Awesome, thanks so much for coming to Debate Con! Folks, thrilled to have you here. We're going to get the debate started. Before I do, I just want to give you a quick shout out and thank you. Thank you to our promo, or I should say, our sponsor for this event, in particular, Manifold. Manifold is a play money prediction platform. So, it's kind of like PredictIt, you've heard about that, but you're not using any real money. Don't risk your own money, it's just for fun. You predict outcomes, including some of our Debate Con debates. So, all of our debates tomorrow, we do have voting, and we're actually going to vote on one tonight because there's going to be an inverse, uh, the in-person hand raise is how we're actually going to determine which side is more persuasive. So, more on that for the next debate. But do want to say, huge thank you to Manifold. That's the, as you can see on the bottom left of the screen there, that's Manifold right there. They're linked in the description as well.

But we're going to go without any further ado with Ain's opening statement. Ain, thanks for being with us. The floor is all yours.

Thank you very much. "Is naturalism true?" The question doesn't even make sense, does it? Because naturalism is commonly understood, or often understood, to be the study of nature. Therefore, it cannot be true or false. It just is. But my experience has been that the intent of the question is not in good faith. When Bonard Day Debate asked me to defend naturalism, I said that the topic is annoying, but that it might be fun explaining that to you, the audience. The reason it's annoying is not just that it's a stupid question, but it's also a fallacy. One that I hear all the time. You see, in 1674, Matthias Knudson, probably the first person to publicly identify as an atheist, wrote a book in which he defined atheism as not believing in any God. A century later, Baron d'Holbach, the father of atheism, declared the same thing, adding that babies are born atheist because they have no knowledge of God. And both men made up different words to describe people who not only have a lack of belief in God, but who also have a belief that there is not a God. Uh, they didn't agree on that part. But Webster's Dictionary accepted and published the non-belief definition that both of them gave for atheism. Then another hundred years after Baron d'Holbach, Thomas Huxley invented the word agnostic. And philosophers tried to use that word to redefine atheism such that instead of just not having a belief in God, philosophers said atheists must also have a belief in not God. And then they went even further, such that a denial of belief became a belief in denial. And atheism was redefined again, this time as a rejection of the proposition rather than rejection of belief in the proposition. That we see as an ill-defined, unsupported absurdity. The faith, conversely, has been described as pretending to know things you don't know, or or assuming things that are not evidently true and believing it anyway. Where believers get to assert baseless speculation as if it was a matter of fact, which is logically indefensible. In any application outside of religion, that would be called lying. Only faith gets to treat unsupported assertions as revealed truth, but it's still indefensible even there. So, defenders of the faith use this definition of atheism to shift the burden of proof onto the unbelievers, as if we have the more difficult burden of having to prove a negative. As if they don't have to substantiate their claim that there is a God, but instead, they found a loophole where it falls upon us to prove that there is not one. The same thing goes for physicalism, materialism, naturalism. Physicalism is the idea that everything is physical, as opposed to not physical, whatever that means. Even thoughts and emotions are essentially chemical synapses. So, even ideas are fundamentally physical. And likewise, materialism is the idea that everything is material. Though both of these can also be interpreted as the belief that there is physical material. And some of us, though not necessarily all of us, accept that there is a physical material world. There are a frustrating few, however, who like to pretend as if there is no physical material, as if atoms don't exist, not really, because everything is essentially imaginary, as if reality is an illusion, just an idea, where we are just a brain in a vat, like the Matrix, or that what we think is reality is really just a dream of Brahma, and that when he wakes up, we will all cease to exist. If you think, therefore you are, then you side with most of us, along with the overwhelming majority of scientists, 85%, who hold to non-skeptical realism, meaning the position that reality is real by definition. Whether you believe in gods and miracles or not, most of us accept that there is physical material. But the faithful propose that there is another aspect of the universe that is immaterial, ethereal, spiritual, mystical. But again, they can't substantiate a belief that they hold on faith in lieu of evidence, and they won't admit that they don't have evidence for it either. So, to get around that, they have defined these terms to mean a positive belief that physical material is all there is. Again, they've shifted the burden of proof onto us, as if it's our job to prove that there is not some sort of un uncertain, undefined alternative reality in addition to the one we know. Asking whether naturalism is true is much the same thing. Presenting naturalism as a belief that everything is natural, as opposed to supernatural, which is another word for magical. When we talk about magical things, we're talking about supernatural things. They are essentially the same thing. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says that naturalism is widely viewed in positive terms, as a positive term, by in philosophical circles, where only a minority of philosophers reject reality. So, most philosophers, most scientists, and most regular people accept that the natural world exists, and that we're not just figments of some God's imagination. Of course, it matters what definition we're using. And that same article also says that there's no particularly precise or informative definition of naturalism, that its meaning depends on the context. And in this case, tonight, I am part of that context because I was invited to debate this topic. And I most often debate science denialists, especially intelligent design creation scientists. Those who are explicit in what they mean by naturalism. For example, Don McLeroy was a young Earth creationist and the chairman of the Texas State Board of Education. He famously objected to the collective testimony of 150 professional scientists endorsing that evolution should be taught as fact in public schools. McLeroy, who is just a dentist himself, not a scientist of any sort, said that someone has to stand up to these experts. McLeroy was also taught in a Christian school where he told his fourth-grade students to keep chipping away at that objective empirical evidence and keep pointing out that their deductive reasoning depends on the supposed premise, "nature is all there is." Remind them they might be wrong. His problem with naturalism might stem from the fact that Darwin and his contemporaries were not called scientists. In the 19th century, the people who studied science were called naturalists. Thus, many creationists conflate evolution with naturalism. McLeroy, for example, is a self-described proponent of supernaturalism. He believes that the world is essentially magical, and that's why he thinks he can dismiss objective empirical evidence as if it's meaningless. Those are just facts, they don't matter. McLeroy's website quoted intelligent design creationist Philip Johnson complaining that "metaphysical naturalism or materialism or just plain old naturalism is the idea that nature is all there is. Modern science today is totally based on naturalism. In all of intelligent design's arguments against both Darwinian evolution and the chemical origin of life, it is their naturalistic base that is the ultimate target." The important aspect of Darwinian evolution is its naturalistic claim that all life is a result of purposeless, unintelligent material causes. So, by that interpretation, naturalism doesn't mean belief in nature, nor the study of nature. What it means is atheism. Worse than that, it's not just a belief, it's not just an absence of belief in God, it's a belief in the absence of of God. And worse than that, it's not just God, it's everything supernatural, mystical, magical, miraculous. It's a belief or assertion that there is no magic, rather than not believing in magic. Typical shifting of the burden of proof. Philip Johnson is an attorney and one of the founders of the Discovery Institute's Center for Renewal of Science and Culture, which is as scientific as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic. The Discovery Institute is called a think tank, but what they really do is focus on promoting religiously motivated pseudoscience propaganda in an attempt to undermine science education. In an internal memo that was accidentally emailed externally, John Johnson explained how The Discovery Institute seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies. How does materialism have cultural legacies? Because materialism is means accepting that the material world exists, but not also believing in the immaterial, supernatural, magical religion. By their arbitrarily imposed interpretation, if naturalism is true, then magic is not real, and neither is God, since gods are made of magic. And these religious fundamentalists think that whether you whether you accept evident reality or whether you prefer to make believe something else instead, either way, they say that it's a matter of belief, of choosing to believe, which is is not an option for all of us, it's not for me. But they say that beliefs are a matter of faith, all of them, and that faith is inherently cultural, that everything you everything you believe is a matter of choice. And and uh, and they say that, uh, it's a religion somehow, and that even a lack of religion is a religion, and that a lack of faith is faith. As if we can choose to believe whatever we want. And they don't understand that some of us don't believe that, that we that we don't make belief, that some of us need a sufficient reason to compel belief, and that we don't want to be fooled into believing anything just because of anything that isn't evidently true. So, we're not going to believe impossible nonsense for no good reason, just because you say so. Don McLeroy went a bit further in an article to the Austin American-Statesman wherein he clarified that he's not just against philosophical naturalism, he's against methodological naturalism too, which is essentially the scientific method. Specifically, it is the premise that all postulation must be based on physical evidence and that all claims or hypotheses must be testable to see whether it's still supported or is potentially falsifiable because if it's wrong, there should be some way to show that. These requirements both keep science limited to what is natural or real, because there's no way to test the supernatural or unreal. Well, if magic was real, there would be people like Spock, Gandalf, Obi-Wan, Hermione, and Doctor Strange who could demonstrate that reliably, at least well enough to show that there's a there there. But of course, in real life, no one can do that. No one ever has. Not one person has ever performed well enough to show any sort of success rate, despite however many thousands of faith healers, snake handlers, tongue speakers, prayer warriors, transcendental gurus, Ouija board mediums, psychic adepts, feng shui decorators, Reiki masters, treasure diviners, fortune tellers, spellcasters, and exorcists there are and have been all over the world since prehistoric times. We still can't show that there even is a supernatural at all. Instead, we know from neuroscience and so on that souls don't exist, and most of the important fables in the Bible and the Quran and all other supposedly sacred scriptures are just fantasy folklore with you a few embellishments and a few legends and such thrown in there with little or no connection to history or reality. Otherwise, and every one of the supposed saints and all the miracles that the Catholic Church claims to have confirmed are dubious at best, if not already debunked. And I say this as someone who was once a very spiritual person. I wanted to, I I I used to believe in reincarnation, of spiritual life force. My actual religion, sincerely, for years was essentially Jedi. I sincerely thought that they were people who really could do all that stuff. I really wanted to believe that there was some truth to the paranormal. I wanted to believe in UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, clairvoyant, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full trance mediums, the Loch Ness Monster, and the theory of Atlantis. I wanted to believe all that was true. But I didn't want to make believe. I didn't want to rely on faith because I know how inherently self-deceptive faith always is. I wanted to know what was true in each case, and I wanted to show the truth of it. The problem is, there just isn't any of that that we can show to be true at all. So, in this debate, I will hope that my interlocutor and I already both accept the the physical material nature exists. And if he has any legitimate evidence of a supernatural aspect in addition to that, such as someone certainly would have by now if there was any real reality to that at all, then I'll be happy to see it. But I will will not accept shifting of the burden of proof. I'll put that burden back where it belongs, nor will I attempt to prove a negative. I will not try to prove that there is not an undefined, indeterminable, non-physical, immaterial, supernatural alternative reality. Instead, I will leave it up to him to substantiate his belief that there is one, which if he means to show that naturalism is not true, then that's what he would have to do anyway.

All right, thank you for your up to six-minute opening. So, uh, we're going to kick it over to you, David, and the floor is yours for up to 16 minutes for your opening statement.

