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March 9, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:09
675 Strong Atheism - Rebuttals

Excellent rebuttals from a recent article "The Case for Strong Atheism"

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It's 8, 18 a.m.
on March the 9th, I think it is, 2007.
Sorry, I haven't posted a video in about a month.
I've been quite manically preparing for my life as an itinerant philosopher dans la internet, hein?
What I mean by that is that I have made the choice to go full-time as a philosopher rather than as a marketing and technical executive in a software company.
Because, you know, compared to software, philosophy is really where the money is.
And me, I'm all about the filthy lucre, frankly.
So, sorry I haven't posted for a little while.
I've had some very interesting comments back on an article that I read recently.
Entitled the case for strong atheism, wherein I put forward the proposition that that which is composed of neither matter nor energy cannot be said to be existing, and therefore, since God is considered to be composed of neither matter nor energy, God by definition does not exist.
And I had some quite ribald and rambunctious responses to this article, and I'd like to talk about a few of them here just to see if we can't move the debate forward a little bit.
And I think that certainly I was not clear, and that was entirely my fault.
I was not clear about one particular aspect that is in the article that is worth, I think, talking about just a little bit more, which is this little question called gravity.
Fairly sure it's real, fairly sure it's keeping me on the ground right now.
And people were saying, well, gravity is not matter or energy, and therefore it does not exist.
And that's absolutely true, and I'm sorry that I wasn't more clear about that.
I had talked about that in a previous podcast.
But the question is really what are the properties of matter?
Now, one of the properties of matter is mass, and one of the properties of mass is gravity.
Well, I don't have to explain it, you know, drop a ball and see what happens.
And so we only really know that matter exists because we can feel the effects of it, right?
The light bouncing off it, the weight of it in our hand, the taste of it until our tongue sticks to the cold flagpole.
Lots of different ways of figuring out that matter actually exists.
And the way that we can look at gravity is it's an effect of matter.
So it moves matter, it's measurable, it's constant, it's objective, it's in the real world outside of our mind, insofar as, unlike what we're thinking of right now, it is not subject to our whim, or we can't will an orange to rise above a fruit bowl.
So, that issue that gravity is not composed of either matter or energy, absolutely true.
Sorry for not being clear. It is that matter has an effect called gravity, or gravity is an effect of matter, and that's how we know that gravity is real.
Pardon me. So...
Let's move on so that I can make it a little bit more clear what I mean by that.
Because it seems that a very common response to this issue or this question or this proposition is that God is then redefined to roughly equal that which may exist which has not been confirmed yet.
That which may exist But which has not been confirmed yet.
So some form of dark matter, some sub-subatomic quarkian particle, or some super-string dangling in the fabric of space and time, that God is redefined as anything which we haven't seen yet, but which might exist.
And, of course, that's an unassailable position.
I mean, it's a completely unassailable position.
And I would be the last one to say...
Well, we have now perceived and learned and understood every single thing that we are ever going to perceive, learn and understand about the universe, and therefore anything that we have not yet encountered is not real, does not exist, and must be summarily dismissed out of hand.
Well, of course, that would be setting myself up for exactly the kind of foolishness that countless thinkers have.
Before us have put forward and thus the hubris of believing that everything that is known is known.
It strikes people down and makes them objects of much mockery later on.
640k ought to be enough for anyone.
So the problem is that that I think is kind of like cheating, if you don't mind me putting it that bluntly.
That's kind of like cheating.
Because when we're talking about God, we're kind of talking about something specific.
We're not talking about anything that you want.
If I say I'm talking about a teacup, and then it turns out that when I say teacup, I mean deciduous tree, that's kind of like a cheat, because you and I both know What is meant by a teacup?
If I say, a teacup grows and is alive and you can make toothpicks out of it and it provides good shade in the summer, you'd say, no, actually, teacups don't do that.
And I say, no, no, no, I define teacup as deciduous tree.
Well, have we really gotten anywhere?
No. I've just made up a definition that is not consistent with the generally accepted definition of teacup.
And there's some of that in the debates with, I would call them deists, not particularly Christians, but people who have doubts about making the strong atheist case that God does not exist and just saying, well, there's no evidence for God and we might run across the old guy somewhere floating on the dark side of Mars or something like that.
