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Sept. 18, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

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3418 The Rise and Fall of Secular Life - Call In Show - September 16th, 2016

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	Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
	Hope you're doing well.
	Three, count them, three callers today.
	The first caller was asking if we cannot determine the existence of a deity or derive the existence of a deity based upon the glory and majesty of everything that exists.
	In other words, if you see a shadow, you assume that something is between the shadow and the sun, and that's how you can infer the existence of something.
	And so we talked about faith and reason and the limitations of faith and where reason can go and where it can't.
	And it was a really, really enjoyable conversation.
	I hope it helps you delineate these matters in your mind.
	Secondly, oh, didn't this just feel inevitable?
	we had someone call in to say, how can I get to free will without believing in a soul?
	A soul, of course, is the ghost in the machine that religious people in general insert into humanity so that they can rescue free will from mechanistic determination.
	We had a great conversation about determinism versus free will, and I sort of really compressed and encapsulated the arguments I've made for many years on it, so I think you'll find it very illuminating and interesting.
	The third caller was pointing out that some of the rules that, or some of the approaches to life that are taken by Christians seem to be much more effective than a lot of the approaches taken by atheists.
	And in particular, fertility is much higher among religious people than among atheists, which is true.
	And how can a country or a culture be sustained if people basically don't have that many kids?
	So I talked about The way in which the age of Christianity must have inevitably imbued it with several very good ideas, or many very good ideas, and we went into a few of those.
	So it was a really, really enjoyable conversation, and thanks so much to all the callers.
	Thank you so much for your time, care, and attention to the show.
	Thank you, of course, so much for your support of this conversation, the most essential conversation in the world.
	You can help us out at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	Follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
	And, of course, you can use our Amazon affiliate link at fdrurl.com slash Amazon.
	Alright, well up for us today we have Neil.
	Neil wrote in and said, I agree you can't directly prove the existence of God because he's not going to show up physically and announce, Here I am!
	Yet the Apostle Paul said in Romans 1.20, For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.
	In plain English, this means we can know him by everything around us.
	Do you agree with this?
	That's from Neil.
	Hey, Neil.
	How you doing?
	Hey, Stefan.
	It's an honor to be on your show.
	Well, thank you.
	I'm not going to make the obvious joke that you seem quite religious and your name is Neil.
	That's just too obvious.
	That's too below the high-quality comedy standards we have for this show.
	So, I just want you to know you're safe.
	You're safe from that.
	All right.
	So, it's sort of like saying...
	If you see a shadow on the ground, you assume that something is between the ground and the sun, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	If you can detect a gravity well, even if you can't see something, you can assume that there is a black hole or something.
	So we can see things not directly sometimes, but by their effects.
	If we hear a plane above the clouds, we assume that the plane is there, even though we can't see it because we can hear the effects of the engine, which is the sound.
	Is that sort of the...
	Yeah, well, you're kind of on the wrong track.
	And what I'm alluding to with this one passage is that there's a whole world that exists and it's not readily visible to the naked eye.
	Well, sure.
	I mean, I can't see sunbeams, but I know I get a sunburn.
	I can't see x-rays.
	I don't see the radio waves going through the air, but I turn on the radio and hear things.
	So I think that we're all pretty aware that there are things that Have an effect on us that we can't see with the naked eye.
	I mean, even what we can see is a very narrow view of the entire spectrum of that, which is infrared and all that kind of stuff.
	But that's different from all-knowing, all-powerful beings, right?
	Yeah, because, I mean, for example, I think it's pretty obvious that I'm a Christian, and Christianity itself is based on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but What I'm pointing out is Paul is speaking about the supernatural world, which is very much in existence.
	And even though we don't understand, it doesn't mean that it isn't there and it's all-powerful too.
	Well, okay.
	So, supernatural world, this comes back to, and I've got a whole book about this called Against the Gods, which I think people should check out, which is available at freedomainradio.com slash free.
	But the supernatural world, this of course is the world wherein there are tangible gods, well I guess if you're into the tripartite analysis, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, there are the seraphim, the cherubim, the various ranks of devils.
	There is an entire pantheon of invisible incorporeal beings that nonetheless can reach through and have an effect in the world that we live in, right?
	Yes, I believe so.
	Thank you.
	Right.
	And is it your argument that there's some objective way of establishing the existence of these beings?
	Or is it your argument that we will never have sort of scientific, objective, tangible, empirical proof of these beings and that's why they use the phrase leap of faith, right?
	Yeah, I don't believe that you could prove that scientifically, because science doesn't particularly explain the supernatural world.
	But it is...
	Well, hang on.
	Sorry.
	I'm sorry to interrupt.
	That's not, I think, correct.
	Science rejects the supernatural world, rejects the existence of...
	Science has standards of existence, that it's matter or energy or the measurable effects thereof.
	It doesn't say, well, we can't explain this supernatural world, because that's to say...
	That the supernatural world exists, but it's not encapsulated by science.
	Science, or empiricism, would reject the supernatural world, because it can not be detected in any way, shape, or form, and it resists detection, right?
	If you say something there, and then you, like if I say there's an invisible pillar in the middle of the room, and then you walk through the pillar, and I say, well, it's invisible, and it's incorporeal, and then I say, well, can I see it with radar?
	Can I see it with infrared?
	Can I Is there any possible way to detect it?
	And you say no, then we don't say that science can't explain the existence of that thing by all standards of science.
	It would be that there's no, because there's no functional difference between that thing not existing and that thing existing in a completely unempirical, unverifiable way, it would be that this thing does not exist.
	Well, I think science, like you can only explain what it's set up to do, because if you speak about God himself, he is a spirit, right?
	And we can't really detect a spirit using the scientific methods.
	Well, are you trying to say that there's another methodology than reason and evidence that could be used to detect something and prove its existence?
	Well, we use revelation by scriptures because he wrote the scriptures and he tells us about who he is and what his plan is for humankind.
	Because I personally haven't seen a spirit and I don't know too many people who have, but yet they exist.
	But that's what they call begging the question.
	So you can't say, I mean, logically, you can't say the way that we prove the existence of God is we look at the scriptures which we accept as having been written by God.
	Because that's assuming the existence of God in order to prove the existence of God, which logically you can't do.
	You can't go to scripture and say, okay, well, if we accept that God exists and wrote these scriptures, then we can accept that God exists.
	Because you're putting the premise...
	At the very beginning, which is actually the conclusion whether or not God exists, and you're saying, yes, he exists, and he wrote these scriptures.
	Yes, but that is the Christian faith, and I believe the Jews are the same.
	They believe in the inspirational view of the scriptures, and that's where they get their revelation from.
	No, I understand that.
	But that's not a limitation of science, right?
	Faith is the acceptance of things not for which there is no proof.
	So, for instance, I don't think people would say that it's faith for me to believe that somewhere in the universe there exists a flying horse, a Pegasus.
	You would call him, not magical, but a horse with wings.
	Or something like a horse with wings.
	A quadruped, an ungulate, whatever it was going to be, right?
	And for me to say I accept that somewhere...
	In the universe.
	There is, on some planet, on some solar system somewhere, a horse with wings.
	Well, I can't prove that there is.
	For me to say, I accept that there is going to be life somewhere in the universe, in the sort of hundreds of billions of stars and planets, so there's going to be life somewhere.
	I mean, I may not run into them in no man's sky, but there's going to be life out there somewhere.
	And for me to say, I accept that there is life out there somewhere, That is not faith, because where one set of life exists as in on Earth, there's going to be other M-type planets or planets with water or planets in that sort of sweet spot between the hellish cool of Mars and the hellish heat of Mercury and Venus.
	So it is not contradictory.
	To science, reason, evidence, and probability to say there's life out there in the universe somewhere.
	I don't think we would say that's a matter of faith, even though it cannot at this point be proven that there is.
	So faith...
	Again, you're the expert, and I'm simply going from my early education and a good deal of reading.
	I took a whole course on the rise of Protestantism and all that when I was doing my master's.
	And faith, though...
	I think as Tertullian said, I believe because it is absurd.
	I believe because it is impossible.
	It is the acceptance of a truth, not only a truth for which there is no proof, but which could be physically possible, but for which there cannot ever be a proof.
	It is impossible by all the standards of empiricism and mere sensual reality.
	Is that anywhere close to your understanding of faith?
	Yeah, it's pretty close because the scripture teaches us that God gives us the faith to believe him because in my original question I said he's probably not going to show up and say here I am.
	So what he has done is he's given us a supernatural revelation through scripture and he's changed us on the inside so we can accept what he says through scripture.
	And like one example is on the question of origins, where did everything come from?
	Well, okay, so there's two things.
	First of all, I don't mean to diminish the divine, but it would be a bit of a dick move to come and show yourself if you were God.
	Because everybody before that moment would have had to struggle with the challenges of faith and belief in that which seems impossible, in believing in the just order of a universe that very often appears wildly unjust.
	So, for sort of God to show up, and this is somewhat of the argument I know that people had with regards to Jesus coming and showing the miracles and coming back from the dead and so on, that that's evidence of divine power to the degree that people before that, I guess they only made it to purgatory, but not necessarily to heaven, but they wouldn't go to hell because they hadn't had the example of Jesus' presence in miracles and resurrection and so on, clearly beyond mortal powers even now, let alone at the time.
	And so if God came down and gave irrefutable proof of his existence, then it would be to carve humanity into the pre- and the post-existence of a deity, right?
	So all of those who believed in deities prior to God coming down in some giant cloud-wreathed escalator and announcing his presence in plain sight, his existence in plain sight, then everybody would have had to struggle with the ghostly tendrils of faith and doubt and all of that.
	Stuff which drives some people pretty batty.
	But then afterwards, it would be pretty easy to believe because there would be irrefutable evidence or proof.
	And so that would be a real challenge, I think, just theologically, and I don't think we would expect that to occur because, of course, one of the virtues Of most religions is to believe not just in the absence of evidence, but in the presence of impossibility, at least according to the sensual realm.
	That's part of the virtue, isn't it?
	To believe in something that you have direct evidence that contradicts.
	Yeah, because during the time of Christ's ministry on earth, he did say more than once that I am the Messiah and I am God, and the Jews clearly understood what he was saying through Scripture.
	They rejected him because they didn't want to accept the fact that some guy is coming and telling them God.
	And as you see, after the resurrection, the Jews have been under his judgment, and we live in what we call the church age or the Gentile age, where anybody who wants to believe in him can receive him by faith.
	So I think it really is a matter of what we accept in our life and what we believe, because we all have to believe in someone.
	And it depends who that is.
	I don't think I would phrase it that you have to believe in someone.
	Philosophy, of course, unlike theology, philosophy aims to give people the tools to apply their own reasoning and evidence and judgments and evaluations of reality and its phenomenon.
	So, it would be anti-philosophical for me to say everyone needs to believe in someone.
	You need to believe in yourself.
	And here are the tools by which you can separate truth from falsehood.
	And this is what you need to be able to stand for yourself, to stand for the truth, to push back against authority, which is going to tell you how to think and what to think.
	I don't believe that we must believe in someone, and this is why I always tell people, you know, do your own research, I'm just giving you the tools, certainly don't accept everything that I say as gospel, so to speak.
	I mean, that would be unwise and would be unfair to the entire mission of what it is that I'm trying to do, which is to elucidate the tools that people can use to think for themselves, because nobody should follow me, that's the whole The whole point of philosophy and certainly of anarchy is no rulers, right?
	No masters, no people telling you what is and what isn't.
	And that's one of the things that I do like, of course, about Christianity is that you can have that.
	In many of the variants of Christianity, it's you and God.
	You don't even need a priest.
	I know in certain, I think in Catholicism you do, but in some you don't.
	It's you and God, you and your conscience, you and your soul, you and your prayers, you and your relationship with Jesus.
	And...
	That not following people but following your conscience, I think, has given Christianity a good deal of moral power for good in the world.
	Yes, and you know, everybody will tell you that there are some good things that come out of Christianity, whether you believe in the faith or not.
	But Jesus meant a lot of strong statements, and one of them is that he said in John 14 is that he is the way, the truth, and the life.
	And that's a A very powerful statement, and that tells you that he determines these benchmarks that determine what's right and wrong for him.
	And there are, of course, rules to follow in Christianity.
	Of course, there is what would Jesus do, and Jesus did some good things, some very good things.
	And there are the Ten Commandments, and this, of course, is designed, I would assume, to give the sovereign conscience of the Christian authority against Unjust secular powers.
