Discussing several questions of faith in this materialist world.
The Halting Problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92WHN-pAFCs
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I'm sure by the time this is up on YouTube, I will have come up with some sort of catchy title for it, but it's not exactly a sort of thesis-driven video that opportunes itself to a fancy, pretty summation in the introduction.
So I'm just going to jump right into it.
And I think you guys, hopefully, you guys will all get something out of this, because Max asks a very detailed question.
So he starts.
I've just read through the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky.
And it struck me in many places how similar the Inquisitor's vision of the future was to your project on Leviathan.
Which, Max, by the way, thank you for prompting me to go reread that because it has been years, years since I read anything by Dostoevsky.
And you're absolutely right.
It perfectly fits in.
And the passage I quoted in my recent video about the CIA, I will likely be quoting in that book as well.
Max continues.
I was raised Protestant, so there are at least a few things that are hard to understand.
The Inquisitor says that only a very few people have the wherewithal to enter the kingdom of heaven, narrow is the gate, and he was one of the few that did have the wherewithal.
Oh sorry, he was one of the few which did, which gave him authority to say that.
Dostoevsky was probably that way himself at one point.
The way I was taught is the John 3.16 way, that whomever has belief will gain eternal life, though they may sin and ought to minimize their transgressions.
Outside of the story, I struggle with the idea of Pascal's wager.
If agnostic immediately before death, pick a god and pray.
What should St. Peter say?
And what if you followed every rule from a simple fear of hellfire?
All right.
There's more to the question.
We'll get back to that in a second.
Now, the Inquisitor in the Grand Inquisitor, the eponymous Grand Inquisitor, There's a certain curse to being an intellectual.
You know, I once read somewhere that priests are the people most at risk of hellfire.
Because part of being a priest is knowing a little bit too much.
And it's similar, I think, for intellectuals, which is what the Grand Inquisitor is.
And it's what, to some degree or another, because it's not a black and white thing.
Okay, I'm going to talk like it's a black and white thing.
Like, we're some sort of high and mighty ubermensch super race of people.
That's not my intention.
You've got to bear with me.
Sometimes we've got to simplify things so we can actually talk about them.
Is that, yeah, you know a little bit too much.
You know, you see, your average Joe out there, he's not thinking about the economy or the damned Illuminati or whatever other thousand and one things that we're worrying about.
He's worrying about keeping his job, keeping his wife happy, making sure his kid gets good grades in school, and etc.
It seems like he's not worrying about much, whereas we're worrying about a lot.
And so, in that sense, he's maybe less aware of evil.
But you know what?
That guy, and he's probably not down for a deep theological conversation.
He'd think this video was pedantic and tedious.
That guy's got his temptations.
That guy knows that he used to party, he used to drink, and sometimes, you know, he goes to a bachelor party or he hangs out with the wrong friend.
He wants to go back to that.
He's like, oh, that was so much.
No, I can't do that.
Otherwise, I screw up my entire life.
So he's got his own temptations.
I think the issue with being an intellectual is that you can see the temptations of others.
You know, being a priest, you hear them in the bloody confessional.
And as horrified as you are by it, part of you wants it.
Part of you becomes desensitized to it.
You know, C.S. Lewis commented that as much as there are probably pains in heaven, the pain of listening to Ode to Joy, for example, that's incredibly painful and beautiful.
There might be pleasures in hell.
God save us from them.
And the intellectual is a little bit better at seeing those pleasures in hell.
And so the Grand Inquisitor, having no faith in God to fix him, he did not want to be fixed.
He was proud to be broken.
Decided that he was going to embrace the pleasures of hell.
And I suspect there are many in the church that do that willfully.
Not priests that have been so overwhelmed that they crack, but those that went into the they went into the service willfully planning to subvert it.
And they gave up the pleasures of the flesh for the pleasures of control.
It's a broader implication that Dostoevsky made against all the Jesuits.
don't know how true it is, but the current alleged Pope.
See, faith is not belief.
The devil believes in God.
He's seen God.
He knows God exists.
But he has no faith in him.
His is an act of will utterly in absolute disobeyance of God.
