Apologetics Session 4 - Truth - Part 2

Tonight. I want to pray for something kind of special that's going to happen tomorrow. There was a preaching camp here earlier today and the man who came was the same man who preached on Sunday. Dr. Tim was here helping us try to get through exposition and theology and systematic theology and canonical theology and everything like that, straightening us all out.

A few of the folks in this room are going to be preaching tomorrow and he's going to be critiquing that preaching and we're really looking forward to it. So I'm going to pray right now for that. Are all the guys here that are actually doing that tomorrow?

Enough. You two guys are and you I think are too, right? He's on.

Ivan, can I let you open it up for him? Sure, absolutely. Father, thank you so much for this gathering of brothers. Thank you, Lord, for the opportunity to serve you, learning apologetics, learning from each other, and honoring you in this way.

We pray for the gentlemen that are going to be testing the waters tomorrow with their own sermons and give them the joy and confidence and the critical thinking that goes into this. We all are very happy that we are now have the opportunity to be part of this.

We thank you, Lord, for that. So give us a good night here and we ask this all in your.

Name just to say amen. Amen. So I don't want to do a lot of backtracking to what we did last time, but I think we need a little bit of context where we got off from what we were talking about. We were talking about relativism was the last thing we kind of hit on.

And you remember we put up the Richard Dawkins video and, you know, he talked about why absolute morality is not a thing, but morality is kind of an evolving thing. We're getting smarter and smarter and we're getting and we talked about the arguments against that.

But we didn't finish up the section in a sense that I wanted to bring out there's some basic problems with relativism that we can just put in bullet points right now. And it has to do with the assumption of the relativist that says, you know, if you declare there's absolute truth, then what's going to happen is that absolute truth is going to oppress the masses.

That is always going to lead to oppression. It is going to lead to, you know, Muslim women wearing the headdresses and having to cover up. It's going to lead to the Spanish Inquisition. And I would agree with the relativist in the sense that if you start with the wrong absolute truth premise, yes, you will end up in trouble.

But the problem with the relativist and what they don't see is this. Relativism, and I'm reading bullet one now, relativism always causes oppression by the majority. Because relativism by definition is what the popular opinion of the culture says at that time.

Which means there is a democracy, viewed as a democracy. Let's all take public opinion right now. We're going to say this is what our truth is today in our culture. What's the problem with that? Things change.

People change their mind. Sometimes they believe, you know, you can believe that one thing is true and then change your mind about it. And that's why you end up with situations like we can say that Jewish people were the problem, you know, in 1930s Germany.

They're our problem. So we need to get rid of them. We need to take care of them. That was the popular opinion of the day. There's obviously great problems with that. And we had the chart up before which showed if you take all of your civil law, I won't put the chart up again, from public opinion as opposed to something that is absolute and solid, you're going to end up on shaky ground.

And that's what that first bullet is. Now the second bullet with relativism is this. Relativism isn't even logical because obviously, and you've heard this before, if you say that truth is relative, is that statement absolutely true?

It's self-defeating. It is self-defeating because if it is absolutely true, that means there's absolute truth. If it's not absolutely true, then it's self-defeating and they defeated their purpose.

So it's not logical. It's not reasonable to say that relativism is truth. You can have your truth and my truth. It doesn't make any sense. And the last thing, we talked about this before, but relativism causes the stifling of critical thinking.

So society no longer uses intellect and rationality, the mind, to attempt to figure out truth and to determine the nature of truth and reality. Basically it's all shut down. And we say, you know, based upon what we feel, that is what is going to be our truth for the day.

So that's kind of where we ended up. And what I'd like to do now is go into a section about what we call the correspondence theory. And the correspondence theory is anti relativism. What it is, it says there are concrete things in reality.

This is a different, an opposite from subjectivism or relativism. The truth is not based upon the perception of the observer. And John Locke realized that objective truth was comprehensible. Now he also realized that objective truth was to be appropriated by our very fallible senses.

You remember last time we talked about the senses quite a bit and how easily we're fooled, how easily we can come to the wrong conclusion based upon sensory perception. And that's a problem. But Locke takes a common-sense approach, and he takes it from an empirical standpoint.

Empiricism was, I am going to appropriate the physical world and figure out that I can understand truth from the physical things and the sensory perception I have. So let's go through what he thought could be accomplished through our senses.