And I gotta tell you, I don't think that that's a viable position.
I could be wrong. Lord knows I have been in the past.
I could be wrong. But let me step you through at least my way of looking at it, and then you can let me know what you think.
So... God, we must recognize, has several characteristics, even if we just go with the most generic ones, that can't be just redefined as there's some form of Z-rays in the universe that we just have not detected yet.
God, in general, and I don't know of any particular exceptions to this rule or this definition, is kind of like consciousness without material form Omniscience or at least vast, vast, vast knowledge which has not evolved but was always there.
God wasn't born a squalling infant and then grew wise as the eons passed.
Now, the dais, of course, would say that he wound up the watch of the universe and retreated to just watch it tick down and does not take any active interest in human affairs.
Other people, unfortunately billions of them, say that he does take an active interest in human affairs and has damned them because a woman in an imaginary garden who was made from the rib of her husband was spoken to by a snake that could talk.
And so people believe the most absurd stuff in the realm of fantasy religions, not religions, and redundant.
So there's a wide variety of definitions, but when you use the term God, it does mean vastly extended, if not omniscient, and if not all-powerful and omnipotent form of consciousness that has no material form.
If there's some vast consciousness that's out there that turns out to be a planet that is a computer, then we don't say that's God.
We just say, hey, a planet with a computer.
And we sort of go about investigating it.
But it then comes into the realm of that which is detectable.
So when people believe that it was Thor throwing thunderbolts that createth the lightning and the thunder, or the thunder was the horse hooves of Zeus racing across the tips of the thunder clouds above the cloud cover, Then they said, well, this is what it is.
Once they found out what it is, clouds bashing into each other, electrical currents stimulated by the ion activity in the lower atmosphere, something like that.
And then they understand it.
Then they don't say, well, it's Zeus.
They say, well, it has a physical cause.
So as soon as you have a physical cause that is comprehensible...
Then you have something that is no longer in the realm of religion.
It's no longer God. Once you explain it, it's just science, right?
So you can't sort of...
I think you've got to sort of understand that it has to be immaterial and non-physical.
As soon as it's physical, if we do find some sort of consciousness that's in a Z-ray bag on the far end of Jupiter...
We can't detect it.
Of course, if we can't detect it by any means, then it's exactly the same as non-existence.
But if we can detect it through some means, then it becomes a physical property that we can examine and we can understand.
It's no longer God. God is that which you have to have faith in.
Pretty much, by and large, that's the way it works.
God is also... Something, an entity that is the unmoved mover, right?
Is the prime mover. So everything that exists is considered to have a cause.
Ah! Except for ye olde sky god, the dude, the ghost up high, who is considered to be a self-starter, let's just say.
You know, he invented himself by his own bootstraps, has always been there or whatever, right?
So you can't just sort of say, well, if you say that God doesn't exist, I'm just going to redefine God as something which hasn't been discovered yet in the universe.
And then you can't make a positive statement that we've discovered everything and therefore God might exist.
Well, it's kind of a cheat, right?
Because God is something pretty specific.
God is not just a big bag wherein we throw things we have not learned yet or things we have not discovered yet.
Because, of course, then you are making a positive statement about something that exists which you have no evidence for as yet.
In which case, everything exists, not God, right?
What you're basically saying is if you say, well, God represents everything which has not been discovered yet and anything might exist, then, of course, everything exists.
Middle-earth exists, right?
Star Trek exists.
It might be out there, right?
Gene Roddenberry might be an invisible zombie clawing his way through the Arctic ice with no way of us knowing or ever detecting it.
Anything could be possible. That's simply a statement that anything could be.
Anything could exist. And that has nothing to do with God.
That has nothing to do with God.
That's just simply saying you can't make any positive statement about anything not existing.
Right? Which is just another way of saying everything could exist.
Absolutely everything could exist.
So that's not related to God.
However, there are things wherein even the most dedicated, and let's just for the sake of politeness call them open-minded people, sort of withdraw from a little bit when it comes to saying what could exist.
So, for instance...
If I say to you, can a square circle exist?
You would probably have some way of saying no.
