Yeah they should have been more clear as to what religion are they talking about. Marxism is very clearly a religion that has lead to hundreds of millions of deaths
Ding, ding, ding! This guy gets it☝️ You can’t group all religions in one basket cuz of their fundamental differences. The best way to approach these topics is to debate each religion separately. I can also say another atheist that believes in free will wouldn’t want to be put in the same group as Alex, who doesn’t, and be treated as if he/she believes in determinism because theists think all atheists are the same.
I’m so glad there are much more intelligent people than myself approaching these subjects reasonably lol. Thanks for sharing this Trent, I may have to check out the whole debate
We should still try and better ourselves in every way, in order to defend our values but I agree. I'm glad these intelligent people exist to speak my values eloquently.
It's remarkable that roughly 1 in 42 people watching this video post a comment. That's a pretty insane interaction rate. Just goes to show how top quality your videos (i.e., your analyses, explanations, reasoning, insights, etc.) are. Thanks for the great content.
“If you hold to a strict determinism, and free will doesn’t exist; then you have zero business praising anyone for moral excellence, or blaming anyone for moral wickedness.” -Bishop Barron
First off, why is that bad? Is it so awful to think that people perform actions due to circumstances outside their control? What are people if not the circumstances that made them: their genetics, their relationships, their experiences, their triumphs and despairs? Even so, we should praise people because the human mind likes it, ha ha. Yes, let's just ignore all the psychological research into conditioning and just stop encouraging good behavior. You're engaging in a straw man.
@@WaterCat5 Play out determinism to its logical conclusion. We could still say, “you behave well which is good for society and order.” But we couldn’t honestly say, “you are praiseworthy and I want to be more like you, or you are wicked and I don’t want to emulate that,” because ultimately, who cares? Like you said if we have no ability to decide then praising virtue or condemning wickedness makes no sense. Stalin for example would be just a poor bloke who was a product of circumstance. What business would we have to judge him?
@@nickmedley4749there doesn't have to be a magic fairy for the dumbest human being on the face of the earth to realize that anyone who commits atrocities against humanity is bad. Free will is just part of survival, and to be desired to be included helps many species survive, and they try to help each other out.
@@nickmedley4749please do me a favor and just read what you wrote back to yourself. How desperate are you to win on some kind of technicality that theists just make up? Do you know who atheists actually are? They are people who worshipped a god, until they decided to really understand their god, and then they make the fatal mistake of reading the bible. Now wiggle your way out of that one.
I think you've misunderstood what he was saying to be honest, I don't believe Alex would say that he is angry at people in either or those examples for precisely the reason you stated, the reason he brought them up I believe was to point out the problem that religious believers will state that the bible can give people objective morality but yet fails to condemn slavery and fails to condemn homophobia and many other things that people would consider objectively wrong.
@@jcbl62 Christianity isn’t all about the BIBLE. The early Christians spent HUNDREDS of years practicing and spreading the faith without a Bible. The Catholic intellectual tradition is THOUSANDS of years old and the concept of Natural Law has been unpacked over this time. The Bible isn’t the only source Christians use when determining morality. If anything, the Bible is proof that Christianity has shifted humanity in a direction that is clarifying our objective morality. The Bible providing an honest snapshot of the environment individuals experienced during the time it was written. It provides modern individuals extremely important insight into humanity’s ethical and moral journey. It provides a model of how to address the current culture while simultaneously providing aspirational ideas that take root and unfold over time. Precisely what Christian history reflects. Alex knows all this, but can’t acknowledge it because it clearly undermines his atheist claims about religion.
That's what really frustrates me, I do like that more atheists are coming around to the conclusion that morality cannot be objective with their worldview but then they have to stop complaining about their interpretation of the bibles morality
@@Forester- They are free to complain. They just can't say that it is a critique of religion. Your argument against religion can't be that it is morally wrong to discriminate against homosexuality when you say that morality is in the eye of the beholder.
@@S.D.323 It is. His argument goes as follows: 1. Morality is non objective. 2. Therefore, Christianity is wrong about morality. 3. Christian morality's wrongness causes moral wrong. 4. Christianity is objectively bad for society. While he doesn't have to directly say Christianity is objectively morally bad, he is trying to argue that it is objectively bad for society because it is immoral. At most all he can reasonably argue is that he doesn't like it. And who cares what he does and does not like?
Shapiro couldn’t lawyer his way out of his moral relativism and really no Judeo-Christian believer can defend why god allowed for slavery, but condemned eating pork.
@ay1489 No. Ben said that owning a slave under the Hebrew guidelines is objectively wrong after Alex asked him - see this section of the debate (ruclips.net/video/j7rtkLJqbxM/видео.html) at 7:38. He then goes on to accuse him of being a moral relativist, only to then ask him the exact same question again at 9:01, seemingly having forgotten Ben's previous answer. It's not moral relativism to say that something was considered moral in the past, and therefore needed a more gradual approach to remove it from society. I still agree with Alex that the Bible could have at least implied slavery was an immoral practice, but I certainly wouldn't accuse Ben of using moral relativism, or that he didn't 'recognise' Alex's accusation
@@jackvanderlinden9234 This is just blatant cope. God claimed so many things as immoral that were culturally acceptable to humans, but somehow had a problem with saying slavery was immoral? Alex clearly won with the moral relativism point.
@@CastleFrasherdude I agree with you in that the Bible could have made that clear and I’m still unsure why it doesn’t. My point is that Ben wasn’t inconsistent - you can agree or disagree with his interpretation of the Bible but he made it clear he thinks slavery, even the slavery mentioned in the Bible, is objectively wrong.
Alex honestly is no better than the atheists decades ago who made the same shallow arguments. How he can say there is no free will when everyone lives a life where they can recount the decisions they made freely that got them to where they are. Morals based on how you feel? When everyone knows that reacting based on your emotions … that your emotions will betray you. I have yet to find someone who can say that reacting emotionally when making a decision is how they accomplish everything good in life. I have no idea why people find his like of supposed logic enticing as none of it makes sense to those who honestly and objectively consider their own lives.
Religion is bad because... I'm so tired of this phrase. Trent who provided an excellent answer with a secular equivalent for comparison. I enjoy this podcast for 1000 reasons thank you, Mr. Trent.
If Alex O'Connor really thinks we're all just a collection of molecules in a meaningless existence with no free will, then he needs to explain why it's so important to him that he spends his life trying to convince other people of it. It's self-defeating.
@@gageduke7652 I disagree, meaning has to be objective. If meaning isn't objective or inherent then it's an illusion. If I'm just a collection of molecules then I'm just.a collection of molecules, no amount of subjective "meaning" is going to change that.
@@billydeewilliams267 Why is it so important that meaning has to be objective? Humans attribute meaning to otherwise meaningless things all the time. Nothing wrong with that. At the end of the day, even if absolute or objective truth or value existed, humans would not recognize it given that we are fallible and imperfect creatures. Our knowledge and interpretation of absolute truth is incomplete and likely to be wrong. For all intents and purposes... meaning, truth, and morality have to be subjective.
The study showing that encouraging belief in determinism leads to more dishonesty doesn't imply people who already believe in determinism would be more dishonest. In fact, other studies show this to be true. So it may only be the case that encouraging a free will believer to doubt their free will leads to dishonesty, it has nothing to do with prior belief in determinism.
I have to do more research on this, in terms of the amount of people who believe in free will, but if the majority of people may have some belief in free will, then won’t actively encouraging free will people to doubt free will potentially lead to even more examples of dishonesty? Unless that tide of dishonesty declines overtime, which is a huge bet on if it does decline, it might be more wise to let them believe in free will, especially given people in oppressed circumstances or abusers or addicts etc
Yhhh, most people on the planet believe in freewill and most people don't doubt freewill unless exposed to certain schools of thoughts. So introducing such doubts would encourage people to be less responsible over time (just observe), especially criminals looking for excuses. To them, all thier criminal drives become thier deterministic destiny, they had no 'Choice'. There'd be people advocating for more comfort and expenses for prisons since from a deterministic view, the criminal had to do what they did and thus, even if they are put aside from society because of thier nuerodivergence from the majority definition of 'normal', they still deserve comfort like any other 'normal' person by society's standards because they apparently had no say in the matter of thier actions. In return, more people would see criminals treated nicely and spoilt and they'd revolt and even wish to go to prison
Religion is inevitable as a result of human society. Atheism has become a religion. I found the debate between Alex and Ben frustrating as Alex would consistently stray off topic and descend into moral judgments of minutiae. In my view, Ben performed well and Alex said little of consequence and displayed an inability to stay on topic. He also acted in bad faith with his repetitive, stubborn and fruitless hypothetical questions. I found it a fruitless discussion that Ben “won.”
Alex went for populist talking points rather than technical ones. And his audience ate it up. The facts dont care about your feelings part especially made no sense given the topic is literally on the effect of religion. Which obviously includes feelings.
Alex's atheism basically boils down to, the bible seems to endorse things I dislike and condmen things I like, therefore there is no God. This includes suffering, and since there are formal arguments about the existence of God using suffering, he goes with these arguments. But when pressed, he goes back to bible difficulties, because that is his real reason for atheism. He just thinks the bible has things wrong, which isn't really a rational argument for the nonexistence of a God.
I can appreciate Alex. However, I've got to be honest, he is the epitome of the trope of young, solidly middle class student, well read and intelligent, but so very pretentious. I met a few like this when I was at university, possibly i myself was a bit like this too. Hopefully, people grow out of it with the wisdom of maturity which enriches their natural intellect, formerly limited by youthful hubris. But... I find him so very ponderous and difficult to listen to. He's obviously intelligent and erudite, but honestly i think such people do not truly realise that potential until they've got some wisdom and maturity to balance it out. Until then, what you often get is a lot of pretense and bluster; showing off like they've swallowed all the books they've read.
Perhaps, but to say this only about Alex and not ben, who has become a pop culture meme because of his pretentious personality and video titles simply betrays your biases.
How familiar are you with academic philosophy? Alex is very far from pretentious given his background. He has an undergrad degree from a very good university and is an excellent communicator and generous debater. He rarely or never pointlessly name-drops, refers to obscure essays, uses overly formal definitions, or waxes poetic with pseudo-profundities (the main pretentious crimes of academic philosophers). I think he makes a conscious effort to state his positions clearly and in plain language. He would be among the least pretentious people in any graduate level philosophy course in my experience. He's not showing off at all!
@@jayvillellaI agree. I enjoy listening to him, but nothing he says challenges my faith. I was raised atheist, marinated in Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens from an early age. I came to faith as an adult and I feel like my faith is far stronger for it. I look at people like Alex as a younger (smarter and more British) version of myself. I used to think people turned religious when they got old so they could “get into heaven” but personally it was just observing the world, culture, and humanity and coming to recognize the necessity of religion. I don’t know if Alex will ever reach that point. There are plenty of aged atheists, but I do think he is just rehashing the same talking points as the previous generation of charismatic atheists, even as the west grows less religious and increasingly spirals into nihilism.
Trent could you do a video on defending free will? It feels like the hardest problem to answer is the apparent connectedness between brain and personality/decisions (as shown by brain injuries)
I think Catholics actually have an easy answer under the framework that we're fully man and fully spirit. Your brain and mind work in conjuction. Your mind works as will and judge and brain processes information. Your feelings and expressed personality are a mix of your innate character and bodily chemical reactions. A change in the brain will change how it interacts with the mind and change how your personality is ultimately expressed
@@ghostapostle7225 it sounds like the self’s ability to carry out its will can be inhibited by the brain in your response. Which means your will isn’t free. And what makes this worse, is if you are suggesting the self interacts with the brain to carry out the will, unless you have a template for how the healthy brain functions and can determine that an individual’s brain doesn’t deviate or isn’t under the influence of something, how could you ever say that your will was actually free during a given action?
@@OrcaneVault - "It sounds like the self's ability to carry its will is inhibited by the brain in your response." It's the opposite. The subject can withdraw from the instinctual striving towards action which is generally embedded within the entire body, not just the brain.
I don't think brain injuries damage free will too badly, but they are certainly in support of a more non-free will view of how we act as well. You're having to further sever connections between the idea of a mind and the physical brain to mix these together. It moreover makes the mind start to sound like a fiction of what could be the mechanism behind your thoughts rather than an actual proposal of what is there.
Alex‘s initial position that religion got things “wrong”, holds a double fallacy in that some of the things that he describes as “wrong“ are matters of opinion, while others are simply examples of things that everyone got wrong: science, math, etc.
This is the main reason atheists are so uncredible imo. Even the smart ones like Alex fall into this self-contradiction where they reject objective morality and free will but proceed to appeal to both. He asks Ben what it means to "act like free will" as if having a debate over free will is not itself an example.
I had an argument with a very stubborn skeptic once who refused to accept that even basic principles of math are objectively true because of the possibility that we could discover new information in the future that would disprove the old. I was just trying to establish a baseline that something is knowable but you can embrace skepticism to such an extent that you refuse to accept even this premise.
@@sivad1025Strange you would argue atheists lack objective morality during a comment on a debate where the theist admits god’s moral relativism on slavery. Truly incredulous
Trent didn’t really show this part in his recap, but if my memory serves me right this isn’t why Alex brought it up. Alex brought these things up in response to the idea that social/scientific progress has largely been a theistic endeavour. Ben even had a funny response about him not needing to justify the actions of the Catholic Church for convicting Galileo “vehemently suspect of heresy”. Alex is essentially saying, look at all these instances where religions not only weren’t at the forefront of discovery, but were actively fighting against it. If we are going to count the times the church did support progress as evidence, then we must also support the times the church actively hindered progress as counter-evidence.
The measuremebts on Noah's ark are wrong. A giant wooden boat would not survive in the ocean. Also, the earth is not flat. The sundoes not revolve around the earth like the story of Joshua implies. Even if The story is saying that the earth stopped, then we would all be dead as it would be similar to stopping a car without a seat belt. We would just fly everywhere.
I got into a debate with someone who stated it wasn’t possible to control thoughts and imagination so it’s bull that “sin begins in the mind” (28 But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. Matthew 5:28 RSV-CE) He believed he was powerless to control himself all as an excuse to enjoy every ugly urge…couldn’t think far enough to wonder what happens when a dude with a sword and a grudge decides he can’t control the urge to lop off a pedo’s head.
They made a correct observation that you cannot control the thoughts that pop into your mind, though. It sounds like you’re trying to conflate ACTIONS with THOUGHTS. You cannot control or choose who you are attracted to, or when your eyes notice someone who you find attractive. That’s why the whole concept of a “thought crime” is insane and immoral.
this is partially incorrect. true, you have no controll over a thought once it pops into your head, but you can controll your intake. When you stop watching porn, how often do you think about porn after a month-- things like that. A guy on a farm in iowa with no access to media, probably has very few instances of thinking about immigration or the war in ukraine, etc. the idea that we cant limit intake i think is what OP is refering to @@TestMeatDollSteak
@@DCxSkateboarding You do in fact control whether or not how you respond to that initial temptation of lust. If you indulge in the lustful thought, that's a conscious choice. If you see an attractive woman, recognize her beauty and your subsequent attractiveness is in itself holy and a good and then leave it, that's a totally different thing than seeing an attractive woman and then proceeding to imagine what she'd look like naked or what you would do with her sexually. The latter is obviously sinful.
Arguments like that are one reason that make me wonder whether the divine hiddenness argukent is really worth it. Atheism is evil because it defends reprobate ideas like lust, porn, etc.
Baptist Wes back here, I still binge your videos here. I legitimately think your past two videos have been some of your best apologetics against “skepticism”. Something I’ve learned that skeptics do is formulate their position based on assertions and when asked about their foundation for absolutely anything it goes back to “i don’t know “ or “I don’t have to explain it”
@@Eliza-rg4vw The foundation of morality and the oughts of treating people one way over the other. Atheism/agnosticism has to ultimately say it’s all subjective, therefore the OUGHT itself it’s by definition subjective.
@@spiderwebbz3356There are plenty of atheists that believe in objective morality (the majority of philosophers for example). But there are even more theists that have no idea about this, because they’ve never needed to learn about the philosophy of morality outside of their own worldview.
@@spiderwebbz3356 isn’t a Subjective morality the norm? An atheist has a subjective morality based on their preferences, a Catholic has a subjective morality based on Gods preferences. We even see God’s preferences change over time. Subjectivity is par for the course
The comment section underneath the original video is pure comedy-it is of course the usual large group of atheists who are obsessed with religion and claim ben got demolished.
We sometimes hear that a society with more atheists will lead to a flourishing of science and art but in practice it just leads to more people talking about God.
Pretty much. If we're all dancing to the tune of our genetics as Dawkins would say, how can they argue for moral accountability...when I robbed that bank, it was just the end result of billions of tiny chemical reactions I was powerless to stop.
@@mattm7798 you have control over your emotions but you are over simplifying the issue. Some people are not born with empathy pathways. How are they able toi understand sin if they have no empathy.
In essence, the fact that we may not have free will isn't actually stopping us from assuming it anyways. It's sort of like how there are tons of optical illusions on the internet, and even though you know these are illusions, you can't stop yourself from being 'fooled' by it anyway. We may not technically have free will, but practically, we may as well. I think also assuming we must 'punish' wrongdoing may also be part of the problen here, though I don't wanna make this too long.
People like Alex only exist in times like this. A peaceful, mostly, sophiscated polite society built fundamentally by the ethics of the very systems he seems to want dismantled. No one had the luxury generally speaking of being a philospher for a living prior to the 1940's.
