Matt Dillahunty vs Braxton Hunter (Does the Christian God Exist)

The following individuals deserve credit for helping me prep for this debate: Layton Flowers, for inviting me to debate; Mike Kona, for hours spent on the phone discussing recommended biography and HL literary conventions; Jonathan Pritchett, for serving as the quintessential devil’s advocate; Erick Hernandez, for providing insights from his own debate with Matt; Tim Stratton, for his incredible advice regarding my own freewill argument; Andrew Armstrong, for the late-night discussions about my approach; Russell Crawford, for serving as my sparring partner; and my wife, Sarah Hunter, for putting up with an often absent-minded husband focused on this event. To learn formally and achieve your degree from home, visit Trinity College of the Bible and Theological Seminary today.

Good evening. I know some are still making their way over from the parking lot and into the facility, and we want to first begin by thanking Truitt for hosting tonight’s debate. So let’s give a hand for Truitt! Baylor University—Truitt’s a great school. Got a lot of great friends that go here and are a part of Truitt. And so if you’re looking for a higher education, Truitt’s a great place to go. And they didn’t ask me to say that either; this is just something that I’ve come to believe and know about. Truitt’s a great place for you to consider for a higher education.

My name is Leighton Flowers. I am the director of evangelism and apologetics for Texas Baptist. Texas Baptist is what is sponsoring this event called the Unapologetic Conference, which will begin tomorrow at Columbus Avenue Baptist Church. And there at Columbus, you will be hearing more from, obviously, an atheistic Christian perspective about why we believe what we believe and learning how to defend and to explain why we believe what we believe. But here tonight, you’re going to actually see it unfold firsthand, live, in a debate between a Christian and an atheist.

And though we are having a debate, and sometimes when people hear “debate,” they think, “Oh, well, that means people are going to be really mean and angry and ugly with each other,” you will not be witnessing that. Because I know both of the two gentlemen sitting on this stage, and neither one of those gentlemen are going to be that way. They are both very firm in their convictions, and they believe what they believe very strongly, but they also know how to speak about what they believe without being overly contentious. In other words, they can disagree without being overly disagreeable. I think it was Aristotle who said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without necessarily accepting it.” And what we’re doing today is a part of education; it is learning to understand other people’s perspectives, learning how to make sound, reasoned arguments against these perspectives, and we’re going to see that played out live.

Before we get started, I have a few just announcements and things that I want you to be aware of. First, I want to thank us—via Atherton—for her helping to organize this event, as well as the Unapologetic Conference; and did his parish and his crew for the camera work that they’re going to be doing. Also, the newest one on our staff, our new lead apologist, Eric Hernandez, is right here in the front row. Stand up, Eric! [In DL recognized]. He’ll—no booing, no bearing. Eric and Matt have had debates before on other topics, and so they have a history together. And that actually—your perfect introduction for what I was going to say next.

As audience participants tonight, we’re gonna ask that you not boo or applaud during the course of the event. We obviously want you to be engaged, and so we have actually planned for a time for you to engage with your own questions. So you can begin to think and even—well, maybe write down your questions as we go through the first portion of this debate, because the mics will be open later for you to come up. And let me emphasize this: ask a question. Okay? Not make a debate point. Not try to finish something Matt didn’t say that you wanted him to say, or that that that Dr. Hunter says that you wanted—even say you wish you would have said this and he shouldn’t. That’s not what this is for, okay? This is to ask a question. So, about under 30 seconds, and we’ll have people monitoring your microphone there. So under 30 seconds, just voice a question, and there’s not going to be follow-up. So you’re just going to ask the question and to move on. Now, if you’d like to get back to the back of the line again and ask another question, that’s your prerogative, but it’s just the one question and then allow our our presenters to to answer that question.

We want you as audience participants to learn from this discussion. We’re not having a debate in order to spread dissension or to say, “Hey, this is this is a way to divide or the way to have trouble within the church or the body.” A lot of times people put down having debates, and and I think this is actually one of the best teaching tools that are available to our students. Because if a person’s able to engage with a cordial and rational debate and arguments over key issues, that is one of the the best ways for you to become educated about what another person believes and and and I promise, as you go through this evening, if you objectively consider both the presenters and what they’re saying and how they’re saying it and listen to their arguments and learn, this can be one of the greatest education tools that you have at any university. And so I hope that this this evening is going to be beneficial for you as as an education as well.

The structure of the tonight’s—tonight’s debate will go like this: We will begin with openers—20-minute openers from each of our presenters—and then we will have 10-minute rebuttals from each of our presenters; and then we will have two rounds of cross-examination where each presenter will lead in a cross-examination of the other, and I will be guiding each one of these sections as we go through them. And then finally, in closing, we’ll have the audience question-and-answer time. And so that’s how tonight’s debate will be structured. And so though you’re going to be holding your applause for the rest of the evening, right now let’s get all of our applause in for our two presenters: Matt Dillahunty and Dr. Buxton Hunter. First up will be Dr. Hunter with his 20-minute opener.

Well, first I want to say what a privilege it is to be engaging in tonight’s debate in this incredible institution. And I have nothing but the utmost respect for the Unapologetic Conference, and I’m excited to be sharing the stage with Matt Dillahunty, who is a really sharp guy and an excellent debater, and so that should make for a lively discussion this evening. And I don’t want to be too forthright in my predictions about what’s gonna happen on the stage tonight, but I do—we’ll make this prediction: If there is a clear winner to tonight’s debate, it will be a bald-headed, bearded man. Just saying.

Now, I’m going to be defending the proposition that the Christian God does exist, and in order to do that, I’m going to be presenting two arguments for God’s existence and a case for the resurrection of Jesus. If God exists and God raised Jesus from the dead, the Christian God exists. Period. No matter what we want to say about anything else. I’ll begin with a simple syllogism tonight. If you freely chose to come to tonight’s debate, then God exists. You freely chose to come to tonight’s debate. Therefore, God exists. Now, let’s—putting it a bit too simplistically—it’s not really my syllogism. Let’s just back up and get a little more complex, but hopefully not too much. If God does not exist, then libertarian freedom does not exist. Libertarian freedom does exist. Therefore, God exists.

When philosophers talk about human freedom, that’s usually divided into two general categories. On the one hand, we have determinism, which says that no free will exists, or at least not the way that you think it does. Kind of sad. On the other hand, you have libertarian freedom, which says, “Free will exists!” Yay. And I would wager that for most of you out there, the kind of freedom that you think you’re talking about when you speak of your own freedom in your own free will every day is probably libertarian freedom, and it’s certainly the position that I affirm. What libertarian freedom says is that you are the originator of your actions and your choices, or you have the ability to do other than whatever you ended up doing. Determinism, instead, says that what we call your decisions is merely the result of what amounts to an extremely long train of dominoes, or something like that. Events in the history of the universe led to your existence, your life experiences, the formation of your neural structure, and the firings of neurons in your brain—but we call those your choices, but they literally could not have been otherwise. In other words, on determinism, you had to come to tonight’s debate; there was really no other option. It couldn’t have been otherwise.

But here’s the thing: If atheism is true, I suspect that that means determinism is true; and if atheism is true, then you have no free will. And as others have said, like my friend Erik Hernandez, the last thing you are is a free thinker. Some thinkers, however, posit what they think amounts to a middle option between these two extremes. Perhaps it’s not as bad as determinism—hard determinism—maybe it’s what we could call compatibilism. And I’m sorry for these really, you know, big words here at the beginning of the night, but compatibilism basically says, “Look, you’re free to do whatever it is that you want to do, and what more do you want than the freedom to do whatever you want?” The problem is that on compatibilism, your wants and desires that drive your actions—those are also determined, and it’s backed just dominos all the way back again. So ultimately, what we’re left with is still determinism: no free will or libertarian freedom—free will.

Now, the last I heard, Matt held the position that I described as compatibilism, which I say reduces to any other form of hard determinism. In a discussion with Lawrence Krauss and Sam Harris, Matt not too long ago said, “Quote: We all agree there is no such thing as libertarian free will—the idea that I could have done differently. So while it seems intuitively obvious to you and I, but when I do like this, I could have just as easily not done that or done this instead, ultimately given the circumstances that was determined and it could not have been otherwise.” Now, in summary: Either you have free—you you are free such that you could have done other than you end up doing, or do you have no free will, and all is determined, like Matt’s position requires. But if you believe that you have freedom of the will—that you should know that on naturalistic atheism, libertarian free will is just an option—for the universe would merely be a natural system of cause and effect. If you have free will, God is the best explanation for that freedom; for if God exists, then the universe is not merely a natural system of cause and effect. God could grant us libertarian freedom. And deep down, I think we all know that we have the freedom to do other than whatever we end up doing. You really could have chosen not to come to tonight’s debate. But if you believe that, then libertarian freedom exists, as I’ve argued, then God exists.

Now, there are actually a couple of implications to this argument that should also be mentioned. First, if determinism is true, then we’re left with what I would call moot morality. Now, what I mean by that is that whether someone ends up becoming a philanthropist and helps people or ends up becoming a sex offender or some other kind of criminal, ultimately, whether that’s good or bad, right or wrong, they ended up doing whatever they were determined to do, and they’d have a novel new approach if they stood in court to answer for their crimes; they could say, “It’s not my fault, Judge; the universe made me do it.” But if you all believe, like I do, that we really could have chosen otherwise, and these people who engage in hate crimes or do whatever evil thing they do really didn’t have to do that, given their circumstances, they could have chosen not to do that and lived moral lives, then you’re affirming libertarian freedom, and of course, as I’ve argued, along with that comes God. Secondly, if libertarian freedom does not exist, then it means that whatever we believe is merely what we were determined to believe. Now, this may stretch the mind and the brain and the head—well, the fact is it’s not just your actions that are determined on determinism, but also your thoughts and your beliefs. So while you may think you have good reasons for believing that two plus two equals four, that you’re watching a debate right now, or that bald-headed, bearded men are the most attractive kinds of men, those and all other beliefs were determined and could not have been otherwise. This means that you are not free to choose against those things which are irrational. That means that you can affirm determinism, you can affirm atheism, but you can’t rationally affirm anything at all, including your determinism. As atheist philosopher John Searle says, “Quote: Actions are rationally accessible if and only if the actions are free. The reason for the connection is this: Rationality must be able to make a difference. Rationality is possible only where there is a genuine choice between various rational and irrational courses of action. If the act cannot be otherwise, then rationality can make no difference; it doesn’t even come into play. End quote.” Here’s what this means for tonight’s debate: If Matt is unsuccessful in overcoming this argument, then at least on the basis of tonight’s debate, you have libertarian freedom and should believe in God, as I’ve argued. But get this: If he is successful in overcoming this argument, then on the basis of tonight’s debate, determinism is true, and you can’t rationally affirm anything at all, including that atheism is true or that the Christian God doesn’t exist. So let’s just put it this way: You’re darned if you do, darned if you don’t.

Secondly, God is the best explanation for the beginning of the universe. Here I’d like to present a case that begins with the Kalam cosmological argument. Now, for those who are familiar with these discussions, you might say, “Come on, Braxton, you’re not gonna bring the old Kalam argument are you again?” You’re darn right! I’ve got a personal philosophy for my life: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And it ain’t broke, folks. The argument may be stated like this: Everything that begins to exist must have a cause for its existence. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe must have a cause for its existence. Now, when I say, “Everything that begins to exist must have a cause,” we have zero counter-examples of this principle. 100% of the evidence backs this up. And when I say, “The universe began to exist,” by “universe,” I mean all of nature, including multiverses, vacuums, or anything else. If the universe had no beginning, it has existed infinitely, and without even a beginning to start from, we could never have arrived at this particular moment that we’re experiencing today. Because if it exists infinitely in the past, and you crossed half of infinity, you still have infinity to go, and we would have never—a lot—arrived at this moment. If you want a simpler way of saying it, try jumping out of a hole without a bottom to it. Not too easy. I’ll leave it to Matt to bring the challenges to the individual premises of this argument, but simply put, for those that have never heard it before, what I’m saying is that whatever begins to exist begins to exist because of something else, and the universe is like that. Something or someone serves as the cause of the physical universe. But what that cause—well, the universe is made up of three things, generally speaking: time, space, and matter. Now, since things can’t cause themselves to come into existence, and since time, space, and matter are the natural universe, and it makes no sense to say that nature came before nature to cause nature, then whatever the cause of the physical universe is must be a spaceless, timeless, and non-material cause. It also had to be able, from a timeless state, to bring the universe into existence from nothing. Are there things like that? Well, some might say that the laws of logic or numbers could exist spacelessly, timelessly, non-materially, but the problem is they don’t have what philosophers call causal powers; that is to say, they don’t do anything. However, a mind without a body—a mind independent of a body—who would serve as a fitting explanation and would also explain how the universe could be created from a state of nothingness, which has no potentialities, no properties, no powers, and no possibilities. Thus, a spaceless, timeless, non-material, sufficiently powerful mind serves as the best explanation of the beginning of the universe.

Now, interestingly, when Matt has been faced with this evidence in the past, and he has on several occasions responded by saying, “Well, perhaps maybe there’s—maybe all that’s true, but it’s not God; maybe the explanation is a spaceless, timeless, non-material, sufficiently powerful group of universe-creating Pixies.” That’s right, Pixies. Now, I understand that Matt is probably saying this tongue-in-cheek; I understand that. But hey, let’s just go with these universe-creating Pixies, because Occam’s razor—the principle that you should shave away everything—anything that’s unnecessary to explain your position—all the unnecessary variables—would leave us with one universe-creating pixie. So you’d have a spaceless, timeless, non-material, sufficiently powerful, singular universe-creating pixie. Folks, that is a description of God; they’re just calling God a pixie. So I’d like to be the first one to welcome Matt to theism—but you pixie theist.