If I say to you, can God make a rock so heavy that he can't lift it?
Then, you know, if you're a logical person, and I assume you are listening to this, then you're going to get a bit of a short circuit because you're immediately going to grasp the contradiction involved in that.
If God can make a rock so heavy that he can't lift it, then God is omnipotent.
But if God can't lift it, then God is not omnipotent.
If God cannot make a rock so heavy that he can't lift it, then God is not omnipotent.
And we've gone through this before on the podcast, the all-powerful and the all-knowing thing, so there's just an enormous amount of contradictions, even in the deist concept of God, let alone something like the Jewish or the Christian or the Muslim concept of a deity, which intervenes in human affairs but can never be detected, sort of like those UFOs that only ever show up as a smudge and anal wounds.
And knows exactly what everyone's going to do, but punishes them for it anyway, and says that you need to intervene in the Good Samaritan parable.
You need to intervene in the affairs of the world to make him better, but never does so himself.
All of that kind of nonsense, right?
So even if we're just talking about the most abstract prime mover, wound up the watch, retreated to a sky cave to watch it all unfold, there's significant and enormous logical problems, right?
God is a square circle.
So, first of all, you can't redefine God as everything which could conceivably exist in the universe, or anything, and then say, well, you can't say that that doesn't exist.
God is something pretty specific, and as soon as you start applying criteria to the existence of God, then you're running around basically inventing square circles, things which logically cannot conceivably exist, because they're completely self-contradictory.
There are mathematical theorems out there which have not been proven yet, of course, right?
I mean, there's no question of that.
And so you can't say, I define God as all mathematical theorems which have not been discovered yet.
And then say, well, you can't say that we've discovered all mathematical theorems that could conceivably exist and therefore God exists, right?
That's not a logical thing. Once you start ascribing properties to God, you come up with square circles, and you come up with logical contradictions and paradoxes, which immediately and inevitably mean that God simply cannot exist, right?
So, if I say, God exists, and you say, well, I'm going to define God as all conceivable, true mathematical theorems, right?
And I say, okay, well, then some of those obviously could exist that we haven't thought of, right?
And you say, ah, you see, then God does exist.
And I say, no, because let's define all conceivable, provable mathematical theorems, or valid mathematical theorems, as being based on 2 plus 2 is 5.
Or being based on green plus road sign equals pi.
Just nonsensical, self-contradictory, either nonsensical in the abstract sense, like you can't add a color to a road sign and get pi, or Or, even if we accept the concept of numbers, but we just add incorrectly.
So if I say that there's a mathematical theorem based on pi, but pi is 12 million rather than 3.14159627 blah blah blah.
Well then at some point, right, you're going to have to have a barrier wherein something can't be possible.
You cannot conceivably Have a valid mathematical theorem based on 2 plus 2 is 5.
You cannot have a valid mathematical theorem that has anything to do with spheres, wherein pi is given a constant of 12 million.
And I absolutely, completely and totally guarantee you that that will never, ever be the case.
And the fact that I got the marks I did in math class seems to be fairly evident of that.
They didn't say, well, I can't really mark you on this because in some parallel universe, you could be right.
I just got the marks I got.
2 plus 2 will never equal 5.
2 plus 2 will never equal 5.
And I know that we don't like saying that because then we sound absolutist and close-minded and so on.
There's a difference between an open mind and a slutty mind, right?
There's a difference between a nudist and a hooker, let's say.
So let's be open to new thoughts, but let's have structure around those thoughts so that we don't just say, well, everything is possible and I'm not going to come to any conclusions.
Because, look, all the bad people in the world come to all of the conclusions they want.
What is his line from Wordsworth, a poem?
It says, the best are full of doubt, something like this, but the worst are full of passionate conviction.
The most rational are full of doubt, but the most irrational are full of passionate conviction.
And that's the state of the world.
All of the good, logical, sensible, decent, honest, honorable philosophers and thinkers in the world are all crawling around saying 2 plus 2 could equal 5 in some alternate universe.
We can't make any decisions about anything.
And then we've got all the crazy-ass Muslims in the world saying, I don't know!
Allah is good. Let's blow ourselves up.
Okay, not all of them. There are some who don't speak English.