There were skeptics in ancient Athens. Best the main reason is his arguments aren’t any good and materialism is clearly false and the hard problem of consciousness is just a rejection of correct metaphysics
Is this supposed to be an argument in your favor? No one had the luxury of speaking out against religion in the past because they would have been ostracized, persecuted, tortured, and burned at the stake. The great Martin Luther supported the death penalty for the Anabaptists and other heretics. Imagine what he would have done to Alex.
Great video, Trent! I agree, Ben did a great job. It was nice to see him debate someone who isn't just a dumb college student. Really looking forward to the Ben Shapiro vs Destiny debate. I hope you do a review of that when it happens.
Those aren't debates 🤨. Those are just Q&A. Haven't you ever seen some speaker come into a campus, give a presentation on a specific topic, and then after the presentation has concluded they open the floor for a Q&A?
Alex wiped the floor with destiny to the point destiny didnt even upload the video on his channel lol.. Shapiro dont need to engage with destiny to be honest, destiny is a fake liberal moron..
@@jamesholt8516 idk, Destiny's a way more experienced debater. Honestly, I hope its more of a conversation. I like both of them, but I definitely agree with Ben on more stuff. It was originally scheduled for November, but I think it got pushed back to January.
Just because Alex can weave words together in a way that sounds intelligible doesn’t make him less dumb than the average college student. It wasn’t that much better, the delusion of objection morality in an atheistic subjective world is by definition contradictory.
I feel like Ben did a good job, but Alex's arguments were stronger. Ben knew that, and picked at little details and pretended to miss the points in some arguments. Like the "ofcourse the inventors of the scientific method started out religious, because the scientific method didnt exist before they invented it" and Ben started strawmanning about secret diaries of atheism and such, but Alex's point was 100% correct. Also the point where if there is no god, we have outdated, man made morality from a primitive time, the bad parts of nihilism, but with certainty and unanswerabiliy of a moral absolute. . Look at the Islamic world, or even islamic societies within the west, they havent socially progressed for 1400 years, and they come out weakest in all socioeconomic and moral poll
I feel like atheists idea of freewill has been overly complicated, in order to rationalize “freewill doesn’t exist.” I look at animal. An animal that doesn’t have hindsight, foresight, imagination, unable to use logic and rationale, primarily utilizing instinctive actions and reactions, and I think, “that’s not freewill.” Humans, although can reflect much of the same traits you see in animal behavior, yet have the ability other animals don’t, granting humans to use freewill. At some point in the conversation, I believe, Cosmicskeptic said, ‘evolution has granted us the ability to think we have freewill,” and it just sounds like an… evolution of the gaps.
The argument they will make is that, although we have the capacity to envision a future, enter problem solved, ultimately, the decisions we make are not a result of our own free will. But just a more complex biological programming.
@@moosechuckle Not all atheists are determinists. It is 1 of multiple stances an atheist can take on the topic of free will. Please don't say "atheists idea of free will" Here is a way to think of what you think is free will in a deterministic universe. Throw a coin in the air. Will it land heads or tails? The only thing acting on the coin is physics. So it is determined on which side it will land right? Given the time it might be possible to calculate the trajectory ect and get the correct answer. But we don't know and the situation does not allow for this. What is the most accurate stance for our pattern detecting brains to take? It is to consider both options as outcomes simultaneously. This gives us the illusion of choice while the coin is in the air. Eventho it is deterministic. I hope this helps you understand it is not that complicated.
That is not an “evolution of the gaps” wtf are you talking about? We know that our biology is the result of billions of years of evolution, and that our biology initiates the way we interact with our environment and ultimately our behaviour. Where in that is there a Gap? YOU are the one haphazardly inserting your “magic” or “soul” out of nowhere because you don’t understand the fundamentals of consciousness. So it is you who is committing a god of the gaps fallacy, lol.
@@aidanya1336 Hmm, but if you want to use the coin analogy it kind of breaks down on larger scales, that is, the more coins you have, you kind of generate a bell curve that shows which is more likely and you have sort of a determinate outcome, sort of like a dice. This is particularly common in nature, look at hest transfer for instance, on a subatomic level the electrons and molecules are jumping around randomly and so theoretically tou can have heat flowing out of a colder object into a warmer one, however the number of atoms in everyday materials are so tremendous that cold to warm heat flow is vitually impossible and unobserved. So if we wanna look at free will like an illusion that a coin offers, there are two options that an extremely large system which at its core is fundamentally just complicated physical laws should look like: (a) The first option is that the system just turns out completely random or chaotic on a macro scale with no seeming direction, drives or motives, stuff just happens as the physical laws allow are applied. (b) The second option is that the system becomes so deterministic that the random aspects are completely averaged out to zero by the large sclae of processes occurring simultaneously. So, if you're gonna use the coin analogy to look at the human consciousness and free will, then you and people around you must be random or extremely predictable the same way you'd predict that warm wster kept in a fridge should freeze up, that level of predictability or randomness must be the outcome of such view of the illusion of freewill according to that analogy. However I'm sure your experience shows otherwise, sometimes people act wierd or random, but often times you notice that people act in ways that you somehow innately perceive as good but don't seem deterministic like hot-cold heat transfer neither does it seem random like the toss of a single dice, they seem sophisticated and intentional
I'm just waiting for Trent to reply to just one of my comments, but since he rarely comments to anyone, I'm not that surprised. Though, I would have expected him to do better in defending his Catholic faith. :]
Not sure why two people who have two completely different ubderstandings of the word “good” spent time having a debate on whether religion is good or not.
The Bible DOES have the modern view of slavery. "For in Christ, there is neither slave nor free, male nor female", etc. The whole reason that society has condemned slavery is because of Christianity.
“For in Christ “ is the key part. In other words in the eyes of the lord. If you argue that “neither slave nor free” means there should be no slaves in society then one could also argue than “male nor female” means there should be no gender in society.
@@michaeldowdell3813 I think your analysis is missing the mark a bit. "For in Christ" does not just mean "in the eyes of the Lord", rather it also means "within the Kingdom of God", or "within the Church". This whole section of scripture means "within God's economy of the Kingdom, there is equality between all members of that Kingdom." People are equal, regardless of their gender, racial background, or status in society.
@@KenKopelson within his kingdom or within the church they are equal is what I meant by in his eyes but what scripture is not saying on earth those distinctions (slave or free) should not exist. If your saying we should view people on earth the same as god does then why would a murderer who is genuinely remorseful and accepts god , ie born again, still has to face judicial punishment and serve time. Even though god would accept them doesn’t mean we let them free.
Alex tried to have his cake and eat it too on the concept of free will. By asserting that he did not believe free will was real because “people are free to do as they will just not will what they will,” he merely redefined what free will is so as to avoid reconciling free will in a materialistic worldview. Being free to do (or not do - hence freedom) what you will is free will. In essence Alex does believe in free will, he just doesn’t admit that he does.
Not actually just take an example: I am right now writing a sentence to you, it is because I want to and I choose to, the want then leads to the action, every choice is based upon a want and the want is what you can not control, hence making all your choices sort of unfree. If I decided not to write this sentence it would be based on my non-want, but non-want which is also a want, hence your choices are grounded of infinite regress of wants and out of your control.
@@albertbecerra if it is based on a want outside your control and that want itself is based on another want outside your control how is it free will? as it is not free, also the self or decision-maker is not an essential existing entity but rather an illusion as free will is.
Alex makes the same mistake you do. People sometimes choose to do what they want and sometimes choose to not do what they want. An alcoholic may or may not choose to break a period of sobriety. In that case the alcoholic may both want to have a drink and not have a drink. That is why will is not merely wants or desires. It is the freedom to decide for yourself what to choose regarding how how to behave that is free will.
@@Anxh007You can choose to do things you don't particularly want to do if your choices are informed by a knowledge of what is good and what is not good.
Okay so this is gonna get lost, but I listened to this on the way to my sister's house where we binge watched the Netflix special "Love under the knife". And at the very end of that documentary about the evils of a ruthless con artist experimental surgeon, the journalist mentioned that while the surgeon was just an awful person, every person that went along with him and didn't stop him or ask questions is also responsible. Our morality, our free will demands that we do the right thing. It is written in our hearts, it isn't a natural conclusion from our surroundings. I want to live in a world that is ordered toward that. Praise to our God Who is all loving.
I get really annoyed with atheists playing the slavery card like it's an ace and a compete rebuttal, of Christianity at least. That key problem of the lack of free will does occur to me and I was disappointed Ben didn't point it out, it's a clear problem in society of people aren't held responsible for their actions.
I mean it is, even tho we have explainations for why slavery xyz they take way too much time and nuance, the moment they mention the word slavery, it acts like some ultimate slogan which 99% of people will be like haha christianity is man made.
The issue of slavery is really complicated because it is tied to many factors such as war and economics. The reason that human beings do not keep war captives as slaves today is because we have better ways such as using the UN or any international system or even nuclear weapons to prevent an aggressive nation from invading. Such options were not available in the ANE. That being said, it's not like the enlightenment were against practices like corporal punishment since corporal punishment was a thing in the military until modern times so the atheist needs to tell us why the original enlightenment didn't get things like corporal punishment right?
Alex wiped the floor with Shapiro - he is a presuppositionalist and people forget he is not Christian. I think both of them did not get to crux of the violence that religious thought has visited on the planet. Also - if you can not prove the existence of gods, how can you make a statement that living AS IF THERE WERE, was actually a good thing.
I like your critique about the informal debate also the portion of Alex's talk with Destiny. At least Destiny follows his non-belief consistently to its logical end.
I'm a non theist, and I'm quite frustrated that in the debate, in reviews and in comments, Alex' view on free will is conflated with atheism. AFAIK most atheists don't subscribe to his position. (I also think "there is no free will" does not accurately summarize Alex's position at all - what he is saying is that to him, the concept "free will" is unintelligible. The sound bite really obscures his meaning). I'm also quite frustrated that Ben Shapiro (and a lot of commenters) make some assumptions about atheists that simply aren't true. I'll elaborate a little: In a reply to Alex, Ben states that if someone came to kill someone, it would more likely be an atheist than a religious person. I'd be surprised if Ben is able to substantiate that. I get the argument that atheist dictatorships have been bad. Granted. Dictatorships usually are. But here we're talking about individuals. Not a single study ever of imprisonment rates or the faith of death row inmates show a (statistically significant) over-representation of atheists. I think that Ben (and many theists) think that the only thing that could ultimately motivate an atheist is self interest, since atheists don't believe in God/gods. I don't think so, or at least I can't come up with a (non-ridiculous) self-interest explanation for me actively paying extra for animal welfare products or for me not outlawing sexual practices between consenting adults - even though I'm a fairly vanilla heterosexual myself. But - even if self interest was my only governing impulse, I don't understand why theists would think that my self interest would take the crude form of killing others for their stuff. My self interest would surely include not risking being punishable by law, and furthermore it would no doubt include constructing and living in a stable society governed by law, with equal rights and equal opportunity for all - not just for myself, but for my kids and eventual grand kids down the line. And I'd want people who directly oppose such a society (such as a murderer) to be marginalized/separated from that society. Getting misrepresented like this is every bit as frustrating to me, as it must be for believers to be portrayed as potential terrorists by the new atheist movement. Kind regards Martin
9:30 Common objection to determinism, but it doesn't really work if you think it all the way through. Yes, under pure determinism a person had ultimately no choice for his bad behavior, but it goes both ways: The other people also have no choice but to punish the person.
I think you’re right to point out that the debate devolved into essentially “religion is bad because it promotes bad things” which is circular. I do wish Ben had pulled back and pushed harder on the “but why is it bad” or how do you determine what is good for society anyway? He did a great job though, like you said it’s really hard in the hot seat and Alex is a formidable mind.
If you promote a bad thing, then wouldn't that make it bad..... and non circular? Slavery is bad, genocide is bad, and rape is bad. Which is stuff that the bible condones.
Personally I was a bit disappointed that they never defined what even is good for society. Without that defintion, a hypothetical reigion which promotes the killing of all people on Earth could be considered good by that religion, and so if we abide by them, yes, religion is good. In thr same vein, then, abiding by Christianity would be anti-this new religion, and so it is bad. Really depends on what angle you're taking and what the truth (if any) actually is. I only got a round to about halfway thru the original vid before I just stopped because I couldn't see it getting any mpre productive.
The truth is, a debate should never be about, who won. There aren't any losers or winners. That's the wrong mentality. Debates shouldn't be about persuading or convincing each other, it should be about laying down logical arguments and letting the participants come to their own educated conclusions
Man, it's so wierd to watch arguments from Atheists who have strong roots on modern philosophy. We are forced to debate if free will exists. Omg. I can only imagine what Socrates would say.
9:58 It's not free-will-denying that makes society worse, it's people not being logical that makes society worse. For whatever reason those people thought we shouldn't punish criminals because they couldn't have acted otherwise. We should still lock criminals up, not because they deserve it but because they're a threat. Not believing in free will is not the problem, not thinking things through is. 12:47 Ben doesn't have an explanation for how free will works. Alex _does_ have an explanation of how free will doesn't work. So won that part of the debate? 19:54 Secularism led to transgender ideology? And I thought you were a smart guy. 20:34 How do you know the horrors of the Soviet Union are coupled with being non-religious? How do you know sexual insanity is coupled with being atheistic? A theistic sexual insanity would be better?
Interestingly European prisons designed to help criminals develop better skills, better self control, providing therapy and treating them as someone who's not fully responsible for their actions, have a far lower rate of inmates recommitting crime than those designed simply to punish prisoners.
@@helgaioannidis9365 I am in fact European and can tell you, that most crimes aren´t even punished although they should be. Gang rapists are running free without prison time. You don´t know a thing about what is happening over here and it shows. P.S. You did not dismantle my argument. Going to prison IS facing consequences.
@@libertasinveritas3198 calm down dear, I'm a German living in Greece who studied in Italy. Doesn't get more European than that I guess. Look at the crime rates in the USA compared to those in Europe and you'll understand what I was talking about
well alex believes in determinism, meaning that external things such as your enviornment will influence what you will do in the future. so basically by exposing ben to his arguments, hopefully the idea is to influence him to change in the future.
Great thoughts , as always. Hearing the debate this came to my mind: How can slavery be wrong if there's no moral frame of reference but feelings? 🤔 One of the points I see on atheist, most of them came to know the Bible from protestant literalism, that brings issues to the debate that are non-issues.
How can it be wrong if the book you get your morals from says its not wrong? That was the whole argument. The moral framework people base their lives on says its not immoral to own people. The bigger question is who are you to tell the creator of the universe that they are wrong?
@@LesChats1991 Exactly. That's one thing Christians will never admit. Also, slavery does mean forcing someone against their will, so Jimmy is plain wrong. It's pathetic how wrong their attempts to dismiss the truth are. The definition of slavery makes that obvious - " Slavery is the ownership of a person as property, especially in regards to their labor. Slavery typically involves compulsory work with the slave's location of work and residence dictated by the party that holds them in bondage. " That's the official definition, and the same definition used in " biblical " times.
I actually disagree with you on the point of O’Connor bringing up slavery. It seemed, at least in the context of the debate, he was saying that the Bible can make people do things we see as immoral today. What’s to stop somebody owning slaves through using the Bible as justification? This is the point I felt he was trying to make and I see it as a pretty good one and one that fits with the debate prompt. You mention objective morality hinging on a divine being but with bringing up how slavery was acceptable back then, Shapiro acknowledged this, and it is unacceptable now, Shapiro also acknowledged this, than we can’t say the Bible gives us an objective morality. O’Connor said “who’s being the moral relativist here?” Why use the subjective morality of the Bible, which has justification for many horrid acts other than slavery itself, when we can use a more modern secular form of morality that the broader public agrees on. This, to me, would be better for society because it comes without the unnecessary baggage of aggressive reinterpretation of religious texts. I understand that O’Connor didn’t make that exact point, that was more my own but I think it relates to the question of “is religion good or bad for society?”.
I thought Ben Shapiro destroyed him in this debate because he 1 stayed on topic and 2 because he actually had a position. It's difficult to debate a person who has no actual conclusion to anything except to question yours. Ben's argument about the likelihood of a murder being committed by a non religious person versus a person who is religous completely ended the debate there is no debate that Alex could have a good faith and common sense to combat that other than a strawman argument.
Plus, he pointed out that he is appealing to mystery to reconsile his beliefs while Alex holds a burden of proof because he's making assertive claims about the observable world. And Alex played agnostic and said Ben held the burden. That's not how it works.... You can't make an assertive claim about reality and pass the burden to the other side
The debate of free will is such an important one for our time. The answer affects us all on such a tangible level. If more people believed in the truth of free will then we would have such a more peaceful time.
There is no free will. Either events are random or determined. If they're random, you have no free will. If they are determined, you have no free will. Events are either random or determined and in both cases, no free will.
@@canine_delight "free will" entails that there is a center of control, a "self" within one's consciousness, that directs actions, can reason, consider outcomes, etc. If events of the mind are random, then they are not "controlled" at all. They occur at random.
I feel the exact opposite. I think our societies are so focused on discussing everything as a moral issue that it clouds our ability to problem solve rationally. Even when I was a Christian I didn’t believe in freewill, so this isn’t just an atheist/theist debate.
The sooner people stop associating a British accent with intelligence the better. O’Connel is fine but hitchens wouldn’t have been near as popular if he had a different accent.
Hitchens' accent and command of the English language carried him a long way. I do love to listen to him talk but his criticisms of religion were just as shallow as the rest of the New Athiests.
Retributive punishment is wrong regardless of free will. Its a beneft of determinism that forces this view. Rehabilitation and safety should be the only concerns of the justice system.