Thank you, James, for hosting this debate and another 487 debates every single month for the past five years. Are officially the all-time, um, king of debate hosting, and you're, uh, you always have a good crew there with you. Uh, a special thanks to Arun Ra for agreeing to defend naturalism, although since he sounds like he doesn't take it very seriously as a position, I'm not sure where this is going to go. Uh, there are people who take naturalism seriously as a position, so I'm happy to, uh, respond, um, to them. Uh, and I think it's a, a good idea to have, uh, to address a position like this in debates like this. There's normally, uh, the theist defending some position and the atheist responding and challenging that position. And guess what? Sometimes atheists hold views too. And there are naturalists, and there are all kinds of various positions. And it's good to ask, hey, why, why do you believe in that position? Um, but we'll, we'll push forward and and see where things go. I don't know where things are going to go at this point because, uh, again, Aron doesn't sound like he adopts this position seriously. Uh, naturalism is, you and Aron's right, Aron's right that there can be different definitions, but they're usually in the ballpark. If you're not talking about methodological naturalism, you're talking about metaphysical naturalism. It's a, uh, roughly the claim that the natural world is what exists or what is real. It would be contrasted with supernaturalism. Supernaturalism would be the view that yes, there's the natural world, but there's something else. That something else could be God or gods or spirits, souls, all kinds of things. And supernaturalism would usually include the idea that these things somehow interact with the natural world. So, in a debate on whether naturalism is true, it doesn't make a lot of sense to not accept the burden of proof. If, if the question is, is naturalism true, um, I'm actually tempted, given a topic like this, to play skeptic, like some of the popular atheists play skeptic. I can just sit here and say, well, that, there's no evidence for naturalism. Show me that naturalism is true, and so on. Prove to me that naturalism is true. You can play skeptic, uh, no matter what the position is. Uh, there's a famous video where Richard Dawkins was asked something like, if God did exist, if God did exist, what sort of evidence could God give you that would convince you? And Dawkins says that when he was younger, he would have said, God could just speak to him in an audible voice. If he heard a big booming voice, he'd say, oh, okay, yeah, I believe. Uh, and that would be enough. But he goes on to point out that upon further reflection, an audible voice wouldn't convince him. If he heard an audible voice, he would simply conclude that he was hallucinating. He then agrees with Peter Boghossian, who's having the discussion with him, that if God wrote a message in the stars, something like, "Believe in me, Richard Dawkins," he still wouldn't believe in God because he could blame powerful aliens for the message written in the stars. So, Dawkins concluded that no matter what the evidence is, it can always be reinterpreted. And therefore, that there's absolutely nothing God could do to convince him that he exists. The most, most interesting part is that Dawkins has spent a good amount of his career challenging theists to provide evidence for God's existence, even though at the end of the day, he admits that he's going to reject the evidence, no matter what it is. Notice that anyone can do this. Any flat-earther can say, "I challenge you to prove to me that the Earth is spherical," but just so you know, any evidence you give me, I'm going to automatically reject it. That doesn't sound very rational. And yet, automatically rejecting the evidence is apparently a position held by several of the popular new atheists. So, even if God appeared in front of us in glory, started blasting people with lightning bolts, atheists could easily explain that away. Maybe we're dreaming, maybe we're hallucinating, maybe we're in The Matrix, maybe powerful aliens are tricking us. In the, in the Q&A from earlier, Matt asked, "Why doesn't God just talk to us and tell us that Muhammad's a prophet?" But think about it, if we suddenly heard a voice, "Believe in Muhammad, he's a true prophet," does anyone think Matt Dillahunty would believe that and convert to Islam? I don't, I don't think Matt does either. So why bring that up? Again, this method can be used to reject anything. I could use this method to reject the existence of any atheist. I could issue a challenge to every atheist in the world. I could issue a challenge to Aron Ra. I could say, "I challenge you to prove to me that you exist." In fact, I'll sweeten the pot. If Aron Ra can prove to me that he exists, I'll agree to become an atheist tonight. Uh, the caveat is that I'm going to use the method of people like Richard Dawkins. And whatever evidence he gives me, I'll say, "Well, maybe I'm hallucinating, maybe I'm in The Matrix, maybe powerful aliens are tricking me or something like that." If I were to use the methods that atheists use, there's no way any atheist could ever convince me that he exists. It's impossible to prove much of anything to someone who's using these kinds of methods. Little side note, by the way, if the method you're using to reject theism could be used to reject any position, no matter how solid it may be, you probably need a new methodology. But let's focus on naturalism, one of the most catastrophically self-undermining hypotheses ever. Some hypotheses are what I would call catastrophically self-undermining. What, what do I mean here? Well, we can see it with simple claims. If I say, "There is no truth," someone would quickly object, "David, if you're saying there's no truth, then the statement you're making wouldn't be true either." The claim undermines itself. Let me give you a more relevant example. In Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes famously imagines what it would be like if an all-powerful demon were constantly deceiving him. Descartes didn't believe this, he brings it up as part of a thought experiment in order to see if there's anything people can be absolutely certain about. An omnipotent deceiver, we're tricking me every moment of every day. Is there anything I could still know? And Descartes says, "Yes, there is. As long as I'm thinking, I can be certain that I exist. I think, therefore I am." It's impossible, even for an all-powerful deceiver, to deceive me about my own existence. And from there, Descartes tries to figure out more things that he can't possibly be wrong about. Again, Descartes didn't actually believe in an omnipotent deceiver. But suppose you meet someone who actually is, someone who actually does believe that. Suppose you meet someone who believes that he's being deceived every moment of every day by an omnipotent demon. This person's worldview should raise an obvious question, namely, if you really believe that you're constantly being deceived by an omnipotent demon, how can you trust your beliefs enough to even believe that? How can you trust your belief in an in an omnipotent deceiver if you can't trust your beliefs at all because you think you're constantly being deceived? Did the demon who's deceiving you about everything else suddenly give you accurate information about the fact that he's deceiving you all the time? In other words, if you take the omnipotent deceiver hypothesis seriously, you can't take it seriously. I'm constantly being deceived by an omnipotent deceiver, then I can't trust my beliefs. But my belief that I'm constantly being deceived would be one of the beliefs I can't trust. Hence, the hypothesis would self-destruct. If you take it seriously, you can't take it seriously. What I'm calling a catastrophically self-undermining hypothesis. But there's another catastrophically self-undermining hypothesis before us, and it's called naturalism. If you take naturalism seriously, you can't take it seriously. And I, I hope we're going to agree on that today. Uh, because you, you can't treat the cognitive abilities that produce the belief as reliable when you're dealing with a hypothesis like naturalism. Naturalism is a hypothesis about all of reality. Naturalism, were true, and you received your cognitive faculties, reason, perception, memory, and so on, from the naturalistic processes that are available to you, then you can't trust your cognitive faculties when you're dealing with a topic like naturalism. They weren't made for anything close to that. Let me explain why. Human beings have the ability to reason. We're using it right now, and we tend to trust our reasoning ability. We wouldn't have discussions like this if we thought that our cognitive faculties, the processes that produce our beliefs, were unreliable. But naturalists have a problem here because they can only explain things by appealing to natural objects, natural events, natural causes. Think about this for a moment. You have, you have beliefs. Ultimately, according to naturalism, your beliefs must be the result of physical processes in your brain. Now, what's going on in here? Particles in motion, chemical reactions, neurons firing. It's all physical, governed by laws of nature, not by some sort of commitment to truth. So, what really seems like careful reasoning to you is in reality, straightforward, mechanical, mindless cause and effect, a fancy array of falling dominoes. Illusions aside, then you arrive at your beliefs via a process that has absolutely nothing to do with whether those beliefs are true or false. Chemicals couldn't conceivably care less if naturalism is true, and you believe in naturalism right now, you were causally determined by non-rational particles obeying non-rational laws of nature via a process set in motion long before you were born to believe in naturalism. If naturalism is true, and you believe in supernaturalism right now, you were causally determined by non-rational particles mindlessly obeying non-rational laws of nature via a set in motion long before you were born to believe in supernaturalism. The particles and the laws of nature that causally determine what you believe right now couldn't conceivably care less whether your beliefs are true or false. A false belief is every bit as determined by non-rational particle interactions as a true belief. So, if naturalism is true, what sense does it make to trust our reasoning ability or our beliefs or even our belief in naturalism? None whatsoever. But it gets worse. Here's a quote from Charles Darwin. Darwin is responding to William Graham, whose book is a defense of design in nature. Darwin writes to Graham, "You have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the universe is not the result of chance. But then with me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of a man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy." Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? Darwin says that he shares Graham's conviction that the universe is not the result of chance, but he goes on to say that he can't trust his convictions because his mind has been developed from the mind of the lower animals. One could argue that reliable cognitive faculties would help organisms survive and reproduce and would therefore be selected in the struggle for survival. But this response would be unsuccessful for several reasons. First, even false beliefs can help organisms survive and reproduce. If you refuse to eat certain deadly berries because you believe they're poisonous, and I refuse to eat them because they've been cursed by an angry wizard, we both avoid the berries and we both survive. A false belief can often help you survive just as well as a true belief. Second, for purposes of selection, false beliefs can sometimes be more effective than true beliefs. You've got the hots for someone, but she's definitely out of your league, and you're too shy to make a move. But you call up the astrology hotline, and the psychic tells you that the position of the planet Venus is just right for love. Your false belief in astrology might give you the confidence you need to walk up to her and say, "Hey, what's your name? What's your sign?" You might be impressed by your confidence, and she might love astrology, and you might have 10 kids together. Your false belief can help you reproduce. Election advantage. Third, the kinds of beliefs that help us survive and reproduce are usually grounded in simple observation and experience. I saw a mate die eating those berries, so I won't eat them. But even the lower mammals are capable of learning by observation and experience. How mice learned to avoid traps. Human beings, obviously, have more developed abilities, but not enough to push their reliability far beyond the tasks they were selected to perform. At best, then, we might trust our faculties in matters that involve finding food, using a spear against an enemy, or doing something to attract a mate. Naturalism combined with natural selection, therefore, gives us almost no basis for trusting our reasoning ability when it comes to theology, epistemology, ethics, or metaphysics. As Patricia Churchland points out, "Given a naturalistic interpretation of evolutionary theory, truth takes the hindmost in the struggle for survival." Kin writes, "Looked at from an evolutionary point of view, the principal function of nervous systems is to enable the organism to move appropriately. Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F's: feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproducing. The principal chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. And so far as representations serve that function, representations are a good thing. Getting things right in space and time, therefore, is a crucially important factor for nervous systems, and there is often considerable evolutionary pressure deriving from considerations of speed. Improvements in sensory-motor control confer an evolutionary advantage. Fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism's way of life and enhances the organism's chances of survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost." If human reasoning ability was selected simply because it helped members of our species get the body parts where they should be, how can we have any confidence in the central claim of naturalism? As Hume would say, "We must be far removed from the smallest tendency to skepticism not to be apprehensive that we have here got quite beyond the reach of our faculties." They're just not made for this sort of thing. So, if naturalism is true, you weren't made to figure out the universe, you were made to find berries. So, how can we believe in naturalism when belief in naturalism, uh, undermines the real, the reliability of our cognitive faculties? I don't know what the evidence is going to be that we should take this seriously as a position, and it doesn't sound like Aron is going to treat this seriously as a position that should be defended. So, we might actually end up agreeing. If we're talking about naturalism versus supernaturalism, the takeaway would be, uh, since the topic is, is naturalism is true, is that the real options aren't between naturalism and supernaturalism. Supernaturalism, you affirm. Naturalism, you can't seriously affirm for the reasons that I've pointed out and several more. So, the, if you reject supernaturalism, you should simply say that you don't know, so that you can avoid intellectual suicide. Real alternatives say supernaturalism or I just don't know.