So he acknowledged that it was difficult to actually get to the point where we understood the essence of things, essence of objects in reality. But he said we can certainly determine that there is objective reality, and we do so by examining the qualities that objects in our world have.

And what does he mean by qualities? He says there are primary qualities and there are secondary qualities. So this is supposed to be a baseball, but I thought this was a lot cooler, actually. I was in that age group, you know.

I found that over in the room, and I was like, man, I might take this thing. Now there are certain things, certain qualities that this has that are primary qualities, and Locke kind of spells some of those things out.

But there's also secondary qualities. The secondary qualities are things that would be only basically things that the observer would know. And let's talk about what these things are. So the primary qualities of things, you can just shout out, like, how would you describe this thing?

And we'll talk about whether it's a primary or a secondary quality. It's round. That was like a baseball. It moves. Movement, roundness, those things are primary qualities. And you're reading all of that at this point, because I have it up there.

Those are things that are primary. They're not dependent upon the observer at all. They're not debatable. Those are objective truths about the object. But if you say this object is fast, you know, the movement is fast, that's kind of a relative thing, right?

It's like, what's that? Or, this object is white. And we talked about color last time, and how we sense color, and is the color itself inherent in the object? And we talked about the reflections of the electromagnetic spectrum, where really this thing isn't white.

And that gets a little bit of a mind-blowing situation there. But this thing also has secondary qualities that would be observable, you know, to the person who is examining it. So, but the primary qualities, Locke is saying, that we actually can determine that there is a existence that we can know, an existence that we can feel, an existence we can experience, and we can live and operate in the world we live in, because objects have primary qualities.

Now, Locke is not like some of our friends, in a sense that Locke feels that the greater truth is outside this physical world. Metaphysics, right? We were talking about metaphysics. People like Plato, and Aristotle, and others, felt like there was something, it must be an external force that was outside of the physical world we see, because of the three laws we talked about, which was ex nihilo, nihilo fico, which was out of nothing, nothing comes.

Which means that this all had to come from somewhere, and the physical world does not explain where all this came from, because we do not see self-creation in this physical world. We don't see spontaneous generation in this physical world.

One of the other laws was cause and effect, meaning that there is something here now, something must have caused it, and that something, Plato and others felt like, was a force in the unseen realm, that must be a greater reality, that we don't see with our senses, or detect with our senses, but it is out there.

We live in a physical world, and we can determine physical things, but there is a greater truth that is out there. Now, Locke's conclusions, he realized that they were going to come up against arguments, and people would say, well, you know, and I'm down with this paragraph now, he's going to use the Rene Descartes argument for why he thinks we can have reliability in our sensual perception, because he knows people are going to say, well, yeah, Locke, our senses can be fooled all over the place, we already proved that, but he's saying, well, I'm going to take the Rene Descartes approach to this, because Rene Descartes was the one, and he lived just before Locke did, and he said, that, well, yeah, there might be, this world might be an entire illusion, there might be a cosmic deceiver out there, a cosmic joker, who is simply providing illusions that we think are reality in our world, and Descartes was reduced to the point where he said, you know what, I'm not sure what I can tell right now, but I know I have my intellect, I know I have cognitive thinking, and he said, I think therefore I am, and he got down to that basic building block, and that was the building block last time I said, oh, wow, that's really deep, you know, well, Locke kind of does the same thing, because he says, okay, if you say we are having sensations within us, that we can feel things, we can touch things, we can taste things, even if our senses are fooled, even if the things are an illusion, he says, the fact that I can have those sensations at all means there must be something that stimulates those sensations, which means that there must be an external reality that is stimulated, even if I can't detect if that's an illusion right now, but that our senses are triggered by something tells us that there is a reality out there, and now, the real thing is, okay, you say that, but what about the Matrix movies, what about those Matrix movies, well, that's right, we're going to take a pill, which pill are we taking, I don't remember, which one was it, red pill is reality, the other one you're living in a fantasy world, now, the people, right, the people were living in a, now, some people may not have seen the movies, okay, Bill's like, oh, my gosh, what are you talking about, I've read the film, what are you talking about, the people were locked away by the machines that were in control, and the machines were stimulating the senses of the people who were under control, they were kept in these little pods, but they didn't know it, they felt like they were out walking the streets every day, right, seeing their neighbors, waving high, driving cars, that all those things were experiences that were put inside their mind and in their brain by the machines that figured out that they could stimulate, you know, the electronic impulses of our minds, and we're kind of back to the same argument again, it's like, well, how do we know we are not cosmically deceived, we're kind of almost in the Rene Descartes argument again, is there a pill we can take that will illuminate us, the Bible, because that's the thing, well, we're going to get there, but right now, I just want to talk about truth itself, is there a way to determine if there is truth, now, remember also, we talked last time, and I'm going to scroll down here, remember we talked about Plato's cave, Plato's cave was a situation where people were locked away and they could not see the light of day, the only thing they could see in that cave was a projection of light from behind them, they would look forward and they would see shadows of trees or bushes or animals, whatever it was, and for them, that was their reality, they did not know anything else, that's all they knew about, and one day, somebody escaped from that cave, and they experienced the light of day, and they realized there was a whole nother reality that they did not know about, and this is the argument here, that even if there is a grand illusion, even if there is something out there that is preventing us from knowing things, you know, to the fullest extent, even in these situations, it wasn't that there wasn't reality, it was that they had limited experience and knowledge of that reality, for, what is it, Nilo, or Nilo, Nio, in the Matrix movies, his illumination was taking the red pill, and once he took that red pill, he found out there was a whole nother reality he did not know about or understand, for the prisoner in the cave, it was coming out to the light of day and seeing things that he had never seen before, and now understanding that there were bigger and greater things, the question is, is there something that illuminates us, where we can know reality?

