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April 11, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:19
1035 The Christian and the Philosopher

My first debate with a Christian in I can't even remember how long...

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Oh, hi. Can you hear me? Steph?
Yes, hello. Can you hear me all right?
Hi, I can hear you. Good, good, good.
Thanks so much for taking the time to have a chat.
Just remember that everything gets recorded, just so you remember ahead of time.
But of course, if it were to ever go out as a podcast, if our discussion is useful to other people, that's at your discretion, so you get a chance to listen to it and so on.
Well, this is strictly a personal matter.
Mm-hmm. So I don't think you'll be able to use it unless you want everyone on your website to know what was going on.
I mean, I'm sure people are up to speed on issues.
We'll record it, and if it does turn out to be useful, we can discuss the other thing.
Okay. Well, what I was talking about on that podcast 10.30...
I just felt that some of the things that you said were kind of inaccurate about my personality since we had only met that one day.
Do you remember that?
I don't remember all of that.
That was a long podcast. I don't remember all of the details, but feel free to refresh me.
Well, it was the first time that I was in there and someone had asked me about God and I had gotten into that conversation and A guest apparently jumped in, which I later found by listening to the podcast was really you, because of the things that you said in the podcast.
Do you remember that?
Not hugely, but I certainly do drop by the chat window from time to time as a guest, just as a sort of quality control thing, but yes, go ahead.
I mean, I'm assuming that everything you're saying is perfectly correct.
Okay. That was just another issue I was wondering about.
I was wondering if you were, for some reason, trying to talk to me as a guest because you didn't want to talk to me as your other name, Steph, on the chat room.
No, no. That's not why I do it.
Okay. I just wanted to hear that from you before I say anything in public because I like to approach the person that I have an issue with first.
Sure. Yeah.
Okay, well on the podcast you said I had like a dictatorial mindset or something like that.
How did you come to that?
A dictatorial mindset?
Yeah. And that's all I said was a dictatorial mindset?
Well, you said a few other things.
I could get the podcast and review it.
But I'd have to get up from the phone and go to the theater.
No, no, that's fine. And this was to do with the conversation where, if I remember rightly, you were talking about how God talks to you by writing in your mind?
Yeah, right. Well, I mean, I don't have a specific memory of it, but I'm sure that I can reconstruct why I would have said something like that.
It's because you didn't seem to be very open to reason and evidence in that conversation.
And I view religiosity as a form of dictatorship because It is something that is, in my experience or my understanding, willed on the part of the individual, and it is not something that bows to reason and evidence.
I mean, one of the things that's a key differentiator between philosophy and religion is that philosophy has a standard of truth that is objective and empirical and rational and so on.
Where you have a look at your internal states or your subjective experiences and you compare them to objective standards, you know, reproducibility, verifiability, and so on.
And I have found that religious people are not willing to take that approach, right?
To say, okay, well, I had this vivid experience, which I call a deity or something like that, but in order to figure out the truth value of what I experienced, I have to subject my inner thought processes to reason and evidence if I'm going to make a truth statement.
Because you weren't saying, I heard a voice in my head and I don't know where it came from and so on.
You were making a truth statement, which was that an external deity was talking to you.
And that is a statement of empirical fact and objective truth.
You didn't say sort of the God in my head.
It was like the God out there.
And so we started looking at that from the evidence, from sort of reason and evidence standpoint.
And we didn't get very far, right?
Because it's just an assertion on your part.
And so that, to me, seems...
Wherever we don't subject our opinions to the disciplines of reason and evidence, it's kind of willed and dictatorial.
It's just like, well, this is the way it is, and reason and evidence can't sway me or can't change my mind.
And that's probably why that comment came out, if that makes any sense.
Okay. Well, certainly entitled to your opinion.
Um... I think what part of the issue could be is semantics, because you have to understand from my point of view, it is my reality, so when we start to talk about subjective and objective, we're going to have a gray area between us.
Can you understand that?
Well, no, because you weren't talking about it in terms of your reality.
You were talking about it in terms of objective reality.
Like, you didn't say, a God within my own mind, but you said, an external God that exists independent of my consciousness.
That's a truth statement outside of your own subjective experience, if that makes sense.
You didn't say, I experience something like a deity subjectively.
You said, an objective deity outside of my consciousness communicated to me, right?
So that's not a subjective statement?
Well, uh... You see, that's the thing.
To me, that's kind of splitting hairs there.