So, in summary, however you want to dice it, God’s the best explanation for the beginning of the universe. Third, I’d like to express that I think we can actually go further than the God of merely the philosophers—God; I think we can specify that this God is the God of Christian theism. If God raised Jesus from the dead—a small feat for a God who could create the universe from nothing—then Christian theism emerges. Can the case be made? I think so. Some reject the resurrection because it involves a miracle. For some, this means that it requires extraordinary evidence of the sort that overcomes the implausibility inherent in any such supernatural claim. Nevertheless, I’d like to head that off with something that I call recalibrated plausibility. What is recalibrated plausibility? Well, if God did not exist, or if Jesus was just any other first-century Jew—and of course the resurrection would be incredibly implausible—but I’ve given good reason tonight to believe that God does exist, and it is universally accepted—or at least almost universally accepted by scholars—that Jesus thought of himself, at the very least, as God’s special agent to bring about the Kingdom on earth. So those two features together give us what I would call recalibrated plausibility. And I’ll give you an analogy for how that works. Imagine that you encountered a group of people in a coffee shop somewhere who were excitedly telling you how they just saw this guy, Neil, walking on the moon. “Can you believe it? We have video of it; we just saw this guy, Neil, walking on the moon!” Now, let’s also imagine that you don’t know anything about NASA, you don’t know anything about the moon landing or space exploration, and so this sounds incredibly implausible; in fact, it’s extraordinary—it’s an extraordinary claim. But then let’s imagine that later you actually do find out about this organization called NASA that has the sufficient power to put a man on the moon, and you also learn that there’s this guy named Neil who was in the 1960s claiming to be a part of NASA’s program—as if he was saying, “Just watch my life and see what happens.” Now go back to your friends in the coffee shop. Does their claim seem implausible? No. In fact, it seems very plausible. Why? Because we have recalibrated the plausibility for the discussion. Now, hopefully the analogy is simple enough to see: NASA is like God, and that God is the sufficient power to do something like raise someone from the dead; and Neil is like Jesus, in that Jesus was walking around basically holding up a sign saying, “Watch my life and see what I do,” as a part of God’s special program. This results in recalibrated plausibility for our discussion.

Also, I’d like to say that the majority of my case will be built on what historians call bedrock facts. A bedrock fact is considered as such by historians if it has two things going for it: one, it is highly evidenced; and two, it enjoys the consensus of critical scholarship, and that includes atheists and agnostics and Christians and perhaps others. With these caveats, we’re prepared to consider the evidence. First, Jesus died by Roman crucifixion. Though it is sometimes argued that perhaps Jesus was able to pull off the resurrection because he never actually died by crucifixion, this is no longer a serious consideration among sober-minded scholars in—the right response to swoon or apparent death theories like these. Thusly, quote: “The hoary old theory that Jesus did not really die on the cross but revived in the cool of the tomb has likewise nothing to recommend it, and it is noticeably important that even those historians who are passionately committed to denying the resurrection do not go by this route.” But you know what? N.T. Wright’s a Christian scholar, and you would expect him to say something like this. So maybe you’d rather hear from an atheist scholar. German atheist New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann writes, “Jesus’ death as a consequence of crucifixion is indisputable.” But maybe you don’t want a Christian or an atheist. What’s up with these extremes? Maybe you’d like a Jewish scholar. Geza Vermes says, “The Passion of Jesus is part of history.” But maybe—when a Christian, an atheist, or a Jewish scholar—maybe you’d rather have a liberal Christian scholar, like John Dominic Crossan, who writes, “There is not the quote slightest doubt about the fact of Jesus’ crucifixion under Pontius Pilate. He says Jesus’ crucifixion is quote as sure as anything historical can ever be, and quote.” But maybe you don’t want a Christian, an atheist, a Jew, or a liberal Christian scholar. Maybe you’d like a liberal Jewish scholar. Paula Fredrikson says, “Quote: The single most solid fact about Jesus’ life is his death. He was executed by the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate on or around Passover in the manner Rome reserved particularly for political insurrectionists, namely crucifixion. End quote.” We have non-Christian reports that testify to the death of Jesus from others like the greatest historian of ancient Rome, Cornelius Tacitus. So one can maintain that Jesus perhaps never existed or that he never died on the cross, but one would be arguing that in the face of literally all the historical evidence to the contrary.

Jesus appeared after his death. This is evidenced by the early creedal nature of Paul’s statements in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8. For reasons that we can get into if necessary, this creed, though provided for us by Paul in the early to mid-50s A.D., can be dated to perhaps less than five years after the events in question. It indicates that almost immediately after the events, early Christians were claiming that Jesus was dead, buried, and rose again. And now some skeptical scholars actually granted these people had such experiences. To quote Fredrikson again, she says, “Quote: The disciples’ conviction that they had seen their risen Christ, their permanent relocation to Jerusalem, their principled inclusion of Gentiles as Gentiles—all these are historical bedrock facts known past doubting about the earliest community after Jesus’ death.” Gary Habermas has been cataloging the positions of scholars who have written on this since 1975, and he comments as firmly as ever: “Most contemporary scholars agree that after Jesus’ death, his early followers had experiences that they at least believed were appearances of their risen Lord.” Now, the explanation for why these early believers actually thought Jesus had risen to appear to them is most often that they experienced mass hallucination—hallucinations of the risen Jesus—even though mass hallucination is both highly controversial as well as an attempt to do group psychology on people from a different culture from 2,000 years ago, when it’s hard enough to do psychology on someone in America in the 21st century who’s sitting in front of you.

Three: The earliest disciples were committed to this belief such that they were willing to die for it. As many before me have said, liars make poor martyrs. It’s one thing to die for something that’s not true when you believe that it’s true, such as the Muslim terrorists who flew the planes into the towers on September 11th, but it’s an entirely different issue to die for something that’s false when you know it’s false. And this would have been the case about the earliest disciples of Jesus, since if it was made up, they were the ones who made it up. Now, one might say this is a false dichotomy; perhaps they weren’t lying but were—

Mistaken because of visionary appearances of Jesus that weren't actually real, but this would, of course, loop us back to the previous consideration: the hallucinations or visions would have to be defended as a hypothesis. Fredrickson says, quote, "I know in their own terms that they saw the risen Jesus; that's what they say. And then all the historical evidence we have afterwards attest to their conviction that that's what they saw. I'm not saying that they really did see the risen Jesus; I wasn't there, I don't know what they saw. I'm just saying—as soon as I wasn't there, I don't know what they saw—but I do know that as a historian, that they must have seen something." For scholars testified to these facts. Here, I simply mean to reaffirm that scholars agree Jesus lived, died by Roman crucifixion, that others believed they had witnessed him alive after the fact, and that those others were willing to die for that claim. Thus, were it not for the fact that many would disregard the resurrection on the basis of its nature as a miracle, it would easily serve as the best historical hypothesis. However, since what I've termed "recalibrated plausibility," I think, accounts for that, I think we're now free to make our conclusion. And so the best explanation is the resurrection, and the most appropriate, that God raised Jesus from the dead, and the most appropriate response is repentance unto salvation. Repentance, by the way, means to turn from your life without Jesus to a life with Jesus; it means to turn from your sin. And that doesn't mean you're a bad person, from in my eyes or from a human perspective, but we're all sinners. And so to turn from that life without Jesus to a life with Jesus.

Now, Matt is an outstanding speaker; he has a quick wit, he's sharp on his feet, and he has a fantastic beard, as we all can see. And all of these things can be very persuasive, and he's a really smart guy, and he really does try to investigate the facts and deal with what's being presented, and I appreciate that about him. But I think he would agree with me tonight that we shouldn't be moved merely by rhetoric; we shouldn't be moved merely by, you know, clichés or jokes that I might bring or that he might bring. We need to be moved by the facts, because clichés and quips don't change the facts. In order to defend his position as the more appropriate and rational position, Matt will have to overcome these lines of evidence. Until he does this, I'd like to invite you all to freely embrace Christian theism. Thank you. [Applause]

Are they allowed to clap? Then apparently this would be weird, cuz I need my glasses to read this, but not to see you guys. So, hi. Hey, yeah, I know you're not supposed to clap or acknowledge or whatever. Girls, thanks so much for having me; I'm really thrilled to be here. My former church, the church I grew up in, would have never done anything like this. And I realized we're not technically in a church, that to this, but you know, there's a Church of Christ that invited me down to San Antonio to do three nights of debates. They haven't had me back, but the Unapologetic Conference has invited me back. I did this—was it two years ago, year and a half ago—in Austin. Mike Laconia and I debated the resurrection, and actually, no, it's like to Mike, but I wish we had done that because I think we're on a slightly different track there. So, tonight: Does the Christian God exist? There's probably some people who thought that Dr. Hunter was gonna walk in and say yes, and I was going to march in and say no, and then there'd be like this WWE brawl. And that's just not the way things work. The arguments that are used here, if we're going to be defending Christianity, shouldn't be arguments that could be used by other religions. Because if you present an argument that's equally viable to Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Jews, whatever, then we're not specifically talking about the Christian God. That's happened a little bit, but we'll get to more of that in the rebuttal.

The interesting thing here is that I'm not here to disprove God. My position is not even "there is no God," which is what everybody thinks the atheist position is. Instead, I am not convinced that there is a God; and for some gods, I'm actually convinced that they don't exist. Now, how do we go about solving a mystery and figuring out what the right answer is? This is something we have to do all the time—simple things. There was a jar of cookies in the kitchen, and now some of them are missing. Let's solve the mystery. Hey, Joey, did you eat those cookies? Nope. Maybe there are plausible candidate explanations that we propose for anything and everything. Maybe the kid ate cookies. But if we have exactly one occurrence of something—like we have never interacted with this child before, we've never had cookies in the house before, the cookies have never gone missing before—we don't really have a pile of evidence. How do we draw a line between "it's most probable that little Joey ate the cookies" than it is that God magically made the cookies disappear, or that aliens came down and beamed part of those cookies up? How do we do that on a single occurrence, and particularly with regard to historic events where we don't have a time machine? As far as I'm aware, we can't go back and actually get the information. We have to build the most plausible cases that we can. Now, with historical events, what we end up doing is saying, okay, are there other similar sorts of events, and what do we know about people in general? And we build up a case for what seems to be the most plausible explanation. Does that mean we're right? No, we might be. So, of the plausible candidate explanations, there based on what we understand, and sometimes we have to acknowledge that we just don't have enough information to reach a conclusion about what's the right answer. There are answers that maybe the best answer that we currently have, and they can be monumentally incorrect. There can be answers that seem reasonable based on the preponderance of the evidence, and those can also be correct. It's entirely possible for you to be completely reasonable and wrong. You want evidence of this? Consider how long people thought it was that the sun went around the earth. It was a most reasonable conclusion; all of the available evidence pointed to it. It's a completely natural thing; it feels right, it looks right, it adequately describes what's going on—and yet it is fundamentally wrong. And it's completely counterintuitive to think that we're on a spinning ball that's spinning around, and that's what makes it look like the sun goes around us. It took a long time to sort through all the details that led us to what we now understand to be the most correct answer. And that's another thing about scientific findings: they're not making proclamations about truth; they are coming up with models that are the most consistent at making predictions based on what we know about what's likely to occur. So maybe little Joey didn't eat the cookies; maybe he did. But if we have a history, if we have a trend where we know that Joey really likes cookies, we've caught him doing it before, we know that Joey is a little liar—that we've given—birthday: Did you brush your teeth, Joey? Yes. Well, let's go check. Then I remember as a kid—I wish I hadn't done this, but it's a true story—I didn't like to brush my teeth, and so my mom would be like, well, let's go check, and she'd go in the bathroom, and then she'd feel the toothbrush to see if it was wet. And I kid you not, in order to get around that, I would go in and wet the toothbrush and put it back in there. I just didn't want to brush my teeth. And she'd go in and check: Yep, toothbrush wet. Thank you for brushing your teeth; you're so good, honey. I tricked her, and that was—that was the game for me. Later on, I brushed my teeth because I saw what it looked like when you stopped brushing your teeth, so I had good—good reasons to do that.