Was Plato's cave an experiment?

No, it was a story, it was something he...

It was a story shared, was it a true story?

No, I don't think there were a lot of people...

So it was a myth, so, okay.

I'm just curious, because, like I said, it was a story. It was a philosophical exercise.

Yeah, I'm just curious, you know, how they explained it and everything, because I'm just trying to wrap my head around it.

I'll tell you honestly, though, over the years, I wouldn't be surprised if people had experiments like that.

There is a new hip thing in Philadelphia where you go to a restaurant and it's sensory deprecation, where the complete restaurant is black, and then you eat with blindfolds and experience the food.

That's right.

It's supposed to be the new hip sensory thing, you know, about not knowing...

You find out you're a McDonald's when they...

Yep, exactly, and serve you with a Mac, and you probably tell you it's steak and lobster.

Right.

And I guess that's in the name of being more experimental.

Well, that's what they're claiming is that you can taste the food.

Trying to figure out a greater reality. I think that's going more to the darkness, actually.

No, it just gives you a reason for more expensive food.

So, there's a couple of people we haven't talked about so far. We've talked a lot about the problems of our sensory perception. We've talked a lot about the problems of our intellect. We've talked about some theories that people have had.

And even John Locke, as much as I like the way he used the correspondence theory, and saying that, yes, there is a physical world and we can know it. You know, I can pick up the Mach 5 here and feel it, and know that it's hard, and know that it has a certain shape to it.

He says that's real. But, John Locke was not necessarily a promoter of God per se. What John Locke would say is he said that, you know, I can't explain this physical world or why it's here. And because of that, I have to acknowledge the existence of God.

Not because I'm necessarily a follower of God, but because I cannot resolve in my mind how this world could be given that nothing comes out of nothing and there's causal relationships in the things of our moral life.

And there's also the law of non-contradiction. But he did not go so far to say that truth lied beyond the physical world. We said, however, according to Plato and others, that we think truth does lie outside the physical world, because the greater truth is the thing that created the physical world.

We talked last time about the things that are seen here were created by things that are unseen. Something that is self-existent, which doesn't exist in our physical world. But putting all the pieces together with the arguments of philosophy, the conclusion is there must be something outside this world that is immutable and self-existent.

So, what about our physical world? Well, we're going to look at a couple of people right now. One named Augustine. And if I could get a little help, if somebody could read loudly, just this whole in italics, what Augustine said about basically knowledge and knowing.

Could somebody read that loudly?

Phil, you're close enough.

The concept of divine revelation was central to Augustine's epistemology or theory of knowledge. He saw that revelation is the necessary condition for all knowledge. As Plato argued that to escape the shadows of the cave wall, in Plato's cave example, the prisoner must see things in the light of day.

So Augustine argued that the light of divine revelation was necessary for knowledge. The metaphor of light is instructive. In our present earthly state we are equipped with the faculty of sight. We have eyes, optic nerves, and so forth, all the equipment needed for seeing.