Without having finished this Trent episode (though I did watch the debate), I’m going to say Ben either reached a stalemate or narrowly lost and it’s not surprising - he is limited in his thought and reasoning by his incorrect/incomplete view of religion and truth.
Alex keeping going at the bible instead of the topic. Very typical for somekne like him to refuse to stay on topic. Wheter ben is jewish, christian or muslim, the point would be the same and alex clearly has a bible beef.
I completely disagree with this. Ben brings up Judeo Christian values several times making it fair game for Alex to go after. Alex also goes after Islam so lets try to be fair. Also Alex and Ben both live in a majority Christian nation so doesn't it make sense?
The Bible is the crux of Christian belief, you can only attack the Bible for arguments for or against Christianity in any way, what else could they discuss? This is THE religious text for the religion
In the free will point, Alex brings up the “You can do as you will but you can’t will what you will.” No one is arguing that we don’t have an instinctual will. Free will is using your reasoning abilities to choose whether or not that instinctual will is ordered or disordered from a moral and somewhat utilitarian sense and then making the free choice. We aren’t slaves to our instincts. I suppose he could still call that an evolutionary mechanism and therefore an illusion but that’s the distinction in my view of what free will means to most people.
but such free will is still not free in any morally relevant way that matters to religions. Because your reasoning abilities are not the product of your choice and you cannot control them, and they are determined by other unconscious processes.
@@marco_mate5181 If having many choices in life despite having certain material limitations can’t qualify as free will then what would you need to have free will ? Do you think having completely omniscient consciousness of your actions and motivations is the only qualification for free choice? Every person who has ever lived has struggled to make choices in their lives. What do you call that exactly? The advantage of the skeptic is shifting the burden of proof. But it’s self evident to most people that they make choices every day. So it’s your burden to prove why making a choice between eggs and bacon or a bowl of cereal for breakfast in the morning doesn’t qualify as free will. If we make simple choices, then it stands to reason that there are more complex choices. Saying that the whole process happens in the brain doesn’t refute that the person could be making some kind of conscious choices somewhere in the process. It’s just a quirk of consciousness that we aren’t 100% aware of our own brain and where along in the process we have a choice.
I haven't full watched the video yet, so maybe I'm repeating what Trent says. It seems like Alex's view is that thoughts cause other thoughts. Therefore, his "either thoughts are determined, or they're not" point works. Although, most of phenomenology implies that it isn't thoughts which cause thoughts, but a foundational faculty (or so Sartre argues in his Being and Nothingness).
"Thoughts cause thoughts" is obviously true in the physical world where everything is a domino chain. But that's why Ben appeals to the immaterial world where we have no reason to believe that cause and effect work this way
@@sivad1025 - The physicalist "domino chain" and general computational theories of mind don't sufficiently account for the temporal and enactive process of cognition. You're basically cherry-picking being.
@@sivad1025 Thoughts originate within a faculty not subjected to thought. If this faculty was subjected to thoughts, it would lead to a regress of thoughts into the unknown. Therefore, a thought may *precede or build off* another thought, but this thought doesn’t originate within the temporally prior thought itself. Edit: Btw, Sartre totally rejected anything immaterial in this process.
@@evangelium5376 I'm Christian, so I'm inclined to agree. I'm saying that in the physical realm, I can understand the belief that all physical actions are entirely caused by prior actions
Most arguments for determinism I've found come down to "cherry picking being," as it were. Freedom is found in the temporal and enactive process of subjectivity, not in the faulty conception of cause-effect relations of objectified "things."
First you have to define what you mean by freedom here then you have to define what you mean by temporal and enactive of subjectivity and then you have to describe why the concepts of cause and effect relations are quote faulty you're just saying words to say them holy fuck everything you've said here literally just makes no sense and completely disregards and underwrites all of the actual arguments made by cause and effect. My brain actually hurts reading how empty and brain dead these comments are for fucksake our school system has failed.
The confusion heavily lies in the fact that few people today understand how free will really works, but the answer to how it works, or at least an answer which I find very convincing, has been around for hundreds of years. It even can be leveraged to show exactly why so many fall into determinism. To whit: we have two mental powers, intellect/reason and will. Now free will by the name implies the will can be directed freely towards everything, and that is the point of confusion. The will actually is drawn by its very nature towards what it perceives as good, and in that sense is kind of deterministic. What makes will free is our reason possesses the capability of freely presenting various things to the will as good. Thus, we possess the freedom to choose what to set before our will, which then goes after it. Only seeing that the will always pursues the perceived good and not that the reason freely presents things as good is a big component in determinism.
@@Theseekerofinfinite you still miss the point. Such precess of "presenting to the will" is not under your controll and is either random or deterministic. Reason is a deterministic process, and our reason is constrained by the caotic mix of chemical processes that go on in our brain. So it is not free but dependent on physical conditions which are still outside our control.
@@marco_mate5181 - The content of the world which presents itself to the subject doesn't need to be undetermined in order for freedom to exist, because you're conflating determination *within* an interdeterministic relation between subject and world vs. a narrow causal chain of determination which goes one way. It comes down to a language trick.
@@evangelium5376 what does this word salad mean? The point isn’t that the content is determined, but the process itself. The abilities of our mind are determined by the natural laws of the reality we live in, and are out of our control. And the processes that present the set of choices to make are also determined, including the act of choosing itself, the alternative is randomness, which by definition would be not under our control.
There was no "winner" as such. There are deep epistemological, ethical and moral flaws with any worldview, and this discussion helped us all to understand the problems and strengths of both systems of thought.
Hi Trent, two questions I have for determinists: 1) if determinism is true, how can you possibly know. 2) if determinism is true, why would one rely on the laws of logic, any thought you have, etc
With regard to the first question, for me, it's about levels of conviction rather than absolute certitude. Determinism seems to cohere with the rest of my ontological positions and seems more plausible than the other alternatives. For that matter, Libetarian free will - which I assume is what most people talk about when they say they believe in free will - just seems incoherent to me. As for your other question, ironically, I think it's actually the believers in libertarian free will who have the problem with trusting your faculties reliability. The denial of determinism entailed by adherence to LFW also means that a certain randomness is built into the fabric of reality to such a degree that any event, even your own thoughts, could very well be completely arbitrary.
@@graysonguinn1943 it can be posed but all of our experience is that we are making free choices. Trent even cites a study on how a belief in determinism changes behavior.
The opening remark finally got me to subscribe to a channel upon being asked to. Hahaha. That was well played. (Thank you for all that you do. Blessings and love!)
Great analysis. Shapiro wins hands down when his opponent admits that he has to live by delusion. O'Connor, for all his polite facade and calm demeanour has to reduce to a HItchensian sneer arguing not the topic, but railing on about supposed biblical atrocities, a la Richard Dawkins. Although his mockery is slightly more subtle, once the case fails all they have left is an appeal to moral posturing.
These overeducated moronic types are the downfall of society. For hundreds of years these "philosophers" have hated society and want it to change (probably for their own inadequacy) and try to change the roots of civilization. Coincidentally it fails every. single. time.
I think you misunderstood. The intuition we have that makes us thing we have free will is the illusion. Alex clearly stated he did not believe free will existed.
Very well stated - I agree 100%. I’ve had debates with atheists on line, and I’ve found their arguments always go off the rails and devolve to sneering. They create an image of religion and religious people in their minds (ignorant unthinking rubes), and thus when it really comes down to it, they don’t think they really HAVE TO provide sound arguments, mockery is sufficient. It’s a decidedly unintellectual approach. It is also astoundingly arrogant to posit how God would necessarily effectuate a moral law through time if God was real. They reject God out of hand because of their own highly superficial moral judgments. It doesn’t “seem” like a “good” God would do things the way he had, so therefore that is “evidence” against God. Their reasoning is so shallow and weak. They are so comfortable with defining how a God must be if he is real. Do they apply such bias and shallow thinking to any other sphere of inquiry? Like trying to understand physics?
Thanks. No, I understand. He believes there is no free will but that evolution has deluded us into the sense that there is, and living as such. With a causally determinate universe he still acts as though he should argue people into beliefs with "facts" and render moral judgments as though we have choices as to what we do.@@aidanya1336
@@aidanya1336 And Ben needs the belief in free will, not Alex. There's no illusion on Alex's side. @BibleSongs Alex posted a short on exactly the point you bring up.
"X is a bad source for an ethical standard because it results in Y" is a bad argument in general because it requires us to already have an ethical standard by which to judge Y. But if you already have this standard, all you can do with other standards is point out where they deviate from your chosen one. Since all other ones will deviate on some point (otherwise it wouldn't exist; it would just be your chosen standard already), all you are really doing is pointing out where a competing standard goes "wrong." CS Lewis pointed out the impossibility of bootstrapping your way into an ethical system from a vacuum. You can't possibly choose one when you have no prior standards by which to judge the candidates; the judgement criteria you might use *are* your ethical system.
Alex like all atheists believe in their views and opinions and hold everyone else accountable to their views and opinions,but if on atheist is vegan and the other carnivore then who is right and the answer is they both because they both hold themselves accountable to their views and opinions, it’s very similar to Protestantism the individual Protestant is his own pope and counsel and holds himself accountable to his views and opinions on Christianity.
Both Ben Shapiro and Alex O’Conner are educated, intelligent and have evaluated Christianity. Both have concluded Jesus is dead. Thus it is reasonable to conclude Jesus is dead.
I am so tired of hearing atheists whine on about slavery when they are all quite happy to enjoy the benefits of modern day slave labour. There has always been slavery in every human culture and there still is today. The Bible advises us on ways to behave within the context of slavery because God knew it was always going to exist.
The example for atheist countries should be Soviet Union, Revolutionary France, Communist China, etc. which is fair. However, for religious societies, the debate has to include religions other than Christianity and Judaism. Discussions should extend to Muslim, Aztec, the biblical religion of Phoenicia and Canaan, etc. Also, Atheist doesn't equal non-religious, for example, Buddhist is an atheist religion and the Buddhist societies seems to be ok, committing direct atrocities wise.
Trent, when are you going to have a good discussion with an LDS person (Mormon)? There are quite a few LDS who are lapsed Catholics. They could use a charitable podcast that includes an active Mormon where you reason through their issues....the "great apostasy" problem, problems with the office of The Twelve continuing, Apostolic-era evidences for baptism by pouring and the true presence, contradictions in their multi-god theology, KJV mistakes in the Book of Mormon, etc. There's A LOT, and much of it they may have never been exposed to. Could be the chance to plant seeds (as you may already know, they are very careful to avoid what they deem 'anti-Mormon' material, so an active, 'orthodox' Mormon's involvement would probably be necessary to get many of them to consider listening).
My biggest problem with "Free will doesn't exist but it's good to act like it does" is that the people making that claim are trying to convince others of it. Isn't that a bit self-defeating? If it's truly good, wouldn't we have evolved to _not_ convince people it doesn't exist? If evolution favors belief in free will, isn't doubt in its existence evidence against the evolutionary process?
I’m not sure Evolution applies to philosophical discussions in the way you think it does. You’re operating from the promise that majority of people don’t believe in free will but in fact people do and they live like it, always desiring more freedoms and wanting to make their own decisions. Just from that the evolution thing fails. Next, I don’t know of any other places except during debates or philosophical discussions, movies/ media wherein people are trying to convince each other of free will or determinism, I wouldn’t say these philosophical discussions actually hold much evolutionary weight at all. Evolution is about biological directional changes that happen over long spans of time geared toward survival,not about intellectual beliefs that a group of people hold over centuries or decades, even if most people didn’t hold to belief in free will, that proves nothing about its evolutionary usefulness. People believe in unhelpful things all the time. What are you trying to say?
@@ABB14-11 Right, but if you're a determinist who believes in evolution, then the human brain evolved in the same way. Alex argues that we evolved to believe in free will because it's useful. But that's a strange claim to me because if free will is so useful and we evolved to believe in it, then why are so many people like Alex arguing against it? Sure it may not be formally argued against in every day life. But the effects are pretty clear. How often do we see people excuse crime because "they're mentally ill and couldn't help it"? I see that quite frequently. But if we truly evolved to believe in an illusion of free will, I would expect to see that almost never
@@sivad1025 Alex arguing against free will could be viewed in a similar way as corrected lenses. Evolution would typically select out people with low/no vision, but in 2023 humans can employ empathy and reason and tool building to solve for the individual with poor eyesight. Would our gene pool be stronger if we stopped anyone with bad eyes or a peanut allergy from reproducing? Probably! Would that be a moral action? Probably not! It’s also worth noting that historically speaking (as in at the level of hundreds of thousands of years) humans didn’t go around “believing” in free will, they just existed.
Evolution also favors belief in a flat Earth. Basically none of our direct perceptions about the Earth’s shape line up with what it actually is in reality. To understand that the Earth is round, you have to either do a bunch of complex tests or you have to be a particularly observant sailor watching the mast of another ship disappear over the horizon. It’s ‘common sense’ that the Earth is flat, but if we stuck with the Flat-Earth view supported by our immediate perceptions we would never have been able to do some really cool stuff - the Space Race, for example. With free will I think there’s a similar dynamic at play. If we acknowledge the ultimate role that external factors have on our actions, it becomes a lot easier to try and shift those external factors on a wide scale to produce better outcomes, or to vote in favour of policies that aim to improve outcomes by improving the environment people exist in. Without that you get into territory where it becomes easy to say things like(for example) “poor people choose to be poor”, without needing to acknowledge and address the sticky reality behind why something like poverty is difficult to escape.
@@ecta9604 I really like this comment because it made me think. I don't think you were responding to my original point though. I was saying that the "Free will doesn't exist but it's good to act like it does" is self-defeating. You don't seem to deny that. You would agree with me that it would be silly to believe in flat earth because it was evolutionarily favored. Your argument is instead that it's _not good_ to act like free will does exist. I think that's an uphill battle. As Trent talked about, there are plenty of studies showing the link between this belief and bad behavior like cheating. I agree that "poor people choose to be poor" is not helpful. But that's also not a logical end-point of free will. We can believe that poor people are poor because of a combination of choices and external factors. I think your example is ultimately counterproductive because even if "poor people choose to be poor" were a logical endpoint, I would prefer that to "poor people aren't responsible for anything they do." At least the former would punish criminals and keep society safe. The latter has no limiting principle. And Black Lives Matter has given lots of great evidence to this by electing judges and prosecutors who release criminals onto the streets because of their perceived hard lives. This mentality hasn't reduced crime anywhere, it's only enabled it. We live in a world where black kids can raid Walgreens in a Chicago mob with no consequences because the "systems" forced them to do so. How is that at all good for society?
Determinism enrages me, because I can’t wrap my head around how an otherwise intelligent person can say they believe in determinism, yet still try to persuade someone of something.
@@billowspillow nope, your understanding of determinism is a strawman. The issue I am seeing is you are conflating free will and agency. They are not the same thing. You still have agency under determinism. Agency is the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment. You do not need free will to do this. A moral agent is "a being who is capable of acting with reference to right and wrong." You do not need free will to do this. To put it another way, you seem to believe determinism wipes out both "free" and "will", but it only does the former, not the latter. You will still have a "will" under determinism, it's just not "free". The laws of physics determine the future. It's not definite because we fully don't know the laws of physics, but the laws of physics that we currently have at our disposal have no opportunity for intercession by human will. We are a collection of particles governed by laws, and those laws don't at any point in the evolution of the particle say, "Hey, can you, like, tell me now what do, person?" They just determine the future based upon what things were like in the past. Normally, the intuitive definition of free will is things could have been different, and I could have made a choice for things to turn out differently. And if that's your definition of free will then I don't see any way to square that with the laws of physics because anything that you do is your particles executing some kind of motion, and the motion of your particles, in your brain and in your body, have no opportunity to allow you as a conscious being to direct them. What force could possibly that direction come from? Is it the electromagnetic force? Well, that one we understand from Maxwell. Is it the gravitational force? We understand that one from Einstein. Is it the nuclear forces? Those we understand from the Standard Model of particle physics. What force could you possibly exert on your particles that goes against or goes beyond those that emerge from the equations of physics? So there is a puzzle right now in quantum physics that has been on the table for 50-75 years, and we don't know the answer to this puzzle, and that's why I have to couch my remarks with a little bit of uncertainty. And that puzzle is this, quantum theory says that you can only predict the probability of one outcome or another. Fifty percent chance electron here, fifty percent electron there. Yet, when we measure the electron, we always find it either here or there. One or the other. So how do you go from the fuzzy probabilistic haze of many possibilities to the single definite reality that we experience in everyday life? We still don't know how to bridge that gap. So within that, if consciousness somehow plays a role in picking out one outcome from the probabilistic haze, then sure, then free will might come for the ride as well. Then there's the neuroscientific perspective. First of all, what's happening at the quantum level doesn't really scale up to whether a neuron fires or not, I mean that indeterminacy. But from the experiments that neuroscience has done, starting in the 80s, Benjamin Libet did studies where he said to somebody, "Whenever you feel like it, just press this button." and he measured brain activation. And he found, and he said, even before they actually press the button because that takes time, to make the movement, "Just let me know where this little dot is on the clock when you feel the first inkling of the intention of wanting to move." And what he found is about 350 milliseconds before a person even had that conscious intention, there was a gearing up of brain activation. So then, leap forward to current times. Neuroscientists can do neuroimaging experiments where they can say to a person, "Okay, just choose left or right, or that hamburger or not." They can predict up to 10 seconds before you even have the conscious inclination of your intention, which you are going to go, left or right, or cheese or no cheese. The brain is making these decisions all the time, and we have this illusion of free will. But the question really is, why do we have this illusion? Why did we evolve this illusion? Is it important, if we didn't have it, would it change our behavior? It strikes me that it gives us that sense of control that, presumably, out of the Savanna, you know, 50,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago, made the difference between surviving or not. If you're invested in how things turn out and feel your decisions can affect how things turn out, you're more attentive, you're more engaged, it's something that matters to you more, and presumably, something like that or some parallel story like that suggests why we have this illusion. I think from both a physics perspective and a neuroscience perspective, we come to the same conclusion that it is an illusion, that free will is an illusion. Even though we really feel like it's not. And actually studies have been done which, when you tell people free will is an illusion, and you start giving them subsequent tests, they're more likely to cheat on a math test. They're more likely to act unethically. So the fact that we have this belief, those who have had it actually are better able to survive in the system. However, we also have evolved for there to be cheaters. And they can win, and so if we are all cheaters, no one would win. So, you know, often people, when they encounter these ideas, they say, "Okay, then I'm not going to do anything but sit on my couch, and what does it matter?" Right, but you see, that's a mixing of two distinct views on one question. You see, if you think you're making a free choice to sit on your couch, then you feel like, "Well, now I am going to give into this, and I am just going to sit there." But if you do that, it was determined. If you choose to sit on your couch, it's not that you made a volitional choice, it was set in place. And if that's what was going to happen, that's what is going to happen. And moreover, but you know, Baumeister's description, I think, really, at least helps me when I think in those terms, which is, it's not that free will is the intuitive one that we're talking about here. Free will really is the fact that we're able to carry out this amazing spectrum of behaviors. We can walk, we can talk, we can sing, we can come up with ideas. The fact that they had an earlier cause, maybe even back at the Big Bang, to me, it doesn't take anything away from creativity. It doesn't take anything away from originality. It doesn't take anything away from having a sense of authorship over your own actions because you are the most immediate cause of those actions. They emerge through you, through your particles. Your particles and your brain are configured in such a way that when certain stimuli hit your body, you say and do certain things. The fact that it is determined, who cares?