When we go for the best explanation, there are explanations that are sufficient to serve as an explanation or serve as a causal thing. The God proposition is like a panacea; I can't think of too many possible questions that couldn't be answered by, "God did it." It's indistinguishable from magic. It's the reason why I use the "universe-creating pixies" on occasion as an alternative. So how could we look around the world and figure out whether or not religions, or a particular religion, are plausible? Well, we can look at what we know now. We don't know everything about the history and origin of religions, but we do know that ancient people worshipped stones, and then they worshipped spirits, and then they worshipped spirits in the sky, and then they were worshipped—or respected, or admired, or revered—a single spirit in the sky. And then after that, we started listening to the people who claim to be speaking for these spirits in the sky. And then it gradually progressed into the point where now—now we're listening to the people who are giving us their interpretation of a translation of a translation of a copy of a translation of what somebody said that somebody—this guy—wanted you know. And I understand I shouldn't be glib about—within the sky. And as a side note, if I offend anybody tonight, that's obviously not my intent. I'm here because I want you to understand that there—I was a Southern Baptist for more than 25 years. We went through that last time when people from my old church came down to the debate. I just want you to understand why people don't accept it, and I think that it'll be intuitively obvious in some regard. And that's because we know people lie; we know people are mistaken; we know that eyeglasses are relatively new—a new invention—and that people didn't always see very well. I'm reminded of this every time I look down and realize I forgot to put mine back on. Most people tend to think that religions other than theirs are mistaken; that these are the result of human inventions, human mistakes, sincere things. It doesn't have to be that somebody lied; we're not—we're not always talking about an intentionally manufactured, fraudulently religion, as we would with Scientology or Mormonism, where we know that somebody actually manufactured the claims about those religions in modern times, and the evidence for this is just overwhelming, to the point where—I mean, there's a Broadway musical exposing the Book of Mormon. But we don't tend to think about that about our religion. I took a comparative religions course my freshman year of high school, and I remember sitting there going, "Gosh, all these other religions are so weird—and not mine." And then it was much later—I was over 30—by the time I sat down and applied my skepticism and critical thinking to what I believed and why. I didn't have a bad experience in church; I didn't have—man, get mad at God, and I lost my job and thought God wanted me—me to be a preacher, which is what people in my church had thought. And so I was like, okay, God, I'll do it; let's get busy, let's get started. And then I found out that some of the things I thought I had good reasons for—I just didn't—doesn't mean they're false. My position is not "there's obviously no God"; it's not even "Christianity is a manufactured fiction" in the same way that I would say Scientology almost certainly is. That's not it; it's just I'm no longer convinced of that. So we need something—some methodology—which, when consistently applied, manages to confirm one hypothesis and not others. If you have a method that leads you to multiple different competing conclusions, your method is flawed; you know that's why we don't flip coins for things that are serious, hopefully, because you know a coin toss can lead you to decide to cross the street in busy traffic, or it can decide to have you stand there and wait for the traffic to go away. We make decisions—better decisions—based on methodologies that consistently provide explanations. Problem is, we don't always know what the answer is; we don't need to have enough information to figure that out. And so if there's several potential plausible or seemingly plausible explanations, how do we tell which one's right? Now, for Christianity in particular, since the subject tonight is "Does the Christian God exist," I have two lines of argument that are not going to disprove God at all, but they are really difficult things to overcome if you're convinced that it is true. And the first one is a notion that's been called the "argument from divine hiddenness." Essentially, as we look around the world, if there is—give me any God model—it could be the Christian God model, could be a Hindu God model, whatever—define what its characteristics are, what its goals are, how it interacts with people, what it wants, and now you can make predictions about what sorts of things you would see in reality. And if we don't see those things, it's not confirmation that that God doesn't exist; it could be that we're wrong about the nature of that God or what it wants. But if you don't see those things, that's a fairly strong disconfirming issue. It's like if somebody says, "Oh, I got a dead body in the trunk of my car," and I go out and I look and I don't find a body, and I don't find blood, and I don't find hair, and I don't—the trunk looks pristine; it doesn't look like there's ever been anything in there. I can't prove that they didn't have a body in their trunk, but there's strong evidence against the proposition.

Now, as a skeptic, as somebody who advocates for scientific models, all of my positions are tentative; I'm not absolutely certain about anything. As a matter of fact, I don't think you can be absolutely certain about anything, which I'm sure will come up shortly. But my position is: I should be able to find and be consistently reasonable. And if, in fact, there were a God who cared about clarity and reason—who, as I believed when I was Southern Baptist, and as people told me they believed—this God wants us to know that he exists, he wants us to know what his purpose is for our life, he wants us to be aware, he wants us to be able to fulfill our obligation under First Peter 3:15 to give the reason for the faith that's within us, and to do so with gentleness and respect—which I used to say kindness, and I got that wrong, but I'll try and stick with gentleness, respect, and kindness—if that's the kind of God that exists, and there are certain things that we would expect to see, and it leads to the second similar line of argument, which is the problem of inconsistent revelations. Now, these two together talk about essentially the reasonableness of non-belief; that an honest actor—and I cannot convince anybody here—there are people almost certainly who will leave here, as they have from any interaction I've had with Christians in my life since identifying as atheist—they will leave and they will think, well, Matt's just been given over to a reprobate mind; he's unreasonable; he won't accept evidence; you know, he's—he's just not bright enough, or he's hardened his heart, or he's—you can come up with any excuses you would like to—but the fact of the matter is, I am being honest when I say that I sincerely am not convinced that there's a God, and in many cases I'm convinced that there's not. I can't prove it to you any more than I can prove to you there's no God, because if a proposition is unfalsifiable, that means there's no way to show that it's false, and most of the God propositions are, as far as I can tell, unfalsifiable. And while we're talking about what's in somebody else's head, I think that that might be unfalsifiable as well. We can—we can get an idea about what's truly in somebody's head by how they act. The problem is is that you can't be extremely confident about any of this unless you know the person and know their motivations, and you can't really do that without getting in their head. This problem of inconsistent revelation is one that I've described really kind of straightforward and simply, and that is: The First Baptist Church can tell you what's wrong with the Second Baptist Church, and they can tell you what's wrong with the Methodist Church, and they can tell you what's wrong with the Presbyterian Church, and they can tell you what's wrong with the Catholic Church. And then a good chunk of the Christian community can tell you what's wrong with the Jewish tradition; they can tell you what's wrong with Islam, and they can tell you what's wrong with Hinduism. All I'm doing is agreeing with all of them; that's what I'm doing. We—it's not even—appreciate the kind of life, but this is what we do. It's, "Oh, I recognize all these faults, but I don't necessarily recognize them within my own." And the only thing that changed about me was recognizing that my skepticism applied to my own religious beliefs as well, and that if there was a God—the God that I believed—and if it was true and real, that there were certain things I would expect to see, and that as a sincere believer on my knees trying to do what God wanted me to do, when I reached out for help I would get something other than silence and crickets, which is what happened. And people say, well, you know, God will reveal himself to you if you just do it in the right way. And I put it in that phrasing because I've heard different ways of potentially doing it. And when it doesn't happen, they'll say, well, you weren't sincere; your heart's been hardened; God won't reveal himself to you; he'll do it his time; he'll do it when you're ready, when you're contrite, when you are—repetitive. How do you know that I wasn't? I find people who have lost their car keys and God helps them out, evidently. I find people who never put any serious effort into understanding and studying either the history of religion, the tradition, the doctrines which church doctrine is based on—which none of that—they're just like, I'm ready, God, and evidently God reveals himself to them. Now that's cool for them, but when people tell me, oh, well, you just did it wrong, you try—all that tells me is how convinced you are that you are correct; it doesn't tell me how correct you are, or that you have reason to think you're correct. It's imagine that you came up to me and said, hey, I just did this nice thing for you, and I said, I don't believe you. Am I saying that you're lying? No, I'm just saying I'm not convinced. But what if I looked at you and said, you're a liar, you didn't do that, and you know for a fact that you're not lying? How convincing am I ever going to be? If there's any cautionary tale about how to engage with atheists or with skeptics and others who are sincerely portraying that they don't believe, the worst thing you can ever do is say, oh, you really believe—worse than that—you know there's a God; you're just in denial, because they don't know—no matter how convinced you are that's the case. And I know that I'm—this is probably the most difficult thing I could ever convince somebody of—they're almost certainly being sincere, and it's a horrible mistake for you to challenge somebody's sincerity, because at that point all you're doing is talking about how you cannot be wrong; it has nothing to do with whether or not they are in fact non-believers and reasonable. I've heard the various excuses, and to me—and this may seem glib or insincere—it's kind of like, I've got a girlfriend, but she goes to another school, so you don't know her. Oh, and I'd let you call her and investigate, but you're kind of mean, and you weren't nice to me about this, and even if I let you call her and talk to her, you wouldn't believe her anyway. These are the same excuses that I get when I say, you know what, I was on my knees for a sincere—sincerely—sincerely—riya dove time and got nothing. People would ask me, what would it take to convince you that a God exists, and in particular, what would it take to convince you the Christian God exists? And for a while I gave the sort of glib answers that other people did: you know, if there was writing in the sky that said, "I'm the Lord, your God," and everybody could read it, irrespective of what languages they understood, or even if they were illiterate, that'd be pretty—powerful—but it wouldn't confirm a God, because I don't have a way to distinguish—as Arthur C. Clarke pointed out—the difference between a God and a significantly advanced intelligence. I'm a magician, and on occasion a mentalist—mind reader—and so I can do things that people have accused me of being in league with the devil—actually, they accuse me of that just for doing the TV show—but I do things that can blow people's minds. Now, if I were to have somebody pick a random hymn from the hymnal, and I don't even know which hymn—now we have—and then I were able to tell you the title of that song and what it was about, that'd be pretty impressive. Would you think that I got a message from God? Is that the best explanation? Or is the best explanation that there was some trickery involved? Maybe I can read minds; maybe it's something has nothing to do with God, but I can, in fact, read minds. You—how would you ever know that? How could you tell if somebody could read minds? My—pretty—my wife, ex-wife, or whatever, doesn't matter—she once said, we were watching sci-fi shows, that the first time somebody shows up who can actually read minds, we should kill them immediately, because they are definitely going to take over the world. But yet we see people do this all the time. It frustrates me to watch shows like America's Got Talent when you see mentalists and mind reader's up there performing, because it's—it's like the judges believe there's actual magic, and Penn & Teller have got some powers, and that's why smoke comes out of his mouth. And I'm not gonna ruin how the tricks work for you guys today, but it's frustrating for somebody who does that to watch people who are gullible. I did tricks for people while I was in the Navy, and they would say, oh, you've got demonic energy running through you. And at the time I was a Christian, and there's no way I want anybody to think that I was using demonic powers to do a card trick, and so I would show them how the trick was done, and they would look at me and say, that's not what you did the first time. And that tells me that they're convinced they can't be wrong; they've reached a conclusion, they think it's reasonable, and no amount of evidence to the contrary—contrary—is gonna change their mind at that time. But that doesn't mean that our minds are immune to change, and it doesn't mean that we're always right. The objections that are launched by me at all religions are the same ones that are launched by you and others at other religions as well. And what I'm striving to be is consistent. When there's a methodology presented that's going to lead me to consistently plausible, reasonable positions, I'm gonna go with that, and I have yet to find one that consistently or reliably points to any God, let alone the Christian God. And what's more, if there is a God, this God should have a great understanding of logic, of reason, of the nature of evidence, of what should and should not be convincing and compelling to people. And if that God exists, where is he? Why doesn't he seem to care about clarity? Why is it that there's a debate ever? What's preventing Jesus from showing up and appearing right here, right now, conclusively? We're recording, yes. Maybe picking a different venue during the Super Bowl might have reached a bigger audience, but I'm pretty sure if we posted this video it would eventually get views that outstrip any Super Bowl. So why doesn't that happen? It can't just be because I'm given over to some reprobate mind, or God moves in mysterious ways and other things. If, in fact, there's a God who cares about truth and clarity, who cares about each one of us, who wants us to know that in fact he died and was raised for our sin, then he has to do something better than presenting a story that has been altered, passed on in languages that died out—people didn't understand Shakespeare particularly well—and yet we're going back to try to figure out what happened 2,000 years ago. Thanks. Now each presenter will give a ten-minute rebuttal; Dr. Hunter will be first. Thank you for that, Matt, and I like the cordiality in the debate, and so as—

You asked that if anything is offensive to anyone here, that they would just overlook that. No, that’s not your intent. I hope that you know that about anything that I say about the positions as well. Much of what Matt said is personal testimony, things that have happened to him, and of course that’s none of my business, and I won’t be responding to those things. However, ultimately what Matt has said tonight is that Christian apologists or Christian theologians have not presented good enough reason to believe, or a good enough reason that it would warrant belief in the Christian God. I think that much was clear.

And so when we begin here tonight, I just want to say that it’s important to understand what we mean by good enough evidence and bad enough evidence. That’s very important in a debate like this. And when it comes to Matt’s position, I think Matt would agree this debate is not about Matt Dillahunty; it’s not about Braxton Hunter; it’s about you, and it’s about God, and where you stand with God, and whether or not the Christian God exists. And so for that reason, it would be important for us to consider what Matt might think would count as good evidence.

Now, my understanding is that Matt isn’t sure what would ultimately count for good enough evidence because it hasn’t been presented to him, and if it does exist, God would know what it is, but he couldn’t put his finger on what would be convincing. That’s what I’ve heard in the past. So we don’t know what would count as good evidence to him, but we do know what would not count as good evidence for Matt. And I would wager that—and I don’t mean to sound harsh with this, I really like Matt; you can tell he’s a likable guy, enjoyable to listen to—but for I think for most of you in the audience that might be skeptics or atheist, I don’t think you have the level of skepticism or atheism that Matt himself holds to. In fact, frankly—and this is just a point about the position, not about Matt personally—I think it’s frankly an unrealistic level of skepticism in a 2017 debate at this conference.

Mike, like oh no, Mike asked Matt, what if a comet collided with the moon and suddenly anyone could look up in the night sky and see that in multiple languages, Hebrew and Greek, it was written, “God exists.” What would you think about that? Was basically the question. And Matt’s response was basically that all we could say about that is, quote, “we don’t know how or why this event occurred.” In other words, he—that was the end of the quote—but in other words, he doesn’t think that would count as good enough evidence. Now folks, I think that that’s major here tonight. I think for many people, if suddenly a comet collided with the moon and it said, “God exists” in multiple languages, that would be pretty good evidence. Likewise, in a 2014 debate with Matt Slick, Slick asked, “Parting of the Red Sea, parting of an ocean, you’re sitting there and someone says, ‘In the name of Jesus,’ and the ocean parts, you’re gonna believe in God?” Now, Matt responds, “No.” Slick asks, “Well, what would it take?” Matt Dillahunty says, “I just told you I don’t know what it would take.” So Matt doesn’t know what it would take for him to believe, and if someone parted an ocean in Jesus’ name, that would not count as good enough evidence to warrant belief.

