Nonbelief Revisited: The Ghost of Veritas48
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 16 ноя 2024
- Why, oh why, can't I make a video under 10 minutes anymore?
My argument: Nonbelief and Peek-A-Boo
• Nonbelief & Peek-A-Boo...
Noah's response: Against the Argument from Nonbelief
vimeo.com/4463...
Follow me on Twitter @CliftonsNotes
Great to see you back Scott! The most articulate RUclips atheist I have ever had the pleasure of watching, and this is another excellent rebuttal. Your sound logical and rational approach to the presentation of your arguments makes them a joy to watch.
Scott you're smarter at 30 than i'm at 40! I wish I could articulate my thoughts so well! I also wish I had 20% of your looks.
"Why, oh why, can't I make a video under 10 minutes anymore?"
So what?? You are one of only a few that never seems to speak too long. Your delivery is quick, concise, and thought provoking. That's what counts Thanks for the upload and kudos.
Very well put. Good to see you're back doing videos, and I hope you post a bit more frequently. Always enjoy listening to you.
What a coincidence! I just finished scripting a video in which I planned to link to your original video on the subject (along with dasamericanatheist's formulation of the argument). Now it looks as though I'll be adding this one too. Great to see you posting again, and glad to hear that you're working plenty. No better reason to take breaks from youtube.
I swear I started watching this video and after what seemed like five minutes, over thirty had passed. Profound and eloquent as always Scott.
TBS, I'm always happy to see your videos in my sub box! Thanks for taking the time to make such carefully reasoned arguments. More than once, I've used your videos as a starting point for arguments with my religious friends and they have been truly helpful in articulating my thoughts better than I ever could have.
I haven't watched it yet but I wanted to say thank you for making another video. I look forward to your videos more than anything on youtube.
Wow! So good to see you back. I think everyone missed hearing your thought provoking insights.
Wow, over 3.000 views in just about 24 hours...glad to see others missed your videos as much as I have. Thanks.
Glad to see you're back, even if from time to time. I place you along side Dawkins, Harris, Ehrman, etc. etc. I'm in my 70's and spent about 45 years entrenched as a strong born-again Christian. Coming out was a process but an enjoyable time in a reading/studying frenzy(which continues). Lots of WOW moments! Today I'm FREE and love listening to you. Keep up the good work of clearly explaining and presenting such solid logical arguments.
@Sethorin I actually reject the idea of "free will" completely, but I'm assuming it for the sake of argument in this video. Maybe I'll do a video about it someday. Good catch. (Yeah, I've seen Harris' lecture on it. Thought it was great.)
For some reason it made me happy that you had to look up a word and a word I've been meaning to look up at that.
This was especially fun to watch having hung out with Noah a few times now myself. He's a good kid, so are you.
Good to see you back, Scott. We are all happy to learn that your mind isn't wasting away on the set of soap operas. Also, judging from the echo in your (new?) condo, you either upgraded in size, or you need more furniture!
I just saw you on the tv-machine, and now you are here on youtube talking, it's like magic.
When I saw your video it felt like Christmas, new year, and my birthday at the same time!
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, I've reached the end of the videooo!! I loved it!!! and yet this is also a sad moment as I know another video will not come for soooooooooooooooooo soooo long!! Now I wish I hadn't watched it just so I could still potentially watch it.
I love your videos...and I am a non-christian, non-mainstream religion believer in a loving God. My God loves this type of debate and holds no judgment against, nor condemns nonbelievers. The True Gnostic Church. Keep up the good debate. You're just scratching the surface. Regards! Noodle
We need someone like Scott in the White House. Not that cheetah blasted oompah loompah we have now. I would assuredly vote for him.
Angel Of Clarity I agree. Or someone like Scott onto the Supreme Court. Could you imagine?
Btw. I noticed you aren't subscribed to Theramintrees or QualiaSoup. Do yourself a favor and get on their channels. Their content is on the same level of quality of Theoretical Bullshit's content.
In fact; I recommend you go to my channel and find my "recommended channels" playlist, and take a look at the ones you haven't yet seen before :)
Peace, friend.
Glad to see you back on here - no matter how brief this spur of posting may be... :)
Good to listen to and see you again ... my brain feels kinda combed through each time I listen to you :)
It's okay that you're absent. You have a 100+ videos for us to enjoy AND you have a life outside of youtube. Take however long of an hiatus you need ... but I'm glad you're back.
