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Aug. 13, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:20
840 Religion and Proof (audio of a video)

Three questions on religious proof from a listener

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Hi everybody, it's Estefan Molini from Free Domain Radio.
I hope that you're doing very well.
I'm going to have a look at a trinity of proofs put forward by Christians, which has been reported to me by somebody on the Free Domain Radio boards.
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So here, this is a post from the Freedom Aid Radio boards, which I'd like to have a quick address of.
Gentleman writes, Three things to research from a Christian conversation.
And I'll do a little bit of feedback on this and then talk about a more generalized way of talking about these very important topics with religious people in your life.
He says, I had a good chat with a good friend today who was a Christian.
I was too, until some time ago when I finally decided outright that the lack of evidence or anything close to it was too much.
For me to ignore and that I'd be better off being honest and dealing with the things I feared about leaving the faith as they come.
So far it's been a liberating experience, but arguing my case can be a frustrating challenge.
Oh, I know. Fortunately, I like a good challenge and a good debate, so it's not really a negative experience at all.
In this conversation today, I came away with three things to think about and hopefully find some answers to with some research.
Then I can chat with my friend again, and hopefully we'll dig a little deeper into the truth.
The burden of proof.
To be brief, I put forward that the burden of proof lies with the person making the positive affirmation of existence, or the positive knowledge statement.
My friend agreed, but resisted in acknowledging that this is the whole truth.
I think the question was, how does the person denying the proposition respond when proof is provided?
Since getting home and thinking a little, I have concluded that the person denying the statement does not have the burden of finding fault with any provided proof, or at least proving that this proof is not sufficient, if he wishes to continue denying the statement reasonably.
They need not actively find any negative proof, though.
What do you think? Well, for those who haven't seen the sort of philosophy-sided podcasts or videos that are from Free Domain Radio, from myself, the burden of proof is a really essential requirement, a hurdle, for anybody putting forward positive claims to overcome.
So I've worked quite hard as an anarchist theorist to prove that services which we traditionally associate with the state could be far more effectively provided without a state and far more safely and with no violence and so on.
But the burden of proof is on me.
I can't just walk up to people and say, we don't need a state, and expect them to believe it.
The burden of proof doesn't remain constant throughout history.
The first people to argue that the Sun was the center of the universe, that the Earth was round, had a high burden of proof, because it seems kind of counter-intuitive.
But now we don't need a whole lot of additional proof, or I don't have to go through all the math to explain to somebody that the world is round.
It's pretty much accepted. And the same thing with slavery.
The people who first advocated that slavery was immoral had a high burden of proof.
Nowadays it's not really considered a women's equality and so on.
So there is some progress in the species with regards to ethical arguments that originally are radical and then be taken for granted over time.
This is the case with the existence of God and the evil of the state and all the things that we argue for, at least I can argue for, in this conversation.
So extraordinary claims also require extraordinary proof.
If I make a claim that says somewhere on the hillside of a mountain in the Himalayas is a rock, well, I mean, that's not an extraordinary claim.
We can all pretty much accept that there is a rock lying somewhere on a mountainside in the Himalayas, so that's not an extraordinary claim.
People aren't going to say, Can't be unthinkable and so on, right?
However, if I say there's a fire-breathing unicorn slash dragon slash pixie living on this, then that's a bit more of an extraordinary claim.
You're not going to accept that without, I guess, some pretty significant proof and perhaps a complete reworking of the science of biology.
So... When somebody is making an extraordinary claim, then extraordinary proof is required.
So, if somebody claims that an invisible, incorporeal, omniscient consciousness lives somewhere in the sky or throughout the world but never makes any kind of appearance and is only available through inference in the present, in the modern world, then they're making the claim that consciousness can exist Without matter.
That life can exist without ever having been created.
And that life can exist without dying.
That contradictions like the unity of omniscience and omnipotence can both exist together, right?
So if I'm all-powerful, then I can do anything, now and in the future.
There's no limit to what I can do.