It doesn't make much difference.
Sorry to interrupt. It's not splitting hairs, and it makes an enormous amount of difference.
If I say, I had a dream last night about flying to Mars, that's one thing.
But if I say, objectively and empirically, I flew to Mars last night, that is quite a different thing, right?
Well, could I say that I believe it to be true?
Is that necessarily an objective...
Is there any proposition that you would set people off to disagree, or would that be more acceptable?
That God exists.
Well, no, because you're saying that it is true that something objective and empirical outside of your own consciousness exists, right?
So that's a truth statement that must be subject to reason and evidence.
Like if I say, it is true that I had a dream about flying to Mars last night, then obviously that can't really be verified, but that's a statement that it's true that I believe that.
But if I say, I actually flew to Mars last night, and I'm going to fly again to Mars tonight, there would be objective ways to verify that statement.
Well, that's kind of what I said, isn't it?
I believe that God exists, so it's a subjective opinion about something else.
But you can't have...
If you're saying God exists, then you're saying God exists not in your own mind as a thought, but as an objective entity outside your mind, right?
Well, yeah. Right, so you're making a truth statement about reality, not a subjective opinion.
A subjective opinion is like, I like jazz or I like ice cream or something like that.
But if you make a statement of fact about an external thing, then reason and evidence have to be brought to bear in it.
Because anyone can say anything.
I have an invisible friend named Bobsy or whatever, right?
Yeah. Okay, well I just have a hard time putting it in terms that you guys want to object to.
Just why I, in later chats, tried to avoid talking about it.
Well, I mean, sorry, just by the by, you're not likely to have much luck.
I mean, you can certainly talk about other topics, but if you're going to make a truth statement about empirical reality that is against reason and evidence, you mean that the onus of proof is upon you, right?
If I say that there's an invisible spider...
I'm sitting on my head or whatever, right?
Then if somebody says, oh, well, if it's invisible, then I can touch it.
And I say, well, no, you can't touch it.
And they say, oh, okay, well, I'll get my infrared goggles on and I'll look at it.
And I say, well, no, you can't look at it either and so on.
And basically, I say that something exists.
But every time somebody comes up with a criteria or criterion for proving that existence, then I say, well, you can't use that criterion for proving the existence of this invisible spider because Then at the end of that process, when it becomes completely impossible to verify the existence of the invisible spider, then there's actually no functional difference between there being no invisible spider and not being able to detect it in any way, shape, or form.
Yeah, I see where you're going with that.
Here's the way I look at it.
All of these observations and Scientific fact depends on our level of technology and ability to detect these given facts.
At one time, we didn't know about bacteria and viruses.
We certainly saw the effects of them when people got sick, correct?
Sure. Yeah, but we had no idea to verify that they really exist, but we know now That they do, in fact, exist.
So I kind of chalk this phenomena up to that.
Simply because there's so many people in the world that do believe in a deity, I feel that is worthy of some investigation.
Because how can you explain all of these people believing in this thing?
Maybe something is...
Sorry, it's because they're taught to believe in it, right?
Well, I wasn't taught to believe in it.
You had no exposure to the idea of a god when you were a child?
Well, yeah, I did, and I rejected it at first.
But only later on, when I was an adult, did I start to have personal experiences that led me to investigate this.
Well, sure, and I certainly agree that religion is a topic well worthy of investigating.
But the criteria that you come up with which says that anything could exist that can be conceived of must mean that Zeus and leprechauns and unicorns and hippogriffs and vampires and ghosts and like all of these things could have a real intangible existence.
Would you say that that's a fair thing to say?
Well, you were talking about my other argument from if you believe in a universe with infinite possibilities.
No, I'm just talking about this argument where you say, because in the past we discovered new things that we didn't know about before, anything could exist, right?
True, but if they did exist, we should see at least some effect upon the populace about them.
And personally, I haven't seen any vampires, aliens, or some such things.
But I do see other people believing in a deity, and I have had an experience myself, so...
It would be completely remiss for me not to at least look into it.
And sure, looking into it is perfectly reasonable, of course.
The exploration of truth is a key aspect of philosophy.
But if we look at, say, the 19th century, just about everybody thought the blacks were inferior, and this was a perfectly and commonly held belief, which turned out to be false, right?
Yes. So the fact that a large number of people believe something does not have any particular relevance?
Well, yeah, that's true.
The truth content of the statement.
Yeah, I won't argue with you on that.
Could be wrong. You could be wrong.