But a man with the keenest eyesight can see nothing if he is locked in a totally dark room. So just as an external source of light is needed for seeing, so an external revelation from God is needed for knowing.

So Augustine is using the term God. So others may use the term external force. Augustine is making the jump to God himself. And as I said before, we're not necessarily trying to prove the existence of God, but prove the existence of absolute truth.

But his concept is very interesting. And he uses the physical world describing a situation where if we turn out all the lights yet not only can we not see if this is white or black or anything else, we can't actually see the object at all.

And if it wasn't for physical light, we wouldn't be able to detect objects in this world. And he's saying that very thing is a gift from God, but he's saying also more than that, meaning this. Look at the conclusion he's drawing.

But a man with the keenest eyesight can see nothing if he's locked in a totally dark room. Okay, that's his first premise. And that's true. So just as an external source of light is needed for seeing, so an external revelation from God is needed for knowing.

That's a big statement, because it means that we can have all the faculties for knowing. He's talking about all the faculties for eyesight here. He's talking about all the faculties for knowing. We have a mind.

We have an intellect that can reason and think. And we can have sensual perceptions from various data that comes into our life. And he says, that's not enough. You have to have the gift of God's natural revelation to understand this physical world.

Everything that we see, everything that we have, everything that we know about in this world, is a gift from God's natural revelation. And that's a concept a lot of people don't think about. But it's because he is the one who has created as the external source, the external power.

He is the one who knows the parameters of this world, and he knows what is needed in this world to perceive, know, think, understand. Let's look at it this way. So if we say, we have all the physical apparatus for eyesight, and we have a physical brain, but without the light in the room, we can't see the baseball, the Mach 5.

It has a secondary quality of whiteness, but in addition, Augustine is saying that we also need revelation to resolve what our eyes see, what our brain thinks, the ball's reality, and the light itself that illumines it.

We have to have his gift of revelation to even understand the light, because it's coming upon us. And that's a heavy theory. But the fact is, is we don't understand things unless God himself reveals them to us.

And obviously I'm transitioning now from just kind of general truth theory to the fact that we need an external source, an external power to reveal things in this physical world. Now many people reject that, but the people that reject it are often in the relativism room, and they can't explain where things came from.

They can't explain why things are the way they are. And as a matter of fact, at this point in time, well, let's talk about Thomas Aquinas for a second. Because Thomas Aquinas built on what Augustine said.

So Aquinas was later on. He was in like around 1200, I believe. Augustine was much earlier than that. But Aquinas said this, all knowledge rests and depends upon God's revelation. This revelation, however, is not found exclusively in the Bible, but shines through the cosmos as well.

So how does this work? This little chart gives us some examples of what is natural general revelation of God. Could you raise that up a little bit? So an example of what we can know. The body's circulatory system.

How do we find that out? We do experiments in the natural world, and we can examine people, animals, things that we've seen, blood flow, you know, the heart muscle, all the things that happen within the circulatory system we all have.

And the thing is is we would never be able to know that unless God has revealed those things through his general revelation. Now, what about God's existence? We've talked about that a little bit. Can we know God's existence?

Well, we can know God's existence either through the Bible and reading that, or through the natural world itself. Yeah, God has given us either special revelation of himself or general revelation. And we do want to read Romans right now, so if somebody could turn to Romans 118 through 20, I think.

118 through 19. And the point is that God, as the external force, has not hidden these things from us. He has clearly revealed all of these things in the natural world so that we may know them, experience them, and trust them.

The things that we have in the natural world, as fallen as it is, as fallible as it is, we still have many, many things we can trust and know. So, who has Romans 118 and 19?

For the wrath of God is revealed from the heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth for what can be known about God is plain to them because God has.

Shown it to them. And we know that verse. We know that there is truth in this world, and it's being suppressed. Not just truth about the reality around us, but truth about God himself. That if people deny the existence of God and attempt to worship the creation rather than the creator.

So, our founding fathers also understood that there were some basic things about the existence we have that are readily understandable. These things aren't a mystery in the world we live in, but they are truths that we hold on to because they are self-evident.

They are out in the open. They're very understandable. And among those things as they say endowed by their creator are the unalienable rights which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those things are undeniable truths.

Those things exist. And even people who want to talk about relativism and the fact that there is not absolute truth would still in their attempt to define what is good and what is right are going to eventually come to the conclusion that these things are good.