But if I'm omniscient, then I know what is going to happen in the future, what I'm going to do, what the universe is going to do, what you or I are going to do tomorrow, because I'm omniscient.
I know everything. There's no barrier.
Of time which my consciousness or knowledge sort of marches behind.
So, of course, if I know everything that's going to happen in the future, I can't change it.
Because the moment I can change what's going to happen in the future, I don't know what's going to happen in the future.
So, if God knows, What God is going to do tomorrow, or even what I'm going to do tomorrow, the question is, can God change it?
If God can change it, then God doesn't know everything.
So you can't be both omniscient and all-powerful.
It's one or the other, right?
So these are the kinds of things that are put forward.
Basically, as I've talked about before, God as a proposition is identical to a square circle.
It's a self-contradictory concept and thus destroys itself.
It's like if I send you a courier with a note saying that couriers never deliver their notes, then my argument is self-defeated.
If the courier finds you and delivers the note, then my argument that couriers will never deliver their note has defeated itself.
If I yell into your ear that you can't hear, then, again, it's the way that it's approached.
The arguments, it destroys itself.
Life is defined as biological and born and died, and knowledge is defined as limited, and power is defined as limited.
All the power in the universe is still limited, so...
Basically, God is a negation of all concepts, right?
God is simply, well, it's life, but there's no matter.
Well, it's consciousness, but there's no birth and death.
Well, there's all power. I mean, it's just all made-up stuff, right?
It's a negation of concepts.
It is not a concept itself.
It's an anti-concept. It's like saying 2 plus 2 equals green, right?
It's just a non-concept.
There's no real way to disprove it because it disproves itself, right?
Other than pointing out the inconsistencies and the logic in the basic formulation.
So, when somebody says that a Jewish zombie guy came back from the dead after walking on water and healing lepers with a touch and driving demons into the bodies of pigs and so on, rose up to heaven, went to hell, came back from the dead, promised to return, lives forever, that you have to psychically and telepathically contact this Jewish zombie.
In order to save your soul from a sin that you never committed, but was committed by Adam and Eve or ancient peoples, which you had no control over, which God in his omniscience knew was going to happen, but decided to punish people for anyway.
Blah, blah, blah. It was all just mad fairy tales, right?
But if somebody puts forward that proposition...
Well, the argument just defeats itself.
It's just too nonsensical for words.
So the burden of proof definitely lies upon those who are making the claim, and the more fantastical the claim, I mean, Einstein's theory of relativity, that mass is going to increase when you get faster and time dilates and so on, and all of that is pretty wild stuff, so he requires some pretty significant proof, and Einstein himself put forward the criteria for proof that starlight would bend around the moon during a time of eclipse because of the gravity well and so on.
Einstein put forward the criteria for proof.
It was an extraordinary claim, a series of extraordinary claims in the theory of relativity, but they were all satisfied when people tested them, so extraordinary claims required extraordinary proof, which was supplied down to the last detail.
So, when someone says that a Jewish preacher 2,000 years ago died and was killed and raised back from the dead and performed all these miracles and so on, well, that's an extraordinary claim.
And, of course, there is no...
It's a ridiculous claim, right?
So Einstein never said that our direct sensual experience was completely invalid.
He never said that 2 plus 2 equals green.
He never proposed a square circle.
But this idea that these people rise from the dead and so on, I mean, It's purely silly.
Born of a virgin. I mean, all this is purely silly, right?
It's like a dare.
I dare you to be a ridiculous thinker enough to believe this, right?
So, you don't actually have to do that much work to disprove it.
You just have to ask for the evidence.
Now, the evidence that is presented In the realm of these fantastical happenings around 0 AD, or roughly around 0 AD, it's all hearsay.
I mean, there's no direct evidence.
Obviously, there's no video. There's no body of Christ that has, you know, like the magical Lenin in Red Square, has resisted decomposition, and if you defibrillate it, it will come back to life and start spouting off more platitudes about The meek inheriting the earth.