And all the fundamentalist Christians in the world saying separation of church and state.
Patui, we spit on it. And all the statists in the world saying we need more government programs, more violence to organize the world.
And they're totally certain.
And I don't really think that we're going to do a whole lot of good for the world by...
Aping incomprehension and aping caution and so on.
Scientists are cautious about the application of the scientific method.
They are not cautious about the scientific method itself.
They don't say, well, maybe you need evidence or maybe you can just make stuff up.
So we can be cautious about the application of the scientific method to the questions of God, the questions of morality, and all of the other things which we talk about in the podcast.
And please feel free to drop by www.freedomainradio.com.
We've got 674 or 5, I think this is, podcasts on just about every topic you could conceive of, from dream analysis to family histories.
To morality, scientific proofs of morality, to aesthetic theories, to analyses of Shakespeare and economics and philosophy and all the goody stuff that I think tries to bring the world into a sharper kind of focus.
So I don't think that people do any...
I think it's a kind of fear. And I do think it's a kind of cowardice.
And I've certainly experienced it myself.
I don't mean this to be offensive.
But I think it's a kind of cowardice that people just...
They won't make positive declarations.
Even about things as absurd as the existence of consciousness without matter and omnipotence and omnipotence simultaneously.
I don't have much respect for the discipline of math if they say 2 plus 2 is 4, but 2 plus 2 could be 5 as well.
Then I just know everything's made up and it's just nonsense, right?
And I think that the world is in desperate enough need of philosophy that we should not be spouting nonsense and pretending that it's wisdom.
And I'm not talking about other people who respond to my posts.
I certainly appreciate those comments, but just in general, right?
I mean, I think we need to be made of a little bit sterner stuff than just faffing around saying, well, I can't decide anything, right?
So, let me sort of describe what I mean by this in a sort of more real-world context about this square-circle-ness of God.
So, if I say to you that God is defined as a species of tree that we have not discovered yet, Then I say God does not exist.
Then what you get out of that is I'm saying every possible conceivable species of tree in this or any other planet has been discovered.
Now, of course, that's never going to be demonstrably true.
Even if you scoured the universe by the time you were done, and it only took you a year to scour the entire universe, once you were done, a new tree could have just mutated or popped into existence on some planet you started before.
And of course, such a scouring is logically impossible, unless the speed of light can be cracked.
So, if I say to you that, basically, through my definition of God not existing, I'm saying to you, all possible species of trees throughout the entire universe have been discovered, of course you're going to tell me no.
I mean, naturally. Naturally.
But, you know, how stupid would I have to be to put that forward, right?
And I know that we all debate a lot of people who aren't that bright in the realm of philosophy, but maybe you could try to make an exception for me, at least until I prove otherwise, right?
So... Obviously, I'm not going to get very far by telling you that all conceivable species of trees that could ever be discovered throughout the entire length of the existence of this and any subsequent, if the big crash or the big, if the infinite expansion or the big collapse is true, the next birth of the universe that we now on this planet have discovered every possible species of tree, of course you're going to tell me that I'm wrong.
And it's illogical. And I'm going to look kind of desperate and pedagogical and ideological and so on.
I'm angry at God, so whatever.
It doesn't exist. But that's not really what is being said here.
I think that's taking the wrong approach.
Certainly not what I mean, and it's not what anybody who generally talks about God means.
So let me try and translate that into something which makes a little more sense using this tree metaphor.
So if I say...
That a tree could exist in the universe that is made of gold, is not subject to gravity, can live without oxygen or nutrition, and is undergoing a constant fire.
That that kind of tree could exist somewhere in the universe.
Well, you'd say, no.
No, that kind of tree can't exist.
Because all matter is subject to gravity, right?
So you can't just make up matter and call it a tree and say that it is immune from gravity.
All life requires oxygen or some form of nutrition, because life is around the expenditure of energy and thus needs renewal in some form, even if it's just photosynthesis.
So all life requires some energy.
Gold doesn't burn.
Gold would just melt if you got it hot enough to sort of not exactly be on fire, but if you got it hot enough, it would just melt and then there wouldn't be a tree.
So you can't have a tree that is alive floating deep in interstellar space that is not subject to gravity, that is constantly on fire, but never burns and never melts.
