof it's necessary? And yet he keeps
saying that there is no proof. I haven't seen it, I can't find
it, we don't know it, nobody knows. It's not possible, blah
blah blah blah blah, and Trent just keeps asking him, Okay, but
that assumes that you have a criteria of proof an evidence, and that you
know what is and isn't sufficient, But you're saying that you can't presume to
have that. So Matt is literally talking out of both sides of his mouth,
said I have no idea what a hygrometer looks like, but I know
I haven't seen one. Seems like you've left yourself open to you've missed it
because you don't know what it looks like. I would never say if I
don't know what a hygrometer looks like, I would never say I know that
I haven't seen one. Okay, could they say that I haven't seen something?
I don't know what I'm saying? Is that so? And all the
opportunities for somebody to prevent sufficient evidence what they have presented are full fallacies and
testimony. There's no physical evidence. There's nothing that would rise to the level
of being admissible in a courtroom. Uh, Matt, Actually testimonies are admissible
in courtrooms, which you said you don't accept. I mean, does Matt
not know that like courtrooms use testimonies of witnesses. Okay, well, at
least in a courtroom. And I've heard you make this analogy before, and
I think it's problematic for claims related to history because a courtroom is not actually
ordered towards a courtroom is not ordered towards finding the truth. There are biases
in the courtroom to prevent the punishment of the innocent right, So you know,
so I mean, like, I'm sorry, go ahead, I mean,
well, like we don't do. We can't try somebody twice, even
if we get new evidence like it's it's slated so that we'd rather let and
it's you know, a guilty person go free. It's not just about finding
truth. It seems like I'm just I'm wary of those kinds of analogies.
I think we should say, well, what does the evidence point to this
pass and for me good? That's the foundation of my epistemology, which is
what I pointed out in the opening. This is this whole notion about the
bias in the courtroom to avoid punishing the innocent is exactly the same thing.
Is I have a bias in my epistemology to avoid being conned. Oh you
see, Matt, exactly, thank you. So now we get MAT's epistemology,
which he couches as a way to avoid being conned, but which he
doesn't realize is actually his own way to wait and reject the evidence such that
nothing will count to convince Matt of anything other than what he finds psychologically convincing.
So Matt is basically admitting that I will determine the criteria of evidence and
what counts as evidence for me, and nothing else can be evidence. And
so therefore, since God does not meet the standard of evidence that I demand,
there is no God. There you go. Matt doesn't even realize that
that's what he's done. So I think we'll end it there, because I
mean, Matt really just isn't even getting the point and duped into believing something
that isn't true. I want to believe as many true things as possible and
as few false things as possible, and you have to have both, okay,
But Matt, to talk about the true and the false requires a criteria
of truthmaking, and it requires an account of epistemology, and your empiricism and
skepticism by definition can do that, but Matt can it cannot figure that out.
So let's move on to the superchats. We've gone for long enough,
and remember, everybody to subscribe to Jasonalysis to support my work and to support
this endeavor. And you can also get forty percent off in the chalk dot
com store of the supplements the neotropics that are really really good stuff. I
highly recommend it. They work. Try it for yourself just to see.
And let's get to these superchats. So there was one from a couple days
ago that I missed. Victor Ziegler five dollars. He says, I'm reading
your book. I absolutely love it. Dude, which one Part one or
two? Be sure and read part two if you're only reading part one.
I was a bit hesitant, as I'm not much into movies, but the
way that you entangle basically all the aspects of the global oligarchy within the context
of movies is bread. Taking my hands off to you, go bluss.
Hey, shout out to Victor Ziegler. You don't like movies, but you
you are named after the eyes white shut gut. You're right, bro.
Joy for ten bucks, Glory to God, Thank you of your work.
Jay, Well, thank you very much. Joy. Much appreciated. Green
Feathers thirty five dollars. Hey, awesome, Bro, much appreciated. I
got to watch your interview with Tristan. Excuse me, beautiful Tristanna. That
was a great interview. Who was the dude that popped in trying to debate?
That was kind of weird. I was. I thought you and Tristan
were doing an interview and then this dude pops in, like with the low
tier relativism, and I was like, what's going on, but it was
entertaining, so I will share that video. So thank you Green Feathers ELC.
Shout out to ELC from the discord. A big problem problem with the
arguments here is that Matt could theoretically be converted to agree with everything that Trent
says and then go into perennialism. Yeah, exactly, And if we're not
arguing for the Christian paradigm, then the red direction doesn't stand as this it's
not some vacuum. It isn't it wasn't an event that occurred in a vacuum.
The resurrection only makes sense with the Trinity, It only makes sense with
the virgin birth and the rest of the system. Jesus is just one of
the manifestations of God. If we can separate and divorce the doctrine of the
resurrection from the rest of Christianity is what Elc's great point is absolutely then made
by Jimbob twenty five dollars. What's up? He says, I've been using
any argument against existence of God that can be used against the existence of truth,
revealing that no one is without faith. Please critique. Let's see against
the existence of God would also be applicable to So any argument that an atheist
says God doesn't exist because there's no let's say, physical evidence, right,
maybe a Matt approach. Could I take that and replace it with So,
what you're basically saying is that there's no reason to believe in truth capital t
truth in an epistemic way or a logical way or an objective way. Does
that work? I like where it's going. I think that it's kind of
the Tag approach. I'd have to sit and think if you could, if
you could interject truth into every atheist argument, if it would still hold.