I gotta say, it gives me hope and makes me just a bit more optimistic about the overriding power of humanity to hear that you and Noah have struck up an amiable friendship in spite of the fact that as best I can tell you have utterly shreaded every one of his arguments that you've ever decided to rebut.
Maybe we can all get along after all as Rodney King once pleaded!
Thanks for sharing that tidbit of people-affirming information.
"Belief is an involuntary reaction created when our minds are exposed to new external information or reasoning."
Yeah, sure, I guess. There are lots of ways for our beliefs to change, though. I wouldn't try to pin it down on one given phenomenon or another.
"The individuals acceptance or denial of their predicament is irrelevant to the diagnosis..."
That's a fair question to ask, given the premise. My first two responses were tackling your definitions of "belief-without-proof, reality denial, belief in the face of contradictory facts or absent data" in your first post. That definition muddied the grander point I ultimately understood you were making.
Really glad to see you posting videos again. One nitpick, only because it's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. You say that knowledge and belief are essentially indistinguishable, and I agree. At 5:58 however, you suggest that "knowledge" is basically "belief" that's "actually true". It seems preferable to say that the difference between knowledge and belief is really about degrees of certainty, not about truth. Many people "know" that dowsing is effective, for example.
Well spoken and, as usual, thorough as hell. This argument still seems to come back to (generally speaking), the impotent, ignorant or imaginary argument... I guess most do. Either that or Pascal.
In these years of my subscription, the dissonance of seeing your face both on the breakroom TVs at work and on here, as it gushes one of the most rational voices on the internet, has never receded beyond surreal.
That's why I put it in quotes. It was Scott's term. I clarified in parenthesis that the view of God having knowledge of what we would freely choose in all possible worlds pertains to Molinism. In any case, the argument stands regardless of what label you want to give the apologetic counter and my subsequent response.
Scott, you've made my day by uploading a video and clearly I'm not alone. The only thing I dislike about you is that listening to you makes me feel so unintelligent... ugh =)
TBS! So glad to see you making videos again. Don't you dare go away again or everyone will cry again.
So great to see you back. I really admire your use of vocabulary, and your capacity for rational deconstruction.
I demand all future videos be over 30 minutes! Great work here... :P
I do not go along with anyone who asserts that there is anything that *is* unknowable; to know that there are unknowable things would require absolute knowledge, and I haven't heard that anyone has that.
I love it. He's asked veritas which video's he's most proud of. Then says, "Hey I never responded to that one. Let me go back and destroy that argument from 2 years ago." lol I know thats not what the thought process was but it's kinda what you did. Congrats on all your success and your career. We miss you on RUclips.
This is definitely the most potent argument or "problem" I've heard for orthodox Christianity. I've actually been getting a lot of people recently asserting that everyone knows "in their heart" that the Christian God exists. At that point, I'm tempted to dismiss them as being disingenuous.
The amount of thought and effort you put into sharing your ideas with the rest of us is really admirable and most definitely appreciated!
Wonderful video, and it's really great to see you back, even if it's just for this one video.
Glad to see a new video! If you can, you should get Noah/Veritas48 to come and make a video with you. Would love to see how much his views have changed and see you two discuss things in a "live" conversation.
Good to see you back. Saw you on TV about a year ago. Had a 'not bad face' moment.
That simply begs the question; already what's in question is explicitly assumed in the word “start” if you’re an Eternalist or you think that something is in fact eternal then it doesn’t start. It's always been there.
Very glad to see you back, Scott. I hope we see more of your excellent videos in the summer!
I have to agree with Garret, here, about choosing to believe certain things. Many, many times in our experiences, we see people choose to/ to not believe various things. The example with the alcoholic you addressed for instance, so many people with drinking problems will simply NOT admit that it's a problem. And that's not an action. It's a belief.
One thing you didnt mention is that the alcoholic analogy also have a problem because the alcoholic know he drinks. If he acept to call him self alcoholic or not, doesnt matter. He know he drinks. He doesnt have a choice about that.
Good video men. Glad to see you again making videos
I'm happy you posted this comment because I too was surprised that you seemed to accept "free will" yourself in this video. Although I'm slightly disappointed because I would have loved to hear you articulate such a position.
I remember this on my first youtube account.. Holy crap, so much beef. I remember this from 2008... VERITAS
I wonder if this may lure noah back onto YT? Would be nice to see him return.
Great video, as always i appreciate your attention to detail.