You still have a will under determinism, but one that is determined by an impenetrably vast network of influences and experiences -- including someone trying to persuade you of something. The determinist obviously thinks -- fully consistently -- that new information, facts, reasons can change someone's mind per determinism. That's how minds are always changed. The alternative is thinking you can choose to change your mind absent determinism, absent any cause or reason to change your mind. And that's a far weirder position.
@@calebsmith7179 I'm sorry but all this turns "determinism" into an unfalsifiable philosophy. Because if I say I reject determinism because a determinist cannot persuade anyone of anything, let alone themselves, you say "you're confusing will with agency." But then you go on to explain further how not even agency can be a thing within determinism because nothing can be controlled by the individual even to the smallest levels of scientific observation. And then you cover all possible bases by saying that even if someone deliberately and consciously makes a decision against what would be assumed to be their determined choice, that doesn't count because we're already assuming determinism therefore even those things were determined. I personally have made a few decisions in my life that are total 180's from where I was going before; I've witnessed so many people that have done the same. We all felt very clearly how going with the flow was leading us to places we didn't want to go, so against everything in us, with great effort and gnashing of teeth, we went the opposite direction. That should be a strong argument against determinism, but the determinist's analysis is "nah must have been possible with some factors that we just can't observe yet." This is like all the worst arguments for the existence of a god rolled up into a secular philosophy. Also everything you've written assumes that the physical world is all there is, and all we've observed of the physical world is all that can possibly be there. We know that neurons are firing in someone's brain when they make a choice, and since the individual is no more than those neurons, they cannot be freely making that choice. But that's a pretty big assumption - one which can only be defended, I think, by assuming determinism to be true out the gate. Lastly, if individual experience makes it feel like your philosophy is wrong, and if the survival of civil society relies on acting like your philosophy is wrong (e.g. we still must punish wrongdoing; we still must reward good decisions), then I posit your philosophy isn't thought through correctly.
Even Nietzsche explained that religion was necessary to provide a genuinely meaningful purpose... To not become a nihilist. The point about how there used to be slavery was completely irrelevant... The Israelis treated their slaves very than all the surrounding cultures, so religion did not cause harm. Even Alex couldn't identify a replacement for religion to achieving inter cultural/ cross class social cohesion
I am a fan of neither side, but I am a fan of these thoughtful, civil engagements between bitterly opposed camps. Whether or not you win the debate, if you build bridges you are doing God's work.
Ben handled O'Connor very well in this debate. That last line he quotes from Voltaire was absolutely biting. Especially given how much atheistic thought has grounded parts of its being on the philosophy of Voltaire, who was at best a lukewarm Deist.
If by handled you mean stuttered when pressed on his moral relativism then resulted in complimenting Alex’s beard, sure he “handled” him. He took another L just like in his discussion with Sam Harris.
I wouldn't expect somebody who makes his living pushing a religion to be able to give an unbiased critique of a debate where said religion has been effectively attacked. Alex got into slavery because the book justifies it and that justification was used for millennia to keep slavery intact. That is a huge example of why your religion was bad for society. So yeah, it's part of the argument.
I have to say Ben wins merely off the principle it seems he was the one constantly trying to pull Alex back on topic. Alex seemed to constantly end up trying to prove “religion is false” while Ben kept having to go back to the utilitarian aspect of the argument because the topic was “is religion good for society.” So I don’t see how you can give it to Alex. He’s like most atheists who just go off track a little bit in debates and end up trying to prove God isn’t real rather than the debate topic
Congratulations, now you have a legitimate excuse for treating half the population as second class citizens, and now you can be proud of wiping out millions of natives so that your God wins. Too bad your God is so timid he can't come join the celebration.
The thing is Ben lost cause if you watched the debate he concided and even agreed with Alex that religion can be harmful for society.. regarding Islam and there beliefs ...
@@Tornadospeed10 Alex traps been in his arguments...like I said if you watched the debate Alex asked Ben would you rather have a society of people believing in Islam or a society of atheist...and Ben weaseled out of the answer by saying he doesn't want to debate the validity of different religion...but you know bens answers he really doesn't believe in the utility of religion
Destiny really clarified why atheism leads to brutal conflict and inhumanity when he says "if two people can't get along, at some point it comes to violent conflict" because without the moral guidance of religion, that "not getting along" shrinks to whatever point you want, which is what we're seeing with cancelling, and why atheistic regimes lead to dictatorship. When something like cancelling work for an atheist, without the morality of religion the next step for the atheist is violent conflict if you "simply can't get along" and use no other metric for moral consideration.
It's not something exclusive to atheism. All throughout history we've seen violence and utter brutality committed by people with religious disagreements, even those proclaiming to be part of the same religion. Whether you're religious or not, you can either settle a moral disagreement by talking it out, or if that fails and there is no option to ignore the problem or agree to disagree, violence ends up being the result.
Punishment for witchcraft is not something bad if you have actual experience on what witches and shamans do. For example in my city a shaman hanged a dead rooster on a palm tree in the middle of a road, even for atheistic morals its gotta be at least animal cruelty. And it gets worse when you understand that a black rooster sacrifice is a spell for death
As an Emotivist, Alex O'Connor believes murder is wrong because it "feels" wrong. Could the source of this "feeling" be Alex's soul, since God has written his law on human hearts? "I will place my law within them, and write it upon their hearts..." Jeremiah 31:33 "For wickedness, of its nature cowardly, testifies in its own condemnation, and because of a distressed conscience, always magnifies misfortunes." Wisdom 17:11
Alex's focus on "free will" got tiresome. But beyond that, he had better points. However Ben "won" in the sense that Alex's fans, such as myself, were expecting Alex to just hopeless embarrass Ben. And that didn't happen. Ben was thoughtful and well spoken and defended his position well, which I acknowledge even though I disagree with him.
We may have different world views... but at least we agree there is a way to conduct civil discourse. Stay loyal to the truth, friend. Where truth prevails, diversity of opinion florishes.
I think the material reductionist has the burden of justifying their positions more so than the Theist. The reason being is the processes to which they reduce human experiences is (must be) empirically based. As such, there is no “hidden” aspect to which one can only reason about through analogy wrapped up in mystery. For the Theist is arguing for an entire realm that is shrouded in mystery and impenetrable by the perception of the senses. But the atheist that ascribes to the materialist model cannot appeal to mystery since all within the material order comes under the perception of the senses. Hence, Alex was out of place in claiming mystery while Ben wasn’t.
The fact that “ genius” Alex thinks free will doesn’t exist makes me think the “ genius” tag he’s often labeled with might be a bit loose in its application.
The existence of free will is based on intuition. Something that works well some of the time. But not at all at other times. But feel free to prove free will exist if you think you can (without appealing to intuition of course).
Alex says a lot of words without saying anything of coherent consequence. I have not been convinced that he is anything beyond above average intelligence, categorically not a “genius.”
I have seen many of Alex's RUclips videos over several years. I would say he has made some progress intellectually, but I have never been really impressed with him. Is really Alex O'Connor the best atheists have to show? Where are the smart atheists? Alex knows how to *sound* intellectual and profound, but so often it doesn't make any sense. In this debate he made some remarks about "slavery, women's rights, and gay-rights" that previous Christians got wrong - we *know* they were wrong back then. How does he get away with such claims? Is slavery really wrong?? How does Alex *know* this? So often atheists get away since their opponents don't want to attack such claims. But they should. Maybe slavery isn't wrong. Who's to say? Alex cannot know it. There is no upward trajectory when it comes to "values" (because there exist no such "values").
Alex O'Connor once got in the cross-hairs of an atheist historian over his false assertions about the Galileo affair and other historical affairs. The historian tried to correct him but he refused to admit he was wrong. The historian described O'Connor as someone with enormous self-confidence and other things I'd rather not repeat here.
Im looking at the study at 9:00. Couple of things, first of all in one of the experiments there were 3 affirmations mentioned, free will, neutral, and determinism. There was no difference between free will and neutral which you failed to mention. So at most the study suggests determinism may correspond to cheating. So the argument is against determinism, not for free will. Second, there are other forms of rejecting free will that are not deterministic, for example if everything was completely random. The study failed take this into account. I see possible issues of endogeneity. It seems like the affirmations included a sense of effort to resist cheating. We should re run the experiment with the deterministic affirmation that says something like “although there is no free will, we should still put in effort to be honest” To make a bold claim that this experiment proves the importance of free will is far too hasty.
O'Connor .. if only by points. He was, for my taste, rather too evangelically hyped with a swamp of largely long-ago disposed-of charges - in rapid-fire mode (perhaps that's the only way to deal effectively with Mr Shapiro .. who likes to get his evangelistic rhetorical fulmination in first). Shapiro made most of the right-sounding responses to the charges as laid; still, if I were an atheist the return blows made by Shapiro wouldn't be overly winning .. least of all when trotted out (as expected) by a politician. Too much of what Mr O'Connor shadow-boxed was simply oldene-tyme (Roman) Catholic orthodoxy dressed up as (a brand of) Judeo-Christianity (sic), slavery, female empowerment, natural law ethics etc. Thus 'religion' was not really addressed e.g. that which binds man to man and all men to (the olde-tyme Catholic concept of) < God > , only one set of (once held) beliefs (now in the process of being synodically redefined for a new synodal meaning more suited to today's synodalised persons); Chesterton's any stick will do approach, if used to beat against 'Rome'. Atheists (believers in unbelief - for any divinity) have a stronger case to make against theists (believers with belief - in some sort of divinity) - at a guess, I say it is .. (subjective) taste, and a Hollywood(-ish) actor did a better job of undoing current Roman Catholic trot-out-able niceness, in place of an uncomfortable one-time faith in conversation with Bishop Barron - that is to say .. (objective) fidelity; but then, who is listening ...? Keep the Faith; tell the truth, shame the devil, and let the demons shriek. God bless. ;o)
@@ABB14-11 Last first .. because I like to .. indeed it is (more or less) how I speak, ordinarily (if given half a chance to talk). First, now last, he is a rather odd chap of whom I know very little .. Shia La Boeuf; he acted as Padre Pio in a Hollywood film and discussed the impact of the role with Bishop Barron. For the rest, I do it to challenge Grammarly and all such efforts to restrict the vast beauty of the English language (which is not my 'native' language but one I love). Yo! God bless. ;o)
I never understood the pivot of religious debate to "is religion good" the only question that matters is "is it true"? if you make the argument "religion is needed or is a force for good but still fundamentally untrue" what you are really saying is "we need to fool ourselves so civilization still runs". but is you focus your argument of if a religious claim is true then it is naturally a force for good because your belief aligns with reality.
We do not even know how simple physical things like gravity works. We can describe and predict their effects but NOT explain how they work. How could we ever think of tryjng to expkain free will
As an atheist, i think that religion is probably better for society than not. However i personally, am limited by the scope of what i find to be rational, and i do not find religion to be rational as i cannot find evidence for such a basis of things. So Im basically a nihilist. I dont really believe in right or wrong but i dont see any truth that leads to an objective morality either. That is not to say that i do not find meaning or fulfillment in life, i love building and creating things and i love science and learning and doing these things makes me fulfilled. Or if not fulfilled then at least i dont feel enough negative emotions to strongly desire an alternative. I recognize this isn’t feasible for most people though
I think that the answer to their debate (is religion good or bad for society) is "it depends on the religion and how it's followed".
Yeah they should have been more clear as to what religion are they talking about. Marxism is very clearly a religion that has lead to hundreds of millions of deaths
Ding, ding, ding! This guy gets it☝️ You can’t group all religions in one basket cuz of their fundamental differences. The best way to approach these topics is to debate each religion separately. I can also say another atheist that believes in free will wouldn’t want to be put in the same group as Alex, who doesn’t, and be treated as if he/she believes in determinism because theists think all atheists are the same.
I'm a catholic youtuber from Poland and just wanted to say: Thank you so much for your work! You're awesome! :)
Subscribed
Be making occasional videos in English. I think that will help those of us who are non-Polish. :)
Catholic in the Middle East, going through tough times. Pray for me
@@Lerian_VMay our Lord Jesus Christ strengthen and protect you all! And may God be glorified!
Consider making English subtitles for your videos
I’m so glad there are much more intelligent people than myself approaching these subjects reasonably lol. Thanks for sharing this Trent, I may have to check out the whole debate
Same here!
Me too! What a relief.
We should still try and better ourselves in every way, in order to defend our values but I agree. I'm glad these intelligent people exist to speak my values eloquently.
@@garintj1547 absolutely! It’s the understanding of those more wise than us that enlightens our own intellects to speak freely
Not a debate. Just questions that Shapiro has no real answers to.
I'm a protestant and I learn so much from your videos. You break down content so that it is accessible to everyone. Thank you.
It's remarkable that roughly 1 in 42 people watching this video post a comment. That's a pretty insane interaction rate. Just goes to show how top quality your videos (i.e., your analyses, explanations, reasoning, insights, etc.) are. Thanks for the great content.
John 14:21
“If you hold to a strict determinism, and free will doesn’t exist; then you have zero business praising anyone for moral excellence, or blaming anyone for moral wickedness.” -Bishop Barron
First off, why is that bad? Is it so awful to think that people perform actions due to circumstances outside their control? What are people if not the circumstances that made them: their genetics, their relationships, their experiences, their triumphs and despairs?
Even so, we should praise people because the human mind likes it, ha ha. Yes, let's just ignore all the psychological research into conditioning and just stop encouraging good behavior. You're engaging in a straw man.
Common Bishop Barron W
@@WaterCat5 Play out determinism to its logical conclusion. We could still say, “you behave well which is good for society and order.” But we couldn’t honestly say, “you are praiseworthy and I want to be more like you, or you are wicked and I don’t want to emulate that,” because ultimately, who cares? Like you said if we have no ability to decide then praising virtue or condemning wickedness makes no sense. Stalin for example would be just a poor bloke who was a product of circumstance. What business would we have to judge him?
@@nickmedley4749there doesn't have to be a magic fairy for the dumbest human being on the face of the earth to realize that anyone who commits atrocities against humanity is bad. Free will is just part of survival, and to be desired to be included helps many species survive, and they try to help each other out.
@@nickmedley4749please do me a favor and just read what you wrote back to yourself. How desperate are you to win on some kind of technicality that theists just make up? Do you know who atheists actually are? They are people who worshipped a god, until they decided to really understand their god, and then they make the fatal mistake of reading the bible. Now wiggle your way out of that one.
Alex seems angry at the people who have chosen to be slave owners or homophobic, but doesn’t believe they have any free will. That doesn’t make sense.
Exactly and he doesn’t seem to be interested in WHAT is directing this unfolding Creation.
For someone so “ smart”, it’s appalling
I think you've misunderstood what he was saying to be honest, I don't believe Alex would say that he is angry at people in either or those examples for precisely the reason you stated, the reason he brought them up I believe was to point out the problem that religious believers will state that the bible can give people objective morality but yet fails to condemn slavery and fails to condemn homophobia and many other things that people would consider objectively wrong.
@@jcbl62 Christianity isn’t all about the BIBLE. The early Christians spent HUNDREDS of years practicing and spreading the faith without a Bible. The Catholic intellectual tradition is THOUSANDS of years old and the concept of Natural Law has been unpacked over this time. The Bible isn’t the only source Christians use when determining morality. If anything, the Bible is proof that Christianity has shifted humanity in a direction that is clarifying our objective morality. The Bible providing an honest snapshot of the environment individuals experienced during the time it was written. It provides modern individuals extremely important insight into humanity’s ethical and moral journey. It provides a model of how to address the current culture while simultaneously providing aspirational ideas that take root and unfold over time. Precisely what Christian history reflects. Alex knows all this, but can’t acknowledge it because it clearly undermines his atheist claims about religion.