And you could go on and on, right?
Just creating these contradictory characteristics.
And at some point, and I don't know how many of these contradictory characteristics would have to be piled on for you to become convinced that such a thing could not exist.
And please don't give me this other universe's thing.
Well, in some alternate universe, maybe this, maybe that, maybe the other.
But that's not what people talk about.
When they're talking about God.
I mean, yes, you can move God to some other universe, but that other universe is simply defined as that which does not exist.
And if you believe that that's the case, no problem, right?
So you just go to your physics teacher if you don't get 100% on an exam, and you say, dude, come on, in some other alternative universe, my answers which are incorrect in this universe could be right, so who are you to mark me down?
I mean, let's just deal with practicality here.
Let's just not make up realms where anything can be true and then say, well, I can't decide anything.
It's not how people live. It's not how people live.
If some friend of yours gets creamed by a truck and dies, you don't say, well, why would I go to the funeral?
In some alternate universe, he's still alive.
So I'm just going to go and have coffee with him in that universe.
I mean, it's not how people live.
You're just making up stuff so that you don't have to make any substantive or positive declarations about truth and reality in reality.
I would say this universe and the universe, right?
No evidence of other universes.
And that just could be anything.
Anything. That's just a big crazy bag that you put anything that you don't want to make a decision about and say, well, you know, there could be some alternate universe, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well... That's exactly the same as religious people.
That's a religious approach.
If you have a theory about alternate universes, you can't put every positive declaration and shred it into that cheese grate or an alternate universe unless you have some evidence for that alternate universe and its properties.
And until you do, then you can't just make up stuff and say, well, I'm just going to throw anything I don't want to make a decision about into this big bag called an alternate universe.
I mean, it's just not logical, right?
It's just not logical. There's no proof for it.
That's religious, right? Religious people just believe in God because they want to and they were told to believe in God as children and they would have got punished if they didn't.
It's just scar tissue, right? The religious faith is just scar tissue from basically being abused as children in the concepts of religion and, of course, countries and groups of all kinds.
Anyway, we don't have to get into all of that, but...
You can't just sort of make, I mean, religious people say, well, I want to believe in God, so I'm going to believe in God, and I don't care about the evidence.
And that's not scientific, it's not logical.
It's actually very destructive.
Not just your mind, but to peace and society and civilization as a whole.
It's make-up stuff. I mean, it's what racists do, just make-up stuff about other races, and bigoted, right?
And so you can't just make up alternate universes and throw every positive declaration in there and watch it die.
I mean, you can. You can do whatever you want, but it has no intellectual integrity and it's not honest.
And it's also not, it's surrendering the world to all the bad people, of course, but I mean, that's just an effect, but there's no intellectual integrity in it.
You're just making stuff up in terms of religious faith, right?
And I'd ask yourself, of course, why?
Why you do that? I mean, that's a psychological question that we talk about a little bit on our show as well, but it's an interesting question.
Why must you automatically recoil from any positive declaration?
Why were you never taught that things are true?
Why were you always taught that?
And of course, this is always true of the most rational.
The most rational people are told that they can't make any decisions, whereas nobody talks about religious faith and says to a Muslim, you can't believe what you believe because you can't make any positive declarations, right?
This virus of doubt is only and forever applied to the rational people.
Not to the truly irrational people.
So I just sort of ask why.
Why do you feel anxiety when you want to make a positive declaration about truth?
And when you dig into yourself and introspect about that, you will come up with some very interesting, though somewhat painful, answers about your own childhood.
But we can talk about that another time.
So the question really, I think, is to say, well...
What criteria could I have for the non-existence of things?
What criteria could I have for the non-existence of things?
And there's some helpful and useful ways that you can approach this.
I mean, I'm driving right now, and one of the ways that I can tell that it's safe to move forward is that there aren't any cars in front of me.
So, as far as cars go, I know there's air and dust and pollen and pollution and all that, but as far as cars go, really there's no car in front of me so I can move forward.
I'm not bumping into any invisible cars or anything like that.
So, we do have some criteria for existence or non-existence, for sure.
Even the sound waves that are traveling to your ears from my voice up here in Canada...