So I don’t say this to throw mud at Matt; that is not the point at all. The point is this: if we’re talking about what counts as good and bad evidence—if you—and it’s not also about whether those things have actually happened or will happen; that’s that’s that’s a different point. The fact is that if they did happen, Matt wouldn’t count that as good evidence. So if you’re out there in the audience tonight as a skeptic or someone who’s on the fence or an atheist, and those things—like it being written on the moon, or if the ocean parted in Jesus’ name—if that would count as good evidence to you, it’s a pretty good evidence, well then Matt’s opinions about what should count as good and bad evidence, I don’t think should have any serious hold on you.

Now let’s talk about what else he said in his discussion here. He said, you know, when you’re going to bring a case for the Christian God’s existence or something like that, then you you shouldn’t be bringing arguments that can be used by other religions. Now he didn’t actually spell this out, but he and I kind of think about the same sorts of things, and I think I know where he’s going with this, and if I’m wrong, he can correct me later. But my first two arguments were arguments merely that God exists; the resurrection case was brought to demonstrate that what we’re talking about here is the Christian God. You’ll recall that I argued, if God exists and God raised Jesus from the dead, then the Christian God exists, period. That’s all there is to it. So the first two arguments that I brought were simple theistic arguments that could be brought by someone from another religion, as long as it’s a monotheistic religion, and perhaps maybe you could apply it in other cases. But the fact is I didn’t leave those arguments there alone; I followed them with a resurrection case to put a name tag on that God: this is the Christian God. So I’m not sure if he wants to say more about that later, but I’ll look forward to what that will be.

He says, “How do we get the probability of a historical event?” Now here’s the thing about when we do a historiography. When we do historiography, what we don’t do is to work some kind of a mathematical equation. Now there are a few historians do that; there very few. Those are Bayesian historians, and maybe there’s some other kind of method that some historians use that I’m not aware of, and they do kind of get into some mathematical probabilities, but that’s not how typically historians do their work. What they do is what’s called inference to the best explanation. So what they’ll sometimes do is they’ll put out a spread of possibilities for any particular historical event: highest possible probability, very probably true, more probable than not, more possible than not, possible, improbable, those kinds of things. And then they’ll look at the evidence, and they’ll look at the different kinds of criteria that they have: does this thing have—is the explanation, the hypothesis we’re putting forward—have explanatory scope? That is, does it account for a large number of the data? It doesn’t have explanatory power; does it account for it easily? It’s it’s kind of—not kind of—like trying to force a puzzle piece where it doesn’t go; it should slide in there nicely. Does it have plausibility? That means is it more likely to be true than false? Is it less ad hoc? Now you may have to say some things that you know you don’t really know; we just have to assume certain things, kind of like if you have a triangle and there’s a little spot of the triangle that’s missing, you have to assume that that’s making the shape of a triangle. Sometimes you have to do that with historical analysis, but you want something that’s less ad hoc; it doesn’t posit a lot of stuff that you don’t really have good reason to believe or evidence for it to make sense of it. And it’s nice if it has illumination; that the things that we learned about this actually could illuminate what we think in other areas of history. And so when it comes to historical argumentation and hard historical investigations, that we don’t work with mathematical probability all the time like that; we’re looking—and I’m not a historian—but we’re looking for plausibility: what is more likely the case than not, using inference to the best explanation.

Now we get to the meat of what Matt was really trying to say, and he was arguing from divine hiddenness: why isn’t God more obvious? Now I want to pause and just say, I understand that there is an emotional aspect of that. Now he didn’t bring an emotional argument, but it is emotionally powerful when someone is going through some sort of sickness or or terminal illness, or they’re going through a broken marriage or something like that; it can be very difficult: why isn’t God more evidence in my life at this moment? And I can’t handle that emotional problem of divine hiddenness, but I think we can do something about the intellectual problem of divine hiddenness. This will sound audacious to my friends here who are not believers, but I don’t find God to be all that hidden. We have incredible reasons to believe that God exists; we have incredible arguments and evidences from almost every area of investigation; we have inferences from history and science; we have philosophical arguments; we have arguments from—I don’t use these—but we could argue from personal experience. Now he’s right, your personal experience of God is it really evidential for him? But just to put a little gravy on top of this thing tonight, how many of you are convinced you had an experience with God, and it would be very difficult to convince you that you haven’t? Would you raise your hands? We have all of these kinds of arguments, many of them I’m not even bringing tonight. So when every physical object and concept in the universe could be used as a reason to believe that God exists, I’m not trying to be critical of those who don’t believe, and I certainly wouldn’t be presumptuous of someone who has genuinely tried to have a relationship with God, and for whatever reason that hasn’t happened. I don’t know what to say about that; you know, it’s it’s almost like I don’t want to respond to the point because I don’t want to sound insulting to your personal position, and I would never want to do that. And I’m not saying that you the that you’ve just didn’t try hard enough or something like that. All I’m doing is pointing to the evidence, and it strikes me that everywhere I look there seems to be good evidence for God.

Now I do understand why doesn’t God show up every two years bodily and just announce it on television so that everyone can see? But see, that would mean that what God is looking for is mere intellectual belief. The what God wants is not merely a lot of people to believe intellectually that he exists; what God wants is for people to enter into a relationship of trust and loyalty with him. And if God is aware—as he would be—that in this world with this amount of evidence, the greatest number of people would freely choose to come into a relationship with him, then God is not required to give more evidence than that just to suit our fancy. And besides all of this, Matt said in a video called, “Who are you to question God?”, that even if he were convinced that God exists, that that doesn’t mean that he would worship God. In fact, he said he doesn’t believe in worship; he wouldn’t worship that God. Now folks, that means that this whole thing of divine hiddenness, while I admit that it can be persuasive sometimes, rings hollow in tonight’s debate.

He talked about inconsistent revelation, so I’ll be quick about this because I don’t have a lot of time. The fact is that one thing that all Christians everywhere who are Orthodox Christians have always believed is that God exists and God raised Jesus from the dead. So I don’t know about the folks at 1st, 2nd, or 3rd Baptist here in town; I don’t know what they think on the 1st or 2nd pew of that church about the other folks in the other churches, but I’ll guarantee if they’re Orthodox Christians, they all believe God exists and God raised Jesus from the dead. I’d like to say more about this thing about 2,000 years ago: how do we consider those people? But I’ll just say this: it’s almost like some people tend to think that the history is like *Bird Box*; you’ve got to wear your something over your face and don’t look because you might catch Christianity. I’m not Sandra Bullock, and this isn’t *Bird Box*. [Music] I’m just waiting as you say, “Go.” Okay, I’m talking, and there’s gonna be a lot to get to because I’ve got to go through rebuttals and everything else.

So he says he’s just pointed to the evidence. I would dispute whether or not we’ve actually pointed to anything like evidence; what we pointed to is arguments that are interpreted in such a way. But early on he began with this notion about free will and determinism, and while I am on record as being a compatibilist, I’ve also done a video with Rationality Rules where he talked about that; that’s almost too much to begin going into, but I will say that I don’t accept that we have anything like libertarian free will. And so if you’re going to propose that God is the best explanation for something that I don’t think we have—I don’t know how that can be convincing. I also don’t know how you could demonstrate that I could have done otherwise. I can demonstrate that I feel like I could have done otherwise, but we don’t have a way to rewind the clock to in fact show that I could have done otherwise. So how do you draw a distinction between the impression that you could have done otherwise and the fact that you could have done otherwise? Meanwhile, the notion of an of a of God of classical theism, which would apply to Christianity as well, is in direct conflict with the notion of libertarian free will because if a God knows everything that’s going to happen and created the universe and chose the universe in which I’m an atheist as opposed to choosing a different universe, then I didn’t get to make those choices. I still made those choices within the context of that universe, but it was decided before me. And when you have a Bible that says that everything goes according to God’s plan and that he can actually make prophecy, you can’t have prophecy unless God already knows how things are going to turn out, and all of this stands in direct conflict with the notion of libertarian free will. Now that’s not a problem for me because I don’t think we have libertarian free will, but we’re probably not going to be well suited to go down that path this evening.

The next thing you presented was the Kalam cosmological argument, and as I pointed out many, many, many, many, many, many times, the Kalam cosmological argument is not an argument for the existence of God. God is not in the premises; God is not in the conclusion. Premise 1: everything that begins to exist has a cause for its existence. Premise 2: the universe began to exist. Conclusion: therefore, the universe had a cause for its existence. That’s the whole argument. Everything else that ties it to a God—about saying, “Oh, that cause must be transcendent of space and time and be an agent”—none of that is part of the Kalam cosmological argument; those are assertions that are glommed on—thought things that I don’t think that we can possibly know about what type of cause might be sufficient and necessary to explain the origin of the universe. So the Kalam cosmological argument is not—and anyway—a proof for God. What it is is it’s a little hanging fruit that makes it seem like you’re being reasonable because, of course, the universe had to have a cause, and then we go on and have a secondary conversation about the nature of that cause. I’m not convinced that we know enough to conclude what the origin of the universe is or how we ruled out things like universe-creating pixies or a multiverse or anything else. I understand that in some of those cases it pushes it back, but just to say that, “Gosh, the proposed explanation for the universe sounds a lot like God,” is not compelling at all because God is a specific invention, in many cases, to explain the things that we don’t know. Every time there’s something we don’t know, we stick God in there, and if God can be an explanation for anything, it’s an explanation for nothing. As a matter of fact, it has no explanatory power; it is functionally identical to saying, “It’s magic,” because we tend to explain the unknown in terms of things that we know.

Now he also mentioned that if I can’t defeat this argument about determinism, then you all have libertarian free will. That’s just a fallacy. Whether or not I can defeat any argument is irrelevant to what kind of will you have or anything else. He measured that we have zero counter-examples to this; we also have zero examples of something not beginning to exist, of something existing necessarily eternally. We have zero counter—zero examples of anything that has been identified as beyond nature. I don’t even know how we could begin to investigate the supernatural. We can investigate manifestations in nature, and we may come up with a model that allows us to conclude that these manifestations are caused by something outside of nature, but we’re not there yet, and we have no way to confirm supernatural causation. This is the reason why science is not based in philosophical naturalism; it’s based in methodological naturalism. Science methods cannot consider supernatural explanations. So when we talk about, “Hey, I’m just the evidence, and the evidence is all around, and I don’t think God’s all that hidden,” what we’re presenting here would not fit in with science, by the way. It also would not fit in in a courtroom because we no longer allow spectral evidence in a courtroom. These are places where we learn how to live our lives and come up with new inventions. Courtrooms are places where we decide life and death decisions, and that should be good enough. I would think that if God can’t stand up in a court of law or under the scrutiny of scientific rigor and critical thinking to where there’s actually evidence for it, then certainly would have to admit that we are using some alternate way of knowing that is necessarily on weaker footing than science and courtrooms.

Now this notion that he brings up about recalibrated plausibility: yes, I completely agree. And the way you recalibrate plausibility is to investigate and examine and come up with more data, and that can’t happen for a single occurrence; it can’t happen for historical events that we can compare it to other events. “How shall not put the Lord thy God to the test?” Well, that already is going to prevent us from doing testing the Christian God. It perfectly, but when we try to test for this—when, for example, the Templeton Foundation does an investigation of intercessory prayer—what we find is that prayer doesn’t work; it works at the rate of chance. And as a matter of fact, if you know you’re being prayed for, those people did worse. The contention is that perhaps they had performance anxiety; that if they knew people were prayed for them and they praying for them, it didn’t get better; this would somehow mock God, so they actually got worse because of the stress. That’s one thing. This notion about the moon landing: there are people who deny the moon landing; I’m not one of them. We’ve been to the moon; the earth is not flat; vaccines don’t cause autism. You know, this is stuff that you can actually look up and investigate, and you will find data. And in many cases, these are things that we can do multiple trials on.

Now the bedrock facts and the minimal facts and Gary Habermas: this thing—I first of all, there are people who don’t think that Jesus existed, the mythicists. I don’t think there aren’t particularly good footing because it’s not really that unusual to think that there’s an itinerant Jewish rabbi in the first century because there were loads of them. But the facts that they’re presenting as minimal facts aren’t confirmable, and so what we’re doing is saying, “He said…” Well, no, you might not want an assessment from a Christian theologian; you might not want an assessment from an atheist; you maybe won’t walk from a Hindu; I don’t want assessments from anybody; I want data; I want evidence. Because every single one of those things cited, whether it came from an atheist, a Jew, a Hindu, or a Christian, is their opinion about what happened. I want the data that leads to that opinion; that’s how we determine whether or not it’s reasonable, not because I can cite more references for my idea, because the truth of a proposition isn’t impacted in any way by the number of people who believe it or the sincerity of their convictions or how many other people agree with their opinions.

Now I agree that we shouldn’t be trying to do group psychology on people from 2,000 years ago, which means we which should point out that we also can’t conclude that they were honest and reasonable, well represented, accurately presented, and that we should accept it. That’s also an assessment; that there are people who would die for a lie. I’m not—I’m not assessing that anybody did or needed to die for a lie because what we have are claims, and we have a dearth of evidence to actually be able to investigate and reach a reasonable conclusion on that. I’m doing a video in the near future on compound inference; it’s a clever title, but it gets into this notion of Occam’s razor and problems with abduction and inference. I won’t go through it too much right now, but this notion that I’m being too skeptical: boy, I get that a lot from people who believe all sorts of things that I don’t believe. “Matt, I don’t see why you believe that the Earth’s a round ball; you’re just too skeptical.” I don’t think it’s possible to be too skeptical because skepticism is not cynicism; it is not asserting that something is wrong; it is simply being intellectually honest and saying, “I am not convinced, and I will not be convinced until the data compels me to be convinced.” And what somebody presents me with—what convinced them—it will either convince me or it won’t, and if it won’t, I need to be able to point out why I don’t accept it, and then they can evaluate whether or not I’m being too skeptical or whatever.