@jcbl62 You would have to explain why you think slavery is wrong then, if you don't believe in free will. Otherwise, you are arguing in bad faith.
Alex: Morality is non objective.
Also Alex: Religion was wrong on this moral question.
That's what really frustrates me, I do like that more atheists are coming around to the conclusion that morality cannot be objective with their worldview but then they have to stop complaining about their interpretation of the bibles morality
@@Forester- They are free to complain. They just can't say that it is a critique of religion. Your argument against religion can't be that it is morally wrong to discriminate against homosexuality when you say that morality is in the eye of the beholder.
not really contadictory all hes saying is that it doesnt meet his moral standards
@@S.D.323 It is. His argument goes as follows:
1. Morality is non objective.
2. Therefore, Christianity is wrong about morality.
3. Christian morality's wrongness causes moral wrong.
4. Christianity is objectively bad for society.
While he doesn't have to directly say Christianity is objectively morally bad, he is trying to argue that it is objectively bad for society because it is immoral. At most all he can reasonably argue is that he doesn't like it. And who cares what he does and does not like?
@@josephmoya5098that's not what he said at all bud
Since Shapiro is a lawyer, i had no concerns with him debating. I am glad though that he could hold himself up in a theological debate.
To be fair, Cosmic Skeptic debate skills is sus.
He did pretty poorly.
Shapiro couldn’t lawyer his way out of his moral relativism and really no Judeo-Christian believer can defend why god allowed for slavery, but condemned eating pork.
@@julianmartinez8954lol, he got Alex to admit that religion is good for society, which was the topic. Seems like he won 😂
@@MrGgabber When did that happen?
Alex pretty much pointed out that Ben was using moral relativism over how religious people behaved back in the past and now.
Well at least attempted to.
@@JUAN_OLIVIER didn't attempt, actually did. The problem is that Ben doesn't seem to recognize it.
@ay1489 No. Ben said that owning a slave under the Hebrew guidelines is objectively wrong after Alex asked him - see this section of the debate (ruclips.net/video/j7rtkLJqbxM/видео.html) at 7:38. He then goes on to accuse him of being a moral relativist, only to then ask him the exact same question again at 9:01, seemingly having forgotten Ben's previous answer. It's not moral relativism to say that something was considered moral in the past, and therefore needed a more gradual approach to remove it from society. I still agree with Alex that the Bible could have at least implied slavery was an immoral practice, but I certainly wouldn't accuse Ben of using moral relativism, or that he didn't 'recognise' Alex's accusation
@@jackvanderlinden9234
This is just blatant cope.
God claimed so many things as immoral that were culturally acceptable to humans, but somehow had a problem with saying slavery was immoral?
Alex clearly won with the moral relativism point.
@@CastleFrasherdude I agree with you in that the Bible could have made that clear and I’m still unsure why it doesn’t. My point is that Ben wasn’t inconsistent - you can agree or disagree with his interpretation of the Bible but he made it clear he thinks slavery, even the slavery mentioned in the Bible, is objectively wrong.
Alex honestly is no better than the atheists decades ago who made the same shallow arguments.
How he can say there is no free will when everyone lives a life where they can recount the decisions they made freely that got them to where they are.
Morals based on how you feel? When everyone knows that reacting based on your emotions … that your emotions will betray you. I have yet to find someone who can say that reacting emotionally when making a decision is how they accomplish everything good in life.
I have no idea why people find his like of supposed logic enticing as none of it makes sense to those who honestly and objectively consider their own lives.
People find his logic enticing because he speaks what they want to hear Not what they Need to hear👍
@@Catholicguy-qs3ngAmen to u brother.
Was was hoping you’d cover this, Trent. Thank you!🙏
Religion is bad because... I'm so tired of this phrase. Trent who provided an excellent answer with a secular equivalent for comparison. I enjoy this podcast for 1000 reasons thank you, Mr. Trent.
Inquisition, colonization, witch hunt, burning people, church taxes, brain washing of young people, blocking science and literacy, holy wars.
If Alex O'Connor really thinks we're all just a collection of molecules in a meaningless existence with no free will, then he needs to explain why it's so important to him that he spends his life trying to convince other people of it. It's self-defeating.
If life is meaningless, that doesn't mean humans can't invent meaning for themselves. Like morality, meaning is subjective.
@@gageduke7652 I disagree, meaning has to be objective. If meaning isn't objective or inherent then it's an illusion. If I'm just a collection of molecules then I'm just.a collection of molecules, no amount of subjective "meaning" is going to change that.
@@billydeewilliams267 Why is it so important that meaning has to be objective? Humans attribute meaning to otherwise meaningless things all the time. Nothing wrong with that.
At the end of the day, even if absolute or objective truth or value existed, humans would not recognize it given that we are fallible and imperfect creatures. Our knowledge and interpretation of absolute truth is incomplete and likely to be wrong.
For all intents and purposes... meaning, truth, and morality have to be subjective.
@@billydeewilliams267 yes it literally is an illusion
The study showing that encouraging belief in determinism leads to more dishonesty doesn't imply people who already believe in determinism would be more dishonest. In fact, other studies show this to be true. So it may only be the case that encouraging a free will believer to doubt their free will leads to dishonesty, it has nothing to do with prior belief in determinism.
I have to do more research on this, in terms of the amount of people who believe in free will, but if the majority of people may have some belief in free will, then won’t actively encouraging free will people to doubt free will potentially lead to even more examples of dishonesty? Unless that tide of dishonesty declines overtime, which is a huge bet on if it does decline, it might be more wise to let them believe in free will, especially given people in oppressed circumstances or abusers or addicts etc
Yhhh, most people on the planet believe in freewill and most people don't doubt freewill unless exposed to certain schools of thoughts. So introducing such doubts would encourage people to be less responsible over time (just observe), especially criminals looking for excuses. To them, all thier criminal drives become thier deterministic destiny, they had no 'Choice'. There'd be people advocating for more comfort and expenses for prisons since from a deterministic view, the criminal had to do what they did and thus, even if they are put aside from society because of thier nuerodivergence from the majority definition of 'normal', they still deserve comfort like any other 'normal' person by society's standards because they apparently had no say in the matter of thier actions. In return, more people would see criminals treated nicely and spoilt and they'd revolt and even wish to go to prison
Religion is inevitable as a result of human society. Atheism has become a religion. I found the debate between Alex and Ben frustrating as Alex would consistently stray off topic and descend into moral judgments of minutiae. In my view, Ben performed well and Alex said little of consequence and displayed an inability to stay on topic. He also acted in bad faith with his repetitive, stubborn and fruitless hypothetical questions. I found it a fruitless discussion that Ben “won.”
Alex went for populist talking points rather than technical ones. And his audience ate it up. The facts dont care about your feelings part especially made no sense given the topic is literally on the effect of religion. Which obviously includes feelings.
Alex's atheism basically boils down to, the bible seems to endorse things I dislike and condmen things I like, therefore there is no God. This includes suffering, and since there are formal arguments about the existence of God using suffering, he goes with these arguments. But when pressed, he goes back to bible difficulties, because that is his real reason for atheism. He just thinks the bible has things wrong, which isn't really a rational argument for the nonexistence of a God.
All atheists think this way
You never watched his any other videos
@@user-gs4oi1fm4lyeah sure nerd
@@user-gs4oi1fm4l that is very closed minded of you to say
Trent, I just finished your book "Hard sayings". It was excellent. Well done!
I can appreciate Alex. However, I've got to be honest, he is the epitome of the trope of young, solidly middle class student, well read and intelligent, but so very pretentious. I met a few like this when I was at university, possibly i myself was a bit like this too. Hopefully, people grow out of it with the wisdom of maturity which enriches their natural intellect, formerly limited by youthful hubris. But... I find him so very ponderous and difficult to listen to. He's obviously intelligent and erudite, but honestly i think such people do not truly realise that potential until they've got some wisdom and maturity to balance it out. Until then, what you often get is a lot of pretense and bluster; showing off like they've swallowed all the books they've read.
Perhaps, but to say this only about Alex and not ben, who has become a pop culture meme because of his pretentious personality and video titles simply betrays your biases.
How familiar are you with academic philosophy? Alex is very far from pretentious given his background. He has an undergrad degree from a very good university and is an excellent communicator and generous debater. He rarely or never pointlessly name-drops, refers to obscure essays, uses overly formal definitions, or waxes poetic with pseudo-profundities (the main pretentious crimes of academic philosophers). I think he makes a conscious effort to state his positions clearly and in plain language. He would be among the least pretentious people in any graduate level philosophy course in my experience. He's not showing off at all!
@@jayvillellaI agree. I enjoy listening to him, but nothing he says challenges my faith. I was raised atheist, marinated in Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens from an early age. I came to faith as an adult and I feel like my faith is far stronger for it. I look at people like Alex as a younger (smarter and more British) version of myself. I used to think people turned religious when they got old so they could “get into heaven” but personally it was just observing the world, culture, and humanity and coming to recognize the necessity of religion. I don’t know if Alex will ever reach that point. There are plenty of aged atheists, but I do think he is just rehashing the same talking points as the previous generation of charismatic atheists, even as the west grows less religious and increasingly spirals into nihilism.
Trent could you do a video on defending free will? It feels like the hardest problem to answer is the apparent connectedness between brain and personality/decisions (as shown by brain injuries)
For the point you brought, I'd say you need a healthy brain for the mind to act properly in the physical world.
I think Catholics actually have an easy answer under the framework that we're fully man and fully spirit. Your brain and mind work in conjuction. Your mind works as will and judge and brain processes information. Your feelings and expressed personality are a mix of your innate character and bodily chemical reactions. A change in the brain will change how it interacts with the mind and change how your personality is ultimately expressed
@@ghostapostle7225 it sounds like the self’s ability to carry out its will can be inhibited by the brain in your response. Which means your will isn’t free. And what makes this worse, is if you are suggesting the self interacts with the brain to carry out the will, unless you have a template for how the healthy brain functions and can determine that an individual’s brain doesn’t deviate or isn’t under the influence of something, how could you ever say that your will was actually free during a given action?
@@OrcaneVault - "It sounds like the self's ability to carry its will is inhibited by the brain in your response."
It's the opposite. The subject can withdraw from the instinctual striving towards action which is generally embedded within the entire body, not just the brain.
I don't think brain injuries damage free will too badly, but they are certainly in support of a more non-free will view of how we act as well. You're having to further sever connections between the idea of a mind and the physical brain to mix these together. It moreover makes the mind start to sound like a fiction of what could be the mechanism behind your thoughts rather than an actual proposal of what is there.
Alex‘s initial position that religion got things “wrong”, holds a double fallacy in that some of the things that he describes as “wrong“ are matters of opinion, while others are simply examples of things that everyone got wrong: science, math, etc.
This is the main reason atheists are so uncredible imo. Even the smart ones like Alex fall into this self-contradiction where they reject objective morality and free will but proceed to appeal to both. He asks Ben what it means to "act like free will" as if having a debate over free will is not itself an example.
I had an argument with a very stubborn skeptic once who refused to accept that even basic principles of math are objectively true because of the possibility that we could discover new information in the future that would disprove the old. I was just trying to establish a baseline that something is knowable but you can embrace skepticism to such an extent that you refuse to accept even this premise.
@@sivad1025Strange you would argue atheists lack objective morality during a comment on a debate where the theist admits god’s moral relativism on slavery. Truly incredulous
Trent didn’t really show this part in his recap, but if my memory serves me right this isn’t why Alex brought it up. Alex brought these things up in response to the idea that social/scientific progress has largely been a theistic endeavour.
Ben even had a funny response about him not needing to justify the actions of the Catholic Church for convicting Galileo “vehemently suspect of heresy”.
Alex is essentially saying, look at all these instances where religions not only weren’t at the forefront of discovery, but were actively fighting against it. If we are going to count the times the church did support progress as evidence, then we must also support the times the church actively hindered progress as counter-evidence.
The measuremebts on Noah's ark are wrong. A giant wooden boat would not survive in the ocean. Also, the earth is not flat. The sundoes not revolve around the earth like the story of Joshua implies. Even if The story is saying that the earth stopped, then we would all be dead as it would be similar to stopping a car without a seat belt. We would just fly everywhere.
I got into a debate with someone who stated it wasn’t possible to control thoughts and imagination so it’s bull that “sin begins in the mind” (28 But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. Matthew 5:28 RSV-CE)
He believed he was powerless to control himself all as an excuse to enjoy every ugly urge…couldn’t think far enough to wonder what happens when a dude with a sword and a grudge decides he can’t control the urge to lop off a pedo’s head.
They made a correct observation that you cannot control the thoughts that pop into your mind, though. It sounds like you’re trying to conflate ACTIONS with THOUGHTS. You cannot control or choose who you are attracted to, or when your eyes notice someone who you find attractive. That’s why the whole concept of a “thought crime” is insane and immoral.
I dont get to choose who I find attractive. lustfulness is ridiculous as a sin. Lust isnt the same as molestation or harassment.
this is partially incorrect. true, you have no controll over a thought once it pops into your head, but you can controll your intake. When you stop watching porn, how often do you think about porn after a month-- things like that. A guy on a farm in iowa with no access to media, probably has very few instances of thinking about immigration or the war in ukraine, etc. the idea that we cant limit intake i think is what OP is refering to
@@TestMeatDollSteak
@@DCxSkateboarding
You do in fact control whether or not how you respond to that initial temptation of lust. If you indulge in the lustful thought, that's a conscious choice.
If you see an attractive woman, recognize her beauty and your subsequent attractiveness is in itself holy and a good and then leave it, that's a totally different thing than seeing an attractive woman and then proceeding to imagine what she'd look like naked or what you would do with her sexually.
The latter is obviously sinful.
Arguments like that are one reason that make me wonder whether the divine hiddenness argukent is really worth it. Atheism is evil because it defends reprobate ideas like lust, porn, etc.
Wait, what! I was just telling a friend earlier today, “it’ll be awesome if Trent reviews this debate!”. 😆
Baptist Wes back here, I still binge your videos here. I legitimately think your past two videos have been some of your best apologetics against “skepticism”. Something I’ve learned that skeptics do is formulate their position based on assertions and when asked about their foundation for absolutely anything it goes back to “i don’t know “ or “I don’t have to explain it”
Do you know where statements like 'idk' are warranted?
@@Eliza-rg4vw The foundation of morality and the oughts of treating people one way over the other. Atheism/agnosticism has to ultimately say it’s all subjective, therefore the OUGHT itself it’s by definition subjective.
@@spiderwebbz3356 So a skeptic should respond 'IDK' to queries regarding what ought/ought not be done?
@@spiderwebbz3356There are plenty of atheists that believe in objective morality (the majority of philosophers for example). But there are even more theists that have no idea about this, because they’ve never needed to learn about the philosophy of morality outside of their own worldview.
@@spiderwebbz3356 isn’t a Subjective morality the norm? An atheist has a subjective morality based on their preferences, a Catholic has a subjective morality based on Gods preferences. We even see God’s preferences change over time. Subjectivity is par for the course
The comment section underneath the original video is pure comedy-it is of course the usual large group of atheists who are obsessed with religion and claim ben got demolished.
That's not new lol, this is a tactic that I have found that is in common with new athiesm and Muslims
We sometimes hear that a society with more atheists will lead to a flourishing of science and art but in practice it just leads to more people talking about God.
@Rocky-ur9mn the exact same thing happens from the opposite viewpoint on religious videos.
@@Darksage5555 right except it doesn't really make sense to go search for things you don't believe in and argue why you don't.
@@Forester- They are religious too, there religion being atheism sadly. Quite ironic isnt it?
If there’s no free will is it wrong to punish someone for a crime they couldn’t stop themselves from doing?
No it is not. Regardless if determinism is real or not, a person can be held responsible for their actions.
Pretty much. If we're all dancing to the tune of our genetics as Dawkins would say, how can they argue for moral accountability...when I robbed that bank, it was just the end result of billions of tiny chemical reactions I was powerless to stop.
@hicow6075
You have provided no justifications.
@@mattm7798 you have control over your emotions but you are over simplifying the issue. Some people are not born with empathy pathways. How are they able toi understand sin if they have no empathy.
In essence, the fact that we may not have free will isn't actually stopping us from assuming it anyways. It's sort of like how there are tons of optical illusions on the internet, and even though you know these are illusions, you can't stop yourself from being 'fooled' by it anyway. We may not technically have free will, but practically, we may as well.
I think also assuming we must 'punish' wrongdoing may also be part of the problen here, though I don't wanna make this too long.
People like Alex only exist in times like this. A peaceful, mostly, sophiscated polite society built fundamentally by the ethics of the very systems he seems to want dismantled. No one had the luxury generally speaking of being a philospher for a living prior to the 1940's.
There were skeptics in ancient Athens. Best the main reason is his arguments aren’t any good and materialism is clearly false and the hard problem of consciousness is just a rejection of correct metaphysics
Is this supposed to be an argument in your favor? No one had the luxury of speaking out against religion in the past because they would have been ostracized, persecuted, tortured, and burned at the stake.
The great Martin Luther supported the death penalty for the Anabaptists and other heretics. Imagine what he would have done to Alex.
Heresiarchs aren't great
People like Galileo and Socrates were Executed for Blasphemy in earlier times.
@@shashwatsingh2748 galileo was not executed learn history
Great video, Trent! I agree, Ben did a great job. It was nice to see him debate someone who isn't just a dumb college student.
Really looking forward to the Ben Shapiro vs Destiny debate. I hope you do a review of that when it happens.
Those aren't debates 🤨. Those are just Q&A. Haven't you ever seen some speaker come into a campus, give a presentation on a specific topic, and then after the presentation has concluded they open the floor for a Q&A?
