All Episodes
Previous Next
March 15, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:09
1618 God Religion Fishes - Sunday Show Excerpt, 14 March 2010
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello, this is Mandy.
First of all, I want to thank you for last week.
I got to ask you a question about anarchy and all that, and it really helped me.
I had to write an essay about it.
But this time, I want to speak about my grandfather spoke to me, and we discussed the proofs that you have on YouTube.
You have proofs of God, you know, proofs wrong, whatever it is.
And he said that it's kind of arrogant.
It's like if you're a deaf person and I'm trying to tell you that there's sound, and you say, well, my senses don't hear the sound, so the sound doesn't exist.
So he's saying we humans are limited and our senses can't see everything.
And even if we have tools like scientific tools and everything like that, we can't prove that we know everything or we can feel or sense everything.
And that doesn't mean that everything around us doesn't exist.
Just because we can't sense God or something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Right, right. Well, he's wrong on just about every level and it's too bad he didn't call it himself.
But of course we can communicate sound to a deaf person.
Of course we can! Deaf people don't believe that there's no sound.
There's two ways, of course, that you can communicate sound to a deaf person.
I guess there's more than two, probably three that I can think of.
The first is that sound has vibrations, so you can put their hand on a speaker playing, I don't know, some sort of Wu-Tang Clan bass beaty song and they will feel the vibrations.
The second thing is that you can look at an oscilloscope which translates sound into visual light waves.
And the third thing I suppose you could do is you could Put sound waves and have them make something very flimsy wave in the air.
So of course it's not true that deaf people can't perceive sound.
They just can't perceive it using their ears, but they can perceive it using their senses and using their sight.
And I would consider it to be...
A pretty dishonorable mental trick to say to somebody, something might exist but you don't have the senses to perceive it in any way shape or form.
Because what that means is that the person is making no philosophical distinction between existence and non-existence.
I mean there has to be a difference.
Between existence and non-existence.
Because if there was no difference between existence and non-existence, there'd be no such thing as doors because we'd just try and walk through walls and we wouldn't cut any holes.
There'd be no archways. There'd be no windows.
There'd be no way to roll down a window in a car.
There'd be no tunnels. There would be nothing that we would attempt to pass through.
We know the difference between existence and non-existence.
And if we say that which is the opposite of existence might exist, that is just a logical contradiction that doesn't work.
And I've had a number of emails come into my inbox this week.
I suppose somebody posted that video somewhere on the web talking about this.
It is a strange thing for me to be accused of arrogance.
First of all, it's not an argument.
Let's say that I am arrogant.
It's not an argument, right?
That's like saying, I'm right because I'm bald.
I mean, it doesn't have anything to do with the content of my argument.
So arrogance doesn't really work.
And what I would say back to your uncle is to say, yeah, of course.
We have no way of knowing everything that exists in the universe.
There's no question that we have no way of knowing everything that exists on the universe.
Like for instance, And could I say that it is impossible for a fish with 10 gills on each side to live, right?
Because I guess most fish have one gill and sharks have five.
I don't know if there is or isn't a fish with 10 gills.
It would be crazy to say there's no way that a fish with 10 gills could exist.
Of course not. I mean, there could be something somewhere deep down in the Mariana Trench.
There could be a fish with 10 gills.
But a fish with 10 gills exists None of its properties contradict existence or itself.
But if I were to say that there is a fish that lives at the bottom of the ocean and in the middle of a volcano, so it lives in water and in the middle of a mountain, a tall mountain volcano at the same time, clearly that would be impossible.
If I were to say there's no such thing as a square circle, there's no such way that 2 plus 2 equals 5 can be a valid statement, we understand that those things are invalid, right?
Really? And to say, well, maybe there's some alternate universe where 2 plus 2 equals 5 is a valid statement, it's like, well...
But then all he's saying is there's no such thing as the difference between existence and non-existence, between truth and falsehood.
That everything that is true could be false, and everything that is false could be true.
But then he's making a truth statement.
But he's already destroyed the concept of existence and non-existence, truth and falsehood, and therefore he can't reject a truth statement because everything has become grey and invalid.
So you can't say anything whatsoever if you destroy the concept of true and false.
So that would be my sort of response to that.
Ah, so if you destroy the idea of existence, if you destroy the idea of senses, then you can't say that something that's nonsensical can exist.