	I know that there's a big phase in Christianity, or at least in certain flavors, wherein the secular powers, the government, the king, the aristocracy, were invested with divine sanction and divine authority, right?
	So there's an old argument that comes out of Martin Luther, not the King Jr., but the original guy who started his life as a monk and ended up as a married father of, I don't know, 50 kids or something.
	Because one of the great things that comes out of Christianity is babies, which we're going to get to later in this show.
	But he said, you know, trying to reconcile an eye for an eye.
	He said, well, the eye for the eye is for secular powers, right?
	If the eye for the eye is that the rulers, the judges, the police can punish you for what you do wrong, and they should.
	Whereas turn the other cheek and love your enemy, that is for your obedience to the secular rulers.
	And if that's what they say, If they say you have to go and, you know, walk 10 miles because you stole a loaf of bread, well, then you don't disagree with them.
	It's their job to do an eye for an eye to punish you, and it's your job to submit to that.
	Now, again, we don't know what he actually believed.
	For almost all of human history, it was virtually impossible for people to speak their minds about what they really believed because there was such significant amounts of...
	Very secular burn you at the stake kind of pressures for the free exercise of conscience and free speech.
	But there is an aspect of Christianity that has historically legitimized rulers and said that to obey the king is to obey God.
	You know, the old divine right of kings that God has placed the ruler over you just as God has placed over you in his authority.
	But that having been said, it is a very Christian phenomenon, at least in the West.
	Maybe it's a combination of Christianity and And Greek philosophy, but it is in the Christian Western nations that separation of church and state and freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, equality before the law, and free markets evolved.
	And I think that has something to do with the fact that you have a relationship with the deity that gives you some ammunition to significantly improve the world and to question Once the divine right of kings was put to one side, then you have the right to question and oppose unjust secular authority, with reference to the divine rules that you are responsible for obeying.
	Yes, and on the subject of the Ten Commandments, that actually came from the Jews, and it's not a very well-known fact that Christians have eleven commandments, and the last one was before Jesus went to the cross, He said, a new commandment I give you is to love one another like the way I've loved you.
	Because, I mean, the Ten Commandments very much still exist, but we're no longer under the power of the Ten Commandments because Jesus paid the price for all of that.
	Right.
	So, I don't believe that we can make a statement that because things are Then there must be a God, right?
	As you point out, Apostle Paul in Romans 1.20, For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.
	So because everything exists, we cannot from that infer that everything was created by an eternal, all-knowing, all-powerful deity.
	Um...
	There's a variety of reasons for that, which I've gone into many times before, but I certainly understand and appreciate and feel, Neil, the gratitude that we, I think, should have for the amazing gift of existence and the amazing, wonderful, beautiful, challenging, exciting, morally...
	Exciting world that we live in.
	The fact that we get to breathe, the fact that we get to climb stairs and sing songs and paint paintings and raise children and think and reason and challenge and doubt and fight for what is good is an extraordinary gift.
	We are, as I've said before, an amazing amalgam of star sneeze that gets to do unbelievably incredible stuff and such a tiny fragment of existence as we know it.
	Think of all of the mass of the solar system versus all of the mass of mere human brains and the amount of thought even in just our own solar system, let alone the Milky Way, let alone the cluster of galaxies, let alone the universe as a whole for all we know.
	We could be the only sentient beings, I doubt it, but the amount of coincidence it takes to actually end up inhabiting one of these amazing thinking meat puppets of eternity and mortality, that is something which we, I think, should be full of wonder and excitement and thrill about.
	I myself, as you know, as an empiricist, I can't go from there to the existence of universal divine will.
	And I think logically we can't get there.
	Because, of course, if logically we could get there, we would not need faith.
	Yeah, and that's why the scripture says he will give you that faith.
	I mean, he will answer all who calls on to him.
	Right.
	Right.
	Well, I appreciate the call.
	Thank you so much.
	I do so much enjoy the Chatting about theology with Christians and with others who call in is a great, great pleasure.
	I really appreciate you listening to this show, and I look forward to more people calling in about these topics.
	And thanks so much, Neil.
	It was a great pleasure to chat.
	My pleasure, Seth.
	Alright, up next we have Vinny.
	Vinny wrote in and said, I've questioned many things in my short life, but my disbelief in God and the independent soul is not one of them.
	I remember vividly the day when I was four years old my father attempted to explain to me what and who God was.
	The very moment he expressed the view that God was something apart from the physical universe, I rejected it, and had been making logical arguments for my entire life which refute God.
	However, I have recently encountered an obstacle I see as logically insurmountable, and that is how can we as beings have free will, rational agency, or whatever you wish to call it, without having a soul which is apart from our physical body?
	It seems to me that if we accept the premise of atheism, that there is nothing other than the physical universe, that we must also accept determinism.
	I have rejected determinism as long as I have rejected the existence of the soul, but I find myself unable to logically and rationally continue the rejection of them both.
	The question I pose to you is, which one is it?
	Are we biologically determined to do everything we do from birth until death?
	Or, do we have a soul that is separate from our physical being, which grants us free will, but seems to condemn our atheism?
	That's from Vinny.
	Oh hey Vinny, how you doing tonight?
	I'm good.
	How are you?
	I'm well.
	I'm well.
	Thank you.
	Yep.
	I get it.
	I really get it.
	So for those who don't know, let me just run through it briefly.
	And if I get anything amiss, Vinny, just let me know.
	But this is the challenge, which is that everything that is physical is part of a sequence of processes, physical, biological, biochemical, chemical, whatever it is, right?
	I mean, it's a series of dominoes going down.
	And if the brain is contained within matter, in other words, if the brain has no ghost in the machine, if there's nothing outside of matter, then how can the brain be assumed or be claimed to have free will when the brain is part of matter?
	And we don't say that the planet has chosen to go around the sun.
	We don't say that the sun has chosen to go around the Milky Way.
	We don't say that the comet has chosen to come by once every 88 years or whatever.
	These are simply...
	Inevitable products of particular physical processes set in place from the beginning of whatever until now.
	There's no choice involved in any form of matter except for philosophically and morally the human mind.
	And this is why a cougar who attacks and kills a child, it may be shot, but it's not morally punished.
	We don't put the cougar on trial because, you know, it's acting on instinct.
	It doesn't have a neofrontal cortex able to intercept.
	You have like a quarter second to intercept impulses and stop them and change them as you move forward.
	And so if the human brain is entirely encapsulated within material reality...
	How can it have self-generating action?
	How can it be the only piece of matter in the universe that has self-generating matter, self-generating choices, self-generating circumstances, situations, and so on?
	And if everything is dominoes going down one after the other, then the human brain has no more choice in its actions than a planet has in its orbit.
	And if we're going to create some magical exception for the human mind, then we have a big problem.
	And the problem is, how do we explain free will in a material body that is subject to all the laws of physics and motion, gravity, you name it, reaction, action and reaction?
	How on earth can we just describe free will to this tiny couple of pound brain of mountain of wetware?
	How can we do that?
	Well, the way that it's solved in a religious context is to take the soul, the invisible, extra-physical, extra-reality essence of a being, and put the ghost into the machine.
	And therefore, the ghost or the soul is that which allows you to choose outside of material reality, because it's not subject to the endless series of dominoes that cause things to happen in reality.
	Is that a fair way to put it?
	Yeah, that's far better than I think I did.
	Hearing the question I posed, re-read, I was like, ooh, I could have written that better.
	But yes, that's exactly the question.
	If we accept physical science, how can we reconcile a free will without borrowing from some immaterial spiritual world?
	Right.
	And it's really a crabby, crabby situation.
	Because I think, I was talking about this with a fellow who called in on Wednesday about UFOs.
	And very briefly, I had some objections to a physical scenario.
	He was pointing out where a UFO accelerated from zero to 3,000 miles an hour virtually instantaneously.
	And I said, well...
	You know, friction would cause it to burst into flames, whereas the sonic boom and any creature that accelerated from zero to 3,000 miles an hour instantaneously would basically turn into a piece of jelly on the floor of this spaceship because you'd get flattened, right?
	The force required for that.
	Yeah, I mean, you're right.
	And so...
	His answer was, well, they have some special technology that allows them to do all of these things that are, you know, not really part of the law of inertia or friction or whatever.
	And the problem with the sole argument is I think most of us deep down, and this is maybe where you are, Vinny, but most of us deep down, we kind of know that pulling the giant magic lever doesn't make you an engineer.
	I don't like that answer.
	The answer of there's a soul, and that's why we have for free will, is not a very good answer.
	It's the invocation of magic to establish a proposition, to reach the conclusion that you want.
	There is an old cartoon And it is a...
	I'm just going to see if I can look it up.
	Oh yeah, here we go.
	It's pretty old.
	It's two scientists looking at a blackboard, right?
	And there is a whole bunch of equations.
	And then there's four words between the first set of equations and the second set of equations.
	And...
	The four words are, so first set of equations, then a miracle occurs, then second set of equations.
	And so the one scientist is pointing at, then a miracle occurs, and he's saying, I think you should be more explicit here in step two.
	And I remember reading this.
	I don't know how old this cartoon is.
	But I remember reading this.
	Unless I'm wrong, I think it is a kid.
	I think I read it when I was a kid.
	I think you should be more explicit here in step two.
	Then a miracle occurs, right?
	And the reason why...
	I hope you'll get comfy as I go on a little bit of a rant here.
	Go for it.
	The reason why this is so important is that so much...
	Human misery and destruction and horror occurs in the middle between these two equations.
	Then a miracle occurs, right?
	I mean, just think of communism.
	We're going to get this new Soviet man, we're going to get this new communist man who's not going to have any self-interest and he's going to be happy to work for everyone else and human incentives are going to be completely screwed up and those who work harder will be taxed more and those who work less will be more rewarded.
	The exact opposite of all biological incentives that got us to the very top of the food chain.
	So, institution of communism, and then at the end there's supposed to be this magical paradise at the other end of communism and in the middle, then a miracle.
	Here a miracle occurs.
	I think you should be a little bit more explicit in step two.
	Central planning.
	I mean, we have this whole incredibly complex interchange and system of supply and demand and bidding and offers and prices and goods and movements and self-interest and an amazing amalgam of voluntary interactions in a free market environment.
	But somehow we give a few people the power to organize and order around everyone at the point of a gun and somehow we're going to get some economic miracle of massive productivity and a Soviet paradise and a socialist paradise or a mixed economy paradise is going to occur.
	So it's like, well, on the one hand we have an unreproducible system which is all of the prices that come out of supply and demand and different people's choices and we're going to replace that with a few people with political pull and power organizing and ordering everyone around.
	Well, um...
	Here, a miracle occurs, and it's somehow going to work.
	It's like, well, I think we should be a little bit more explicit here in step two.
	Yes, I'm talking to you, people zeitgeisters.
	And this happens all over the place.
	All over the place.
	Somehow we're going to get to a post-racial society by screaming racism every five minutes at anyone who has opinions slightly different or information that's slightly startling relative to what we believe.
	So, we want a post-racial society, and we're going to scream racism at everyone who disagrees with us.
	A miracle occurs, and we get to a post-racial society.
	It's like, well, I don't think that screaming racism at everyone is really going to get us to a post-racial society.
	Or...
	Some of the arguments around the welfare state.
	You know, well, we're going to give money to women who have children out of wedlock because we care about the children, which means that they can't have a man in the house because if they have him, otherwise they would just live together, not get married, and the woman would claim to be a single mom.
	They'd get all of this free government cheddar.
	And so we have to make sure that the man and the woman don't live together.
	We're going to pay women to have children.
	Then a miracle occurs and everything is great, right?
	Paying the least responsible people to have the most children when we know that intelligence is to some degree genetic and Well, we're going to take money from people who are smart, and we're going to give money to people who are irresponsible, and then a miracle occurs, and we get paradise.
	And when you start to see this, this is why I'm sort of spending some time on this cartoon.
	And we'll put a link to it below.
	You can stare at this cartoon, and this is like the history of the human race.
	And in the same way, when we look at something like free will, we have...
	The brain is subject to the laws and rules and limitations and consequences of material reality.
	Free will is something that is self-generated.
	It is its own cause, so to speak.
	It can't be a series of dominoes from things that happened before, because then it's not free will.
	You may have the illusion of free will, but you don't actually have free will.
	So for the religious answer, and it's funny, but this cartoon was written by somebody named S. Harris.
