Debunking All Arguments For God's Existence, Transcript

Debunking All Arguments For God's Existence - Professor Pink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PU2s3PrdBWI

Transcript:

(00:05) Unless you were raised in a Baptist Sunday school, you probably think that if you believe in God, you should be able to explain why. Luckily, Christians and other philosophers have been answering this question for over 2,000 years. They have failed conclusively. It's over, and there is nothing that you can do here in this room that can turn that around. Hello everyone, I'm Professor Plink. I respond to various theological and ideological questions and claims from a rationalistic and naturalistic approach in an effort to give and explain the

(00:35) opposite viewpoint and help to balance the conversation. Today we're hearing again from Redeemed Zoomer. Last time we checked in on him, he was attempting to debunk all atheist arguments for the non-existence of God, which ended up being a fail considering that atheism doesn't strictly offer arguments against God per se, but instead debunks attempts to argue for the existence of God. Then he further shot himself in the foot given that most of his supposed atheist arguments ended up being anti-Christian counterarguments that any non-Christian could make, including members of any other faith. But you often can't expect

(01:16) believers to accurately characterize or actually steelman atheist positions because they so rarely understand atheism at all. It's like watching someone trying to translate a different language that they themselves don't speak. But this time RZ made a video that is attempting to explain in short form all arguments in favor of God's existence, and since this time he's talking about something from his side of the philosophical aisle, there's hopefully a better chance that he will actually be able to get it right this time around. And he's going to be powering through

(01:50) these in short form with relatively surface-level explanations of them, so I thought I'd give the scaled-down surface-level counters for each of them just to, as I want to do, balance the conversation. So let's dive in and hear about RZ's take on the traditional apologetic approaches for proving God's existence. But before we get to that, if you end up liking what you see in this video and would like to help out the channel, make sure to subscribe, click the bell so you'll always be notified when new content comes out, check out my social media including my Patreon and Twitter, all

(02:23) linked in the description, and of course like this video, pop in a comment, all that goes a long way towards pleasing the YouTube algorithm, that neighborly normalizer of non-belief navigating the never-ending neighborhoods of nonsensical ne'er-do-wells and no-goodniks may keep my channel motoring along. Now on to today's video. Evidentialism tries to argue for God by giving evidence of supernatural events. For example, a lot of Christians think the resurrection of Christ can be historically proven because there were a lot of eyewitnesses who all died for their faith, and generally people don't die for something

(02:57) they know isn't true. Sometimes people give evidence of supernatural things like demonic possessions where people start speaking in languages they don't know or near-death experiences where people see things outside their body that they shouldn't have been able to see. Okay, the first argument in favor of God: evidentialism. And right off the bat, a lot of these are going to be very Christian-centric, much like all of RZ's videos are, which is all fine and dandy if you're attempting to validate Christianity. But when your title of your video is "All Arguments for God Explained

(03:30) in 10 Minutes" instead of "All Arguments for Christianity Explained in 10 Minutes," one would think you should generalize your points so that they could be applicable to non-Christian theologies as well. But RZ doesn't do that, for example with this one, which is focused entirely on proof in the form of evidence from the Bible of accounts of people who supposedly saw miracles like the resurrection of Jesus. Except the Bible does not contain any accounts of eyewitnesses to the resurrection; it only contains claims that there were

(04:06) eyewitnesses to the resurrection written by authors who themselves did not witness the resurrection, like when Paul wrote about these supposed 500 eyewitnesses who saw the resurrected Jesus, which would be like me writing that a bunch of my friends saw Bigfoot, but I won't give you their names, let alone any direct accounts of the events, but just trust me, this totally happened and they really did see it, all actual evidence be damned. And accounts of demonic possession are even worse because to claim that someone was speaking in a language that they didn't know, well, they would need to establish that a) they

(04:45) actually were speaking in a real language and not just spouting gibberish that the person listening mistook for a language that they also don't speak, and then b) that the person speaking it actually and truly didn't know any of that language when they could have easily picked up a few phrases in just about any language by spending 10 minutes reading a book or by Googling it. Like for instance, "Ego sum legio, quia multi sumus." That was Latin, a language which I do not speak, hence my horrible pronunciation. And as long as Google Translate was accurate, what I just said