Alex wiped the floor with destiny to the point destiny didnt even upload the video on his channel lol.. Shapiro dont need to engage with destiny to be honest, destiny is a fake liberal moron..
He's gonna debate Destiny? Destiny is gonna get rekt...
@@jamesholt8516 idk, Destiny's a way more experienced debater. Honestly, I hope its more of a conversation. I like both of them, but I definitely agree with Ben on more stuff.
It was originally scheduled for November, but I think it got pushed back to January.
Just because Alex can weave words together in a way that sounds intelligible doesn’t make him less dumb than the average college student. It wasn’t that much better, the delusion of objection morality in an atheistic subjective world is by definition contradictory.
I feel like Ben did a good job, but Alex's arguments were stronger. Ben knew that, and picked at little details and pretended to miss the points in some arguments. Like the "ofcourse the inventors of the scientific method started out religious, because the scientific method didnt exist before they invented it" and Ben started strawmanning about secret diaries of atheism and such, but Alex's point was 100% correct. Also the point where if there is no god, we have outdated, man made morality from a primitive time, the bad parts of nihilism, but with certainty and unanswerabiliy of a moral absolute. . Look at the Islamic world, or even islamic societies within the west, they havent socially progressed for 1400 years, and they come out weakest in all socioeconomic and moral poll
I feel like atheists idea of freewill has been overly complicated, in order to rationalize “freewill doesn’t exist.”
I look at animal. An animal that doesn’t have hindsight, foresight, imagination, unable to use logic and rationale, primarily utilizing instinctive actions and reactions, and I think, “that’s not freewill.”
Humans, although can reflect much of the same traits you see in animal behavior, yet have the ability other animals don’t, granting humans to use freewill.
At some point in the conversation, I believe, Cosmicskeptic said, ‘evolution has granted us the ability to think we have freewill,” and it just sounds like an… evolution of the gaps.
The argument they will make is that, although we have the capacity to envision a future, enter problem solved, ultimately, the decisions we make are not a result of our own free will. But just a more complex biological programming.
@@felipetejeda7545 yeah, I’ve heard this argument.
I just think it sounds like redefining the concept of freewill as to deny that it exists.
@@moosechuckle Not all atheists are determinists.
It is 1 of multiple stances an atheist can take on the topic of free will.
Please don't say "atheists idea of free will"
Here is a way to think of what you think is free will in a deterministic universe.
Throw a coin in the air. Will it land heads or tails?
The only thing acting on the coin is physics. So it is determined on which side it will land right?
Given the time it might be possible to calculate the trajectory ect and get the correct answer. But we don't know and the situation does not allow for this.
What is the most accurate stance for our pattern detecting brains to take?
It is to consider both options as outcomes simultaneously. This gives us the illusion of choice while the coin is in the air.
Eventho it is deterministic.
I hope this helps you understand it is not that complicated.
That is not an “evolution of the gaps” wtf are you talking about? We know that our biology is the result of billions of years of evolution, and that our biology initiates the way we interact with our environment and ultimately our behaviour. Where in that is there a Gap? YOU are the one haphazardly inserting your “magic” or “soul” out of nowhere because you don’t understand the fundamentals of consciousness. So it is you who is committing a god of the gaps fallacy, lol.
@@aidanya1336 Hmm, but if you want to use the coin analogy it kind of breaks down on larger scales, that is, the more coins you have, you kind of generate a bell curve that shows which is more likely and you have sort of a determinate outcome, sort of like a dice. This is particularly common in nature, look at hest transfer for instance, on a subatomic level the electrons and molecules are jumping around randomly and so theoretically tou can have heat flowing out of a colder object into a warmer one, however the number of atoms in everyday materials are so tremendous that cold to warm heat flow is vitually impossible and unobserved. So if we wanna look at free will like an illusion that a coin offers, there are two options that an extremely large system which at its core is fundamentally just complicated physical laws should look like:
(a) The first option is that the system just turns out completely random or chaotic on a macro scale with no seeming direction, drives or motives, stuff just happens as the physical laws allow are applied.
(b) The second option is that the system becomes so deterministic that the random aspects are completely averaged out to zero by the large sclae of processes occurring simultaneously.
So, if you're gonna use the coin analogy to look at the human consciousness and free will, then you and people around you must be random or extremely predictable the same way you'd predict that warm wster kept in a fridge should freeze up, that level of predictability or randomness must be the outcome of such view of the illusion of freewill according to that analogy.
However I'm sure your experience shows otherwise, sometimes people act wierd or random, but often times you notice that people act in ways that you somehow innately perceive as good but don't seem deterministic like hot-cold heat transfer neither does it seem random like the toss of a single dice, they seem sophisticated and intentional
I'm just waiting for Trent to reply to just one of my comments, but since he rarely comments to anyone, I'm not that surprised. Though, I would have expected him to do better in defending his Catholic faith. :]
Not sure why two people who have two completely different ubderstandings of the word “good” spent time having a debate on whether religion is good or not.
The Bible DOES have the modern view of slavery. "For in Christ, there is neither slave nor free, male nor female", etc. The whole reason that society has condemned slavery is because of Christianity.
“For in Christ “ is the key part. In other words in the eyes of the lord. If you argue that “neither slave nor free” means there should be no slaves in society then one could also argue than “male nor female” means there should be no gender in society.
@@michaeldowdell3813 I think your analysis is missing the mark a bit. "For in Christ" does not just mean "in the eyes of the Lord", rather it also means "within the Kingdom of God", or "within the Church". This whole section of scripture means "within God's economy of the Kingdom, there is equality between all members of that Kingdom." People are equal, regardless of their gender, racial background, or status in society.
@@KenKopelson within his kingdom or within the church they are equal is what I meant by in his eyes but what scripture is not saying on earth those distinctions (slave or free) should not exist. If your saying we should view people on earth the same as god does then why would a murderer who is genuinely remorseful and accepts god , ie born again, still has to face judicial punishment and serve time. Even though god would accept them doesn’t mean we let them free.
Alex tried to have his cake and eat it too on the concept of free will. By asserting that he did not believe free will was real because “people are free to do as they will just not will what they will,” he merely redefined what free will is so as to avoid reconciling free will in a materialistic worldview. Being free to do (or not do - hence freedom) what you will is free will. In essence Alex does believe in free will, he just doesn’t admit that he does.
Not actually just take an example: I am right now writing a sentence to you, it is because I want to and I choose to, the want then leads to the action, every choice is based upon a want and the want is what you can not control, hence making all your choices sort of unfree. If I decided not to write this sentence it would be based on my non-want, but non-want which is also a want, hence your choices are grounded of infinite regress of wants and out of your control.
@@Anxh007doesn't that make it free will? Because you made the choice?
@@albertbecerra if it is based on a want outside your control and that want itself is based on another want outside your control how is it free will?
as it is not free, also the self or decision-maker is not an essential existing entity but rather an illusion as free will is.
Alex makes the same mistake you do. People sometimes choose to do what they want and sometimes choose to not do what they want. An alcoholic may or may not choose to break a period of sobriety. In that case the alcoholic may both want to have a drink and not have a drink. That is why will is not merely wants or desires. It is the freedom to decide for yourself what to choose regarding how how to behave that is free will.
@@Anxh007You can choose to do things you don't particularly want to do if your choices are informed by a knowledge of what is good and what is not good.
Okay so this is gonna get lost, but I listened to this on the way to my sister's house where we binge watched the Netflix special "Love under the knife". And at the very end of that documentary about the evils of a ruthless con artist experimental surgeon, the journalist mentioned that while the surgeon was just an awful person, every person that went along with him and didn't stop him or ask questions is also responsible. Our morality, our free will demands that we do the right thing. It is written in our hearts, it isn't a natural conclusion from our surroundings. I want to live in a world that is ordered toward that. Praise to our God Who is all loving.
I get really annoyed with atheists playing the slavery card like it's an ace and a compete rebuttal, of Christianity at least.
That key problem of the lack of free will does occur to me and I was disappointed Ben didn't point it out, it's a clear problem in society of people aren't held responsible for their actions.
I mean it is, even tho we have explainations for why slavery xyz they take way too much time and nuance, the moment they mention the word slavery, it acts like some ultimate slogan which 99% of people will be like haha christianity is man made.
I get tired of Christians no owning the fact that the god they worship 100% endorsed the owning of other people.
And the fact that it was christians who ended slavery throughout the world in the abolitionist movement is always ignored by such athiests.
o
@@Rocky-ur9mnbuy why did God allow slavery and even support it for so long if it's wrong?
The issue of slavery is really complicated because it is tied to many factors such as war and economics. The reason that human beings do not keep war captives as slaves today is because we have better ways such as using the UN or any international system or even nuclear weapons to prevent an aggressive nation from invading. Such options were not available in the ANE.
That being said, it's not like the enlightenment were against practices like corporal punishment since corporal punishment was a thing in the military until modern times so the atheist needs to tell us why the original enlightenment didn't get things like corporal punishment right?
Alex wiped the floor with Shapiro - he is a presuppositionalist and people forget he is not Christian. I think both of them did not get to crux of the violence that religious thought has visited on the planet. Also - if you can not prove the existence of gods, how can you make a statement that living AS IF THERE WERE, was actually a good thing.
I like your critique about the informal debate also the portion of Alex's talk with Destiny. At least Destiny follows his non-belief consistently to its logical end.
Yeah, I like Ben and Alex both, but the only major problem with Alex I have is that he doesn't follow the argument to its ultimate end.
I'm a non theist, and I'm quite frustrated that in the debate, in reviews and in comments, Alex' view on free will is conflated with atheism. AFAIK most atheists don't subscribe to his position.
(I also think "there is no free will" does not accurately summarize Alex's position at all - what he is saying is that to him, the concept "free will" is unintelligible. The sound bite really obscures his meaning).
I'm also quite frustrated that Ben Shapiro (and a lot of commenters) make some assumptions about atheists that simply aren't true. I'll elaborate a little:
In a reply to Alex, Ben states that if someone came to kill someone, it would more likely be an atheist than a religious person. I'd be surprised if Ben is able to substantiate that. I get the argument that atheist dictatorships have been bad. Granted. Dictatorships usually are. But here we're talking about individuals. Not a single study ever of imprisonment rates or the faith of death row inmates show a (statistically significant) over-representation of atheists.
I think that Ben (and many theists) think that the only thing that could ultimately motivate an atheist is self interest, since atheists don't believe in God/gods. I don't think so, or at least I can't come up with a (non-ridiculous) self-interest explanation for me actively paying extra for animal welfare products or for me not outlawing sexual practices between consenting adults - even though I'm a fairly vanilla heterosexual myself.
But - even if self interest was my only governing impulse, I don't understand why theists would think that my self interest would take the crude form of killing others for their stuff. My self interest would surely include not risking being punishable by law, and furthermore it would no doubt include constructing and living in a stable society governed by law, with equal rights and equal opportunity for all - not just for myself, but for my kids and eventual grand kids down the line. And I'd want people who directly oppose such a society (such as a murderer) to be marginalized/separated from that society.
Getting misrepresented like this is every bit as frustrating to me, as it must be for believers to be portrayed as potential terrorists by the new atheist movement.
Kind regards
Martin
unbelievable needs to get Trent on, he is a genius, his debate with Destiny on Abortion was one of the best debates I have ever seen.
9:30 Common objection to determinism, but it doesn't really work if you think it all the way through. Yes, under pure determinism a person had ultimately no choice for his bad behavior, but it goes both ways: The other people also have no choice but to punish the person.
I think you’re right to point out that the debate devolved into essentially “religion is bad because it promotes bad things” which is circular. I do wish Ben had pulled back and pushed harder on the “but why is it bad” or how do you determine what is good for society anyway? He did a great job though, like you said it’s really hard in the hot seat and Alex is a formidable mind.
If you promote a bad thing, then wouldn't that make it bad..... and non circular? Slavery is bad, genocide is bad, and rape is bad. Which is stuff that the bible condones.
Personally I was a bit disappointed that they never defined what even is good for society. Without that defintion, a hypothetical reigion which promotes the killing of all people on Earth could be considered good by that religion, and so if we abide by them, yes, religion is good. In thr same vein, then, abiding by Christianity would be anti-this new religion, and so it is bad. Really depends on what angle you're taking and what the truth (if any) actually is. I only got a round to about halfway thru the original vid before I just stopped because I couldn't see it getting any mpre productive.
Atheist Regimes have religions beat when it comes to social atrocities if one wants to be honest with the tally
@@user-gs4oi1fm4l Name an Atheist regime? Cause I can name plenty of theistic regimes that are absolutely terrible.
@@ereyes6718 Mao, Rwanda, Bolshevik, just 3 off the top
The truth is, a debate should never be about, who won.
There aren't any losers or winners. That's the wrong mentality.
Debates shouldn't be about persuading or convincing each other, it should be about laying down logical arguments and letting the participants come to their own educated conclusions
Man, it's so wierd to watch arguments from Atheists who have strong roots on modern philosophy. We are forced to debate if free will exists.
Omg.
I can only imagine what Socrates would say.
👍
9:58 It's not free-will-denying that makes society worse, it's people not being logical that makes society worse. For whatever reason those people thought we shouldn't punish criminals because they couldn't have acted otherwise. We should still lock criminals up, not because they deserve it but because they're a threat. Not believing in free will is not the problem, not thinking things through is.
12:47 Ben doesn't have an explanation for how free will works. Alex _does_ have an explanation of how free will doesn't work. So won that part of the debate?
19:54 Secularism led to transgender ideology? And I thought you were a smart guy.
20:34 How do you know the horrors of the Soviet Union are coupled with being non-religious? How do you know sexual insanity is coupled with being atheistic? A theistic sexual insanity would be better?
If there is no free will, we cannot expect criminals to face the consequences of their behavior. Edit: Trent used the argument as well. Good. 😅
Interestingly European prisons designed to help criminals develop better skills, better self control, providing therapy and treating them as someone who's not fully responsible for their actions, have a far lower rate of inmates recommitting crime than those designed simply to punish prisoners.
@@helgaioannidis9365 I am in fact European and can tell you, that most crimes aren´t even punished although they should be. Gang rapists are running free without prison time. You don´t know a thing about what is happening over here and it shows. P.S. You did not dismantle my argument. Going to prison IS facing consequences.
@@libertasinveritas3198 calm down dear, I'm a German living in Greece who studied in Italy. Doesn't get more European than that I guess. Look at the crime rates in the USA compared to those in Europe and you'll understand what I was talking about
@@helgaioannidis9365 calm down lefty
@@RobertZemeckis2025 love your name. Great director!!!
Why is Alex admonishing Ben for his position when he has no control over it by his viewpoint😂
because he hopes that his arguments can change bens mind
well alex believes in determinism, meaning that external things such as your enviornment will influence what you will do in the future. so basically by exposing ben to his arguments, hopefully the idea is to influence him to change in the future.
Great thoughts , as always. Hearing the debate this came to my mind: How can slavery be wrong if there's no moral frame of reference but feelings? 🤔 One of the points I see on atheist, most of them came to know the Bible from protestant literalism, that brings issues to the debate that are non-issues.
How can it be wrong if the book you get your morals from says its not wrong? That was the whole argument. The moral framework people base their lives on says its not immoral to own people. The bigger question is who are you to tell the creator of the universe that they are wrong?
Morals aren't just feelings, also for atheists.
@@JimmyHolt-ji8hz The bible gives regulations for how to treat slaves. That is condoning slavery, whether you like it or not.
@@LesChats1991 Exactly. That's one thing Christians will never admit. Also, slavery does mean forcing someone against their will, so Jimmy is plain wrong. It's pathetic how wrong their attempts to dismiss the truth are. The definition of slavery makes that obvious - " Slavery is the ownership of a person as property, especially in regards to their labor. Slavery typically involves compulsory work with the slave's location of work and residence dictated by the party that holds them in bondage. " That's the official definition, and the same definition used in " biblical " times.
@@LesChats1991- Creating slavery norms is not a suggestion of slavery per se.
I actually disagree with you on the point of O’Connor bringing up slavery. It seemed, at least in the context of the debate, he was saying that the Bible can make people do things we see as immoral today. What’s to stop somebody owning slaves through using the Bible as justification? This is the point I felt he was trying to make and I see it as a pretty good one and one that fits with the debate prompt.
You mention objective morality hinging on a divine being but with bringing up how slavery was acceptable back then, Shapiro acknowledged this, and it is unacceptable now, Shapiro also acknowledged this, than we can’t say the Bible gives us an objective morality. O’Connor said “who’s being the moral relativist here?” Why use the subjective morality of the Bible, which has justification for many horrid acts other than slavery itself, when we can use a more modern secular form of morality that the broader public agrees on. This, to me, would be better for society because it comes without the unnecessary baggage of aggressive reinterpretation of religious texts.
I understand that O’Connor didn’t make that exact point, that was more my own but I think it relates to the question of “is religion good or bad for society?”.
Whoa, I’m the second viewer of this vid. Trent, were you the first? Which would actually make me the first? Whoa…
From these clips, Ben didn’t just do a good job, but he did a GREAT job! Quite impressive.
He did?
Liar 🤣
He was destroyed
I thought Ben Shapiro destroyed him in this debate because he 1 stayed on topic and 2 because he actually had a position.
It's difficult to debate a person who has no actual conclusion to anything except to question yours.
Ben's argument about the likelihood of a murder being committed by a non religious person versus a person who is religous completely ended the debate there is no debate that Alex could have a good faith and common sense to combat that other than a strawman argument.