All right, well, thank you for that introductory statement, both of you. For your introductions, uh, we're going to kick it into a nine-minute rebuttal. So, over to you, Ain. Nine minutes on the clock.

Thank you. Mr. and I have violently conflicting views on evolution's effect on social species, which is profoundly different than the selfish modes of other species that he's thinking of. And, uh, because we are a social species, we are dependent on society, and society, this abstract concept, is also dependent on us cohabitating productively. And that means that we're not just looking out for ourselves. We are looking, the thing that set us apart over the other apes at one time, when we lost the, the, the muscular power that, you know, chimpanzees and gorillas retain, when we didn't yet have the enlarged brains and genius that we eventually got, when we, when we already had reduced fangs, were very, very weak, except for one thing. The one thing that carried us over was something that we still have. We had then, and we still have better than any chimpanzee does today, and that is our empathy, our ability to empathize with other people. The type of social species that we are. And you very rarely see this in other social species, but it happens, happens on a cave when the, the slow or the weak will be singled out by the predator from the herd, and sometimes the herd will turn. And that's what happens in our case. You with one of us, you with all of us. And that's any Smilodon can take out any, any person from any time period, but you can't take on all 40 of us. And we've got sticks and stones, and we'll break your bones. That's what got us, that's what got us to where we are. So, just as a matter of population mechanics, the people who stood by their word, who who had a natural empathy for their family, friends, and fellows, who who were the ones that you could depend upon, the ones we could rely on, these are the ones who ended up being favored. While there are people who were selfish, not empathetic, not feeling toward other people, and they tended to be over the terms of generations and mathematics and in population mechanics, these are the ones that tend to be ostracized from society, either be being, uh, banished, imprisoned, or killed. So, again, just as a matter of population mechanics, we end up admiring and praising and and and preserving the people who kept by their word, the ones that had a degree of morality. And the, the type of morality that we have extends not just to our tribe. The more intellectual we are, the more widened we become. We, we, the more that the broader our perspective is, so that we accept other people. We even accept other species. Now, earlier today, Mr. Wood, I heard him explain a couple of times that when people make supernatural claims, that he would automatically take that as a reason to view their claims with skepticism. But maybe he only accepts it or only extends this critical analysis when it's people of other religions. I don't limit it. You know, I, I consider that, hey, even my own position has been wrong in the past. I might be wrong again. I'm always open to that possibility. When somebody comes up with something that is unprecedented, something that is undocumented, something that after all these years of research on my part and checking with the experts in every possible field, is there anything I missed? No. So, when he says that he, that that in order to take naturalism seriously, I have to take the burden of proof to to prove a negative, I don't think so. I think we're still at the situation where he, he has a burden of proof to show that there is a supernatural aspect. He's not going to do that. So he wants to reverse the burden of proof onto me, and he's going to strawman my position at the same time. Now, I don't understand how accepting what, what he said before about accepting what is, uh, evidently true and not also assuming what is neither indicated nor even possible. He describes that as irrational, as being as if being convinced by what is not, not apparently even possible, is somehow rational. He says that that that evolution would cause us to to work against our own psyche. That that makes no sense to me. But I've heard a number of his speeches. The way he talks about atheism, and it is fundamentally flawed. So I hope we can have some more discussions on that. Now, as far as proving a point, I mean, when he, he, he casts, uh, the people who naturalists, the people who don't believe in magic, he casts them in the same category as flat-earthers and creationists. I can prove evolution to a creationist. I can prove that the world is spherical to a flat-earther. It's just a matter of, is it a good faith argument? I've been in conversations with these people when they think that I, that that I've got them in a corner, and then we'll find out whether the position is good faith or not. In one case, there was a flat-earther who somehow thought that I was a super mega rich guy, and that I had an airplane that had my own jet, and I said, "Look, this is something we could do. You say that there's no such thing as Antarctica. We can go to Antarctica. We can, we can go to the landing station that most people go to. We could take off in a jet, we could fly all the way around the island continent, and you, and just watch the whole shoreline as we go. You watch all your gauges, whatever, and we'll land back at the same place that we took off from. Whereas if you were right, and Antarctic is a ring around the entire planet, the plane would not have the fuel capacity to do that." This idiot thought that I had my own L-jet and thought that I was going to force him into this, wherein he admitted that he believes what he does because he wants to. So it has nothing to do with what the truth is. With some of these people, you can, you can take them out to a weather balloon. You can get them to hook up their own GoPro to the weather balloon, send it up into the stratosphere, bring it back down, their own GoPro, they set it on, they turn it on, everything. If they were to try to convince their friends, if they were themselves convinced, they would be dismissed as being part of the conspiracy. So, there's a huge difference between whether you're good faith, sincere, and whether you're not, whether you just want to believe what you want to believe because that's what you want to believe. Now, I understand, and I agree with Dawkins on this one point. Don't agree with Dawkins on a lot, but I agree with him on this one point, that a personal experience of God is going to be deceptive. I personally know somebody who lives not two miles from me who worships the Egyptian cat-headed goddess Bast because she appeared to him physically manifest in his house, visible, tangible, audible, made him to become her disciple, gave him a hug. And of course, he did, because when a topless cat-headed goddess appears in your house and says, "Worship me," you do. That's, you know, you just do. And so I know, and George Harrison famously made, made comments that when he chants the mantras, he and John Lennon were saying that when they, they chant the mantras to Krishna, that Krishna shows up physically manifest in their house, that you can see him, talk with him, laugh with him, that they're, that they're having a real conversation back and forth. So, it is so easy to deceive yourself. And I used to be a neopagan spiritualist. I've walked people through this path many times. And the frustrating thing for me was that I knew a lot of Hindus at the time. I can get, I can get Buddhists to meet Christian, meet him, or I can get Christians to experience the Holy Ghost or something like that. I can get pagans to experience whatever they already believe. You've got to already be primed for it. I can't get, I can't get a Christian to see Krishna, and I can't get anybody to see what they don't already believe. And so I realized I'm all I'm doing is I'm just, I'm setting the ambiance, whatever is appropriate to that belief system, and I'm letting their imaginations run. So, if God was going to communicate with me, and he's only going to connect with me, then I know I've got an improbable tale to tell that nobody's going to believe. It's going to be just like Muhammad, right? Why would you pick out one guy, pick the least believable guy, and then talk to that guy, and then tell him to go kill everybody else that doesn't believe him? No, if God existed and wanted to communicate, and really wanted people to believe, and he's going to punish us forever if we don't believe, then he's going to be able to communicate with all of us. Okay? And then let's see if there's anything else I need to cover. Uh, yeah, and as far as meeting the burden of proof for atheism, because I don't just hold that atheism is a lack of belief, the primary definition is, but I am in that subset where I was for the longest time, I was an agnostic atheist, and now I've learned enough that I now hold a belief that there is no God on top of that. And I will hold, I will defend my position there logically, rationally. And I just want to say that I'm happy, very sincerely happy, that Mr. Wood accepts that reality is real. I always view faith as some degree of real, real, it denial. Like, if you're going to, if you're going to believe in souls when we have all this evidence against souls, it's not just we don't have evidence for souls, we have evidence against souls. We know that all the scriptures are false, you know, to a large degree, all the important stories, most of them are are are completely false. But when you, when you hold that everything is an illusion, then I have to think about, look at the explanations we have for why our eyes work, why our olfactory works, why, why ears work. All of this is, it's from a, a God that wants to deceive us. It seems to me that Descartes did believe that he was being deceived every day.

All right, we're going to hand it over to you, David. Nine minutes on the clock. Maybe a little 30 seconds extra there. Uh, over to you, buddy.

All right, so here's one of my issues. Everything Aron just said was, according to naturalism, a direct result of cause and effect. Why should we take anything he says seriously? Why should you take anything I'm saying seriously if everything we're saying is simply particles in motion? I know it's not popular to actually think through this stuff. The, the point, the main point I'm trying to make here is this is a much more serious problem than people are aware of, and people never bother to think about it. But hopefully, some of that comes out, uh, in this discussion. Um, so anyway, as far as like particles in motion, like, there, there aren't, there aren't lying atoms and truthful atoms, you know what I mean? It's not like you're getting one or the other, and one is going to produce a true belief, and the other is going to produce a false belief. It's, it's the same, it's the same processes that are producing true beliefs and false beliefs. And, uh, I, I would like to understand this better. If you're a naturalist and you believe that's the only, that's where your beliefs come from, how you think that you're being rational. Um, and so anyway, we're in the odd position again of Christians needing to explain the philosophical implications of naturalism to naturalists. We're not making up the implications. Again, I quoted Darwin. I quoted Darwin. Darwin saw this. He got it. He got the point. "I can't trust my own convictions." He's talking, he's not, keep in mind, he's not talking about the conviction like, "Oh, there's a bottle in front of me." He's talking about bigger things than that, like, "We've, I'm looking at the universe and it seems this way rather than that way or something. Can I really trust that, given where I got my cognitive faculties?" He concluded, no. Aron says that we have radically different understandings of, uh, evolution and mechanics and so on. He explains how we can develop ethics through population mechanics. I'm not disagreeing with any of that here. Concerns for other members of a species can help feeding, the four F's, feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproducing. The point here is none of that, none of that gives you any reason to trust your cognitive faculties when you're dealing with these grand worldviews. Developing a, some sort of herd instinct to take care of other members of the species gives you no basis at all. Again, there are other animals that can do that. We're just, we're a little better at it. How do you say, "Well, we're a little better at it, therefore we can discover, uh, the truths of the universe?" That's, that's kind of the question. Aron says he rejects the, the burden of proof. I kind of says something about naturalism, it's naturalism is a popular position. He's right. There is atheism that you can define that as just a lack of belief in God or so on. But there is a, a narrower position that is called naturalism that is held very seriously by many people, and that's the claim that the, the natural world is, is what's real, and, uh, what else? That there is nothing else. Uh, um, he says, I, I claim he claims I said that evolution would undermine our own psyches. No, evolution combined with naturalism, that's the point. If you, if you believe in evol, if you believe that you got your cognitive faculties by the mechanisms available given naturalism, in other words, there's, there's no point to it, there's, there's, there's nothing being added to it, you end up with some problems. Again, I'm not the one who came up with the problems. I'm telling, I'm just, I'm just reciting what the problems are. So, some of them, again, causal determinism, it's particles in motion. Everything you believe was decided according to causal determinism before you were born. We normally take it as a problem if we say, "Oh, the real reason you hold this belief is X. The real reason you believe that is because you were raised to believe that." And that's considered a problem for your belief. Well, if the real reason you believe something is because non-rational particles determine that you believe it, how is that not any sort of problem at all? That's the question. Uh, a, a sort of a follow-up to that issue is a very popular position in philosophy of mind is epiphenomenalism. Aron mentioned Thomas Huxley earlier. Thomas Huxley is the one who popularized this view. Epiphenomenalism sounds fancy, uh, kind of is. Huxley gave the famous example of a train. Says, you've got a train, it's got all the working parts, and that those working parts make the train go down the track. But then there's the train whistle. The train, the, the train affects the whistle, but the whistle does not affect the workings of the train. Whistle is real, you can hear it, but it plays no causal role in the motion of the train. According to Huxley, your physical parts are the train, your mental states are that whistle. Your mental states are not playing any sort of causal role. Your thoughts, your beliefs, there's kind of a weird byproduct of physical processes that are going on in you. So, if, if again, non-rational physical processes are what are putting your body in the right place, helping you survive and reproduce and so on, and then you have this weird byproduct that is your, your mental states, why do we take those seriously? That's the question. And it's a, like it or not, it's a problem for naturalists. Then we have, of course, the unreliable cognitive faculties. If your faculties are selected because they help survival and reproduction, yes, developing a herd instinct, something like that, these can all help with that. None of this gives you, gives you, uh, reliable faculties that could be used for determining, uh, again, grand cosmic theories.

