Why Atheist DEBUNKING videos Shouldn't Worry You At All, DEBUNKED
“I love a good courtroom drama. I like watching lawyers work within the established legal
framework in order to make a case for a particular position, using whatever evidence is available.”
Well then, Braxton, you’re in luck, as it’s time to brew-up a courtroom drama, with you
being the defence, and I the prosecution… Let's see who can win over the jurors, shall
we?
[Intro]
Why hello my fellow apes, I hope you’re well. Just over a month ago, Braxton Hunter
of Trinity Radio published a video with yours-truly in the thumbnail, and a caption saying “I
can’t be the only one noticing this?” The title of the video is ‘Why Atheist DEBUNKING
videos Shouldn't Worry You At All’, and as it stands it’s one of his most highly
viewed as of late. Now, I must admit, this is going to be a bit of a difficult one to
respond to, since the analogy Braxton gives is, well, problematic… but I still think
it's worthwhile responding, if only to challenge his rhetoric and framing. So let's get this
trial started.
I love a good courtroom drama. I like watching lawyers work within the established legal
framework in order to make a case for a particular position using whatever evidence is available.
And even though fiction makes it seem much more common than it really is, occasionally
someone who actually did commit a crime will go free because of some technicality related
to legal procedure.
Alright, so, when it comes to argumentation, analogical reasoning has a vexed reputation.
Consider the most famous (or infamous) theological use of analogical reasoning… William Paley’s
Watchmaker Analogy. This argument draws an analogy between a pocket watch and biology
(as can be represented by, say, the human eye), and reasons that just as we know the
pocket watch, by virtue of its complexity, had a creator, so too we know that the eye,
by virtue of its complexity, had a creator. Variants of this analogy convinced a lot of
people of theism, for a very long time, and yet when Darwin published the Origin of Species,
and in doing so revolutionised the world with evolution by natural selection, it became
instantly obvious that Paley’s analogy is bogus. But as hesitant as I am, let's continue.
And in such a case the person might not receive the verdict ‘guilty’, but everyone involved
not only knows that they likely are guilty, but knows a lot of the relevant details about
how they committed the crime – and they know this because of the weight of evidence
in the case. In other words, what individual people can clearly see as true, or have strong
justification for believing, isn't necessarily the same thing as establishing that legally.
So, Braxton is setting up a scenario here in which we all know that someone is guilty
of a crime – but how we know, and to what degree of certainty, he doesn’t say. Further
still, he doesn’t specify the type of technicality, and so his entire analogy is extremely vague,
meaning that it’s going to be very difficult to draw a correspondence between his analogy
and whatever theological scenario he’s about to lay out.
But what have we thought about the case for God's existence not in terms of a legal case,
but in terms of the tight, syllogistic argumentation in the field of philosophy of religion? Just
as is possible the evidence in some legal case could demonstrate that a person did a
particular thing but the case might not go through because of some procedural mistake,
philosophical arguments for God's existence often give very good reason to believe that
God exists, even though some aspect of the argument could not seem to be conclusive,
though still very, very likely.
Well, is it a technicality, or is it a procedural mistake? As they're very different things.
But the case might not go through because of some procedural mistake.
In any case, and to reiterate, without a tangible example of someone escaping the justice system
due to a specific technicality (or indeed procedural mistake), it’s pretty much impossible
to draw a correspondence here. Now I could, of course, provide such an example, but in
doing so I might not capture the analogy as Braxton intended, and so I won’t. Unfortunately,
we’ll just have to proceed with this very, very vague analogy.
But perhaps you as an individual see the force of these arguments, but there's some extremely
technical objection that you don't know how to answer.
“Extremely technical?” I mean, some objections are technical, sure, but others are not…
such as Darwin’s natural selection. This objection is pretty easy to get one’s head
around – so much so, in fact, that as of today the majority of Christians, no less,
accept natural selection, and thus have discarded Paley’s Watchmaker Analogy altogether. What’s
more, the fact that some objections are technical is really quite irrelevant to whether or not
they successfully undercut or rebut an argument. The specific orbits of the planets are technical,
and yet they proved to be a very serious objection to Newtonian mechanics. So, I’m not really
not a fan of Braxton's framing here, since he’s at least implicitly painting all objections
as ‘extremely technical’, and they’re not.
Just as with the court case, you may come to think that some particular aspect of the
argument has some sort of weakness, but that doesn't mean that you as an individual can
still see the force of the argument in general. Let's look at an example. Take contingency
arguments. Reality has things that are contingent, and require an explanation from outside of
themselves, a reality also has at least one thing that is necessary, and requires nothing
outside of itself for existence.