(05:23) was "I am Legion, for we are many." Now my friends and family know that I do not speak Latin, but if I had a mental breakdown tomorrow and started having a fit while screaming that phrase over and over, my parents might think me possessed and speaking a language that I didn't know. Well, my parents wouldn't because my parents aren't idiots. And even if these things could be established with no possible rational explanation for them, at best that gets you to some kind of supernatural influence. It doesn't get you anywhere near a god. Hell, it doesn't even get you to demons actually existing when it could have easily just

(06:03) been a spell cast by a very human magic wielder. But even if you did prove actual demonic possession, all you've proven is demons, not God. Perhaps demons actually exist, but God doesn't. Stop trying to prove God by unsuccessfully attempting to prove things that aren't God by claiming that those non-God things couldn't possibly exist without God based on nothing but blind speculation. And then you mention near-death experiences. Well, near-death experiences have been debunked countless times. People near death imagine things

(06:42) that simply didn't happen, and when they sometimes accurately report things that did happen while they were unconscious, such as things the doctors said or did while working on them, it can be chalked up to some intermittent awareness of their surroundings, enough that things around them incorporated themselves into their dream before dying, like how sometimes your alarm clock going off can become a part of your actual dream. It doesn't indicate anything supernatural. The moral argument is basically: objective morality is only

(07:15) real if God is real, but objective morality is real, so therefore God is real. Question: is cannibalism good or bad? I think it's good. I think it's bad. I think it's good. I think it's bad. Which one of them is correct? Now I'm assuming you agree with this one. If you don't, please stay away from me. But how do you know that he's actually correct? How do you know that these aren't just different opinions? Our little friend here can only be objectively correct if there's a supreme authority that says cannibalism is bad, and that supreme

(07:48) authority is what we would call God. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. I would agree that cannibalism is bad, subjectively so. Objective morality does not exist. Objective morality cannot exist. This argument is a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between objective and subjective. All morality is based on value judgments. Declaring something good or bad, right or wrong, positive or negative, these are all value judgments, and all value judgments, I repeat, all value judgments are

(08:32) subjective. There's no such thing as an objective value judgment. All value is assigned. All value is based ultimately on opinion. As such, it can never be truly objective, as all value requires a thinking agent, a subject, to assign it. Even if God exists and that God has written incontrovertible moral law, that moral law is still subjective, with God being the subject who assigns it. So you aren't talking about objective versus subjective morality. What you're actually talking about is deity-derived versus human-derived morality. And so now it's become a circular

(09:19) argument. If deity-derived morality exists, then a deity must exist to derive it. Deity-derived morality does exist, therefore that deity, God, exists. Except you haven't established that deity-derived morality does exist. You haven't proven that an unequivocal moral standard of any kind exists. Yes, you and I may agree that cannibalism is wrong, but I imagine the cannibal would disagree, and your only defense against that moral subjectivity is to declare that the cannibal is wrong. But based on what? Your feelings that they're wrong, that cannibalism is wrong? Your feelings about that? Well, I have that feeling too, but

(10:08) I'm self-aware enough to understand that that feeling is coming from me and my understanding of morality from my personal subjective moral framework, and I'm not so self-deluded as to think that it's being beamed down from on high, and for some reason that morality beam just isn't getting through to the cannibals of the world. The cosmological argument is basically that something must have caused everything else. Everything that happens has a cause, and that has a cause, and that has a cause. So where does this go? Does this go on forever? That's not possible. At some point, there needs to be

(10:43) a first cause of everything else. There needs to be an unmoved mover, an uncaused causer, an unchanged changer. It needs to be eternal because if it ever starts or stops existing, that's change, and it can't do that. It needs to be outside the universe because everything in the universe is caused. It also needs to be all-powerful because if it can't be moved but it can move anything else, that means it's all-powerful, and this is what we would call God. So this is the William Lane Craig version of the cosmological argument, and it largely boils down to a lot of unproven assumptions and