I could be right. I could be wrong.
You could be wrong. I mean, we never really know anything with 100% certainty because of human error.
Well, but that's the purpose of science and philosophy, right?
Is to eliminate those errors, right?
As much as possible. I mean, it's always tough to find...
Yeah, and my path to do that has led me this way.
That's really all there is to it.
I mean, it's somewhat of a faith either way you go, whether you believe in God or you don't believe in God.
That part is not true.
To believe in something that goes against reason and evidence, and the difference between God and something like bacteria is that bacteria is a logically consistent We don't say that a bacteria is a square circle, that bacteria both exist and don't exist at the same time.
Bacteria don't have contradictory properties and we could see objective effects Of bacteria upon flesh, right?
I mean, if a dog dies, it gets furry and smelly and, you know, all that kind of stuff.
And you can see on a loaf of bread the fuzz of bacteria growth on it and so on.
So there was evidence for bacteria, although we couldn't actually see them because we didn't have microscopes.
And bacteria were not proposed as self-contradictory entities, so nobody said that bacteria are a square circle.
Bacteria are defined by the equation 2 plus 2 equals 5.
So bacteria weren't proposed as logically inconsistent or self-contradictory entities.
And we could see the empirical and objective effects of bacteria, but this is not the case with God.
God is proposed as a self-contradictory entity.
In other words, it is a square circle.
It is consciousness without matter.
It is life without birth or death.
It is, you know, as is often thought, God is all-knowing and all-powerful, which is a self-contradictory.
Oh, did we lose each other? Hang on, let me call you right back.
I think I just lost you. Hello?
Oh, hi. Sorry about that. I think I just lost you.
So, if we say that God is all-powerful and all-knowing, then if God is all-knowing, then God knows what's going to happen in the future, and therefore God cannot change what's going to happen in the future.
If God can change what's going to happen in the future, if he's all-powerful, then he can't be all-knowing.
So, these kinds of things, the difference between God and bacteria is that God is proposed as an entirely self-contradictory concept.
Which does not have any objective...
There's no objective evidence for the existence of God in the world in the way that there was in terms of, you know, fuzz appearing on a loaf of bread if you don't put it in the fridge in terms of bacteria.
So I think the analogy is not particularly suited to the difference between bacteria and God.
Now wait a minute there.
Let's backtrack to what you said about if he's all-knowing and all-powerful.
Could you run that by me again?
Sure. Well, if God is all-knowing, then God knows everything in past, present, and future, right?
Yes. So God knows what I'm going to do tomorrow, right?
Yes. But if God knows what I'm going to do tomorrow, then God cannot change what I'm going to do tomorrow, right?
Well, that has to do with free will.
Well, no, no. We're just talking about God.
If God is all-knowing, then God knows what I'm going to do tomorrow.
If God knows exactly what I'm going to do tomorrow, then God cannot change what I'm going to do tomorrow, because the moment he can change it, an element of uncertainty is entered into his knowledge, and therefore he can't be all-knowing.
So all-knowing and all-powerful are completely contradictory criteria.
Okay, well, let's not confuse that with putting you under the equation, because then that gets into a topic of free will.
But I see what you're saying there.
If he knows everything, He knows how something is going to turn out, and if he changes what's going on, then he's contradicting what he knows is going to happen.
Is that essentially what you're saying?
Yeah, he can't both know exactly what's going to happen and have the ability to change it.
Well, why not? If he changes, if he decides to change something, I mean, hypothetically speaking, because I don't think he changes his plan over and over and over again.
It's already set from the very beginning of time, but let's say he does change something, then he would know what's going to happen because he's the one who changed it.
Well, sure, but if he knows that he's going to change it in the future, then he can't change the fact that he's going to change it, right?
Like, if I know I'm going to go to the gym at 4 o'clock today, and I know that for absolute certainty, that I know everything about my own future, I know exactly that I'm going to go to the gym at 4 o'clock today, then obviously I can't change whether I'm going to go to the gym at 4 o'clock today, because if I can change it, then I don't know it for sure, right?
I think we're getting into fourth-dimensional thinking here.
Nope. This is actually not that...
I mean, I know it's a little trippy, but it's not fourth-dimensional thinking.
If I know that I'm going to go to the gym at 4 o'clock today, then I can't change whether or not I go to the gym, right?
Because if I can change it, then I don't know for sure whether I'm going.
Well, but if you did that, then what the knowledge is would...