Because your senses are false.
Right? Is that what you mean?
But if someone says to me that my senses are false, how are they communicating that to me?
They're using my senses.
He's not saying that my senses are false.
He's saying more than my senses.
But how would he perceive more than the senses?
Oh, because let's see, because the idea of what he's saying is that I'm limited, right?
I can't perceive a high, because I can only see, you know, 2 plus 2, let's say, right?
But he says, I know, as long as I know that I'm a limited being, I can know there's probably a higher method, something where 2 plus 2 is 5, or where there are square circles, and I just can't understand that.
And then he says, since it's unlimited, it can come into limitation.
That's what he tries to say.
But is he saying this right now?
Right, so that's fine.
So if he's proposing that there is another standard of truth other than reason and evidence, then how is he going to do that?
How is he going to propose that there's another standard of truth than reason and evidence?
Is he just going to assert it?
Well, that's just an opinion.
That's just bigotry, right? So you can't just say there's another standard of truth and evidence.
There's another standard other than truth and evidence.
Because if you just say it, You're just asserting something that's empty.
I might just as well say a round circle is a pink uniform, unicorn, right?
It's a nonsensical statement.
So if he's going to say there is a higher standard of truth than reason and evidence, he can't just assert it, he needs to prove it.
But the moment he tries to prove that there's a higher standard of truth than reason and evidence, he's going to need to use reason and evidence, which confirms the thesis that he is trying to destroy.
There's simply no way to get around it.
There's only two ways human beings can assert something.
Opinion, reason and evidence.
There's only two ways.
And if he's going to just assert it, then it's just an empty stupid statement and who cares?
Anyone can say anything.
I can say I think Mount Everest is a giant ostrich masquerading as a rock.
Anyone can say anything.
But if he's going to say I have proof that there's a higher standard Then proof, then that doesn't make any sense.
That's like using mathematics to disprove mathematics.
It doesn't work, right? So fundamentally, there's no way out of that.
Well, what he's doing is he's just limiting me.
He's saying, you're human, you're limited.
Instead of just making a preposterous statement, he just kind of says, you don't know anything, and I don't, you know, he's like, we're kind of limited, and there could be things more than you know.
And then he says...
No, no, no, sorry, sorry, sorry.
No, but this is where you need to stop him, right?
So when he says there could be more things than you know, oh, of course it's true.
Of course nobody imagines that you or I or anyone has the full and subtle sum of conceivable knowledge within the universe.
Of course there's more things than we can know.
The question is, how are we going to know them, right?
Because what people do is they'll say, well, there's more things that you can know, and therefore God might exist, and therefore to say that God does not exist is trying to prove a negative and blah, blah, blah.
But the question is not, how much do we know?
We all understand that what we know is tiny compared to what there is to know.
The question is not, how much do we know?
The question is, how do we know?
What is the standard of knowledge?
Not what is known, but how things are known.
That's epistemology, right?
Yeah, well it's either reason and evidence or it's just some blanket dumbass assertion.
I'm not calling him a dumbass, I'm just saying that to think that she's stating something proves anything is childish and it's embarrassing, right?
So if he says reason and evidence, what happens then?
I'm sorry? If he says reason and evidence, what then?
Well, reason and evidence, then, we accept reason and evidence is ways of identifying the laws of logic, like non-contradiction, identity, and so on.
And what that means is that something cannot be itself and its opposite at the same time.
So, for instance, if gravity is an effect of matter, then you can't have gravity without matter.
Right. I mean, that would be like saying, if a shadow is, you know, a dark spot that's in the trailing end of something facing the light, then you can't have a shadow without the object blocking the light, because the shadow is an effect of the object blocking a light, right? We understand that.
Right. Now, consciousness is an effect of physical matter.
Right. And so you can't have consciousness Without physical matter.
Any more than you can have a shadow without something blocking the light.
Right. So if consciousness is an effect of physical matter, then any form of consciousness is subject to the laws of reality.
Right. Because it's matter, right?
Right. So if all consciousness is subject to the laws of matter and logic, then any god that is perceived to exist And by God is always meant some form of consciousness, then that consciousness must be an effect of matter, and therefore God will be detectable in some manner.
That's only when he comes into reality, right?
Whenever he comes into reality, he's gonna have to use matter.