	I don't think it was Sam Harris, but S. Harris.
	So with the religious thing, it's like, well, we're material beings.
	We want free will.
	So in the middle, then a miracle occurs.
	We're inhabited by a non-material ghost that is not subject to the laws of physics, but somehow gives us free will.
	Then a miracle occurs.
	Yeah, I think you should be a bit more explicit here in step two.
	And that question, then a miracle occurs, that to me is where Bullshit lives.
	I mean, this is where big, stinking, heaping piles of Jurassic Park dinosaur, stegosaurus crap lives.
	And, you know, Jeff Goldblum cocking his sexy Jewish hips to one side and saying, wow, that's a big pile of shit right there.
	That is, then a miracle occurs.
	And I am not satisfied with the answer of that.
	The ghost in the machine, the soul in the body, it answers nothing.
	Then a miracle occurs and I'm right.
	Nope.
	It's not how things work in reality.
	And we're all tempted to pull the big giant miracle bag and sprinkle it around to make all of our dreams come true.
	This is what I want.
	I want an egalitarian society run by giant robot mommy cities where I'll never have to work and can sit there learning the loot all day like I'm Sting.
	How am I going to do it?
	I Well, there is the price problem.
	There is the price calculation problem, as von Mises talked about.
	There is the human motivation problem.
	There is the organization of resources for scarce resources.
	Well, I want to sit around in my unisex monotard and learn the loot all day.
	So how am I going to do it?
	Well, resource-based economy, robot cities, whatever it's going to be.
	Then a miracle occurs, and I can get what I want.
	And we all have that incredible...
	Incredible temptation.
	You know, why just have a salad when you can have a word salad?
	Putting the trun in truncated.
	Putting the fun in funcated.
	But anyway, so we all have this great temptation.
	I want to solve the problem of poverty.
	I don't like the fact that there are poor people.
	I think poor people should have more money.
	I don't have enough money to give to them to solve the whole problem of poverty, so I'm going to give the government the violent power to redistribute or to coercively move and shuffle money around in the economy.
	And that's going to solve the problem of poverty.
	Then a miracle occurs and there's no more poor people.
	And like society's Not just individuals.
	Societies literally fall into the sinkhole of then a miracle occurs.
	And the people who say, well, oh, you want this great thing in society.
	You want the poor to get good health care.
	Well, we're going to force the government to have people buy health care.
	We're going to force people to pay for other people's health care.
	We're going to prevent insurance companies from discriminating against.
	People who have pre-existing conditions, which basically means people wait till they get sick before they get healthcare, which is why we have to force them to buy it.
	We're going to force young people to buy healthcare and subsidize everyone else's healthcare, even though they don't want to and they'll rather pay the fine.
	So, you know, this is what crazy, mean, nasty sociopaths do, is they figure out, what are you hungry for?
	What do you want?
	What are you desperate for?
	Mm-hmm.
	Are you desperate for healthcare for the poor?
	Okay.
	Boom, boom, boom.
	Give us lots of power.
	Then a miracle occurs.
	And everything's going to be great.
	And they do this all the time.
	Oh, do you think that we should have no drugs in society?
	Okay.
	Give us all of this power to wage this war on drugs.
	Then a miracle occurs.
	And drugs are gone.
	Poof!
	Same thing with prohibition, right?
	Oh, ladies, is your husband a bit of a drinker?
	Is he drinking all of the money that you need to feed your kids with on his way home from getting cash in his paycheck?
	Don't worry.
	We're going to ban alcohol, and then a miracle will occur, and nobody will be able to get any access to any alcohol.
	I don't want to belabor the point too much, but when you start looking at the problems in the world...
	Then a miracle occurs, right?
	We are going to import in Germany, right?
	We're going to bring in a million people from the Middle East who have no experience of Western democracy, no experience of the free market in particular, no experience of egalitarian gender relations, no experience, no history, no understanding, no language skills, no.
	Then a miracle occurs and everything works out fine.
	And whenever people offer you a solution, the closer that it is to your heart, the closer that it is to your yearning.
	Like if somebody said to me, Steph, I know you're Not into government programs.
	But, Steph, let me tell you, I've got one great government program that would only cost one tenth of one percent of the entire GDP of a country that would guarantee that parents treated their children peacefully.
	Don't you want it?
	Huh?
	Don't you want it?
	Aren't you hungry for it?
	Come on!
	Come on!
	And it's swinging its It's hiking up its legs.
	It's got those nice fishnets on or whatever the hell turns your crank.
	And it would be like, oh, yeah, well, okay, I really do want children to be parented peacefully.
	So wouldn't it be really tempting?
	Maybe I could just this once bend the principle just a little bit so I could get...
	Then a miracle occurs and everyone's peacefully parented and all that kind of stuff.
	you have a yearning for free will, as do I.
	But that's where you have to be very careful about then a miracle occurs.
	Because that is the big foggy middle part of the sandwich wherein civilizations fall to their doom.
	Then a miracle occurs.
	We'll just keep borrowing and keep borrowing and keep printing and keep printing.
	Then a miracle occurs.
	And we're going to head off into the Middle East, you see?
	We're going to head off into the Middle East.
	We're going to invade all of these countries.
	And we are going to impose democracy on them because they're exactly the same as us, just repressed.
	Then a miracle occurs and everything's going to be great.
	And that is very dangerous.
	In fact, that's really the most fundamental danger.
	And the whole purpose of this show...
	Not just this show, but this show as a whole, and I would argue the whole purpose of philosophy is to stand there and say, not just, I think you should be a bit more explicit here in step two where you claim a miracle will occur, but you don't get any further.
	Stop right there!
	You don't get any further.
	Stop in the name of thought!
	You don't get any further until you tell us what the hell is going on in the big, foggy, meat-muscle-sandwich part called Then a Miracle Occurs.
	Because usually that is...
	Where you and your children and your history and your culture and your country and everything, your civilization itself is going to get robbed into oblivion in that fog.
	So thank you for the rant opportunity.
	Do you want me to very briefly go over my thoughts about free will or is there something you wanted to add to what I'm saying?
	Just to clarify what you seem to be getting at there.
	The thing we want is free will, and then obviously the spiritual world would be the miracle, and then at the end we would have explained, the thing we get is having explained free will.
	Yeah, free will cannot exist in a deterministic universe, but the soul is not part of the deterministic universe, and the soul is where you get free will.
	That's then a miracle occurs, right?
	Right.
	But this is where I'm having a little bit of trouble following, you know, where you're trying to go with this, because it seems to me that all the things you listed before, you know, the things that, like, you wanted peaceful parenting and stuff, does that mean we can't have peaceful parenting until you We do it the right way.
	Does that mean we don't have free will?
	Or we can't say we have free will until we figure out a logical, scientific way of proving it?
	Is that where you're getting at here?
	I don't know where peaceful parenting comes in, but the question around free will is...
	Just the way that you put it...
	Let me just bunch you in here.
	This is not going to be a rant.
	This is going to be very brief.
	And this is not the full entire spectrum of possibilities, but I'm just going to break it down into two things, right?
	It's a pretty funny video on YouTube about sort of movie cliches.
	One is there are two kinds of people in this world, right?
	That is one of these things that you see all the time in movies and somebody's put the whole clips together.
	That was sort of one.
	And the other is, the other cliche is you just don't get it, do you?
	Right?
	So when somebody wants to convince you of something, what they will do, And you're pushing back and they'll say, you just don't get it, do you?
	And it's then an appeal to your insecurity to say, oh, well, I want to get it.
	And I guess you're right.
	I'm just too dumb to understand it or too resistant.
	So when people say to you, you just don't get it, do you?
	That's when you have to really, really be careful.
	And it's all over the place in the shows that are trying to program the American population into accepting Hillary Clinton.
	Yeah.
	Madam Secretary, I think with Tierra Leone, the one with the woman from Seinfeld, Julia Louise Dreyfus, and I guess the good wife and so on.
	It's all over the place in those.
	Anyway, enough pop culture references.
	But there's two ways to establish something, right?
	Number one is through Socratic reasoning, through syllogistical proof, right?
	All men are mortal.
	Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal.
	You don't need any external references within its own situation.
	It's valid.
	It doesn't necessarily mean it's true.
	It's just logically valid, right?
	You could make up anything.
	All men are unicorns.
	Socrates is a man.
	Therefore, Socrates is a unicorn.
	Well, it's valid logically.
	It's just not true empirically, right?
	So when you combine, this is why it's reason and evidence, right?
	You get reason allows you to pursue the arguments, but you must tie your original premises into physical, tangible, material, absolute, true, honest-to-goodness reality.
	Otherwise, you may be valid logically, but you're not true from an empirical standpoint.
	Now that's one way, is you just tie things in, and this is the way that science works, right?
	Science doesn't care about motivation.
	Science just says this is the way that the world works.
	Objects fall to earth at 9.8 meters per second per second.
	Gases expand when heated for the most part, and all mammals except for that playful platypus Breastfeed their young or something like that.
	Anyway, so I have to put in all these caveats because Lord knows I have a healthy cloud of nitpickers around my brain when I do these shows and I appreciate that.
	It's always important to be accurate about these things.
	So that's one thing.
	But there's another way, which I focused on quite a bit and I think it's kind of unappreciated and I've got videos about this kind of stuff as well.
	And that is you don't need to Tie empiricism into syllogisms in order to make your case or to make your point.
	Yeah, I think I actually, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I kind of know where you're going with this.
	Is it going to be a little bit of a Cartesian proof?
	No, I call it a self-detonating statement, right?
	So, if I say to you, Vinny, All language is incomprehensible.
	Is there a way to rebut what I've said?
	Right.
	Okay.
	I mean, no.
	Because we're using language.
	Yeah, there is.
	Look, if I say to you, Vinny, all language is incomprehensible, then you can defeat my argument by pointing out the following.
	You could say, Steph, if all language is incomprehensible, either A... I have understood that statement, in which case language is comprehensible.
	Or B, you've just said a bunch of mush mouth.
	You might as well have just said, but because I've chosen very specific words, all language is incomprehensible, if what I'm saying is true, then I would never use language to communicate that idea.
	I mean, for instance, I couldn't.
	It would be like if I don't speak Japanese and they only speak Japanese at some job, why would I go for that interview?
	We wouldn't be able to understand each other because if they don't speak English and I don't speak Japanese, we are incomprehensible to each other.
	So I wouldn't go to that job interview.
	There's an old joke.
	I can't remember.
	It might have been Howie Mandel.
	Who also seems like the guitarist for Train.
	But anyway, Howie Mandel had this old joke.
	I think it was Howie Mandel.
	And it was something like how when you go overseas and you speak into someone, I don't know, they're German or Austrian or something, and they don't understand you.
	You know, where is the bank?
	And then you do it louder.
	You know, where is the bank?
	Right?
	Like, if you just go louder and slower, somehow you break through the barrier.
	This is all pre-Google Translate, right?
	And he was sort of saying, well, imagine if the German, or whoever it is, comes to your town, you know, Wo bist der Hundesteifen?
	Right?
	And you say, I don't know what you're saying.
	Wo bist der Hundesteifen?
	It doesn't, you know, going slower and louder doesn't Doesn't help, right?
	So if I make the case to you that all language is incomprehensible and you understand what I'm saying, then I am assuming that language is comprehensible in order to make the argument that all language is incomprehensible.
	And that's a self-detonating statement because it relies on my statement being false in order for me to use the statement.
	In order for me to communicate to you that all language is incomprehensible, language must be comprehensible.
	Yeah, actually, I think that I understand.
	Do you mind if I try and see where you're going with this?
	Yeah.
	So, are you saying that in order to conceive of free will, we would need to have free will?
	No.
	That's called begging the question, which I was talking about with the first caller.
	Let me give you another example.
	Let's say that you and I are emailing each other back and forth, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	And I send to you, no, let's say you email me and you have this free will question, right?
	And I email back to you and I say, Vinny, I can't do this over email because emails never get delivered to the right person.
	So we can't do it this way.
	You'll have to phone me, right?
	Right.
	1-800-big-chatty-forehead.
	Now, why would that be...
	An incorrect statement or an invalid approach or statement for me to make.
	If I sent you an email saying, well, the problem is, Vinny, emails never get delivered to the right person.
	Well, assuming, well, if you sent that email, then you would have necessarily received my email, which would have disproved the statement.
	Well, and I'm sending it back to you saying, Vidi, this message I have for you will never be delivered to you.
