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Dec. 5, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:50
On the Existence of GOD!
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All right, so let me do the impossible, at least as some people perceive it, as impossible, because there's a question floating around on X, which is prove the non-existence of God.
And I'm going to do that in a relatively short timeframe, and not because I'm some sort of blinding genius or anything like that.
I've been studying philosophy for 44 years.
And I was raised Christian.
I became an atheist.
I'm very sympathetic to Christianity and very positive to a lot of Christian ethics.
So rest assured that this is no disrespect to Christian virtues as a whole.
But the question of the existence of God is something that can be disproven despite what, of course, a lot of people believe.
So I will do that.
And hopefully this makes sense to you.
And of course, if I've erred in my reasoning or my definitions, please, please, please tell me I do not want to get this wrong for peril of my potentially eternal soul.
So when we say, does God exist?
What we're doing is we are creating a category called existence.
Not existence, like the general purpose, everything that exists, but we've got a category called exists.
So we have to define what does it mean to exist?
And then we have to figure out if God as a concept fits into the category of that which exists.
So think of a doorway with an open door, right?
The door exists, but it does not bar you from walking through when the door is open.
It bars you, of course, when the door is closed, which is the sort of point of a door.
So you have existence.
If you have been a bad teenager and you have some, I guess, pretty aggressive parents, then your parents might do something like take the door off the hinges, right?
So you had a door.
You don't have the door anymore.
The door does not exist in the doorframe.
The door may exist in the basement or, you know, some other place or whatever, but the door does not exist in the doorframe and therefore you can walk through it.
If you have a tree in your front yard and it is putting too much shade on your house and you want to get rid of it to get more sunshine or better view or whatever it is, then you cut down the tree.
The tree exists.
You cut down the tree and the tree no longer exists.
Of course, the cells, the atoms, or the cells are sort of, you've burned it or whatever, they're converted into energy and the atoms of the tree still exist, but it no longer exists as a tree.
You've cut it down.
Maybe you even tear out the roots or something like that.
So we have a category called existence.
And the question is, what is it that fits into the category of existence?
So there are three categories of existence.
Again, this is nothing too shocking.
I'm sure we can all sort of understand this.
So the first category of existence is things which do exist.
We know that they exist.
How do we know they exist?
How do you know that there's a tree in your front yard?
Well, you can see the tree.
You can touch the tree.
If you are feeling particularly adventurous from a culinary standpoint, you can taste the tree, right?
You can smell the tree and so on.
So the tree conforms to all of the evidence of your senses.
Every single one of your senses confirms the existence of the tree.
You can't walk through it and touch, smell, sound.
You can hear the tree rustling as the wind blows through the leaves and so on.
So the tree exists.
It is in accordance with all of the evidence of your direct senses, and it is not a self-contradictory entity.
In other words, if someone said to you, I have something in my front yard that is both a tree and an elephant and a bonfire at the same time, right?
You would say, well, it can't be all three, right?
And so something is incorrect in that.
So these are things that do exist.
There are things that could exist, but have not been proven yet.
So we can all imagine that there are some crazy lamp forehead creatures that live down at the bottom of the ocean that could exist, right?
We could draw fantastical drawings and so on.
And they're not self-contradictory entities.
They could exist, but we have not proven them to exist.
So one example would be a horse with a horn on its head, right?
Could that exist anywhere in the universe?
Well, sure.
It could.
Now, could it be a magical unicorn?
Well, no, because magic is not real.
Magic is self-contradictory manifestations of matter and energy.
But a horse with a horn on its head could exist somewhere in the universe.
So we have things that do exist, the tree in our front yard, knock, knock, knock.
You climb it, you smell it, you listen to the rustle of the leaves.
It exists because it is consistent with reason and evidence.
So consistent with reason means it's not a self-contradictory entity, like the tree that is a tree and an elephant and a bonfire at the same time.
Well, that would be a self-contradictory property.
Sorry, a self-contradictory entity and therefore cannot exist in the same way that a human being who has an alibi, by definition, cannot have committed the crime, right?
If there's a murder and you say, oh, Bob committed the murder, but Bob was in fact on a plane flying to China at the time, and you know for sure that he was, then he kind of committed the murder, assuming the murder wasn't on the plane to China.
I don't want to get overly fussy about these.
Well, what about this exception?
Yeah, but in general, right?
So we have an alibi because human beings can't be in two places at the same time.
If the murder took place in Pittsburgh and Bob was on a plane to China when the murder took place, then Bob could not have committed the murder because Bob cannot be in two places at the same time because that's a function of entities, that entities inhabit only one particular place in space and time and not two opposing places in space and time at the same time.