And the terrifying thing is we have that capacity too.
We're not like the animals.
Okay, the animals, they learn something of guilt, something of good and evil from us.
Anytime my dog does something she's not supposed to do, and I catch her doing it, she knows she's being sneaky, and she feels a little bit guilty, and she's playful about it.
You know, wolves don't have that.
She is better than any wolf.
But she doesn't truly have the ability to sin.
She's the ability to be sneaky and not do what I told her to do, but not to hate me.
She does not have the capacity to hate me.
To she can do these minor little rebellions when she's so hungry and that steak on the counter looks so damn good.
But she can't hate me.
She can't choose to hate me.
We can choose to hate God.
And that's terrifying that he gave us this agency.
And at the same time, we're half animals.
And half the time we want things that to do them would effectively be hating God.
And so yes, faith is the answer.
Faith isn't merely belief.
Okay?
I mean, sometimes my belief wavers.
Sometimes I don't know what God wants for me.
And far too often I stray from the path.
I got a long time in purgatory, I'll tell you that.
But faith is the returning to God.
Faith is saying that I want to be better, and I know that's impossible, that I'm never going to be better.
I am just this terrible, weak creature, but I want to be better.
And, you know, I ran into this one video talking about, you know, near-death experiences.
And as Christians, we should probably put even less faith in those than the atheists place in them.
Or perhaps I should say less trust in them.
We should be even more skeptical than the damned atheists, because it's a lot closer to home for us.
But I ran into this one story of a man who nearly died from a drug overdose.
And it just, it rang very true.
Where he was saying that, you know, it's like I thought I hadn't been a bad person.
I'd never hurt anybody or murder dad, da, da, da, da, da.
Like, I've never, you know, I thought I was a good person.
And then I found myself falling into hell.
And I saw it happening.
And I shouted out, Christ, save me.
And then I woke up on the operating table.
Or ambulance, or whatever.
So if we go back to the simple man, who is just concerned about getting a raise at work, buying the TV to keep his kids happy, etc.
That guy knows he's flawed and he's fighting against it.
And he accepts help when he needs it.
The Grand Inquisitor would not accept help.
And I think that's the real question at the core of all of this is what faith is.
you accept help?
Because nobody we don't want to accept help.
That's That's the sin of pride.
Which, by the way, I might actually look into the linguistics and etymology and grammar behind that because there's a huge difference of doing something to make other people proud versus having pride and turning against God.
Two entirely different concepts.
It's kind of messed up that they use the same word.
So yes, by faith alone.
And yet faith producing acts, faith and acts.
Will you act in a manner according to your faith?
And do you have faith to act in such a way that you will ask for help when you need it?
Grand Inquisitor didn't have that.
The masses he tempted towards sin, as vulnerable as they were because they don't obsess over politics, theology, and philosophy like we do, they nonetheless had faith.
All right, let's continue with his question.
In Christianity, miracles only seem to happen in special situations.
I mean the type of miracle that no one can deny with any seriousness that God was the cause.
Not the sort of in the emergency room.
Many people still believe in God for the second type of miracle.
In my youth, I believed I saw a few minor miracles and interventions like that, but now that I'm older, I can't take them seriously.
Now, once I'm done writing this, I'll look at moral proof for God again since I'm lacking the knowledge there, but in all my searching, I haven't found an unavoidable rational proof for the existence of God, nor have I seen a proper miracle.
This is the way the world is.
How could a just God damn all the skeptics?
Here goes my expanded rant about proof.
At least a little bit, at least a little above the average fedora.
The best I can do is call prima causa is called prima causa God.
Remind myself to read about Hume and the Scottish minister whose name I forget.
There is energy, therefore energy can be created.
The way Newton wrote his laws implies that he thought God was a prerequisite.
The ontological argument is garbage, and any teleological argument would speak more about against than for God.
Intelligent design just isn't that great, especially when the person is trying to deny evolution.
Alrighty.
So there's a lot in that paragraph.
Now, first of all, I think we should point out that the scientific understanding of the world is a very, very recent one.
And as absolutely, like, as obviously good and useful as it is.