	This is why I'm sending it to you.
	It makes no sense, right?
	What I used in the past was you mail a letter to someone saying that letters never get delivered to the right person.
	So I would have to assume that my message, my email, is going to be delivered to you directly.
	I have to assume that.
	So if my argument is that emails never get delivered to the right person, but I have to assume that it's going to be delivered to the right person in order to make that case...
	Then I'm wrong.
	Right?
	And I'm wrong not because you have to analyze whether emails get, do you have to trace IP addresses or skips or whatever it is, right?
	I'm wrong because by my own argument, I am contradicting myself.
	Emails never get delivered to the right person, so I'm going to send you an email to tell you that.
	Well, which is it?
	If I genuinely believe that emails never get delivered to the right person, I'd never write that email.
	The moment I write that email and send it to you, I cannot claim, I cannot claim that emails never get delivered to the right person.
	I mean, assuming it gets delivered to me.
	Well, no.
	But you see, if I'm sending it to you, I am assuming it's going to be delivered to you.
	Let's say it ends up in your spam folder.
	Let's say that an asteroid hits some mail server somewhere.
	Let's say it never gets delivered to you.
	I'm still wrong.
	Because when I hit that send button, I'm replying to you directly saying I can't reply to you directly.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	I follow.
	If something intervenes, I'm still wrong.
	Because by my own premise of action, by what I am doing, I am contradicting, that the form of my argument is contradicting the content of my argument.
	Do you see what I mean?
	Right.
	If I'm saying, I'm sending you an email to tell you emails never get delivered, the form of my argument, the sending of the email where it's, well, contradicts the content of my argument, which is that emails never get delivered.
	In the same way if I say all language is incomprehensible, the form of my argument, which relies on the comprehensibility of language, contradicts the content.
	Of my argument, which is that all language is incomprehensible.
	Right, I think I have enough.
	So, look at the form of what people are saying.
	First, and I'm telling you, 95%, actually I think we've measured 95.5% of philosophical discussions can be resolved by looking at the form of the argument.
	Everybody wants to rush past the form of the argument and start dealing with the content.
	Say, well, I can prove to you that emails do get delivered.
	I can prove to you that...
	Forget it.
	Just look at what the person is doing and say, does the form of the argument match the content of the argument?
	Let me give you another example because I want to make sure that people understand just how powerful this argument is.
	And thank you so much for giving me a chance to rant on this.
	I haven't talked about this in years, but it's very, very, very, very important.
	So someone comes up to you, and they say, I'm going to give you an argument, I'm going to give you an argument that the government should fund science, or the government should fund abortions, or the government should fund whatever, right?
	I'm going to give you an argument.
	Now the form of the argument contradicts the content of the argument.
	Because the form of the argument is, we should reason through this stuff.
	I should bring you evidence.
	I should bring you arguments.
	I should appeal to your rationality, to your self-interest, to whatever.
	I should not force you to accept my argument, but rather I should make the case for you to voluntarily accept my argument.
	And if you reject my argument, I do not have the right to use force against you, right?
	I mean, can you imagine getting into an argument with someone about funding NASA, right?
	Yeah.
	And you say, I don't want to find NASA. I think it should be voluntary.
	I'd rather have private charities do it or private agencies or whatever, right?
	And then they get all, you know, Tarantino Jackson on your ass and pull out some heater and step on your neck and it's like, you better find NASA, bitch!
	You better find NASA or I'll pop a cap in your something or other, right?
	I can't really, I don't speak Java.
	But, I mean, can you imagine how crazy that would be?
	Mm-hmm.
	Right.
	But that is actually an argument where the form would match the content.
	Because when they're trying to reason you into accepting a government program, what they're saying is, you should voluntarily accept a rational argument.
	But what they're proposing is that people are forced to do stuff.
	Does that make sense?
	Right, right.
	Okay, I think.
	The content of the argument is about giving the government the power to initiate the use of force to collect funding for whatever government program this person.
	So they're saying, I should reason with you, and that's the best.
	And if I took out a gun and forced you to do something, everybody would think I was crazy.
	But the content, so that's the form of the argument.
	The content of the argument is the government should pull out guns and force people to do stuff.
	So, right, the fact that you're using reason just by its very nature proves that things can be accomplished without the government.
	Well, what they're saying is it would be insane for me to pull out a gun and force you to fund NASA. What's civilized is to have this debate.
	But that's what the government does.
	That's good behavior.
	And only crazy people will pull out guns and force you to do stuff.
	But the content of the argument is that the government should force people to do stuff.
	And specifically people who disagree.
	Because if you already agree with funding NASA, you don't need a government.
	The funding of NASA or whatever it is going to be, the funding of any government program is only and always and specifically for people who bloody well don't want to do it.
	Because if everyone wanted to do it, you wouldn't even need a government program.
	Right, okay.
	Right, so it is forcing people to do what they don't want to do at the point of a gun, under threat of jail, under threat of sanction, under threat of fine, which leads to jail if you don't pay it.
	It is a violent threat against people who disagree with you, but they're making a case and giving you a reason to argument and all that kind of cool stuff.
	So the form of the argument, which is we should resolve this through reason and voluntarism and choice and arguments and evidence, boom!
	It completely, completely and totally contradicts the content of the argument, which is we should bloody well force people who don't want to do what I think they should do.
	Right.
	And they should damn well go to jail if they don't fund NASA or welfare or whatever it is, foreign wars.
	Unless for some strange reason your implication was the person you're trying to describe this to, you two are the only rational citizens in the entire country, or something like that, which would be...
	No, that's a good point.
	Let me just think about that one for a second.
	I mean, you know, your own reason...
	Well, no, that wouldn't work because if you're talking about a democracy, you need to have a majority of people agree with something, right?
	So if you're the only two rational people, there wouldn't be any point having a debate about it because...
	Right, unless you were the...
	Nobody else would listen to reason, right?
	...country, like you're in some sort of king-queen monarchy and one view is...
	But if you're the king and queen, you don't need to reason with each other because you can just enforce your will on the population, right?
	Unless you have to mutually agree on whatever you're enforcing in the world.
	I don't know how modern keys work.
	Yeah, well, I don't know that that's necessarily particularly common or historically valid.
	I mean, I agree with you that you could construct some scenario, but not one that ever exists in the world, right?
	That shouldn't have even said it, but yeah, go ahead.
	No, no, listen.
	No, you absolutely should have.
	Look, absolutely, absolutely should have.
	And I appreciate that.
	So...
	When it comes to free will, we look at the form of the argument versus the content of the argument.
	The form of the argument in debates about free will, if somebody's trying to convince you that you do have free will, the form of the argument and the content of the argument align.
	They don't contradict each other.
	If you don't believe in free will, and I am trying to tell you that you do have free will, I'm trying to appeal to you to change your mind, And the content of my argument is you have the power and capacity to change your mind.
	Right?
	So you see the form of the argument and the content of the argument don't contradict each other.
	Right.
	Wait, are you sure?
	This is important.
	I don't want to drag you over this bridge in a sack.
	Let me know.
	If we need to go over it again, that's totally fine.
	I still kind of think that this is the exact way I was thinking about it.
	It's a drastic manipulation of the Cartesian proof.
	It's similar.
	You're saying that the fact that I'm trying to use my own free will, I suppose, to...
	I'm assuming you have free will to change your mind about the concept of free will necessitates the existence of free will.
	Or at least is valid with the existence of free will.
	Yeah, now this doesn't mean...
	That's not a proof of free will.
	Right, right, right.
	It doesn't prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that free will exists.
	But what it does, if I'm trying to convince you that you have free will...
	Then I'm trying to change your mind, and that's perfectly in accordance with my fundamental belief that you have the power to change your mind.
	Right.
	Make sense?
	But determinism doesn't work.
	Is that what we're getting at?
	Right.
	With determinism, the form and the content directly contradict each other.
	With determinism, they're saying, you really should change your mind and stop believing in free will because you have no capacity to change your mind.
	Well, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, of course, but is determinism not like whatever you believe or the output of your mind is based on the input of all concepts that you've ever been exposed to throughout your life?
	So theoretically, if you're exposed to nothing...
	Yeah, Finny, I completely agree with you.
	And if you play billiards or snooker...
	Where the ball lands is the function of your cue and the first ball and every ball that hits it, right?
	But we don't debate with the balls.
	No.
	Right?
	I mean, if I switch on the television and the television is just a machine, the television might change my mind about something.
	I'm watching some show or whatever, right?
	But nobody would say that the television is debating with me.
	The television is just a machine, right?
	And so, sure, I mean, this is what they say, well, listen, you're just a sum of your inputs.
	I'm just a different kind of input, right?
	But the problem is they're just a sum of their inputs.
	And if we're all just a sum of our inputs, the question is, if a rock is bouncing down the side of a hill, is there any possibility that it could land in a better or more honest or more truthful or more accurate space, or could it land in a less is there any possibility that it could land in a better or more honest
	If it's bouncing down the hill, presumably ahead of both of these places, it's possible for either of them?
	Well, no.
	I'm thinking about it wrong.
	It doesn't make...
	I mean, it's going to land where it's going to land.
	Oh, okay.
	There's no...
	Oh, this is a nice place to land or this is a bad...
	I mean, I guess if you want it to land in your car or whatever, I mean...
	But from a moral standpoint, the rock is just bouncing down the hill.
	Right?
	And so if the rock is just accidentally dislodged for whatever reason, or just erosion and it just starts bouncing down, well, it's an accident, right?
	Wherever it lands, it lands, right?
	If it lands on your car, that's a shame.
	However, if somebody pushes the rock down the hill and it lands on your car, we have a different situation, right?
	Now somebody is coarsely responsible for the destruction of your car.
	There's a moral element.
	You can whatever, right?
	I agree.
	I think that's why I always rejected the concept of determinism because it ultimately removes the best things, I think, in life.
	It seeks to invalidate love and other things and also moral responsibility, or at least it necessarily, logically invalidates these things because you can't be responsible for something that you were Right.
	Now, that is an argument from consequences in that if determinism is true, I lose all of these wonderful things.
	But that's not a rational argument.
	No, of course not.
	Somebody could say, well, look, if you disprove the existence of God, then I lose the belief that I get to live forever.
	I lose the belief in life after death and being reunited.
	But that's not a moral argument.
	That's not a rational argument.
	That's just a, I don't like it if it happens, right?
	But it's important, right?
	Because it's important to talk about your biases, your prejudices.
	You know, we all have them.
	And it's important to be honest about them.
	And I've made that speech about, I don't get to love my wife or my daughter or myself or just a machine.
	And that's because I want people to know why I'm attached to free will.
	And I want to be honest about my attachment to free will because I like being in love and I like admiring people and I like challenging myself to be a better person.
	So here's the thing when it comes to determinism.
	A determinist will say that determinism is true and a belief in free will is false, right?
	Right.
	However, there is no such thing as true or false, right or wrong, correct or incorrect, having integrity or being corrupt.
	None of those things exist in a deterministic universe.
	There is no preferred state in a deterministic universe.
	There cannot be.
	Is it moral for Jupiter to have the orbit that it has?
	Is it better or worse?
	Would it be better or worse for Jupiter to be one mile closer to the Sun or one mile further away?
	The question makes no sense, right?
	Because Jupiter is a purely determined entity.
	It has no consciousness.
	It has no choice.
	It has no brain.
	It has no free will.
	It just is gonna go where it's gonna go, right?
	And so would that not mean that our experiences as humans would necessarily lead to the same place Sort of every time, you know, plus the random chance of whatever...
	No, no, hang on.
	Sorry.
	That's not...
	I mean, we'll get there in a sec.
	That's not the argument I was...
	So, for a determinist to say, your free will is an error and you should accept determinism because it's true, there the form of the argument doesn't match the content of the argument.
	Yes.
	Because in a deterministic universe, there is no preferred state.
	There is no better or worse state.
	There is no preferred or non-preferred state.
	There's no truth.
	There's no falsehood.
	And there's no truth is better than falsehood.
	Therefore, you should choose truth.
	You should choose to abandon your belief in free will and you should accept the reality of determinism because truth is better than falsehood and your belief is false and therefore it's better for you to believe something that's true.
	There's no better.
	There's no true.
	There's no preferred.
	There's none of that because we're all machines.
	Right.
	And there's no choice, nothing we can choose differently.
	There's nothing to strive for.
	There's no better place to get to.
