5 ways atheism becomes a “universal acid”

In this episode Trent reveals how some arguments for atheism unintentionally refute more than most atheists are willing to give up about reality.

[glof]

If atheism is an acid, theism would be a base/based.

[mathewjose]

Hey Trent, could you please make rebuttals of Hinduism?
Note : Hinduism is more than just a polytheistic religion. There are Pantheistic, Monotheistic, Dualistic, and even Atheistic types of Hinduism. The term 'Hinduism', itself is messed up. It means A LOT of different things

[iqgustavo]

🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation:

00:03 🤖 Atheism becoming a "universal acid" explained.
01:14 🛡️ Atheistic arguments undermining multiple beliefs.
03:19 💼 "If God told you to kill me" argument's limitations.
08:50 🛡️ Bible's alleged unreliability and parallels in ancient history.
11:08 💼 Questioning the cause of God as a challenge to explanations.
12:47 🛡️ "One less god" argument criticized for oversimplification.
16:12 🛡️ Brain chemistry explaining belief can be overly reductionist.

[petery]

I really hate it when Atheists act like a single contradiction is enough to overwhelm the entirety of a positive case for the Reliability of Gospels. It's really irritating and rigid.

[leonhewitt]

Great as always, just a reminder to put the link you mention in the description below.

[Qwerty-jymj]

Sartre knew this quite well, if God doesn't exist then life _must_ be absurd. As a christian, reading through "Existentialism Is a Humanism" comes across as desperate coping. The last thing people are willing to let go of is their pride, even when they have conceded it's an absurd thing.

[Jonathan-pzzb]

5:28 Answer #2 doesn’t work, because people using this argument ALSO throw out books about aliens, etc., but they KEEP books about basic math, etc. All they’re rejecting is anything related to the supernatural, whether that be from the past or the present.

[Enaccul]

Love the videos Trent!
I agree with the sentiment that if taken to its conclusion different atheist arguments have a sort of domino effect that changes other things. I think this is what's uncomfortable about the ideas of atheism because its hard to JUST belive in any one idea and not everything that would have to follow from that. Like how if morality is subjective and there is no ultimate morality, that would be an uncomfortable thing to come to terms with. Or how if evolution is true, that leads to many other things you'd have to accept. Another comment mentioned how atheism is descriptive and theism is prescriptive and I think that's so true. Atheists (should) follow observation, which is what leads them to their beliefs, however uncomfortable. Theists will be more than happy to be descriptive as long as it matches their religious prescriptions until there is a contradiction and they have to either deny the observations or belive that the prescriptions were just poetic, or metaphors (young earth creationists vs theists that accept the age of the earth for example)
Again I find your videos so interesting, much love!

[andonedave]

Another interesting and thoughtful video from Trent Horn.

[Digganob]

The question of "if God told you to kill me" can also be answered by asking, "who's someone you love and trust to be moral? If they asked you to do something horrible and to trust them, would you do it?" The obvious answer they give is that that good person wouldn't ask that arbitrarily of them.

[BigHelianthus]

I would use 'unconditional skepticism' or just 'skepticism' maybe instead of atheism here as the universal acid, but I agree with the overall sentiment.

[billbrock]

Humans live in groups, and like all social animals we've evolved a system of cooperation that makes living together possible. We call our system morality. Behavior is judged to be good, bad, or neutral according to its impact on group cohesiveness.

[CyberManor]

Maybe I'm just numb to all the philosophical talk regarding religion/atheism but these types of questions aren't really what interests me anymore. As an agnostic I've been comparing the synoptic gospels in Greek and seeing what was changed/added/removed by Matthew and Luke and it's been rewarding and a fun dive into early Christianity. These kind of questions just aren't that engaging for me anymore and like you said with the first question, you could bring up to an atheist that if they felt the need to take a life they would have to be convinced it was for a good reason, just like a Christian. So they really shouldn't be trying to ask a question to elicit an emotional response since they are in the same boat.

