Transcription
All human beings are worthy of provision and protection. All of them, right? Do you—would you agree with that? All human—all members of the human family, no matter what their achievements, no matter what their attributes—all members of the human family are worthy of all provision and protection.
I have no idea.
Mhm. That's a problem. You say Hitler comes to me and says, "You wouldn't believe how much better our society is off now that we're eliminating these people." Then you have to go back and look at it and say, "Okay, what have you lost?" You have to point to something where they're adding value to society, so they have to achieve; they have to add value. But they don't have value.
Yeah. The conversation that you're about to watch features what is maybe the best ever—at least the best that I've seen—conversation between an atheist and a Christian about morality and how objective morality actually does point us to the existence of God. Now, Matt Deah Hunty is going to try to dodge and avoid this logical conclusion in a number of ways, but watch how Glenn Scrivener slowly corners him into the logically necessary conclusion here. Let's get into this.
The fact that we seem to have a desire for meaning, purpose, value—all those things—he'll use as evidence for the God because that serves as an explanation for it. I can do that with that exact same example. The fact—the reason that Glenn sees God as the justification for that is because he's uncomfortable with the possibility that there isn't an explanation for it, or that this isn't some sort of universal truth. So, a preference for, "I want there to be intrinsic human dignity," gets you to, "Hey, if there was a God, there would be human dignity because this God is guaranteeing it." And so that same circular preference is there. I'm just eliminating both of them and saying, "I'm going to go ahead because I care about human beings, and and I value human beings because I am one," and say, "Whether there's a God or not, this is what I'm going to go for." And if there's a God that has a better way, they can demonstrate it. Why isn't a Damascus Road experience good enough for everybody?
Um, so the moral argument for God's existence is—is not that we—we need some kind of arbitrary moral figure who has some whims, and He will enforce them at the point of hell, and therefore it would be better if we want to live in a moral world to believe in such a God. The moral argument for God's existence is: there is an objective realm of moral values, and the explanation for that objective realm of moral values um is not going to be a a material cause, because morals are not material things, right? Um, moral values are not reducible to just biological reality, and—and thank God for that, because biological reality is the survival of the fittest. Okay? But moral values are something distinct from biological values, natural values. You cannot get from those natural values to the ethical values. You can't get from an "is" to an "ought," and—and you sure can't get from preferences to an "ought." You can't get from a "like" to an "ought." There is—you can always get from preferences to an—no, you can only get from preferences to another preference. It's just—it's just becomes another preference, just backed up with force. He says that you can get from an "is" to an "ought," but listen to how he defines that bridge being crossed and see if you can recognize the massive problem here in his reasoning. The pro—all right, we're not going to—we're not going to necessarily—So first of all, I don't think we disagree on—on—on the is-ought dilemma, but as soon as you get into preferences, that's the objection. The reason you can't get from an is-ought is that you have to inject a preference. It's—it's injecting the preference that gets you to the ought. "I would like to live in a world where this happens; therefore, I ought to do that." The—the objection on the is-thing is this thing: if—if I try—if I start with a foundation of, "I would like to"—is not a problem with what it leads to, but why should I like—with the power, I suppose, is what I'm getting at. Glenn is saying, if—if the person in power, say the Hitler, simply has a very different conception of what the best is for his life compared to your life, then do you have any moral—uh, if you like, force to say you're doing something wrong? Isn't he just going with his preferences as opposed to your preferences? Is—yes. You can see the gears turning here. He's going, "Is it really good for me to be saying that Hitler says, 'I would like there to be a world without any Jews; therefore, I ought to go about doing the Holocaust'?" I think that the—the—the chickens are coming home to roost here. Keep—let's keep watching this.
