(Debate): Does God Exist?

Revealed Apologetics

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Ynglyn at aelodaeth cyhoedd a 'n fawr iawn. three uh subject matters here is obedience to the law required for salvation interpretation of deuteronomy 28 and is jesus god so that's gonna be a long -winded one so look out for a good two and a half hour debate there october 5th 2019 we have scarlet clay versus gina belk and if you know gina belk she is from the atheist experience and she co -hosts at times with matt diller hunting so she decided to come on with scarlet clay and they're gonna have a discussion concerning the personological justification for the belief in god so that should be a good discussion might also have that scarlet clay and gina belk are my first female participants so that's exciting times it's always good to be able to get the females involved they're able to defend the faith and are your points as well so it's always wonderful to bring them on october 6 miles kettleson and taylor grade he calls the snake is right i believe that's his youtube channel the snake is right and they'll come on they're going to be debating can atheism account for objective morality so that's just the next four shows um i have a whole bunch of shows coming up i'm all the way booked all the way to mid -december so there's gonna be a lot of shows coming up and there should be exciting times over here um with that said i'm gonna go ahead and introduce these guys uh i'm gonna let them introduce themselves but i just want to give you a rundown how i met eli and met chris i met chris i hit him up on youtube i believe it was and um you know we um i offered him i wanted him to come on and debate a christian opponent and he was more than welcome to do so his conversation is cool he hit me up on we connected on facebook and everything and then i was able to connect him and eli together and he was able to have a quick conversation to set up the debate so i appreciate chris for coming on and then eli eli's cool captain he's all right he's he's i do that but eli's real cool man uh i see a friendship with me and him really growing and uh i appreciate all he's doing for the body of christ and uh his little five minute videos that he puts out you know very very helpful in growth in the bottom and love for christ and theology as well for learning who god is so i really appreciate eli and chris for coming on but that's enough for me i'm rambling a little too much i'm gonna go ahead and let these guys introduce themselves and what they got going on and uh then we'll get into the court uh the debate format so first up eli go ahead and introduce yourself for me well my name is elias ayala that's my full name my friends call me eli um i am a middle school and high school teacher i teach at a christian private school and um on the side i do apologetics i have an apologetics ministry called revealed apologetics and uh really my goal is to just help christians understand why they believe what they believe and how to defend it and i try to do that the best i can i really really enjoy discussions um and this is actually my first kind of formal debate with a uh with a formal format so i'm kind of excited about that and i'm married i've got three kids and i'm 37 years old if that matters all right thank you thank you appreciate you all right chris if you can do a quick introduction to yourself sure thing uh my name is chris most people probably know me as service the skeptic i have a youtube channel about 24 000 subscribers over there um that's what i do full time on there i do a combination of politics social issues uh counter apologetics sometimes just bringing people on and not engaging in counter apologetics i've hammered out where we come on for more uh standard discussion uh recently if any of you are familiar with james from modern day debate uh he has a particular version of pascal's wager that he likes to use we had him on to discuss um which was really interesting a lot of people enjoyed that episode um so yeah pretty much what i'm all for is discussions and helping people figure out why they believe what they believe i don't have any particular uh goal as far as like converting or deconverting anybody as long as the reasons that they have for believing what they believe are justified that i'm fine with that as long as they're not causing any harm okay i appreciate both of you introducing yourselves um so the format for this debate is going to be we're going to open the statements and we're going to have about a 60 minute discussion um no 60 minute discussion is going to be three you guys are going to get three opportunities each to go ahead and ask questions for 10 minutes um i'll be the moderator of that time so whenever you get whenever that time has expired i will conclude it wherever you're at in your in your statement i'm going to conclude the time then the next person you get that 10 minutes so with that said um i believe eli you're arguing the affirmative so what the affirmative has to go first uh in formal debates so eli you are up first with your opening statement all right well um i'd like to thank marlon thank you for having me on your show and i really enjoy and appreciate what you're doing i think this is uh great to have the context for people to discuss competing ideas and things like that within uh respectful context i think that's very important and i'd also like to thank chris for being willing to be here to interact with me a bit i look forward to an engaging conversation and uh i have to admit i don't know much about chris uh so i'm looking forward to listening to what he has to say and uh so there we go so thank you for for being here as well so with that said let me go right into my opening statement first um i'd like to define the terms of this debate as i see it does god exist and for me as a christian theist i deny the existence of any other god other than the christian one and so i'm going to be defending specifically christian theism today where i do not believe that any non -christian conception of god is rationally coherent and not without detrimental philosophical problems once the details of these competing deities and or worldviews are fleshed out and i do not find the non -christian worldview systems to be rationally defensible as i find them unable to provide the necessary preconditions for intelligible experience and by way of kind of a quick summation i do not find non -christian worldview systems to be defensible in that they either have internal inconsistency problems or if we grant their hypothetical truth such systems can be shown to undermine human reason and experience now to the nature of the debate as as i understand it um we need to be very careful uh since when we're engaging in debates over the question of god's existence there is all too often the naive assumption that we can proceed in a tit for tat back and forth discussion over individual pieces of data facts or evidence when in reality this debate is not an issue of facts absent of a worldview context the debate between the christian and the skeptic or the christian in any other form of the non -christian position is really a debate over worldview systems and so if my opponent desires to discuss any particular point i will politely remind him that any particular point of contention will only and can only have meaning and coherency within a broader worldview context i do not believe that we can discuss any particular fact in some sort of neutral worldview independent fashion and since my worldview foundation is in diametric opposition to any non -christian foundation i'm going to take issue with the interpretation of any particular point of contention taken on its own for since we both will be operating from different worldview perspectives different paradigms if you will it becomes foundational to this debate as to which position has a worldview context out of which the intelligibility and coherency of any fact is possible so in quick summary this debate is not over evidence per se although i believe that my position has both evidence and a worldview context in which something like evidence even makes sense but rather our debate is one over competing worldviews we're debating competing systems of thought and i having a christian worldview and chris having a non -christian worldview now there may be a temptation from the skeptical perspective to suggest that since they're taking the negative position that there is therefore no requirement to put forth a defense but rather the task is merely to evaluate the validity of the christian's position i'd like to point out that while i am happy to um uh admit that i am taking the uh the positive position i'm making the positive assertion that the christian god exists i would also point out that every non -christian perspective has explicit or implicit positive assertions of the falsehood of the christian worldview for instance if the skeptic's position is to suggest that they do not know if the christian god exists this itself is implying the christian worldview is false since an important assertion of the christian worldview is that in a very profound sense all men know that god exists now the skeptic is free to reject this idea of all men knowing god in some sense which i would imagine chris would want to reject i don't think he believes that but by rejecting this christian proposition he is saying in essence that the christian worldview is false and if this is his position then we will need to engage in some intellectual sparring over worldviews or again if the skeptic wants to take the tact of discussing particular facts that are neutral or he wants to take the tact that it is even possible or even appropriate to come to these issues in a neutral fashion he again would be implying the falsehood of the christian worldview which teaches that there is in fact no neutrality from the christian worldview every fact has its meaning in the ultimate definer of fact which is god himself so every fact is what it is because god has created these facts to be what they are and hence if someone defines a fact that is contrary to how god has sovereignly defined that fact then i would argue that the person redefining that fact contrary to god's definition is wrong and does not understand that fact truly so in essence my point here is that no fact is neutral the nature of this debate is not over piecemeal issues but rather over worldview systems which themselves give particular facts their meaning but the question then becomes whose worldview can provide the necessary preconditions for intelligible experience for this i now turn to the nature of my particular argumentation so as i have elucidated thus far the nature of this debate is that of worldview against worldview principle against principle system against system having competing systems or worldview perspectives are we relegated to a standstill unable to push the debate any further since whatever fact the skeptic brings i'm going to interpret in light of my worldview and every fact that i bring he's going to interpret in light of his well i don't think that this is the situation that we're just at an immovable standstill i think we can break this apparent standstill by demonstrating the truth of one's perspective transcendentally so the nature of my argument for god's existence is transcendental in nature for those who may be listening what do i mean when i speak of transcendental arguments well when we speak of transcendental arguments we are in essence asking what are the pre -conditions that is to say what must be the case in order for something else to be the case an easier way to understand this would be something to the effect like i'm standing on the floor in my house you know i'm standing in my living room for instance what are the preconditions for my being able to stand up in my living room well among other things the beams upon which my house is built need to be under the floor holding everything up if the beams aren't there then i wouldn't be standing but here i am standing up so the beams need to be there so that's just a simple example to kind of get the idea transcendental argumentation asks what must be the case in order for something else to be the case if we use the examples of the laws of logic you need to understand that transcendentals are proven by the impossibility of the contrary so suppose someone rejected the laws of logic the transcendental necessity of the laws of logic are clearly seen and that even in denying them one needs to presuppose them in order to deny them in other words the transcendental necessity of the laws of logic are demonstrated by the impossibility of the contrary deny them and you demonstrate their existence in your very denial since your denial necessarily presupposes them in like fashion my argument is this but the proof of the existence of the god of christianity is that if he didn't exist one could not prove anything at all if one denies the christian theistic worldview i would argue that such a denial would reduce the non -christian's perspective to absurdity now again