Have an existence, and you accept that they have an existence, and you accept that what I'm transmitting is what you're receiving, and so on and so on and so on.
So our very communication here relies on the existence and the non-existence of things, right?
If I just went, like if it just had one noise, then that would be constant, but there has to be existence and then non-existence of wavelengths in order to, for this to be translated into human speech.
So, if you're understanding what I'm saying, which I hope you are, then clearly you're accepting automatically and through your autonomous nervous system, you're accepting that there is existence and there is non-existence, even in the waveforms.
The pause is between my speech, so I'm not just one high-pitched, get-the-paddles kind of whine.
Let's make my turn here.
So, at some point you're going to have, I would think, just even at the base logical, empirical, and sensual kind of position, you're going to have some criteria for non-existence.
And that criteria for non-existence is going to be one of two things.
It's either going to be that there is no evidence, there's no matter or energy or effects of matter or anything like that.
In a universe without matter, there'd be no such thing as gravity, right?
So gravity is an effect of matter.
The same way that a blind man can know that the sun is out because it's warm, right?
You don't have direct sensual evidence if you can see the effects or feel the effects.
So at some level, there's going to be a criteria for non-existence.
And it's either going to be, well, there's no evidence of existence, right?
So the car ahead of me, I can see a car ahead of me, a Mazda.
So I know that there's a car there.
I'm not going to drive into it. But if there's no Mazda there and the lights are green, then I'm going to move forward.
No other car. So there's sort of sensual, physical evidence, no matter or energy.
There's the effects of matter or energy, right?
Heat or gravity or whatever.
And that's sort of the one scientific Or empirical way of determining whether something exists or not.
Is there a car in front of me? No.
Could there be an invisible car in front of me?
Well, yeah, I guess some James Bond guy could be racing around, but it's not really my general premise when I'm driving.
Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to drive anywhere.
Now, the second criteria for non-existence, which is, sorry, actually the first, but I sort of wanted to go from the outside in.
The second criteria for non-existence Is logical consistency.
The logical consistency of a theory or a proposition or a statement.
So, to metaphorize this just one more time.
Just, ooh, give me just one more.
Just one little more. If I want to build a bridge that's going to accept five garbage trucks at the same time, it has to be a pretty strong bridge.
Now, the first thing that I'm going to have to do is figure out the tensile strength that's required and the materials that I'm going to use and their properties to be able to carry that weight and resist rain and wind and hail and all that kind of stuff.
So I'm going to have to figure all that stuff out before I build the bridge.
Now, if I make a substantial calculation, like an order of magnitude calculation error, Then anybody who's checking my work is going to say, don't build the bridge because you said 10,000 here when you really meant a million.
And so your bridge is not going to work.
It's not going to hold. It's not going to...
It may not even hold its own weight, let alone the weight of all the trucks.
And the same thing, of course, is done with theories, in terms of scientific or mathematical theories.
The first thing that happens is they're checked for logical consistency.
And then you go about testing them, if that's possible.
Psychology less so. But the first thing you do is check a theory for logical consistency.
Now, if the logical theory is completely inconsistent, self-contradictory, then non-existence is a given.
Because reality is logical and consistent, and therefore something which is self-contradictory cannot exist.
So if I say to you there's this amazing plant that will cure cancer that's in the rainforest and it has these properties and it's been used by these people and here's 12 eyewitnesses and here's the before and after picture of their tumors and here's the doctor's testimonials that this stuff works, whatever that I have to do to prove you that this at least is a chance that we should go and take, then we go in and try and find this plant and so on, right?
Well, that's going to be something that may be worth doing for you if you're, say, Sean Connery.
But, if I say to you that there is a plant in the rainforest that cures cancer, and that plant flits around on wings of fire, it burns itself into ashes in a phoenix-like manner, and then resurrects itself in a puff of pixie dust within 10 milliseconds, and it sort of explodes in and out of existence every 10 milliseconds, and it's completely invisible, but you can see it.
And it has mass, but it's not affected by gravity, and that it does not require any food, and whatever, right?
Whatever I put forward, at some point you're going to say, you know, I think that you're insane.
I don't think that this plant cannot exist.
This plant cannot exist.