So what is it that's up here that says those preferences are better and those preferences are worse? This is what—is that—this—this is the—the objection that's—that's often launched. So I could sit down with Hitler—I wouldn't, because he's dead—but I can sit down with Hitler, and if we could find the thing that we agree about—that we care about—I can show—we can then demonstrate which one of our preferences are in conflict with that. If—if he—because what we—what we do as human beings is often delude ourselves, and—and we look at our preferences and assume they're right, but they're going to conflict with something foundational, which basically, at the beginning of that superiority to secular morality talk, I talked about how you could begin with, let's say, three foundational premises: life is generally preferable to death, health is generally preferable to sickness, and pleasure is generally preferable to pain. None of them are universally true. Sometimes pain is preferable. Sometimes death may be preferable, which is why I support death with dignity for people who no longer have any hope of a—of a quality of life, and with their individual autonomy and control over their own life. But you can begin with those, and you can build something. But you can start with anything. You can start with, "Death is better than life," and what you get to is extinction. And so if I find something—I think Hitler probably—I mean, there's the old joke—Hitler probably loved his mother, too. Hitler probably valued human life, just had justifications for excluding certain others, right? You think you could reason Hitler into—I don't know that I necessarily could reason him into his way. It might be—it might be the case that Hitler could reason you into his way of thinking. That's a fairly awkward thing to admit on the internet. I'm not—I'm not saying that—that's not necessarily the case. I'm saying if you can show that what your actions are and the things that you're justifying are in conflict with a—a—a—a foundation that you agree with—Mhm. That's where the problem is, right? And what if the—it's—it's the establishment of the master race? Because if the fittest do survive, then wouldn't it be nice if the fittest should survive? Like we take that hop, skip, and a jump, and—and—Sure. And then you—then you ask, "What criteria are you using to determine fittest?" And again, we're having a symposium when we should be fighting a war. And—and this is—No, no, we should always be having a symposium so we don't have to fight wars. Why would anybody ever say we should be fighting a war? You sound like Neville Chamberlain. You know, I—"I found peace in our time with Hitler because I'm going to sit down with him, and I'm—" I'm sorry, I'm sorry that advocating for reasoning rather than blowing crap up is so anathema. Um, I—I think we tried to reason with him. Um, I'm not saying—see this—okay, here's where the confusion is. I'm not saying after the war started, send Matt in, and he can sit down with Hitler. Something he's very clever—we're—we're using a precise example to talk about a more abstract one, which is essentially, let's say you and I disagree on—you—you want to take some action; you want to exterminate some portion of the population. The—the process that I'm advocating for is for us to figure out what shared foundation we have, if any, which—we'll find something shared and show which one of us is more in conflict with, and which one of us is more in keeping with that foundation. Is it always going to be the case? No. But you asked how you would actually solve that, and I would—and if it didn't work, I'd kill him. And if—and if well-being, just very vaguely, just—just defined—if well-being is—is the metric that we're using, yeah, and if Hitler could say, "Oh, we are so much better off without the disabled," you have no idea, you know, "We're soaring—our industry, our numbers are through the roof, our well-being is—is yeah—is doing incredibly well once we eliminate the—the sick, the weak, the handicapped," um, is he right at that point? Well, that's when you go through and you talk about what data are you looking at to define well-being? Because what data—you're having that conversation about the—because he's—because he's just told you—I've eliminated—it's not like I'm—No, no, okay, because it's happening right now. Okay? That there is a Down syndrome population, for instance, that's being eliminated globally right now, and we're having a conversation about it. Okay? And I—and I think it's better to have a conversation than to blow people up and all that sort of stuff, but—um, it's—it's a very live issue. I—it's not—it's not just Godwin's Law. I'm just going with the example that you say Hitler comes to me and says, "You wouldn't believe how much better our society is off now that we're eliminating these people." Then you have to go back and look at it and say, "Okay, what have you lost?" Is your society better? And are you just looking at the short term? Did you—in fact—how do you know that you didn't lose a cure for disease? How do you know that you're not worse off because it has fundamentally changed your psyche? How do you know that you're not worse off because you've lost art? Because you've—you've lost human connection? It's not just—see, this is one of the problems that you could point out to people that are going down—there—well-being is not just—people's lives are worth something, even if they didn't produce a cure for cancer or great works of art, even if they just, you know, sat around and consumed all the resources that all the able-bodied people were doing. If somebody sat around and did nothing but consume—I—I don't know how you could consider that in as adding value. You—you have to point to something where they're adding value to society, so they have to achieve; they have to add value. But they don't have value. Yeah. So this is what I'm saying when I say that there's no intrinsic value to it, but that I value—that I value human life, and that everybody—almost everybody—see—who's—I—you—you might—I'm speaking specifically for me, but also someone else doesn't—you try to reason them out of it, but—well, yes, what do you—Okay, see, you sit there—okay, let's try it. "I don't value human life. Change my mind." Um, look at the Nazis. Look at that vision of humanity. I don't care. Mhm. "I don't value human life. Change my mind." Mhm. Um, you have yourself a humanity that has dignity. You might not believe it right now. I don't—change my mind. I'm trying to change your mind by saying, "Without achievements, without attributes, without contributing a penny of money, without ex—spending a calorie of effort," I worry, by the way, that this is going to get cut as if this is really me saying this when it's not, and I'm counseling you or something; I'm your therapist.