Because if he's going to join in our existence, if he's going to be able to be proven in evidence even at one point, at that point he had to be able to be subject to the laws of matter, of reality.
Right, and if someone says that something exists outside of reality, then they're using language in a completely ridiculous way.
Because outside of reality is exactly the same as non-existence.
It means that something outside of reality is something that cannot be detected or reasoned about or perceived in any conceivable manner.
And that is exactly the same as non-existence.
So when they say something exists outside of reality, what they're saying is something exists which doesn't exist.
Right. Right? I mean, that's a contradiction, right?
Right. Okay.
Now, what if we say, like, God came in, let's say, it revealed itself at Sinai, or something like that, and then it went away, and went back into its hiding place, or whatever.
It just kind of told us what it wants from us, and then it hid away again, and since it's unlimited, it can do anything, including limit itself.
So, sorry, let me just make sure I understand the argument.
So the argument is that God came down with the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai.
Right, and he went back to his hiding place in his non-existent place.
And then he vanished again, right?
Right. Well, how do we know?
Well, because of proof and evidence, of course, you know, because of the people that were at the mountain.
Sorry, what is the proof and evidence that God came down 2,000 years ago, or 3,000 or whatever, right?
Oh, of course, because usually, like many people, they say something happened, it's like three people saw it, whatever.
According to Judaism, there's like three million people at the mountain which tossed it down to their children's children, and it's the same building in the entire world.
Hearsay from 5,000 years ago is not evidence, right?
Okay. Sorry, if you say from 5,000 years ago is evidence, then it's evidence for everything.
And that means, because 5,000 years ago everybody believed the world was flat and the sun went around the earth, right?
Which is clearly false. But that's what they believed.
And every human society 5,000 years ago Had a fundamentalist, bizarre religion, which means that they all have to be true, right?
So some people believe that God came down and handed stuff to Moses, other people believe that it wasn't God, but that was in fact a devil, and other people believe that it wasn't true at all.
And that's why hearsay can't be evidence, because hearsay contradicts itself, right?
And that's why you need direct, perceivable reason and evidence.
Okay. Right, well, so then he goes into the whole thing of, oh, you think you're smart in all events.
No, but it's not a question of intelligence.
It's a question of knowledge.
So, am I smarter than the most brilliant surgeon of the 18th century because I know that you have to wash your hands?
Well, I am smarter in that you do have to wash your hands, and they didn't know that back then.
Am I smarter than Hippocrates because I know that the blood circulates in the body and doesn't just sit there like a water-filled balloon?
Well, I'm not smarter than that.
I just have more knowledge. Just as people in the future will have more knowledge.
It doesn't mean that they're smarter than us.
It just means that more knowledge has been accumulated, right?
Okay. And also, people have tried to throw away the idea that people, let's say, die for a value or something like that.
They say, well, people died for, you know, Bolivian paganism and stuff like that.
That doesn't make it right. Is that the way you'd answer about that there?
Thousands of people have died for this, and you're just going to throw it away, you know, that type of thing.
Well, I mean, first of all, a whole bunch of Nazis died for their philosophy too.
Does that mean that we should all be Nazis?
Does that mean Nazism is good?
What about those guys who cut their own balls off to go join the comet a couple of years ago that was flying through the solar system?
Does that mean that their society is valid?
And if you live in America, you can ask the fellow, well, does that mean that you're now going to become a Muslim because a bunch of hijackers flew planes into buildings and died for their beliefs?
Mm-hmm. So basically you have to subject everything to basically evidence and stuff, and that's what you base everything on.
And anything outside of that is nonexistent.
I think you used the word functionally nonexistent.
I like that, because you're not saying that, let's say, if you don't know about x-rays yet, it doesn't exist.
You're just saying it's functionally nonexistent, and as soon as we can prove it and stuff, that's when we're going to know it exists.
Yeah, I mean, something cannot be both a soap bubble and an antelope at the same time.
I know that for a fact.
Now, there may be antelopes that live underwater that have gills.
I mean, obviously, that's not very probable, but it's possible, because that doesn't contradict the laws of existence or of reality.
But there's no way that something can be a soap bubble and an antelope at the same time.
And people have to be, like, if you're debating with someone, that person has to grant that basic reality.
I mean, because if they don't, Then they're epistemologically insane.
It means that they have no way of differentiating between truth and falsehood.