Science and engineering, automobiles, computers, absolutely amazing.
Unless if it's your job, it's actually pretty useless most of the time.
We very seldom use a scientific understanding of the world to accomplish anything.
About the only time I do it is when I'm fixing my car, and maybe not really anymore.
Like, I used to be big into Linux and all of that, but back in the day, these days, if I need to fix my computer, I just Google the damn question.
So, about the only time I really use the scientific understanding of reality, the objective understanding of reality, is fixing my car.
I don't use science to drive the bloody thing.
I don't use it to figure out the best diet.
I don't use it for anything.
Unless if it's your career, being a full-time engineer, being a full-time dietitian, and even then nowadays, how many of them are actually using the proper scientific method versus just, yeah.
Don't overemphasize the scientific method.
It has its role, it's place.
It's very, very useful.
It's as useful, it's as useful as Latin.
And I think everybody should learn Latin.
I think everybody should learn the scientific method.
I think they should have some practice conjugating verbs and some practice doing some experiments.
But at the end of the day, let's be frank.
You know, it's important that kids learn a little bit of calculus, but most of them are probably never going to use it again in their lives.
And see, that's the real issue with creationism: creationism presupposes a scientific worldview.
Okay?
Nobody 2,000 years ago would understand what creationists were getting on about.
They'd probably agree with them, because if you went back to ancient Israel and sent a creationist back there, they'd probably agree with him.
It's like, okay, yeah, so we're 7,000 years old.
What's your point?
What does this have to do with anything?
Who cares?
The irony is the only people that would care whether or not the world was 7,000 years old would be a scientist.
So they're kind of going after the wrong market there.
They're misunderstanding what the whole thing is about.
Now, you're not going to find that objective proof of God in this world any more than if you examine the water within a vase.
You know, a vase full of water.
you examine the water, you're not going to see the vase.
You'll see implications.
You'll see suggestions about the vase, but you won't see the vase itself.
Such as it is with our universe.
Now, I encourage you to look more deeply into Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
Or the halting problem.
Here's another great example of this: the halting problem.
And see, these do not prove God.
But what they aren't saying suggests God.
What the Gödel's Gödel's incompleteness theorem, very briefly, what it boils down to, is that math, which is the most intrinsically true thing we have, can't prove itself to be true.
Think about that for a moment.
Think about what a profound disconnect that is.
When Gerdol discovered this, when he proved this, he mathematically proved that you can't prove math true.
That's astounding.
That is mind-boggling.
And the halting problem is just a more practical version of this.
That if you imagine a machine, imagine a computer that tests whether or not a program will halt.
For instance, like if you give a the example, I'll link it to a video down below, but you have two computers.
One is a chess-playing computer, the other one is a calculating computer.
And so if you put a 2 plus 2 into the calculator, you get an answer.
You put 2 plus 2 into the chess computer, nothing happens.
It halted.
And vice versa.
You put a chess move, it's all good.
Into this one.
It halts.
Now, why don't we build a machine that can detect whether or not a computer will halt?
Well, the halting problem proves mathematically that you can't build that computer.
And yet, now, on the one hand, you can never know if a program's halted.
You know, when your browser freezes and the little circle starts spinning, it might just be thinking.
It might take a million years.
It hasn't technically halted.
And what computers do is when a program halts, it just, if it's hanging for too long, it just says, it might have stopped.
We don't know.
You want to kill it?
Start it over again?
Because we can't know for certain that it's halted.
The only way we can know it's halted is to let it hang until it's not halted anymore.
And yet, and yet we are able to say that this program is clearly crashed.
Same way we're able to say mathematics is clearly, obviously true.
Even though we also know that it's impossible to prove that.
Yeah, if you look for God, you're going to find these little hints here and there.
You will find patterns, and many of these patterns are basically miracles.
But at the same time, these patterns are inbuilt into the universe.
This is why my study of strategy really was part of what led me to faith.
Is because strategy is so obviously true, so absolutely true, and yet you can't put it into bloody words.
You can't make strategy mathematical.
It's the higher thing above mathematics.