the temptation will be to suggest that my argument is merely an assertion but to think such fails to recognize the nature of my argument and the nature of transcendental arguments in general remember the transcendental argument for god's existence is an argument and it is my job in this debate to make good on my argument and i'm going to try my best to do so so what is required of my opponent today if my argument is that the proof for the truth of the christian worldview is that if it were not true one could not prove anything at all what my opponent must do is to lay out his own worldview and demonstrate that given the truth of his own worldview outlook he can save knowledge science logic meaningful history rationality induction and in essence intelligibility hence given the very nature of my argumentation chris is not relegated to merely stating his lack of belief if that's his position again i will let him speak for himself and only responding to why he thinks my view is insufficient the very nature of my argument requires the responder to show his hand and lay out his own perspective his worldview and engage system versus system in essence what ground is chris standing on what is his worldview foundation and is that foundation coherent and consistent and does it provide the necessary preconditions for intelligible experience what is his worldview what does he believe about the nature of reality what does he believe about how knowledge is gained what does he believe about how we should live our lives and is what he believes about these things consistent with each other what becomes especially interesting is what is his epistemology how will he address these issues he could go the rationalist route everything that's true must be coherent but how does he avoid the traditional problems with rationalism he can go the empirical route uh through sent knowledge comes through sense perception and experience but how does he answer the issues that are inherent within empiricism or he can combine the two and go the way of khan but then that perspective i would argue has its own problems again i don't want to speak for chris so we're going to wait and see uh what he has to say and from there engage in uh worldview interaction but for now i think this is sufficient to lay out the issues at hand and so for now i concede my time all right thank you eli for your opening statement i appreciate you for that uh chris it is now your turn for a turn at opening sure thing um so my positions i'm going to go ahead and lay them out now because they're going to come up in conversation later anyway uh my personal epistemology is that of pragmatism um which in a in a very brief sense uh argues that what is useful uh is ultimately what we end up working with um as a result if we're looking at science pragmatism would argue that for the purposes of science we would use instrumentalism which is the view that concepts and theories are useful instruments and progress of science cannot be couched in terms of concepts and theories somehow mirroring reality they have to work on an instrumental basis and are used for the purposes for the amount of time that they are required there um when it comes to things like metaphysics um some pragmatists like john uh like john dewey were empirical thinkers um so it really depends on what you get there on where pragmatism has issues is that it is sometimes uh what's the best word for it uh sometimes it works against itself um but also pragmatism was literally built on three people not agreeing with each other about what pragmatism is so i would argue that sometimes those inconsistencies are inherent to the inner bakings of pragmatism and i don't see a problem with that as long as it gets the job done and it's useful that's what it's there for uh that said moving on to uh my position on god so if we're talking philosophical uh philosophically speaking uh then i have to label myself like an agnostic i don't have a choice if we're talking colloquially uh then i'm perfectly fine labeling myself an atheist under say the lack of belief position anything like that um but again it depends on which side of the coin we are arguing for hard philosophical definitions or if we are arguing for more colloquial or as i would say useful definitions um whichever one you want to use perfectly fine with me i go into the atheist not accepting the laws of logic because it is through laws like that like the law of non -contradiction that i start to have issue with the way god is presented at least in the standard christian worldview insofar as the term standard christian worldview even has a coherent meaning just as there is no atheist worldview there is no agnostic worldview i would argue that there are at least christian worldviews and probably more depending on how many individuals there are with worldviews based on christianity if there were one coherent christian worldview then we wouldn't have a series of no true scotsman fallacies battling each other over the last two thousand years as far as god the god of the bible is denoted as a god of love before we can get into this conversation about what a god of love means we have to figure out what type of love we're talking about because the biblical version of god is going to argue that his version of love would be what we would call agape love which would be unconditional love for anybody who's unfamiliar with the term agape i would say that that is the type of love that is most coherent and most often given to god my problems with that though are that unconditional love would denote certain things for one it would denote that people that he loves he may not commit genocide against i know that it's the common played out trope to go to the flood but unfortunately it is in the bible so i'm gonna have to go to it it's hard for me to square the circle of a all loving being that would actually commit genocide against all of his creatures especially if this being uh is all knowing and all powerful which means that they not only uh had other options available to them being all powerful they also knew what these options were because they are all knowing and because they are omnibenevolent they would be behoven to act on these other less cruel notions and yet they didn't so obviously one of these traits isn't there either they are not all powerful and they had to choose one of the more violent routes or they are not all knowing and could not conceive of one of these less violent routes or they are not all loving in which case the violent realm may have even seemed to be a beneficial one at that case denoting some type of catharsis alternatively there is also the problem of hell however my particular issues of hell will always be contingent on the type of hell that the christian is asserting as i do not know um what eli's version of hell is i do not know if this is an annihilation concept or if this is more of a hey you're going to be burning forever like the standard baptist teaching i know that he's a calvinist um but i do not know i have not heard yet his particular variant of hell so i cannot bring the hell argument in unless i know what his version of hell is so i will go ahead and have to skip over that for the time being back to the type of love god has god's love is best described as unconditional love or agape he is the embodiment of love and somehow created things like the global flood and hell but again i'm not going to bring up hell in detail because i do not want to speak for eli's uh view on hell without knowing what it is however this does lead us to some problems at least as far as i'm concerned if god created everything which if we're to accept the christian worldview and work within it we would have to accept that he did create everything uh there is no start without him being a first cause we have to accept that he also created evil this is supported by the book of isaiah but if god is all knowing he would know that the result of any of his actions would lead to evil either its creation or lead to him having to enact some type of evil if he knew ahead of time that any of his actions would lead to evil which if we grant that he's omniscient we have to uh then any action that he takes that would lead to evil can be considered evil i don't think consequentialism works as a moral framework for most people because most people do not know what the end result of any of their actions will be this is one of the reasons why in a court of law for instance uh intent is only one part of an equation that's how we determine motives sometimes but a lot of times we will argue things based on what the consequences of actions were as well as with the intent with god the intent is not part of the equation only the consequences and the reason for that is because god regardless of intent knows what the consequences are he is in a privileged position to know the consequences of any and all actions moral other moral or otherwise so while most actions any action from a human can be considered moral immoral or amoral depending on your particular ethical framework yaoi's actions necessarily create evil because consequentialism is the only way that we could really judge him because he knows the consequences of his actions again a privileged position unlike anyone else for god to create anything that thing must be within his nature well we know that god can create evil he's created things that necessarily led to evil and he knew that and he had the power and i would assume with omniscience the creativity to do otherwise and actively chose not to this means that creating evil is within god's nature if creating evil is within god's nature it must also then follow that evil is within god's nature if evil is within god's nature the idea that he's omnibenevolent must necessarily be discarded this is a particular omni trade that can no longer hold the only way that i could find to escape this is to somehow judge god by a standard of morality that one does not know either by arguing out of the youth of rho dilemma that all goodness stems from him in which case how can we even consider god good even even something like divine command theory considers itself ethical subjectivism or we can argue that god is separate from good and that he adheres to good in which case he's bound by it now i recognize this is probably not eli's position eli's position is more than likely going to be that that good necessarily stems from god necessity necessitating that god would be above any of these laws i would argue then that if this means that we can never judge the moral character of this being whatsoever then how can we in how can we call him good we can't call him evil so we must necessarily not be able to call him good as these two are polar opposites and our ability to judge one will be contingent on our ability to judge the other so if we are going to argue that god is above all moral um what's the word for it if we're going to argue that god is above all uh moral judgment and say that good necessarily stems from him and therefore he's above these judgments then again i will point out that this means that we cannot call him good the omnibenevolent trait still has to be dropped off because there is no way for us to judge that particular trait it's impossible at that point finally if we imagine the life of a single person as an inch on a ruler think of how many inches you have everybody's lifespan is an inch well you have not an infinite but a perceivably infinite amount of lifetimes there in which a series of evil actions can take place however god is eternal and we would also think even regardless of what the particulars on a version of hell are we would at least think that god knows that any punishment that he gives should it be eternal compared to this inch if you if you extend that life force of a person from the inch to say the square footage of your house that's still nothing in comparison to eternity change the square footage of the house to the circumference of the earth this person is now living for thousands and thousands of years relative to the inch that we gave originally this is still not eternity though any punishment that god decides to on these people and it would be him deciding to enact again he's bound by consequentialism at this point would be considered evil one of these traits has to go one of the omni traits has to leave if the god is going to be described as a tri -omni god then one of these traits is going to have to be yeeted out the window i'm perfectly fine with taking the omnipotent out i'm perfectly fine taking the omnibenevolent out that's just me if god is going to be described as a perfect tri -omni god there's the incoherence for me and that's my time all right thank you chris thank you eli for those opening statements all right now we're transitioning to the core of the debate the crossfire the most exciting part of a debate um so once again the affirmative goes first so we're going to allow eli to question chris for to his first 10 minute cross examination all right yeah you said a lot of good things and i what i first want to get out of the way is i