Speaker 1: Understand the thinking atheist. It's not a person, it's a symbol,
an idea.
Speaker 2: The population of atheists in this country is going.
Speaker 1: Through the rule, rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred.
If I tell the truth, it's because I tell the truth,
not because I put my hand on a book and
made a wish and working together for a more rational world.
Speaker 3: Take the risk of thinking. Feels so much more happiness.
Truth Usian wisdom will come to you that way.
Speaker 1: Assume nothing, question everything, and start thinking. This is the
Thinking Atheist podcast hosted by Seth Andrews.
Speaker 3: My INTERVIEWEAT today a compelling and wonderful guest. As always,
we had an imperfect connection, so there's a little bit
of phasing on the audio. I don't think it's a
deal breaker, but I beg your patients at indulgence. There
is a video of this exchange the YouTube link in
the description box of the show. Having a conversation today
with the gentleman who was there at a pivotal time
in my life. I was coming out of Christianity, I
was beginning to actually I was in the middle of deconstruction.
Stumbled upon his book Godless, and it just I mean,
it made an amazing impact. So it's always cool when
I get a chance to cross paths with Dan Barker.
He is the author of many books. He was an evangelical,
hardcore Sunday go to meet and preacher for a great
many years, co presidents of the Freedom From Religion Foundation,
and author of a new book called Controduction. Dan, It's
good to have you back, brother.
Speaker 2: Good to see you again. I've also been influenced by
your books too, so I guess it's a cross pollenization here.
But I do have a complaint. Seth Okay. You gave
me one of your wonderful mugs of thinking atheist mugs
and you signed it, but your signature is washing off,
and I.
Speaker 3: Don't I think that's symbolic. No, that's indicative of life.
Speaker 2: That is, I have to get another one.
Speaker 3: I'm fading over time as a human being. So I
think this is probably a you know, symbolic of my life.
The subtitle of your book fascinates me, the hidden fallacy
that inverts reality. I feel like we live in an
inverted reality. I mean, just as far as the headlines
the people I live around. Do you ever feel that way?
Speaker 2: Dan? Yeah, and that was kind of the point of
the book. And by the way, the publisher took the
subtitle off of the book, it's just now called contraduction.
I had wanted to subtitle the book the Death of
the design argument. But contraduction, as you point out, it's
a new word, and it's still not in the dictionary,
but a lot of people are embracing it and using it.
It's a fallacy that in virtu reality we get things
totally wrong. And like I said in that debate, you
were at that debate in Florida where this whole thing started.
It's kind of like the guy who's so impressed, And
how did they make all those rivers flow right along
the state border? How did they do that? It must
have been an immense expensive civic project to exquisitely fine
tune those rivers to perfectly match the borders. Well, of
course that's backward, right, it's inverted. It's what i'd call contraductory.
If you think about things the wrong way around, you
won't see the real picture. And this, of course applies
to what a lot of people say is the strongest argument.
It's not a great argument, but the strongest argument for
a God is the fine tuning argument, where we think,
look at how look how the universe is exquisitely fine
tune for life. Well you can see where that's going,
can't you.
Speaker 3: It's a word that you made up. Is it a
Dan Barker word?
Speaker 2: It is a Dan Barker word. In fact, you were there.
Do you remember the debate in Florida a couple of
years ago. You gave a talk at the Free Flow
and I was debating Adam Lloyd Johnson, and during his
opening statement, if you remember, he said, I'm not going
to argue for the biblical God. I'm arguing for mere
theism using abductive reasoning. And I thought, abductive. You know
how often do we hear that word? Well I knew
what it meant. And as I got up in my rebuttal,
I said, abductive is the week is kind of reasoning.
It's really just kind of a best guess, you know,
the best explanation. And I said, I think Adam's thinking
is backwards reversed, and what we need. And you can
see this during the debate, I was ad libbing. I
was thinking, we need a new word, not abductive, we
need a word and I said, how about post deductive?
We need a word this shows it wrong, that has
slipped around wrong. And the audience did not seem impressed
with that because I was just add a living. But
later I was thinking, so well, word is doing you.