And either there is something higher upholding all of this, making it true, God the judge, God the lawgiver, the God that says 2 plus 2 will always equal 4, no matter what I feel like, or else everything is feeling.
And you get the Islamic stance.
You know, I will fulfill my oath, God willing, that God could always change his mind.
Nothing is set in stone.
So, you know, who cares?
Just do what you feel like.
Incidentally, also the attitude of postmodernists and SJWs, which is why they love Islam so much.
They hate God the judge, God the lawmaker.
And thus they reject God the Christ, God the Forgiver.
So let's, and here's the last paragraph.
I'm not sure Leviathan is such a bad thing if done properly.
If there isn't a God, of course, Earth is the only place we are certain to have.
Why shouldn't we build a kingdom of conscience after the kingdom of heaven?
They said the ends doesn't justify the means.
It would absolutely be wrong if we murder an organ donor to save someone's life if we value human life.
In that case, we would have murdered someone and saved someone else.
The means must be included in the ends.
That being said, religion, true or not, could be a great thing.
I enjoyed going to church while I was a teenager.
It benefited and developed me.
Atheism is like racism.
Due to its history, some won't dare be realistic about it.
Though awful things have been done in excess for what seems to be true ought not to make it taboo, I still tend to agree with him.
If I sit through public school history and the greatest story I've never told and okay, okay, so I'm yeah, the greatest story I never told, a documentary series on Hitler and the Nazis.
You'll learn a fair bit watching it.
Or should you believe your school teacher, or should you just believe whatever is popular?
If you go and actually talk about World War II, you know, you make a YouTube video about it, you're going to have Thunderfoot calling you a Holocaust denier.
You know, so should you just believe whatever's true?
And should you believe that if you want to be popular with the 1488s, that Hitler was the greatest guy ever?
Or should you believe that he was the red skull and be popular with the mainstream?
all of this actually let me address you know i think this is all summed up early in that paragraph Ends justifying the means.
Down below, I'm going to link to a Flash video game about philosophy.
It's called Socrates Jones, I think.
And I've never seen a better and more straightforward and easy to digest critique of utilitarianism.
It's the thing with utilitarianism, the problem with building heaven on earth, is that every single time, like you start with the value that we value human life.
Okay, so let's murder that guy and steal his organs and save 12 people.
Well, okay, we value human life so long, and then you add a patch.
Okay, so we no longer murder that guy to save 12 people.
You add a patch to it.
But then you wind up with another enormity.
And so you add a patch for that one.
And for the next one, and the next one, and the next one.
Add nauseum.
You never have enough patches.
The problem with utilitarianism and the problem with trying to build heaven on earth is that we take the good, okay, that thing up there.
And the good that involves human dignity and saving human lives and human flourishing.
It's all these things.
And we take this and we try and bring it down into objective reality.
And every single time we try and do that, as soon as we try and become God to say what is good and what is evil, an enormity results.
This is why the founders of the American Constitution, they created negative rights.
Not positive rights.
They weren't saying these things are good.
They were saying that these things, trying to do anything against these things is evil.
We're not saying these things are like, is freedom of speech good?
Well, not if you're doing it for the sake of calumny.
Freedom of speech is not good if you are using it to misinform.
And yet banning freedom of speech and saying this will be the speech allowed, that's evil.
So the founders of the United States allowed a lot of stuff that would be evil.
I mean, there's certain freedom of speech is banned, like libel, etc.
Clearly demonstrable harm is banned, as it should be.
But stuff we can't quite say, like we know it's wrong to spread a lie about history.
That's wrong.
You shouldn't do that.
But does that mean that we should ban any question about the Holocaust?
And America would say no.
The rest of the world is saying yes right now, but America would say no, because the inquiry matters.
Anytime we try and say what is true, we fail.
We can sometimes, through the legal process, accepting its limitations, say what is wrong, but we cannot say what is good.
And that's why we need God.
Anytime we try and become the arbiters of good, anytime the water inside the vase decides to say that it's going to decide what the container is, everything falls apart.
We are just not capable of that.
That is the limit on us.
The same way that mathematics cannot prove itself, we ourselves cannot say what is good.