(11:14) small-mindedly assigning aspects of our universe and how things work within it to prior to or outside of the universe. Firstly, assuming that any kind of first cause needs to be intelligent or have intentionality, rather than even contemplating the idea of any first cause potentially being completely a natural occurrence devoid of any intellect or intentionality. Then insisting on things like the first cause being eternal without actually knowing what that means. It gives the impression of something existing infinitely into the past and

(11:52) future, but time itself does not stretch infinitely into the past or future. Near as we can tell, time started when the universe took its current form 13.7 billion years ago. This line of thinking also insists on the first cause being outside of the universe, thereby assuming that there is such a thing as outside of the universe in the first place, a notion that has not been established. Then the craziest one of all, insisting on the first cause being all-powerful because, um, it can't be moved, but when did we prove that it can move anything and everything else? But when did we prove that? I mean, even if it moved the first thing and started the Big Bang, that doesn't mean that it has all power over everything that occurred thereafter. I mean, I can make a first move by pushing a large boulder that is teetering on the edge of a mountain, and then it moves absolute tons of as it careens down the mountainside. That doesn't mean that I have all power over all the trees that it knocks down or the creatures that it killed along its path.

(13:03) Basically, starting off a chain of events does not insist that the first movement in that chain has all-encompassing power over everything that happens along that chain. So basically, none of this stuff follows from the initial idea of there being a first cause, which itself doesn't even insist on intelligence or intentionality. I don't get it. Okay, let's make it even harder then. Everything is a mixture of act, meaning what it is, and potency, meaning what it could be. For example, a baby actually is alive, and it could be an adult. An apple actually is

(13:39) red, and it has the potency to be eaten. So if you eat an apple, you're actualizing its potency to be eaten. But you also are a mixture of act and potency. For example, you have the potency to be strong, but you're not. Anytime something changes you, it's actualizing a potency in you. Anytime a change happens, you have one thing actualizing another, but you can't go back forever. So eventually, you need to go back to an unactualized actualizer, which we call God. Okay, this seems like the theistic take on quantum superpositioning. This sounds pretty much

(14:14) like Schrödinger's cat, where you lock a cat in a box with poison, and since you can't see or detect whether the cat is alive or dead, the idea is that it exists in a superposition of being both alive and dead simultaneously until you open the box and collapse the paradox into one reality. So all that about everything being a combination of observed reality and the possibilities of what it could be, all that's fine, but the problem occurs when you trail that chain back to your first cause and then assume that it

(14:48) can't have been a similar mixture of reality and possibilities. Well, why not? What brought you to the conclusion that the god that you believe in couldn't have expressed its potential any differently, especially given that you think that God has all power to do whatever it wants? But the actions that we take shape our reality, restrict our potential into a singular way of being. For instance, you use the example of a person having the potential of being strong. If they choose to take the steps towards building their muscles and getting stronger, that choice and the actions that were taken restricted the

(15:27) potential and actualized the reality of that person being strong. Well, isn't the same true of God? Didn't God have the potential to be a deity who created a whole universe and life in order to have a relationship with that life that it created? Couldn't that God have also decided not to create a universe at all and just be content in and of itself as a perfect being? Or couldn't that God have chosen to create life differently than it did, or to create the world or universe differently, or to have no relationship with that life that it created at all?

(16:08) Weren't these all potentials that were unrealized until the god that you believe in acted in order to actualize them? So then how is God different from the person realizing the potential to become stronger? How is the god you believe in not a mix of act and potency also? Is this one sphere distracting anyone else? The random color swap is flaring up my OCD, and I don't even have OCD. Pascal's [Laughter] wager. You serious? Pascal's wager is much simpler, and it's more of a thought experiment than an argument. Let's say

(16:55) you're an atheist, and atheism turns out to be correct. Nothing happens after you die. Well, then you don't really gain or lose anything. It's just kind of neutral for you. But let's say you're an atheist, and it turns out you're wrong, and God is real. Then it could be very bad for you. Now let's say you believe in God, and it turns out atheism is correct. Well, then you still don't gain or lose anything. It's just neutral. But if you believe in God, and God is real, then you could gain everything. So between these two possibilities, which one do you want to bet on? This one gives you a much better