We don't need a prefix that means after, We need
a prefix that means inverted. So contraductive. We have deductive reasoning,
inductive reasoning, abductive reasoning for whatever that's worth. Then, and
I think we have a fallacy that precedes the reasoning
called contraduction, where we if your premise that you start
with is reversed, your whole argument is wrong.
Speaker 3: Dan, how many debates, I mean, just ballpark? How many
debates have you done over the years.
Speaker 2: I don't need a ballpark. I've been keeping track since
nineteen eighty five February, where I did my first debate
as an atheist with doctor Ruble Shelley in Nashville, Tennessee.
I have done one hundred and forty formal, public, moderated
timed debates like the one that use one hundred and
forty of them. And I don't count informal debates or
TV talk show debates or radio debates as actual debates.
So I don't count the debate I did with William
Lane craig on National TV because it wasn't a formal,
moderated debate. It was more like a you know, casual conversation.
So one hundred and forty debates as of right now.
Speaker 3: I'm going to come back to William Lane craig in
just a second because he's famous for kalam and it
will explain for those who don't know what the colomb
cosmological argument is. Do you find it when you're talking
to just every people. They're not theologians, they're not apologist,
or don't play in that sandbox. Some of that stuff
gets really esoteric, especially when it comes to the lofty
language that comes out of the mouths of the experts,
the god defenders. They go way off into the weeds.
Do you ever find people kind of glazing over, checking out,
like you've got to literally rope them and drag them
back into the conversation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because there are these specialty fields like the philosophy
of religion or philosophy subfields like fine tuning, and all
these words that are very important and useful words that
the experts used to talk among themselves. With, but the
people on the street aren't part of that little subculture,
and so it sounds like gobbledygook, Which is kind of
why when Adam Johnson used that phrase, I'm going to
use abductive reasoning, I wanted to kind of demystify the word.
It's just a fancy word that just means, hey, it's
our best gas, you know, And so you can say
the same things using simpler words. But you're right. I
was walking by the Jehovah's Witness booth on campus a
few weeks ago, and this young man there was telling
me about the truth and we get along pretty well.
So I stopped and I asked the guy. He seemed educated.
I asked him, oh, so tell me what is your epistemology?
And he just stared at me. Huh, what is your stemology?
He goes, what does that word mean? So he's college educated,
but he doesn't even know the word epistemology. And I
guess I don't blame him. If you're not running in
that little circle or that circle of thought, you're not
going to know those words.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but how much of that do you think is
I know this is a subjective opinion, but by one
hundred and whatever debates under your belt? How much of
that is just the weaponization of language to impress, right,
let me use a lot of syllables, therefore I shall
sound credible. It's almost like those you know, intelligent design
apologists who talk about the quantum and they just go
way off into these really lofty sounding terms to overwhelm
people and sound credible.
Speaker 2: Well, then they're bad debaters because the debater is supposed
to relate to the audience and communicate with an audience
in ways that an audience will understand. And if I
don't think they're always obfuscating, I think they genuinely use
those words because they're common words to them in their field.
But it almost sounds like sometimes they're talking down to
the audience. I did an audience with Richard How. We
did two debates. I did one in Florida and then
another one at the apologist conference for the Southern Evangelical Seminary.
And Richard how at the first debate we did, he
got up before that university audience, not Tampa, at the
university there, and he had brought a big trunk with
him and he unloaded the trunk and put the stack
of books by the podium on the floor, and during
the debate he was telling these students, you're not going
to understand any of this unless you've read as much
as I have. You know, there's so much depth behind
all of this. In a debate tonight, we're not going
to be able to go too deep. So trust me,
I have read all these books. Look at him, And
of course that backfired. That was like insulting the audience. Yeah,
you can refer to author I refer to authority sometimes,
but mainly to quote what they say, not just to say, hey,
look at there's all these authorities. So if your only argument,
or if your main argument is an argument from authority,
you don't really have an argument that'll stand on its
own feet.