appreciate it because most atheists or skeptics or whatever uh don't usually uh come out and share their views as clearly as you did so i appreciate that um so you said that god creates evil what is your what is your view what do you think christians believe about the ontological nature of evil the ontological nature of evil that which would be the opposite of good okay does uh do you think on the christian view evil has an ontological essence in the christian world view i'd say that good and evil both have ontological essence my personal thought though this is just me speaking from my world view obviously we're going to have to be doing a lot of that my personal thought is that good and evil are labels that we assign onto actions and what we assign onto those actions a lot of times can be a matter of perspective so if i see for instance um if i see something like say a family member of mine is killed i see that as evil however uh from somebody else's perspective that might not be seen as evil but that's never going to change the fact that to me this is going to be considered an evil action right and so uh well i'm i'm trying to respond i'm trying to ask these questions because i want to i'm trying to understand how you perceive what christians believe about the ontological essence of evil in other words uh to say that god creates evil we do not believe that he actually creates this thing called evil and evil is a is a privation and so uh there's not something that god creates and it's called evil evil is something that is not in conformity with his nature so and violates his law or whatever so it's it's more of action that is in disconformity to to the standard uh which is god so it's not something that he actually creates out of his nature so i would say that that your statement in regards to god creates anything that's consistent with his nature god creates evil therefore god is evil or something to that effect i would say that it doesn't follow since the christian position we do not hold that there's this positive ontological essence of evil that god creates that's what that's what i'm that's that's why i was asking the question so you gave me a view of what you think evil is but that's not what the christian position uh holds to so do you want to clarify a little bit of what you think the christian position is and maybe perhaps retract that as an argument or you can clarify and rephrase the argument sure um so if i could i know this is your time to question me but there is one of these one of these things that i would have to say necessarily uh leads into it do you believe that god creates color i'm sorry do you believe that god creates color well again i don't want to overstep the you could ask me when it's your turn so i i don't want to because once we let the question go back and forth then we'll kind of intermix and we'll defeat the whole purpose of cross -examination so you could ask me that question and i'll try my best to answer that all right so i will then i will have to say that i'll have to side at that point i'd have to actually sidestep your question because my answer will necessitate your answer on that so we'd have to move on to another question at that point okay all right so um in regards to um epistemology you said you are a pragmatist right yes do you believe in objective truth i believe that the concept of objective truth can be useful do you believe there is something do you believe that there is objective truth um i have a definition of truth that that will work for you do you understand what i mean when i say objective truth perhaps you could clarify okay um i think objective truth deals with something that is true independent of our personal opinions or something is true independent of what we think about and there's something out there that's objectively true do you believe that there is objective truth and do you believe that it's possible for someone to know that objective truth so for somebody to know an objective truth that actually would fit into my personal definition of truth my definition of truth in general is um if something well i hold on best say my definition of truth is that which comports to reality my definition of knowledge is a belief that comports with reality if you believe so if we have a venn diagram truth is on one side belief is on another where truth and belief collide is where knowledge is at least in my personal worldview if you believe something and it happens to be true then you have knowledge is there any way that someone could have access to what is actually the case so that they believe things that are true and that they can know them to be objectively true within your world perspective within my worldview perspective strangely enough so within pragmatism something being objectively true as in something uh something having ontological value correct is that how you would define this i would say that something to be objectively true we are believing something we have uh again i would i would define truth as a justified or knowledge as a justified true belief can we have beliefs that are true and we have justification for believing they're true and those reflect the uh objective reality so justified true belief from what i understand and correct me if i'm wrong but justified true belief basically takes the venn diagram that i have where you believe things and true things are on one side knowledge is in the middle and it adds a third piece to the venn diagram where there is a justified side so anything that is justified and believed and true becomes knowledge so can we have access to objective reality such that we know it on your perspective of pragmatism an epistemological view of pragmatism i would agree that we don't actually have access to objective reality everything that we see everything that we perceive is filtered okay so if that's the case then would you say that your worldview system lacks the preconditions for intelligibility since every worldview would have to have some forms of truth or something to undergird a foundation for knowledge so intelligibility uh just has to do with whether or not it is intelligible i know that's a that's a bit of a tautology um basically if something can be it's basically if something can be understood or is accessible or digestible under pragmatism yes because literally if something is unintelligible or undigestible then it's going to be discarded that's what happens in pragmatism if something cannot be understood in its form then it must be set up in a way and so that it can be understood while also still being true so for instance if i were explaining a mathematical concept to somebody and my method was unintelligible then my method would need to be discarded and i would need to find a new method in order to teach the person okay but when i say intelligibility what what is the preconditions for intelligibility well logic has to be binding we need to have uh correct reasoning processes within a epistemological perspective that is pragmatic and that you don't as you've admitted have not you don't have access to objective truth how can hold those consistently within your worldview that we need logic these unchanging uh universal standards unless you want to define how you understand logic how do you have those things which we must know objectively but within a worldview in which we have no access to objective reality it seems as though on the one hand you would say we have no access to it but then to even have intelligibility you have to presuppose it since you have to presuppose the validity of logical so you're there you're unchangeable so you've just made two so you've just made two separate statements and i want i want to point this out to you because i don't i don't i don't think you're a bad faith actor so i'm 90 certain you didn't catch that you said this okay but you said one has to presuppose that we can uh ascertain essentially uh the ontological truth of something if we can ascertain if something is ontological logically true and then you said but on the other hand you argue whether or not something is in fact ontologically true here we have a warring of issues on the one hand you're asking about personal perception and on the other hand you're asking about ontology personal perception is going to be a perception of ontology and a filtering of what is objectively true as an example i'll i asked the question earlier um but i will i will say it in a statement form instead because it is required for this um if you're familiar with the concept of is your green migraine this is a a very common uh concept for things like color theory um is your green migraine basically says uh if i'm looking at a an item and i perceive that it is a shade of green is that item in fact green is the ontological nature of this item's color green well there's a lot of that there's a lot of things that go into that for one my perception of it is that this object is green if we just look at the perception of the shade someone else's perception of that is going to be that it is a completely different shade of green we can get 10 people to disagree on what shade of green a particular leaf is however if we actually look at what goes into making a green leaf green we find that the the only color that is absent in that leaf is green because the leaf itself is absorbing every color except the green it's reflecting the green and that's why we see that so is this leaf actually green well again we come to well no ontologically it's not green so does it have color i guess it contains all colors well no it's actually containing wavelengths this is the problem with ontology versus perception my perception of this is being filtered through several different uh several different chasms in order to get to the point where i perceive this leaf is green but ontologically that statement doesn't even make sense all right so let me let me interject there so are you saying that we cannot know objective reality we only know perception all right you can only know perception that's that's time fellas that's time okay all right thank you all right chris it is your turn to cross -examine uh eli for 10 minutes sure thing um and i'm sorry if i if i ate up the last the last couple minutes there eli that's okay um that's okay it was not my intent uh that's why i was trying to ask that as a question beforehand uh i'm also leaning into my time now here unfortunately um okay okay so one of the things that you pointed out is that under uh we're having a conversation on world views therefore we can't have a tit -for -tat discussion um but if we can't have a tit -for -tat discussion then what is the point of us even having a conversation at this point i'm and i'm not trying to be rude there but no it's not just a tit -for -tat discussion what i said was a tit -for -tat discussion over specific things in other words when i'm focusing on is that the difference between you and i is not an issue of just merely i have a fact that you don't or you know we're arguing for specific things i just wanted to bring the point that when we're discussing these issues it's system versus system not independent neutral facts that's that's what i meant by that okay that's fair um and then another point you brought up stemming from that um the debate isn't about facts it's about world view systems if your opponent desires to discuss a particular point that point can only work in reference to a world view so for instance um if i were to ask you uh the nature of truth you would embed that in god correct i would say that god is the source of all truth because creation reflects you know what his plan his purpose everything that is made is understood within that context so things are true because god makes them true okay so my question then becomes um one of the criticisms that you gave for for and it's one of the things that you noted that i i didn't do so i i do thank you for noting that um is that there's a there's a slippery nature uh where a lot of skeptics are concerned where they take the lack of belief position and then just say i'm not convinced i'm not convinced i'm not convinced and they won't actually give you this is my world view this is how i came to it these are my positive assertions against a particular type of god they just hide behind i'm not convinced do you see there as being any functional difference between that slippery nature and the nature of being able to hide behind well nothing's true without god so therefore everything doesn't work without god i think it's i think it's irrelevant i'm not the nature of the my argumentation is not that i'm hiding behind god i actually think that the uh the world view of the christian world view actually is the preconditions i'm not just saying god you know just answers the question but it just so happens that from my perspective i think god does answer questions much better than the non -god position so it's not an issue of hiding behind it i'm willing to tell you what my entire world view is you are willing to tell me what your world view is many people don't because they don't want to defend a specific point