There's a blog post he wrote on the 12tuesday site in which he reacted to some of Nietzsche's writings, and it made him rethink some of his opinions. But I don't remember him saying that it caused him to reconsider Christianity.
17:35 This is all me! “All belief is involuntary”. You’re saying my main arguments here. The fact that belief is necessarily involuntary means I can’t choose to believe in God any more than Noah can choose to stop believing in God. You’re saying what I would say and you’re saying all that needs to be said.
Theoretical Bullshit I'm familiar with the fact that beliefs are reflected in our actions, but I was not aware that the brain activity was the same for both belief and knowledge responses. I find that both intuitive and highly disturbing at the same time, but it would explain a lot about human nature.
An angry child still has more of a relationship with their father than a child who doesn't know they have a father in the first place. That's the point.
The latter is more important to me, especially when coupled with the extreme lack of reasonable evidence for that in which we are supposed to believe.
I'm reminded of the absurd elaborations of the old geocentric model of the solar system. At first the model seemed simple enough; Earth at the centre, everything going around it. Yet when we looked more closely, some objects in the system defied the model and people tried to ad hoc their way out of trouble (circles within circles within circles). When we eventually trashed geocentricism and put the sun at the centre, all the ad hoc scaffolding disappeared and a much simpler model emerged.
Thanks for the video, well spoken as usual. I don't know how you manage to be so eloquent.
@SisyphusRedeemed @SisyphusRedeemed To "follow certain rules of inference", or to "reject evidence in favor of faith", are courses of action. They are not believed propositions. A believed proposition would be, "X is a poor rule of inference". And if you believe this, you cannot suddenly choose to become genuinely convinced that "X is a stellar rule of inference".
Waking up and finding TBS in my playlist is only topped by finding Philhellenes there.
Hey. Great to see you back. I know how things can be. Hope to see some more videos, seriously.
For starters, try Googling Sam Harris' doctoral thesis.
From 15:00 to 16:30 your argument about freewill and belief. That’s my argument! The one I think so much depends upon. It shouldn’t be glossed over or only mentioned. It is the crux of the whole Theist / Atheist problem. If someone as articulate as you would thrash it out in all its detail and implications, I cannot see how any theist could resist its explanatory power.
On a second note. I rather enjoy listening to your rational response to everything, I think most of us could only hope to look at life this objectively and rationally. Sometimes humans have odd combinations of emotion and rational thought...i think we all do to some degree, and those 2 things can be at odds.
TBS, you are really one of a kind. I vote on you for the 5th Horseman. Oh, wait! 4th, because, sadly, Hitch is gone. I suspect he would be honored to be replaced by a razor sharp mind like yours. Welcome back.
Thanks for posting a new video! Good to have you back!
it is the predominant belief that we must deal with, AND it represents belief itself....a model of belief so to speak.
#1
Yes, I was referring to the Matrix concept. I've spent some time on this subject too. After I saw the movie, I actually lost some sleep over it. I couldn't stop thinking about how likely & preferable such an existence might be, especially to a species who had acquired extreme longevity, or even eternal life. It's not that far off, my friend, although we won't live to see it...unless we're already in one.
I listened to a number of Physicists who actually believe we are in a VR environment now.
Christian here, Great video scott I'm glad you're back! Keep up the videos man
Great to see you back! Hope to see some more videos from you!
I finished watching Veritas' response (to catch up) thinking, "Man. how the hell is Scott gonna tackle this one?", and yet. like always, you managed it beautifully! I especially liked the part about the involuntary nature of belief-forming. An interesting side-note: that conclusion may actually negate free will entirely, though you do profess a belief in free will (regarding actions) in this video. Have you watched Sam Harris' lecture on the illusion of free will? It's quite intriguing.
"Believing in the tooth fairy is foolish and for children."
Now make your case for the holy spirit.
I really, really enjoyed this video. It's very long, but necessarily so.
Causality doesn't require time or a spacial location, Aristotle made this point and called it "ontological causality".
And if you think the Universe needs no cause then that's incompatible with your premise "All things have a beginning." Because The Wave-Function of the Universe is what gives the unconditional probability that the Universe can have no cause. Yet its existence is necessary.
@EvangelistEvan
"And why?"
I think Scott's answer comes close to being comprehensive, or at least providing a basic framework for formulating a comprehensive answer.