Now when Laconia asked about, you know, the comet smashing into the moon and producing that with that key, you know, “God exists,” would that convince you? No, it wouldn’t convince me that God exists, for well the reason I already pointed out. There would be arrogant of me and incorrect of me to think that I could tell the difference between what a God did and what some technology that I’m unaware of. That’s how con artists work; they play on what you think your kind of pop or folk understanding of what reality is. A magician’s work; I know too much about how we are fooling ourselves on a regular basis to say that yes, that would be confirmation of God. He did the same thing with regard to: if we lopped off somebody’s head and then they got up and walked out, would you then believe in the supernatural? No, but I would believe that we lopped off someone’s head and that they got back up from the dead. The fact of something occurring is independent from whether or not I understand how it occurs. And this is why when we talk about, “Why won’t God reveal himself?” Yes, if in fact a God revealed himself to me, that does not compel me to worship or obey or anything else, but it would certainly make it easier to get past these pedantic exercises about whether or not there’s a god that actually exists and focus on whether or not this is a God that is worthy or deserving of worship or any whether any God could be. There’s no conversation; confirmation of the supernatural ever. Any time the supernatural has been proposed as an explanation for something that we’ve observed and we’ve actually been able to narrow it down to what is the most plausible explanation, the explanation has never been supernatural or magic. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen; it just means we can’t confirm it. All right, during this next session of the cross-examination, it’ll be 12 minutes long, six minutes being led by each of our presenters, so Dr. Hunter will begin by asking questions. And what I want to ask of our presenters is if you are to ask a question, please at least give about 30 seconds before you start to interrupt or to jump on each other’s words. I want you to be able to have a good conversation, but having been in debates before, I know it can get really confusing if you ask a question and you immediately begin to interrupt them while they’re trying to get out an answer. So at least let the the one be responding go at least a good 30 seconds before you jump in or maybe redirect the question or something of that nature. And I’m going to give them as much freedom as I can, but at the same time, if I need to jump in to make sure that the audience is understanding and that there’s clarity, I’ll do that. And so there’s six minutes on the clock, and Dr. Hunter, you’ll lead in the first six minutes. All right, so Matt, I think you’ve already answered this, but I just like to get it clearly out there: is it possible, on your view, to have

Absolute certainty about anything, including your own existence? I have no idea if it's possible. I do not think that it is possible. So, in other words, epistemically you're not certain of anything. We're talking about Cartesian certainty, like, I know you have to accept the reality that you're in and all that, but, and as far as like Cartesian absolute certainty, you would—your position would be—we can't have that even about our own existence, so far as you know.

So I'll try to do this quickly; it's a really specific point, and we may be talking about two different things. Basically, when Descartes, the Cartesian, or some Hobbs pointed out, essentially that's contingent on the validity of reason, and whether or not we can ever show that reason is reasonable may prevent us from getting to absolute certainty. Which is why when I debated sites in Bruton Keitai, I called what I feel as maximal certainty. So if I begin with identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle, from that we can directly derive mathematics, and then from that point you either have deductive reasoning that leads to things that are as certain as logic, but I don't call it absolute certainty because I don't know how we can confirm the validity of reason. Okay, thank you.

Now you have said many times, and I'm not sure if you said it tonight, that we should believe something when it has been demonstrated. Can you define for me what you mean by demonstrated?

Sure. So, in—it's gonna be different for different claims, and different claims are gonna require different types of evidence. If you say, "I just got a dog," I'm just going to believe you. And part of it has to do with how that fundamentally affects or changes my worldview. I know I know dogs exist; I know people don't have dogs as pets, and so I'm willing to accept that. If you say, "I just got a pet dragon," to borrow Carl Sagan's example, I'm not going to believe that; I'm going to need more. And so what would be required to convince me that is going to depend entirely on what the claim is. So if you've got a dragon, I would prefer that you just show me that.

The Christian God exists? Well, see, that's the thing. When we're talking about something that is capable of doing anything, I can't tell the difference between God did it and some advanced technology. You know, it's like going to a magic show when you know nothing about magic. That's why we—that's why people conclude that, "Oh my gosh, Darren Brown's really reading minds!" Yeah, he's not. Yeah. And so—so would you say that you don't know what that demonstration would look like for the Christian God's existence?

I have said that, and I tend to follow it up by saying that if God knows—if if a God exists, then God does know what would convince me, and God should be capable of producing that, and the fact that he hasn't means that either he doesn't exist, doesn't want me to know, he exists yet.

Is it possible that given your epistemic framework—and I know you said that you thought it was reasonable to say that if a person parts the ocean in Jesus' name or something—that that shouldn't convince you—but but is it possible, given your epistemic framework that there—you've constructed a setup where it just isn't possible that, short of God taking away your libertarian freedom—which I know you don't believe you have—that he could actually make you believe?

Even if I had libertarian freedom, God—I don't see how that God demonstrating his existence would preclude my freedom. Now I'm saying, short of him taking away your liberty and freedom and making you believe it, may be that your epistemic framework is such that there's nothing that he could do that would actually make you believe.

No, there's loads of things that I did not believe that I became convinced of based on good evidence. The fact that I don't know what evidence would convince me for this particular claim is about the nature of the claim. But God wouldn't have to violate my libertarian free will in order to convince me of this. For example, if somebody just appeared right here and said, "Hey, I'm Jesus, I'm real, I'm here to show you," that would begin the process of figuring out, "Okay, do I have good reason to believe that's the case?" But you still might be skeptical that that's an apparition or that you're just having a mental issue or something. That would be the initial assessment. Yeah, that's why you investigate to make sure that you weren't—you didn't just jump to a conclusion. So if somebody parts the waters in the name of Jesus—well, what if they part the water—I'm sorry, to your question—time. Okay.

Is it the case that you're not offering a competing hypothesis to the resurrection tonight? Correct. Okay. I don't have a lot of time for that. When it comes to, let's say, the free will argument, is it not true that on your view whatever you end up doing, it could not have been otherwise? And doesn't that extend to your thoughts and beliefs?

No, it's my position that I have no way of knowing if it could have been otherwise.

Yeah, but you affirm the position of compatibilism, right?

Well, I have in the past. I've gone back on compatibilism just a little bit, and—and that's back toward libertarian freedom or toward determinism.

Well, compatibilism is the notion that determinism is true and not in conflict with—so it's not a move back to come to determinism. I was never in a position—heed back to her libertarian freedom. No, I've moved back towards the notion that we don't have free will of any sort. Okay, that's not—this is why I said it's too complicated—that it be something to be happy to discuss. Okay, given else I don't know that it's relevant. Okay, but given the circumstances, my doing this right now, even though I experienced that as a free choice and all those kind of things and there's thoughts and everything and I'm thinking through it, that was determined and could not have been otherwise because our mental states are reducible to our brain states, which are reducible to our biology, right? I'm just saying that I have no way of knowing that that wasn't determined.

How would you show that this was actually—that whether or not this felt like something I did voluntarily or if I just feel it because we have scientific studies to show that the brain makes decisions before the consciousness is aware of it, and that is troubling. It's something we have a live in experiments; we could talk about that, but here's—I'm not saying that we've reached a conclusion; I'm just saying that that's what the data showed. Okay, but the point is your position currently is that—am I doing this—could not have been otherwise?

No, I have no idea if you could have done otherwise, and I have no idea how you could demonstrate that you could have done otherwise. So anyone saying that they could have done otherwise is now made—that's determinism.

No. Okay, we got to the effort into the first six minutes now. Matt will cross-examine Lee. The cross-examination for the sir, I won't leave that as I know I'll use some of my time to get this saying you couldn't have done otherwise would be determinism; saying I'm not convinced you could have done otherwise is not determinism; it's a recognition that determinism is essentially part of this, but I don't know how you would show that you could have done otherwise. That's—that's the problem with that.

Well, that—that wasn't—I mean, that I was asking you, and that sounds like—respectfully—that sounds like a little bit of a dodge. I don't know how you would determine that—that wasn't what I was asking. Okay, asking on your view, how can you tell it's Mike—my question—how can you tell the difference between feeling like you could have done otherwise and actually being—having been able to do otherwise?

Okay, here's a couple of things. I know you won't like the first one; you might like the second one, but I doubt it. Okay, the first one is—I believe—so our immediate experience that we seem to have liberty and freedom. You know, you've probably seen John Searle and—and others say things like, "Look, it seems when I do this that I could have just as easily done this," and that are very difficult, and that's very powerful to escape. So—and trying to be quick—but so my immediate experience of liberty and freedom—a good argument has to have premises that are plausible, which means more likely to be true than not—and any argument structured that would try—that would convince—Otakon—Vince me that libertarian freedom does not exist would rely on one or more premises they're less plausible than my immediate experience of a libertarian freedom. Sure, but that doesn't—okay, so that's one—how can you—okay, where's the second one? Okay, the second one is that I think if we don't have libertarian freedom, then rational affirmations are impossible. So there's a third one—to—you'll need to go ahead and say it or wait—no, because I'll deal with this one, and we've got other questions, and I don't want to spend on that own free will. I thought this was something I wanted to address in the rebuttal as well, and that's the notion that a calculator can reach a right answer irrespective of whether or not it has any free will. So saying that we couldn't have reasonable positions without free will just seems to me an assertion that doesn't have a justification.

Is that a question? No, but it can be now that we've—you can—I address that since you did say it. Well, this—this will touch on that. So maybe the first question I had is—reasonable non-belief possible? I think there are people who don't believe, and from their perspective they feel like there are good reasons for their non-belief. Wow. Okay. And trying to figure out which it was dodged more—right—then as long as we both admit we're dodging a little—well, so that actually—I don't think it was—people—people can—it seems to me—and correct me if I'm wrong—it seems to me that your city—people can be convinced they're reasonable even if they're not. I think yeah. Okay, I would agree with that, but like going back to the Moon example, those people were being reasonable; it's just their conclusion was wrong. Yeah. Okay. Sure. Is reasonable non-belief possible in the context of, for example, the moon or the Earth's on example? As far as what? Now like you could come to the wrong conclusion, but you could be a completely reasonable based on—you can be reasonable and be wrong. Cat—it's true. Oh boy. So I still would like to answer that thing. Go ahead. Why not? What was it again? The calculator could be right, but—but—but it's purely a deterministic piece of technology, right? Basically, yes. Here's the thing—that's—that kind of proves my point because my position is that if liberty and freedom does not exist, then rational affirmations are impossible. That doesn't mean that your beliefs are false; in fact, if it were possible for a person to have—and I don't know that there's anything on contradictory about this—for a person have 100% true beliefs, they could have 100% true beliefs and yet they didn't get there rationally. Sure. And the reason for that is because rationality, definitionally, is reducible to reason, and reason is the process by which you deliberate over between beliefs and choose which is a good or a bad thing to affirm, and if the libertarian freedom does not exist, then we don't have rationality—is impossible because you can't choose against the irrational.

Yeah, I don't think that I accept that at all because I didn't—we—we—our decision-making machines and the things that feed into us—the fact that we're having an argument or whatever else—somebody may or may not become convinced, and to them they may have this experience of, "Oh, I've changed my position on this"—nothing about determinism suggests or implies that you cannot change your decision based on new information that you receive—that you're not a computer—it's the fact that it's more complex obfuscates that which is how—why—I'm—the original question was—how do you tell the difference between feeling like you could have done something different and demonstrating that you in fact could have done something different? I have no solution; I've never heard anybody give a solution that other than—well, I really feel like I can—and it would be absurd for me to think—well, actually—first of all, I do think—how do you test it? Yeah, I do. Okay. Well, I do think that if you do seem to have a belief about something that seems almost impossible to doubt, then you are justified in affirming that and believing that until someone gives you good reason to believe that that is not the case. So I do think that's true. However, however, I actually have other reasons—one of those is the moot morality thing. I think that if libertarian freedom does not exist, then we're left with moot morality, and what I mean by that is whether someone ends up becoming a philanthropist or ends up becoming a sex offender, ultimately it's not that they didn't think through things, and it's not they didn't—you know—but ultimately it was determined. Yeah, but that doesn't—so the mere—the prayer—grant that—hang on—so I got 10 seconds—there are 60—the—the primary concern about free will and morality is how do we hold people accountable, and the truth is whether or not they have free will—that was the agent that took the action, and we hold them accountable, and we may not in fact have any choice in that thing, but this notion that you should believe something and tell somebody change their mind is actually a fallacy. The notion that the burden of proof is on somebody trying to change your mind—I understand that's how it works in practice, but that doesn't mean that your positions rational—just—I'll go ahead—responded that if that's okay because it was supposed to be questioned. Okay, so here's the thing—this came up in your debate with Mike—like Conan—quite a bit—if you felt like the whole night that—that's what he was doing, and I don't necessarily—I don't think that's what he was doing, but I can tell you tonight that's not what I'm doing. I'm not saying if you believe something until there's good enough evidence you're justified in believing it, even if it's something like the supernatural. What I'm saying is something like libertarian freedom where it seems impossible—it seems almost absurd to deny it. Yeah, it seems like an extraordinary claim—it seems like there's less willing suspension of disbelief in the Terminator movies because at least they're the robots were robots—you—so I would need—I would need some extraordinary evidence—where I come from—extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence—meet you—all right.