you know in some cases so um i don't think it's relevant i don't have such a problem good well good yeah and i appreciate that i really do um so i have no problem uh letting people know what i believe and then they could ask the questions and we can engage in internal worldview critique so i'm not hiding behind something uh and i do understand as you probably would agree there are some people who do hide their position so that they don't have to defend what they defend it just so happens in this discussion we're not doing that fair enough and i do appreciate the honesty there um if there's one thing that i i don't like it is a uh is a slippery interlocutor as it were um not because it gets very hard to pin them down on things but because it's very it's very difficult to actually have a discussion at that point um right okay so the next question i had is you said that no fact is neutral under under my worldview facts are definitionally neutral um it is how you use those facts i guess this is because it's from a pragmatics perspective um so for me it's the usage of the facts that cause the facts to be either for or against any particular position but i view facts personally as neutral could you clarify the statement facts are not neutral um in other words me and you will will understand the foundation of any fact in completely different ways given the diametrical opposites of our worldview since god created everything in my worldview every fact is what it is because god created that fact to be what it is and so you don't hold to that and so um for me there is no such thing as casting my worldview aside and then you casting your worldview aside and then just making sense out of this independent worldview independent uh piece of data so i would deny the existence of brute facts i don't think brute facts speak for themselves i think facts only make sense within a worldview context and so in that sense i i would say they're not neutral we can't um interpret a fact independent of an intellectual framework with which we use to interpret the fact okay so you don't view brute facts as a thing that existed exist in an abstract sense mind you not exist as in this has ontological value uninterpreted facts uninterpreted facts okay right so do you accept um i'm fairly certain you do but do you accept axioms then um some axioms yeah axioms are uh it depends because i uh when you get into mama presuppositionalist when you get into presuppositionalism as an apologetic methodology you have two branches uh between van cornelius van till and gordon clark and i think a key distinction here is that clark held uh that the bible is the word of god is his axiom and he would define axiom as something that cannot be justified um by appealing to something external to itself anyone could pick any axiom and so there's no justification for it he just thought that if you pick an axiom it needs to be able to coherently build your worldview whereas on my perspective i don't take axioms in that fashion as a matter of fact i i rarely use the term axiom i would use and i kind of just use this myself i don't know if there's actual technical terminology for this i would say that i have an ultimate presupposition now i think the faulty thing about how people understand presuppositions can you still hear me i can still hear you just fine okay because i lost uh these airpods see this ran out of battery so i'm going to recharge this and switch between them um just so you know these guys are only 20 bucks okay so if you wanted to get a replacement that doesn't have a battery okay sounds good um so i would take my foundation not as an axiom but as an ultimate presupposition and i think there's a fault in people's understanding of a presupposition and that there's a common understanding that presuppositions are assumptions without justification and i deny that if someone were to say that a presupposition is an elementary assumption without justification what they're doing is actually implicitly rejecting the reality of transcendental argumentation since transcendental argumentations try to justify presuppositions not by appealing to something external to itself by but by appealing to its transcendental necessity kind of like that example when i used um logic deny it and you demonstrate it because logic must be um it's uh something that's actual in order to deny it's a lot like when somebody says they think cool excellent um okay so my my contention with that um from what's the best way to word this from everything that i've studied uh in philosophy there is no functional difference to me between a presupposition and an axiom um and an unquestionable presupposition from what i understand is simply an axiom because an axiom all an axiom is is a truism uh it is a a principle or a a dictum uh something that is regarded as regarded as being established uh accepted or self -evidently true so if you presuppose god you are saying that god is self -evidently true he is justified in and of himself by simply being himself correct well i would disagree with your understanding of the presupposition as seeing no functional difference between an ultimate presupposition and axiom to say that there's just functionally no difference is to implicitly deny the validity of transcendental arguments because the very fact that an ultimate presupposition my ultimate presupposition and not just this presupposition of god but say for example the assumption of logic um it is an ultimate starting point but it is justified it's just not justified in the same way some other presuppositions may be so when uh if you try to justify a presupposition but an ultimate presupposition by a standard outside of itself then that presupposition is no longer your ultimate standard the ultimate standard is the thing by which you judge the validity of that prior presupposition what you just cut out i can't hear you anymore it is justified by an appeal to its own transcendental necessity that's that's the difference now i'm not sure uh how much you've studied this area i would have one question one question for eli regarding to the bait and not regarding the debate at the same time um can you send me after this debate uh any reading that you have done uh on the nature of axioms versus presuppositions so that i can read those because you're the first person that has tried to argue that axioms and presuppositions have any functional difference that i've seen wow okay i mean have you ever studied the works of someone like cornelius fantel and greg bonson um i have not though i have several calvinist friends who have uh and i've had i'm not sure if you're familiar with rca uh for instance reform christian apologist okay he's a he's an apologetic he's an apologetic youtuber uh as well you guys actually because you might get along a lot of my study here is through audio and things like that and some i wouldn't know which page but i could give you resources where you can kind of see a presentation of a transcendental argument um so you can kind of see what you want to send that to me i'll gladly digest it yeah okay okay so do you want to continue that 30 seconds chris or do you want to conclude no that was that was my that was my 30 seconds okay that was research material for post debate sounds good sounds good okay eli you got the second go for 10 minutes okay so we um so it seems to be that you hold to uh an epistemological perspective that seems to and you can correct me if i'm wrong have the same logical outcome of something along the lines of of emmanuel kant so that we can't know the noumena we can only know perception is that is that your view that would be my view um i i don't think that we can understand what is ontologically true through our perception but we can get close enough to be able to to function and that's really all that we need to be able to do in my okay all right so if we can't know perception we can't know reality and so do you see why i would think that as an epistemology you don't have the preconditions for intelligibility cons cons perspective i would argue is fallacious you know it's kind of like he commits what some have called the nothing but fallacy right uh it's a fallacy because nothing but statements imply um more than knowledge khan says he knows the data that gets to his brain is nothing but phenomena but in order to know this he would have to be able to see more than just the phenomena in other words in order to differentiate one thing from another thing you have to be able to perceive where one ends and the other begins so when he says we can't know anything about reality he's actually making a statement about reality that given his own principles he couldn't know and so do you see the the the issue where you're saying we can't know reality but you're in in it's an objective sense but you're actually making a claim that well we can only know perception i think it's fairly demonstrable that we can only know perception for instance um we have a perception of free will um which i know that as a calvinist you probably already have contentions with just on a just on the basis of me uttering that um but for instance we have we have a perception of free will um however from what we've understood from brain scans most of our decision making is done about six microseconds in the subconscious before we actually have a chance to make it is is that the case is that the case or is it is that is that the way we perceive it again when you say those things about studies it presupposes that we have knowledge that those studies reflect something that is true so again here's the nature of pragmatism and how it helps here so with pragmatism so under pragmatism okay what we find if what we find has usage if what we find has utility then that is as far as it goes that is as far as it need go what we understand about the human brain is that things happen in subconscious before they happen in the conscious before you are perceptually aware before you have perception of a decision that has been made it has been made now granted for legal purposes we still have to hold people culpable for their actions regardless of any legal apologetic saying that oh well the subconscious was in charge of that not the conscious but there are as an example for pragmatism when we were looking at something like science i said in my opening statement that pragmatism views science as a tool it sees it through the lens of instrumentalism as long as it is yielding results and it's yielding consistent results then it maintains utility and then we continue using it regardless of whether or not regardless of whether or not it can say anything about ontology in its purest form which it one day might be able to i don't know i don't have that ability to but if i can if i can cut in um it still seems to me that on the pragmatic view it's making knowledge claims that goes beyond what pragmatism allows for i mean uh you know on the one hand you claim that we can't know anything about the real world because we use these things pragmatically while on the other hand asserting that we can know the real world is unknowable in that way or make any statement well perhaps we can know in the future you're still making knowledge claims that even themselves are not objectively true necessarily because are they knowledge claims or are they belief claims well if you believe them then what's the why should anyone believe them to be true on that world view you don't have preconditions for knowledge because it seems as though in your world you can't have knowledge you're not you're not concerned with true beliefs you're concerned with what works but then we could ask the question is it objectively true that pragmatism seeks after what works you still are stuck in a need for objective truth which your view does seem to not allow so there's two types of objective truth we're dealing with here um you're talking about objective truth about an abs an abstract principle so what what pragmatism as an epistemology is concerned with is an abstract principle because i cannot hold pragmatism in my hand in the same way that i cannot hold one in my hand or i cannot hold purple in my hand i can hold um facsimiles of these concepts but i cannot hold the actual thing in my hand the ontologically true or false nature of a proposition is not the same thing as the ontologically true nature of say um the exact chemical makeup of my desk for instance that's something that even if i were to be able to break down down to the quark there's still things below that that i don't know there's still parts about reality of this desk that i do not know whereas the uh the truth value of a proposition is in a different category is it objectively is it objectively true that it's in a different category again we have to go to the fact that we're dealing with propositions propositions are not the same thing as the ontological nature of reality these are things that we have built up in ourselves in our own conversations for instance is it ontologically true that superman can fly as an example well no but within the reality that's been built around the character