(17:24) chance, so it's better for you to believe in God. You actually brought up Pascal's wager? What, were you just trying to fill time and didn't care how batshit crazy and nonsensically stupid this line of thinking is? Let me try to parse through some of the major flaws in Pascal's wager as quickly as I can. For starters, this is where your Christian-centric approach to these arguments is really shooting yourself in the foot. If you're a Christian and you believe in the Christian God, well, what if it turns out God is real, but it's a Hindu god, and

(17:58) that Hindu god really doesn't like Christianity? Then the Christian and the atheist are in the exact same boat, and both are going to Hindu hell, even though the Christian fervently believed in God. Also, even if the god you believe in does exist, that's no guarantee that you picked the right religion to properly follow him. For instance, the god of Christianity is ostensibly the same god of Islam, but Christians insist Muslims will go to hell for not being Christians, and Muslims insist Christians will go to hell for not being Muslim. So what

(18:32) if your God does exist, but he favors the Muslims? Then the Christian and the atheist are in the same boat, both bound for hell. Now, if you really want to look at this from a gambling perspective, a wager-placing point of view, then to tie yourself to one God belief is clearly the worst bet. Let me explain. So let's say you start off with the same basic setup as Pascal's wager. Let's say there's a 50/50 chance that God exists and that God doesn't exist. I don't think that's anywhere close to the actual odds of both options, but fine, I'll give you

(19:09) that one. Well, if it turns out that God does exist, now you have to figure out which God exists. Using the same logic of equal odds for all options, then we have to divide the "God exists" side into all of the different possible gods that could exist, and that's somewhere in the vicinity of 4,500 gods that humans have believed in and worshiped since we created theism in the first place. That's if the god that exists is actually one of the ones humans have conceived of and not something totally different. This lowers your odds to

(19:44) having selected right to about one in 9,000 since you only had a 50% chance of being right about any God existing in the first place. My odds of being right that no God exists is still one in two. You don't have to be a Vegas odds maker to understand that atheism is the safer bet here by a country mile. The teleological argument says that stuff in the universe seems to have a purpose, so that means the universe must have had a designer. If you found a machine lying around, you would assume that somebody designed the machine, so

(20:18) the teleological argument tries to argue that the universe works like a machine, so somebody must have designed the universe. Why do attempts to exemplify the teleological argument always fall back to man-made objects and then compare them to the universe? A machine, whatever that machine may be, is a man-made object. We already know that it's man-made by the very nature of what it is. Why don't you use something complex that is not decidedly man-made, like a snowflake, for instance? Snowflakes comprise complex geometric

(20:54) forms, and yet we understand how and why they form the way that they do naturally. The ice crystals that make up snowflakes are symmetrical or patterned because they reflect the internal order of the crystal's water molecules as they arrange themselves in predetermined spaces known as crystallization to form a six-sided snowflake. Ultimately, it is the temperature at which a crystal forms, and to a lesser extent the humidity of the air, that determines the basic shape of the ice crystal. Thus, we see long needle-like crystals at 23°F and very

(21:30) flat plate-like crystals at 5°F. The intricate shape of a single arm of the snowflake is determined by the atmospheric conditions experienced by the entire ice crystal as it falls. A crystal might begin to grow arms in one manner, and then minutes or even seconds later, slight changes in the surrounding temperature or humidity cause the crystal to grow in another way. Although the six-sided shape is always maintained, the ice crystal and its six arms may branch off in new directions because each arm experiences the same

(22:03) atmospheric conditions, the arms look identical. So we know that snowflakes, despite appearing complex and intricate enough that we might think they're designed, are actually just the result of natural occurrences that are conforming to the forces at play around them. The reason proponents of the teleological argument are always attempting to compare the universe to something man-made is because obviously man-made objects were made intentionally, with intentional design. And if they can say, "Hey, the universe is complex, and hey, this Maserati is complex, and hey, the Maserati

(22:43) was designed with intentionality," then hey, the universe must have been designed with intentionality too. Or it's a natural occurrence just conforming to the natural forces at play, just like a snowflake. But of course, theists tend to think everything, absolutely everything, including snowflakes, are all designed by God. So there's literally nothing a non-believer could ever point to as undesigned, meaning that the teleological argument in the mind of a theist is an unfalsifiable argument, which means that it should be revised or discarded if one is actually attempting to find truth, because a key part of any hypothesis is