	There's no truth that is preferable to falsehood or error.
	None of that can exist in a deterministic universe.
	So the moment that somebody who's a determinist comes to you and says, Vinny, you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong.
	Free will is an illusion.
	You should be a determinist.
	Well, they're saying you should choose a better state, a preferred state, called truth over error, accuracy over falsehood, validity over delusion.
	And all of these things are objectively better, and you have the capacity to choose what's better.
	Yeah, but you don't have the...
	Well, no!
	You don't get preferred states if you're a determinist.
	You don't get preferred states, or truth, or falsehood, better, right, wrong, anything.
	There's no honor, no nobility, no love, no virtue, no accuracy, no error, nothing.
	Nothing.
	Right.
	But these are only arguments presupposing free will.
	Yeah.
	You should choose to be a determinist makes about as much sense as you should read this email that will never be delivered to you.
	Right.
	All language is incomprehensible.
	Mm-hmm.
	You should choose to believe in determinism is a self-detonating argument.
	The form of the argument and the content of the argument directly contradict each other.
	That's actually a perfect illustration of something I've had bouncing in my head around.
	Whether it's true or not doesn't matter.
	And you're saying because in determinism there is no truth.
	But Whether it's true or not, it doesn't matter.
	Determinism is necessarily just immoral, I suppose would be the best way to say it.
	No, determinism robs you of the capacity to change anyone's mind.
	And so the only determinist who's acting with integrity is the determinist you never hear from.
	I mean, is it possible that a person could be determined to influence you?
	Well, yeah, okay, but then what they're saying is it doesn't matter what you believe.
	You can do whatever you want.
	Consistency with your beliefs is completely irrelevant.
	Okay, well then I don't need to be consistent with any beliefs, right?
	So if they say, listen, I can be a determinist and still try and change your mind, what they're saying is that determinism means nothing.
	Sure, okay.
	I guess I'll call myself a determinist and go around to trying to change everyone's mind too.
	Fine.
	Then the word determinism means nothing.
	In other words, determinism changes nothing about what you do Relative to believing in free will.
	In other words, you can say, well, I'm a determinist, but I still get to really try and change other people's minds.
	I still have preferred states.
	I still have truth, error, falsehood, love, hate, morality.
	I still have all of that stuff.
	I just call myself a determinist.
	Which is kind of like me saying, okay, well, I believe in God.
	I go to church.
	I pray.
	I believe in an afterlife.
	I believe in the resurrection of Jesus, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
	Hallowed be thy name forever and ever.
	But I'm an atheist.
	It's like, well, then the word atheist has no difference whatsoever in how you act and what you believe and what you do than calling yourself a Christian.
	Right, okay, so I think I get you now.
	So, like, if you're a determinist, then there's absolutely no reason whatsoever why you should think there's any value in attempting to persuade others to be determinists, and therefore, if you are doing that, then you must necessarily be acting on the basis of something that isn't explained by determinism.
	Right.
	There's a program from way back in the day called Eliza.
	It was a simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist.
	And this was around when I was a kid.
	So it was like a doctor, right?
	So here's an example of Eliza on an EMAC. I am the psychotherapist.
	Please describe your problems.
	Each time you are finished talking, type RET twice.
	I have a terrible headache.
	Maybe you should consult a doctor of medicine.
	Hi, I'm a psychiatrist.
	Okay, I'll do that then.
	Can you elaborate on that?
	What are you talking about?
	No, I cannot elaborate.
	See you later.
	Why do you say that?
	Now you're just talking nonsense.
	What makes you believe now I am just talking nonsense?
	You're not making any sense.
	Perhaps your plans have something to do with this, right?
	So it was kind of like a foggy, how do you feel about what you're saying kind of stuff.
	And it was supposed to sort of, it was written between 1964 and 1966, at which point it passed into my brain as I was born.
	And it's sort of like Zork, if you know the old Zork 1, 2, and 3 games.
	The worst chatbot ever, it sounds like.
	Yeah, like worst chatbot ever or whatever.
	The question is, do people get into debates with chatbots?
	No, it's a serious question.
	The chatbot's responses may not be predictable, but they are determined, right?
	Yeah.
	Now, do people actually get into debate with chatbots?
	Well, of course not.
	Here's another complex system.
	Here's another complex system.
	I say, well, you know, people are predictable.
	You know, they respond to incentives, therefore they're like robots.
	It's like, oh, that's nonsense.
	The weather is predictable, but it's too complex to know with any particular...
	You can say it's going to rain tomorrow afternoon, but you don't know exactly where or how many drops or whatever, right?
	And so the weather is a highly complex system that can be predicted in aggregate, but not in detail.
	But nobody would say, I'm going to go out if it's, you know, I've got a wedding this Sunday and the storm clouds are gathering.
	Yeah, we miss him too.
	And I'm going to go out and I'm going to yell at the weather to stop storm clouds gathering and raining on my wedding.
	Like somebody, in King Lear, he goes out and yells, the crazy elderly king goes out and yells at the storm, right?
	And nobody would...
	Debate with a chatbot because a chatbot is predetermined.
	Nobody would go out and debate with the weather, even though it's a complex system which can only be predicted in aggregate, not in detail.
	In the same way that if financial incentives change, you can guess what people are going to do or predict what people are going to do in aggregate, but not in particular.
	If the price of some good drops, a bunch more people are going to buy it, but you don't know exactly who, exactly when, how many people, right?
	So, here's the other challenge for determinism.
	And I think this is, you know, we've had a good run on this.
	I think we'll end with this.
	There's more.
	And I've got a whole series on free will on youtube.com slash free domain radio.
	It's free will part one, two, and three, of course.
	But here's the thing, Vinny.
	You can't say...
	Let's say that you have...
	50 apples on a cart, right?
	You're an apple vendor.
	You got 50 apples in the cart.
	And I come up to you and I say, Vinny, these apples are all identical.
	How much for an apple, you say?
	50 cents for an apple.
	And I say, these apples are all identical.
	No difference between any of them.
	All exactly the same.
	And I say, I want an apple.
	I give you 50 cents.
	You hand me an apple and I say, oh God, no, not that one.
	And you say, oh, I thought they were all the same.
	They are exactly the same.
	But you're not giving me that one.
	That one stinks.
	That one's terrible.
	That one's got a worm in it.
	It's bruised.
	It's shaped like one of Kim Kardashian's arse cheeks.
	And I'm not that hungry.
	Right?
	And so you take it back, you say, you grab another apple, you give me that.
	Oh God, no, I can't eat that apple.
	I don't want that apple at all.
	Why not?
	I think it's made of wood.
	I think it's a wax apple.
	I think it's an Ikea display case item.
	And we go through this whole thing, right?
	And then finally you hand me an apple and I say, that is exactly the apple I want.
	That's perfect.
	That's the only apple I'll eat.
	But remember, all the apples are identical.
	Would that make any sense?
	I think I'm starting to get a lot of think about it.
	I'll probably end up re-listening to this when you post it.
	Oh, please do.
	It's a very, very important argument.
	Yeah.
	Would it make any sense if you were the Apple vendor and I behaved in this way?
	Would it make any sense at all?
	No.
	It wouldn't, right?
	Because if the apples are all the same, why the hell do I care which apple you give me?
	Right, right.
	But if I say the apples are all the same, but I only want one particular apple and I completely reject all of the other apples, I can't then claim that the apples are all the same, right?
	Yeah.
	So ultimately, the downfall when arguing, if you ever get into an argument with a determinist, is why are you arguing?
	No, no, no, no.
	This is different.
	No, that's an earlier one.
	This is a different argument.
	No, this is a different argument.
	Okay.
	Now, the determinist cannot logically say that the human brain is fundamentally the same as every other piece of matter, right?
	A rock has no free will.
	We accept that, right?
	A tree has no free will.
	We accept that.
	The human brain is exactly the same as all of these other entities.
	It's more complex, of course, right?
	But it's fundamentally a chatbot.
	Now, if a determinist comes and debates with you, and only you, like they don't debate with a hamster, they don't debate with a camera, they don't debate just with your hand, they don't debate with a cloud, they don't debate with an airplane, they don't debate with a chatbot, they don't debate with Jupiter, you understand, right?
	They don't debate with anything in the known universe except your brain.
	Your brain.
	And what they're trying to do is convince you that your brain is exactly the same as everything else in the universe, just a more complex variety of a rock, right?
	But they cannot have it both ways, right?
	And they cannot say the human brain is exactly the same as everything else in the universe.
	But to debate with anything in the universe except a human brain would be completely insane.
	Because by only debating with the human brain, rather than with a cloud, a wall, a door, a block of wood, a hamster dropping, or, you know, the leg of a cow or something, to debate with anything other than a human brain would be completely insane, but the human brain is exactly the same as anything else.
	That's what I mean when I say these apples are all the same, but you can't possibly give me anything except that one apple.
	Okay.
	Right?
	The human brain is exactly the same as everything else in the universe.
	But I'm only ever going to debate with the human brain because to debate with anything else would be completely insane.
	But couldn't you call carving?
	Like if you had a piece of wood or bone or whatever, if you wanted to debate with it, you wanted to shape it, you could carve it.
	That's not something that is...
	Oh, that's a reach, my friend.
	No, you're not debating with it.
	You're trying to manipulate another human brain.
	No, no.
	Okay.
	First of all, you're not using language.
	You're not trying to convince...
	The piece of wood to turn itself into an ancient Dutch skate, right?
	You're not using, you're not saying, well, you know, you really should try and, you know, move your bark up this way and push the blade out the bottom and my size foot is ten and a half, so you should do it this way.
	You're not attempting to use words.
	Yeah, but words could just be a tool.
	Well, if words are a tool, then you should be able to use words on a piece of wood, right?
	But if you can only use words on a human being, then you're saying the human being is vastly different from everything else.
	You can't use a knife on a stone.
	No, but just because you can't use every tool on everything doesn't mean that you can use language on anything other than a human brain.
	Okay, so there's one tool for one device, and it's a very special tool for a very special thing to manipulate in the world.
	Right, so the only thing that you can change with words is the human mind, therefore you can't say that the human mind is exactly the same as every other piece of matter.
	I really want to understand what you're saying, but I don't know that necessarily just because there's one tool and one device doesn't mean that it's still not being carved.
	If there were one knife that could only carve...
	If it were so soft that it could only carve butter, if there were a knife that could only carve butter, does that mean that butter is inherently different from everything else in the universe?
	You see what I'm saying?
	Well, no, your example doesn't make any sense because if a knife could only cut butter, then it could cut snow, it could cut water, it could cut jello, it could cut like so many other things.
	Whatever the softest thing in the world is.
	No, we're not talking about the T levels of a cuck.
	But let me give you another example, right?
	So you have to use diamonds to cut diamonds, right?
	Diamonds are the hardest substance as far as I understand.
	Hardest naturally occurring substance in the world, right?
	Right.
	So you have to use thoughts to shape thoughts.
	Right.
	So diamond is the very hardest substance in the world.
	And so diamonds can cut other things and diamonds can cut themselves, but it's all a matter of degree.
	But if only words can shape the human mind, then you can't say that the human mind is just like everything else.
	Because you're saying that the human mind responds to language, to arguments, to reason, to evidence, hopefully, positively.
	And therefore, if there's only one Way to reasonably change a human mind, which is through argument through, right?
	Then you can't say that the human mind is exactly the same as everything else.
	In other words, you can't say, I'm going to try and change only a human mind because trying to change the weather with my words, trying to change the...
	I guess you could change the rate at which a plant grows with your words, but only because you're exhaling carbon dioxide, which is plant food.
	But...
	If to debate with anything except the human mind would be completely insane, not just like not effective, but insane, to get into a big, virulent argument with the chatbot, to attempt to lecture an ant colony into adopting the Constitution, right?
	Somebody might as well be using it.
	So if all of these things would be completely insane, Right?
	Not just ineffective or kind of a waste of time, but literally the mark of a crazy person.
	A crazy person would be attempting to use words to change an ant farm or to convince a hamster that it had free will.
	I mean, you understand that would be the actions of a truly insane person.
	And so if it's completely insane to attempt to change the mind of anything except the human mind, and then completely rational to change The human mind, it's not a difference of degree.
	It's not like 90% rational to attempt to debate with a hamster, but 100% rational to do it with a human being.
	It's 100% insane to debate with a hamster and 100% sane to debate with a human being.
	It's not a difference of degree.
	It's an opposition.