of superman yes so is it ontologically true that pragmatism says a or b well no there's no ontological value to it but within the framework of pragmatism then we can make that statement is it objectively true that within the framework of pragmatism we can make those statements you can dial this back a thousand times the answer is going to be that's right and i and i would but it's the point because the because the game does well don't don't apologize because i understand what the what the the game here is and i'm not saying that you're gaming me i don't worry about it you know you don't have to just i understand you're a nice enough guy i understand we're just having a conversation but this is basically this is basically um a hyper application of the socratic method i'm really not thinking along those terms i'm just thinking of trying to um consistently apply a pragmatic outlook on the one hand we can't know objective reality yet you're making statements when you make reference to scientific studies or anything like that um i see it seems to me that that's inconsistent with a pragmatic approach if we can't know objective reality then you can't really make any statements that reflect reality unless you're just saying they're they're just useful which you go into here's the when you when you go into this infinite regress when you start getting to the point of infinite regress um that's usually where pragmatism will stop because an infinite regress does not have utility it does not have explanatory power it lacks utility um for instance when we are talking about i understand you think you've got me in a gotcha i see that look on your face i just wanted to i just wanted to ask a question there is uh when you said that when you said that an infinite regress has no utility well it does have utility if by pointing that you're stuck in an infinite regress it shows the futility of that view as being a sufficient epistemological perspective that can ground knowledge and everything else within one's worldview that's that's the utility of going through the infinite regress not like what some presuppositionalists say well how do you know that's true how do you know i'm not trying to do that as kind of a got you i'm trying to consistently apply on that perspective that is a problem the infinite regress is a problem within pragmatism which as i perceive it makes it an insufficient epistemological uh position to hold as a grounding for knowledge so so if on your view we can't have knowledge and you can correct me if you do believe in some way we can then my original argument is true that the the non -christian position your specific version of it does not have the preconditions for knowledge given the truth of your own perspective under pragmatism it would also be argued that nobody has the preconditions for knowledge it's not just that the pragmatist yeah it's not just that the pragmatist does not have this ability it's that everybody lacks the ability to do this under um for instance one of the things that was brought up uh was as long as something has utility we we keep it um and there seems to be issues with that but as an example uh you are speaking to me through a microphone that is currently connected to an ipad that is currently being ran by a logical processor and that logical processor is a direct result of pragmatic thinking regardless of the ontological value of anything in that no actually historically that's true check well i'm sure i wanted to go were actually originally invented by pragmatists that i'm not getting you fine what i'm getting at is when you say that we can't uh you know you're saying that in the pragmatic approach this is everyone's in this position again given pragmatism you're not in a place to know that this is everyone's situation again you're making statements that go beyond what pragmatism allows if you're a pragmatist and we can't have objective no pragmatism isn't a big pragmatism it's still my time so i just want to ask ask this question on a pragmatic epistemology how can you make the sweeping statement that everyone is in the same position that just begs the question in favor of of your position we can't know reality so how can you know what it what other people are able to do in regards to epistemological issues that's my question so the answer to that would be as far as pragmatism is concerned it is it is useful to be able to make the statement that it seems to be the case that everybody's stuck in the same boat but it is also equally useless to operate under the condition that nobody can perceive reality and again you're you're dealing with an epistemology which is about personal theories of truth personal theories and beliefs and trying to juxtapose that to ontology which is about the the case of things in the world i would say that everything that we do in the world that's time right there that's time right there that's time right there okay okay all right so now go ahead chris there's not that much time to answer and go back and forth so thank you 10 minutes is small but that's fine all right chris you have 10 minutes to go for sure thing um i'm actually going back on my on my notes here um so when you say that an argument is transcendental uh transcendental arguments argue what must be the case in order for something else to be the case um is that not a a type of misapplication uh of the principle of entailment um where if you say one thing must be the case for another thing to be the case um do you have a way of actually demonstrating that that is again the case at that point yeah when i deal with uh issues of transcendental argumentation it asks what are the preconditions in other words uh there are things that must be true in order for us to have this conversation uh for example logic must be applicable universal principles for in order for us to even have a coherent conversation now if one wants to you know someone says well i don't believe in logic demonstrate it for me the very denial of logic that person's gonna make me angry well yes that's true and you'll be surprised i've actually heard people who actually do deny logic but the point still goes that to deny logic you've actually demonstrated it why because transcendental arguments are proven by the impossibility of the contrary deny them and the person's position is reduced to absurdity just like the person who would deny the existence of of logic so when we're talking about transcendentals they are proven by the impossibility of the contrary deny them and you've demonstrated them affirm them and you're still you know the point is made either way that's why they're so important because you know does that does that not sound somewhat circular to you though that that literally makes it to where you have a position that has no ability to even be falsifiable well because the contrary is impossible right so when we say if something is uh necessarily true then it's non -falsifiable so i would say logic is necessarily true and by definition is unfalsifiable try to falsify it and you demonstrate its truth because you need to presuppose it in order to do that you know you need to utilize logic in order to undermine logic that logic is um you know invalid you're gonna have to give me an argument which presupposes logic and then you'd be demonstrating the very point i'm making okay um so when we're when we're dealing with the transcendental arguments um the issue that they this is not not an issue that they present um but in the questioning you end up reducing the opponent's argument to an infinite regress or an ad infinitum and then the i would assume in your world view god is used as the terminator for that regress correct that is correct yes the ability of god to terminate the infinite regress comes from omnipotence right what i would say god is the stopping point if you don't have a stopping point then you run into the risk of an infinite regress and you'll never be able to justify anything that's built upon upon that because you can't build something upon something without a foundation okay so then my question is if you're going to use god as a foundation there and we're going to argue that he is you would argue that he is self -evident correct yes okay um so on the proposition that god is sufficiently self -evident um do you not see how that causes a bit of a uniqueness problem what do you mean by uniqueness problem so the uniqueness problem comes down to um he is unique in and of himself um we have no way of understanding without uh extra means uh that he exists because of his uniqueness for instance uh i have no way of knowing that a tree like if there's only one tree in existence as an example i have no way of knowing that that tree exists unless i see that one tree otherwise i have to have a reference point to find that one tree this is the the uniqueness principle if only one thing if only one of this thing exists and there's no way for us to compare it to any other thing that is like it because there's nothing like it then we have to have some way of determining that it's there so if god is self -evident how do we actually establish that he's self -evident it seems to me correct me if i'm wrong but it seems to me that we need scripture in order to show that he is self -evident but if we require scripture to understand that god is self -evident then doesn't that now mean that he is no longer self -evident because we have required scripture in order to even get to a belief claim on god it was supposedly self -evident right that presupposes that knowledge of god is um immediate that we need to look and conclude oh look there's god if we grant the christian perspective the knowledge of god is both immediate and immediate we can know god by if you're familiar with the verse the heavens declares the glory of god but also knowledge of god is immediate and that man is creating the image of god and so that very image the very thinking process makes man in a sense aware of god now we get in some theological issues of um and again this part this part gets you know most skeptics find this insulting but the christian position as i said at the beginning uh teaches that in some way if we can kind of work our way and discuss this issue of self -deception in some way all men know that god exists again you don't have to agree with that but that's the christian position and that knowledge of god is actually innate scripture is more specific knowledge and so we would just we would make a distinction there between general revelation and special revelation but general revelation includes not only knowledge of god immediately mediated through our observing but it's also knowledge of god immediately in that the very fact that we're creating this image um it's kind of like what john calvin says that um we can't understand when we understand ourself knowledge of god and knowledge of man is simultaneous we can't know ourselves unless we in some sense know god so it's an it's an immediate knowledge of god not necessarily something that we draw a conclusion to okay and then um my next question would be do you view i i i supposed earlier in one of my arguments uh that you would view god as the the foundation of good not as separate from good as as euthyphro would put is that right god god's nature uh the goodness reflects god's nature so god is is good by the very definition of who he is can god do anything outside of his nature no okay so he is bound by his nature that's just saying he just does what he does yeah well no you said he cannot not he will not he cannot right god can't do something god can't do something that is out of accord with who he is so yeah that's a biblical position for example the bible says uh that god can't lie it would be logically impossible for a perfectly holy and good god to do that which is not uh perfect and holy so i would say that he acts consistently with who he is to act outside of his nature would be a contradiction in terms okay and as you as i'm sure you would understand you probably heard some christian apologists say this and i'm in agreement that god doesn't do the logically impossible and i wouldn't say that that's a detriment to his omnipotence because the logically impossible is not a thing it's just i actually i agree with you on this i actually have a video on my channel called the worst arguments against god and the first one i bring up is the argument from the stone basically saying please stop using this argument it's horrible okay well oh thank you well that that would be my response god does anything consistent with his nature um and uh he doesn't do anything that's contrary to his nature doesn't do anything contrary to his nature okay um and you would agree that he is omnipotent and all loving correct uh what do you mean by all loving uh all loving as i as i defined earlier that he has unconditional love uh for his creation he has agape love i would say that god loves his creation but there are different degrees within his love he doesn't love everyone in precisely the same way okay is there a verse that you can reference to where he says that uh yes it's a deduction from