Now I appreciate that Braxton is just laying out the argument here, but the proposition
of a necessary being is actually very contentious. While it's true that some philosophers (and
especially theists) maintain that there is at least one necessary thing, many philosophers
don’t – including some prominent theists, such as Richard Swinburne. Bertrand Russell,
Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Stephen Hawking, and Sean Carroll, to name just a few other
prominent thinkers, found and find the proposition of a necessary being ludicrous.
Now if these philosophers and scientists are correct in their assessment, then contingency
arguments completely fall apart, since they insist on a necessary being. And so again,
contention over the existence of a necessary being isn’t just some technicality… no,
it’s half the damn case!
One challenge that's brought to arguments like this is to say, perhaps things don't
require that sort of explanation. Now since this sort of a principle undergirds our scientific
work and actually is evidenced by one-hundred percent of our experience of the world – and
chanting quantum mechanics here doesn't really help because, number one, you'd be making
the point of this video, and number two, atheists actually need to do quite a bit more work
to make that a relevant objection. Now, in such a case perhaps an individual finds it
difficult to uphold this notion philosophically, but that doesn't mean they can't see the force
of the argument!
So it seems that Braxton isn't really aware of the objection he’s touching upon, or,
at the very least, he didn't articulate it very well – so let me… or better yet,
let Carroll. In the in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Physics, Carroll writes the
following:
The naturalness of the impulse to ask why the universe exists does not imply that the
question is coherent or answerable… It might be the case that the property of “having
a reason why” applies to facts within reality, but not to all of reality itself… Our experience
of the world, which is confined to an extraordinarily tiny fraction of reality, doesn’t leave
us well equipped to think in appropriate ways about the question of its existence.
Carroll’s words here express the same sentiment that Bertrand Russell did in his debate with
Frederick Copelston, which was on the contingency argument, no less. In short, yes, when we
look around us, we see that everything in the universe is contingent, that everything
is predicated on something else, that everything is explained in terms of other things. For
instance, I’m making this response primarily because Braxton stuck my mug on the thumbnail
of his video [get close to the cam] (and by the way, thanks for the compliment, Brax).
But even if it were the case that absolutely everything within the universe is contingent,
it in no way follows that the universe itself is contingent – just as it doesn’t follow,
to use Russell’s example, that the human race as a whole has a mother because every
individual human has a mother. This is a fallacy of composition. And again, this isn’t just
an ‘extremely technical’ objection or just a pinhole in the fabric of the argument
– no, it’s a very serious flaw in the case, since if we don’t have sufficient
reason to confidently state that the universe is a contingent being, then the argument from
contingency is pretty much bankrupt. We can just say that either the universe is a necessary
being, or, indeed, that the universe is a brute fact.
Or take the Kalam Cosmological Argument, which famously says everything that begins to exist
must have a cause for its existence, the universe began to exist, therefore the universe must
have a cause for its existence – and then we reason further that that cause must be
God In defence of premise two, that the universe began to exist, proponents of the argument
might try to demonstrate this by showing the impossibility of a past infinite series of
causal events or temporal moments. I’ve offered this in nuanced ways all over this
channel. But perhaps you just can't shake the idea in your mind that though it seems
extremely unlikely, maybe there's a non-zero chance that the universe is past-infinite?
Extremely unlikely? Honestly, I find this confidence quite frankly repulsive. There
is currently a multiplicity of contenting models of the universe, with many positing
an infinite past, and while physicists and philosophers have their favourites, I don’t
think I’ve ever seen one ooze as much confidence as Braxton here... exception, of course, for
the odd philosophers who also happens to be an apologist… Craig.
If you're right, it could show that people in the philosophy of religion need to spend
more time working on the argument to make it as tight as they can possibly make it.
Or, possibly… it could mean that the argument isn’t very good, couldn’t it? You know,
that we've made progress, by, say, making new observations, or establishing new theories.
Natural selection is a good example here, but since we’re on the Kalam, consider Al-Ghazali’s
argument that we know that the universe had a beginning since if the solar system had
existed forever, then it would follow that Saturn has made as many orbits as Earth, despite
the former taking twenty-nine times as long as the latter to do so.
(“That’s absurd!”)
For many, this conclusion is unintuitive, but Georg Cantor’s Set Theory blew this
argument (along with many other Kalam arguments) out of the water. As it turns out, there are,
in fact, different sizes of infinite. There’s no contradiction in drawing a one-to-one correspondence
between the natural numbers and a subset of the natural numbers. Now, sure, some still
champion Al-Ghazali’s argument, such as William Lane Craig, but to fail to see the
‘force of this objection’ and merely conclude that philosophers (and let’s be honest,
you mean theologians) just need to dot the I’s and cross the T’s, strikes me as absurd!
(“That’s absurd!”)