So we have things that do exist, things which could exist, right?
And if you see a picture of a tree on a lonely moor, right, from 20 years ago, and you travel somehow to that lonely moor and there's no tree there, you would say, oh, well, I guess the tree was cut down.
You can't 150% prove that the tree from the picture of the lonely moor from 20 years ago existed, unless there's maybe there's multiple pictures or whatever, which would raise the likelihood, but it could all be a cunning fake and, you know, whatever it is, right?
So it could exist.
You can't say for sure that it does exist in the way that a tree that you climb and touch and hear and smell and so on exists.
So it's not self-contradictory for the tree from the lonely moor 20 years ago to exist.
You can't prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that that tree existed.
You could get pretty close, right?
And a few people, hey, did you see that tree on the moor?
Yes, I did.
I climbed it.
I kept a piece of it.
Whatever, right?
But it's not self-contradictory for that tree to exist, right?
In other words, if somebody said, 20 years ago, on a lonely moor, there was a tree that was a tree and an elephant and a bonfire at the same time, and you would say no.
Or if you said, there's a tree, the same tree is in my front yard, and on a lonely moor in another country 20 years ago, right, you would say, well, no, the same tree can't be in two places, right?
And that's sort of a function of sort of reality and the stability of matter and energy.
So in the category of existence, there's things which do exist, there's things which could exist, and there's things which cannot exist.
So an example of something that cannot exist would be a square circle, something that is both a circle and a square at the same time that cannot exist.
So we cannot say for certain that a horse with a horn on its head does not exist anywhere in the universe.
And we could never say that for sure, because we could scour each one of the 100 billion solar systems or stars at least in any of the 100 billion galaxies and we could find no horse with the horn on its head, but the universe is so vast that by the time we finished looking, it could have evolved in the first place we went to.
And so we could never, absolutely never say for certain that a horse with a horn on its head does not exist because it is not a self-contradictory entity.
Nothing is claimed about it that makes it impossible to exist.
We're not defining it as a square circle and so on, right?
However, if you were to say that a horse with a horn on its head, that is a magical unicorn that can run with fire on its feet without getting burned through the air and fly without wings and teleport itself and, you know, just come up with all of these impossible characteristics, then we would say that creature does not exist.
And we would not need to scour the universe and we would not need to test everywhere we could possibly go.
We would know that that would be an example of an entity that could not exist.
Disappearing from one place through the power of your mind and then reappearing at another place is impossible.
Being able to fly by stomping your feet that are both fiery and not burning, stomping your feet and thundering through the sky is not physically possible because a horse with a horn on its head is heavier than air and therefore cannot run on air, right?
Well, you see where I'm going here.
So things which we know for certain do exist.
There are things which could exist, both theoretically in that we have not experienced them, but they are not self-contradictory entities.
If we were to say that there is a fish at the bottom of the sea that is both a fish, a mammal, and a mineral, a rock, simultaneously we would say, well, no, it can't be a fish, a mammal, and a rock at the same time.
It's not possible for an entity to have those characteristics.
In the same way, if we were to say that there exists, or if we were to propose in the universe, there exists a gravity well without any mass.
In other words, we would have the effects of gravity without any cause of gravity, the cause of gravity, of course, being mass.
That would be contradictory.
That would be like saying there is light without a source of light.
And the reason that we know that having an effect without a cause is impossible is that the effect is a production of the cause.
So, and people, not you, of course, I'm sure that you're well versed in this kind of stuff, but people get confused because they hear the term black hole, black hole, and they say, well, Bosh, it's just a hole, but it has a gravity well.
And it's like, no, no, no, but a black hole is super dense matter.
Like the whole earth fits into a tablespoon or two of that kind of matter.
It's super dense matter.
And it's only called a hole because it's so dense that even light, which is both a wave and a particle, it seems, that light cannot escape its surface because the gravity well pulls the photons back down.
And so to say that you could have a black hole with nothing at the center would be a contradiction in terms, because gravity is an effect of matter.
And to say you can have a gravity well with only a hole or a void or nothing at the center would be a contradiction.
It would be like if your father was asking for a light source while he fixes a car and he needs you to shine it in a particular way in a way that a lot of people find quite stressful, right?
So your father says, shine the light up here, but don't turn on the flashlight.
I need light up here, but don't turn on the flashlight.
You would be probably a little confused and wondering if maybe he'd been inhaling oil fumes for too long.
Because if your father says, shine that light up here, but don't turn on the flashlight, then you would say, I can't give you light without turning on the flashlight.
I can't produce light or shine light without a light source, right?