All right, we're going to hand it over to you, David. Nine minutes on the clock. Maybe a little 30 seconds extra there. Uh, over to you, buddy.

Like, uh, like naturalism, or I would say for rejecting, uh, supernatural claims, you're not, you're not made for that either. Uh, he says he can prove the shape of the earth to a flat earther if it's a good faith discussion. I actually agree there. I actually agree. So there, there are good faith discussions, and there are bad faith discussions. But that's, that's the, that's exactly the point I was making. When Richard Dawkins says that no matter what the evidence is, he can just reinterpret it as if he needed to powerful aliens again. God could appear right here, blast us with, start blasting lightning bolts. Could we say these are powerful, this is just a powerful alien trying to trick us? Absolutely. Other people have made the exact same point. Michael Shermer, he made the point, he called it Shermer's Last Law. He said, "Sufficiently powerful aliens would be indistinguishable from God." And of course, therefore, God would be indistinguishable from powerful aliens. So if God appeared, how do you distinguish that from powerful aliens? What if it says, "I'm God"? Well, how do you know the aliens aren't just messing with you? So these are, these are not rare positions. Peter Atkins, the, the Oxford, uh, the great Oxford chemist and atheist, he said if he died and woke up outside the Pearly Gates and he sees Peter there and he has all this stuff, he said he still wouldn't believe. So I, I don't know what this is. What I mean by bad faith, if you're saying, "Give us the evidence," and simultaneously saying, "No matter what the evidence is, we will reject it." If God appeared, if we woke up, if we woke up in heaven, if we heard a voice, no matter what it is, we'll just reinterpret it as something within, uh, as something that's caused by something in the natural world, like aliens or something. Is that a good faith discussion? I don't think it is.

Um, the, uh, Aron says that personal experience can be misleading. Yeah, that, that is ab- no, no disagreements there. So you would, you would have to be careful. If you, if you heard a voice telling you to do something, uh, then you would, you would definitely need to be careful. And you, you'd want to make sure you have sort of confirmation or some sort of outside confirmation. But that's not, we weren't just talking about hearing the voice. It would make, it would kind of make sense for Richard Dawkins to say, "Hey, if I walked outside and I heard a voice, I'd think it's a hallucination." I'd probably think it's a hallucination too, if I, if I just heard some, some random voice or something like that. Uh, but there are other things. Suppose a million people all hear the same voice. You could still, you could still explain that some other way, powerful aliens or something like that.

Usually, when we say, um, again, usually when we say that that someone, uh, came to their views in some less than rational way, we conclude that that belief is somehow under investigation. There are multiple ways, accord- if you, if you accept naturalism and how we got our cognitive faculties, given the tools that are available within naturalism, there are multiple, multiple reasons that our, our beliefs should be investigation. Um, but here, if no one wants to actually defend naturalism and say why naturalism is the correct view to hold, I'm totally fine. But it looks like we would agree the alternatives are not supernaturalism and naturalism. The alternatives before us are supernaturalism or who knows. I just don't know. And so I don't know. I regard that as progress. All right, we're going to go into a mini rebuttal period. Four-minute rebuttal. Over to you, Aron.

Okay, well, I know, not notice that I, I did state that it's naturalism versus supernaturalism. And whether I take the shifting of the burden of proof or not, he still has the burden of proof in this debate to show that there is a supernatural aspect of the universe. If I take the position that the natural world is all we know, and we agree on that, and I don't also assume things that are not indicated where he does, then he should justify his additional assumption. He chose not to do that. Uh, and he made no attempt there to show that there is a supernatural at all. No reason to believe that there even is something else. Instead, he pretended to explain to me what I already explained, that I clearly understand, including a couple of things that I already explained to him. For example, God, if there was one, would not only speak to me, and certainly not at one time. It would be like it is for practically anything else we can verify to be true. It's indepe- objectively ver- verifiable. God would have some way of communicating with all of us regularly. It would be something that we could, we could update our information, we can confirm and and test and prove by many different ways, just like we can with evolution. And if the supernatural was real, I can think of many different examples of what kinds of things we could do to demonstrate that. As as somebody who, I didn't come from a Christian background like most people did. I mean, I was Christian for a minute. I was, I was even a reborn Christian once upon a time. Fortunately, that didn't last long. But I had a much more enriching spiritual experience as a neopagan occultist that went on for years after that. As I, as I went to all manner of exploration, I wanted to know what the truth of these things were. I tried Transcendental Meditation. I tried to do the astral projection. I've done séance after séance of different types. I realize that it is really easy to trick the mind. But I saw how it was a trick. I was even able to do demonstrations. I could show other people, and I even convinced a few other people by building up psychic energy in the palms of your hands to the point where you can't actually touch your fingers together anymore because you've built up this psychic energy, and you can feel it pulsing. And then you release it, and it goes off, and you can feel it hit that other person. And when, when you're in the faith, you will see all kinds of things. You can read or when I, I, I release that psychic energy and the person I hit it with, the hair blows back. It's amazing. It's just, it's amazing what you can be made to believe when you rely on faith, which is my biggest problem. Then faith, when I realize that, that if people are seeing that, people under my care are seeing, uh, are experiencing Christianity, which I don't believe in, or they're, or they're meeting Krishna, which I don't believe in, or they're meeting Vishnu, which I don't believe in, then I'm not showing any of these people anything that is actually true. I'm just letting their imaginations run. And so if, then all I'm doing is letting them fool themselves, it occurred to me that it was possible that I could be fooling myself. And then when I reexamined the very thing that I was using as a demonstration for other people, when I looked at it skeptically, I realized I am fooling myself. I realized how I had talked myself into believing a thing that was never even true. The sad thing, and the alarming thing for me, was I want, I wanted objective verification because I want to know the truth of these things. So through the power of the internet, I meet the people who were, who shared these psychic experiences back in the day with me. I met the two most important people for these past experiences, and not only did they not remember these shared experiences the same way that I did, they didn't remember them at all. They were complete rationalists, don't believe in anything supernatural anymore. And so I realized I didn't even, I couldn't have remembered it. It never happened.

All right, thank you, Aron. Over to you, David. Four minutes on the clock. What you say? Four minutes? Four minutes, yes. All right. Um, Aron again says that he rejects the burden of proof. Here, the topic isn't naturalism or supernaturalism, which is the truth. The topic is whether su-, whether naturalism is true. And so I don't know. There have been thousands of debates on, "Does God exist?" "Do miracles happen?" "Is there a soul?" We get these debates all the time. But one time we ask atheists to actually defend a, a comprehensive worldview. It's, "No, we're not doing it." Interesting. Um, Aron says he warned us that your experiences can be misleading. Then he spent, uh, the last few minutes describing his experiences, and his experiences are supposed to be relevant to the rest of us. Your own, your experiences can mislead you, but not the rest of us, apparently. Uh, just let me give, let me give a little, little example here, as far as, as far as, uh, we're obviously seeing things very differently here on the issue of, of naturalism. So let me give a, a kind of parallel or, or an analogy. Um, you got metaphysical naturalism, the claim that the natural world is all that exists. That, that's it. A parallel would be solipsism. Metaphysical solipsism, a metaphysical solipsist believes that he's the only thing that exists. So if I were a metaphysical solipsist, I would believe I am the only thing that exists. Well, what happens when I, everything around me? Well, I interpret that as just something going on in my own mind. All that exists is my own mind, and I kind of invent the world around me to keep myself entertained because I'm the only thing that exists. And you can kind of experience this when you're dreaming. It's not, it's not stuff that's actually around you. Your brain is producing these things. That's what's happening when your brain is like, you know, when your mind is like on low level and your conscious waking state, you, you see a world around you. Now, suppose you're talking to a metaphysical, uh, solipsist, someone who believes he's the only thing that exists, and he says, "Prove to me that you exist." The metaphysical solipsist asks you for proof that you exist. What proof could you give to a metaphysical solipsist that he could not reinterpret as his own mental states? Exactly. There's nothing. You have constructed a worldview that is impervious to refutation. I can interpret absolutely anything that you could do or say. You could punch me in my face a thousand times. I can interpret that as just my mind, uh, inventing you to keep myself entertained. I could do that. Just as Richard Dawkins can say anything, any evidence that you could possibly give, I would reinterpret as something within my world of metaphysical naturalism. So here's, here's the question. If someone tells you, "Hey, I'm a metaphysical solipsist. I'm the only thing that exists. The burden of proof is only on you to prove me wrong." Would, would you take that seriously? Or would, would you kind of say, "I don't know. If you're saying you're the only thing that exists, maybe you need to be proving something here. To maybe we should actually have a debate on whether you are the only thing that exists, and we should, we could see what your evidence is that you're the only thing that exists." That would make sense to me. You're holding a position. You've got a position here. And so if we could say that a metaphysical solipsist who holds that position shouldn't be able to say, "Well, the burden of proof is only on people who are going to tell me things that I'm going to reinterpret as my own, uh, my own mental states." Well, why can't we say, "Hey, if you're saying that the, that there is no supernatural realm or something like that, or that the natural world is all that exists, uh, why, why can't we say, 'Hey, why don't you give us your case?'" Just once. But we can't have that. What we can have is faith. Aron has condemned faith a lot. But if we have all of these problems with the reliability of our cognitive faculties, and yet we're treating them as very reliable here, seems like there's some faith here.