The funny thing is that it is really him saying this. He's just kind of going into a slightly more caricaturized version of what he's actually saying, but he is actually saying that he literally just spent 10 minutes saying that humans don't have intrinsic value, but that they're only valuable—that we are only valuable—that any person is only valuable to the extent that they're able to contribute something to society. I mean, that's literally what he just said. And then the—there's another thing here that's so important is when they kind of go into the little roleplay here. Uh, Glenn basically has to appeal to—to a biblical portrait of—of what a human being is, and Matt plays the same game that he always plays, which is, "I'm not convinced. I'm just not convinced." And what's so ironic and also horrifying about that is that ultimately, yes, you either do have to actually believe that what God says about humans is true—you actually have to believe that—that the Bible is revealing something that is true—that we are actually different from the rest of creation—that we're actually made in the image of God—that we have intrinsic value—that we're not like the chairs that we're sitting on—that we're not just material—that we actually are ensouled creatures that have eternity in our hearts—that are created with love and that are designed to be in union with a good and loving God. You either have to believe that or not. There is definitely an aspect of faith here, but the problem is that if you don't believe that, you're then going to end up where Matt ends up saying that we are just material—that we don't actually have intrinsic value—that if Hitler's assessment about the Holocaust is really good and true—uh, or if—if he goes through with it, and if he believes that it's good and true, then for him it is good and true. This is the—this is where the kind of the—the philosophical gets really scary, because—and this is also how atheism—I'm sorry, but atheism—in the sense that it is materialistic—in the sense that it—it—it subtracts God, and in doing so, it—it subtracts the image of God from man—becomes extremely dangerous. This is why, although he pushed back earlier and—and said that Jordan Peterson misunderstood that he was talking about secular humanist societies—not—not these atheistic top-down regimes—but I'm sorry, the philosophy leads you there. If you dehumanize humans—if you say that we don't have intrinsic value—you are far more likely to carry out atrocities. I mean, it—it's just—it's so obviously the case. And so yes, this little roleplay thing here is—you know, he's like, "I hope someone doesn't clip this." Well, bro, I'm clipping it, Matt. I'm clipping it because you said it—you said it before you went into the roleplay, and it's a logic—I—I don't blame you for saying it, in the sense that it's the logical outcome of an atheistic materialistic worldview—that you can't place human—human value into anything other than might makes right or—or—or cultural preferences or ethical emotivism or all of these things, but none of these things can actually amount to an "ought." None of these things can actually tell you what someone ought to or ought not to do. You actually have no authority to use to condemn somebody like Hitler. And so you go as far as, in this clip, saying that you might even be convinced by Hitler that he was right. That's why this is so dangerous. That's why this is so horrifying. That's why this must be resisted at all—at all costs. And we have to come back to the biblical portrait of what we are—that we are different from the rest of creation—that we are made in the image of God—that we do have intrinsic value. This is so—so important for—um, not only for society in the world now, but this is important for you to understand for your own good and for your eternal good. Uh, the—the—the price tag of rejecting God is also that you reject your own self, and it's not worth it. Whatever thing you think about God that is bad, or think about Christianity or church or whatever kind of things that you're thinking about that you don't want to believe God for—I'm telling you, it is not worth it, because the price tag is that in your rejection of God you also literally reject yourself and your fellow man, and the entire human race is—is entirely devalued, dehumanized, and that leads to—and it has already proven to lead to—times almost a hundred million times over in the 20th century alone—the massive loss of human life. And so yeah, this is a very practical example of it, but this is why morality on atheism is totally incoherent. It doesn't—it doesn't add up; it doesn't make sense. And more than it just being incoherent, it's actually—it's literally scary. Like, it's literally dangerous. If you—if you actually carefully listen to what Matt Deah Hunty is saying here, it's actually horrifying, in the sense that you can understand how this flawed worldview's basis for morality leads you to moral atrocity in a consistent and logical manner.
I think that's all that I have to say for now, but I hope that you guys enjoyed this. By the way, Glenn is going to be coming on the podcast with me in the near future, so if you're not subscribed, subscribe so that you don't miss that conversation. Glenn is awesome. Uh, we're going to do like an hour-plus podcast ourselves; we're going to debrief on some of this Matt Deah Hunty stuff and also talk about a lot of things in the world and how the world has changed over the last, you know, five or so years since the time of this recording. So—um, subscribe so that you don't miss that, and I'll see you guys in the next video. Thanks. Bye.
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