Speaker 3: You talked about the rivers that outline the states and
how amazing it is that those were created just to
border us. Some reminded I think it was a Douglas
Adams argument that talked about the pothole and the rainstorm
and the water had gone up and had said, Wow, look,
this pothole is made perfectly for me. The edgies are
formed and the depth is absolutely perfect. This must have
been designed with me in mind. Would that be a contraduction, Dan, It.
Speaker 2: Would be yes, if such a thing actually happened. I mean,
it's a good metaphor. I suppose. Another one would be
look at the human nose. Look how perfectly shaped the
human nose is to support a pair of eyeglasses. How
do you explain that? Look at the perfect fit?
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: So that's contraduction, that's just thinking the wrong way around.
I think the earliest and most powerful contraduction in the
human species is the idea or the impression that the
sun rises every morning. The sun rises, right, Well, actually
it doesn't. It's only because from our point of view.
We are looking at the world like I think all
organisms have to start from their own point of view,
and it looks like the sun is rising, assuming a
geocentric or a flat earth concept. But actually the sun
is not rising. That's contraductory. It is we who are rising,
and so we use the word sun, right, even those
of us who know that it doesn't mean what it says,
we know the sun's not rising, we still use the word,
which is just a convention of language, I suppose, because
what else would we call it? Oh, look the horizon set,
you know. I mean, that's a weird way to flip
your mind around and the illustration I start the book
off with, and by the way, thanks for giving me
a good endorsement on it. Have you ever been sitting
on a train that's not moving when the train next
to you starts to move and you briefly think it's
you who's moving, or on a plane or a car.
I think has happened to all of us, and we
get it totally backward because we're looking at it from
our point of view rather than from outside of our
point of view. That's contraduction.
Speaker 3: Do me a favor for those not aware define the
Kalam cosmological argument.
Speaker 2: So Kalam is an ancient Islamic word that for Islami
scholars who first developed this idea that since you can't
have an infinite series of preceding events, there had to
be a first event, right, because if there was an
infinite series of preceding events, we never could have got
to now, but we have got to now, So that
means there must have been a beginning. That Kalam argument
has been spruced up in modern times with the knowledge
of the Big Bang and people like William Lane Craigan
others are saying, well, now the Big Bang shows that,
in fact, indeed there was a first event, the Big Bang,
And so the argument goes, everything that begins to exist
has a cause. The universe began to exist, therefore the
universe had a cause. On its face, that reasoning is valid.
It's a good deductive argument assuming the premises are true.
But it turns out that the conclusion is not valid.
The conclusion is not sound. It's well, in my book
I explained that this really a category errors. What's happening here?
Speaker 3: I think Kalam was added after they started with just
a cosmological position the universe has a cause, or everything
that is has a cause or something. But then they
added the word begins. I think because they wanted the
starting block where they could, I guess, stick God with
a starting pistol there at the beginning of the race.
And it seems to be a deistic Oh go ahead, Dan,
go ahead.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, but I mean begin. The idea of beginning
was implicit within the early Colomb argument, is I see,
because of the impossibility of an infinite preceding events.
Speaker 3: You know, But yeah, Dan, isn't that just a deistic claim?
If that I mean when I see William Lane Craig,
and I've been to his website, it talks about everything
that begins to exist has a cause, and then there's
just paragraphs pages of word salad and a huge canyon
size leap to his specific deity with a proper name.
But Kalamb itself is not a theistic position, right.
Speaker 2: It's just the columb itself, which just supports the theistic position,
supports it in that there must have been a first
that must have been a beginning or a first cause.
Speaker 3: Yeah, But I mean, in all these debates, how do
they get from point A to point z.
Speaker 2: Well, in the debate that you saw that prompted this
new book with Adam Lloyd Johnson, he was honest enough
to say that I'm not arguing for the God of
the Bible here tonight. I'm arguing basically for mere theism,
whatever that means. And I'm and there's actually there's another
book coming out about that debate, and I'm asking, well,
what is mere theism? Are we supposed to offer it
mere worship? You know what? Obviously he's a Christian and
he has an organization, a Christian organization called Convincing Proof.