We're coming to our final round of cross-examination, which again each presenter will get five minutes, and we'll start again with Dr. Hunter, but what I want to prepare you for is the question/answer time for the audience, so you're about to get your chance to participate, and so that'll happen in 10 minutes from now, so begin to prepare if you have not already. The microphones will be on either side, and—and we will take them in order—just in the line that you're standing, and we'll just rotate from one side to the other. If you'd like to stand behind the microphone and be in line for those—those questions—don't take your places yet, but as soon as the cross-examination is over, you can come to ask just one question—remember, no follow-up—that way everyone has enough time that wants to ask questions. So five minutes, beginning with Dr. Hunter. All right, so when it comes to the Kalam cosmological argument, I think you misunderstood me because I said in my opening statements—I'm not—I said I'm bringing a case that begins with the Kalam cosmological argument, and so I've heard—I've heard you before say, "Look, the Kalam doesn't even conclude with God; therefore, it's not an argument for God." Well, but of course, often when we move on to that stuff that follows up, then the questions begin, you know, that would have been addressed by the Cologne. So when it comes to premise one of the Kalam, you questioned—did you question whether it's true that everything that begins to exist must have a cause, and is it your position that it is epistemic—lees possible—epistemically possible that universe could have come to exist uncaused out of nothing?

I don't know, and I didn't address that tonight.

Okay, do you think it's epistemically possible that universe came to exist uncaused out of nothing? And I don't know because this is—this—so there are things that we cannot investigate, and so we can't get back beyond the Planck time—math breaks down at that point—we can't—so the proposition—and one thing that you kind of raised was this notion that either there—to come out of nothing—and I think you've heard—I've heard you before use the—the sort of nothing that rock stream of—it was a reference to a quote from somebody else—that's not what physicists are proposing. My objection to Kalam is that the conclusion is—therefore the universe had a cause for its existence—well, I give the klom at all—why not just put that as a premise in the—in the argument that you're actually building? Because if I already accept that the universe had a cause of its existence, and that seemed superfluous.

Okay, but didn't you just raise a criticism that would have been addressed by the Kalam tonight? Raiser—what you just raised a can—I think you just raised a concern that I don't—that's not—didn't seem to be what physicists think—that there's this nothingness that came before the gong—doesn't address nothing—this either. No, but you just said—but this would have been addressed by the Kalam—whatever begins to exist must have a cause for its existence—that the word nothing does not appear anywhere—so are you willing to move beyond the Kalam and talk about the claims after the Kalam? Of course. Okay, so do you believe the universe had a beginning? I'll say that I have no idea. So here's the thing—really short—our local presentation of the universe—the evidence points to some starting point that we cannot investigate and don't know anything about. Yeah, it may in fact be absurd to talk about things prior to the Big Bang if in fact time began with a big bang. I don't know; I'm not a cosmologist, and I don't know that we have sufficient understanding to actually say yes, this is the case—a matter of fact—they haven't—physicists friend who's working in an alternate model to that. Okay, so when you say, "Do you think the universe had a cause for its existence?" I don't know. Okay, but multiverse—universe—vacuum—all contiguous physical reality—my question is—do you believe—okay, so you either have the universes past eternal or it's not—is your answer just "I don't know"? Correct. How could it possibly be that the universe could be infinite into the past? I don't know. How is it—how could it possibly be that God is infinite in the past? Well, we believe God is timeless. I know—it doesn't matter what you believe—it matters what you—gosh—definitionally—you asked how is it that God could be infinite in the past—I'm saying definitionally—well, maybe something doesn't make it so—well, I know—but you asked me how could God exist infinitely—you did not explain how God could exist—you just certain that he does by definition—you asked me definitionally something about the Christian God, and I gave you an answer—we believe he exists timelessly—so—so he doesn't exist infinitely—so I don't have that problem—actually—you didn't give that answer—touch us now—but okay—they're good—oh yeah—okay—so the problem with the past infinite seems to be—it doesn't—that if you crossed half of infinity—if time and events—there's no such thing as—sorry—Minh—past events—all just a series of events—then infinity isn't a quantity—it's unquantifiable—it's a concept to describe something that is—that is—there's no number four—right—so there's no such thing is half of infinity—right—then similarly there's no such thing as half of eternity. I know, but sure—descry—aren't you describing the very problem that I'm raising is that when you posit that the universe has existed forever—however word you want to use for that—isn't it the case that if that's true you would have this mathematical quandary where you never arrived at today? No, because if time began with the universe, then the universe has existed since time again. Okay, so then it's not past eternal. I never said it was past eternal. Said you didn't know—correct—I don't know if the—why is this so difficult—I'm not a physicist—I don't think anybody knows—the difference between me and many apologists who also aren't physicists is that I'm not willing to pretend that I know just because I got stumped by a question and proposed something that can be an answer to everything—why do you need to be a physicist in order to understand the philosophical point that the—the universe can't be past infinite because we would have never arrived it today—because a philosophical approximation is different from what actually happened at the origin of the universe. All right, five minutes now, continuing with Matt leading the cross-examination.

Yeah, this is where the—the frustrating things is that you know I constantly—if I—if I honestly don't know something—I say I don't know, and then people act as if it's absurd because they're convinced they do have the right answer. So when we're talking about how one could demonstrate that God existed, there's the filthy illogical assertions, there's the philosophical arguments, but there's no thing that I'm aware of that could enter into a scientific investigation or even investigation of a courtroom. Am I right about that? Are we kind of stuck in the philosophic—well, there are those people in the intelligent design community who do deal with science and stuff like that—I'm not one of those guys—you'll notice I didn't bring a teleological argument tonight—a design argument—but I would say this—since you asked me—the thing about it is—I think—and I think that lots of other apologists have mentioned this to you—I don't—I know you don't agree—but it seems like you're using your—it seems like you want to use a method like—you prefer methodological naturalism—no, is that not the case?

Okay, well, clarify—preferred methods that demonstrate that they lead to consistently reliable results. Okay, great. Scientific processes do that; the theological processes don't. Okay, faith doesn't—faith is not a path to understanding—there's no position you couldn't justify based on faith—and I know you're not appealing to that. Yeah, I'm saying if—what methodology can somebody demonstrate that we have a good understanding of its reliability that leads to the conclusion that a god—any God—let alone the Christian God—exists? Okay, I think those kind of—when you say—and I want to understand you properly—when you say that God needs to manifest in some detectable way—and I don't know if you said that's night—but you've said it—sure—or—or God needs to—you know—it sounds like what you're saying is that there needs to be something kind of—I'm not saying science—but something kind of science-y that we can kind of test this thing—and here's the thing—here—use my response to that—so I'll do it by analogy—let's imagine that we have a metal detector, and that metal detector represents science or whatever you're proposing, and if you were to say, "Man, this metal detector—every time there's metal—this metal detector chirps—it's like the best metal detector in the world—therefore we have no good reason to believe that sand and water and trees and air exist"—that would be—that would be a problem—what you would do, in other words, is you would look for another device—and I think what you brought tonight is philosophy and history, and I think philosophy does reliably get us two answers, and I've given you philosophical arguments, but I haven't heard—and it's not that you haven't said things about them—you have—and I've enjoyed it—but I don't think you've said anything substantive to really deal with—especially the Kalam cosmological argument—so—or the case that begins with the Kalam.

Oh, I did—the substantive thing is that even if you concluded that the universe—that next one—it must have an explanation for its existence or must have a cause for its existence—what do you know about that cause—and how do you know it—and whenever—when you or anybody else has presented the case—it is a list of assertions. Well, can I answer—so if it's—if it's the cause of all nature coming into existence, then that would be—if nature is space-time matter—then the cause would have to be—if your nature can't come before nature to cause nature—how do you—

Know that well, because it's nature that we're trying to explain. Okay? How do you know it's not a different nature? Well, it could be, but then you have—I said all contiguous physical reality—so what we would have is you would still have to have a cause for that nature coming into existence. It would just mean you haven't gone back far enough.

Yeah, so what I would say then is the cause would have to be a spaceless, timeless, non-material cause. What—what requires—and how is that an assertion? So I'm sorry, it's your question. The fact that I'm fine with the notion that people intuitively reach the conclusion that whatever caused the universe is apart from the universe, but actually that—sure, apart from our local presentation of the universe. Sagan used the word cosmos because the universe is a terrible word when you're talking about multiverses or else and even attendant conflict. So the cosmos is everything there is, ever was, irrespective of time or anything else. So if the local presentation of the universe had to have some cause, then the only thing that I can—that I can know about that is that it seems to be the case that it couldn't have been our universe—it caused itself. So there must be something else. Yeah, what that something else is or needs to be, I have no idea, because I have no way to investigate it. I have no other universes to compare this to.

You'll notice that in my opening statements, I specified that I'm talking about our local representation—multiverses, vacuum models, whatever you want to bring up—and it can't be past infinite for reasons that I'm happy to defend. And I know you say, "Oh, I just don't think we can know," and I'm saying whatever comes before all of that, that we can call Sagan's Cosmos, which is a Greek word that means the world, but Sagan's Cosmos—all of that—whatever comes before isn't that. But I see what's the case that it needs to be an agent.

Okay, can I answer that? We've got four seconds left, but it was a question. I'll—I'll go ahead and answer that. So there's a couple of reasons why it has to be an agent. First of all, an agent would have causal powers. Now that doesn't—that's not the insistence—that's not necessary, but that's not the end of the story. Also, you have types of causation, right? So event-event causation would be if I took this water ball model and threw it at the moderator and the microphone fell out of his hand—that's an event that caused another event, and I won't do that. But then there's state-state causation, which is like a frozen pond where you have a log resting on the top of that pond—this state is causing this other state. What you would have with the beginning of the universe is state-event causation. You would go from a state of timeless nothingness to an event—the beginning of the universe. The only thing that makes sense of that is agent causation.

Okay, just an assertion that that's the only thing you can think of? It's not the only—it's not just that it's the only thing I can think of. And lastly, I'll say this: it would have to have libertarian free will, and the reason would—and the reason it would is because there was no prior determinism to lead to that event. And what sorts of things have liberty and freedom? Agents do. All right. Well, one thing I am certain of—obvious—it's obvious that intellect causes people to lose their hair, and all the brain food just makes the hair go away. Give a—give a round of applause to our presenters. They'll be a great job. [Applause] We can go—I'm good. All right, we are ready now for the question and answer from the audience, so please go ahead and take the microphone. I have to pee, but that'll just make me more anti-hate—just be—and walk out. Alright, then. Okay, go ahead, take your places. This gentleman was at the mic first, and I—yes—and so I will let him ask the first question again. Keep it to one question and keep it brief, and if you'd like to go to the back of the line and—and start again for another question, that's fine, but go ahead, state your name and—and ask to ask away.

I'm Drew. My question is for Matt. The debate question tonight was, "Does the Christian God exist?" and Braxton answers that question with "yes." I'm wondering, do you answer that question with a dogmatic no or a maybe? And if you answer the question with a maybe, then why do you self-identify as an atheist instead of an agnostic?

Oh, so I thought I hid this at the top, but I was talking fast. So I answer it with neither—no—nor a dogmatic no, nor—nor maybe. My answer is that I have no idea if the Christian God exists, but the case for it that I've examined has been unconvincing, and I can point out why I'm not convinced and why I don't think other people should be convinced. Atheism is not the dogmatic assertion that God doesn't exist, although that is a subcategory of it. It is—I am not convinced that a God exists. It's essentially God's on trial, being accused of existing, and the atheists are voting—did you shake your head like I got a-theism wrong? Yes. Okay, well, I'm so glad that happened. If I walked in here and told people they got Christianity wrong, how you think they're gonna take that? Probably not. Well, yeah, the thing is, there's multiple usages of lots of words, including atheism. Atheism, generally speaking, is disbelief. I do not believe. I am not convinced. Wait, you keep smirking. I think it's the proposition of belief that there is no God. I don't think it's—well, you're wrong. I'm explaining that to you as a—gang—I don't really care how you define it. That's not—we're done. Traditionally—if you don't care how I define it, why are you at my iveco? Okay, can I say—yeah—and what we'll do on the—on the cross-examination, please address who you want to ask the question to, and then the—the opposing side will—we'll get about a minute to—to rebuttal or to say anything and follow-up to the question that was asked. So you want to—actually want to take up format here for a second? Honestly, I make no bones about the fact I'm an apologist second and an evangelist first. I know that doesn't sound cool to anybody—don't really care. I want people to have real conversations with people that don't believe what they believe to come to the truth. And so I personally—I know there's a big debate about what an atheist should call himself or whether it's an agnostic or whatever, and there are people that get real heated about that. I want to tell you something: in terms of actually getting traction with someone and having a real conversation, what matters the most to me is that we find out what they mean by what they're calling themselves and then go with that. Yeah, the label is irrelevant. Whether you think I'm an atheist—way you think about fake atheists—whether you think I'm an agnostic—way to think I'm a dumbass—whatever the label is irrelevant. I stated what my position was, and we can either address that or not, but if you're here to tell me that I'm not a real atheist, I'm gonna say that I've hosted the Atheist Experience for 15 years, and that's probably good enough credit for most people, and if it's not, I don't care. All right, young lady right over here, go ahead.

Hi, my question is for Braxton. Matt brought this up in his rebuttal, but I don't believe that you answered it, probably just because there are too many points, but I'd be fascinated to know: how do you personally reconcile your belief in libertarian free will with your belief in an omniscient God, which would know the outcome of everyone he creates?

Yeah, thank you for asking that. That gives me an opportunity to answer it. I've actually done debates with people that are—who don't believe the same as me about libertarian free will—who are Christians. And I didn't think this would be a Calvinism debate tonight, but maybe it is though. So when we tell—when we think about a God who is omniscient—he knows all future things—so are you asking me if he knows everything—it's like—it's already set—so then how are we free? Is that your question? Yes. Okay, so that would be—and I'm not accusing you of this—but that would be what's called a modal fallacy. It's a category error. Knowledge isn't causal. Knowledge doesn't cause anything. So God's knowledge of what I'm going to do in the future doesn't cause me to do it. He knows it because I'm going to freely do it. So it's just—it's just a category error—it's a modal fallacy.