Aron. All right, we're going to throw it into open discussion. So, uh, feel free to jump in and get your thoughts out there.

Aron: Yeah, I gave my case, and then you told everybody that it didn't give a case. I explained how some things, if there is just, if they're down to personal, uh, experiences, they can be, if they're entirely personal, if they're subjective, then they can be deceptive. But if they're objective, well, now you've got group confirmation. I gave an example of when I tried to go for objective verification, and that objective verification failed, showing that I had subjectively deceived myself. You said that you can defi-, you can interpret absolutely anything such that you don't have to change your worldview. And I think that says a lot about yourself. But you're, you seem to be projecting onto me a bit.

David: No, you're, you're saying, "Here, here are my experiences. I went through, I investigated these things, and, uh, this is what I concluded after all of this." So, couple problems here. One, there are other people who've had very different kinds of experiences. And if someone says, "Hey, I looked into this and, you know, I saw someone who was miraculously healed or something like that," you would think there's something wrong, that this person was somehow, that this person somehow, uh, got something wrong or was misled. There was, there was that Pew study a while back where they, uh, investigated, uh, one Christian denomination in 10 countries to add up how many people believe they had witnessed a miracle. Yeah, and they were in, I think, a million people in 10 countries, one Christian denomination. If you kind of multiplied that, so what if it was every country and every denomination of every religion or something like that? It would seem like you're, you're probably going to be in the ballpark of a billion or two billion if you got 200, 100 million just off a, just off a, a poll. So the point is, so that's one issue. It's, you've got all of that, and we're willing to conclude, "No, all of these people must be wrong," and it's because your experience says something different. But the real issue I'm pointing out here is that if you have, uh, if you hold to naturalism, and I can see all the problems with the reliability of your cognitive faculties, given and adherence to something like naturalism, and you're saying, "Hey, even given the problems with my cognitive faculties, I think I can actually speak to the unreliability of everyone out there." This mutant berry finding ability is starting to sound an awful lot like omniscience. Like, I know everything about the world, and I know what, uh, that all these people are somehow wrong, and I know the correct position, and so on. And I'm basing this on a, on a mutant berry finding ability. That's kind of the problem.

Aron: Sounds weird. Yeah, because I didn't say anything remotely like that. So I wonder where you were, where, where you were when I was talking, or what you were listening to, because I said nothing like that. Um, I don't understand what the, what you, the problem you imagine with the, with naturalism. If I don't assume, if I assume that the natural, from past experience, again, objective past experience confirmed by a whole bunch of other people, that there's never been any demonstration that we can actually verify that there is a supernatural. If there was, there wouldn't be just one, there'd be several of them, right? But there'd be something. We'd be able to, I would be back where I was when I was in high school when I thought there was verification of this, that there were people that were demonstrating telekinetic abilities or telepathic abilities, or that, that, that parapsychologists were actually finding ectoplasm and that we could examine the chemical construct of ectoplasm when I thought that all of that was real. But one by one, by one, everything falls apart. And now I'm asking you, as someone who actually holds to and takes seriously the naturalism position, which is that the people who believe in magic, the supernatural, have consistently failed to show that there's any truth to their position at all. I give you the position. I explain that I will hold to my, my part of the, the, the, the burden of proof. I explain the kinds of things that would convince me, which is entirely different than what you described about Dawkins, is entirely different what they, what you paraphrased about me. I said what I would accept, what we should all accept, what we should expect. This is what I used to believe. This is what I used to think is the truth. And if it was the truth, and then, then all of these things would have been confirmed. I wouldn't have constantly only shown that everything is frauds, falsehoods, and fallacies, and nothing beyond that. You would at this point not be pushing everything onto me to tell me that I need to prove a negative. You would be presenting a positive. You'd be showing that there is a supernatural. You'd be showing some way to objectively verify that, not just one way, but several ways. But you haven't produced a way. Nothing at all. You, you have said a few things that are, that have mischaracterized my position entirely, and that's literally all you've done. Can you do better than that, please?

David: Well, the topic is not Aron Raw's personal beliefs. The topic is, nor did I say, "So is naturalism true?" Right? Which is not my, I said, "I will hold the position that naturalism is true." I don't have a problem with that. But it's not my personal belief. We're not here for me personally. We're talking about objectively, as I've specified many times, can you show that there is a supernatural addition to this natural world, other than making false statements that not assuming impossible nonsense for no good reason is somehow natural, or excuse me, rational was the word you used, which, by the way, that is absolutely the opposite of rational by definition. Um, so, so look it up. What rational? Assuming impossible nonsense for no good reason. That is not rational. Are, are atoms rational? Are they assumed for no good reason? No. Are, is an atom rational? An atom itself, a rational thing? Okay, so normally that would involve, if I, if I break down a cell phone, is any one component of the cell phone an entire cell phone? At that point, like, do you believe all your thoughts are determined? I'm not sure. I don't want to, I don't want to misrepresent you. Do you believe your, your thoughts are determined by, by straightforward, uh, are they causally determined by physical processes? I'm not entirely sure. So you might be, you, you'd be open to supernatural?

Aron: No, what I'm, I'm not, that's not what I'm saying.

David: Okay, okay. I am open to whatever might be true if you can show me that it might be true. I would be open to that. Now, not really naturalist. You're just saying, "I don't know. I don't know if naturalism is true or not." That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying I'm holding the position that there's no, there is no supernatural because no one's ever been able to demonstrate that frauds, falsehoods, and fallacies are not evidence, and that's all I've ever seen.

Aron: No, that's, that's, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying if, do you have anything more than that? I'm not, I'm, look, I do debates. If you want to debate the existence of God, or if you want to debate whether superna-, debate coincidentally right now, do you have something to show that there is? I would regard that as off-topic. If you want to debate, "Is supernaturalism true?" On this topic, I ask you, "If you can debate this topic," and you said it's off-topic. We're in a debate titled, "Is Naturalism True?" Can you show naturalism is not true? Or am I on the wrong side of the table? Listen, if someone, if our debate was, "Is metaphysical solipsism true?" And I just sat back as a metaphysical solipsist, "I believe I'm the only thing that exists," and I say, "You prove to me you exist." The metaphysical solipsist says, "For proof that you exist." You're saying you wouldn't say no? If you're, if you're defending metaphysical solipsism, then present your case.

David: Your case. Your case can't be, your case for metaphysical solipsism can't be, "Well, nothing anyone else is saying is proving, uh, proving, some other position to be true." It would be, "Is your position true?"

Aron: All right, so you can make up another debate that I wouldn't participate in, in which you could win because I wouldn't participate in that debate. But in the debate, I, I would, I would participate in a debate called, "Is Supernaturalism True?" But I would, if you, oh, I'm sorry, if metaphysical, whatever, in the other, in the hypothetical debate, I wouldn't be participating in that one. But this one, I'm okay with, and I'm expecting you. It's a, it's a parallel. I'm expecting we, we, I'm taking the position that naturalism is, which is a ridiculous thing, still, because it is a shifting of the burden of proof. But I'm still here for that, because it's the burden for you is the same either way. You still have to show that naturalism is not true. The only way to do that is to show that there is a supernatural aspect. You have not even attempted to do that.

David: No, that's false. Open to that. The way to, the way to reject naturalism is not necessarily, that would be proving supernaturalism. Would be one way to do it. Yeah. I've chosen a philosophical response, which again goes back, I mean, demonstrates my position that you can't show that there is a supernatural. No, it doesn't. If I, again, I started off by pointing out that there are catastrophic self-deceptive. Did I win this easily? Has he shown that naturalism is true? I haven't seen. I haven't seen an argument other than, "Is not." I gave the criteria. I showed what it would take. Gave many different options that you could present. I gave you multiple reasons to show that if we take your, my argument, we can't, that's not, that's naturalism. I'm not misrepresenting naturalism. You mischaracterized my position a number of times. You said I didn't present. My position is, if I mean, if you're saying, "I know," and I just presented it. I'm responding. I'm responding to a philosophical position called naturalism, or metaphysical naturalism, that is a claim that the natural world is all that exists. Right? And as a follow-up to that, there's a question of how you would prove something like that false. The other issue is, is the worldview coherent? I'm saying it is incoherent. It is, it is, it's not, it's not the same as thinking that you're being constantly deceived by an all-powerful deceiver or something like that. If someone came to me, if someone came up to me right now and said, "David, my worldview is that I'm constantly being deceived by an omnipotent deceiver. Prove me wrong." It would not cross my mind to say, "Well, let me go through all the evidence and prove to you that there's no omnipotent deceiver." My response would be, "If you take that seriously, you've got some problems here." Are the problems that you have? You cannot coherently hold that position. So now I'm saying that with a position like naturalism, again, it's not the exact same thing as an omnipotent deceiver, but you're dealing with fundamentally non-rational causes for everything you believe. You're dealing with cognitive faculties that have no business dealing with a question, dealing with a topic like naturalism. Again, it's feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproducing. It's not made for anything beyond that. And you're applying it. Again, this is Darwin. This is Hume. Hume talks about going far beyond what our faculties are made for, and you're judging the entire universe. So I'm pointing out those kinds of problems, which again, all you have to do is say, "Okay, I don't affirm naturalism. I don't know what the case is, but I'm not a supernaturalist." That's it. That's it. But that would notice then we would agree that we have no real reason to believe in naturalism. But, but no, yet Hume described why we should, because we have no choice but to, but to accept as a beast would, or as a baby would, that what our senses perceive is the truth of the matter. We don't have a choice in that. We have to accept the reality of these things.

Aron: No, I, I note that you came up with a second hypothetical debate in which you would win that one, because I wouldn't even participate in that one either. But that second hypothetical debate still shows that you can't meet this one, the one you're in right now, where you're trying to prove that naturalism is not true. Because I can accept either side of this. I can accept that I, I, I either hold the position that there's just the natural and there is nothing else, in which case you would have to show me that there's a something else, or I can say, "Hey, look, I realize that this is a shifting of the burden of proof. I believe that there is a natural world. Please show me that there's something else." In either case, you still have the same burden of proof. Either way, I gave you the criteria. I gave you the many different ways that you can meet that, and all you could do is mischaracterize my position and come up with hypothetical debates that apparently you wish you were in right now.

