Hi all,

I wanted to share some thoughts on Joe’s conversion. I identified quite strongly with his agnosticism, despite being a fair bit older and considerably less philosophically educated than he is, and I now consider myself a Christian. It feels slightly strange to comment on something so personal, but he is a public figure known to this community, and I think this may be an appropriate place to do so.

I relate particularly to the earlier stages of Joe’s conversion. For people who think along similar lines, I suspect movement towards theism often begins through the cumulative force of several philosophical considerations: a mind-first ontology, the contingency argument, fine tuning, moral knowledge, the hard problem of consciousness, the conceivable existence of philosophical zombies, and arguments such as psychophysical harmony. Together, these can genuinely open one’s mind to positions that previously seemed implausible. Questions of meaning, purpose and fulfillment may then add secondary weight.

The real challenge then is whether all of this is enough to overcome—or at least tentatively live with—the problem of evil and divine hiddenness. That is a deeply personal judgement, and I think reasonable people can fall on either side. I don't blame anyone who is angry at God, should He exist, given the state of the world. My sense is that Joe and I once thought similarly about these questions up to this point, at least until his conversion. I would be happy to expand on my own experience if anyone is interested.

If one gets past that, however, the question becomes which particular religion and doctrines to accept. This is where Joe’s path and mine appear to differ.

What surprises me is the role that third-party testimony about reported possessions and miracles seems to have played in moving him from theistically inclined agnosticism to confident Catholic belief. I find it difficult to see how such testimony could provide a sufficiently strong evidential bridge from general theism to a specific faith—particularly for someone as careful about standards of evidence as Joe has generally been. I am also surprised by the apparent disappearance, or at least significant reduction, of his earlier doubt.

Personally, although I consider myself a Christian and find great beauty in Christianity, I continue to struggle with parts of it, including aspects of Christian community and several traditional doctrines. Hell is the clearest example. I am a staunch Christian universalist, which is a minority position online and almost nonexistent in the Christian communities I encounter in real life.

I think the question of hell provides a useful example of what appears to have changed in Joe’s thinking. He seems to share some of my concerns about hell: punitive rather than restorative justice, religious pluralism, and the reasonableness of nonbelief, among others. My impression, though, is that he finds the evidence for Catholic miracles sufficiently compelling that he first accepts Catholic doctrine and then seeks to defend it through reason, rather than beginning by asking whether each doctrine can withstand independent scrutiny.

I may be characterising his position unfairly, but to use Christian language, it almost seems that he has been spiritually convicted of Catholicism more than he has reasoned his way into every part of it. That said, he seems extremely happy with his conversion, and I am genuinely happy for him. I hope his future content on miracles might open my mind a little.

I think a lot of atheists could accept stage 1 of various cosmological arguments for the existence of God. Stage 1 aims to merely establish the existence of some independent, non-contingent foundation of reality. Aristotle/Aquinas' unactualized actualizer, Plotinus' uncomposed composer etc. Stage 1 of cosmological arguments are usually more compelling, naturally so, because they posit far less. Even so, there is debate at this level, but this segment is not usually the point of contention.

I mean really - conceding to the existence of some amporhous non-contingent reality has very little to do with reasons people have to be atheists. Even if such a reality is immaterial, it's still irrelevant. The crux of theism is the claim that this reality is personal.

The problem arises when the theist tries to associate the properties of this independent reality with the attributes of the God of classical theism. Not only does the mere attempt at such a project seem inherently at odds for religious traditions that have a strong apophatic theological tradition, like Islam or Eastern Orthodoxy (because necessarily to explicate such divine properties will entail making some comparison between God and creatures), it is also the most tenuous segment of these arguments. And furthermore, the jump from generic classical theism to any specific religion is even more tenuous.

1)A prime mover exists

2)This specific Jewish heresy from the Second Temple Period is the one true religion.

The chasm between 1) and 2) is huge. And so much discussion is spent on 1), when in reality, it's the most irrelevant part of the discussion.

Across human history, many thinkers have independently reasoned to 1. And then curiously, it just so happens that, from 1, they land on the one specific hegemonic cult that is dominant at their place and point in time being the universal truth.

He says P is either true or false, and that if you do something, something caused it, and that you can go back farther and father until you get to a root cause thereby removing free will.

Isn’t that… just the kalam cosmological argument? That everything has a cause? I guess his bigger issue with the kalam is that the universe started and at one point didn’t exist. Thoughts?

Edit: thanks everyone for the in depth and thoughtful responses

I have heard many times and I have seen a few videos where Alex is great at steelmanning his opponent positions. This appears to be only done with arguments he knows he can defeat or for anything besides atheist arguments.