They have no standard of truth or knowledge.
And everything is just crazy assertion.
And I genuinely think that in the future this will be classified as a mental illness.
But right now, it's all too common.
But in the future, if you were to ask someone, can something be both a soap bubble and an antelope at the same time?
And they said, yes! Damn it, because Jesus told me so.
That would be a sign of mental illness.
That person would need some significant mental health treatment.
I'm not saying that everybody who believes that is insane, because most people judge the quality of their beliefs by the surrounding agreement, rather than any sort of objective facts and evidence.
But as philosophy begins to take hold, this kind of thinking will be viewed as extremely bizarre and something that needs to be treated, not with philosophy, but with probably, I would say, a good rousing course of therapy.
Well, back to this, this is exactly my point.
My grandfather's basically saying a square circle exists, and you can't disprove that because you're a limited human being.
And you know that there are so many things in the universe that you don't know about, and you, based on your kind of, let's say, blindness or whatever, let's say you don't have that faculty, you think that the only things that can exist are circles or squares, and you don't understand the idea of a circle square existing.
But it's just above your knowledge, you're limited.
Right, but see, what I would say to that is, first of all, I would just say that that's just not a good argument, because there's no such thing as a square circle.
I mean, that is a kind of self-evident thing that people are going to either admit or they're not.
Now, if they're not going to admit it, then...
You see, for a square circle to exist, then something can be both itself and its opposite, or at least something completely unrelated at the same time.
Right, but see...
But for that to be valid...
See, when somebody's using language, when somebody's using words and a logical argument...
See, he's using a logical argument to say there's no such thing as logic.
Forget about the details and the square circles.
The whole form is saying, if this, then that.
Because of this, this follows.
So because of your limited perspective, you cannot make a true-false statement with any certainty.
But that itself is making a true-false statement with complete certainty.
The whole form of the argument contradicts its content, right?
So that's the first thing I would say. The second thing that I would say is that if a square circle can exist and something can be itself and its opposite at the same time, then I'm going to assume that every word that you say means the opposite of what it says and you're actually agreeing with me.
Okay. Okay.
Basically, we can't have this argument.
This argument is above our intelligence, too, because...
Well, yeah, if somebody's using language, then what they're doing is they're saying words have a precise meaning, and they can't mean themselves and the opposite at the same time.
So when I say, I agree with you, that doesn't mean that I disagree with you.
I mean, that's a basic tenet or accepted convention of arguing, right?
Like, if you're a three-year-old, And someone says, I disagree with you, you can say, well, words are opposite.
That means you agree with me, na-na-na-na-boo-boo, right?
I mean, we understand that's a very childish argument, right?
To just redefine what someone is saying as its opposite and then say, well, so you agree with me and everything's hunky-dory, tickety-boo.
I won, right? I mean, that would be crazy.
That's like getting knocked out by Mike Tyson and saying the first guy to hit the floor wins the heavyweight championship.
I win, right?
That's just sort of spit out your teeth, right?
So if something can be itself and the opposite at the same time, like a square circle, then when someone says to me, you know, God exists, then I'll say, well, since something can be itself and the opposite at the same time, I'll just choose the opposite of what you said, and that's what you're saying, and therefore we agree.
Okay. Now, one more thing.
Based on this argument, he's saying, also in other parts, let's say we do say there is reason and evidence.
He's going to say, well, there was reason and evidence, but it just happened, let's say, 5,000 years ago.
So, I can't prove it to you right now, because let's say he revealed himself then, and people actually saw it, and there was evidence and all that stuff, but it just, he's not doing that right now.
He did it once. Let's say, that guy that saw that, you know, that, let's say you see a private far away, and he It comes out of the earth like every 3,000 years.
And a guy 3,000 years ago saw that and kind of wrote it down and proved it or whatever it is.
Yeah, like a comet, right? They saw a comet in the ancient world that hasn't been back since.
We can't say the comet doesn't exist, right?
Correct. Exactly. Right.
So he's using evidence and reason and stuff, and he's just saying...
No, no, no. Sorry. We talked about this.
Sorry to interrupt. We talked about this already.
Hearsay from 5,000 years ago is not evidence.
Okay, okay. So you can never use that, ever.
A mathematical argument, like Euclidean geometry from 2500 years ago, that's valid, right?
Because that's a reasoned argument.