David: Um, no, these are all men as examples to illustrate some of the problems. And by the way, Hume is a perfect, presented a problem. Hume is a perfect example right here. And this would be an example of, of, of what I'm talking about right now. If you asked Hume, "Is naturalism true?" Hume would say, "Why the heck are you asking me? How would I know? How the heck, how would I know that? How would I possibly know that?" You go to Darwin. "Hey, hey, Darwin, does the, does the universe look like it formed by chance?" "Do you think the universe by chance?" "No, I don't trust myself to talk about things like that." So you can, you don't even have to be a supernaturalist. You don't have to prove supernaturalism. Again, I've agreed. If you want to have a debate where that's the topic, then I'm happy to do that. If the topic is, "Is naturalist true?" you don't have to be a supernaturalist to reject naturalism. You could say, "I don't know. I'm not made for this. Why would you even think, why would you even think, given my cognitive abilities, that I'm capable of making a decision like that?" If you agree with that, then good. We can go home. We actually agree on something, and I'll give you at least that. So you, you can make some points, and I agree that Darwin wouldn't have argued about the origin of the universe. I've seen creationists, because, you know, that's what I usually argue with. Creationists have criticized Darwin for believing in big, or for inventing Big Bang. That Darwin was an evolutionist, so he must have invented the Big Bang. And there, you know, excuse me, Darwin was a hundred years before the Big Bang. He didn't even, he never heard of the Big Bang. He didn't think that the universe had, he didn't come up with that.

Aron: We agree. What's that? We agree. Darwin did not come up with that. Yeah. So I mean, there's a number of things that we actually agree on. But we still have the point that if I take the position that the natural world is all there is, and we both agree that there is a natural world, y-, then it falls upon you to show that there is a supernatural alternative. Now, if I take the point that, that this is all there is, and this is my belief is that that all there is, well, now it's up to you to prove me wrong. Either way, you still have the burden of proof. If all you can do is tell me that I can't prove that there's not magic, that tells me that you can't prove that there is. And notice, you agree, you admitted that you would not debate someone on whether metaphysical solipsism is true.

David: Right, because I don't want to, I want to pretend that I've imagined everybody in the room. Yeah, and it would be too easy to to win that. I'm saying, I'm saying if a dreamed you up, if a metaphysical solipsist said, "I challenge you, uh, to a debate, is metaphysical solip-, am I the only thing that exists?" And I challenge you to a debate. And then I say, "The burden of proof is on you to prove that something outside of me exists." But just so you know, I'm going to interpret everything, any evidence you could give me, as my own mental states, just to entertain."

Aron: Understood. And in the hypothetical debate that you are not currently in, because you can't apparently debate the one you're currently in, this is an example. It's exactly what's going on in the one that you've just invented. That's called an analogy to make a point. I understand. And in the answer that I gave you, that apparently you didn't hear, my answer to that would be that I would have imagined you to say that. So in the debate that we're actually in on whether naturalism is true, if I take either of the two positions, because I'm good with either one, can you show me that there is something other than the natural? Can you justify any of the false statements that you've made about my position or me, or any of that? I'm not aware of any, uh, false statements about your position. I'm talking about naturalism here. And, no, the, if the, if a topic is, "Is naturalism true?" Yes, one way would be to demonstrate supernaturalism. I said I'd be happy to debate supernaturalism. Totally happy to do that. If the topic is, "Is naturalism true?" The, there's not one way to go about that. You can show that there are problems in, in internal to the position that make it incoherent and make it such that no one can rationally affirm that position who is aware with some, who is aware of some of these problems. You're not dealing with any of the problems. You're just saying, "You have to prove to me some alternative is correct." I'm saying it is a fundamentally incoherent position. And you failed to that. You made an assertion about that. You made an assertion about that, but you failed to make the point. You, you said things that did not make sense that if naturalism was true, that that there would be these, these, these, these conclusions that are non-sequiturs. They don't fit. What the, the ones I got from, from Darwin and Hume and Patricia Churchland. And, yeah, excluding Churchland. You get him from the 19th century. So is that, is he wrong? I don't hold 19th-century scientist. No, no, no. I'm saying Darwin is saying, "Hey, yeah, the universe looks designed." Now, you could say, "Hey, we know more about the way, more about the universe than we did back then." But I have no reason to think that someone couldn't do, couldn't hold the exact same position. If he, understand, he's not saying that based on how much he knows about the universe. He's saying that based on his view of where he got his cognitive faculties. So I'm saying a person right now, notice, if you said, "Hey, there's a Big Bang," and a, a theist would say, "Ah, you see, that's how God created the universe." And an atheist, uh, uh, cosmologist would say something completely different. It, it seems entirely plausible that someone could say, "If someone's a naturalist and believes that he arrived at his cognitive faculties in a certain way, would just say, 'How am I supposed to know whether that has something to do with God or not? I don't know. I have no idea.'" So I'm saying, if you look at where, according to naturalism, how you arrived at your cognitive faculties, your, your reasoning abilities, how you got them, what the purpose of them is, is especially if you consider some of the, some of the issues like epiphenomenalism, where, where your mental states aren't even playing a causal role in, in what your body is, is doing, and they're just a weird byproduct. It makes perfect sense to say, "I cannot affirm naturalism. I'm not going to affirm anything else. I'm not going to say anything else is true. I'm just saying, 'How in the name of common sense would I think that I'm made for this kind of thing? I'm not.' Therefore, I don't know." That seems to be Darwin's position. And given his view of how he got his cognitive faculties, he seems entirely right. Even if he knew way more about the universe and way more about the world and way more about the laws of physics and so on, it still, given that belief, it still makes perfect sense to me to say, "How, that, how would I know?" And that seems to be Hume's position. And I think Hume could learn a lot more about the universe. You could let Hume know everything we know right now. He's a, he's a genuine skeptic. It looks like he would say, "I'm not made for, I'm not made for any of this stuff. Given my world, I'm not just not made for this stuff. How would I know?" And that would mean you, you can't, that naturalism is true, which is our debate topic. Yeah. And so I don't have any contest with the 19th century, or indeed the 18th century view of this question. I don't have a problem with that at all. But as I have explained, in either of the positions that I take, it falls upon you to show me that there is an exception, something that is not rational. And what you've given me are arguments that are not rational. Excuse me, that's why I didn't say that. Something that is not natural. Something that, that is supernatural. And what you've given me are arguments that are not rational. That we are not rational simply because we're natural, simply because we do not assume things that are not evidently true, nor even possible. You said that was rational, that we should assume things that are not possible or not apparently possible. I would grant that Darwin thought that the, the universe looks designed. Dawkins has said that the universe looks designed. I've seen things myself that look like that, looks like there's a, there's a reason that there was this, this was devised. And I can figure out the, the population mechanics, the natural selection, whatever that would lead to something like that appearing to be designed. There's something I call incidental design. I get where these people in earlier decades would have thought something like this. But the question now is, is the universe just natural, or is there something more? You can't show that there's anything more. All you can do is point to me and say that I can't, can't prove a negative in this case. Okay, maybe I can't prove the negative in this case, a negative that was never indicated, for which there's not even a possibility to consider. Um, can you, so you're talking about these guys being in the 19th century? Uh, again, I see no reason that a person right now wouldn't hold the same position. Uh, so imagine someone like Richard Dawkins. Wouldn't it make, would you, would you be, would you be shocked to see someone who has like the, the knowledge, the scientific knowledge of Richard Dawkins, sitting back saying, "You know, I've thought about this for a while, and I've thought about what my cognitive faculties are for, and how they were selected for, and what they were meant for, and then how I'm applying them now. And yes, they work really well for certain things. But when it comes to the, you know, the, the universe and what something that could be beyond it, or souls or spirits or something like that, I, I just have, I just have no idea. I, I don't trust my cognitive abilities to make rulings on this sort of thing." I've, I've already seen Dawkins say things where I wouldn't trust his cognitive abilities on that.

Aron: Okay, but that, that's all I can. Why are atheists turning against Richard? Because we don't have authority for one thing. It's all based on the data. That's what I care about. I don't care about personal experiences. Your personal experiences are meaningless. My personal experiences proved to be meaningless. I couldn't trust myself. I wanted objective verification. You're unable to give me that. You can't even recite the things that I told you. You can't even get that right. You turn around and say that I didn't make a case when I clearly made a case, and you say that I won't, I won't accept the burden of proof when I clearly did.

David: Ten seconds. Actually, yeah. I think I cut you out right at the right time. All right, we're going to do five-minute closings. And you know how I did this last time. So over to you, David. Five minutes on the clock. With your Canadian system. With my Canadian European. That is weird. The person who started should be the. You never noticed I always do that on the show. No. All right. Over to you, David. Notice every, all the Americans agree. All the Americans are where are we? Are we in, [Laughter] Ottawa? You're good. You're good. It's, it's your, your show. You make all the rules. No matter what anyone else. All right. So all right. So just, again, just to, uh, just to recap. Um, naturalism is it true? Uh, I, I, I made an argument in my opening statement that if you, you can look at this in multiple ways. You can look at it, uh, just from the perspective of what your cognitive faculties are. If the natural world is all that exists, it's all particles in motion. Again, if you tell a, it's very common to say to the Christian, "Oh, you, you were raised to believe in God, and that's why you believe in God. You were just raised that way." Well, well, guess what? So you're raised by other people with, with functioning minds to believe in something that's considered a, you know, a justification for dismissing it. Like, if you were just raised to believe in something, that doesn't make it true or something like that. Imagine if the reason you believe in something is completely mindless particles in motion. The reason you believe or don't believe, the reason you believe in God or you don't believe in God is all just a series of particle interactions, and this was decided for you long before you were born because everything is causally determined. Do you think that might be a problem? No, it's not, according to our atheist friends. It's no consideration whatsoever. If you take, again, very popular position, it's the position of Thomas Huxley, epiphenomenalism, that your mental states are actually just a weird byproduct of the physical processes that are going on. The physical processes are proceeding exactly according to causal determinism. Your mental states are like a train, train whistle, choo-choo, that's it. That's all that it is. It plays no causal role in what leads to those beliefs. Do you think that might be a problem for treating your, your, uh, assessments of all of reality as valid? I certainly would. I certainly would. And then you have, if you're talking about how you got your cognitive faculties, where did you get them? What was the process? Well, our friends, our atheist friends, can lay out exactly who, exactly how it happened. How do we get these beliefs? They were selected. They were selected, and the processes that gave us our cognitive faculties are the exact same processes that gave the, the tiger its claws and the baboon its colorful rear end. Why would you think that you could take an ability like that and use it to determine all of reality, or to say, "Hey, this person says he witnessed a miracle. This person doesn't know what he's talking about. This person's wrong." Why do you think he's wrong? Because my particles in my mind determined me to think like that. So the point here is, again, it's not, it's not naturalism versus supernaturalism. You could have a debate like that if the topic is whether naturalism is true. If the, if the position is simply incoherent and it self-destructs, great. Take that into account. Then you can investigate whether supernaturalism is true. But we don't have a, we just don't have a good reason to think that naturalism is true. You can say I'm agnostic about it, or I don't trust my cognitive faculties, but you have no reason to just say that this position is correct. So I would say, if you understand all of it, you understand what your mental abilities and your mental states and your cognitive faculties are according to naturalism. If you still trust your cognitive faculties after that, either you're not really a naturalist, or you're just a terrible and inconsistent, uh, naturalist. Um, so I just wanted to point out lots of times we, uh, we show up to debates to attack other people's positions. Show up to debates to attack other people's positions, and we want to say, "Hey, attack that other person's position." Uh, occasionally, occasionally we're trying to understand other people's positions. And yes, I like the attacking part. I do. But, but I would like it if everyone at least understood, at least understood, uh, the thinking going on here. Um, if you ever want to understand what's going on in my head when we're having a discussion like this, it goes something like this. This debate, and every debate we have, and every debate that's ever been on modern-day debate, if I'm looking at that, it makes way, way, way, way more sense to me that we're having these kinds of debates if we're using faculties that have some other origin other than just mindless processes and particles and motion. So it really looks to me like something else is going on here. Um, can I defend supernaturalism? Happy to do that. Aron, happy to, happy to have that discussion. But as of right now, even in this, even just having this discussion, all I really hear out of you the entire time is, "Don't take naturalists seriously. They can't, can't be taken seriously."