But he came to the debate unwilling to defend his
own personal God. He just wanted to defend this concept.
So the kalamb argument and some of the and the
fine tuning argument, other types of these arguments are really
just an attempt to give a scientific plausibility that that
that God could then plug into. It's not those arguments
don't prove God. But what they do is they show
that their theism is not incompatible with science. There for
you are justified in making the leap if you want
to go further like and believe the Bible or believe
all those things.
Speaker 3: More on thinking upside down and then trying to flip
it right side up with my guest Dan Barker. Next,
Continuing now my conversation with author Dan Barker about his
new book, Controduction, Dan. I just released a speech to
YouTube where I take on God the intelligent designer with
some ideas for improvement. So I was talking about bad
design that you know, those who are talking about fine
tuning and optimization. I mean it was everything from the
appendix to harmful UV rays, to the birth canal to
blind fish with eyes. I mean, you name it. But
when you get into the concept of controduction, you get
into fine tuning, how do you approach someone says, well, man,
if the Earth was this much closer, this much further
from the sun, we would either fry or freeze. How
do you explain that?
Speaker 2: And that is the essence of the fine tuning argument.
And it's important to point out that the fine tuning
argument is based on natural laws, natural principles, natural probabilities,
and real mathematics in the real world. So, yeah, it
does seem improbable if the universe were tuned for life,
any one of those twenty or so parameters or constants
that could be the forces like force of gravity, electroweak force,
the cosmological constant, and so on. There's about twenty or
so of them. If any of them were off by
the tiniest amount, then life would not be permissible. That's
assuming that life is the aim right, It's like the
rivers and the borders, right, it's assuming you've got it backwards. Yes,
life would not be permissible. But who in the world
said that the cosmos has to be aimed at life
being permissible? And in Victor Stanger's book The Fallacy of
Fine Tuning, he was a wonderful man. He died not
too long ago. He was an astrophysicist. He concludes the
universe was not fine tuned for us. We were fine
tuned for the universe. It's like the glasses in the nose, right,
You've got it backwards if you think the universe was
fine tuned for us. And he shows that actually it's
true that if you miss with one of those constants, ooops,
the whole thing falls apart. But he shows in his
book that if it's like dials, imagine God stumbles upon
this primordial soup of constants that he has to like
twist them until he finally makes life up here. Victor
Stanger shows that, yeah, if you twist this one off
this much, then life's not permissible. But if you twist
this one this way, like writing a bike, you could
stay in balance. You could have a universe that is
life permitting, maybe not necessarily carbon based biological life, but
you could have a life permitting universe with other variations
of those constants being tuned in a different ways. And
he gives examples of it, and I can't even understand
his all of his equations, but he gives the exact
examples and then Lawrence Krass comes along and he said, well,
you know what, some of those constants are not that
fine tuned. The cosmological constant is very tiny, but it
could have been less. In fact, as Krous points out,
if the cosmological concept were even smaller than it is,
life would be more probable. So there's all those ways
that you can approach it, but I think the basic
way is just to go like, you know, like Gilda
Radner on Saturday Night Live, she realized, oops, I got
it wrong, and she says, never mind. We were thinking
about it the wrong way around, like we're looking through
the wrong side of a telescope. Oops, never mind, I
got it wrong, and flip it around. Then you can
see how things are. It's only because we humans think
the cosmos must be aimed at us, because we are
all human centered, that we tie ourselves in knots, kind
of like what Ptolemy did with this solar system. In
the second century. Ptolemy came up with what's not as
the Toolemac solar system. He couldn't understand the motion of
the planet, so he invented this weird Rube Goldberg machine
concept of spheres within spheres to account for their retrograde,
and this really complicated thing. When all he had to
do is realize the Sun's and I rising, we are,
that whole thing just disappeared. You don't even need the
argument because there's no question there in the first place.