I share a lot of sensibilities with most of the people around me. Like most people, I like life over death, peace over violence, safety over insecurity, wealth over poverty, liberty over servitude, health over sickness, happiness over sadness. Equally importantly, I can empathize with how other people feel about these things.
I love the point about how belief and knowledge are indistinguishable at the neurological level. I saw a Gallup poll fairly recently that reported that (if I remember correctly) 87% of people who believe in God claim not only to believe but also claim to know that God exists. I think it's disingenuous of theists to claim that perceived knowledge of (rather than mere belief in) a deity has no effect on their position.
Glad to hear from you again, Scott, thought you disappeared forever.
Fantastic to hear from you again.
Nice to have you back making videos again.
You've been busy working? I know. I've been watching non-stop Hope/Liam/Steffy plotlines for a gajilllion years! Plus I live in Australia, so everything is released about 3 months delayed and I'm still right in the middle of it. Haha.
Anyway, I'm glad you're back, and I hope you're going to continue making videos more regularly. I need my fix of intelligent arguments!
"nothing we can test empirically arose from absolutely nothing."
- Which comes down to say that if God created the Universe, he did so using something else, or he did so in a way that we cannot empirically test. Because this is the only example of anything "coming into existence" that we ever found that didn't come from prior matter, it still invalidates the first premise because we never even saw anything come into existence, nor did we test it.
I agree.
I think very few people ever really think about actually living forever, as one continual consciousness. I think that it would eventually result in insanity, utter madness.
Many Christians have told me that they want to go to heaven and exist forever with jesus, praising and worshiping him. I tell them that getting their wish would be equivalent to being in hell. They say being punished with god's permanent annihilation is hell, but I'd see it as mercy.
Everything should have its time.
The thing about "insanity having its own perks"...I think that'd be a highly individual determination, and I'm not anxious to find out.
I don't know, I see the eternity factor as being the real hell in any setting. Then again, if it were true that we're all existing in a Virtual Reality Environment, we could live countless lives, each being a new experience, and all that'd be needed is to program each individual to have his past memories deleted. He'd likely be saying the things as I am rt now!
Are you back? Nice to see a video up from you again.
Good to hear from you again. Once again an interesting video with good points. I enjoyed watching it. :)
I'd like to see you write a book on this and related topics. I think your youtube channel has much of the work already in it waiting to be transcribed.
A TBS video? *drops everything*
That being said, none of that in any way affects my original point, which is that both believers and non-believers can be agnostic.
While already of the opinion that God does not exist (albeit it recently and of my own thinking), you, TBS, have made that path much more clear and logical. Thank you.
One of my favorite uploaders is back! Yay!
No, I'm not saying that "more belief" IS "evidence", but that the issue is that, given what we know about the Christian God and His purported desires for humanity, we should expect to see more *belief* in the world (regardless of the evidence), not necessarily more *evidence*.
Yep, and even though I stated my stance on philosophy, this philosophical conversation will continue, due to a lack of physical evidence.
TBS, you should do a video on whether delusional belief is genuine belief. Personally, I've noticed that people who are deluded don't really care if their beliefs are true or not, which makes you wonder that maybe it is possible to actively believe something just because you want to and you therefore genuinely believe it.
So glad to see you back!
Ok, would you mind expanding on how rationality is undermined by deterministic thoguht processes under the problem of criterion? IT seems to me the answer to the problem under determinism is answered as methodistic, almost by definition.
Yes, I already asked him for traits which link the universe's creation to his god. Also the irony of that situation would be amplified if the Metallica song playing was The God That Failed, that would be funny.
Great to see you back on youtube.
Well, as recently as August 2011, he defended the Kalam Cosmological Argument against TBS on Tuesday Afternoon, so if he is an atheist, it was after that.
Oh how I've missed you, Scott!! Welcome back!!
By now it should be apparent to you that we - at the very least your subscribers - do not find videos longer than 10 minutes problematic. In fact, I know I largely prefer it. And, as is echoed by some below, you've made us wait for it, so it had better be a long one ;)
@TheoreticalBullshit Noah's link doesn't work :( Also, great to have you back on youtube!
Take your time. I will get around to answering eventually, given time zones and stuff.
When discussing knowledge and belief it stands to reason that most logical people would first acquire knowledge with proofs and follow it with belief. I do agree that knowledge and belief are indistinguishable when applied to religious "belief." For there, unverifiable knowledge is the basis for belief. This ends discussion since the religionists argument will go circular based on blind belief!