So there is no evidence whatsoever other than hearsay.
And of course the stuff that was written down about Jesus wasn't written down until mostly a generation or two after his death.
So these extraordinary claims simply rely on hearsay, which is self-interested people who wish to found a church, told everyone that this Jewish zombie guy was a deity, and so on and so on.
And of course they did a fair amount of adjustment in the life of Jesus to make him conform to Old Testament Prophecies.
They had to have them born in Bethlehem and so on, so they made up this nonsense about a tax audit where everyone had to go back to the city of their birth, the town of their birth, which never occurred historically.
They have to make all this stuff up, to make them conform to the Old Testament prophecies.
It's like in a movie where they have some psychic who's going to predict that something's going to happen and then it happens.
Well, it's a movie. You can write the script to make it conform.
It's a whole lot different than testing psychic abilities in real life, which tends to fail considerably all the time.
So hearsay is the way that Christians or other religious people put forward as to support the claims of something like a resurrection and so on.
The problem with that, of course, is that hearsay miracles are common to thousands upon thousands of religions.
So, if hearsay, the reporting of miracles by a number of people, is your criteria for truth, it seems hard to understand how you wouldn't believe that the sky is populated with thousands of gods answering every conceivable description throughout the history of mankind.
Zeus, Anubis, Baal, Thor, all of these gods have reported miracles that hundreds of people have seen and so on, right?
And so it's really hard if you believe that these reports of miracles constitute proof of divinity, then you would not ever be able to be a Christian.
You'd have to be in every ism, right?
Every conceivable deity has this particular tale behind it.
So, you can't say that you believe in God because of a principle called, a hearsay of miracles is reasonable evidence for believing in the divinity of the person who's being reported about, or the deity that's being reported about.
If you take that as a principle, you don't end up at Christianity.
You end up believing everything, including the people who were in the Jamestown Massacre, the Jimmy Jones Massacre where everyone drank the Kool-Aid.
They all believed the guy was a divinity.
There were a bunch of guys who cut their balls off to go and join Alien race on a comet.
They obviously believed that something extraordinary was going on.
You'd have to join all of those faiths as well.
So you can't take as a principle the validity of hearsay and then end up joining one religion.
You end up having to join all religions and a whole bunch of other nutty things as well.
So the burden of proof definitely lies on those, and you can't use hearsay as an evidence, especially hearsay for things that are impossible.
Historical evidence for the death and resurrection and other miracles continues this post.
According to my friend, the real crux of his faith lies on the evidence for the death and resurrection of Jesus.
He says that there are descriptions and accounts of this from many sources, from people who love Jesus, people who hated him, and people who were indifferent.
I argued that many of these accounts, disciples, were not exactly impartial, and that the texts were not historically as reliable as he perhaps thinks.
What sort of historical evidence is there regarding the death and resurrection?
Who wrote it? How reliable is it?
Linkage would be great. Well, I'm certainly now a biblical scholar, but of course, the basic story, Jesus was crucified, he died, he was buried, he descended into hell, and then on a third day he rose again from the dead, he ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, although of course God has no sense of right.
There's no right or left for God, because he's everywhere, but nonetheless.
So, how is it that Jesus proved that he came back from the dead?
Well, he appeared to people.
You know, up he popped. And he said, here, sniff this.
That's not just regular B.O. That's death.
And so there's a number of places in the Bible which describe Jesus' appearance after his death.
Matthew chapter 28, Luke, sorry, Mark chapter 16, Luke chapter 24, John chapter 20 and 21.
1 Corinthians 15, 3 to 6 is a nice summary.
This is from a website, God is Imaginary.
For I delivered to you, as of first importance, what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, That he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the twelve.
Not the twelve colonies, the twelve disciples.
Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.
Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.
Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also To me.
So, clearly, Jesus has no problem manifesting himself in the flesh to hundreds of people many, many times over.
So, why did he stop?
Why did he stop?
Kind of an essential question, right?