Speaker 3: When you were an evangelical pastor. How much of this
was I guess what Carl Sagan would have called the
folly of human conceits. How much of this was I
want to be superior, right, I'm feeding the ego, I
am the center of all things. Did that feed some
of your perception about the universe?
Speaker 2: Maybe in retrospect, looking back on it, maybe at the
time I didn't think that. At the time, I thought
we humans were worms, We humans were small, We needed
to bow down, shackle our wrists, lower our head before
the Great Master, and that the Great Lord was deserving
of worship, and he's all powerful and so and so
we're sinners and we're little and we need his grace
all of that. So that's what I was thinking as
I was preaching that how great thou art? You know,
we were created for His glory, you know the Westminster
Confession to worship. We're here to give glory to God.
So you know, what is the end of man? So
that's what I thought, that there really was a being
who was deserving of our worship. And the next book
I'm working on is going to address that question. Why
do we have this innate instinctive need to worship anything?
And I think there's a good adaptive explanation for that
which I'm going to argue this whole idea. If you
look at the postures of prayer, you know, prayer, Your
hands are shackled, your head has bowed, your kneeservent, you're
prostrate on the floor. They're the same postures of slavery,
exactly the same if you look at it. You go
to the airport and you see the chapel signed as
a person like this, kneeled down like this, humbled little,
like I'm praying before the big, great Lord. So in
my mind, I had a very negative perception or a
negative image of human nature. We were bad, we were little,
we were small. We deserve damnation and we can't do
it on our own because we're just not good enough,
and we needed the grace and the goodness of this
wonderful God.
Speaker 3: There was no one worthy, no, not one. Yeah, you
get into eternal life as a contraduction. Hope you understand
that where are you going?
Speaker 2: Well? So I have a chapter in the contradiction called life,
And a lot of people think life like it says
in the Bible we have this treasure in earthen vessels,
that life is something that comes from the outside and
inhabits this physical being of ours. And a lot of
religionous think that that we are something that transcends, we
are souls. And there's even some non religious people who
think life is some kind it's called vitalism, that there's
something alive that comes into us, as if these boxes,
these physical boxes call our bodies, are receptacles for this
thing that comes into us. I think that's the contraduction.
Life is not something that comes into us from the outside.
Life is something that emanates out of us. We measure
life by body temperature, at least we measure life by
the movement of the organism. And when the body dies,
people ask, when the body dies, where does the soul go?
Where does the mind go? Well, mind and soul, if
you can use that word soul, mind and consciousness are
really just functions of an organism that's working. The brain,
right When the brain is working, nothing's coming into it.
When working, it's creating this whatever you want to call it.
In fact, we are aware of things, and then when
we become aware of the fact that we are aware
of things, we create these loops. That's what I think
is consciousness what Daniel Dennett called the center of narrative gravity.
So when the body dies, when the stomach dies, nobody
asks where did the digestion go? Or when the heart dies,
where did the circulation go? The word mind and circulation
and digestion are labels for the functioning of the living being.
If you see a plane flying over, how does the
sound of that airplane travel with the airplane? How does
that happen? Well, it's not because the sound is something
outside of it is produced by it. So death basically
is the cessation of all the organs of the body.
And nothing has left, nothing has gone, Nothing spooky went
out of us somewhere. We just died. When we eat
a piece of steak. If you're a meat eater, do
you think you're eating a soul when you eat steak? Well,
what happened? Where did it go? Well, that's backward thinking,
that's thinking that life it comes into you when actually
life emanates out of you. This contradiction. So therefore I
can't live on. And I have a whole chapter in
the book about time too. The whole concept of eternal
life is an incoherent concept, just like it's the same
with the concept of time travel is also incoherent.
Speaker 3: I remember looking at eternity in the Bible after I
left the faith. I didn't really thought it through when
I was a believer, except wow, I get to go on,
because I was afraid of death, and I had this
very nebulous idea of a happy place with color and
light in the family, dog and music and mansions and
all those things. I hadn't thought about those verses where
essentially I sit around and just say, Holy, Holy, Holy,
is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and
is to come forever, Which does not sound like heaven
to me. Dan, And do you explore the concepts of
eternity your own concept when you were a preacher?