scripture for example we have uh the idea of the hatred of god psalm 5 it says i hate the worker of iniquity but then in another sense there's a sense in which god does love the world but that sense is qualified by those other statements which we tried in scripture that we try to hold consistently so there's a way so it is not so it's not unconditional love uh well i mean because there are conditions that you've just set up i'm sorry because i have i haven't set up any conditions in the bible in conversation in conversation you have set them up not that they were set up by you in particular but within the conversation right i would say that in the scriptures themselves god himself differentiate differentiates his love you have explicit scriptures which talk about his specific and special love for his covenant people you have scriptures that talk about his general love for mankind but it's not a kind of redemptive love we talk about in theology this idea of common grace that's that is an expression of a kind of love but it's definitely not the same kind of love that god has for his elect so there is differentiation within the bible itself and so since the bible is my standard the basis upon which i formulate these ideas that's consistent within my perspective if anyone tries to define omni benevolence in some way that's contrary to that i would just say that such a conception would be contrary to my worldview and wouldn't apply to me okay um then my next question would be what is your view on hell eternal conscious torment eternal conscious torment right but i understand that christians within the realm of orthodoxy hold to a wide range of views on that this is this happens to be my view so my view i'm convinced that this is uh the correct way but i have conversations with people about different perspectives that's why i didn't declare what your version of hell was when i was speaking earlier i recognize there's a uh i recognize there's several versions of hell that have been posited and a lot of them end up stemming from for instance the apocalypse of peter which was then extrapolated into dante's inferno and that gave us our our very like southern baptisty version of hell um okay whereas the bible itself is somewhat vague in many of its passages when dealing with hell all right that's time that's time all right eli you have 10 minutes your final 10 minutes or crosses emma chris okay um let me see here okay we talked about love you have a philosophical version of agnosticism so that's consistent with your pragmatism because you admitted that we can't know objective reality let me see where i would go from here i mean it's very difficult to to say i i guess i could ask i'm still i'm still convinced that your position of pragmatism within your world view perspective if it's true you would you agree that within your world view you don't have the preconditions to know objective reality and so your view is skeptical about everything we really can't know anything in its in its reality just just perception so it sounds i'm not sure if you're familiar with the argument from the ass not familiar with the argument this is this is actually this is actually an old greek argument i'm i believe you so the argument the argument from the ass uh states this is this is important for this the argument from the ass is a is an argument against skepticism um the ass as a donkey uh is stuck between two uh piles of feet and the piles of feet are equidistant they are equal sized um so the the donkey is skeptical on which one it should eat uh the donkey basically cannot pull an ought from the is of the current situation which is a giant problem that everybody has issues with you can't pull an out from it is in any any situation um because the donkey cannot figure out which uh pile it should eat from the donkey starves due to its skepticism and its inability to uh know which side it needs to go uh the donkey ends up dying um so with pragmatism there's a conversation where skepticism is concerned so you do have a level of skepticism uh towards essentially everything if somebody tells me one thing that they believe or one thing they think is true i will probably look it up without taking their word on it which pisses a lot of my friends off that's unfortunate for them i'm sorry um but in that skepticism uh pragmatism also holds that there is no utility in not taking a position this is why i didn't begin this by taking a non -position something that again thank you for for having a modicum of respect for um pragmatism would hold that there's no utility in taking that that non -position or not actually acting so pragmatically the donkey would have to choose regardless of there being a a good or worse option would have to choose one of the two sides so yes in that skepticism we can't know something ontologically but in pragmatism we must still act because without action there is no utility okay but the but the story of the ass presupposes the objective reality that the ass exists so you if we can't know anything about objective reality then my next question would be do you know that you exist can you operate under beliefs alone i'm sorry you're my question so i i'm just i'm just asking the question given your perspective if okay we can't know objective reality then can someone know objectively that they exist if you could know objectively that you exist then you can know some aspect of objective reality which would refute the idea that we can't know objective reality knowing an aspect knowing an aspect about objective reality does not mean that you know objective reality you've been able to pull an aspect of it from your perception which has marginal utility it uh it may be closer in proximity to the ontological truth of the matter but it does not necessitate that you have actually gotten close enough to perceive the ontological truth of the matter my position is that one can operate entirely on belief alone those beliefs can lead them to knowledge possibly whether they know that they actually have knowledge as much of a tautology as that statement is is a bit hard to perceive but a being just in general can operate purely on belief especially if they have to make action but you did say just then that we could move closer to the ontology but how would you know we would be moving closer to the ontology since we can't know on your view uh you have no way of knowing but it doesn't matter i'm sorry you have no way of knowing but it doesn't matter for instance um if i am closer to what the ontological value of graphite is what it actually is in general um that neither helps nor hinders and in many cases it may hinder because it will throw me into the problem of the ass of uh unfettered skepticism essentially um i have no way of knowing the ontological value of every single facet of the chemical makeup of this graphite but i recognize uh that this graphite has utility it can be used to write it can be used for several other experiments that can be used in other instances so you don't you don't keep going and hit that infinite regress you go until you get to the point where okay this has now become absurd if you get to the point where it feels like it's becoming absurd then there's no reason to continue forward at that point this is why pragmatism is commonly used as a as a uh as an answer to solipsism right and i don't think it's a good argument because my point is that pragmatism does reduce to absurdity since on the one hand you're positing pragmatism but then you make claims that are look like knowledge claims but then you have to admit that's not knowledge your world you seems to not be able to provide the preconditions for knowledge i mean even by saying well we could only just know perception that's a knowledge claim and and you say well i don't know i don't know if that's objectively true well that's a knowledge claim i don't see how you could avoid the infinite regress if infinite regression is absurdity then i say that that's that's what seems uh that seems that your world view goes down that route that's why i'm kind of i'm trying my best to understand what you're saying but it seems as though you're proving my point in my initial argument that to reject a world view that has the foundation that i'm suggesting the position is reduced to absurdity if your position is pragmatism you got the infinite regress if your position is empiricism you got problems there if your position is rationalism there's problems there so i tried to i put those out as red meat just to and i'm glad you you clarified you know you didn't take any of those so i'm a pragmatist and that helps narrow things down but it seems that that position um really you can't make any certain claims about anything even that pragmatism is something useful because that's a that's an objective knowledge claim how would you respond to that uh my response to that would be we look at what uh we would have to look at what the fruits of that particular epistemology are uh so under pragmatism under pragmatic thought uh we have as an example i i hate the word scientism and i hate people who adhere to science being the end all be all to everything i can't stand that science science doesn't get you to ethics as an example there's a reason we have a separate category for ethics of science um but under pragmatism we can see things like philosophy of science instrument uh instrumentalism and we can see these things and we can determine their utility so how do we determine the utility of say alchemy versus science well we look at its fruits well how do we determine the utility of pragmatism versus say solipsism well we look at its fruits if solipsism uh naturally would beget somebody who operates as if they are the only living being on the planet and everything else is a manifestation of their mind in hard solipsism um the type of person that is begot from that largely doesn't have any utility behind anything they do they don't have a reason to do anything for anybody else except say feed themselves because they're the only one they can even figure that exists but even then the food that they're consuming might not exist under pragmatism though you still have to actually go into action so the fruits of pragmatism end up outweighing the fruits of something like solipsism right but the fruit is not something that is known objectively it's a perception of what that fruit is and so we can have skepticism literally about everything that we perceive to be the fruit or utility of something you're again yeah we right and so that position would destroy the possibility of knowing anything at all and there's nothing wrong with that a being can operate entirely on beliefs do you know that to be true i believe it to be true and i can operate on that right but you see the infinite regress i could ask you do you know that you believe that to be true it's going to keep going back because that's the nature can you explain what the problem of an infinite regress is i'm sorry can you explain what the actual issue of an infinite regress is right if i were to say why do you believe you know a let me say well because of this i'm like why do you believe that because of this why do you believe that because of this and you continue to go ad infinitum then you have never justified how you actually know the initial the initial thing infinite regression will destroy the possibility of understanding anything because you could never have a justification a stopping point that actually grounds that you'd go on forever and never know anything which it's if that's true that position is reduced to absurdity since you'd have to say on that view okay we can't know anything but if you can't know anything how do we know we can't know anything that position is self -refuting and so i would see that position as as an absurd position unless you have some kind of stopping point that can ground those beliefs and give a proper justification for them that i and i think the christian world you can do that see i don't necessarily see there's being an issue with not all right that is that's time right there for eli's 10 minutes final 10 minutes all right uh chris you not can questions eli for your final 10 minutes sure um so for my final 10 minutes uh i want to get into the concept of hell for a little bit um so you brought up you brought up your version of hell is eternal conscious torture so this is something that a being would be able to perceive till the end of time and what is your definition of torture that you're using for this um i don't know the description of hell is uh where the difficulty comes for me i know people have different uh ideas of what hell actually entails uh to be quite honest based on my own study i'm not sure uh what in what way the people suffer i know one aspect of the suffering is being eternally separated from god and so uh you know that is going to be a part of it but in regards to the details i'm not so sure and that's a conversation that i'd like to have uh with my fellow christians that kind of explore that a little more okay but you do view it as suffering of a nature correct oh yes