I mean, that's weird, because it's like fourth-dimensional thinking.
What would happen in the future would come back to the past and correct that knowledge.
So it would be as if you'd never have changed it.
Well, do I know if I'm going to change ahead of time or not?
I mean, we can loop back time, which of course also doesn't exist in reality.
Time is sort of a one-way flow.
But if I know ahead of time, if I'm all-knowing about what I'm going to do in the future, then I can't change what I'm going to do in the future, right?
We can accept that at least, right?
Well, I'm not too sure about that.
We're just getting too far out there.
But, I mean, if you're going to say that, then you have to be able to say that God has changed his plans.
Which I don't have any indication that he has.
Well, is God able to change his plans?
Oh, I don't know. Well, if he is able to change his plans, then he's all-powerful.
If he's not able to change his plans, then he's bound into his plans and is not all-powerful, because he has to follow his plans.
And if he can't change his plans, then he's not all-powerful.
If he can change his plans, he's all-powerful, but then he's not all-knowing, right?
Yeah, but like I was saying, hypothetically speaking, if he had to change something, then it would just come back into the original plan and self-correct it.
Well, but that's not how time works, right?
Time works in a forward pattern, right?
Yeah, but you can't say that it works for him, though.
I understand that.
But then what you're doing is you're just removing another criterion of logic from God and saying, well, time doesn't apply to God.
Which is like saying, well, logic doesn't apply to God, and the fact that we need to be able to have testable hypotheses to prove the existence of something, that doesn't work for God.
Well, I'm not saying that.
I'm saying we're not capable of understanding that.
We're not at that level.
If you say that we're not capable of understanding something, you're removing a criterion for proof, right?
But taking away criterion for proving something, like with the invisible spider, if I say, well, you can't use infrared, and you can't touch it, and you can't, you know, it shows up on no, you can't x-ray it, you can't...
Removing criterion for the proof of a contradictory entity does not prove the existence of that entity, right?
No, it doesn't, but I'm pretty sure that It is used sometimes in scientific methods if someone is researching something and they find that the area that they're exploring for the proof isn't going to do it, so they back out and try a different way.
Well sure, but until they can establish an objective criterion for proof and reproducible methodologies for proving something, it remains unproven.
Okay, so now we're getting back to scientific method.
So here's the problem.
God in His very nature isn't of the physical reality, and a lot of our logic and reasoning and scientific methods are designed for proving things in the physical reality, so it's kind of wishful thinking to hope that we can objectivize and categorize what's going on in our own reasoning.
We haven't gotten to that level yet.
But look, when God talks to you, he's certainly impacting the physical realm, right?
Because if God was completely separate from the physical realm, then we would never know about God's existence, right?
Well, that's true, but what I'm saying is, he does have a noticeable effect on the physical realm, obviously, because of all of the people that believe in him, and that's what I cite, too, as an indicator.
But you can't Unless you can get inside somebody's head and find out whether they're lying or not, you know, you can't really prove it in the same way that you can with the physical reality because the physical reality around us can be easily, I wouldn't like to say duplicated, but you can always find another instance where it's going on and observe it.
But you can't necessarily do it in this case.
Well, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but you said that God doesn't show up in the physical realm, and that's why science doesn't apply, right?
Well, He hasn't in our lifetime.
Well, He has for you, right?
Yes. So, if you were to, just hypothetically, if you were to be hooked up to an MRI when God was writing in your brain, then some effect of that could be seen, right?
Well, I don't know about that.
There's some external... I mean, he has to be changing something within your brain in the physical realm in order for you to be experiencing a conversation, right?
That's an assumption. Well, but your brain is composed of matter, right?
And energy. Yeah.
So if something in your brain is changing, it has to be based on an alteration of matter and energy, right?
Well, yeah. I mean, if they can pick up...
They can pick up different thought processes or something like that in the MRI. I don't know.
I don't know how that works.
They can, actually. It's sort of interesting if somebody's thinking about hitting a ball.
It hooks up the same mental processes as if they were actually hitting a ball.
So here we have some sort of impact on the physical world, which is God speaking to people in their minds, right?
Yeah, it impacts...
It impacts those people in the way that it causes them to think about it.
Right. It changes their mind about things, sure.
Sure. And so we would look for an external energy source that was coming in to affect people's minds, right?
Well, how are you certain you'd even be able to detect that?
And you would only detect the changes in the thought patterns of the individual.