Aron: All right, thank you for your closing statement there. Five minutes on the clock for you, Aron. Well, that wasn't remotely what I implied in any way at all. Despite that grotesque mischaracterization at the very end, I want to thank, uh, David Wood for being, what I, what I suspected would be the case. I've seen a number of your previous debates, and when I've seen you argue against Muslims, it's very coherent arguments, very well thought out and done. And so I realized when I accepted a chance to debate you that it would be a, a more challenging debate than the last several that I have had. And I, I'm being completely honest. But that said, uh, it still occurs to me that, and I always want to understand the other person's position, even when I'm, even when I'm talking to a Muslim or a flat earther, I want to know where they got to where they are. I really, really do. And sometimes it's completely mystifying. The problem that I have with believers like yourself is that all of you collectively seem to have this terrible problem understanding the concept of emergence. How something can happen with an appearance of implied or or inherent, or excuse me, incidental design that was not intentionally designed. It's like you have this perspective that everything has to be governed from the top down, when really it's emerging from the bottom up. And we've got lots of indication that this is the case, and nothing whatsoever to imply that it was dictated from the top down. That that just doesn't happen. How much time do I have? Okay, thank you. So all the claims, absolutely all of them for all the supernaturals, you can, you can find everybody has their own supernatural stuff. You can find clergy that have volumes of supernatural claims. Not one thing can be verified. Lots of it can be falsified. There is no truth to any religion. Nothing we can show to be true. Nothing that any religion can show that they're any more accurate about than every other religion. And every other religion is all declaring that they're the absolute truth and the revealed word of the one true God, even when they can't agree on what God that is. If they have a God, because some of them don't. Some of them have something different. But they're all professing their personal experience. They're all expressing, they're all expressing how they have this personal evidence, and this whatever it is drives them to this belief. I want to understand it. I just can't. I'm sorry that I don't have a problem understanding how population mechanics can lead to implicit or, or excuse me, in-, uh, inherent, or what was the word I used? Incidental. Incidental appearance of design, because it just naturally would. I never had a problem understanding that. Believers constantly have this issue. And then you retort by telling me that it is irrational. This is the part that I'm having a problem with. You tell me that it is irrational.

Not to assume things that are not implied, things that are not indicated, things that are not possible that I should assume these things. That I should H, that I should accept that this is the probability when it's not even a possibility. I have a problem with that. You have to show me that it's a possibility first, then show me that it's a probability, then show me that it's a fact. We can't get to the first step because there is evidently no truth at all to anything supernatural whatsoever. There's no souls, there's no God. All the scriptures are are made up folklore, fantasy folklore, you know, myths and legends and all of that as a compilation. There's just nothing else. Faith healing doesn't work. Faith healers don't work in hospitals. I mean, all we have is frauds, falsehoods, fallacies. That's it. That's all. That's the entirety of it. You can come tell me that you're a Reiki master, you're no different to the Pope. It's all make-believe. I was hoping from someone of your caliber that I would get something better than that. I'm done. All done.

All right, well, we're going to kick it into a Q&A, guys. So if we want to make a line for those who are here before, you know what to do. If you haven't been here, we're just going to make a line, go into the back of the room there, over towards the door. If it's too long, thank you, everybody. And thank you to our speakers, of course. All right, your first question. Yeah, do you have reference to that, uh, Dawkins, Boghossian interview or the discussion? Yeah, you could, you could probably just, you probably, they're not that many with Go. Uh, you can talk to me afterwards. I can, yeah, I can, I can verify. I don't know. I don't know how many discussions they've had. I've heard Dawkins ask that same question, and that's not the, the answer I've heard from him. He says, he says that he, yeah, he says that he's, yeah, you can talk to me afterwards. I'll find you exactly. But he has said that his position has changed. He said that his position has changed over the years. He said when, you know, younger Dawkins would have said, hey, all kinds of things, God could do, God could talk to me, God could do. And he said, I've since come to realize one. You saw, and that's the one I want. Yeah, I'll give it to you afterwards. Yeah, we'll look it up. We'll just look it up. You, you can, you can kind of, you can kind of, I can kind of tell by what they're wearing. So they're wearing the same thing in the picture I, I showed. Yeah, then that's, that's the one. Yeah, there, there, there's a section there. They start, they start earlier on and they're talking about fine-tuning and stuff like that, and then they get into what would actually. Okay. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah, you can show it to me and I'll tell you. Just be over there. Uh, hang on. I saw. Right. Oh, thank you so much. Never mind. He's got another one over. I should have taken two when you offered two. H, your question. Arin and David, thank you both for this debate. It was very spirited. Arin, Arin, I'm sorry, by the way, is that a real name or is that like, it's Icelandic? Wow. I was, I was in, I was in a restaurant in Iceland and I said, here, let me show you. I have a table full of friends. I write my name down. The waiter comes over, blonde, of course, like, how do you say that name? Goes, even rolled the R. See, I have a question for David. Uh, the natural universe, at least appears to be in principle, consistently measurable. Is there a method or process that you can think of that would allow us to consistently measure the supernatural or the non-natural world?

Um, no, I don't know how you would, uh, consistently measure the supernatural. It's been pointed out that, um, if something supernatural occurred, it would kind of immediately fall after that. It would kind of immediately fall into the natural world, right? Like, like if I'm, if I'm, if I'm dying of cancer and I just get miraculously healed, someone says the name of Jesus, get better, and I get better. From that moment, everything is completely natural over again. And, and that, that's that kind of, that's kind of the issue because there is something that Dawkins is right about. You can can always interpret anything that happens as natural if you, depending on how far you're willing to go. So, like, I could say, look, here, here are a hundred doctors who all saw this guy and they verified and he, the scans and he had cancer, and some guy walked up and put his hands on him, said, in the name of Jesus, be healed. You can always say, I think they're all making it up, or they all misread something, or someone's playing a trick, or there either are cosmic, uh, you know, they're aliens. And so, uh, for me, it's kind of a, uh, not, not something I'm going to explain in a, in a, uh, in a Q&A period, but it's kind of, you, you're looking for a certain pattern. Looking for a pattern to the to the supernatural. Yeah. Yeah. And this is going to sound strange, but I disagree that if magic was real, it wouldn't necessarily be natural. We would have discovered supernatural. So when Gandalf, you know, does the incantation and the crystal on the end of his staff lights up, it's because he did the incantation. So there's some, the magic is defined the same way miracles are. It's the evocation of supernatural forces or RTI to control or forecast natural events in ways that are inexplicable by science because they defy the laws of physics, right? So when you do incantations, when you have psychic phenomenon, telekinetic movement, and that sort of thing, all the psionics, what all I would be open, and I was for the longest time, open to all kinds of things that I would have accepted as supernatural if the word magical is offensive, just go supernatural, which would include psionics and so forth. I would accept that there was a whole another world to that, and it was increasingly frustrating that I couldn't find scrap one of that alternate world. Yeah.

All right, your question. Uh, I just wanted to say first off, thank you guys both for coming by, uh, and debating. It was very cordial. I wish me and my friend from Singapore were as cordial as you guys. It usually gets pretty hectic. Uh, but my question is, either way works. Yeah, but my, my question for, uh, uh, it could be for both of you guys, but mostly for, uh, Arin, is that, um, that you claimed earlier that, uh, there was no proof of supernatural or that it, any kind of proof that was in history has been debunked. Uh, yet there have been many instances. I said it was either dubious at best or has already been debunked. Right. Exactly. Uh, but, and I was specifically talking about the miracles that were supposed, that were claimed as confirmed by the Catholic Church. Okay. Yeah, 'cause I was actually getting, I was about to get into something. One of those by the way was a bleeding statue, or it was a, a statue with tears, right? And people would come up and lick the tears off the feet of the statue. And then a friend of mine from India found out what that was. It was a backed-up toilet elsewhere in the temple that was causing this leak to come down the statue. I thought I saw that scene in South Park with the bleeding. Made it way. Yeah, yeah. The funny thing was, when he revealed what the truth is, you would think that the people who were licking human feces off this statue would be appreciative of the fact that that, that now they're aware of what there, this terrible thing that they're doing. But no, they wanted to kill him for disrupting their fantasy. Well, I mean, look on the bright side, at least now we know what ecoli is. So yeah, we'll have to get that question out because there was a cur Your Enthusiasm episode like that. Yeah. So, um, anyways, but to what I was saying was, um, there have been many instances of, uh, supernatural and religion, you know, being intertwined with our world, uh, almost like 2,000 years, uh, before the birth of Jesus. The Zoroastrian religion, uh, prophesized that a chosen one that they called a Sant would be born out of a virgin woman, uh, and within 30 years, the world will know who he is, and he will rid the world of evil. Be careful about those, because there's a lot of those kinds of prophecies that we get in popular culture. Fortunately, I went to go verify a bunch of these, like in, I can't remember his name, there was a guy that wrote that wrote about 16 of these Christs, and I can't remember the author's name right now, but 16 crucified saviors. And it turned out, I was only able to verify two of them. But what I was going to go with was that, um, even at his birth, three wise men, which were also called Magi, who were the priests in, uh, Persia, they also admitted, or they also went to see him. And then, not only that, but in the book of Isaiah, um, they met, he prophesies that King Cyrus would, uh, save, uh, the Jews. And this was written 200 years before Cyrus even came into existence. So with all that being in, in mind, uh, could you really still make the argument that all of that was, uh, not supernatural in any way? And if David, if you knew about this or didn't, if you want to put in your input as well, there are a lot of prophecies and not just with the Hebrew religion, but but but Zoroastrianism and Hinduism. I've seen examples like where in Hinduism, for example, they have retrofitted their prophecies into where the sixth incarnation of Vishnu came back as Buddha to deceive the atheists. And this was all written after the fact. So a lot of these prophecies are coming in after the fact. They're written after they're supposedly fulfilled. And then some of them that the few that we can verify actually were prophecies and actually did occur before the event failed spectacularly. And Matthew 7 is a perfect example of that where the the child will, but by the the maiden is with child. By the time she, by the time the child can choose honey over curds, you will realize the king, you will realize that your enemies are no threat. Before that happened, the enemies were a threat and they wiped him out. So, I mean, it failed every way that it could fail.