Plus, he pointed out that he is appealing to mystery to reconsile his beliefs while Alex holds a burden of proof because he's making assertive claims about the observable world. And Alex played agnostic and said Ben held the burden. That's not how it works.... You can't make an assertive claim about reality and pass the burden to the other side
@sivad1025 right, just like Trent said he used the common aethist tactic against Alex, and even Alex admitted defeat
there was no "destroying" from either side. Your tribalism is pathetic.
The debate of free will is such an important one for our time. The answer affects us all on such a tangible level. If more people believed in the truth of free will then we would have such a more peaceful time.
The opposite. It’s much easier to be patient and accepting of others when you realize they are biological “machines”.
There is no free will. Either events are random or determined. If they're random, you have no free will. If they are determined, you have no free will. Events are either random or determined and in both cases, no free will.
@Boratio can you explain why events being random leads to humans having no free will?
@@canine_delight "free will" entails that there is a center of control, a "self" within one's consciousness, that directs actions, can reason, consider outcomes, etc. If events of the mind are random, then they are not "controlled" at all. They occur at random.
I feel the exact opposite. I think our societies are so focused on discussing everything as a moral issue that it clouds our ability to problem solve rationally.
Even when I was a Christian I didn’t believe in freewill, so this isn’t just an atheist/theist debate.
The sooner people stop associating a British accent with intelligence the better. O’Connel is fine but hitchens wouldn’t have been near as popular if he had a different accent.
Hitchens' accent and command of the English language carried him a long way. I do love to listen to him talk but his criticisms of religion were just as shallow as the rest of the New Athiests.
Retributive punishment is wrong regardless of free will. Its a beneft of determinism that forces this view. Rehabilitation and safety should be the only concerns of the justice system.
I was looking forward to your recap, while watching the video a few days ago. God bless
Without having finished this Trent episode (though I did watch the debate), I’m going to say Ben either reached a stalemate or narrowly lost and it’s not surprising - he is limited in his thought and reasoning by his incorrect/incomplete view of religion and truth.
Trent you are growing like crazy since 100k! Love your work, God Bless you
Everyone plays so nice with Alex, but he strikes me and hopelessly arrogant.
Alex keeping going at the bible instead of the topic. Very typical for somekne like him to refuse to stay on topic. Wheter ben is jewish, christian or muslim, the point would be the same and alex clearly has a bible beef.
I completely disagree with this. Ben brings up Judeo Christian values several times making it fair game for Alex to go after. Alex also goes after Islam so lets try to be fair. Also Alex and Ben both live in a majority Christian nation so doesn't it make sense?
The Bible is the crux of Christian belief, you can only attack the Bible for arguments for or against Christianity in any way, what else could they discuss? This is THE religious text for the religion
@@Darksage5555 The Bible is NOT the crux of belief. The Catholic Faith would still exist without the Bible.
@ThatCatholicGamerDude is the Bible the word of God?
What do you mean by that?@@Darksage5555
In the free will point, Alex brings up the “You can do as you will but you can’t will what you will.” No one is arguing that we don’t have an instinctual will. Free will is using your reasoning abilities to choose whether or not that instinctual will is ordered or disordered from a moral and somewhat utilitarian sense and then making the free choice. We aren’t slaves to our instincts. I suppose he could still call that an evolutionary mechanism and therefore an illusion but that’s the distinction in my view of what free will means to most people.
but such free will is still not free in any morally relevant way that matters to religions. Because your reasoning abilities are not the product of your choice and you cannot control them, and they are determined by other unconscious processes.
@@marco_mate5181 If having many choices in life despite having certain material limitations can’t qualify as free will then what would you need to have free will ? Do you think having completely omniscient consciousness of your actions and motivations is the only qualification for free choice? Every person who has ever lived has struggled to make choices in their lives. What do you call that exactly? The advantage of the skeptic is shifting the burden of proof. But it’s self evident to most people that they make choices every day. So it’s your burden to prove why making a choice between eggs and bacon or a bowl of cereal for breakfast in the morning doesn’t qualify as free will. If we make simple choices, then it stands to reason that there are more complex choices. Saying that the whole process happens in the brain doesn’t refute that the person could be making some kind of conscious choices somewhere in the process. It’s just a quirk of consciousness that we aren’t 100% aware of our own brain and where along in the process we have a choice.
I haven't full watched the video yet, so maybe I'm repeating what Trent says.
It seems like Alex's view is that thoughts cause other thoughts. Therefore, his "either thoughts are determined, or they're not" point works. Although, most of phenomenology implies that it isn't thoughts which cause thoughts, but a foundational faculty (or so Sartre argues in his Being and Nothingness).
"Thoughts cause thoughts" is obviously true in the physical world where everything is a domino chain. But that's why Ben appeals to the immaterial world where we have no reason to believe that cause and effect work this way
@@sivad1025 - The physicalist "domino chain" and general computational theories of mind don't sufficiently account for the temporal and enactive process of cognition. You're basically cherry-picking being.
@@sivad1025 Thoughts originate within a faculty not subjected to thought. If this faculty was subjected to thoughts, it would lead to a regress of thoughts into the unknown. Therefore, a thought may *precede or build off* another thought, but this thought doesn’t originate within the temporally prior thought itself.
Edit: Btw, Sartre totally rejected anything immaterial in this process.
@@evangelium5376 I'm Christian, so I'm inclined to agree. I'm saying that in the physical realm, I can understand the belief that all physical actions are entirely caused by prior actions
@@existential_o I don't really follow
debates are not there to be won, but to exchange ideas and learn from each other…
Most arguments for determinism I've found come down to "cherry picking being," as it were. Freedom is found in the temporal and enactive process of subjectivity, not in the faulty conception of cause-effect relations of objectified "things."
First you have to define what you mean by freedom here then you have to define what you mean by temporal and enactive of subjectivity and then you have to describe why the concepts of cause and effect relations are quote faulty you're just saying words to say them holy fuck everything you've said here literally just makes no sense and completely disregards and underwrites all of the actual arguments made by cause and effect. My brain actually hurts reading how empty and brain dead these comments are for fucksake our school system has failed.
The confusion heavily lies in the fact that few people today understand how free will really works, but the answer to how it works, or at least an answer which I find very convincing, has been around for hundreds of years. It even can be leveraged to show exactly why so many fall into determinism. To whit: we have two mental powers, intellect/reason and will. Now free will by the name implies the will can be directed freely towards everything, and that is the point of confusion. The will actually is drawn by its very nature towards what it perceives as good, and in that sense is kind of deterministic. What makes will free is our reason possesses the capability of freely presenting various things to the will as good. Thus, we possess the freedom to choose what to set before our will, which then goes after it. Only seeing that the will always pursues the perceived good and not that the reason freely presents things as good is a big component in determinism.
@@Theseekerofinfinite you still miss the point. Such precess of "presenting to the will" is not under your controll and is either random or deterministic. Reason is a deterministic process, and our reason is constrained by the caotic mix of chemical processes that go on in our brain. So it is not free but dependent on physical conditions which are still outside our control.
@@marco_mate5181 - The content of the world which presents itself to the subject doesn't need to be undetermined in order for freedom to exist, because you're conflating determination *within* an interdeterministic relation between subject and world vs. a narrow causal chain of determination which goes one way. It comes down to a language trick.
@@evangelium5376 what does this word salad mean? The point isn’t that the content is determined, but the process itself. The abilities of our mind are determined by the natural laws of the reality we live in, and are out of our control. And the processes that present the set of choices to make are also determined, including the act of choosing itself, the alternative is randomness, which by definition would be not under our control.
There was no "winner" as such. There are deep epistemological, ethical and moral flaws with any worldview, and this discussion helped us all to understand the problems and strengths of both systems of thought.
Hi Trent, two questions I have for determinists: 1) if determinism is true, how can you possibly know. 2) if determinism is true, why would one rely on the laws of logic, any thought you have, etc
1) Maybe you don't. Does not have any impact on whether there is determinism or not.
2) Because you are determined to rely on the laws of logic etc.
Couldn’t the first question be posed to free will equally
With regard to the first question, for me, it's about levels of conviction rather than absolute certitude. Determinism seems to cohere with the rest of my ontological positions and seems more plausible than the other alternatives. For that matter, Libetarian free will - which I assume is what most people talk about when they say they believe in free will - just seems incoherent to me.
As for your other question, ironically, I think it's actually the believers in libertarian free will who have the problem with trusting your faculties reliability. The denial of determinism entailed by adherence to LFW also means that a certain randomness is built into the fabric of reality to such a degree that any event, even your own thoughts, could very well be completely arbitrary.
@@Netum6am unfortunately, those responses don’t address the questions.
@@graysonguinn1943 it can be posed but all of our experience is that we are making free choices. Trent even cites a study on how a belief in determinism changes behavior.
The opening remark finally got me to subscribe to a channel upon being asked to. Hahaha. That was well played.
(Thank you for all that you do. Blessings and love!)
Great analysis. Shapiro wins hands down when his opponent admits that he has to live by delusion. O'Connor, for all his polite facade and calm demeanour has to reduce to a HItchensian sneer arguing not the topic, but railing on about supposed biblical atrocities, a la Richard Dawkins. Although his mockery is slightly more subtle, once the case fails all they have left is an appeal to moral posturing.
These overeducated moronic types are the downfall of society. For hundreds of years these "philosophers" have hated society and want it to change (probably for their own inadequacy) and try to change the roots of civilization. Coincidentally it fails every. single. time.
I think you misunderstood.
The intuition we have that makes us thing we have free will is the illusion.
Alex clearly stated he did not believe free will existed.
Very well stated - I agree 100%. I’ve had debates with atheists on line, and I’ve found their arguments always go off the rails and devolve to sneering. They create an image of religion and religious people in their minds (ignorant unthinking rubes), and thus when it really comes down to it, they don’t think they really HAVE TO provide sound arguments, mockery is sufficient. It’s a decidedly unintellectual approach. It is also astoundingly arrogant to posit how God would necessarily effectuate a moral law through time if God was real. They reject God out of hand because of their own highly superficial moral judgments. It doesn’t “seem” like a “good” God would do things the way he had, so therefore that is “evidence” against God. Their reasoning is so shallow and weak. They are so comfortable with defining how a God must be if he is real. Do they apply such bias and shallow thinking to any other sphere of inquiry? Like trying to understand physics?
Thanks. No, I understand. He believes there is no free will but that evolution has deluded us into the sense that there is, and living as such. With a causally determinate universe he still acts as though he should argue people into beliefs with "facts" and render moral judgments as though we have choices as to what we do.@@aidanya1336
@@aidanya1336 And Ben needs the belief in free will, not Alex. There's no illusion on Alex's side.
@BibleSongs Alex posted a short on exactly the point you bring up.
"X is a bad source for an ethical standard because it results in Y" is a bad argument in general because it requires us to already have an ethical standard by which to judge Y. But if you already have this standard, all you can do with other standards is point out where they deviate from your chosen one. Since all other ones will deviate on some point (otherwise it wouldn't exist; it would just be your chosen standard already), all you are really doing is pointing out where a competing standard goes "wrong."
CS Lewis pointed out the impossibility of bootstrapping your way into an ethical system from a vacuum. You can't possibly choose one when you have no prior standards by which to judge the candidates; the judgement criteria you might use *are* your ethical system.
Without yet watching, let me guess who youre with...Shapiro?
This is a Catholic apologetics channel. Shapiro was arguing that religion is not harmful to society. Yes, we’re with Shapiro on this issue. -Kyle
Alex like all atheists believe in their views and opinions and hold everyone else accountable to their views and opinions,but if on atheist is vegan and the other carnivore then who is right and the answer is they both because they both hold themselves accountable to their views and opinions, it’s very similar to Protestantism the individual Protestant is his own pope and counsel and holds himself accountable to his views and opinions on Christianity.
It's no coincidence atheism flourished after protestantism
Brilliant Trent! Thank you so much for your work, helps a lot🙌
Both Ben Shapiro and Alex O’Conner are educated, intelligent and have evaluated Christianity. Both have concluded Jesus is dead. Thus it is reasonable to conclude Jesus is dead.
Trent, you should have Gavin on to dialogue about this. Some ecumenical axiological defense of theism as such. :)
I am so tired of hearing atheists whine on about slavery when they are all quite happy to enjoy the benefits of modern day slave labour. There has always been slavery in every human culture and there still is today. The Bible advises us on ways to behave within the context of slavery because God knew it was always going to exist.
The example for atheist countries should be Soviet Union, Revolutionary France, Communist China, etc. which is fair. However, for religious societies, the debate has to include religions other than Christianity and Judaism. Discussions should extend to Muslim, Aztec, the biblical religion of Phoenicia and Canaan, etc. Also, Atheist doesn't equal non-religious, for example, Buddhist is an atheist religion and the Buddhist societies seems to be ok, committing direct atrocities wise.
Buddhists aren't ok look at what they did to Sri Lankan Tamils
If the religion is fake then it's a poor representation of religion
Trent, when are you going to have a good discussion with an LDS person (Mormon)? There are quite a few LDS who are lapsed Catholics. They could use a charitable podcast that includes an active Mormon where you reason through their issues....the "great apostasy" problem, problems with the office of The Twelve continuing, Apostolic-era evidences for baptism by pouring and the true presence, contradictions in their multi-god theology, KJV mistakes in the Book of Mormon, etc. There's A LOT, and much of it they may have never been exposed to.
Could be the chance to plant seeds (as you may already know, they are very careful to avoid what they deem 'anti-Mormon' material, so an active, 'orthodox' Mormon's involvement would probably be necessary to get many of them to consider listening).
My biggest problem with "Free will doesn't exist but it's good to act like it does" is that the people making that claim are trying to convince others of it. Isn't that a bit self-defeating? If it's truly good, wouldn't we have evolved to _not_ convince people it doesn't exist? If evolution favors belief in free will, isn't doubt in its existence evidence against the evolutionary process?
I’m not sure Evolution applies to philosophical discussions in the way you think it does. You’re operating from the promise that majority of people don’t believe in free will but in fact people do and they live like it, always desiring more freedoms and wanting to make their own decisions. Just from that the evolution thing fails. Next, I don’t know of any other places except during debates or philosophical discussions, movies/ media wherein people are trying to convince each other of free will or determinism, I wouldn’t say these philosophical discussions actually hold much evolutionary weight at all. Evolution is about biological directional changes that happen over long spans of time geared toward survival,not about intellectual beliefs that a group of people hold over centuries or decades, even if most people didn’t hold to belief in free will, that proves nothing about its evolutionary usefulness. People believe in unhelpful things all the time. What are you trying to say?
@@ABB14-11 Right, but if you're a determinist who believes in evolution, then the human brain evolved in the same way. Alex argues that we evolved to believe in free will because it's useful. But that's a strange claim to me because if free will is so useful and we evolved to believe in it, then why are so many people like Alex arguing against it?
Sure it may not be formally argued against in every day life. But the effects are pretty clear. How often do we see people excuse crime because "they're mentally ill and couldn't help it"? I see that quite frequently. But if we truly evolved to believe in an illusion of free will, I would expect to see that almost never
@@sivad1025 Alex arguing against free will could be viewed in a similar way as corrected lenses. Evolution would typically select out people with low/no vision, but in 2023 humans can employ empathy and reason and tool building to solve for the individual with poor eyesight.
Would our gene pool be stronger if we stopped anyone with bad eyes or a peanut allergy from reproducing? Probably! Would that be a moral action? Probably not!
It’s also worth noting that historically speaking (as in at the level of hundreds of thousands of years) humans didn’t go around “believing” in free will, they just existed.
Evolution also favors belief in a flat Earth. Basically none of our direct perceptions about the Earth’s shape line up with what it actually is in reality. To understand that the Earth is round, you have to either do a bunch of complex tests or you have to be a particularly observant sailor watching the mast of another ship disappear over the horizon.
It’s ‘common sense’ that the Earth is flat, but if we stuck with the Flat-Earth view supported by our immediate perceptions we would never have been able to do some really cool stuff - the Space Race, for example.
With free will I think there’s a similar dynamic at play. If we acknowledge the ultimate role that external factors have on our actions, it becomes a lot easier to try and shift those external factors on a wide scale to produce better outcomes, or to vote in favour of policies that aim to improve outcomes by improving the environment people exist in.
Without that you get into territory where it becomes easy to say things like(for example) “poor people choose to be poor”, without needing to acknowledge and address the sticky reality behind why something like poverty is difficult to escape.
@@ecta9604 I really like this comment because it made me think.
I don't think you were responding to my original point though. I was saying that the "Free will doesn't exist but it's good to act like it does" is self-defeating. You don't seem to deny that. You would agree with me that it would be silly to believe in flat earth because it was evolutionarily favored.
Your argument is instead that it's _not good_ to act like free will does exist. I think that's an uphill battle. As Trent talked about, there are plenty of studies showing the link between this belief and bad behavior like cheating. I agree that "poor people choose to be poor" is not helpful. But that's also not a logical end-point of free will. We can believe that poor people are poor because of a combination of choices and external factors.
I think your example is ultimately counterproductive because even if "poor people choose to be poor" were a logical endpoint, I would prefer that to "poor people aren't responsible for anything they do." At least the former would punish criminals and keep society safe. The latter has no limiting principle. And Black Lives Matter has given lots of great evidence to this by electing judges and prosecutors who release criminals onto the streets because of their perceived hard lives. This mentality hasn't reduced crime anywhere, it's only enabled it. We live in a world where black kids can raid Walgreens in a Chicago mob with no consequences because the "systems" forced them to do so. How is that at all good for society?
The debate was quite poor in relation to the topic, but that falls on the moderator, not the debaters.
Determinism enrages me, because I can’t wrap my head around how an otherwise intelligent person can say they believe in determinism, yet still try to persuade someone of something.