Yeah, no, absolutely, you're right.
And then what we would do is we would say, okay, so thought patterns are being changed within someone's mind, and then what we would do is we would see if we could get an atheist to reproduce the same effects, right?
Yeah, but I don't really see how that's proving anything, because how do you interpret these changes in the brain?
I mean, you don't know what those thoughts actually are.
Well, but this is just Occam's razor, right?
So if we have the ability to reproduce that which people say is religious without there being a religious component, then we can say that this is a spontaneous action of the mind in the way that dreams occur for us and certainly people who have had...
epilepsy have had very strong religious visions, and if they electro-stimulate certain areas of the brain, they can very clearly create, scientists can very clearly create in people, literal, like they see cherubs, they see angels, it's a particular aspect of the brain which produces religious experiences when electrically stimulated. it's a particular aspect of the brain which produces religious
So what we would do is we'd say, okay, well, if what occurs within the brain can be reproduced without there being a divine intervention, then Occam's razor would simply eliminate the possibility of a self-contradictory, universal, out-there, impossible-to-detect kind of invisible deity, and would say impossible-to-detect kind of invisible deity, and would say this is a spontaneous activity within the mind.
Well, I've never heard of such a thing being done.
Is there an article on this?
Sure, yeah. No, I'd be happy to send you a link to it as well.
And it certainly is the case that, and historically it seems to be that a lot of people who had very strong religious visions also had epilepsy.
People do experience that kind of stuff.
Of course, people dream about, you know, Jesus and God and so on every night, and some people who are even atheists would dream about these kinds of things, and we would recognize that dreams are a spontaneous activity of the human mind, right?
Yeah. Yeah. So, in the scientific approach, we'd say, well, if there's no evidence of an external energy source coming into the mind, and if we can reproduce it without any need for the theory of a deity, then it is an internal process of the mind, and there's no need to invent other dimensions, beings without time, omniscience and omnipotence, self-contradiction, life without birth or death, consciousness without matter.
Like, we wouldn't need to overcomplicate things.
That would be like saying that a rock falls to the ground because little angels fly it down.
You don't need that thesis if you have a more scientific proof, right?
Well, I can see your logic, but like I said, I'd have to actually look at the article and analyze that for a while before I can say anything about that.
Sure. So to come back to the original point, that's to me where the aspect of dictatorial comes in.
To me, it is kind of willful, and I don't think in a very honest or humble way, to say, I have had a subjective experience, so I'm going to call it contact from a...
Omniscient, contradictory, out of time, out of the universe, non-physical, non-reproducible, non-testable, you know, invisible giant guy in the sky, so to speak, right?
That seems to me like a huge leap, which is completely unsupported by the evidence and which is counter to logic and evidence.
And then what happens is, when people make that leap, what they do is they start just making up other rules.
Well, he's not detectable, he's outside of time, he's outside.
And that, to me, is just stampeding off a cliff intellectually.
I mean, you have a very sharp mind and you have great language skills and this and that.
But that's what I mean by dictatorial.
It's like, I want to believe this.
I'm not going to subject my desires to reason and evidence.
I want to believe this.
And so I'm just going to go and make up a bunch of stuff which supports it, for which there is no empirical evidence.
And that seems to me dictatorial.
Really? Wouldn't a dictator try to impose that on others?
I try not to do that.
Well, but you certainly told me that your subjective experience was objectively true, right?
And even without you, there would be, I mean, all the examples of religious schools and religious indoctrination and institutionalized stuff and all the stuff that goes on.
Jewish communities, the Islamic communities, the Christian communities, the Buddhist communities, the Hindu communities, that religion is definitely something that is very powerfully and I think destructively inflicted upon children.
Yeah, I don't really believe in forcing people to believe in those things.
And the religious organizations in the past that have done certain things I don't necessarily support.
And basically sometimes I feel like I'm caught in a rock in a hard place.
But the moment that you say that something is objectively true, then people either have to say, I'm going to reject that which is objectively true, which is not a healthy thing to do, or I'm going to accept it or I'm going to debate it, right?
Yeah, they can reject it or they can accept it.
Yeah, what's the problem?
Well, the problem is that if you claim that something is objectively true, either it is or it isn't, right?
Yeah. And if you believe that it's objectively true, then you have to prove it, right?
I mean, I can't just say, I have a proof to some complex mathematical theorem, but I can never tell you what it is, and there's no way to test it, right?
I mean, I can say that, but nobody's going to take me seriously.