He's all-powerful, so clearly Christ can manifest himself anywhere, anyplace, at any time.
Clearly, in order to establish the truth of his divinity, the reality of his divinity, to those of his followers, Christ came back from the dead and appeared before them in the flesh.
Touch, feel, measure, you could slap an MRI on him and look into the infinite space of God's brain.
So Christ came back from the dead because he did not require, or he knew that it wouldn't work, we can only assume this, that he knew that it wouldn't work to just ask people to believe he was divine because he screeched on about loaves and fishes.
So he came back from the dead in order to establish his divinity to his followers.
So he didn't rely on their faith.
He presented them with direct, tangible, corporeal evidence of his divinity.
No problem doing that.
That's his methodology.
That's his modus operandi. And it had to be the right thing to do, because he is the most moral, virtuous, and perfect being in existence, if we forget this trinity thing and just pretend it's not polytheistic and work with a single divinity.
So, providing evidence of his own divinity to his followers in direct corporeal form is the most moral thing to do, because that's what he did.
So, we don't call somebody moral if they just do the right thing once in their life.
We call somebody moral if they consistently apply theories of ethics, or at least practices of ethics, to their behavior.
So, if it was right for Jesus to appear before his followers in the past to prove his divinity, and he can do it at any time, in any place, anywhere, on the planet, to anyone, Why did he stop?
Why did he stop?
If Paul needed a personal visit from Jesus to prove Jesus' divinity, why don't we?
Are we any different from Paul?
Paul actually knew the guy.
Paul met the guy. Paul assumedly saw Jesus perform all these miracles.
So he has less reason to doubt the divinity of Jesus than any of us in the present time 2,000 years later.
So if Paul needed a visit from Jesus to confirm his faith, even after he'd seen Jesus perform all these miracles directly, Why don't we, who've never seen any of these miracles?
Why don't we?
So, let's have him here, right?
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.
You know, I will repudiate all of my videos.
Just come and pop in back here and put that Hippie little face on my wall and talk to me, right?
Because this is what he did for Paul, right?
So he has no problem doing it, coming in and intervening with people who may doubt his divinity.
So let me just get out of the frame here so that we can see Buddy Jesus pop up here.
Because that's what he did, right?
That's the right thing to do. That's what he does.
Oh, Jewish zombie.
Well, maybe he's having trouble finding the place.
It's a relatively new development, this house.
It's not on some of the maps. So, let's just continue, and then you let me know if he pops up over my shoulder, and we'll continue.
So, let's have a look back and look at the last set of questions that this gentleman had.
Evolution and math. I have a pretty cursory understanding of evolution.
I've listened to Steph's podcast on the subject and read a little.
Enough to know that it seems totally reasonable and is a fine answer to the question of complexity on Earth.
My friend mentioned that even biologists agree that the chances of life-forming are something mathematically significant, one in three trillion trillion or some such.
I'm not sure if he meant life-forming exactly as it is now or life-forming at all.
If the former, who cares? If I pour a bucket of sand on the floor, there is a one in three trillion trillion chance of each grain landing as it does, nothing significant here unless I predict the outcome, which nobody did in the case of life.
If you meant the latter, I'd feel that over a long enough period of time, even three trillion trillion is inevitable, but I didn't have the wherewithal to dispute this supposed fact of the time.
Maybe somebody can help clear this up, because it sounds to me like who people Two people, neither of whom know much about evolution, were having a conversation about evolution.
Well, Dawkins is the guy to go to about evolution.
People always talk about the miracle of the human eye, and the human eye is actually one of the simpler constructs in biology.
You start with a patch of skin that is more sensitive to light, and it just develops from there.
It's not actually that hard. And to borrow a great metaphor from Dawkins, he talks about we're standing at the bottom of a huge cliff.
And we're looking up, you know, hundreds of feet, and we say, wow, that cliff is like really, really, the odds of scaling that cliff unassisted are virtually nil.