yes very much so all right then it doesn't actually matter uh i would argue that it doesn't matter then what type of suffering it is because regardless of if the suffering is burning forever or being tickled forever or having a or having a graphite or having a graphite pencil slowly pushed into your ear but never quite penetrating all the way through forever these are all forms of suffering unless somebody's got a weird kink that i'm not entirely certain of and would maybe question um so my position would be that it doesn't matter what type of torture it is or what type of suffering all suffering is equal if it's infinite because there's not going to be any difference between one type of suffering or another if they're infinite just like all types of happiness i would disagree you would disagree i disagree with that so for example you can see a functional difference between suffering if it's infinite well uh i would argue that there may be some indication within the bible that discusses different degrees of punishment so that people in hell are all punished but there are different degrees now what does that look like i don't know only god knows the degree and the degree that's appropriate for uh for the person but um i don't see that that's necessarily the case that it's just all the same so the reason the reason i say that it's all the same um for a finite amount of time we we we perceive any type of suffering that we have based on the degree of suffering that we have in the length of time we have in that type of suffering which will increase the degree of suffering for instance um if you're familiar i'm not sure how familiar you you are with like old school military torture methods but many of them i have gandered in the encyclopedia of torture uh uh i don't know there's actually an encyclopedia that goes into different torture methods throughout history so i have i have dabbled a little bit out of curiosity but go ahead okay um so what we find when we look at torture methods that have been used throughout history many torture methods and some of the most uh psychologically damaging ones are ones that we would consider mundane if they were done for a short period of time for instance dripping water on somebody's forehead for a an amount of time while they're strapped down this is considered a relatively mundane thing to endure for even 10 minutes however when we extend this torture to a long amount of time for instance an hour a day a handful of days we find that the torture actually gets magnified greatly to the point where it is equivalent to if not worse than other types of more violent brutal torture so my position is that if someone is suffering if that suffering is infinite all suffering eventually will reach a point where it is indistinguishable in the amount of total ages i would say torture actually uh you use conscious torture this is fine any type of torture of any kind will result in the same amount of suffering if the amount of time allowed is infinite because there is no end point they will all reach the same point and continue on past that point infinitely well i mean you're saying all these things uh that's i'm not committed to those understandings from my worldview and if you're saying that from your worldview you're not even sure that that's objectively true since within your worldview you can't know that you perceive that that's how things work and how these things would have various logical entailments i i'm not obligated within my worldview to understand the things the way you've just described them okay and that's fine that you're not obligated to um so then my next question would be do you view god as all good any any action that he takes would be good yes okay and so you view him do you view that there are people who are predestined uh to go to hell they are born and they will be going to hell period they are simply not elect they are reprobate yes okay and do you view that as as just that these people were born never having a chance to actually be saved well we're going to have to get into some theological weeds there which is fine uh if we were you know discussing theology as an entire conversation i wouldn't want to imagine to get into the details of that here however it was a yes no question if if i'm sorry well it was a yes no question do you do you well well it's yes or no questions can be pretty tricky because i'd want to qualify certain things but if you're asking within my worldview and you're asking is something fair even if i didn't know how it would be fair if i were to say it's fair which i think it is since god always does good it is a good thing even if i wouldn't be able to explain to you the details of all that um my worldview does not require me to go into the details and explain it my worldview uh provides uh my worldview uh within it is that everything that god does is good now if i can't explain well how is this good that's irrelevant to me having or god having a sufficient reason a good reason for why he's doing those things so there's no inconsistency within my own perspective uh yeah if if so i wanted to go to hell it's a good thing and it's just because god did it god doesn't do anything not just and so it would logically follow that it is just now if you were to respond with a question but what about those are interesting in -house theological issues but given the truth of my worldview it would be just and so there wouldn't be a logical problem there okay so there's two questions i want to ask on that okay the first one is you do you recognize that you accidentally equivocated there maybe but i'd be happy i mean i'm not perfect okay so um so i used the word just and you swapped to the word fair are you i'm fairly certain that you're using these interchangeably answer your question i did recognize that i that i equivocated so yes okay um yeah so you recognize that just refers to an action that's justified under its particular circumstances um it can also be defined as a suspension of mercy um fair refers to an action that treats people as they deserve to be treated many times actions are are just but they are simply not fair many times actions are fair but there is no justice in their fairness so swapping these words so thanks put you in a way so thank you i did i did equivocate so kind of just responding and thinking off the top of my head um i would say that everything god does uh in regards to exercising his justice he is right in doing so and it is truly the just thing to do whatever he does okay um so then we recognize that under that worldview uh should he elect i i know you're a father um should he elect to take one of your children and say that they are not elect uh they are doomed to suffer for eternity and there's nothing that you or anyone else can do about it no matter how hard they try do you see that as a as a just action well i would say that god is free to elect anyone he pleases and so what i think is irrelevant to whether that's just or not now we do make a distinction within reform theology between god's decrees and secondary causes and things like that and so we do not believe within our worldview that our actions don't matter now we could get into the intricacies of those things and then we'll just be opening up theological issues which is fine but given my worldview um god is free to predestine anyone um and he is free to send everyone to hell if he wants and he's free to send everyone to heaven and he has the freedom to do that it's it's irrelevant what i think god can predestine my children from before the foundation of the world to go to hell if he sees fit okay and you are perfectly fine worshiping this god that would condemn your children to eternal punishment and know within the choice within my within my worldview i don't understand the things in the simplistic way that we just kind of did that exchange within my worldview i agree that god is just he has morally sufficient reasons for uh what he allows and on what he does you know whatever what he permits what he causes and i would say that in order for me to say that that's wrong i'd have to presuppose something inconsistent with my worldview namely an external standard of good that i perceive god not to be uh acting in accord with now i do believe that when god created uh when god saved me um the bible teaches that my actions do matter in some way um and so i do uh bring my children up uh in the admonition of the lord um and the bible says that god uh ordains not only the ends but the means and so i see my actions as very important so it's not this issue of well god you know could have predestined my children to hell so how could you worship a god like that well it's more complex than that if you read some of the christian creeds we go into some of the details of the relationship between god's sovereign decrees and uh human actions and and their importance all right all right that is the end of the cross -examination portion of this debate um with that i do have two questions if you guys don't mind um so like a little q a if you will um so the first question is for eli um like a lot of uh a lot of arguments from the pessimist the skeptical world your skeptical position has to do with the morals standing question the morality of god right so the understanding is if god is all loving if god is all loving he's holy why not just wipe out evil altogether what is the what's the purpose of for example allowing someone to be raped something like that yeah and i picked the most extreme i picked the most extreme one because that's typically what it is you know uh all that stuff fits you know torturing babies for fun this is the kinds of stuff we need to talk about because i think the the the most intense examples bring out the point i think and that's why i think people you know talk about these things um we have to understand that my inability to know god's morally sufficient reason for allowing something is irrelevant uh to the fact that god has morally sufficient reason to do so deuteronomy 29 29 says that the secret things belong to the lord and those that he's revealed belong to us and our children's children so within the christian worldview it's consistent for me to not necessarily know why god does certain things but because god has also revealed his goodness there is sufficient ground within scripture itself that i can trust that those areas of life that i don't understand god does in fact have morally sufficient reasons for uh for allowing them um so uh when you say why did god allow a rape or a murder um i don't my inability to know god's reason is irrelevant to the fact that god has morally sufficient reasons he may tell us there might be instances in scripture where he explains why a specific evil occurred and then there are instances where he doesn't explain within my worldview god's not obligated to explain i'm just happy that when certain bad things happen he does explain some of it so uh so that's not an issue in terms of the truth of my perspective there's no logical incoherency within my perspective my perspective grants that i won't know always god's morally sufficient reasons okay uh chris you wanna you wanna you got thoughts on that uh only one thought i just find it very interesting uh that my interlocutor's position for better or worse is that it's perfectly okay uh when rape happens because god has a reason for it to happen that's not what i said but okay well that's the principle of entailment god has a plan how you understand those issues onto my perspective within my worldview um it would be inappropriate for me to say that god is okay with rape just because god permits evil doesn't mean that he's okay with it god permits certain things and he is accomplishing purposes but not everything that he permits he's okay with but he definitely has purposes for why why it's allowed and of course god will one day within the christian perspective judge uh people for their sinful actions so i think that would be a straw man to understand my position as it's okay for someone to be raped okay uh chris i have a question for you you mentioned you spoke about god's agape love his unconditional love um is it right okay so this is okay so i'm sort of leading to the question a little bit if if we have a god right we have a god who's all loving all powerful and he's just in his actions um is not he allowed to show wrath in that in that same in the same way that he shows love or is it just that we look at the agape love and we say well the agape love wouldn't allow this the agape love wouldn't send anybody to hell you know is he not allowed just like we do as you know as parents i'm not sure if you have children chris but um as we do as parents there is a time where we love our children but there is also a time where we have to discipline them we have to put them on punishment and so forth um do you not think that the almighty god the all just god has the right to love and also um lay down uh lay down the hammer if you will so there's a couple answers to this uh the first one we have to deal with what types of wrath are enacted uh in the here and now and then what