Speaker 2: Well, when I was a preacher, it did sounds nice
to me because I was in love with that Lord,
you know what I mean. I was in love with
that God. I truly worshiped, and unlike a lot of believers.
I actually got goosebumps when I was praying. So I
felt this loving, parental, guiding father figure that was with
me and that someday I was going to be with him.
I mean to me, that was attracted. I didn't think
through all the details about. Like Woody Allen asked, the
trouble with eternal life is when does it end?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 2: It just there's no end to it. And in my
book Life Driven Purpose, I point out that real purpose
in life, purpose and meaning comes from trying to solve problems.
That's where purpose comes from. We have challenges, we have problems,
and whatever they are, we work to solve. That gives
us meaning. But in heaven there won't be any problems.
Heaven will be meaningless and purposeless. And if you believe
the Book of Revelation, and a lot of Christians didn't
in the early days and some still don't now, heaven
is just this big cubic city that comes down and
sits on the earth, which is fifteen hundred miles across.
It's a cue basically with one street because there won't
be vehicles. I suppose the street of Gold is for
the king to promenade, you know, to watch out and
basically we we'll spend the whole time just praising that king,
which I used to find an attractive thought into it.
Like you, I thought it through and I realized that
that's kind of pointless, and it's kind of like you're
not even a living being anymore. And there's no sex
in heaven, there's no marriage given in heaven, and there
won't be any sleep in heaven. So what are your
rooms going to be? Like? What are these mansions going
to actually be? Like? Do you have to eat? Do
you have to defecate?
Speaker 1: You?
Speaker 2: Will there be waste management in heaven? I mean, I
think through the details of it, and it becomes a
sort of nebulous, immaterial idea that our souls are going
to just blissfully go up to me. That's the absence
of life. That's not life after death, that's like death
after death.
Speaker 3: There you are in the pose of the slave, right
here on your knees with your hands together, and you
were bowing to the Great King as he parades. By
total digression. This is not in the book, but maybe
it relates. Somebody had said they were talking about why
it was an apologist like an armchair apologist talking about
why there's so much awfulness, so much suffering on this planet,
and one of the sort of the knee jerk responses
is free will. Well, God gave us free will, and
we chose poorly and things went to hell literally, And
so then the next question is, well, will there be
any strife or pain or cancer or abuse or any
of those things now infant death, Will any of that
stuff happen in heaven? And they say no, Well, then
are you saying that there is no free will in heaven?
And then their brain explode. No, no, No, is that a
bad argument?
Speaker 2: Dan, Well, I guess it's not incoherent to make that argument.
I mean, if that's.
Speaker 3: A compliment, thanks, Dan's totally incoherent.
Speaker 2: No, I'm saying their argument is not, oh not yours. Yeah,
your point is very very good, but their argument, i think,
is within the context of their faith system, is not incoherent.
But yeah, you're right if they're saying, and I don't
think they would all say this, that free will exists
so that we can deal with these problems in life,
and there won't be any free will in heaven, because
if you're going to worship God for eternity, would you
have the freedom not to? Apparently that's what happened with Lucifer.
Lucifer was a creative being who somehow had the free
will to change his or it's or their minds. So
I do have a chapter in the book about free will,
which I think is also an illustration of contraductive thinking.
And to make a really long story short, it's kind
of like looking in a mirror. When you look in
the mirror, you think left and right or reversed, but
they're not. It's really front and back that's reversed in
the mirror. And if you can flip that around, you're
actually not looking at yourself in the mirror. You are
looking with yourself in the mirror, and so the goes away.
You imagine that person's looking back at us, but actually
looking through the paper with us. So with free will,
the analogy I use is that looking backward, looking to
the past. I think, and many philosophers and scientists think,
it's obvious that there's no such thing as libertarian free will.
It's all determined if you look back, and you can
look at all the previous causes that led to you.