But just to respond to that first question, I find it weird Christians can't just say "yes" to that question. Although at the same time, and this will imply Christians aren't consistent or are weak Christians but, I don't actually think most Christians would respond the same way that Abraham did when he was told to kill someone. I understand God stopped him before he did, but he was convinced God told him to do it so he went about doing it. Now because I think most Christians are level headed, empathetic, reasonable and not psychopaths, I think they would seriously question their mental capacities if they thought God told them to kill someone. I just wish when they answered the question they would say "If God ordered me to (since he has ordered people in the past) then I would but it would be because God can take life and would have sufficient moral reason to command that. But don't act like you (mr./mrs. atheist) wouldn't do the same if you thought it was what was right. You're just asking that question for shock value."

And for the second question. The contradictions in the bible should show you that the bible is not perfect and you have to use tools OUTSIDE of the bible, the historical method, to figure out what actually happened. And history presupposes methodological naturalism. If you want to believe the miracles on faith or because you had a personal experience then fine. But the books in the NT are subject to critique just like other books of antiquity, and often have mistakes/contradictions as well.

[killianmiller]

“I believe in one God less than you” assumes something about theistic belief which ignores the principle that one man cannot have two masters. It’s impossible to be a Christian and a Hindu at the same time because the two contradict each other in truth claims. As such, there is not a degree or spectrum of the number of Gods you believe in going from 0 to 1 to 33 million or so. To go from 33 million to 1 is the same leap as to go from 1 to 0, not numerically, but qualitatively.

[creatinechris]

Thank you for making this video, Trent!

3:56 I would encourage everyone (including Trent) to look up why the consensus in philosophy is moral realism and why the consensus in philosophy is atheism. Moral Naturalism solves all of your "atheist morality" objections and it solves the euthyphro dilemma that plagues religious versions of objective morality.

6:50 yes, there are contradictions in other works of antinquity (including the bible), we dont throw them out we just decrease our confidence in their reliability/accuracy

7:35 yes, many other writers didnt include sources (just like how Luke doesnt include sources) so again we dont throw them out, we just decrease our confidence in their reliabilty

8:28 yes, bibliographers today dont cite every reference, but at least they explicitly cite one (unlike Luke). I think citing some sources is the standard we apply today for reliability and we shouldnt lower our standards for Jesus. Doesnt mean jesus didnt perform miracles and all that, we just shouldnt have high confidence.

10:50 ultimate explanation = brute fact for the trilemma presented. Ultimate just means "god" which reduces to being a brute fact when asked "why does God exist?". God existing as an ultimate explanation/brute fact is the same explanation naturalists apply to "nature" existing. One just requires a number of unjustified ontological assumptions, one does

17:50 this is why skepticism is the default position. Something existing in the brain, but having no evidence of existing in reality (ie God) can be tentatively assumed to be purely conceptual. Similarly if an image of your friend exists solely in the brain, but has no evidence of existing in reality, your friend can tentatively be assumed to not exist in reality. Most of the time though we do have evidence that your friend exists in reality. Most of the time we do NOT have any evidence that God exists in reality.

18:50 almost as if we are bilogically predisposed to hear voices when there are none or FEEL as if we are communicating with people/gods that are not

[rainer-unsinn]

The main difference of the bible to most of other ancient literature is the use of it.

Very few people build their life around the teachings of julius ceasar or the odyssey.

But if you do that with the bible and life descisions are centered around it you should be pretty sure it is accurate and reliable.

And it is not.

[hernandovallejo]

"What caused God?" - This line of thinking kinda infuriates me, because the usage of the word "God" already means there is NO higher being... Any questioning on its "creation" is basically moot.

[ToxicallyMasculinelol]

Max Tegmark's "mathematical universe hypothesis" is probably the best multiverse argument, as far as they go. His proposal sort of sidesteps the issue of why a random universe generator should exist, by saying there is no such thing as "physical reality, " the universe is just a mathematical structure (like a mathematical concept, something that exists in the same way the number 2 does) and we, being part of it, experience that mathematical structure as physical reality. But when you get down to what matter really is, it seems to be best described as numbers, vectors, and other mathematical objects. On this view, all conceivable mathematical structures exist, just like we'd agree that all the (infinite) natural numbers exist, even though nobody can count that high. They exist in some Platonistic realm which, like the laws of logic, has necessary existence. There are some statistical objections to this view, and it's barely testable at best. It still fails to explain fine tuning except by vaguely gesturing at the anthropic principle, which as we know is not an explanation but an excuse for ignoring fine tuning.