types of wrath are enacted in the afterlife if we're talking about the here now we run into the issue of we're seeing god essentially as a parent who's using uh punitive action as a teaching mechanism would you say that that's somewhat correct sure okay so when punitive action is used as a teaching mechanism there's a lesson to be learned at the end so when you and when you use punitive action as a parent you typically communicate why something happened for instance uh your child steals something from the grocery store um you find out you spank them you let them know that hey just so you know what i did to you right now uh was infinitely less bad than what would happen to you in the penile system uh i'm letting you know right now that the action that you did was wrong you need to take that back to the store and you use it as a teaching method the purpose of punitive action here is to teach when we're dealing with god's wrath on earth it's very hard for many of those actions to be seen as teaching mechanisms because there is not the follow -up from the parent that hey the reason i did this is this it's up to the person's perception here we don't ask children to figure we don't spank a child and then basically just say uh you know what you did and you know why it's wrong we can't do that until we've actually sat down and explained that to the child secondly if we're dealing with the issue of the afterlife i view the punitive action of god at this point again depending on which version of hell you're using as largely useless because if we're going to view punitive action as a method of teaching someone a lesson there is no lesson to be learned once you're in hell because if you're there it doesn't matter if you learn your lesson or not there's nothing you can do with it at that point you can't then take that lesson and be a better person you can't use that in any other in other any other area so it seems to me that when we're dealing with hell the afterlife punishment we have punishment for punishment's sake and i view neither of those the punishment without communication and the punishment for punishment's sake i don't view any of those as congruent with the type of punishment we would use on our children as a parent for teaching purposes okay eli what you got to say yeah i wouldn't equate uh god's wrath necessarily with how was just expressed there um and basically you're asking the question uh chris from your perspective wouldn't god have a right to do you know to punish and bring down the hammer again he's gonna have to answer that in two ways either from his own worldview perspective or from within the christian worldview perspective if he's answering within the christian worldview perspective then he's gonna have to grant the truth of the perspective and on its own terms answer that question which i don't think he did if he's answering it from his own perspective then there's the problem of his pragmatic epistemology if we can't know objective reality how does he know the objective truth of everything he just said if he admits it he doesn't know those things to be true then he really hasn't said anything if he says he can know those things to be true and how we're to understand wrath uh then his view is false since he's claiming to have objective knowledge as to those categories that he's just delineated between and regarding the different kinds of wrath and punishment and correction and lessons to be learned okay okay well you guys are in luck i only got two questions for you so this was an enjoyable discussion okay same here same here and i really appreciate i don't know if we're done if we're doing closing statements or whatever but just to say beforehand i'm not saying this superficially i i really did enjoy this conversation i find you to be a respectful debate partner excellent i find you to be the same excellent i'll transition to you know if you guys want to say something closing uh go ahead and give you guys a chance to close and then we'll close this close this debate out we'll close the show out all right eli i'm gonna go ahead allow you to go ahead and uh give uh some closing remarks all right well just to summarize my argument at the beginning was that the christian worldview provides the necessary preconditions for intelligibility all non -christian perspectives lack that foundation the non -christian perspectives either are internally incoherent or undermine uh human um let me see if i can find the specific words they undermine human reasoning and experience and i think um given the pragmatic approach i think we see that once you grant the uh hypothetical truth of pragmatism human reasoning and experience is in fact undermined since you can't make any objective uh statements about reality yet on the one hand i think the pragmatist does run them up and does make um these statements about objective reality you have to actually presuppose uh you know the opposite of what you're actually what you're actually saying so on the one hand we can't know everything or anything objectively and on the other hand there are statements being made that presuppose that we can know certain things um objectively and so i think that that is a detriment to the pragmatist uh perspective um now again we didn't get to hash out the details of my own worldview uh as it's as it being transcendentally necessary um again that's probably due to the uh the time uh frames and just the way the discussion flowed but i do believe that the christian worldview its benefit is that it is true in a transcendental sense deny its metaphysic its epistemology and its worldview framework and the position is reduced to absurdity now of course we didn't have time to go into the details of other worldview perspectives but hopefully i i hope that in this discussion it was demonstrated that pragmatism doesn't have the legs to stand and build a coherent worldview foundation that being said and i'll close with this as i said before i definitely appreciate chris coming on um and interacting in a respectful manner and um my prayer for him is that he continues to look at these things and and have discussions which my prayer is that one day you will come to know the lord jesus christ um and have your sins forgiven and that you know um that's my prayer for you and i'm sure other people have said that but i just want to share my heart there and wrap up my comments thank you all right thank you eli for those closing remarks i appreciate it all right chris you got it uh sure thing uh my closing remarks would be i still that obviously at the end of this uh remain unconvinced uh that god is a thing at least the christian god is a thing um i was for 18 years uh but that largely fell away i've actually got videos on my channel dealing with that but i'm not going to use this as an attempt to plug because my opponent did not use this as an attempt to plug um so what i'll say is this i do not find still that whether or not we can perceive the ontological nature of reality as terribly important as long as we can get close enough in approximation to garner utility again this is we know that science as an example gets us closer to an approximation of ontological truth because of the fruits of its efforts whereas something like alchemy does not get us closer uh to the ontological nature of truth because alchemy largely over the centuries never yielded any fruit um again that's not to say that everything boils down to science when we have arguments about morals and ethics science can tell us uh how perception has developed around those things but it can't necessarily give us any moral oughts to argue that it can as a is a not from his problem um so at the end of the day the only thing i want to say is i enjoyed this discussion with eli and even though we come out at completely opposite ends of the spectrum i do enjoy the fact that he was a respectful interlocutor because i've had many a debate where my interlocutor uh was was certainly not that so i did want to say that in closing all right thank you once again both of you thank you for a well -rounded discussion i appreciate the effort that you guys took in order to prepare for this and just the the openness and making your time available for something like this you know these open discussions where people are able to come together and actually hear each other you know and actually hear each other's arguments and be able to respond in a respectful honorable manner is lacking in today's culture so i really do appreciate it and um with that i do want to bless both of you with gifts for coming on so i will get with both of you after the show expires i will get with both of you and i will uh look for a contact or a place where i can send a gift so uh with that said once again thank both of you i appreciate both of you and uh i'm gonna close this show out and be on the lookout for both shows i'm gonna try to get y 'all doing somebody else man i might do a part two with this man this was a great conversation so i appreciate you both thank you all right all right no problem no problem wanted to say uh real quick eli if you're here um would you mind if in the group chat uh between you and marlin i dropped the uh worst arguments against god video that i did so you could give me your critique on that so uh let me see if i i'm not really familiar with this so let me see i don't even know how to get to the comments see i am should just be the facebook conversation that we had i just dropped it in there okay all right thank you i'll take a look and uh yeah cool thank you i appreciate that never all right fellas see y 'all soon man i'll close the show out take care it was a pleasure thank you so much for having me on and thank you chris for engaging i appreciate it no problem all right all right all right that is it folks the gospel truth man hey we you know i love these conversations i love the fact that you know this you know the platform that god has blessed me with is being used in order to engage you know in order to engage those who do not agree with the christian perspective and then doing that you know it's done in a manner that's that's great that's awesome um and i just want to encourage all the christians out there you know when you when you engage with those who disagree with your position you need to do it in a manner that's going to allow them to hear you the the uh condescending attitudes the sarcasm the emotional responses all that does nothing we need to be able to engage ourselves and represent our lord and savior jesus christ in a manner that he's called us to represent him and um once again i just want to thank eli and chris for doing that i want to thank these two individuals for coming on and doing a great job at at arguing for their position uh with that said i do want to go into the gospel truth uh you know the gospel truth is jesus christ death bearing resurrection and then first john 4 9 through 10 it says in this love of god was made manifest among us that god sent his only son into the world so that we might live through him in this love not that we have loved god but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins jesus christ is the appeasement he is the appeasement for our sins the ultimate sacrifice he appeased the wrath of god so that we wouldn't have to endure it god calls us out our sins repent of our sins and we are in the fold of christ so it's absolutely vitally important that we take this into strong consideration if you are not a believer take these words to strong consideration that the gospel of jesus christ is the power unto salvation please take these words these are very very vital important words and the way this world is going now is it very important that you grasp this and we pray over here at the gospel truth that god will you know give you repentance will allow repentance that the holy spirit will come in your heart regenerate your heart and change your heart but with that said i want to go ahead and rehash some of the shows that i have coming up september 25th i have andrew rapport versus stephen bonnell uh never be debating is secular humanness a period of christianity october 1st 2019 i have another debate ricky crony will be debating miles patrick and they're going to be debating is obedience to the law required for salvation the interpretation of deuteronomy 28 and is jesus god october 5th 2019 uh scarlet clay versus gina belk our first female debate uh the topic will be are christians epistemologically justified to believe in god and october 6 miles kettison will be debating taylor gray and everybody can atheism account for objective morality so we have a whole slew of shows coming up and uh you know i'm just you know i i i do these debates i do these debates and i do these lessons and i do these interviews um so that the gospel will be sent out so that it will engage the culture that we live in and then that sometimes you need support right so if you can put on your heart put in your prayer list if it's on your heart to support this ministry i would appreciate it if god has put on your heart to support you know you can go to www .patreon