But flipping around, like looking in the mirror and looking
forward looking into the future. Since we don't know the future,
we don't know what it's going to be now, we
will later will know what happened. We have this illusion
that that mirror is looking back at it. We have
this illusion that since I freedom make my choice between
now and then, even though looking backward will know you
were not, at least for now. We have this illusion,
I think, and some people think it's a pernicious illusion.
I think it's a beautiful illusion, kind of like the
illusion of depth perception, which helps us navigate the world.
I think free will is an illusion, but it's a
useful illusion in the meantime, as we before you make
your final decision, you have that gap. And by the way,
if there's a God who knows the future, he also
knows his own future decisions. He cannot look forward and
have a period of uncertainty during which he's going to
what should I do? He knows in advance. Therefore he
doesn't have free will, like God who knows the future
cannot have free will. I know. They try to argue
out of that by saying, well, he's a timeless being,
whatever that means. He exists outside of time, but free
will in the illustration you gave, I think raise is
another serious problem. And that God created Adam and Eve,
and God is a perfect being and he can only
create perfect things. And yet he gave Adam and Eve
free will, And for some reason, Eve chose wrong eve
exercise for supposed free will, and she made the wrong choice. Ah,
Now the human race is damned because she made this
wrong choice. Seems like we inherited that, doesn't it. It's
like I say, in our genes or something. But why
did Eve make the wrong choice? There was obviously some
flaw in her nature if you believe the story. I
don't believe a story. But if the story's true, why
did Eve make the wrong choice? There was something wrong
with her before she made that wrong decision? Who created
that flaw? If Eve was created by God with a flaw,
who created that flaw and who's responsible for it? So
what good is the free will defense in that case?
Speaker 3: I'm going And this is again a digression. I'll come
back to the end of the book in just a second.
But it becomes infinite regress, doesn't it if we don't
have free will? But then we ask God to change
what his will is then we're asking a perfect plan
to be altered. So was it imperfect to begin with?
Or was God expecting us to pray because he fore
knew we would drop to our knees and petition him
for some alteration, some miracle whatever. And then he's holding
the answer hostage. But he meant to do it. I mean,
you've gone in this sort of hamster wheel, right, it's
maddening after a while.
Speaker 2: There's a big theological word kenosis, which just means that
God emptied himself when Jesus came, And so God created
this physical universe with risk in it, with problems in it,
and with suffering in it, so that we could then
test our free will against that. If God had not allowed,
not created this big mess of the universe, then we
would just be robots. We would just be like the angel.
So God is temporarily willingly allowing the universe we live
in to be a degraded state within which then we
can exercise. And those few of us who do turn
around and say yes to God, He's going to bless them,
and the rest, of course, are either abolished or go
into eternal torment, depending on your theology. So it's all
done for a test in One of the theodicies that
some Christian apologists the theologians offer is the what's called
the character building or the sole building analogy that the
reason we have suffering and evil is so that we
can grow from it it becomes stronger. And how in
the world could that happen unless there were challenges and
obstacles and threats and risks in the real world.
Speaker 3: I know Doctor Norman Geisler used to say that you
have to have the crooked line so that we know
what the straight line looks like. And his argument partially was, well,
how would we know what good is unless God contrasted
it against evil, and then with the evil he can
demonstrate his great goodness, So evil becomes a utility. I
think it was in Isaiah forty five or it was
said that God created evil. This conversation about contraduction continues
in just a second. Hang on. My special guest for
the show today, Dan Barker, co president of the Freedom
from Religion Foundation, author of many books, including his latest Contraduction.
I remember I was I'm trying to think of the university.
It's about half an hour east of here, Northeastern State.
Maybe it was a debate. It was an atheist and
an apologist, and the apologist said something fascinating. He said,
you know, if I wasn't a Christian, I'd probably be
a murderer. I mean, he just said something like that
on the stage. You know, if it wasn't for Jesus,
who knows why I could be a rapist or a
murderer or something like that. And I remember the atheist
guy said, well, in your case, I'm kind of glad
you're a Christian, right, I mean, your case might be
a good thing to be a Christian. But I find
that claim a bit insulting. If you didn't have my God,
you could be I saw one on Twitter this morning,
you would be a criminal. So you get into ethics, morality,
how do we know right and wrong? In the book contraduction,
you want to give me just a primer kind of
set it up.