So this is all based upon the universal and stable properties of matter and energy.
And so you cannot have an effect without a cause.
That would be like saying, I want to bake bread with no ingredients and no oven.
An empty pan.
You can, I mean, imagine handing this to someone and saying, you know, for your final exam in the culinary course, you must produce bread with no ingredients and no oven.
It'd be like, well, like, no, you cannot have an effect without a cause.
So once we put these things together, we have a category called existence, which is divided into two subcategories.
The first is we know for sure it exists.
And the second is it could exist.
Self-contradictory entities cannot exist because matter and energy behave in perfectly consistent ways.
Now, again, I know that you can sort of burrow down to the subatomic level, the level of quarks and quantum physics and so on, but we are talking about not subatomic particles.
So it's with the question of God.
We're talking about all-knowing, all-powerful, all-wise, all-good consciousness that precedes the universe and is larger in scope than the universe and created the universe and so on.
And also, our capacity to reason is derived from the stable and predictable behavior of matter and energy.
In other words, reason is a codification of what happens at the atomic level as it transmits up to the evidence of our senses.
And all quantum phenomena cancel each other out and produce stability long before you get to the level of sense data.
So we have reason, rationality, we have the rules of reason because matter and energy behave in stable ways.
And of course, if matter and energy did not behave in stable ways, we would not be here because there wouldn't be enough stability in the behavior of matter and energy for us to be able to develop bodies and brains and reproductive systems and genetic transmission.
Like there has to be stability.
And of course, if there was no stability in matter and energy, then we would not have a stable enough planet in which life can emerge.
So matter and energy behave, at least at the level of sense data.
Again, I'm not sort of talking about the subatomic level or the quark, the quantum level, but matter and energy behave in perfectly stable and consistent ways.
And matter and energy do not self-contradict.
Something is not both a carbon atom and a helium atom at the same time.
It may be in the process of going from one to the other, but something is not both water and carbon at the same time.
Again, you might mix the two in and so on, right?
And gravity does not both repel and attract like goth girls at the same time, right?
Gravity is stable, and we know that it's stable because that's why we have a planet, that's why we have a solar system, that's why we have life.
So we know that gravity is stable.
The Earth doesn't sort of wake up tomorrow and say, hmm, I think I will just fly off into space and let centrifugal force overcome gravitational attraction, right?
The planet has been stable for billions and billions and billions of years, and the moon has been stable and so on, right?
So we know that gravity is a stable force, and even the level and strength of gravity, 9.8 meters per second per second acceleration towards the Earth is stable, again, with some variations based upon atmospheric distortion and so on.
But gravity is stable.
The behavior of matter and energy is stable.
And self-contradictory entities cannot exist.
So we've got the three categories.
That which exists, that which could exist.
In other words, it's not self-contradictory, but we don't have proof of its existence.
And that which cannot exist.
Square circles, things that are in two places at the same time, things that are, for instance, both fish and mammals and rocks at the same time.
These things cannot exist.
And I know that this is tough for people.
And I sympathize with that.
But this is what everything is based on, life.
I mean, even the data flow of this communication, me recording and transmitting and you listening and receiving, the stability of the sound waves and so on, these are all absolutely foundational.
We could not be alive if matter and energy did not behave in not just stable, but perfectly stable ways.
I mean, think of all of the atoms that go to make you up.
If atoms were just randomly changing form and gravity was changing, like people were dialing up and down gravity, then, or the universe was, then we simply wouldn't exist because there would not be enough stability for us to have a four billion year evolution.
Or even if you think it's shorter than that, we couldn't have the same personalities.
We couldn't have the same bodies.
I mean, you don't wake up tomorrow wondering if your arms have been replaced with tentacles because the behavior of matter and energy is remarkably stable over the course of our lives.
And that is the nature of matter and energy.
And it's everything that physics has proven.
It's everything that the laws encapsulate.
And it's so stable that we can actually send spaceships past Jupiter, take photos, have them transmitted back to Earth.
Like it all works perfectly.
So again, we've got these three categories.
And then the question is, where does God fit into these three categories?
So let's look at the first one.
Things which for which there is both reason and evidence.
Direct evidence, right?
Like you touch the tree, you hear the wind in the tree, you can climb the tree, and so on, right?
You can't walk through the tree.
You have direct, tangible, sensual, physical evidence of a non-self-contradictory or a logically consistent entity called a tree.
Is God that?
No, God is not that because God does not show up in the evidence of the senses, right?
We cannot measure God nor his direct effects.
