Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - Do Self-Contradictory Entities Exist?
Aired: 2025-06-02
Duration: 06:13


=== God's Contradictions (04:47) ===

[00:00:00]  So, the statement is, do self-contradictory entities exist?
[00:00:05]  If they don't exist, which they don't, then if God is a self-contradictory entity, then God does not exist.
[00:00:11]  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.
[00:00:22]  If God knows for certain what's going to happen tomorrow, God is powerless to change what is going to happen tomorrow.
[00:00:27]  Therefore, God cannot be both all-powerful and all-knowing.
[00:00:31]  And if we say that there's no such thing as consciousness without matter, That all consciousness that exists is an effect of matter.
[00:00:42]  and then you're saying there's immaterial consciousness, well, all shadows are from So, not very well.
[00:00:50]  A little bit, right?
[00:00:51]  So, all shadows are the effect of something solid blocking a light source, right?
[00:00:58]  So, that's a shadow.
[00:00:59]  A shadow is an effect of something solid blocking a light source, right?
[00:01:04]  So, if you were to say, like, can you imagine that there were shadows back there doing their thing?
[00:01:09]  Without my hand in front of it, that would be incomprehensible, right?
[00:01:12]  I was talking about this with my daughter the other day.
[00:01:14]  Like, imagine if you're on the sidewalk and you see a shadow with no person attached.
[00:01:19]  That would be really, really freaky, right?
[00:01:23]  And so, a shadow is an effect of something solid blocking a light source.
[00:01:33]  There is no shadow without that.
[00:01:35]  And there is no consciousness without matter.
[00:01:38]  Consciousness requires a brain.
[00:01:40]  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?
[00:01:49]  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?
[00:02:03]  um We know, evolutionarily speaking, that you require something.
[00:02:14]  Something less complex evolves into something more complex, right?
[00:02:16]  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.
[00:02:24]  But you wouldn't start with the human eye.
[00:02:26]  Like, evolution doesn't start with the human eye.
[00:02:28]  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?
[00:02:38]  That would not make any sense.
[00:02:39]  You start with less complicated and come to the more complicated.
[00:02:43]  That's how evolution works.
[00:02:44]  That's how life works.
[00:02:45]  That's how consciousness evolves.
[00:02:47]  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.
[00:02:56]  God started off as the most complicated thing.
[00:02:58]  That would again be like saying that the human eye or the human brain is the beginning of evolution and it evolves from there.
[00:03:08]  That's not how evolution works.
[00:03:10]  There would be another sort of contradictory trait.
[00:03:12]  If you say that a God interferes or has an effect in the material realm, right?
[00:03:21]  Then How do you have an effect in the material realm, right?
[00:03:25]  Well, if I want this SD card, right, this little SD card, if I want it to move, I have to pick it up.
[00:03:33]  It's not going to move on its own, right?
[00:03:34]  I have to have, my matter has to interact with the SD card's matter in order to make it move, right?
[00:03:39]  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.
[00:03:48]  Now, if God, If God interferes with or has an effect in the material realm, then God must manifest some material property.
[00:03:59]  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?
[00:04:06]  But if God does manifest in material form, then we should be able to measure him, right?
[00:04:11]  Should be able to notice the materialization and then the...
[00:04:14]  Right.
[00:04:14]  So, I mean, other things like miracles are contradictions.
[00:04:18]  Human beings can't walk on water because...
[00:04:22]  So we can't do that, right?
[00:04:26]  You can't be dead for three days, come back to life.
[00:04:28]  So these would be the arguments that self-contradictory entities don't exist.
[00:04:33]  They're impossible by definition.
[00:04:35]  And so the way that you would deal with this Polynesian God is you'd say, does the Polynesian God have self-contradictory properties?
[00:04:42]  Therefore, it doesn't exist.
[00:04:44]  Now, I don't know why that's particularly complicated.

=== Self-Contradictions Don't Exist (01:26) ===

[00:04:47]  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.
[00:04:57]  Right?
[00:04:58]  And babies understand the nature of matter and energy very well.
[00:05:03]  All right.
[00:05:04]  So let's go on a bit more.
[00:05:05]  Because that's your presupposition that It is a presupposition that you reject self-contradictory entities.
[00:05:15]  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.
[00:05:35]  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.
[00:05:41]  So, I mean, you just have to look practically at how you live and draw the principles from there.
[00:05:48]  And also, Jordan Peterson, let's say that his fail was 50%, like anything lower than 50%, you'd fail.
[00:05:54]  So you would have to make a judgment based upon numbers.
[00:05:58]  And somebody couldn't say, well, I got a 20%.
[00:06:04]  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.
[00:06:10]  Valid, and there's no point.
[00:06:11]  My question is quite simple.