But what a bunch of people may or may not have seen During a time when everybody was fundamentally insane, right?
And when they had no science, when there was no way of physically recording anything.
And the other thing that I think is really important is that if we're going to say that some incredibly advanced intelligence contacted people 5,000 years ago and they wrote it down, then I would accept that a vastly superior intelligence Did contact people 5,000 years ago if they wrote down something that they could not possibly have known at the time.
Like if they wrote down E equals MC squared.
And they wrote down the proofs of the theory of relativity.
Or they wrote down some proofs of Schrödinger's quantum physics equations or whatever, right?
And they basically had no idea what they were writing.
It was just a whole bunch of symbols to them.
It might as well have been you and I transcribing Chinese or something, right?
So if they had written down something that they could not possibly have known at the time, then that would be evidence It wouldn't be certain proof, but it would be significant evidence towards the fact that some superior intelligence, and it most likely would have been an alien race rather than gods, right?
But it would have seemed like, as Arthur C. Clarke said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
But the reality is That of all, all, all, I tell you, all of the religious writings that have ever been written down throughout history, that all claim to be channeled from a universal omniscience, not one scrap of one sentence on any page of these millions of pages of religious texts, not one scrap of information, is a fact that was not commonly available.
To any reasonably literate person of the day.
And that's how you know it's not any superior intelligence, because a superior intelligence would give people things beyond their knowledge.
Obviously, right? I mean, if you and I went back to the Stone Age, right?
Or just, you know, back to ancient Egypt, We would have probably about a million things to tell them that they didn't know at the time, like about electricity, about the movement of the blood in the body, that the heart is the center of the blood pumping and that the brain is the center of reason.
The movement of the planets, you know, quantum physics, computers, monorail, I mean, you could go on and on, right?
But we would have all of these amazing things to tell them.
And you and I are not, I'm certainly not any kind of scientist or psychologist, I'm just a guy who's interested in certain topics, right?
But we would have about a million things to tell them, and that's just going back 5,000 years with our limited human intelligence talking to their limited human intelligence, right?
And so this would be infinitely greater if a God who is all-knowing came to people a couple of thousand years ago.
It would be infinitely superior in terms of the knowledge that could be transmitted.
It would be infinitely superior to what you and I could bring back to ancient Egypt if we had a time machine today, right?
And yet not one scrap.
And I know there are going to be some Muslims who write to me and say, but the allegories in the Koran seem to indicate some foreknowledge of quantum physics.
It's like, well, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you can interpret anything.
I'm not talking about interpretations.
I'm talking about actual facts.
Like you and I would not go back and say E equals MC squared as some sort of Aesopian allegory.
We would just say E equals MC squared, right?
No way. Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.
I think that's how it goes, right? So the reality is that there's not one scrap of information in any of these superstitious texts that is not easily available to anybody with any literacy skills.
And of course you'd have to be literate to write it down.
And that is complete proof that no superior intelligence visited.
Mm-hmm. Well, what if they start bringing stuff, you said allegories, you said, but, you know, that profits and this and that, and they're telling you about, you know, these future times, and this is going to happen, that's going to happen, let's say it like that.
So, I mean, they're going to start bringing all these types of proofs like, you know, oh, we'll get...
No, I'm sorry, that doesn't work either, because, I mean, this is the Nostradamus thing, right?
First of all, if you make enough predictions, a few of them are going to come true.
But if you and I went back to ancient Egypt, again, even with just a layperson's knowledge of history, you know, we would be able to say, you know, that at this time some carpenter's going to be born who, after he gets nailed up, is going to be utilized all over the place for a bunch of superstitious nonsense.
We are going to be able to say...
I would say, you know, in 1066, the French invade England.
In 1914, Europe goes to war, and again in 1939.
Like, we would have, even with a layperson's knowledge of history, we would have about a thousand specific facts to give them.
Not weird allegories like, a mustachio's dragon shall arise from the Austrian, whatever, right?
I mean, oh, it's Hitler, right?
Or something, right? We would just give them the basic facts, right?
And yet, all of these allegories, of course, can be interpreted to mean anything, so there's no fact, right?
Gotcha, gotcha.
Okay, great. Thank you so much for your time.
I really appreciate it. No, these were great, great questions, and I really do appreciate you bringing them up.
All the best. Okay, thanks so much for me.
▲
Export Selection