All right, your question. Uh, well, he said that was for for both of us, uh, but yeah, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not really gonna, um, uh, I'm going to give you a, a perspective of a theist. So, I, I believe in the supernatural, I believe in, uh, miracles and so on. If you also do, doesn't mean you have to believe every miracle claim that comes along. So, yeah. So notice, if you got, again, let's say a billion people who believe they've witnessed some miracles, and you go to certain places, and it's like 70% of the converts convert because they believe they've witnessed some supernatural healing or something like that. Uh, Arin and I might look at some of the same ones, go, nah, I'm not, I'm not buying that. Uh, and other ones, you'd say, I don't know, could be, could be either way. Like you say, hey, you were really sick and you got better, or something like that. Okay, maybe something weird happened and your immune system got turbocharged or something like that. And then, but then, so the question is, do you act? Now, notice here's the, here's, here's the only thing I wanted to point out. Uh, you, let's say you have other ones where really, really, you've got plenty of witnesses, this person was really sick and then just instantly got better when someone put their hands on, or was blind and then could see, or something like that. Notice there, you'd obviously have a better case. But even in, even in the ones where it's, hey, I was sick and then a guy prayed for me and I got better, even that doesn't have to be a miracle, right? So it, it kind, it kind of depends on the, it kind of depends on the situation. But there are some where you could say, okay, yeah, uh, I don't know, could be a miracle or or could not. And there are other cases where, h, that looks like it's fake or someone's misinterpreting something. And then other ones where, I don't know, if these guys are telling the truth, then sounds like there's something there. But anyway, yeah. So the, the point there is, you can believe in the supernatural and not believe that everything, every story that's told to you is is true.

All right, we're going to have to try to be a little quicker here, just because we have the next debate coming up. So we'll, you want rapid fire? Yeah, well, not quite rapid fire, but, you know, I'll give you a chance. Borderline rapid fire. No. Yes. Australia, 1942. They were done. I'll try to make it quick. Go. Canada. All right, so I am a naturalist. I do understand that people have problems with cognitive function. You're a 19th century scientist. I'm sorry, I am a 21st century person, not a scientist. Anyways, you said you're a naturalist. I'm a naturalist. I do understand that we do have problems with cognitive functions. We can actually measure that. We can see that between various peoples. I have problems with my own ability to understand the external world. And we, the way we get around that is by collaborating and confirming that what we're experiencing is true or not. It seems to be like you're claiming that rationality is a supernatural sort of claim. And I want to know how you know that is true. Very much. Uh, it's not. It's more along the lines of, and by the way, I'm saying this, I'm saying this because I'm thinking if I were a naturalist, this would be my position. If I were a naturalist and I believe this is how I got my cognitive faculties and this is what my mental states actually are, I would be pretty skeptical in the sense that I would say, how, how would I know? How would I know what, how would I know what's true about the universe or not, beyond what what can be verified? But if you're talking about whether there are things beyond, how would I, how would I know any of that? That I'm saying that, that because that's my position. But what I would say is that if we can say, here's what your cognitive faculties are according to naturalism, specifically combined with how you got those cognitive faculties, if that's what, if that's the state of our cognitive faculties given this worldview, and then we treat them as something like they're way, they're way more reliable than that, it seems like we're treating them as if we're rejecting, as if we don't really believe in naturalism, right? So that's kind of, that's kind of the position.

Your question. Yeah, so there are many testimonies about miracles happening, and so we would assume that is a supernatural phenomenon. And there is one case that I find really compelling, and so I just want your thoughts about it. There was a pastor, and he is preaching a sermon about healing, but he had gotten an infection and he had a lot of damage to his vocal cord, so his voice was very distorted and very difficult to understand. And in the middle of his sermon, you hear in the recording, it just goes completely back to normal. And there is a lot of medical documentation showing that he had these medical issues, and he went to the specialist, and he can't give him any kind of explanation because this was scar tissue, and there's just no way that it could have just disappeared. And so if you were to see that documentation, what, what would you think about that? Would that make you consider miracles a possibility, or the supernatural possibility? I don't automatically dismiss something just because it doesn't agree with what I already hold. I know that faith-based arguments will automatically dismiss whatever, but I always try to keep open the possibility that I might be wrong on any point. If I were to see documentation that backs up what you're saying, I would be forced to consider it. My expectation going in is that it probably won't, because whenever I've looked for that documentation, every time I've got into a debate with a creationist and they say that this scientific paper supports this or approves that or whatever, when I get a chance to read it, no, it doesn't. It says exactly the opposite, every single time. So I will have doubts, but I'm not going to be unreasonable.

All right, your question. So you both seem to agree that the natural world is real. But I'm really glad about that, by the way. I hate that argument. Pretty standard. Pretty standard. Uh, but you're asserting that there is more than just the natural. No, I'm not. I'm not. In this debate, I'm not. I believe I believe there's more, but I'm, I'm just saying, I, I don't know. If I stick to a topic, I'm sticking to a topic. Is naturalism true? Again, I pointed out that there are two ways to reject naturalism. One, you could say, okay, here's, here's proof that that there's something supernatural. The other is to say it's incoherent. Don't affirm it. It doesn't mean it doesn't mean the opposite. It doesn't mean. So based on what we're talking about here, rejecting naturalism does not mean that supernaturalism is true. It just means you don't have the cognitive faculties to affirm it. So you can't affirm that it's that it's true. With, if, if I stopped being a theist right now, if I stopped being a Christian, if I, in other words, if I were an atheist right now, if I became an atheist, I, I probably still wouldn't affirm naturalism. I'd just be like, I don't know. How would I know? I'm not made for this. We got, let, we got to let him ask this question here and get the grace in. Although it seems to be the case that as was evident there, that instead of substantiating that there is more than the natural world, your primary evidence throughout the course of this discussion has instead been that, uh, the alternative to your, uh, uh, mindset is that we would be forced to live in a deterministic world. I'm not sure how that follows, because even if we assume that it's true, which it doesn't necessarily follow that if we live in a purely naturalistic world, we're all living in a deterministic world. But assuming that that is the case, how would that be any different from the world that we already live in? When determinists are stating that everyone is walking around thinking that they have free will, but free will and determinism look the same. It's just a matter of perspective. The only difference seems to be the confidence that you are applying to free will, and I'm not sure why that would create any more confidence than us living in a deterministic universe. Uh, as far as determinism is true, it's kind of, if you're a naturalist, it's kind of the only game in town. I mean, even people who argue that something at a, at a quantum level, uh, wouldn't be deterministic and so on, that doesn't help your reasoning abilities at all. In fact, it seems like it would make them less reliable if random things are happening and causing thoughts. Uh, as far as, as far as like a, a theistic view versus, um, a naturalistic view, you've got a couple things. Once you can have other things involved other than particles in motion, but you also could arrive, you could, your cognitive abilities can have a different source, source beyond just what natural processes. In other words, you're, you can have a higher purpose for your cognitive faculties. In other words, if you believe you're created in the image of God, you can look at the universe and say, hey, I was made to figure this out. Uh, if, if you're, if you're stuck with naturalism, you can't say you were made to figure this out. You weren't made for that. You were made to find berries. You're made to survive and reproduce. That's what you're, that's what you're made for.

All right, last question. Critical Base Theory. Glad you made it out. Thanks. Say, is there to David, is there any reason why you would doubt the liability of a fully deterministic machine that's programmed to be rational? Like, it's, it's fully deterministic, but it's programmed to be rational. You said that you would doubt our ability to be rational if our brains were deterministic and just molecules in motion. But would you have any reason to doubt a rational machine? Uh, if something was programmed to be rational, then you can make a case that it's rational. The point is, we're not programmed to be rational. Okay. You think you're programmed. You think you think you're programmed to be rational. Talk about me. Human. Just a hypothetical rational machine. If something is pro, something can do what it's programmed to do. Like, I would, I would trust this. I would trust this laptop to do what it's programmed to do. If it's not, then it's function, there's something wrong. It's not functioning properly. Uh, you can, you can trust something to be, to do. Like, I, if you're programmed to survive and reproduce, and your cognitive faculties are meant to aid you in that, guess what? You can have reliable cognitive faculties for those kinds of things. It's, again, it's the same thing that Hume said. Once you go far beyond what your cognitive faculties are fit to do, you trust it less. And less, you can trust your cognitive faculties less and less and less. And so a, a grand theory like naturalism would be like a, a paradigm case of something that is like massively beyond what your cognitive faculties are meant to do. Now, I am not a philosopher. I've never had the time to study philosophy much, which is a lament because I would really like to. But my understanding of determinism and rationalism both conflict with the descriptions that you're giving. I don't believe that that reality is deterministic, nor do I see, I think your arguments failed when you said that it is, that you can't take naturalism seriously or you can't be rational, because does none of this, all of it contradicts the definitions that I understand. Mind you, I'm not a, a full-on philosophy student. Wish that I was. Just wanted, I just want to be clear. If you're, if you're, I don't know what the alternative for a natural, I don't know what the alternative to determinism would be apart from like, again, like quantum events that aren't aren't supposedly causally determined. Uh, but if you, for some reason, you have some view that I'm not aware of, then I would, I would drop that point for you. I would drop the, I would drop the deterministic point. I still think there are other. I argued that natural selection was deterministic in that, that that it ends up heading for something that is going to be better refined for doing whatever it does. That made that argument, then other people come in and say, no, in in philosophy, determinism means that it can't be any other way. Well, everything that evolves can be other ways. There's lots of options. So I can't use the deterministic label anymore. Like I said, I don't study philosophy. So you believe in, in what's called the principle of alternative possibilities? That if, if you could somehow rewind the clock, like right from right now, if you could rewind the clock back an hour, things could play out differently and they wouldn't be determined. If there are, if there are other possibilities, if you, if you don't just wind back time and let it be exactly as it was, if there's anything changed, something, then well, yeah, of course, if you change that. But I mean, determinism is if, if nothing is, if you just let everything play out without the changes, then everything is just going to, you could rewind the clock a thousand times, the exact same thing is going to happen unless we're in essence.

We're gonna have to wrap it up because we do have the next debate starting in just a few minutes. So, uh, I know him, he'll be cool.

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David Wood Vs Aron Ra | Is Naturalism True? | DEBATECON 4 in Dallas, TX

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