And that's just what it says in Romans chapter 2. Where it talks about those even without the law of God understand that there is a natural law that God has put in place. And they themselves understanding what the law of God is in their hearts.

That there's things written on the conscience of man. Now, man can get to the point where you suppress the truth, suppress the truth, suppress the truth and get to the point where the Lord will hand you over to a mind that will reject those things which are good and right and appropriate.

But no man is going to have an excuse before the Lord that they did not know the truth about who he was. Now, we're going to jump to a video right now because I had a video last time which talked about, which showed Richard Dawkins and how he attacked the idea of absolute morality.

Chances are you're not going to get into a discussion with Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris. But you will probably get into a discussion with folks like this. And these are the folks who have been basically taught in our society through our school systems and education.

Yeah.

So absolute truth is inside of you? Yeah. Do you believe in absolute truth? Sure. What is an absolute truth? Something that's universal. Alright. And where does that truth come from?

It comes from the society.

So what if the society changes its mind?

Then the absolute truth changes. Doesn't that mean it's relative? Everything's relative though.

If truth is relative, what is its basis? It's probably relative to who you are and what you consider the truth to be.

A lot of confused people out there. You get the idea, right?

You know, our class is not for being a tax sheet where we go out and prove our points and wrestle someone to the ground and convince them that we contain all knowledge and truth. But it's having a heart for people like these that are out there.

They're really bewildered and lost. And I think if I was to take from what I've seen and read in these things that we've gone over so far, you know, the things that stand out to me are the three laws, really.

Nothing comes out of nothing, meaning that something must have created all this. And that does get into God's existence. The fact that there's a causal relationship in the world. That there's not anything that has happened that didn't have a primary cause underneath of it.

So what is that primary cause? Can we know it? And then, you know, talking about the fact that there are things that have been revealed to us. There are realities that we can know because they are right in front of us and we can handle them.

And they do point to the existence of a beloved creator who has created this world for our well-being and has given us the ability to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. Now that jumping off point and just saying that there is a creative force outside of us and that we are experiencing truth and that that truth is contained in the external, the metaphysical world.

And that doesn't change. That's a very good thing. Things aren't going to change from day to day. Things aren't going to change from week to week. There is absolute good and absolute evil. There is right and wrong.

And that's a very comforting thing. Even though the society, you know, continues to say, well that's your opinion or that's your judgment. You know, I think we can point to the fact that there's an external reality outside of the physical world.

And that has to come obviously through God's revelation in the person's, you know, heart and life that we're talking to. So let's get into an example of a possible argument. I have one from Sean McDowell right here.

So you haven't seen the rest of it, but I'll read this. I know some can't see this right now. It says, the skeptic says, how can you say that abortion is wrong? That's your preference. So if you do not want to abort a child, then don't do it.

Don't take part in it in your life. Have you heard that before? Why bother other people? Just don't do it yourself. Then you can have your truth and I can have my truth. There's only like a three verse response to this where he turns it on its head.

And I think studying through or looking through some of these things is really helpful. So Sean says, well my friend, are you against racism and or slavery? And that's a hot topic, hot button item, right?

The person says, of course. That is evil, that is wrong, right? And Sean says, well, okay. If you're against slavery, don't own a slave. What did he do? He turned the argument from something that is absolutely true in that person's eyes to, oh, that's your preference.

If you don't like slavery, don't have one yourself. And I won't have one myself. That'll be my truth and that'll be your truth. And then, of course, the person's gonna say, but no, slavery is wrong. But where is that coming from?

And then you can launch into, obviously, no, there are things that are absolutely true and even you know that. You know that because these things are on your heart already. And all people know certain things about this world.

You know, they know all societies across the world have created laws against stealing. You know, that you have property and you don't steal from one another. There's laws about if you take your neighbor's wife, that kind of thing.

Now, I said before, if you suppress the truth, you can get into some really debauched societies. But there are still absolute moral statements you can make that anyone in the world will say, you know what?

Yeah, that's true. And I think when we get into a situation like this, you know, having the wisdom to know how to handle an argument is important. And, you know, we're not gonna, like I said, we're not gonna be debating Sam Harris.

But we probably would talk to our neighbor down the street, the young man who is graduating high school this year or something. And he would be like one in the video who would say, well, there isn't an absolute truth, it's all relative.