I don't subscribe to it, but the thing I like about this view is that in some ways it's compatible with hylomorphism or dualism. Unlike the dominant strains of naturalism, it has a decent explanation for how conscious creatures can exist with their own private seats of experience, rather than automatons that have neural activity, sensory inputs and physiological outputs, but no subjective experience. On the mathematical universe hypothesis, it's at least _more_ conceivable that something like a soul could exist and be causally connected (through quantum mechanics or something) to their bodies. Personally, I think subjective experience is so bizarre that it can't really be explained as a mathematical object either. It's better than physicalism, but it still seems quite strange that experience could naturally exist.

But anyway, the appeal of this hypothesis is that the universe is less physical and more "conceptual, " and that you'd get an infinite multiverse of all logically consistent mathematical structures, which would have necessary existence in the same way we say logic necessarily exists. While I think this hypothesis is motivated by a desire to explain reality without God, it's interesting that it is also compatible with God. This mathematical structure isn't so different from what we tend to think the universe is: a set of objects conceived by God and sustained in existence by him. From God's perspective, I suppose the universe really is a mathematical structure. I prefer to think there are no laws of nature. The laws are just our descriptions of how things normally behave, but those things are sustained in existence by God, so it stands to reason that the behavior of everything in physics, from gravity to quantum mechanics, is just God unfolding his creation, moving the pieces, etc. And mathematics perfectly describes the orderly way in which God ordinarily operates his creation, notwithstanding the occasional miracle that deviates from the usual patterns. Those deviations aren't violations of law, since the universe is not simply a set of objects that move on their own according to laws. It's a board with pieces controlled by God. Since God is perfect, he normally moves the pieces in an orderly way, but he has every right and power to do otherwise whenever he wants. Even time itself does not unfold automatically; the pieces are pushed along time by God. So I don't mean to suggest that the universe really is a self-sustaining mathematical structure; just that it seems plausible because God does things in a logical, comprehensible way.

Anyway, this theory seems like something we should be thinking about how to respond to. Before I became a Christian, I found it to be the most attractive explanation of reality. It does have serious challenges from physicists and mathematicians, but they're mostly challenges to its falsifiability, or more accurately challenges to its claim to being more testable and realistic than other multiverse hypotheses. If you don't believe in God, and you do your research, you eventually get forced into speculating about a multiverse. And most people aren't bothered by falsifiability. In choosing a provisional worldview, they are forced to choose between unfalsifiable positions, because no explanation of the rock bottom ground of existence is directly testable in the here and now. But you still need some way to organize your thoughts. So people will pick what seems appropriate to them. Falsifiability is more of an ad hoc story that scientists tell after they've already adopted a paradigm, or a weapon they wield against innovative ideas that threaten the paradigm. As a principle, it doesn't actually guide the development of science, much less physics (which has spent the last 50 years mostly pursuing unfalsifiable theories of everything like superstring theory). So I think we do need a clear answer to the mathematical universe hypothesis and other similar conjectures.

[glof]

Sometimes I think theist-atheist conversations are often stagnated by one side speaking descriptively and the other prescriptively.

Theists approach their arguments as "God exists because He did X", i.e made the world, is the most maximally great being/, is existence itself, made transcendental category, etc." Choose an argument and this likely applies.

Atheists approach it as "God does not exist because if He did, He would do x". X can be remove evil, show Himself hanging out in the sky, do a magic show for whoever asks, cure world hunger, show Himself on a screen in a lab, say "yoohoo, it's me, God" to someone... again, choose an argument.

It's as if both sides appeal to prescription to some degree, but disagree on the prescriber (atheists make it themselves, theists make it God)

[Hamann]

Great video. About number 4# the people who use that lousy argument are guilty of hienous crimes because they only committed one less murder, rape, etc than the other people.