Objections like these are actually helpful and fun to talk about because they help us
to tighten up the argument as much as possible, or to get rid of certain defences.
Or, maybe, get rid of the argument itself, right? I mean, I think it's fair to assume
that Braxton doesn't buy every argument for God's existence. Surely, he recognises that
some of the objections have indeed ended the debate?
But as an individual, you can still look at the weight of the case and see the strength
in it. If people think contingency arguments can be dismissed because they doubt PSRS,
or that the universe is past infinite despite that seeming to result in absurdities, I can
only advise that such a person step back from the arguments and recognise the difference
between the work of a philosopher to shore up every defence and make it as tight as they
can, and an individual's ability to see where the evidence lies.
Okay, there’s a lot to address here, so let’s go through it again, one step at a
time.
If people think contingency arguments can be dismissed because they doubt PSRS.
Well, they can, can’t they? If one isn’t convinced that everything must have an explanation,
then contingency arguments do, indeed, fall apart.
Or that the universe is past infinite despite that seeming to result in absurdities.
If by an ‘absurdity’ we mean ‘something that is unintuitive’, such as that there
are different sizes of infinite, then, this just isn’t a problem. General relativity,
electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics are unintuitive… but this is no way reason to
doubt the ‘force’ of their explanatory value. And if by ‘absurdity’ we mean ‘something
that is contradictory’, then isn’t this one of the crucial premises that a proponent
of the Kalam is attempting to demonstrate? I mean, if we’re not convinced by any of
the arguments, then, trivially, we’re just going to deny that assuming an infinite past
results in a contradiction.
I can only advise that such a person step back from the arguments and recognise the
difference between the work of a philosopher to shore up every defence and make it as tight
as they can, and an individual's ability to see where the evidence lies.
Notice that Braxton frames those that defend theological arguments as ‘philosophers’
and those that issue objections as ordinary, ‘individuals’, but this, ironically, is
pretty much the opposite. The vast majority of philosophers are atheists; they are naturalists.
Indeed, the people that most thoroughly study the fabric of what is supposedly God's world,
are less likely to believe in God than the average Joe.
To nutshell what I'm basically saying, these arguments have stood the test of time, and
occasionally an objection comes that is what I have in the past referred to as a 'pinhole
sort of objection', something that is extremely unlikely, but it still has a non-zero possibility
of being true. It doesn't mean that we should throw out the argument on the basis of this
extremely unlikely thing. And if you are the person who is wiggling out of the strength
of the argument through a pinhole, you might consider why that's the case.
Again, the framing here is quite frustrating. Could it not be, Braxton, that greater minds
than we both have considered these arguments, and yet they (predominantly philosophers and
scientists) have come to the conclusion that these arguments are not sound?
Why paint them as merely ‘individuals’ who’re just trying to ‘wiggle out’ of
a pinhole? What are you trying to achieve here? Are you just trying to reassure your
flock? Because while I don’t normally have a bone to pick with you, I do here. Please,
my dude, cease with this loaded language, and stop implicitly portraying those that
don’t agree with you as disingenuous.
I'm not annoyed by these objections. I find them helpful. Philosophers need to tease out
all the problems with certain defences of certain arguments to make the arguments and
the defences of their premises as strong as they possibly can, but that's a separate issue
from what you are doing as an individual to see the truth as it is represented through
the arguments.
Yeah, but it’s not. Philosophers, and more accurately theologians, are, to continue with
the court analogy, the defence, and we are the jurors. If it happens to be the case,
and indeed it is, that the most educated among us find the defence’s case unconvincing,
then maybe… just maybe, there’s more than ‘technical issues’ and ‘procedural mistakes’?
To return to the title of Braxton’s video: should theists be worried about atheist debunking
videos? Well, if you have a faith like Braxton, then probably not. I’m actually somewhat
astonished by his confidence in, for instance, it being ‘extremely unlikely’ that the
universe is past-infinite. Given our current epistemic state - given our scientific understanding
- I’d honestly raise an eyebrow at anyone who’s extremely confident on any view related
to this proposition. But putting this aside, I can tell you this: over the years I’ve
had countless emails from people kindly letting me know that my videos have helped them recognise
the flaws in theistic arguments, and that they have consequently cease endorsing them
- and I know that my atheist colleagues here on YouTube have had similar experiences. Add
to this the demonstrable growth of atheism over the last century, and I think it’s
really quite obvious that debunking efforts - be it on YouTube or elsewhere, is certainly
something apologists should be worried about. Anyhow, as always, thank you kindly for the
view, and an extra special thank you to my wonderful patrons
and YouTube members. If you’re a fan of the channel, and want to help keep the lights
on, then please do check out Patreon or YouTube members, as it really does help - and especially
during times when views are low, such as at the moment. Much love all.