We can measure gravity, we can measure light, we can measure wavelength, we can measure infrared, ultraviolet, but we cannot measure God in any way, shape, or form.
Now, that doesn't mean God doesn't exist because we have these three categories, that which does exist, that which could exist, and that which cannot exist.
So, God is not in the first category in that we don't have direct sense evidence of God.
It doesn't show up in any scans.
There is no way to reliably gather information from God.
There is no reliable way to get information that would be impossible for the person to know from God.
And so, there's no way to directly measure God or his effects, right?
So, you don't directly measure gravity.
You simply measure the effects of gravity.
So, God does not exist in the first category, no direct sense evidence.
Does God exist in the second category of that which could exist but has not been directly proven as yet?
Well, as you remember, square circles do not exist in the first category because we can't touch them.
Square circles and magical unicorns do not exist in the second category because they are self-contradictory entities.
So, then we have to ask, is God a self-contradictory entity?
Well, let's just look at a couple of the basics, right?
So, if we say God is all-powerful and all-knowing, and I'm sure you know these arguments, but I'm putting them as context of the three categories.
If we say God is all-powerful and all-knowing, then God knows exactly what's going to happen in the future, which means that God cannot change what happens in the future.
If God can change what can happen in the future, then God is not all-knowing.
So, if God knows that I just scratched my nose on the left-hand side of my nostril, and God has known that since the very beginning of time, that I'm going to do this on this day of the 2nd of December, 2025, at 9:55 p.m., that I am going to scratch my left nose.
If God has known that from the beginning of time, then God cannot change that.
If God can change that, then God cannot be certain of his knowledge.
Now, you can say, ah, yes, but God is certain that he's not going to change it, in which case God cannot change it.
Therefore, God cannot be all-powerful.
If God has the power to change things, then God cannot know all things.
If God knows all things, then he doesn't have the power to change things.
So, that would be a self-contradictory entity.
That would be a square circle, which would fall into the category of things which do not exist because they cannot exist any more than a horse with a horn on its head that can defy the laws of physics and be in two places at the same time, that cannot exist.
A square circle cannot exist.
Let's look at the question of consciousness.
So, consciousness is an effect of the brain.
We do not have consciousness in the absence of a brain.
Remember earlier, I was talking about how gravity is an effect of matter.
So, consciousness is an effect of the brain.
A heartbeat is an effect of the heart.
Light is an effect of a light source.
And consciousness is an effect of a physical brain.
So, if we're saying that there is such a thing as consciousness without a physical brain, then we are saying that there is light without a light source.
We are saying that there is gravity without any attendant matter, which is impossible.
You cannot have an effect without a cause.
And the effect called consciousness is the result of the cause called the physical brain.
So if you're saying there's consciousness without a brain, you're saying there's an effect without a cause, which cannot be true.
It is a contradiction to say that there is an effect without a cause.
That's like saying there's gravity without matter or light without a light source and so on.
And if your father were to say, shine that light on this motor I'm fixing, but don't turn the flashlight on, you would say, I can't.
It's impossible because I cannot shine a light without turning the flashlight on, which converts the energy in the battery, potential energy in the battery to the kinetic energy of the photons or the light beam.
So you'd say, no, no, no, it's impossible.
And he would say, no, no, no, no, just have faith, right?
When you say, well, no, it's not possible to have an effect without a cause.
I mean, this is an old question, right?
Can God create a rock so heavy that God cannot lift it?
And if you say, well, no, God can't create a rock so heavy that he cannot lift it, then God cannot be all-powerful.
If God can create a rock so heavy, then he if God cannot create a rock so heavy that he cannot lift it, then God is not all-powerful.
If God can create a rock that he cannot lift, then God is not all-powerful.
Like it doesn't work, right?
Life is an effect of, I'm just going to go straight, you know, Darwinian biological evolution.
And if this bothers you, I get it.
This is not necessary, but it's important for those who are a little bit more on the evolution spectrum, so to speak, then that which is more complex evolves later.
That's one of the proofs of evolution, right?
That you don't get a huge complex eye that appears out of nowhere, but it slowly evolves over time from the basic organs that sense light to the sort of complicated thing that we have now to the eye, or two, you know, if you're lucky.
So, to say that that which is the most complex is at the beginning of things would be like saying that somebody who is just sitting down to learn the piano for the first time starts with the most complex possible piano piece and the most challenging sight reading and is able to do it with no pride.
training the first time they sit down at the piano.
So if you were being taught opera and it was your first time singing and somebody said, you know, here's this score to Aida or some Wagnerian five-hour lungbuster and it's in, you know, I want you to sing this in German and French and English and Italian and so on.