I tend to think it might, but I'd have to think about that more
so. But really good question, Jimba. I appreciate that volunteer. Three
dollars. If Matt claimed to be an empiricist positivest epistemology, Wait, if
Matt claimed an empiricist positive epistemology, which he does, and then started to
undermine Trent's entire metaphysical foundation, do you think Trent would be sharp enough to
grassy action and respond, well, well, I guess we will find out
tomorrow night, won't we exactly? Hacksaw Jim Duganism five dollars Glory to the
Father's Son and the Holy Spirit aim into that. Fly Daddy two three four.
Last week you mentioned father deconductor Antoniasis epistemology lecture is a must watch.
Uh, it's the one that he did on Orthodox Shahata, the one with
Lewis. You said, I looked this up in five different ones came up
the one on Orthodox Shahata. Which one are you referring to? That one?
So shout out to fly Daddy and that's the one you're looking for.
Volunteer three dollars. What if an atheist in the debate just outright denies justified
true beliefs and size steps these the theists framework by claiming that he's a pragmatist
in epistemology as long as it works in practice is justified. Well, the
pragmatism actually isn't a justification because kind of bound up in the notion of pragmatism
is some idea of what it means for something to work right. So in
that there's a kind of criteria of value judgments that tell you this works better,
that works worse. We want to do what works better. But those
are all things that don't fit with pragmatism, right. Primatism is an a
metaphysical position. Typically it's a deontological type of position. And yet it's relying
on these types of things. And if we don't have to justify our claims,
then there's no good reasons to believe in pragmatism, And pragmatism can't just
say well, we should really believe in it because it works, because it's
begging the question works to do what works for what right? Then it's going
beyond pragmatism. And if you don't have to justify your claims, that's essentially
saying you don't have to give good reasons for your beliefs. And if that's
the case, then there's no debate, there's no argumentation. Well, emmanual
five dollars is challenging beliefs and considering alternative explanations. Relativism, no, relativism
is not posing theoretical dilemmas. Relativism is adopting a position that there's no objective
truth. When I try to criticize relativism, I get, you think you
have the truth. You are narrow minded, yeah, But for them to
say you think you have the truth is to make a truth claim. They're
being narrow minded. That's the response, Mary is the big dumb dumb ten
dollars. Hey, I took chalk and I was actually able to understand some
of your words. Also, deadlifts are better. Well, I was never
telling you to replace weightlifting with supplements. I mean, do both, Bro,
But thank you for that, dumb Trent's gonna get counseled five since five
dollars. Thank you for everything that you do, Jay, Could God be
with you tomorrow? Trent doesn't know what's coming. Well, I think that
it's gonna be a good discussion. Obviously I haven't. I haven't laid out
my hand tonight. So maybe some of the topics that came up tonight will
come up tomorrow night. I don't know. We'll have to see. But
no, I have a lot of we have a lot of big guns we're
going to bring to the table tomorrow night. So yeah, look forward to
that. Thank you for that. Ken throw five dollars and he says nothing,
thank you doctor GE's treadmill. I think doctor Gregor's treadmill technician. Thirty
dollars. I finally caught you live. Are you hyped up on chalk?
I'm always hyped up? So absolutely Bro, so definitely go get you some.
I would like to thank you for all of the great content. Well,
hey, thank you for supporting the great content, and thank you,
thank you for that. Yes, tomorrow night's debate is in the community tab,
so go over to my channel's community tab. I'll put it in the
show description here too. It's over on Intellectual Conservatism Channel by Suan Sona.
If you haven't seen Suan's debate with UBI, those are great debates. I
highly recommend checking those out. And we'll be doing that tomorrow at seven pm
Eastern, sixth Central. And yeah, hopefully it'll be a good thing,
and it's going to be formal too, so there won't be this like half
of a debate and then do whatever which Matt Frad had them do. It's
going to be a consistently back and forth formal exchange. But one thing I
do appreciate about Trent is that he's civil and he doesn't get you know,
angry, he gets you know, you can get heated, you can get
passionate. But I think is a good debater and I don't anticipate him,
you know, saying anything stupid or you know, it's not gonna I don't
think it's going to devolve into name calling and being mean or anything like that.
I think it's going to be a great discussion, and hopefully we can
convey both positions, you know, at least such that he understands what I'm
saying. Even if he disagrees, at least hopefully he'll understand it, and
I'll understand at least all of why he believes natural theology is the case and
why it should be accepted. I mean, I spent a lot of time
studying and reading that, you know, proponents of natural theology and the Roman
Catholic tradition, so I think I know the reasons why. But we'll let
Trent give his reasons tomorrow. But anyway, thank you guys and everybody,
have a good night, and look forward to