Well, that's the thing, you know, define proof, you know.
Define truth? Define proof.
Certain things people don't accept as proof.
Well, proof is...
The first criterion of proof is logical consistency.
So if I have a mathematical theorem that's based on the equation that 2 plus 2 equals 5, then everything that follows that is based on that is automatically false because the premise is false.
So the first thing that is required for proof is logical consistency.
And then the second thing that is required for proof in a scientific or even in a philosophical realm is a consistency with External reality, right?
So if I come up with an equation that says a rock is going to fall to the ground at 9.8 meters per second per second, then obviously the math and the logic has to be internally consistent, and then we have to actually measure the speed at which a rock falls to the earth and find out if it does fall to the earth at that rate of acceleration.
And if both of those criteria are met by a number of different people independently in different places and so on, just to avoid the problem of confirmation bias, Then we can say that something is proven, right?
Yeah, if you want to apply those standards to it.
What I was saying was... Sorry, that's not an if you want to.
You keep saying, like, if you want to and if you prefer.
Well, we're the ones that came up with those standards, though, Steph.
Reality. That is the standard of reality.
Truth is fidelity to reality.
That's how we differentiate it from opinion.
That's true, but you can't dismiss the fact that whatever our perception of reality is...
Might influence that.
But sure, that's why I said reproducibility in different people to avoid confirmation bias and so on.
Right. We already went over that, though, with the cannot be physically verified at this time.
Well, but since the concept of God is logically contradictory, it fails the first test, and since there's no direct physical or measurable or empirical evidence for the existence of God, it fails the second test, and therefore the thesis is disproven.
You mean the logic about the all-knowing and the all-powerful?
Well, it's consciousness without material form.
I mean, consciousness is an effect of matter, of the complexity of the brain.
You can't have consciousness without matter.
And so if you say you have consciousness without matter, then you're saying you have an arm without any flesh or bone, right?
And that's not possible.
Or an arm without any material form?
Then it's just a concept.
It doesn't have any existence in reality.
Light doesn't have any physical reality, but it's there.
Sorry, light doesn't have any...
Oh, sure it does, yeah. In energy form.
You can actually measure the heaviness of a photon as it hits something.
So light definitely has physical properties.
You have light waves, you have the weight of photons, and so on.
Yeah. And so since God is...
And you have life without ever being born, you also have, from a biological standpoint, with the concept of a god...
You have an amazingly complex being which never evolved.
And the only way that we know that complexity arises in life is through evolution, right?
But God sort of winked into existence or has always been there and was highly complex.
So it contradicts all of that aspect of science as well.
Well, I wasn't debating evolution.
No, no, I'm not debating evolution either.
I'm just saying that the only way that complexity arises in life that's ever been measurable or conceivable is through a process of evolution over time.
I mean, the first organism was not a human being or an ape.
It was a single-celled whatever-whatever, right?
And then that evolved into complexity over time.
And since God is pretty much the most infinitely complex life form, but is proposed to exist with no evolution, that also goes against biology as well as all the physics and logic that it goes against as well.
So, all I'm saying is that since the concept is logically self-contradictory and there's no empirical evidence, then it fails the test of proof, I mean, completely.
Well, so you say.
But there are other indicators that I haven't mentioned.
Well, but the hurdle of proof, as we talked about before, is logical consistency and empirical evidence, right?
Well, I'm just saying that our logical processes to prove things aren't necessarily applicable to God.
Yes, but it's also true that removing the criterion of proof does not establish the validity of anything, right?
If I just say, well, you can't apply this proof or that proof or any proof whatsoever, then the test fails anyway, right?
Because the concept is self-contradictory, right?
Well, would it make you feel better if I referred to a deity as a theory?
Would that be more accurate?
Well, you could refer to it as a theory, but it's a self-contradictory theory, and therefore it is a failed or false theory, or an invalid theory, I guess you could say.
It would be like a theory that says there's such a thing as a square circle, which is a contradictory concept.
That would just be a, that's not a valid theory, right?
Well, again, that's just what you say.
I haven't verified that logic.
Okay, well, I'm going to end this call because it's sort of pointless for me to keep proposing criteria of proof and then you putting it down for opinion alone, so there's not much point continuing the conversation.
Okay, I'll just have to think about that longer.
I can't jump to what you're saying that quickly.
Sure, no problem. I just have to look into things more.
Alright, man. Talk to you soon. Alright, bye.
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