(23:28) its condition of falsifiability. But hey, don't let logic or intellectual honesty get in the way of what you think is a mic drop moment for your position, am I right? Things in nature, like the human cell or the ecosystem of the world, are very complex and they work like a machine. Now, Darwinian evolution can explain why that is, but there are also things Darwinian evolution can't explain, like the four constants of the universe. There are physical constants like the gravitational constant and the electron charge, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force that are perfectly fine-tuned such that if they were even

(24:03) the slightest bit different, the entire universe would immediately collapse in on itself. To say that the fundamental forces of the universe are fine-tuned requires that those forces had a reasonable chance of being different from what they are. If they were any different, the universe would collapse in on itself, as you say. Well, prove that it's even possible for the forces of the universe to be different from what they are. Prove that it's even possible for gravity to have a different constant or for the nuclear force to work

(24:35) differently than it does. We have no idea how to even begin to alter these forces, nor even if it is possible for them to be altered, and we only have one universe to draw data from. So the constants of the forces of the universe being what they are seems to have odds of one in one, or 100%. Near as we're able to tell, there is no chance at all that the forces of the universe could even be different from what they are. So they aren't fine-tuned; they have precisely the only values that they even could have. The ontological argument says God

(25:20) exists because of the way he is. Bruh. Yeah, the ontological argument is the purest theistic in all of apologetics. If you really want to hear RZ ramble about it, go watch the original video, but it all comes down to attempting to define God into existence. God is defined as the greatest being imaginable, and actually existing is greater than not existing, so therefore God must exist. The only retort needed to this flotsam, well, other than "that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," is that definitions are descriptive, not prescriptive. Definitions come from

(26:03) observation and understanding of a thing. We define a fish as a creature that swims, not because we insist upon it, but because we observe it swimming. But you're defining God as a being in which nothing greater can be imagined because that's what you need it to be defined as in order for the ontological argument to work, even though it still doesn't work. That definition is not based on any kind of observation or self-existent reason to put those terms onto the god that you're proposing. Also, I can imagine a being

(26:40) greater than the god you're proposing. I mean, part of your conception of God is that God is unchanging. You went over that back during the cosmological argument: the unmoved mover, the unchanging changer. Well, being able to change is greater than not being able to change. I can imagine a God who is rigid and unmovable when it wishes to be, but can also be infinitely flexible if it chooses. So this super God that I imagine has more free will and more abilities than your God does. But wait, that would just mean that the super God that I'm imagining is

(27:19) actually the god that you're thinking of, right? Since your God is defined as the greatest being imaginable. But no, it's not the same being because you believe that the god that you're thinking of created the whole universe, but the super God that I'm imagining didn't create the universe but instead gave that task to a lesser-powered being, which would be the god that you're thinking of, because delegating to others is greater than being forced to do something yourself. So I have now defined a being that is clearly different from the god

(27:54) that you believe in but is also clearly above and superior to the god that you believe in. But I bet you would say that my definition is flawed, right? Yeah, good retort. Definitions can be flawed, can't they? I mean, it would be silly to insist upon an unproven definition and then insist on that thing's existence based on said unproven definition, right? Do you understand what I'm saying? There is also the argument from personal experience. It may sound silly, but everyone does see the world through the lens of their own personal experience. A lot of people are convinced God exists either because of supernatural events

(28:40) they've seen or because of answered prayers or just coincidences in their life. So this is very good at convincing oneself that God exists, but not very good at convincing other people. Wishful thinking. You misunderstand something that happens and assume it was a supernatural event when it wasn't. Something goes your way and you see it as answered prayer, ignoring all of the unanswered prayers, which is sometimes called remembering the hits and ignoring the misses. Sometimes things go your way, sometimes they don't. Doesn't mean there was any supernatural intervention involved. And then coincidences happen. To

(29:18) think that coincidences are supernatural is to fail to understand probability and the downright inevitability of coincidental occurrences. The transcendental argument basically says without God, nothing can make sense at all. There's a lot of things we assume but we can't prove. We assume that logic works, we assume that there's consistency in the natural world, we assume that truth exists, but we can't prove any of these things scientifically because these are the basic assumptions we need to make to even do science. All of these things make sense if we