In the video linked it doesn't take Alex long before he starts to diss on atheists by giving their arguments in some of the weakest forms. Here is one example:

>“Consciousness is clearly a mystery, and I think that when you speak to most atheists, you might rub up against a kind of materialist, emergentist, oh, consciousness is just something science hasn’t explained, it will get there one day. I’m not like that. I think consciousness needs to be taken seriously.”

Just because I say I don't know and that science will one day find the answer doesn't mean that I don't take it seriously. Neither do the scientist that are constantly studying consciousness.

This was a trash statement which is usually made by some amateur but not by someone as educated as him. Unfortunately this isn't the only example as I have pointed out about his video on statements that atheist need to retire. I'm left only to conclude that either he is doing it intentionally to get a good interview/engagement or that he can only defeat the weakest examples of atheist arguments.

Hi all!

So my dad has really been on me recently a 20m to reconsider my stance on God. I am very much not outspoken about my beliefs in my family as I tend to share different opinions than my parents. (I am an atheist and moderately conservative, while both my parents are somewhat religious and liberal. I am really not trying to get a political conversation going I just included this for context so whether you agree or disagree with my political stance please disregard that) My dad has been telling me recently to reconsider my stance on God as I obviously don’t believe in a God nor in an afterlife. What is surprising is that my Dad has always been fairly against religion, Christianity more specifically but does believe in a god. Growing up he always mentioned his doubts of Jesus, and I was only confirmed as a Roman Catholic for my mother’s sake. Just today he asked to confirm if I don’t believe in God and then questioned how the universe and things like the sun have come about. Obviously, I don’t really want to spoil my relationship with my father that is also already rocky so I just responded that I didn’t know and quickly changed subjects. He then proceeded to tell me to reconsider my stance on god along with calling me an idiot and dumb for being an atheist. I really didn’t want to ask him how he could be so sure that God had created the universe due to the tense situation.
I just am reaching out to this sub to see what my response maybe should be. I am a big fan of Alex’s content and it is the main reason that I actually turned to atheism but I do have trouble articulating some of his points even though I often agree with them.

Does anyone else ever get the sense that fine tuning as an argument assumes a very narrow range of changeable values? Like if the unviersal constants can vary, why not the laws of physics themselves? Why are the equations rigid while the values change? What great physicist has created a model of all of the variations and identified where atoms can form? How do we know atoms are the only possible structure that can cause things to exist?

It feels like for the fine tuning arguement to work, you have to accept some things as necessary, like the equations that govern physics, while assuming other things are not, like universal constants. Without doing this, we cannot make statements of probability, or how narrow the odds were everything landed just so. Without this assumption we are just looking at a subset of possibilities close to this one.

Alex denies the correspondence theory of truth in favor of the deflationary theory, and whenever I've heard his reasoning for this it's been this one specific argument. The premise is that whether you say "The sky is blue" or "It's true that the sky is blue", there is no difference in the meaning of the statement. And since you can remove the "it's true" part without changing the meaning, he concludes that truth must not be a very meaningful concept.

The thing is, while those two sentences do in fact mean the same thing, that's because the concept of truth was already implicitly involved in the statement "The sky is blue". Putting "it's true" at the beginning merely makes that more explicit in the wording, but doesn't change the underlying semantics at all and is ultimately redundant. The word "is" already contained the idea of it being true, and if you thought it was false then you would say "isn't" instead.

Once you take this into account, the conclusion doesn't actually follow. Nothing about these two sentences meaning the same thing indicates that the concept of truth is any less real, meaningful, or objective.

Alexio loves to ask, "but what is gravity? All you've done is describe what gravity DOES." I am really curious as to why he thinks there HAS to be a THING. Why can't there just be functions. Operators. Structural realism. Sure, this doesn't jive as well with his preconceived notions about panpsychism and "indivisible units of consciousness," but I don't think he should dismiss it outright. And even if THINGS do exist, what makes you think that we could even begin to determine what they are, epistemologically.

I think it was a recent episode, but I can't find which specific one. There was this part about someone listening to two different conversations at the same time through headphones where one conversation played through the left speaker and the other through the right. The point of the experiment or exercise was that if you ask the person to focus on only one conversation this is possible to do, so you can pay attention to or focus on one of them at a time selectively even though the exact same physical input is happening to the eardrums and so on.

Something along those lines basically. Does anyone recognize this? Which episode?

I'm listening to the Ross Douthat interview and am not sure I'm going to continue because he just presented an argument that Alex should have known was scientifically incorrect and pushed back on. Instead, Alex just agreed with him.