Good. Matt, would you like to—yeah. This is why when I addressed it, I pointed out that it's not contingent merely upon a God knowing it—it's a God who knew it—created the universe and had options. Did God create the universe? Yes. Did he have options of other universes? Here, can I answer this? Can I answer—that's why I—yes. Okay, so—so when—when we think—now this is going to get really complex really fast, so just hang with me—but when we talk about philosophy—Matt's aware of this—we talked about full possible world semantics, and what we mean by that is not other worlds that actually exist—what we mean is other—other hypothetical worlds. And if something is a possible world—if it is a world that contains no contradictions—okay, so is there a possible world where Matt remained a Christian? Yes, and I hope that that's the actual world. We got an organ over here; we could have an altar call, and I'd love to see him come to Jesus tonight—not counting on it, but I'm just saying. So—so there are—there is a possible world where Matt remains a Christian. There's nothing contradictory about that. However, it—when—if God chooses to give me a libertarian freedom, then we have a subset of possible worlds which we call feasible worlds—that's the worlds—remains has liberty and freedom. If God wants to give me an liberty and freedom, it may be that among those feasible worlds there simply isn't a world where Matt freely chooses to remain a Christian. Now, I personally don't believe that—I'm praying that Matt does come to faith—but that's the answer that we give.

Okay, just for clarity—yeah—are you suggesting that God could not have created a universe in which I have libertarian free will and sitting here today would have been a theist? What I'm saying is that is a possible world, but if God gives people libertarian free will, that gives us a subset of those worlds, and it may be that in none of those worlds where you have libertarian freedom you choose to become a Christian. So if God wants to get—so yes, God could make a world where you're a Christian, but it would be one where he—it could be one where he does—where you don't have a libertarian freedom.

Okay, let me jump in here, 'cause I know—I know this debate—and you get some to Molinism and Calvinism, and it can go forever and ever and ever, because I've been a part of that world. So read on Braxton's page on Molinism and in Matt's page to get more information about that. We're not gonna get through all our audience questions if we don't move along. Go ahead.

My name is Ellis, and my question is directed to Matt. I don't remember exactly what you said towards the end of the—the debate, but on element of faith—and as if you reject that—but—so Mike and I believe very much the Christian God—much ever—very much is based on faith. So my question is: if there is a God—they determine—predetermined that faith is a necessary element to experiencing him—then you categorically reject that at that point? Is that—is that what you're saying?

So it would depend in part on how we're defining faith. I had a whole debate on whether or not faith is reasonable, and Blake was basically defending the notion that all faith means is confidence, but I went more with the Hebrews 11:1 thing—that faith is the evidence of things unseen. I find that to be a grossly flawed epistemology that could be used to justify anything, and—and I'm not saying that—that obviously doesn't mean you're wrong, and it doesn't mean that you know—if there's a God—he picked that model—that that's wrong. I'm just saying that I have a hard time—I could say white people are better than black people and say it's based on faith, and that would be a problem. And so for the most important questions that we could possibly ask—is there God—is there such thing as salvation—what must I do to be saved?—it—it's very troubling for me that not only is there not a clear obvious answer for those things—you could still be able to reject it. I mean, anybody who believes in Satan thinks that there's somebody who absolutely knows God and his power and yet chose to rebel and reject it. But to say that those things are conditioned on faith—faith—faith—is—some people called it gullibility. I prefer—faith is the excuse people give for believing something when they don't have a good reason, because if you have a good reason, you just state the reason, and you never say it's based on faith. Approximate. So I don't think that—that's—I don't accept that position on—with Blake. I don't think that's a good biblical definition. The word *pistis* is used 227 times in the New Testament, and we—it often just means conviction of the truth of anything, and that conviction can be based on evidence. Hebrews 11:1, which you mentioned, I think a good translation for that is: faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. And remember, this comes in a chapter replete with examples of people exercising faith on the basis of incredible evidence. I mean, we're talking about all these characters in the Bible. Lastly, I would just say Theophilus of Antioch, in his letter to Autolycus—his book 1, chapter 8—begins to talk about what faith is, and he describes it in—and I won't read it—but he—he basically describes it as when you have good evidence for something and you're trusting that evidence. So I think that's a good biblical definition of faith, and most people believe on the basis of something—whether I think that what they're basing it on is good or not.

All right, go ahead. My name is Bob, and I have hearing aids, so the question is to Matt. I think I heard you say that we are decision-making machines, yes, and so my question is: do you agree that no decisions can be made pertaining to past events of which you have not been personally involved? One more time: do you agree that no decisions—you can't make any decisions pertaining to any past event of which you have not been personally involved? Because you were saying—I believe that—unless if people had these opinions—that was not really evidence. So it seems as though you would have to be personally there in order to prove anything, and that would rule out anything in the past.

No, that's—that's—that's not what I'm saying. I apologize if that's the way it came off, but when I first heard the question, I thought you were asking me if—if I could make decisions that influence events in the—in the past, and that's the case. Can I make assessments of past events where I wasn't involved? Right. I can be—I can make assessments of all of the available evidence I have and determine whether or not I can make any—sometimes I'm not going to be able to make a reasonable—reasonable conclusion. You know, if I'm a juror and the prosecution presents all of its evidence, I may not have enough evidence to reach a strong conclusion. I may be forced to vote not guilty even if maybe I suspect that something's there. I can, of course, make decisions about anything—I'm presented—past, present, future—it's just that the—the strength of my conviction and the accuracy and reliability of my reasonableness is going to be contingent on both what information I'm presented with and whether or not I'm exercising, you know, proper critical thinking methods. So I don't have a problem with the notion that—well, I think we're always assessing past events—like you ask me a question, but that's in the past, right? And of course, I was there for that, but if somebody asked me, "Did my parents have sex sometime between 1968 and 1969?" I'm pretty confident they did, because I'm here—actually, would have been '68—but—and—but that is based on the fact that I know I'm here, I know how biology works and procreation, I know people have sex, I know—and so there's a mass of evidence. It's not just that one event. If you asked me about an event like, "Did—did Jesus walk on water?" Well, now I have to assess that in—in the sense of, "Alright, are we—are we assuming it's not frozen, and that he's not a dynamo with a trick for doing it? Did he actually get out and walk on water?" Well, all the available evidence suggests that this isn't possible by any normal means, and so now I need to assess whether or not it's reasonable to conclude that there was some supernatural means, and I have no evidence of anything supernatural—lots of claims about things that are supernatural—and to me it's really strange that the—it—the rate of miracle appearances in the world seems to decline as our ability to investigate and film them on camera increases. It's just like mysteries have started going away. You know, once upon a time there is pillars of fire, a cloud, and manna from heaven and all this other stuff, and of course the website—why won't God heal amputees?—but now it's—it's like, you know, "Oh, we were having—there was the thing I saw the other day where somebody's sister was killed in a bus or fire or whatever, and the Bible survived, and she's like, 'It's a miracle,' and I'm like, 'Your sister died.' I—I'm baffled by the way people want to twist things in order to make it look like, wow, you know, 'to God be the glory,' no matter what.

Alright, let's look at two things about that: one, I make no assessment about Matt's parents' past copulation experiences; and secondly, you know, I think miracles happen every day. I know that sounds cliché—I really do believe that—and I know you're aware of Craig Keener's massive work on miracles. I'm sure you've heard about that, and I think that's a great evidential discussion of miracles, and I speak in churches—I've spoken in hundreds of churches over the past 20 years—and I'll tell you what I know that we don't—we—I know that we haven't in all these cases looked at the evidence for these and all that, but everywhere I go there are multiple people in every crowd that knows someone in their family who was healed of something in a way that the doctors have no explanation of what happened. I realize that doesn't mean it's a miracle—it could merely mean that there's some natural—they're not aware of—however, when this happens again and again and again, it does seem like there's smoke—there's fire. I'm not saying that those things are miracles—I think they are—but I'll tell you this much: it means that the idea that miracles don't still happen—it's a defeater for that, I think. Thank you to your boat though—I enjoyed it. Thank you.

Okay, so my question's about the Kalam cosmological argument, and I have some major issues with it, because I mean its first premise is that everything that begins to exist must have a cause, right? But then if you claim that the cause must be some timeless, spaceless God, then you're making a special pleading, because then what's the cause of the first cause? What's the cause—yeah—of your God?

Yeah, thanks for that. I—I appreciate that. So the reason that we do this—it's not special pleading—what we're saying is we're saying, okay, what—what are we talking about? We're talking about nature. Are we talking about—we're talking about the physical universe—Sagan's Cosmos—however you want to put it—we're talking about three things generally speaking: space, time, and matter, right? So if we're looking for what the cause of all of space, time, and matter is, you can't say, "Well, it's something in space," or "it's something that is in time," or "is made of matter." It has to be something that is not those things that we're trying to explain, which means it's spaceless, timeless, non-material. And as for—then why we would say that it's a god or an agent that is sufficiently powerful—first of all, has to be sufficiently powerful to begin the universe, but secondly, we would say that, you know, like I said a moment ago, you have state-state causation, you have—you have event-event causation. Here we have an example of state-event causation, and an agent is the explanation for that. Secondly, it would have to have a libertarian freedom because there was no prior determinism to lead to that. Lastly, you asked, "What about the cause of that?" Kind of like the old question, "Who caused God? Or who created God?" If God exists timelessly, the only kinds of things that need beginnings or endings are temporal things—things in time. If God exists timelessly, then he needs no beginning, and he just exists.

Yeah, and I can actually try and help for half a second. So it's—I—I spend as much time probably talking with atheists about how to better—have better arguments—to not make mistakes—this I do arguing with—is the Kalam cosmological argument was specifically designed to avoid a circular pleading in the original cosmological argument, because the original was: everything has a cause for its existence, and then of course the response is, "Well, what's God's cause?" So now you rework, and the Kalam became: everything that begins to exist—so that you can exclude God because God didn't begin to exist. It still has the problem that you're pointing out at the—the second layer, but it was designed to avoid that and demonstrate that that was the original Kalam—no—not the original Kalam—the Kalam—is—does the original cosmological argument—like I'd have to go look up—okay, maybe it's up to me later—after—sure—and I could be wrong, but that's the way I was taught was that there were—so there is no be cosmological—that's right—category of cosmological arguments, and a version of that began with: everything has a cause, and then Kalam was: everything begins.

All right, this line's a little bit longer, so we'll do two in a row on this side just to come help catch up because the gentlemen that have been sitting—that have been standing a little longer than you guys—so two in a row on that side. Go ahead.

My name is Jason, and I got a question for Braxton. It's about the cosmological argument—to that—kind of issue with that. So this might be due to my confusion of apologetics, but is the—is the cosmological argument consistent with science up to the point of the Big Bang? Is that where God comes in? And if that's the argument, does that render like the whole creation part of the Bible metaphor? And if—if it's metaphor, when does the Bible stop being metaphor?

Okay, great questions. I appreciate—so let me make sure I remember the first part of your question—okay, science—and in the second part—the Bible—okay, I'm gonna go in reverse order. So with the Bible, there are various—the Bible is a collection of books, you know, and so whenever somebody says, "Well, you're supposed to read the Bible literally," I say, "I agree—you are supposed to read the Bible literally where it's meant to be read literally." We wouldn't look at the Psalms and say you have to read this literally because those are poetry, right? And so there's narrative, there's poetry, there's apocalyptic stuff in there—the Gospels are Greco-Roman biography. Now, Genesis chapter 1, which is really what you're talking about—Genesis chapters 1, perhaps through 3—those—this one particularly—is a very difficult genre to pin down, and even before—in pre-scientific—even like way back with, say, Augustine, and they were talking already about what—what exactly is it—is going on here. So there are various views on that. I would point you to the work of, obviously, guys like William Lane Craig, but also you could go—there's a—you know, young earth creationists—they have their stuff—and then you can have guys like Walton—John Walton—he has a literary framework view. There are various views on Genesis 1. So that's not a deal breaker if someone happens to believe that the universe is as old as whatever—you know, 15 to 20 billion years or whatever—that's not a deal-breaker.

Now, as for science, yes, I don't argue for the Kalam using science because I'm just not that scientifically minded. I'm aware of that. Someone like W. L. Craig would do that, but, or some maybe some others, but I argue philosophically. But yes, it would be consistent with science all the way to that point of the beginning of nature, which is what science studies. And then when we talk about existence sans the physical universe, yeah, then we're gonna have to talk about philosophy and stuff like that.

Matt, okay, the next time on, go ahead.

Hi, my name is Jonathan, and I have a question for Matt, but I guess it could be for both you guys. I believe that desires drive us to seek answers and things, I guess, in the world, and and that so my question, I guess, is what is it ultimately that you want to believe? I guess, both of you. Yes, I'm just curious.

Oh, that's easy. I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible. I have this one, I I'm a like an obsessive learner; like I have way too many hobbies. Like if there are people who, if they came over to my house, would be like, "Gosh, you're just a really boring guy," and they're right, except that if we took a list of all the things that I've done and explored and tried to learn about, and I tend to research until I get to a point of diminishing returns. But if something's true, I want to know it. It there's a reason why the James Randi Educational Foundation would test psychics and dowsers, because if there were psychics and dowsers that could demonstrate that they could do what they said they'd do, that would be worth knowing; it would fundamentally change our understanding of the world. So if there's something supernatural, I want to know. If there's an even if, and if it's the case that there's nothing beyond nature, I'd like to know that -- I don't assert that that's the case because I don't think we know. Wrexham, I want to believe there's going to be a fifth Indiana Jones film. I really want to believe that and see that; the debate loser right there. I want to believe, and I want to believe it's gonna be awesome. But where do I want to believe? Well, I want to believe the truth, and I think that's where me and Matt agree; we both want to believe the truth. And the thing about it is, there are some true things that I don't like, honestly. There are some things that the Bible teaches that might not suit my every preference, but you know what? It doesn't really matter what I want to be true; it matters what is true. And I think the it mattering what is true is what Matt and I would agree about tonight.