Let me just sit down with a biologist and say, I believe that there's such a thing as a zebra.
That lives in the ocean, has 98 tentacles, has 6 million eyes, and is completely invisible, and flies through the water exactly as you would through the air, has nothing but feathers, and can't breathe underwater, and lives at the bottom of the ocean.
Well, the biologist is not going to say, my god, man, let's go look!
That's going to make us a fortune, my friend!
No, he's going to say, no, that can't exist.
You can't have something that lives underwater, that can't breathe underwater.
I mean, you know, it's just not possible.
Not possible. And biologists don't say, well, yes, you could be right in some alternate...
I mean, that would be ridiculous, right?
That would no longer be a science.
It would just be a sort of made-up fantasy land of basically cowardice and self-abdignation.
But... But that's the important thing to understand.
Whatever your criteria for non-existence is, and if you don't have one, then of course this is just coming across to you as...
Because there's no variation in the sound waves.
There's no presence and then absence of sound waves that modulate this into speech.
If you understand what I'm saying, you automatically accept that there's such a thing as non-existence.
There's an absence of sound waves. So you have to accept that there's an absence.
You have to. I mean, you can do whatever you want, but it's completely mental to not accept that there are things that don't exist.
I mean, if you can't get that, then we have no basis for discussion, right?
And it's not a stalemate.
It just means that you won't admit even the most basic of logical truths, right?
In which case, you're just like a virus of anti-thought, right?
There's not much I can say about that.
So, once you accept that there are some criteria for non-existence, and the fact that my speech modulates, or whatever, right?
Even the presence and absence of certain patterns of light are what create the video image.
So, So once you accept that there is such a thing as non-existence, that red is a non-existent manifestation of blue, blue is not present in red, I mean, other than, you know, whatever wavelength and complications and so on, but in general.
Once you accept that there's such a thing as non-existence, then you have to figure out what your criteria is for non-existence, and I would say, composed of neither matter or energy, nor manifesting any effects of matter or energy.
And prior to that, logically completely contradictory, self-contradictory, a square circle, a plant made of gold that needs no fuel and never lives and never dies and is invisible but you can see it, and so on and so on and so on, at some point it becomes impossible, right?
And sure, let's talk about alternate universes.
Show me some proof, right?
If you can reach through the time-space continuum and tickle my forehead, it's not hard to find, then I will be absolutely impressed and let's go make a fortune together because that'd be pretty cool.
But, so forgetting this alternate universe thing, which is just a load of nonsense, right?
It's just a big crazy bank. You put in anything that you don't want to make any decisions about.
And good luck if you say, oh, I paid my taxes in an alternate universe, so you can't prosecute me, right?
I mean, the moment that somebody actually starts using this alternate universe in something other than to undermine other people's certainty about even the most basic truths of reality, I will be really impressed, right?
That would be somebody really living by their ideals.
But this alternate universe is only ever trotted out when...
People wish to undermine other people's capacity for rational certainty, which makes it just a tad suspicious in my view.
But let's get our fabulous lighting system going here.
Oh, look at that. I'm orange.
So yeah, you've got some criteria for non-existence, I think, which are absolutely essential to figure out.
Logical consistency, self-contradictory things simply cannot exist.
Something cannot be both a bird and a rock simultaneously.
This is just the nature of reality.
This is not something I'm making up.
It's not a man-made rule. It's just derived from the nature of matter.
It can't be created or destroyed.
Something cannot have consciousness without matter.
Consciousness is an effect of living matter.
It's an effect of the mind. The mind is an effect of the brain.
So you can't have consciousness without matter.
Any more than you can have light without a light source.
So that is another way of sort of understanding the contradictory nature.
You can't have omniscience and omnipotence at the same time.
It's a square circle. It's totally self-contradictory, right?
Because if you know the future, if you're omnipotent, you know the future, which means you can't change it.
If you can change it, you invalidate your knowledge of the future.
So this is another example of non-existence, right?
Something simply cannot exist if it is self-contradictory.
So I hope that this makes some sense.
I hope that this is useful. Thank you so, so much for listening and for watching, of course.
I really do appreciate it. I'll try to get some more videos out when I go full-time, but so far that's still a little bit of time away.
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