And then you can say to him something like, well, is it okay for people to torture children for the sake of fun? And they're aghast at that. What are you thinking about? Who would torture a child for fun?

And that's universally known throughout the world. You do not torture children for fun. That's something that's easily understandable as something that is absolutely true. So if there's a bedrock of truth that we kind of all know about, how can we say things are relative?

And how can we know what is right and wrong? The first part is to say that there is absolute truth. And acknowledge that there are things in this world that are absolute. So I don't think I'm doing that great of a job of explaining it this time.

I hope some of the videos will. But I want to go down to another video from Sam Harris now. And just talk about his arguments again and how Sam... Drew, before you go there,.

The counter-argument would be that morality truth is about morality are cultural constructs, right? They're societal constructs. And that a society chooses what is acceptable or not acceptable. And it's not that it's absolutely true, but that it's mutually agreed upon within a culture.

But the problem is there are cultures who have deemed certain things as morally acceptable. Take the United States during the time of slavery. Take primitive cultures that thought that killing and eating other humans was acceptable.

Take Nazi Germany as an example. The extermination of the Jews. There were societal constructs that were created by evil people. I mean there was in the Bible child sacrifice and some other primitive cultures, child sacrifice.

And today we would say that that's morally wrong. It's absolutely morally wrong. And so the true relativist, if they're honest with themselves, would have to say that because our culture deems it as wrong doesn't mean it's actually wrong.

It just means that we don't feel like it is acceptable. But everyone knows in their heart that these things are wrong. And that is because I think the God of the universe set the rules, right? He set what is morally acceptable and I think that that is sort of written somewhere inside us so that we know when we see things that are evil, you know, when we see them.

To piggyback what you're saying, and I touched on this at the first and second session, it gets drilled down to conviction versus convenience. And if you think of movement of truth, convenience would always have a quicker movement towards relativism and cultural relevance.

So conviction is always the stopgap. It's always going to be the stopgap because of a greater or higher power that's outside of us. Convenience is always going to be about us. And that's always convenient.

So moral relativism feeds off convenience. And it's always attained to whatever the culture is at that time. And the perfect way to do that is in Judges 21 -25, in those days there were no king and everyone did what was right in their own eyes.

So it's not a new concept. It's something that was built up and brought.

To the forefront. And like what Matt said, there is conscience. And conscience being common with science knowledge. We have knowledge with God of what's right and wrong.

Isn't there somewhere in Romans where Paul says that if you think if the person sinning thinks it's a sin, then.

It is sin. If it's not a faith.

It's sin.

I'm talking about in Romans, I think it's not a faith it's sin. I'm not sure where it is. We talked about it this morning. In Romans 14.

Basically you're violating your conscience.

Right. If you violate your own conscience, even though maybe it's not a sin under the Ten Commandments of God, but you yourself think it's a sin, then you're sinning.

Somewhere, I think it's in Romans. Thomas Aquinas went deep on that one. I've read Thomas Aquinas on that. He had some very interesting things to say about that. Basically every time you violate your conscience he said yes, you are sinning.

Even if your conscience is wrong. Which is very interesting. Now the reason I bring up this Sam Harris video is not because I want to get into an argument with Sam Harris. But I want you to see where he goes as far as things that he's going to argue for.

Now Sam is a. He takes things from a very scientific, he says, approach. Science, to him, proves out morality. So he definitely is an atheist. He does not believe.

In God at all. One of the four horsemen of the new atheism. Yes, he is.

He's also a neuroscientist.

That's his field of study. And maybe just some background so you know Sam a little bit. He is not one of the people that would say, you know, let's do abortion at all, all the time. The biggest blight on the planet is the fact of overpopulation or the fact that people are burdened down by these unborn children or anything like that.

He doesn't say that. He says that it's a scientific thing and that as soon as a child can feel pain in the womb, don't abort. So he's like kind of a tweener, in a sense, that he's like under 15 weeks or under 14 weeks, says whatever that line is, he said he'd be okay with doing that.

So he's not quite like all of maybe the other atheists we think about. He has rationales for what he believes, but I want you to think carefully about what he says here, about what he thinks morality can be based upon.

There are going to be right and wrong answers to these questions and it's just patently obvious that certain cultures are not maximizing human well-being at this moment. And I cited as an example the violent misogyny and religious bamboozlement of the Taliban as a culture that was not perfectly conducive to human well-being.