Maybe try to better understand determinism then. Or don't let something that doesn't really matter enrage you lol.
@@calebsmith7179 If determinism allows for persuasion and decision making, then the determinist's understanding of "free will" is a straw man.
@@billowspillow nope, your understanding of determinism is a strawman.
The issue I am seeing is you are conflating free will and agency. They are not the same thing. You still have agency under determinism. Agency is the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment. You do not need free will to do this. A moral agent is "a being who is capable of acting with reference to right and wrong." You do not need free will to do this.
To put it another way, you seem to believe determinism wipes out both "free" and "will", but it only does the former, not the latter. You will still have a "will" under determinism, it's just not "free".
The laws of physics determine the future. It's not definite because we fully don't know the laws of physics, but the laws of physics that we currently have at our disposal have no opportunity for intercession by human will. We are a collection of particles governed by laws, and those laws don't at any point in the evolution of the particle say, "Hey, can you, like, tell me now what do, person?" They just determine the future based upon what things were like in the past.
Normally, the intuitive definition of free will is things could have been different, and I could have made a choice for things to turn out differently. And if that's your definition of free will then I don't see any way to square that with the laws of physics because anything that you do is your particles executing some kind of motion, and the motion of your particles, in your brain and in your body, have no opportunity to allow you as a conscious being to direct them. What force could possibly that direction come from? Is it the electromagnetic force? Well, that one we understand from Maxwell. Is it the gravitational force? We understand that one from Einstein. Is it the nuclear forces? Those we understand from the Standard Model of particle physics. What force could you possibly exert on your particles that goes against or goes beyond those that emerge from the equations of physics?
So there is a puzzle right now in quantum physics that has been on the table for 50-75 years, and we don't know the answer to this puzzle, and that's why I have to couch my remarks with a little bit of uncertainty. And that puzzle is this, quantum theory says that you can only predict the probability of one outcome or another. Fifty percent chance electron here, fifty percent electron there. Yet, when we measure the electron, we always find it either here or there. One or the other. So how do you go from the fuzzy probabilistic haze of many possibilities to the single definite reality that we experience in everyday life? We still don't know how to bridge that gap. So within that, if consciousness somehow plays a role in picking out one outcome from the probabilistic haze, then sure, then free will might come for the ride as well.
Then there's the neuroscientific perspective. First of all, what's happening at the quantum level doesn't really scale up to whether a neuron fires or not, I mean that indeterminacy. But from the experiments that neuroscience has done, starting in the 80s, Benjamin Libet did studies where he said to somebody, "Whenever you feel like it, just press this button." and he measured brain activation. And he found, and he said, even before they actually press the button because that takes time, to make the movement, "Just let me know where this little dot is on the clock when you feel the first inkling of the intention of wanting to move." And what he found is about 350 milliseconds before a person even had that conscious intention, there was a gearing up of brain activation. So then, leap forward to current times. Neuroscientists can do neuroimaging experiments where they can say to a person, "Okay, just choose left or right, or that hamburger or not." They can predict up to 10 seconds before you even have the conscious inclination of your intention, which you are going to go, left or right, or cheese or no cheese. The brain is making these decisions all the time, and we have this illusion of free will. But the question really is, why do we have this illusion? Why did we evolve this illusion? Is it important, if we didn't have it, would it change our behavior?
It strikes me that it gives us that sense of control that, presumably, out of the Savanna, you know, 50,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago, made the difference between surviving or not. If you're invested in how things turn out and feel your decisions can affect how things turn out, you're more attentive, you're more engaged, it's something that matters to you more, and presumably, something like that or some parallel story like that suggests why we have this illusion.
I think from both a physics perspective and a neuroscience perspective, we come to the same conclusion that it is an illusion, that free will is an illusion. Even though we really feel like it's not. And actually studies have been done which, when you tell people free will is an illusion, and you start giving them subsequent tests, they're more likely to cheat on a math test. They're more likely to act unethically. So the fact that we have this belief, those who have had it actually are better able to survive in the system. However, we also have evolved for there to be cheaters. And they can win, and so if we are all cheaters, no one would win.
So, you know, often people, when they encounter these ideas, they say, "Okay, then I'm not going to do anything but sit on my couch, and what does it matter?" Right, but you see, that's a mixing of two distinct views on one question. You see, if you think you're making a free choice to sit on your couch, then you feel like, "Well, now I am going to give into this, and I am just going to sit there." But if you do that, it was determined. If you choose to sit on your couch, it's not that you made a volitional choice, it was set in place. And if that's what was going to happen, that's what is going to happen.
And moreover, but you know, Baumeister's description, I think, really, at least helps me when I think in those terms, which is, it's not that free will is the intuitive one that we're talking about here. Free will really is the fact that we're able to carry out this amazing spectrum of behaviors. We can walk, we can talk, we can sing, we can come up with ideas. The fact that they had an earlier cause, maybe even back at the Big Bang, to me, it doesn't take anything away from creativity. It doesn't take anything away from originality. It doesn't take anything away from having a sense of authorship over your own actions because you are the most immediate cause of those actions. They emerge through you, through your particles. Your particles and your brain are configured in such a way that when certain stimuli hit your body, you say and do certain things. The fact that it is determined, who cares?
You still have a will under determinism, but one that is determined by an impenetrably vast network of influences and experiences -- including someone trying to persuade you of something. The determinist obviously thinks -- fully consistently -- that new information, facts, reasons can change someone's mind per determinism. That's how minds are always changed.
The alternative is thinking you can choose to change your mind absent determinism, absent any cause or reason to change your mind. And that's a far weirder position.
@@calebsmith7179 I'm sorry but all this turns "determinism" into an unfalsifiable philosophy. Because if I say I reject determinism because a determinist cannot persuade anyone of anything, let alone themselves, you say "you're confusing will with agency." But then you go on to explain further how not even agency can be a thing within determinism because nothing can be controlled by the individual even to the smallest levels of scientific observation. And then you cover all possible bases by saying that even if someone deliberately and consciously makes a decision against what would be assumed to be their determined choice, that doesn't count because we're already assuming determinism therefore even those things were determined. I personally have made a few decisions in my life that are total 180's from where I was going before; I've witnessed so many people that have done the same. We all felt very clearly how going with the flow was leading us to places we didn't want to go, so against everything in us, with great effort and gnashing of teeth, we went the opposite direction. That should be a strong argument against determinism, but the determinist's analysis is "nah must have been possible with some factors that we just can't observe yet." This is like all the worst arguments for the existence of a god rolled up into a secular philosophy.
Also everything you've written assumes that the physical world is all there is, and all we've observed of the physical world is all that can possibly be there. We know that neurons are firing in someone's brain when they make a choice, and since the individual is no more than those neurons, they cannot be freely making that choice. But that's a pretty big assumption - one which can only be defended, I think, by assuming determinism to be true out the gate.
Lastly, if individual experience makes it feel like your philosophy is wrong, and if the survival of civil society relies on acting like your philosophy is wrong (e.g. we still must punish wrongdoing; we still must reward good decisions), then I posit your philosophy isn't thought through correctly.
Even Nietzsche explained that religion was necessary to provide a genuinely meaningful purpose... To not become a nihilist.
The point about how there used to be slavery was completely irrelevant... The Israelis treated their slaves very than all the surrounding cultures, so religion did not cause harm.
Even Alex couldn't identify a replacement for religion to achieving inter cultural/ cross class social cohesion
They should have brought someone like historian Tom Holland for this debate imo
hes busy filming Spiderman series
@@akak8299Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a Spider-Man can (1960s Spider-Man animation song).
I am a fan of neither side, but I am a fan of these thoughtful, civil engagements between bitterly opposed camps. Whether or not you win the debate, if you build bridges you are doing God's work.
Ben handled O'Connor very well in this debate. That last line he quotes from Voltaire was absolutely biting. Especially given how much atheistic thought has grounded parts of its being on the philosophy of Voltaire, who was at best a lukewarm Deist.
If by handled you mean stuttered when pressed on his moral relativism then resulted in complimenting Alex’s beard, sure he “handled” him. He took another L just like in his discussion with Sam Harris.
@@grega2638lol, he got Alex to admit religion was good for society, which was the topic of discussion.
Looks like a W to me 😂
@@MrGgabber When did that happen? i must have missed that part.
Lol, Ben handled what? Agreeing with Alex most of the time?
I wouldn't expect somebody who makes his living pushing a religion to be able to give an unbiased critique of a debate where said religion has been effectively attacked.
Alex got into slavery because the book justifies it and that justification was used for millennia to keep slavery intact. That is a huge example of why your religion was bad for society. So yeah, it's part of the argument.
I have to say Ben wins merely off the principle it seems he was the one constantly trying to pull Alex back on topic. Alex seemed to constantly end up trying to prove “religion is false” while Ben kept having to go back to the utilitarian aspect of the argument because the topic was “is religion good for society.” So I don’t see how you can give it to Alex. He’s like most atheists who just go off track a little bit in debates and end up trying to prove God isn’t real rather than the debate topic
Ben could lose if he allows himself to be distracted by the topic changes.
Congratulations, now you have a legitimate excuse for treating half the population as second class citizens, and now you can be proud of wiping out millions of natives so that your God wins. Too bad your God is so timid he can't come join the celebration.
The thing is Ben lost cause if you watched the debate he concided and even agreed with Alex that religion can be harmful for society.. regarding Islam and there beliefs ...
@@aaroncarl2493 Alex does something similar during the free will debate admitting it’s better for people to believe they have free will…
@@Tornadospeed10 Alex traps been in his arguments...like I said if you watched the debate Alex asked Ben would you rather have a society of people believing in Islam or a society of atheist...and Ben weaseled out of the answer by saying he doesn't want to debate the validity of different religion...but you know bens answers he really doesn't believe in the utility of religion
Destiny really clarified why atheism leads to brutal conflict and inhumanity when he says "if two people can't get along, at some point it comes to violent conflict" because without the moral guidance of religion, that "not getting along" shrinks to whatever point you want, which is what we're seeing with cancelling, and why atheistic regimes lead to dictatorship. When something like cancelling work for an atheist, without the morality of religion the next step for the atheist is violent conflict if you "simply can't get along" and use no other metric for moral consideration.
Atheist philosophy collapses into marxist statism or self-will centeredness, a guaranteed recipe for conflict.
It's not something exclusive to atheism. All throughout history we've seen violence and utter brutality committed by people with religious disagreements, even those proclaiming to be part of the same religion. Whether you're religious or not, you can either settle a moral disagreement by talking it out, or if that fails and there is no option to ignore the problem or agree to disagree, violence ends up being the result.
Punishment for witchcraft is not something bad if you have actual experience on what witches and shamans do. For example in my city a shaman hanged a dead rooster on a palm tree in the middle of a road, even for atheistic morals its gotta be at least animal cruelty. And it gets worse when you understand that a black rooster sacrifice is a spell for death
Like you don't support animal cruelty by eating meat?
Let's put you to jail also
As an Emotivist, Alex O'Connor believes murder is wrong because it "feels" wrong. Could the source of this "feeling" be Alex's soul, since God has written his law on human hearts?
"I will place my law within them, and write it upon their hearts..." Jeremiah 31:33
"For wickedness, of its nature cowardly, testifies in its own condemnation, and because of a distressed conscience, always magnifies misfortunes." Wisdom 17:11
Alex's focus on "free will" got tiresome. But beyond that, he had better points. However Ben "won" in the sense that Alex's fans, such as myself, were expecting Alex to just hopeless embarrass Ben. And that didn't happen. Ben was thoughtful and well spoken and defended his position well, which I acknowledge even though I disagree with him.
We may have different world views... but at least we agree there is a way to conduct civil discourse.
Stay loyal to the truth, friend.
Where truth prevails, diversity of opinion florishes.
The "facts don't care about your feelings" response and " who's relying on the delusion here?" Were both sick burns that left Ben Speechless?
I think the material reductionist has the burden of justifying their positions more so than the Theist. The reason being is the processes to which they reduce human experiences is (must be) empirically based. As such, there is no “hidden” aspect to which one can only reason about through analogy wrapped up in mystery. For the Theist is arguing for an entire realm that is shrouded in mystery and impenetrable by the perception of the senses. But the atheist that ascribes to the materialist model cannot appeal to mystery since all within the material order comes under the perception of the senses. Hence, Alex was out of place in claiming mystery while Ben wasn’t.
I actually think shapiro did very well but this review seems to be pretty bad faith towards alex
not seems, is.
I'm pretty sure I heard Ben recommend you recently as someone to learn more about Catholicism from.
The fact that “ genius” Alex thinks free will doesn’t exist makes me think the “ genius” tag he’s often labeled with might be a bit loose in its application.
The existence of free will is based on intuition.
Something that works well some of the time. But not at all at other times.
But feel free to prove free will exist if you think you can (without appealing to intuition of course).
Alex says a lot of words without saying anything of coherent consequence. I have not been convinced that he is anything beyond above average intelligence, categorically not a “genius.”
I have seen many of Alex's RUclips videos over several years. I would say he has made some progress intellectually, but I have never been really impressed with him. Is really Alex O'Connor the best atheists have to show? Where are the smart atheists? Alex knows how to *sound* intellectual and profound, but so often it doesn't make any sense. In this debate he made some remarks about "slavery, women's rights, and gay-rights" that previous Christians got wrong - we *know* they were wrong back then. How does he get away with such claims? Is slavery really wrong?? How does Alex *know* this? So often atheists get away since their opponents don't want to attack such claims. But they should. Maybe slavery isn't wrong. Who's to say? Alex cannot know it. There is no upward trajectory when it comes to "values" (because there exist no such "values").
Alex O'Connor once got in the cross-hairs of an atheist historian over his false assertions about the Galileo affair and other historical affairs. The historian tried to correct him but he refused to admit he was wrong. The historian described O'Connor as someone with enormous self-confidence and other things I'd rather not repeat here.
you sound so incredibly biased lmfao alex destroyed shapiro in this debate@@mortensimonsen1645
Im looking at the study at 9:00.
Couple of things, first of all in one of the experiments there were 3 affirmations mentioned, free will, neutral, and determinism. There was no difference between free will and neutral which you failed to mention. So at most the study suggests determinism may correspond to cheating. So the argument is against determinism, not for free will.
Second, there are other forms of rejecting free will that are not deterministic, for example if everything was completely random. The study failed take this into account.
I see possible issues of endogeneity. It seems like the affirmations included a sense of effort to resist cheating. We should re run the experiment with the deterministic affirmation that says something like “although there is no free will, we should still put in effort to be honest”
To make a bold claim that this experiment proves the importance of free will is far too hasty.
O'Connor .. if only by points. He was, for my taste, rather too evangelically hyped with a swamp of largely long-ago disposed-of charges - in rapid-fire mode (perhaps that's the only way to deal effectively with Mr Shapiro .. who likes to get his evangelistic rhetorical fulmination in first). Shapiro made most of the right-sounding responses to the charges as laid; still, if I were an atheist the return blows made by Shapiro wouldn't be overly winning .. least of all when trotted out (as expected) by a politician.
Too much of what Mr O'Connor shadow-boxed was simply oldene-tyme (Roman) Catholic orthodoxy dressed up as (a brand of) Judeo-Christianity (sic), slavery, female empowerment, natural law ethics etc. Thus 'religion' was not really addressed e.g. that which binds man to man and all men to (the olde-tyme Catholic concept of) < God > , only one set of (once held) beliefs (now in the process of being synodically redefined for a new synodal meaning more suited to today's synodalised persons); Chesterton's any stick will do approach, if used to beat against 'Rome'.
Atheists (believers in unbelief - for any divinity) have a stronger case to make against theists (believers with belief - in some sort of divinity) - at a guess, I say it is .. (subjective) taste, and a Hollywood(-ish) actor did a better job of undoing current Roman Catholic trot-out-able niceness, in place of an uncomfortable one-time faith in conversation with Bishop Barron - that is to say .. (objective) fidelity; but then, who is listening ...?
Keep the Faith; tell the truth, shame the devil, and let the demons shriek.
God bless.
;o)
Who is this Hollywood person?
How and why do you comment in a single-song kind of way?
@@ABB14-11 Last first .. because I like to .. indeed it is (more or less) how I speak, ordinarily (if given half a chance to talk). First, now last, he is a rather odd chap of whom I know very little .. Shia La Boeuf; he acted as Padre Pio in a Hollywood film and discussed the impact of the role with Bishop Barron. For the rest, I do it to challenge Grammarly and all such efforts to restrict the vast beauty of the English language (which is not my 'native' language but one I love). Yo!
God bless. ;o)
I never understood the pivot of religious debate to "is religion good" the only question that matters is "is it true"? if you make the argument "religion is needed or is a force for good but still fundamentally untrue" what you are really saying is "we need to fool ourselves so civilization still runs". but is you focus your argument of if a religious claim is true then it is naturally a force for good because your belief aligns with reality.
We do not even know how simple physical things like gravity works. We can describe and predict their effects but NOT explain how they work. How could we ever think of tryjng to expkain free will
Yeah , it is very much like trying to run before learning how to walk
As an atheist, i think that religion is probably better for society than not.
However i personally, am limited by the scope of what i find to be rational, and i do not find religion to be rational as i cannot find evidence for such a basis of things. So Im basically a nihilist. I dont really believe in right or wrong but i dont see any truth that leads to an objective morality either. That is not to say that i do not find meaning or fulfillment in life, i love building and creating things and i love science and learning and doing these things makes me fulfilled. Or if not fulfilled then at least i dont feel enough negative emotions to strongly desire an alternative. I recognize this isn’t feasible for most people though