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, if we look at the example
of God in the Bible, he himself was the genocidal
murderer and what I would call the immoral character. But
I think morality is one of the chapters in the
book Contradiction is an example of contraduction itself, and that
we think morality should be top down, when really morality
is bottom up. We don't measure our actions, or we
shouldn't measure our actions by the decrees and the commands
of some big lord and master. That's what the masters want,
right to know what is right and wrong, because then
right and wrong just becomes a matter of the decree
of the master. But real morality, and I don't think
there's such a thing as objective moral values, but I
do think the values that we hold in our mind
that we call moral can be objectively justified, not by
referring to this top down model, but by flipping it
contraductively and referring to the real world. Morality is really
a measure of harm, and the way to be a
moral person is to act with the intention of minimizing
harm and harm whatever it is, it's natural. Harm is
something real. You can name a thousand things that are harmful.
And so to measure our moral values, we would refer
to the natural world bottom up. What are the actual
consequences of my action, of my decisions? What are the
actual fruit? Should I put this chemical in the river
or should I use this harm? You know what I mean.
That's how we determine what is right and wrong by
actual reference, justifiably referencing objectively in the real world, rather
than following orders.
Speaker 3: I will say, you know, being I'm like you, I'm
a frontline guy. I've read a lot of books, you know,
listen to a lot of audiobooks along these lines. But
I've never seen or read or heard anything quite like Contraduction.
And I think that's one of the reasons that I
was sort of glad to preview it when you'd sent
it out, which is why I had the subtitle, because
it's had that at the beginning. But I've never heard
the inversion phrased and compiled in this specific way. And
it's an easily digestible book. It's not like War and Peace.
I mean, this is something somebody could probably read in
the weekend.
Speaker 2: Right well. Ac Grayling, the Eminem's British philosopher, he read
it and one day he said, and he's read. In fact,
he put a blurb on the book. So it is short,
and it's spread out. It's got some cute illustrations by Marcostelius,
who's a physician in Santiago, Chile. And so I think
it's a fun book. I think it's light, and I
think it just scratches the surface. And I invite readers
to offer examples of their own, from their own field
of what they think is contraductory thinking. So it's starting
a conversation.
Speaker 3: I'm going to petition the dictionary like Webster's Dictionary. This
is a word that probably should be included in the future.
So any final thoughts on the book before I let
you go, No, I mean, just give me the brochure
real fast.
Speaker 2: You should petition Stephen Pinker because he's the editor of
the American Heritage Dictionary and he actually gave a blurb
to the book. Contraduction is an innocent fallacy that happens
to all of us, and not just with religion. It
could be all sorts of things in life. It can
be you know, free will or sleep, or it can
be looking in the mirror, it can be looking at
the sunrise. And in order to combat that and to
minimize the risk of having faulty premises before your logic
even begins, we have to actively look for errors and
fallacies in our own mind. We have to actively look
kind of like a continuity supervisor in a movie production,
looking to make sure that in the scenes everything fits together.
The viewer of the movie doesn't look for that stuff,
but the continuity supervisor does. And so I challenge most
readers to be their own continuity supervisors and look for
areas where we might indeed be flipping our oppression of reality.
Speaker 3: Thanks evangelical author hero legend brother Dan Barker Man, It's
always good to cross paths. I'll link the book in
the description box. All success with it. Good stuff, and
let's talk soon.
Speaker 2: Okay, thank you, Seth, You're a real brother not in Christ.
Speaker 1: Follow The Thinking Atheist on Facebook and Twitter for a
complete archive of podcasts and videos, products like mugs and
t shirts featuring the Thinking Atheist logo, links to atheist
pages and resources, and details on upcoming free thought events
and conventions. Log onto our website, The Thinkingatheist dot com.