	I mean, there's pretty stupid human beings that it's fairly insane to debate with.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	And that may be a lack of intelligence, it may be emotional resistance, and so on.
	Just because we have the capacity for free will doesn't mean that everyone exercises free will.
	We have the capacity to exercise doesn't mean that everybody exercises or gains the benefit thereof.
	Okay.
	I think I see your statement.
	Put these all together.
	The last one...
	is one of these form versus content things.
	The human brain is just like everything else, but it would be insane to debate with anything except the human brain.
	Well, if it would be insane to debate with everything except the human brain, the human brain simply can't be like everything else because you're treating it in an opposite context.
	Debating human brain, totally sane.
	Debating anything but human brain, totally insane.
	They can't then be exactly the same as everything else because you're treating them in an opposite way.
	Okay.
	All right.
	So, I appreciate this topic.
	I do like determinism.
	I'm not sure that determinists always like me.
	And let me just end up, finish off a little bit here with something that is not an argument, but an observation based on, oh, so many years of talking with determinists.
	Okay.
	In my experience, in my experience, because the question is, why on earth would somebody be drawn to To determinism.
	I mean, you and I both know, Vinny, how much you give up by being a determinist, right?
	I don't think they recognize that, but yeah.
	Oh, I think they do.
	I think they do.
	I asked this of the UFO guy, like, why are you so interested in UFOs?
	And it's not a philosophical question, but it's a self-knowledge question.
	Because debating philosophy with people who don't have self-knowledge, you can't get to philosophy because they're just bouncing off their emotional prejudices without any knowledge of them.
	And you can listen to this call.
	It was a very interesting call because I asked this guy...
	Why are you interested in UFOs?
	He couldn't even understand the question.
	Like, oh, well, I watch this show.
	It's like, well, we all watch different shows about different things.
	I've watched shows on the Sasquatch or the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and, you know, I mean, lizard people from living among us and so on, right?
	That doesn't mean that I'm then going to devote the rest of my life to figuring one particular, all exposed to a bunch of things.
	Like, why am I so into philosophy?
	Because I was raised by crazy people.
	And I didn't want to go crazy, so I had to really learn how to think because I could see where things went if you didn't learn how to think.
	That doesn't mean that I'm right about philosophy, but it at least explains why I'm so interested in philosophy.
	And The question is, why would people be invested in?
	What emotional benefit would determinism?
	Because it's not a rational position.
	It's not even close to a rational position.
	And people are very, very invested into it.
	I could feel that in you, Vinny, when we were talking about this last argument.
	Push back on that.
	And it's fine.
	It's perfectly fine.
	It's not a criticism.
	It's, I'd simply try to entertain an argument I disagree with for the best possible, you know, answer from somebody whom I would agree with, which I agree with you on absolutely everything I've ever heard you talk about.
	So if I've sounded like I disagree with you, it's only because I'm conflicted.
	No, no, I'm not talking about the intellectual process.
	I'm talking about the emotional content.
	And you'll hear it when you listen back to it.
	And it's not a criticism because I'm very passionately invested in the free will argument, which I'm very honest about.
	It doesn't mean that I'm right or wrong.
	It just means that I have the self-knowledge to know why it's important to me.
	But the question is, why would somebody want to look at themselves like a machine?
	What emotional relief, what emotional payoff would it provide to someone to pretend that they never had a choice and they're just a machine?
	Well, People who've done bad things.
	People who have a bad conscience.
	People who have lacerating criticisms of their own choices.
	People who've done things that are so bad they can't be undone.
	Or that we should avoid the consequences of.
	And I know, please understand, this is not an argument.
	This is an observation.
	And it's not true in every...
	Not all determinists are like that.
	The question is why?
	Now, if you've done something really bad in your life that you can't undo, then your conscience, which is, I've got a podcast called UPB as Conscience, or Conscience as UPB, Universally Preferable Behavior, my free book on ethics at freedomainradio.com slash free.
	When you have done great wrong, To others you must immediately start lying to yourself and you must exclude yourself from the moral rules that you expect others to obey.
	Oh what a practiced, oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.
	And you must either try to make restitution, you must try to make better or whole that which you have harmed or broken, or You can pretend that you never had any choice and you're just a machine.
	And that is the way that you build a wall of determinism between yourself and your ravaging conscience.
	I never had any choice.
	I never had any choice.
	It was done unto me.
	And you see this with bad parenting all the time.
	You see, bad parents will treat their children as perfectly voluntary moral agents.
	You promised me you weren't going to take any cookies.
	You took cookies.
	You're a bad kid.
	Bang, bang, bang.
	Right?
	So your six-year-old, your five-year-old, your seven-year-old are perfectly free moral agents who are 100% responsible for what they do.
	Right?
	So you give them 100% free will.
	And then you punish them for making the wrong choices, for making bad choices.
	Right?
	Now your children grow up.
	And they say to you, Mom, Dad, you hit me a lot when I was a kid.
	And you hit me a lot because you said I was responsible for everything I did.
	Aren't you responsible for hitting me?
	How could I have 100% free will and be responsible for taking the cookie?
	I said I wouldn't.
	I'd get punished for it.
	But aren't you, when you were at that age, 35, 100% responsible for hitting me?
	And do you know what the parents say?
	The bad parents.
	Do you know what they say?
	They say, number one, I did the best I could with the knowledge that I had, which is a form of determinism.
	I did the best I could with the knowledge that I had.
	It's a form of determinism because it's saying, well, I was an empty vessel filled with a certain amount of knowledge and I couldn't have done any different.
	Well, how about getting more knowledge?
	How about reading more books?
	How about getting therapy?
	How about figuring out ways to deal with your children other than belting them or hitting them?
	Spanking and beatings don't matter much in terms of how the child experiences or the effects that it has.
	And if you push them further, do you know what they'll say?
	They'll say, but you do understand, son, that I was beaten as a child.
	And so that's all I knew how to do.
	See, they are dominoes of history.
	Because they have a bad, tortured conscience about how they treated their precious and tender and sensitive children.
	They hit them, they beat them, they harmed them.
	And so they hit their children because they give their children 100% free will, moral responsibility.
	But when the children grow up and confront them about having been hit, Or abused, even.
	Then they say, well, I didn't have any choice.
	I couldn't have done any better.
	But how is it a 35-year-old gets to claim determinism because he hit a 7-year-old that he claimed had 100% free will?
	How could the parent have less free will than the child?
	The child is a child.
	The parent is an adult.
	And you'll see this happening all the time.
	Now, people hurt other people.
	And when confronted, they retreat into determinism because it's agony to have harmed someone to the point where restitution has become impossible.
	Harmed a good person to the point where restitution has become impossible.
	It's moral agony.
	And I think it's almost determinism or self-destruction to relieve yourself of the ravaging hyenas of your conscience that chase you across your mental landscape from here to eternity unless you build a giant wall.
	Between you and your conscience.
	The doubtless the conscience has to pay for, right?
	So I think that's one of the primary motivations.
	Now, it may be the last thing that I'll say about this, and I appreciate your patience, Fanny, but it also may be not that you yourself have done bad things, and that's why you are a determinist, but that you are defending somebody who's done bad things.
	In other words, if you were harmed by your parents as a child and you sit down and talk to them as an adult and say, this stuff happened and it wasn't good at all.
	It was bad.
	And your parents retreat behind the determinism.
	We did the best we could.
	I was this way.
	I didn't know any better.
	I couldn't have done any better and so on.
	Well, did you get to say that when you were seven?
	I can't do any better.
	I just wanted the cookie.
	No, you're responsible.
	You make choices.
	You made a promise.
	You're responsible.
	Well, if your parents...
	Retreat behind the deterministic wall.
	It could be anyone.
	We're just taking this example.
	And they say, I couldn't have done any better.
	It was not my fault that I hit you.
	Then how can you retain free will for yourself while believing in determinism for your parents?
	See, it could be that you end up being a determinist because you're protecting the conscience of bad people or people who've done bad things.
	And Again, I put this forward as an observational theory rather than a syllogistical proof, but it's important to think of this stuff.
	Years ago, we had a determinist on the show whose parents just regularly locked him in his room, wouldn't let him go anywhere, wouldn't let him do anything.
	He couldn't make any effective choices as a kid, so he became a determinist.
	To protect who?
	To protect whose conscience?
	To protect what?
	These are just interesting questions because when there is a universally occurring phenomenon, and determinism is quite a common phenomenon, and there is a universally occurring phenomenon, it must benefit people in some manner.
	And given the negatives of determinism, as you say, if you're logical and consistent about it, you lose the ability to debate, you lose the ability to love, to hate, to have judgment, to have a preferred state, have truth, any of these things.
	So given the negatives that accrue to determinists, there must be some positives for it to be A near universal phenomenon.
	I say, oh, well, why is there states, right?
	Governments, right?
	Because governments hugely benefit the power hungry and the less competent in society.
	So that's why they're there.
	And they rely on compassion and pathological altruism in order to get their way.
	So that to me is a potential explanation as to why determinism seems to be so prevalent, but it doesn't prove anything as far as determinism goes, but it simply supplies An observational argument as to why it may be so prevalent.
	Right.
	It's a coping mechanism for some people.
	Yeah, I think kind of a cowardly one.
	But since I have a good conscience, I don't know what it's like to be tortured by a bad conscience.
	So I can't really speak to that.
	But thanks very much for the call.
	And listen, call back in if what I'm saying...
	On further reflection, turns out to be a bunch of windy nonsense that makes no sense on rehearing it.
	And of course, if you're listening to this, I am very happy to talk more about this.
	And if you're a determinist, please call in as well.
	It's been a while.
	I'm tanned, rested, relaxed and ready to go.
	Thank you so much.
	It's an honor to be on your show.
	Thank you so much, Vinny.
	A great pleasure.
	Alright, up next is Sean.
	Sean wrote in and said, Not only this, but as the most conservative and quote-unquote backwards Christians who are really on your side here.
	I know you're an atheist yourself, but doesn't it seem odd that if their whole worldview is so wrong, there are the very few who have gotten this important issue right?
	In addition, I don't know if anyone has done a formal study on this, but there seems to be a direct relationship between a society's religious character and its fertility with disastrous consequences for today's secular cultures.
	Although this is not a philosophically rigorous argument, it seems that a culture which is aligned with reality should be better suited to survive than a culture which, en masse, believes utter falsehoods.
	Either religion contains important truths, largely forgotten by secular societies, or the human species is not well adapted to living with truth.
	That's from Sean.
	Hey Sean, how you doing?
	I think I'm deplorable today.
	How about you?
	Okay, for those listening in the future, this is Hillary Clinton's comment, and not an off-the-cuff, but prescriptive comment that half of Donald Trump's supporters belong in what she calls the basket of deplorables, which, and homophobes, racists, sexists, whatever it is, right?
	So, yeah, and it has kind of backfired because it is a very gay...
	It sort of reminds me, when I was a kid, I was lining up I grew up in Don Mills and I was 11 when we got there and I didn't know how to skate because I was from England and not a lot of skating in England.
	And I wasn't used to the barbaric colonial practice of just insulting people for fun.
	I don't know if it's a big thing in England now.
	It wasn't in particular.
	I went to boarding school for a while when I was younger.
	It wasn't a particularly big thing.
	We had the common enemies of the prefects and the masters.
	But anyway, I was standing in line and some girl...
	Was making fun of my accent or something like that.
	And I didn't know...
	I didn't really know how to respond.
	Because, you know, I was new to the colonies.
	And as I mentioned before, I was still trying to get used to the fact that in grade six, apparently the in thing and hip thing to do was to hunt girls down in the playground and punch them in the groin.
	I couldn't...
	I couldn't...
	I can't even...
	I couldn't do it.
	But apparently that was the thing.
	And...
	So I, this girl was making fun of me.
	And of course, I wasn't even remotely worldly enough to know that she was making fun of me, probably because she found me attractive.
	And so I didn't know that.
	I didn't even know, like when some girl asked me to go steady, I have no idea what that meant.
	So I said no, because I didn't even, I don't know if that was some weird indoctrination into something I didn't understand.
	I actually emailed her a little while ago and apologized for that.
	I found her online.
	Anyway, so...
	So this girl was making fun of me and my accent and all that.
	And instead of being sort of gracious about it and understanding that it was because she wanted to chat or whatever, I sort of put my nose in the air and I said, I'm afraid I only have pity on you.
	Oh dear.
	Oh dear.
