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June 2, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
06:13
Do Self-Contradictory Entities Exist?
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Time Text
God's Contradictions 00:04:47
So, the statement is, do self-contradictory entities exist?
If they don't exist, which they don't, then if God is a self-contradictory entity, then God does not exist.
And there's a couple of arguments, which I'll touch on briefly here, from the atheists, which is to say, God cannot be both all-powerful and all-knowing, because if God is all-knowing, then God knows what's going to happen tomorrow for certain.
If God knows for certain what's going to happen tomorrow, God is powerless to change what is going to happen tomorrow.
Therefore, God cannot be both all-powerful and all-knowing.
And if we say that there's no such thing as consciousness without matter, That all consciousness that exists is an effect of matter.
and then you're saying there's immaterial consciousness, well, all shadows are from So, not very well.
A little bit, right?
So, all shadows are the effect of something solid blocking a light source, right?
So, that's a shadow.
A shadow is an effect of something solid blocking a light source, right?
So, if you were to say, like, can you imagine that there were shadows back there doing their thing?
Without my hand in front of it, that would be incomprehensible, right?
I was talking about this with my daughter the other day.
Like, imagine if you're on the sidewalk and you see a shadow with no person attached.
That would be really, really freaky, right?
And so, a shadow is an effect of something solid blocking a light source.
There is no shadow without that.
And there is no consciousness without matter.
Consciousness requires a brain.
Consciousness is an effect of matter and energy in the form of the human mind or the brain of whatever you want to call conscious, right?
So if you're going to say there's immaterial consciousness, then you're saying that consciousness, which is an effect of the brain, does not require a brain, which is like saying shadows can be independent of something solid blocking a light source, which is false, right?
um We know, evolutionarily speaking, that you require something.
Something less complex evolves into something more complex, right?
So you've got these cells that are vaguely sensitive to light, and they can be of value to primitive organisms, and then eventually you build up to the human eye.
But you wouldn't start with the human eye.
Like, evolution doesn't start with the human eye.
It would be like saying that I have a theory of evolution that we start with human beings and hopefully evolve to single-celled organisms and self-replicating DNA in a future soup of chemicals, right?
That would not make any sense.
You start with less complicated and come to the more complicated.
That's how evolution works.
That's how life works.
That's how consciousness evolves.
And so if you're going to say that a god is the most complicated consciousness that can possibly exist, And God did not evolve.
God started off as the most complicated thing.
That would again be like saying that the human eye or the human brain is the beginning of evolution and it evolves from there.
That's not how evolution works.
There would be another sort of contradictory trait.
If you say that a God interferes or has an effect in the material realm, right?
Then How do you have an effect in the material realm, right?
Well, if I want this SD card, right, this little SD card, if I want it to move, I have to pick it up.
It's not going to move on its own, right?
I have to have, my matter has to interact with the SD card's matter in order to make it move, right?
So, in order to interfere with or have an effect in the material realm, then I have to touch, my matter has to touch the material realm.
Now, if God, If God interferes with or has an effect in the material realm, then God must manifest some material property.
If God doesn't manifest any material property, then that would be an effect without a cause, which doesn't exist in the world, right?
But if God does manifest in material form, then we should be able to measure him, right?
Should be able to notice the materialization and then the...
Right.
So, I mean, other things like miracles are contradictions.
Human beings can't walk on water because...
So we can't do that, right?
You can't be dead for three days, come back to life.
So these would be the arguments that self-contradictory entities don't exist.
They're impossible by definition.
And so the way that you would deal with this Polynesian God is you'd say, does the Polynesian God have self-contradictory properties?
Therefore, it doesn't exist.
Now, I don't know why that's particularly complicated.
Self-Contradictions Don't Exist 00:01:26
You know, one of the things that I did in the realm of philosophy very early on was I said, look, if an 18-month-old baby can figure it out, philosophy should be able to figure it out.
Right?
And babies understand the nature of matter and energy very well.
All right.
So let's go on a bit more.
Because that's your presupposition that It is a presupposition that you reject self-contradictory entities.
It undergirds your argument unless you can prove that that's the Right, so Dr. Peterson would fail people who didn't turn in their work.
Now, he can't read minds, and therefore he doesn't know for sure whether the work was good or bad or done or not done, but he would still fail people.
So, I mean, you just have to look practically at how you live and draw the principles from there.
And also, Jordan Peterson, let's say that his fail was 50%, like anything lower than 50%, you'd fail.
So you would have to make a judgment based upon numbers.
And somebody couldn't say, well, I got a 20%.
He'd say, no, no, no, a pass is 50 or higher, and he'd have this absolute certainty of knowledge, and so that's just how we live.
Valid, and there's no point.
My question is quite simple.
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