(29:49) presuppose a worldview where God exists because then we can say all these other things are grounded in the mind of God. But if God doesn't exist, then we have no justification for the things we assume and everything just collapses. This is sometimes called presuppositional apologetics, or the people making these claims are sometimes called presuppositionalists if you run into them online, and they are as silly as their line of thinking sounds. We don't just randomly think logic works or that there's consistency in nature based on

(30:21) nothing and for absolutely no reason. In fact, we have every reason to think these things. Literally 100% of the evidence that we have indicates these things. Consistency: we assume the same physical constants that we experience right now will be true tomorrow, not because we're basing that on absolutely nothing, but because they have proven to be constant for as long as we've been able to detect, going all the way back to the Big Bang. The constants of the universe have been the same. To think that they will

(30:55) randomly and for no reason change tomorrow, that would be crazy. And it's the same thing with logic. We believe that logic works because, well, logic works. It's always worked. It has never not worked. So why would we think that logic will suddenly stop working tomorrow for no reason? Not only do these things always work and always have worked, we don't even know how they could ever possibly change. So for the unchanging, unchangeable brute facts of how the universe works to continue to do so, well, that's not indicative of some kind of supreme

(31:36) supernatural power. That's exactly what we would expect to be the case in a naturalistic universe conforming to the natural forces at play. Now, if those constants were to suddenly and inexplicably change, that would be evidence for an all-powerful supreme being because it would take such a being to cause these things to change, to cause the constants of the universe to suddenly alter where they never have before. But that's never happened now, has it? And as far as truth exists, which was something else you said that we sometimes use as a basic assumption, that's a philosophical question. There

(32:20) are plenty of philosophers who have spent their lives questioning the very nature of the existence of truth or what even truth means, or is there capital T truth or lowercase t truth, and what do those terms mean? I'm not going to get into that here. Suffice it to say, the only grounding we need for the axioms of a naturalistic universe are that those axioms work, and they have always worked, and we have every reason to think, based on experience, that they will continue to work. If they ever appear to change, we'll change those axioms accordingly, but we

(32:56) don't need to appeal to a supernatural, undemonstrated God being to say that the universe works the way that it works and will continue to work that way into the future. There is the argument from the mind or consciousness, which says consciousness cannot be explained naturally. Generally, the atheist explanation of consciousness is that our brain is just a very advanced biological machine, but unlike our minds, machines can be reduced to their parts. Now, our brain can be reduced to its brain cells, but that's not the same as the

(33:25) experience of consciousness. For example, you could find a part of our brain that sees the color yellow, but that's not the same as the experience of seeing yellowness. You cannot study consciousness scientifically because one can only observe one's own consciousness. Consciousness and experience are two different things. Consciousness is what we call a collection of functions and processes that our brains carry out. Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain resulting from the communication of information across all of its regions and cannot be reduced to

(33:58) something residing in specific areas that control for qualities like attention, hearing, or memory. When you talk about experiences like seeing the color yellow, you're really talking about how one function affects other functions, turning sensory data like vision into memory, or how that sensory data might trigger emotional reactions, like what if you weren't seeing the color yellow but were looking at a loved one, and what emotion would that stir in you? Consciousness is the overall canopy term for all of the things that your brain is doing that produces

(34:35) cognition. Experience is how those individual functions interact with each other. You can study all of these things from a scientific, neurological standpoint, and neurologists have been doing so for years. Literally every single thing the brain does that we experience as consciousness or the formation or maintenance of our minds has been mapped and studied from a purely materialistic, biological perspective, and there's nothing that even hints that any of it comes from something ethereal or spiritual or that there's some kind of a soul involved in

(35:12) how our minds work. Then there's the argument from mathematics, which says there's an infinite reality higher than our physical universe. So basic math isn't all that special. For example, the number five corresponds to five apples, and 5 * 3 corresponds to three groups of five apples. But the more you get into advanced math, the more math starts to get disconnected from our world, but it still works. For example, there are real numbers, which are numbers that correspond to real things, but there are also imaginary numbers that are just as