You would not be able to do it because those are very complex things that you have to learn over time.
You start with chopsticks.
You start with scales.
You start with things that are simple and you move on to things that are more complex.
And then when you have true mastery, then you would end up with the things that are the most complex.
So you go from the least complex to the most complex.
When you're a little kid, you start by learning your basic letters, apa, k, efa, ge, right?
Smonetic is better, right?
So you start with learning just simple letters, and then from there, you go on to learn the phonemes and then words, and then you get more complex, and then eventually you end up maybe learning other language and so on in your language acquisition and knowledge.
But you wouldn't start a two-year-old with Shakespeare or Klingon or something like that.
This is very complex and very, very challenging.
So you start with the least complex and go to the most complex.
And God is infinitely complex compared to our sort of human mind, which is a very late stage in evolution, human beings, depending on how you read it, a couple of hundred thousand, maybe a million years out of the four billion years of evolution and the 14.8 billion years of the universe and so on, humanity and the complexity of our minds comes along very late.
And of course, it takes a long time to grow.
The human brain is the slowest growing brain in existence because that which is the most complex takes the longest to evolve and the longest individually to grow.
So to say that the most complex entity is at the very beginning of things is like saying that the most challenging piano piece is automatically known by the person just learning piano.
That would be an unfair, if not downright abusive Tiger Mom standard, right?
So for these and sort of other reasons, that to know that something exists first requires that it not be self-contradictory.
And second, to know that something truly exists requires that there is tangible and material evidence for its existence.
Again, a unicorn with a horse in its head could be somewhere in the universe.
It wouldn't be exactly like a horse, but it would look something like a horse with a horn on its head.
It would not be a magical unicorn.
But to know that something exists is to say, I have no doubt that something exists.
And we don't need faith to know when things actually exist.
I don't need faith to know that there is a tree in my front yard, right?
I see it every day.
I can climb it with my daughter.
I have to rake its leaves.
I enjoy the sound of the leaves rustling in the breeze.
Like, I know.
And if we say, well, you don't know for sure, it's like, well, then there is no knowledge, right?
Then there is no.
If I don't know that a tree exists that I interact with every day in my front yard, if I don't know that, then there is no knowledge that is possible.
And then we can't know anything.
We're back to sort of radical Cartesian skepticism.
I think, therefore, I am stuff, which I've disproven a number of times before.
So I want to get into all of that here.
You can go for my free book, Essential Philosophy at essentialphilosophy.com for more on disproving that sort of radical skepticism.
So in the category of does God exist, we have things which we know for certain exist because they conform to reason and evidence.
We have things that could exist because at least they're not self-contradictory.
And we have things that cannot exist because they are self-contradictory.
If you have a scientific quote proof or a scientific conjecture or hypothesis where you say, my scientific hypothesis requires that gas both expand and contract when heated, that requires that gravity both attract and repel at the same time, that an object held at arm's length and dropped goes both up and down and sideways at the same time.
Nobody would test that and nobody would evaluate it further.
And they would say, no, no, no, these things are impossible.
So I don't care what you've said after this.
Like if you have a mathematical proof that says, okay, if we assume that two and two make five and you go from there, people would say, no, two and two do not make five because four is just another way of saying two and two.
And so you are violating the first law of identity.
Since four and two and two are the same things, then saying something that is the same is not the same is a contradiction.
And nobody would go further with any mathematical proof you proposed if the mathematical proof rested on two and two make five.
And so given that there is no physical evidence for God, there is no tangible evidence for God, and God is a self-contradictory entity, we can very firmly and confidently say that God does not exist.
Now, if you're going to create a second category called faith, then you are no longer able to use the word exist because exist is a very specific word, which means there's rational consistency and empirical evidence, right, for actual existence, not potential existence.
So if you want to say God exists and it's based on faith, well, you don't use faith to prove that God exists.
You don't use faith to assume that God exists.
Existence refers to rational consistency plus empirical evidence and repeatability and all the sort of hallmarks of good science.
And so if you're going to use the word exists, whatever you're saying, X exists, X has to conform to rational consistency, non-self-contradiction, and empirical evidence.
God does not conform to either standard.
Therefore, we can, with great confidence, say God does not exist.
And if you have a second category, then you have to use some other word for it because existence refers to reason and evidence, entities that are confirmable by reason and evidence.
That's what we mean by existence or that which exists.
And if you want to create some other category, then you can't use the word existence.
And then, of course, the dangerous part, of course, is that if God does not exist and you're praying to God, you're praying to the part of you that thinks it is God.
Not super healthy from a mental standpoint.
So again, happy to get feedback.
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