And that's what happens when we look at the end results of the evolution, which so far, of course, according to complexity, we are the absolute pinnacle.
So we look at the complexity of us, and we're looking at this cliff, and it's like, my God, it's huge!
There's no way we could climb that.
So it had to be created by a God to get to the top, right?
I mean, there's just no way. We look at all that complexity.
But as Dawkins points out, if we walk around to the other side, what we see is a very gentle slope that goes on for miles and miles, wherein we can simply walk up.
Because, of course, the challenge in evolution is conceiving the time and the incremental changes, right?
The time span is billions of years, the incremental changes intergenerationally are often very small.
So, if we walk those miles and miles, we can actually go up this huge cliff that seems insurmountable and staggering to us when we look at it from the sheer side.
We can actually walk up this very gentle slope that goes on for miles, and we barely even know that we're walking up a slope.
We may not even know that there's a slope at all, but we still end up at the top of this cliff, and that's really a good metaphor for evolution.
The chances of life originating on this earth...
It's very hard to have Christian patience with the religious people in these sorts of areas, because Religious people have sort of boundless faith when it comes to their own principles and then boundless skepticism when they come to far more rational principles.
So, this trillion trillion chance of life arising, completely not true at all.
I mean, that's just stuff that Christians just read their own stuff, right?
Be like, if I only read atheist texts and never read the Bible, I've read the Bible all the way through.
So, you have to read stuff that disagrees with your viewpoints in order to become a well-rounded and mature human being, a wise human being.
But there's evidence for life, let's say, insofar as we are alive.
So, whatever odds there were of life starting, clearly, they were surmounted.
Because there is life.
But... What are the odds that a man walks on water?
What is the odds that a man can heal leprosy with a touch?
And on and on and on.
What are the odds that a man can fly up to heaven on a chariot or whatever?
So, Christians seem to have trouble believing that life started because the odds against it are quite high, you see, even though there's evidence for life and clearly whatever odds there were, which are pretty much impossible to calculate, what I'm guessing is that somebody looked at the odds of atoms collecting or cells collecting in an eye and said, well, it's a trillion trillion to one, but that's not how evolution works.
Evolution doesn't work with things just randomly assembling into eyeballs, right?
Evolution is complexity that results from natural selection.
And, of course, this is another argument against God.
The complexity only results from evolution.
There's no such thing as the spontaneous creation of complex life forms.
Since God is the most complex of all life forms, there's no conceivable way that God could have existed prior to evolution, because evolution starts with very rudimentary single-celled organisms and then progresses to multicellular all the way through mammals and human beings.
So there's no way that God could have existed prior to the complexity of life that is only the result of evolution.
So God can't have been an entity which set things in motion.
So Christians say, well, you see, the odds against the formation of life were very high, therefore there must have been a God, right?
But they don't apply that same level of skepticism to the divinity of Jesus rising from the dead and coming back to save your soul, which doesn't exist from a crime you've never committed.
So, I would simply say, well, whatever the odds are of life starting, life is here.
Saying that God started it is a complete non-answer, right?
It means saying, well, we don't know the odds are against it, therefore God must have done it.
This, of course, is the problem with religion, is that it's a non-answer, that is the opposite of the truth.
The opposite of truth is not a lie.
The opposite of truth is a lie that you think is true, because it stops you from progressing.
If I tell you something you know it's a lie, You'll be skeptical, you'll research, you'll figure things out.
If I tell you something that's a lie and you think that it's true, and then you think that it's moral, you stop looking, you stop questioning.
So, God is the worst answer, conceivably, because you say, well, where did life come from?
Well, some incomprehensible being created life in some unimaginable way for some unfathomable purpose that we'll never understand.
And people call that an answer.
Well, it's not. It's a non-answer.
It's a coward's approach to the truth, which is mere social conformity and the manipulation through pseudo-logic of facts and evidence to suit your own claims.
And I think we've had just about enough of it in this world because it's far too dangerous and destructive to one's own mind and being.
Thank you so much for watching.
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