Over here, go ahead.

First, I just wanted to say, yeah, I was in that line and I snuck over here to kind of cut, like, then you took two questions, so maybe there is a guy. But my question is for Braxton. We've heard you ask Matt several times what kind of evidence it would take for him to believe. So my question is, what kind of evidence would it take for you to not believe? If I a straight hit the moon and it said, "There is no God," in multiple languages, or if somebody split the sea and the name of Buddha, would that change your mind?

Yeah, it's an interesting question, actually. My worldview, my Christian -- is gonna hang with me here -- the Christian worldview actually accounts for supernatural stuff happening in other religions. I make no bones about it; I'm not the least bit ashamed to say that I believe there are supernatural forces that are positive, and there's supernatural forces that are evil. And so, for that reason, yeah, as a deception, I think there could be things in other religions. Now, that doesn't mean that my worldview is not falsifiable. He brought up falsifiability, and I meant to get to that. You're not gonna like what I say about falsifiability. And by the way, for those of you that don't know, if falsifiability is the if you if you have a good hypothesis, you should be able to provide something that would show that it's false. One thing that would show that that Christian the Christian God, if God doesn't exist, so someone could show -- a lot of times people will say, "Well, you can't prove a negative." Well, that's simply not true. There are no married bachelors, right? I don't know that because I've looked all over the universe and I haven't found any. It's because the idea is contradictory internally. If someone could show that God, so defined, is contradictory, well, that would show that that God does not exist. And people try to do that with problem of evil arguments and stuff like that, so that would do it right there. Another thing would, if you if you if maybe there was some one of the disciples, and we had some good reason to believe we found some document that dates the right time, maybe there's a group of these guys, and they're all saying, "Hey, these guys are out there saying that Jesus rose from the dead, and they're doing all this. It's Buncombe, and we know it's bunk, and and they're liars and all that." Okay, if there's something like that, you know, that would be powerful evidence. So I would be willing to change my mind if I was presented with good enough evidence to change my mind.

Matt, do you say anything there?

I'll keep it brief. This is what I was talking about in the opening statement when I say that we're all trying to solve these problems in pretty much the same way. I agree with it by and large. I agree with him on, you know, the notion of falsifiability and and the process of changing minds. Where we disagree is on what evidence would be sufficient to warrant belief. And it gets us to this point; this happens everywhere, and it's no fault of -- I do it, too. Everybody in this room has done it, where all of a sudden we've become convinced of something, and now we're sticking with it until somebody actually proves us wrong. And this is why what makes what I do so difficult, because I can't prove you wrong. All I can do is show that you might not have good reason to believe the thing that you're convinced you do. That you know, if we if I could show you that the ruler you used to measure by is not reliable, you should walk away going, "Wow, every measurement I've ever made with that ruler is unreliable," not that it was necessarily wrong, just that I don't have confidence to think it's right. We're both doing the same thing; we've just kind of reached different conclusions.

Clark over here in the red shirt, go ahead.

Hi, my name is John. It's for you, Matt. You talked a lot about evidence and uncertainty tonight, so basically I have two questions. You know, if if we can't really know for certain why things are certainly true, one, what benefit does it do to try to convince somebody that they're wrong? And two, I'm sure my teenagers back here would like to know why they are asked to take asked to take tests on things that are certain, dear Drew, such as math or English or science.

Sure. So when I say when I say they can't be absolutely certain, I also talked about maximal certainty that I began with. Essentially, the logical absolutes of identity, non-contradiction, and everything's derived from them is as certain as we can be about everything. And the world that we inhabit and experience, it's as far as we can tell, all contingent upon that. So deductive arguments that tie back to that are as certain as we can be. It could be that maximal certainty, as I call it, is ultimately absolute certainty; we just don't have a way to demonstrate it because we don't have a way to demonstrate essentially that reason is unfounded. However, the tools of reason consistently demonstrate the reliability in giving us an accurate model of the world. It's not like I'm likely to walk out into traffic, you know, and a bus appears out of nowhere. And science -- the world appears to operate in an orderly fashion, and as long as that's the case, then the best -- it's like people would say, "How do you solve hard -- solve systems? How do you know you're not the Matrix?" I don't, but until somebody shows me I am in the Matrix and a way out, there's nothing I can do about it. I have to deal with this reality based on the rules that it seems to present to me. And so why should they take a test? Because they're stuck dealing with the reality that there are consequences to not taking that test and not gaining that understanding. It doesn't matter even if you were in the Matrix; let's say you're not in the real world, you're in a construct, and until you have a way out, you've got to deal with the rules of the Matrix you're in. Now, I I happen to be fairly convinced that I live in the real world and that I share experiences with other people, but that's mostly because I don't think that my brain has written every wonderful song or been every obnoxious caller to the show. So I'm fine with the notion that I share space with other people until somebody shows me differently.

Braxton, you want to add to that?

No, that's fine.

Okay. Right over here. This is a question for Matt: Are we only decision-making machines? And I guess based this on your your current understanding, and then is that Everett from a past understanding that you've had?

I don't know. I don't know. How's that difficult to answer? I think there's a way you could look at it where we are merely decision-making machines, but you'd also have to look at it as that we are so much more than that as human beings, because not everything we make is some -- not everyday, not even every decision we make is some sort of rational process. I don't choose what I like. Matter of fact, I don't think beliefs are a choice at all. I think you can you your as an agent you are acting in accordance with your beliefs. You become convinced of things; it's not something I I just I'm now I'm gonna believe that gravity doesn't work; that that just doesn't work out. But we're not always remotely reasonable, either. I didn't choose to like chocolate ice cream. I didn't choose to fall in love with somebody, and I don't think there's any problem at all. I think that while we could look at like love, romantic love for example, as something that could be viewed as ultimately irrational, I think there's a way you can look at it as ultimately rational as well, because I'm stuck on this rock as far as I can tell, and I have to share space with people, and things in my life affect their life, that things in their life affect my life. And so finding a way to live and work cooperatively is, I mean, that's just straight-up game theory on how to do this. And so maybe having someone that I'm potentially irrationally emotionally attached to is such a massive benefit to me in all these other areas that it's ultimately rational, even if we don't recognize it that way. So we're decision-making machines, but we're not anywhere near a perfect decision-making machine.

Braxton, do you want to follow up?

No, that's okay.

Probably the last question. We have 30 seconds left. Mantha's questions for you. I don't want to misquote you; did you mention that you believe the Bible might have been altered, or certain stories in the Bible might be altered?

Yeah, I believe the version of the Bible we have is clearly altered, and I don't think that that's remotely outrageous. Most Christian scholars that I've spoken to about it, they don't deny that it's altered; it's just whether or not it's altered in any significant way. It's like if you go to Mark chapter 16, verses 9 through 20, we were talking about earlier, they don't exist in the oldest and best manuscripts. And that's where it talks about, you know, if you're a true believer, you can drink any poisonous thing and it won't harm you, and you can handle snakes. Well, Christians can argue all day long about whether that should be in there or not, but there's no real debate on whether or not it was in the oldest manuscripts. And it's things like that, the comma Johannean things like that, where I think there were possibly alterations. But even if there were none, that doesn't change whether or not I find it Mexico. Yeah, this this some of what I say maybe quotations from Craig Blomberg, but Airman Guard -- Airman talks about there being 200,000 to 400,000 textual variants in all of the New Testament manuscripts before the printing press in 1440 AD. Since there are only 138,000 words in the whole New Testament, readers might think that that means every word was in question, with most of them having multiple possible alternatives. This is false. These are spread among over 5,000 manuscripts. There are 220,000 translations into other Middle Eastern, Eastern, and European languages from Greek. That means you have an average of 8 to 16 unique variants per manuscript; not that scary. I agree with him about the ending to Mark chapter 16, and maybe I wasn't quite paying attention, maybe some of the other ones that are well-known. And fortunately, most of your Bibles, though I grant not all, have a scholarly notation, because Christians are aware of this; our seminaries teach this, and good pastors let their congregations know about this. So I agree with that part of what he said, and I think it sounds like he agrees with me that the variations that we have, the the, you know, the scare -- scare tactics about the difference is is way overblown. Yeah, anybody anybody who's saying, "Oh, your Bibles just full of all kinds of false crap," that somebody -- and they don't know what they're talking about. There may be some of that blame. The problem is, because we don't have originals, it's always an inference to figure out how reliable the version you have is. It's one of the reasons why we ended up with a Protestant Reformation. If the church isn't going to dictate what I need to believe, I've had a personal relationship with Jesus, and the Holy Spirit can guide me through the Bible. And if that is actually all true, that's fine, and it doesn't matter if there's an error. I think there are some errors that are perhaps significant to doctrine; most of them probably aren't.

All right. One more time, let's give a round of applause for our two presenters.

Now, I will admit what I'm about to say now is not fair to our atheist friends, but after all, we are at a Baptist school, and this is being hosted by Baptists, so I take the prerogative to do as I wish, because I'm a libertarian -- free to do so, and I will give a past world word in closing by just simply saying I'm very similar to to Matt in the sense that we were raised in Baptist churches, both being told we were going to be growing up to be Baptist preachers. And I came to a fork in the road. I remember having those doubts in my life. Why we're looking up at my ceiling fan, I said, "God, if you're really there, just turn on the fan and I'll believe in you. I will trust you. I will know what you're there; just turn on my ceiling fan." And it didn't happen. Remember, notice I'm sitting there, "Go, Lord, if you just make that pencil right over there, do you just make it hover across the room, then I'll just know you're there. I'll know it; I'll just know it. And then I'll serve you. I really just be committed, and I know it." And God got in my face that again -- he doesn't speak audibly to me; I'm a Baptist; I couldn't handle that -- but God, it pressed upon me and saying, "Layton, what if I did do that? Where would you start seeking for me?" The reason the Bible says it's a perverse generation that continues to look for signs and wonders is because when you begin to look on the external, you will never hear the voice of God here. And when you come to a fork in the road, you either go to the fork in the road where you look for the science and the external, or you start looking here. And I started to realize that it's only when you begin to realize that God ordained faith, and that he doesn't talk through the big storms and the big the big hurricanes; he talks to the still small voice. And when he gives you -- if he were to give you an external sign, guess what you're going to be looking for the rest of your life. You know what's going to happen? I want to say, okay, guess what happened to me, Braxton? God turned on the ceiling fan for me; it was just amazing. And what's Max is gonna think? God didn't turn on my ceiling fan. Well, maybe I should say, "Ask God to turn on my ceiling fan." So what Brock -- what's Braxton gonna do? Instead of looking for the still small voice in the internal, what's he gonna do? He's gonna start looking for the external. He's gonna look for the sign; he's gonna look for the wonder, and he's gonna miss the still small voice, because God chooses -- whether he believes this or not -- the Bible says God chooses to speak through faith. And I'm here to challenge you; I'm here to challenge you. You can go Matt's route and look for the external and never find it, and even come to the conclusion that no matter what he did, if he lobs somebody's head off and put it back on, I'm still not gonna be convinced, because it's not about what God's doing externally; it's what he's doing here. And I'm just telling you, if you're still searching, you're still seeking, don't look externally; look here, and I promise you will find; I promise you will find him if you continue to seek him with all your heart. You may not believe that yet, and that's fine. If you come to the same conclusion, I'm not trying to put him down here; I'm simply saying that's my testimony; that's what God did to me. I can only say, "I was once blind, but now I see." I was once blind, but now I see. And you can never you can never take away the stories of the thousands upon thousands of people. And I'll end with the C.S. Lewis quote: "If Christianity is false, if it's false, it is of no importance; it's not. But if it's true, it's of the most importance. What it cannot be is just moderately important. It can't be that." That's why these kinds of discussions are so valuable, because this is ultimately what drives the purpose of our life: Why are we on this big ball? Why are we here? Why do we exist? And if that's something you haven't grappled with as a college student or even as a 70-year-old who's already retired, it doesn't matter what stage of life here. And if you haven't grappled with that truth and asking yourself the question, "Why am I here? What's the purpose of my existence?" My challenge for you as a theist, as a Christian, is don't look for the external, because our God is one who speaks and the still small voice of faith. Please continue to seek Him, and seek him with all your heart. I'm gonna close with a word of prayer. Father, I do pray that God, everyone in this room, regardless of where they are in their faith and their walk, where they are in their doubts and their skepticism, I pray, Father, that you in your own wisdom and your own ways will continue to reveal yourself through the still small voice, that we won't look to the external, but we would continue to listen through faith, and that you may be glorified in Jesus' name. Amen. I want to invite you to the Unapologetic Conference right down here in the front row. There are some flyers that if you would like to come, it's not too late. There will be registration open at the door. If you want to come and register at the door, if you can't afford to go, come talk to me or Eric, and we will provide you a scholarship; we will find you a scholarship. If you literally just -- I can't come up with any money for it -- you come see one of us, and we will provide; we will help you find a scholarship for that. So don't don't not come because of money. Please grab one of those brochures. He's heading right through the back with those, and as you leave, you can grab one of those brochures, and hopefully we'll see you at Columbus Avenue. Thank y'all for being here. Good night. Be safe going home.