	Things that don't work in the colonies.
	And so she sort of stopped and looked at me and her jaw dropped open and she's like, Did he just say, yes, pity on me?
	And she went to all of her friends.
	That guy over there, he said, oh, I have pity on you.
	Because you just started making even more fun of me.
	And I really can't blame her.
	I can't blame her for that at all.
	Because...
	That is entirely appropriate.
	So there's my big memory about this deplorables thing.
	Because, of course, people take it now as a badge of honor and it's achieved the exact opposite effect.
	Because when it comes to political fighting, Hillary Clinton is basically completely tone deaf.
	She's like the William Hung of political insults because she bangs, she falls.
	Anyway.
	So, Sean, the hell were we talking about?
	Oh, yes!
	Right.
	Christians.
	Christians, Christians, Christians.
	Yeah, the Christians make some babies and the atheists don't.
	And so I just had a long chat about this with my daughter today that people who don't believe in God tend to have a lot fewer kids than people who do.
	And right now with the state and with borders and governments and unfunded liabilities and old age pensions, what happens is countries that don't have babies either Die on the vine like these big giant inverted demographic pyramids like Japan where it's like, what is it, 1.1 reproduction rate where they're selling more adult diapers than child diapers and you've got Japanese ministers openly wishing for the death of all the old people because they can't possibly afford them and a debt to GDP ratio that's 240% or whatever the hell it is.
	And because they won't do any immigration, well, the population is going to collapse and they're simply not going to be able to pay the bills, right?
	Because they take all this money.
	Governments always take all this money.
	From people to, quote, pay for their retirement.
	Of course, they spend the money.
	And then the way that they get the retirement money is by taxing the young people.
	And if there aren't enough young people, then they can't tax enough of them.
	And then they try and jack up the taxes on young people, which means that the young people can't afford to have children, which means that the next generation is even smaller.
	And society is basically, it's like a big, long, slow, watching a dandelion fluff go down a big, giant sinkhole or a drain or a whirlpool in the ocean.
	Yeah.
	And yeah, it's a pretty atheistic nation.
	You can see this happening up in the Scandinavian countries.
	You can even see this.
	I mean, the big Catholic country of Italy has replacement rates of like 1.2 or something like that.
	And so either you get this demographic collapse, which destroys the economy because there's this big giant inverted pyramid of expenses and costs with nobody paying taxes and everybody consuming money.
	At the end of life, particularly, I mean, the Japanese are like zombies.
	Like, you can't kill them.
	Like, they just won't die.
	I mean, they just live on and on.
	Like, yeah, enough of eating that seaweed.
	Here's some burgers, for God's sakes, right?
	And so that's the way it works in some countries.
	And in other countries, of course...
	They bring in these immigrants, right?
	And for various politically correct things, they seem to be immigrants, I don't know how to put it as nicely as possible, without a long Western tradition of Western values that they can easily absorb and replicate.
	And that is going to have its significant challenges, to put it mildly, as well.
	So, yeah.
	Highest birth rate, I think, in the West was in the baby boom, where it was over five.
	I think it was over five in the height of the baby boom, two parents producing five kids.
	And Christians, of course, like it to make it to babies.
	And there's lots of different reasons for that.
	But I think a lot of it has to do with bringing the glory of God and creating life and all of that.
	And atheists tend to be...
	Into things other than making babies.
	And in a stateless society, like in a free society, or even a minimum state society, sort of prior to the welfare state and so on, as I've said before, I mean, this stuff would work out just fine.
	Just fine.
	Because in a free society, the richest people can have the most kids.
	Given that wealth is associated with intelligence, then you have the most intelligent people having the most kids, which raises the IQ of the society as a whole over time.
	Right now, we have, of course, the exact opposite, whereas the smartest people, and atheists tend to be a little smarter than your average bear, or the atheists are having the fewest children, and the irresponsible single mom welfare brigade are having the most kids.
	Intelligence is actually passed along through the maternal line, through the mother's genes, has the most influence on intelligence.
	Single moms tend to be less intelligent than the average woman, and so you have a giant funding of taking money from the smartest people, giving money to the least smart people so that they can reproduce like crazy.
	And...
	Hip hop ho, off the cliff we go.
	And that, of course, did not happen in a Christian society, because in a Christian society, the welfare state did not come out of Christianity.
	The welfare state came out of, I've made this case before.
	Sweden has been around since the 14th century, but it's really only the last couple of decades.
	It's early in the middle of the 20th century.
	They got the welfare state very soon after women got the vote, right?
	When women get the vote, they want the welfare state.
	When men have the vote, they pay for the welfare state.
	When women get the vote, they receive money from the welfare state.
	So women will always vote for the welfare state in general, and men will always try to resist it in general.
	But Christianity did not give the welfare state because...
	Christianity has been the dominant influence and did not demand...
	I mean, there was Spenumland, which I talked about years ago on the Peter Schiff show, which you should look up.
	S-P-E-N-H-A-M-L-A-N-D, Spenumland, which was sort of one experiment that occurred in England with the welfare state, which was the usual freak and horror show that you would expect from these kinds of things.
	Destroyed the entire economy of the region for centuries, literally.
	But Christianity requires...
	A virtue to be chosen in order for it to be a virtue.
	There is no virtue in advocating for a coercive welfare state in Christianity, because if it's not freely chosen, it's not a virtue.
	Not a virtue.
	So Christianity relies on private charity and social ostracism and social pressure and all those kinds of good things to deal with problems of poverty.
	It is anathema to Christianity, despite the fact that there's been a strong element of Christian socialism, which we've got a presentation that's going to drop on the Pledge of Allegiance, but we talk more about this.
	In general, my understanding of Christianity, if it's not chosen, it ain't a virtue.
	And therefore, the welfare state is anathema to the virtuous salvation of the poor.
	Jesus did not say, lobby for a welfare state.
	He said, take your possessions, sell them all, and give your money to the poor.
	He made the case.
	He made the argument.
	He did not force people to do it.
	He did not say, get the government to force everyone to sell everything they own and give the money to the poor.
	Because he said, the poor will always be with us.
	Just not necessarily breeding at the rate they are at the moment.
	And so...
	The focus on voluntary virtues that is inherent to Christianity and the celebration of life that is sort of central to Christianity and the selflessness, I know it's a tricky word for the objectivist, but the selflessness of Christianity is to me very important.
	There are some significant sacrifices in having children.
	There are some significant sacrifices to having children.
	And religious people are willing to make those sacrifices and thus ensure the continuation of their culture, of their country, of their religion.
	And non-religious people don't seem to be willing to make those sacrifices.
	And so how could those civilizations survive?
	I don't know.
	I have to say, for one thing, you seem to have a better grasp of some Christian ideals than a number of Christians I talk to.
	I have heard Christians saying, well, because you're a Christian, you should support such and such policy to take care of such and such.
	Well, no.
	If you're a Christian to the extent that you can, you support them yourself.
	You help them, but...
	Saying the government should do this on my behalf, that doesn't, I mean, maybe the government should, but that doesn't make you any better.
	Well, no, I think that the argument would be that it makes you worse.
	Because this is why, according to strong elements within Christianity, there is no compulsion in matters of religion.
	It's spread by the word, not by the sword.
	Because if I support a government program that takes money from you and applies it to some end, maybe we even both agree is virtuous.
	It cannot be virtuous for you or for me anymore because it's now done under compulsion.
	By instituting government programs, we rob people of the capacity for virtue.
	Because they're no longer doing it voluntarily.
	Listen, the conversion to Christianity, the conversion to accepting Jesus...
	Is a passionate case that is made with a wide variety of conversations.
	Anybody can take a gun to someone's head, put them in a church, and force them to recite certain texts, right?
	Is that going to get them into heaven?
	No, not remotely.
	Well, in fact, quite the opposite.
	Whoever does that ain't going to heaven.
	God must be chosen, which is the argument that I had earlier with the guy who said, if God came down and revealed himself, then God would no longer be a choice but an epistemological or metaphysical reality.
	And so God and virtue must be chosen if they are forced to If you institute a government program that forces people to pay for the poor, you have just robbed millions and millions and millions of people of the capacity to earn heaven points by doing virtuous actions by choice.
	You have now forced them to do something which is like dragging someone in a burlap sack into a church and calling them saved.
	And on the other end of that, you have robbed someone else of the opportunity for gratitude.
	Yes, and what's happened is because you've dragged them in a burlack sap into the church, they're much less likely to want to choose Jesus, right?
	Because they'd be dragged into the sack, right?
	So if people are forced to pay for the poor, what happens is you end up with an annoyed, antagonistic relationship to the poor rather than a sympathetic let's help them relationship to the poor.
	Right?
	So because taxes are stripped from people and given to the poor in very unproductive and destructive ways, not only do we lose...
	The virtue of choosing to help the poor because we care about the poor, but we end up in a situation where we resent and are annoyed by the poor because the poor become dependent on government programs, start voting for more and more government programs, threaten our own interests, threaten the stability and security and future of the country and so on, right?
	Like a woman who was raising a child without a father, Used to be called a widow, and we'd have great sympathy for that person.
	And there would be communities that would go around and try and help that person, and they'd cook meals for that person, and they'd take care of that person's kids, and they'd introduce her to nice men she might be able to marry again.
	But you get swarms of tens and tens of millions of single moms all hanging off the government titty and extracting your money through your urethra.
	Well, people get kind of annoyed at that.
	So not only do we not have the chance to voluntarily help the poor and feel good thereby and actually help the poor, we end up resenting the poor and feeling that it's them or us and ending up in this absolutely oppositional, horrible relationship to the poor.
	And that's one of the greatest tragedies, I think, is the lack of fellowship and lack of commonality.
	The state makes things win-lose.
	Charity is win-win.
	So, would you say my assessment is correct that like, give me a second, the main faction in your society today that actually substantially with you about how men and women should get along appears to be Christians?
	Yes.
	Well, you could say religious people as a whole, but yeah, I would say certainly Christians.
	Well, in our society, Christians are, you know, the majority of the religious people.
	Very true.
	And so, you would say they've gotten something very important for the functioning of society right.
	Oh yeah, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	But the important thing to remember, too, is that Christianity has had a hell of a long time...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	No, go ahead.
	Christianity has had a very long time to evolve.
	Yeah, Christianity has had a very long time to evolve, and Christianity has itself inherited the evolution of thousands of years of Jewish traditions before that.
	Right, so anything that lasts must have some value to it.
	You know, like there were these crazy guys who cut their own balls off to go and join the Helly Bop Comet, some cult, right?
	Right.
	Well, that didn't last, right?
	And anything that survives for a long time must have some value in it.
	It doesn't mean that it's true or valid or philosophical, but it must have adapted to some positive or productive value, right?
	Okay, that's...
	I... Okay, I can completely understand where you're going with that.
	I understand that, and I can't...
	I... Don't think I could really argue with you any further on that one.
	Sorry to interrupt, but let me give you a tiny sort of example of that with regards to the afterlife.
	So, let's just talk about Christianity, but it's true for a lot of religious societies.
	There are two things that happen.
	Number one is the afterlife, and number two is pair bonding, till death us do part, and so on.
	And there is also control over female sexuality, which is that the man has every right to expect fidelity on the part of the woman, right?
	A The playwright Arka Stringberg wrote in a particularly tortured play, the woman always knows the child as her as the man never does, right?
	So control over female sexuality, making sure that the fidelity is something that is maintained within the religion.
	God's always watching and to be unfaithful is to go to hell and so on, right?
	So the afterlife plus Pair bonding and providing as much certainty as possible to the man that his offspring or his own seems to be pretty common in many religious societies and certainly within Christianity.
	So the reasons for that, I think, are fairly obvious and that it's simply because if you believe in the afterlife, then you will be more willing to fight to the death when it comes to combat with other tribes or other countries or other cultures, number one.
	If you are pair bonded and you are sure that your children are your own, then you are also going to be more likely to fight to the death or fight hard or fight strenuously because you are protecting your pair bonded wife and you're protecting your children.
	Because of course, traditionally when tribes would overrun each other, they would keep the women as prizes, which is why there's Fifty Shades of Grey and all that.
	But they would keep the women as sexual prizes and they would usually kill the men and at least the male offspring.
	Atheists are not always particularly the greatest fighters because when they're dead, they're dead.
	And so there's no reward for them for fighting for the death other than death itself.
	And if they don't have families, if they don't have children, then they're going to be less likely to fight for long-term values.