(35:43) mathematically real, but they don't correspond to the real world, which is why they're not called real numbers. But they still exist mathematically, even though they don't exist in the real world. The big problem with this argument is that it's attempting to view mathematics as something self-existent. It's basically a mathematical spin on the teleological argument, that was the one that says complexity exists, complexity indicates design, that cosmic complexity therefore must indicate a God to design it. This argument is basically saying that math exists, math is complex, complexity indicates design, therefore there must be

(36:21) a God who created math to work the way that it does. The problem is math is a language. It is another one of those things that is descriptive, not prescriptive. We use math to describe the universe. The universe doesn't work in accordance with math; math works in accordance with the universe. And as a language, as a descriptive system, math is not self-existent. Like any language, say English for example, English is not self-existent. Even those things that we created words for that might themselves be existent, like the rock or the table, the language itself is just a system of

(37:04) symbolic cues that stand in abstractly for that rock or that table. Math does the same thing. The things in the universe that math explains or describes exist, but the numbers themselves are just symbolic cues. Numbers don't exist as anything other than concepts, and as such, we can make similar symbolic cues that don't reference anything but exist as pure concepts, like imaginary numbers. And trying to use the complexity of math to indicate design in the universe runs into the same problem as trying to say complexity in the universe

(37:39) indicates design. The complexity of the universe can exist entirely naturally and without intentionality, and since mathematics are just a language for describing the universe, it makes perfect sense that math too would be as complex as the universe it describes, and every bit as natural. So that was Redeemed Zoomer rushing through not all, but certainly some of the most common apologetic arguments for the existence of God. And as he closes his video off saying, "And by the way, this video wasn't intending to make any of these arguments. It would take a much

(38:14) longer video to do any of these arguments justice. It's just to give you guys an overview of these arguments so you can look more into them yourselves if you want." And that's fair enough. It certainly would take much longer to flesh out all of these arguments in their entirety, just as it would take longer for me to go over all of the different counters and debunks to all of them. Frankly, I'm fairly sure I've made videos debunking all of these at one time or another, some of them multiple times over. But when I was going through my deconstruction of my faith and I was desperate to find

(38:47) just one single good reason to continue to believe in God, I went looking in the form of religious apologists, and these arguments were not the entirety of what I found, but definitely they are the biggest and most recurrent arguments that I ran into. And even when I was giving them every benefit of the doubt and I so wanted to agree with them in order to maintain my faith, I couldn't ignore the massive holes in these arguments that were big enough to drive a truck through. Every one of them has major problems that basically discount them from

(39:19) serious consideration. The cosmological argument requires a variety of unproven assumptions. The moral argument doesn't know what words like objective and subjective even mean. The teleological argument assumes complexity must mean design when it doesn't. The ontological argument attempts to define God into existence, which doesn't work. The mind argument is just ignorant of basic neurology. Personal experience discounts the unreliability of personal experiences and how prone we are to misunderstanding things that happen to us. Pascal's wager presupposes one God

(39:56) and one religion is the only theistic option. Transcendental precepts assume there needs to be a supernatural grounding to reality when there doesn't. Math arguments for God assume math is prescriptive and self-existent when it isn't. And evidentialism relies on faulty or non-existent evidence. It was my inability to find a single sound argument for the existence of God that was the final nail in the coffin for my waning belief in God, and in the years since, I've still not encountered any arguments for anything supernatural that hold

(40:35) water. Redeemed Zoomer may have just been giving surface-level pitches for these arguments for God for those largely uninitiated to them, but even at the most basic of surface levels, this is still some really weak sauce. And the sad thing is, it's about the strongest stuff that apologists have to offer. And so that is where we'll end things for today. So thanks for watching everyone. Don't forget to like this video, comment, and subscribe so you'll always be notified when a new video comes out. Check me out on Twitter and Patreon if you'd like to support my work directly, my Teespring if you want some Plinky

(41:11) merchandise, all that linked below in the description. Special shout out to my most recent super thanker here on YouTube, TheWeirdo61, Stephanie Spinella, 3925, and Salvi Mike. Until next time, I'm Professor Plink reminding you to keep striving for greater understanding. It's the best way to get wherever you want to go.