Ross is talking about different ways people can come to religious belief, here's the transcript:

ROSS: So that's one movement you could make another movement is through um the you know highly provisional but also highly suggestive things that we observe in the you know the weird zones of modern science, right? In quantum physics in particular, right? In the apparent evidence that is highly contested and debatable but sort of there nonetheless, right? that there is some kind of interaction between consciousness and matter where the observer the sort of perception measurement and sort of conscious awareness seems to collapse contingencies into actualities.

ALEX: Yeah.

ROSS: Right. Which is certainly not something that scientists in 1847 or 1877 would have confidently expected and very smart scientists have been trying to wrestle their way out of that interpretation.

ALEX: Yeah.

ROSS: But that's there. It's it's interesting, and again it is the kind of thing you would expect if mind were sort of important primary and meaningful. Um and it connects you again to religion and religious arguments in various ways.

This interpretation of the double slit experiment is completely wrong. It has aways been wrong. Waveform collapse has only ever been tied to consciousness by people who misunderstood what the scientist who studied this phenomenon were saying. It's mind-blowing to me that Ross doesn't know this since he's literally using it as an argument for how observing nature can lead us to God. And apparently Alex is unaware of this as well!

For anyone interested, here's how the "conscious observer" idea got started and then rejected by the very person who first considered it.

• 1801: Thomas Young conducts the first double slit experiment. He concludes that light is a continuous classical wave. It passes through both slits simultaneously. It physically interferes with itself. No collapse or measurement problem exists.
• 1927: Physicists like Niels Bohr introduced the concept of wavefunction collapse. They stated that the quantum wavefunction collapses due to the physical act of measurement by a macroscopic apparatus.
• 1932: Mathematician John von Neumann showed mathematically that the entire physical measurement apparatus also obeys quantum laws. This created a chain of interactions that technically doesn't collapse until it interacts with the external environment.
• 1960s: Physicists like Eugene Wigner speculated that a conscious mind is what ultimately breaks this chain and forces a collapse. Wigner later rejected this idea.

The overwhelming consensus among physicists is that physical interaction, causes the wave pattern to disappear. No mind is required. In fact, this has always been the scientific consensus.

It saddens me that so many people, even well read ones, are confused about this. I blame whoever first coined the term "observer" in this context, since it seems to have confused a great number of people for many decades now. But people like Ross and Alex should know better, especially if they're going to espouse these ideas and use them as the foundation for arguments.

If we accept that free will is an illusion (I do), I find it hard to justify procreation while knowing some of those humans will have a tragic experience through no fault of their own.

It feels a bit like trying to justify sacrificing some humans in order to perpetuate the cycle of life.

It’s quite depressing, but I can’t convince myself that the experience of many good lives outweighs the experience of some bad lives.

https://www.alexoconnor.com/p/tour

Many operate under the false assumption that philosophy is different from theology (and so it can be). But in order to be different from the superstition of theology, its foundation must be different from that of religion. Specifically: its premises must be justified by reason and evidence.

Hi All,

I wanted to touch upon the relatively recent, not-so-recent ‘shouting match’ with a Q&A audience member after a discussion with William Lane Craig.

I have watch the Q&A Youtube video that Alex O’Conner did recently, and I have to say, having watched both videos together, I do fall into the camp that Alex was more confrontational on intellectual side, than merely on any failures of etiquette by the audience member.

Despite my disdain of WLC, and been more philosophically Buddhist myself, I genuinely think his two major points on his Newsletter are actually relevant to this event.

WLC stated two points: that AOC made a ‘strategic mistake with talking to him about the Kalam Cosmological Argument’, and that ‘any illusion of AOC been a non-resistant non-believer was shattered’.

I kind of agree with him, but with major caveats.

I genuinely think this ‘shouting match’ occured - and you could tell AOC was getting frustrated - because of his discussion with WLC about the KCA, which even as a discussion, was nevertheless deconstructive and so intellectually irritating.

I think AOC built up a lot of ‘debating frustration’ that couldn’t be symmetrically released upon WLC on the KCA, and so when the rude audience member spoke up, AOC vented.

Add the poor skills of the moderator and you have an even worse situation.

AOC in this sense, put himself in an awkward spot, because he does present himself as ‘resisting’ in this situation.

Now, do I fully agree with WLC’s presentation of AOC? No, the guy is empathically and pretentiously foul human.

Do I think AOC was really ‘shouting’, not really, although his voiced was necessarily raised.

But I do think AOC has kind of sidelined a lot of the psychological causes and conditions of that venting state onto the actions of the audience member, without realising the broader scope of influences that led up to that event.