	This doesn't have to be a physical fight.
	This doesn't have to be a combat, like a physical combat, a war.
	It can be a cultural war.
	Right, and I think a lot of, I certainly changed in this, you know, people say, well, why are you more into current events?
	It's like, because my daughter's gonna have to live in the future.
	Before, it was more abstract, right?
	So we all know, I think, how this works, right?
	The very gay John Maynard Keynes said, when people said, well, what about the long run?
	He said, well, in the long run, we'll all be dead.
	Well, that's true if you're gay and don't have kids, not so much if you are gonna have kids.
	So for those societies, let's say, and there's lots of experimentation throughout history, and you've got to see what lasts and what doesn't.
	For those societies, That did not promote an afterlife.
	And there are some, of course, right?
	Jews don't believe in an afterlife.
	And there are some Buddhist areas where it's, of course, Buddhism is a philosophy, not a religion.
	But there are cultures that don't believe in an afterlife.
	And there are cultures that don't necessarily promote pair bonding.
	They tend to be our selected cultures in places with lots of resources, but lots of uncertainty like diseases and predators and so on.
	And those cultures tend to be conquered by cultures that have pair bonding and an afterlife because it makes you a more staunch fighter.
	And so this is just tiny examples of the belief in an afterlife and a focus on pair bonding, which is two characteristics of Christianity, right?
	Marriage is between a man and a woman, sanctified in the eyes of God, till death do you part, and so on.
	It provides significant martial benefits.
	And, of course, pair bonding is the best way to transmit complex values, right?
	If you don't have pair bonding...
	With two people who share the same values, two Catholics, two Anabaptists, two Lutherans, whatever, right?
	If you have pair bonding, it's a much better mechanism by which to transmit or transfer strong values, which is why when they say multiculturalism is a strength, what they mean is that multiculturalism dilutes the values that can be transmitted through society, which allows leftists to take over with the resulting cultural and value-based power vacuum, but that's a story for another time.
	So there's sort of some basic examples of ways in which Particular beliefs, regardless of their philosophical accuracy, provide significant benefits to the survivability of a society.
	Does that make any sense to you?
	Yeah, yeah.
	So, what do you think of the statement that it...
	Well, okay.
	You said part of the problem...
	Give me a second.
	You said that part of the problem that states today are suffering is because...
	It's because of the structure of government, which is changing the incentives regarding children.
	Yeah, I mean, the government, you know, it's not the pill, it's not birth control or anything like that.
	It's not abortion.
	These are all, I mean, it's the welfare state that has fundamentally changed all of these things.
	So now women can gain resources without having to rely on a man, because they can rely on the state.
	And that's changed everything in society and it's one of the main reasons for the collapse of the family.
	The welfare state is the national debt, is the single mother state, right?
	The only reason there's a national debt is because of single mothers to a large degree, I mean to a significant degree.
	And the only reason there are single mothers It's because the capacity for society to exercise restraint over female sexuality has vanished.
	And there's no point exercising, trying to exercise control over male sexuality.
	It's not going to happen, right?
	And so society used to have a methodology for exercising control over irresponsible female sexuality, which was, you know, slut-shaming, which was you've got to give the kid up for adoption because you can't raise the kid without a...
	A husband, a father, somebody to provide.
	And society used to recognize...
	I just had this conversation on Friday when I was actually in Oklahoma City for some medical stuff.
	I had a conversation with a woman who genuinely couldn't understand why her sexual market value would decline when she had a child.
	And for some other guy, right?
	Just genuinely couldn't understand it.
	And this used to be very clear.
	If you got pregnant out of wedlock, you'd be spirited away to some aunt...
	For some visit and you'd have birth and the child would be torn from your hands and given up for adoption and you would never speak of it again.
	And that was a shameful, horrifying experience.
	The shotgun weddings, right?
	You knock out my daughter.
	Hey, guess what?
	You're married.
	And if you don't want to be married, well, welcome to a world full of buckshot, right?
	And so there used to be all of this control over youthful sexuality completely gone out the window with the welfare state.
	No, there's no point having it anymore because you can't control people if you can't control their resources.
	If the government's gonna give resources no matter what, there's no point trying to control irresponsible female sexuality, therefore irresponsible female sexuality, Hypergamy, looking for the lust of the moment rather than the stability of the future.
	All of that combines to destroy the family, which in turn destroys society.
	Because when families get destroyed, as you know, the state rushes in to fill in the gaps.
	And as the state rushes in to fill in the gaps, it further destroys the family.
	And this circle happens until disaster.
	So, if I had to choose between a Christian society and an atheist society, Given the numbers that I've seen and given the understanding that I have gained over the last few years of rather horrifying research into things like demographics and statism versus social enforcement, well, I would choose the Christians over the atheists.
	And that is part of the change that I have undergone because I'm always going to be trying to be passively pulled behind Tied to the truck of reason and evidence, no matter how many gravel roads we've got to go over, I'm still going to look at the facts.
	And a Christian society...
	Christian societies have survived for thousands of years.
	Atheism took over a generation ago, and we're already staring into the abyss.
	Yeah, I haven't...
	I haven't...
	reproduced a whole lot yet, but I do have one little boy and I am very afraid for the world he is going to inherit.
	Have you ever...
	Well, okay, you've done a show with Vox Day.
	Have you ever heard of John C. Wright?
	I don't think I have.
	He's an author who's published...
	With Vox Day's publishing house.
	It's a great name for a philosophy.
	Let me just put you to that, right?
	John, see right.
	See correctly.
	It's really good.
	But go on.
	Actually, he does also consider himself a philosopher.
	He considers himself a philosopher, and he has a It's kind of interesting.
	You might find it amusing, at the least, to listen to his story of how he went from being a very staunch and even argumentative atheist to having become Catholic, because he said there were two stages, and the first was, you know, those Christians seem to be oddly right about a number of things that my secular friend's Have completely wrong.
	Anyway.
	No, and of course, this is the great rewriting, right?
	So human society has inherited rules that have largely been propagated by religion, and to a smaller degree philosophy, rules that have been developed over thousands of years of trial and error and success and failure.
	And the great temptation, and I've been prey to this myself, I mean, the great temptation is to say, well, we can just throw all that, all of it out.
	Just throw all of it out.
	Yeah, that's...
	Day one.
	That was the French Revolution.
	Year one.
	Communism.
	Year one.
	And it's...
	It's easy to understand temptation, too, because obviously we're smarter than them.
	Those people from way back then obviously were so much smarter than them.
	We know...
	We have science, and they didn't.
	Well, we have science, but...
	There's some things that science doesn't analyze in certain ways.
	There's some things science hasn't been able to...
	I'm sorry to interrupt, but I mean, just because we had this conversation a little earlier in the show.
	The problem with atheists is not their addiction to science.
	The problem with atheists is their addiction to the state.
	The problem with atheists is they don't extend the rational principles of existence and non-existence to their special God called the state.
	I call them statheists, right?
	I mean, they're atheists, but they're statists.
	And so the problem is not that they like science, but science can't explain the mysteries of the universe.
	I mean, the mysteries of the universe never come and take half my income in taxes.
	I mean, they don't put my child in debt and, you know, they don't create crappy schools.
	The mysteries of the universe or whatever you want to call them that religion has as its province doesn't do anything to unbelievers, doesn't do anything because it is a state of mind rather than a state of weaponry known as the government.
	So the problem with the atheists has nothing to do with their preference for science.
	It's the fact that they have this preference for science, for reason, for evidence, for the existence of things, and they understand that God is a mental construct that does not exist in external reality, at least scientific reality.
	But when you say to them that the state is a mental construct that does not exist in external reality, They completely freeze and panic.
	And this is why they are simply, in my opinion, to a large degree, just another set of religious adherents, except their religion is far more dangerous than Christianity because their religion is based on force, whereas Christianity is based on debate.
	I agree with that.
	I think I was unclear in what I was saying.
	Because what I was getting at was that there was a certain kind of arrogance that comes along where they say, We can throw out all these old ideas, and that's one thing.
	I don't have anything against actual science at all, but I think that's one thing that gets invoked as for why we can throw out all the experience of human history, which has taught us this works, this doesn't work.
	Yeah, I mean, if you go to atheists and you say, look, multiculturalism has in general been a disaster throughout history, they reject all of that.
	When you go to atheists and you say, well, there's good reasons to be skeptical of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming, they throw all of that out and call you anti-scientific.
	And when you say to people, well, as the state grows, human freedoms and human potentialities tend to diminish and you end up with an ever extending spiderweb Of gruesome violence extending across the landscape, and national debt needs to be paid off, otherwise you're enslaving the next generation.
	When you say all of these basic things that are far more true and far more valid than any addiction to quantum physics or any of these are far more understandable, they don't require advanced degrees to figure out.
	When you bring all of these basic facts to atheists, and if you were to say to atheists that science should be decided by government force, They would be horrified at you, at the statement, as rightly they should be.
	But when you say to things, well, charity should not be decided by government force.
	Education of the young should not be decided by government force.
	National debt is the infliction of government force and government enslavement upon the unborn.
	They simply refuse to see it.
	And this is why, to me, Atheism is, in many ways, the most dangerous religion because it dispenses with social enforcement, which generally is the way that Christians approach things.
	And when you get rid of social enforcement, you end up with state enforcement, which is far less flexible, far more dangerous, and far more pervasive and universal.
	Are you familiar with the blog Ace of Spades HQ? No.
	You know, I gotta tell you, I hate to say this, every time people bring up something, just assume I'm not familiar with it, because there's a lot of stuff out there, and I basically am spending all my time on my own show not consuming much of other people's.
	Except Milo's podcast is fun.
	But go on.
	Well, this conversation reminds me of something I saw him say a while ago.
	It's a conservative political blog, some cultural, mostly political, but The lead blogger on the site who goes by Ace of Spades, he is an atheist himself, but I remember a couple months ago he said something effective.
	Looking at the way things are running today with our society and the way things appear to be likely to run into the future, he said that Even if you don't agree with Christianity, you have to look at the...
	Like, certain ideas, by their very nature, preclude people holding certain other ideas.
	And once the older set of ideas are vanquished, or are largely dismissed, people may try all kinds of other ideas that were not considered viable while the first set was there.
	And some of these ideas are effectively suicidal.
	And that seems to be...
	Yeah, that seems to be where we are.
	Yeah.
	And it has been a...
	It has been a relatively quick demise.
	You know, it was in a post-war period, 70 years ago.
	Birth rate of five kids per family.
	And now it's, you know, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, depending on where you go.
	And even that wouldn't be the end of the world.
	But...
	Governments have run up so much debt that they can't afford the time it takes to raise children anymore.
	They have to just import people and that is, well, people just have to watch my presentation on the fall of Rome or look up studies critical of multiculturalism.
	There's quite a lot that are out there and the facts seem to be pretty clear that diversity is not a strength.
	And now it's a strength for politicians because they get to import people who are hopefully going to pay taxes rather than have people give birth to children.
	Because when the state is paying for children, which it has to with a whole bunch of, you know, the government run daycares and having parents out of the workforce, which costs government money because they have to pay unemployment insurance and aren't getting taxes and all of that.
	When children cost money, then the government is going to do very little to encourage the growth of the birth rate.
	Instead, they're going to import adults who either will vote for them right away or who will hopefully pay some taxes or whatever.
	And as soon as the state is in charge of reproduction, the state is going to screw up the survivability of the society because the state and violence as a whole screws up everything.
	So I guess to sum it up, I would say that – and Murray Rothbard was talking about this in the 60s where he was talking about some commune where they said, soap is so bourgeois, you know, and then they all got scabies and bedbugs and, you know, got awful crotch rots and so on.
	It's like, oh yeah, that's why soap's been in use for quite a long time and all that.
	So this great forgetting of history and just thinking you can wipe the slate clean and start again with nothing is a great mistake.
	And I think I've done a fair amount to avoid that.
	Just in terms of talking about peaceful parenting and gradual multi-generational change and so on.
	I think that's the way to go.
	But thanks so much for the call.
	And please let us know if you have any other comments.
	It's always a very enjoyable topic to talk about and I really appreciate the conversation.
	Well, thank you.
	It's been, yeah, it's been interesting.
	Thank you everyone so much for calling into the show.
	It's a great and wonderful highlight of my week to have these amazing conversations with Yowl.
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	Hugely appreciate that as well.
	Thank you for being so much.
	Welcome to your fall.

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