Episode #040 ... Superstition
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When we think about superstitious people in modern times, what typically comes to mind are visions of people, you know, walking under ladders, or a black cat crossing your path at night. We usually think about really extreme, silly forms of superstition. You know, people say something like, uh, today is Friday the 13th, and something really bad happened to me today, so therefore, the reason why something bad happened to me is because it's Friday the 13th. It's just an unlucky day. Bad things happen on Friday the 13th.

People will say things like, "An apple a day keeps the doctor away." "The reason why I haven't had to go to the doctor in a long, long time is because I've been eating my daily apple." That's the reason why. Now these are ridiculous examples, but let's dissect the thinking a little bit, because superstition really doesn't need to be this ridiculous.

Let's just think about what superstition is. The dictionary defines superstition as falsely attributing some cause to some effect. For example, it's the apple that's preventing me from ever having to go to the doctor. That's what's causing it. But when you start to think about superstition in these terms, and you think about it for a little while, you start to realize that being superstitious is not just something reserved for pirates and pirates of the Caribbean.

Most people wake up every single morning and live their lives with an incredibly superstitious outlook on the world that they're trying to navigate. And this isn't because they're bad people. This isn't because they're stupid people. They're just mistaken about the true causes of things.

Now what am I talking about here? Well, I could point out the avid sports fan that made an appearance on the Stoic Ethics episode. He goes to the game every Sunday and he has a very deliberate ritual that he executes, completely convinced that at some level, the type of beer that he drinks is going to affect the outcome of the game. But obviously this is just a much more modern and widely accepted version of how the Atlantic pirates were thinking back in the 1800s. But what about superstitions we hold when it comes to something like happiness? Hmm?

If superstition is just the act of somebody mistaking a cause with an effect, then don't many of us walk around with incredibly superstitious beliefs all the time? Just to illustrate what I'm talking about, let's talk about happiness for a second. Most people come into the world and they realize pretty quickly when they're young that they want to be happy. So what do they do? Well, they look around them and they usually try to find people that seem happy and then they try to emulate them.

Now, unfortunately, they usually start in all the wrong places. They find some rich people living on the water. They got a beautiful house. They got a basketball hoop, two cars, fireplace, picket fence, and a big screen TV. And they superstitiously conclude that the cause of their happiness has to be all of these material things that they have. After all, what's the most obvious difference between them and me? It's got to be the jet skis.

So this person goes on thinking this way for a while, and at this point they don't just throw their hands up in the air and resign themselves from ever understanding things deeper. Their thoughts on happiness inevitably evolve, because what they eventually realize is that there are plenty of rich people all around that are completely miserable. There must be something else. It must not be the material stuff that's making these people happy. So maybe they start thinking about things. Maybe this person does some research. Maybe they read a little Socrates. You know, happy is he who is content with the least.

And maybe this person concludes after reading that that happiness really lies in low expectations about things. After all, it seems clear that I get mad about stuff when I have some expectation that's not being met. So if I try really hard to only expect the bare minimum from life, you know, enough food to get through the day, enough clothes on my back and a roof over my head, then anything else that comes my way that goes above and beyond that is just a pleasant surprise. What a great recipe for happiness.

So this person goes on for a while and they superstitiously conclude that happiness must lie in low expectations. One day, maybe they're sitting quietly thinking about stuff and they ask the question, well, what if even my most basic needs weren't met? Would I need to be unhappy in that case? Well, no. Obviously the answer is no. Even if you don't collect enough food to feed yourself for that day, you can still choose to be accepting of that and therefore not be bothered by it.

So this person at that point might conclude, perhaps superstitiously, that happiness actually lies in acceptance. But then what is acceptance? I mean, if you think about it, isn't acceptance a two-part thing? This is something I was thinking about earlier this week.

On one hand, acceptance is accepting everything that's happened in your past, including everything that you have, meaning both in your mind and in your bank account and your storage unit, accepting everything that you have right now. But on the other hand, it's also accepting everything that's going to happen in your future, any future adversity or trials that you could possibly go through. So if acceptance is just accepting the past and the future,

Is happiness really just being fully present in this moment? Is that what we're all shooting for? Is this the reason why we try to make money in the first place? To get to a place where we don't need to worry about any future adversity because we have a surplus? And to get to a place where we don't need to worry about or regret things in the past because we're content with where we are now? Or is this just another superstitious conclusion?

The point of this is that superstition is something that we're all guilty of on an everyday basis. You are not exempt from this, person listening to this. And I'm not just talking about happiness. This is actually a really effective exercise to do. It's one that I try to do every once in a while. Try asking yourself what things you might be superstitiously concluding. You know, mistaking some particular cause for a particular effect. But then again, this is kind of paradoxical, isn't it? Because if you knew what things you were being superstitious about, you wouldn't be doing them in the first place.

Well, the two thinkers we're going to talk about today both attacked superstition. They both attacked this monster that presented itself in different ways. This monster known as superstition was a huge enemy during this time period that we're heading into in philosophy, which is known as the Enlightenment. It was one of the chief enemies of these thinkers.

Let's talk about the Enlightenment for a second. Now, in the context of history, the Enlightenment is actually a very short period of time. And the vast majority of the Enlightenment is made up by three key generations of people that all had very revolutionary ideas on the backs of each other. To me,

This is absolutely incredible. I mean, it just goes to show you how noteworthy and awesome these people were that were coming up with these ideas. If we can look back in history and the period of time that's known as the Enlightenment for humankind took place in such a short period of time, it's incredible. Now that said, there are many different ways that people try to describe the Enlightenment.

But it's kind of a lost cause. I mean, there's far from a consensus when it comes to historians of philosophy. But for the sake of this program, let's talk about a couple of the most common ways that people describe the Enlightenment.

Some historians think, and this is probably the most common perspective, they think that the Enlightenment can be seen as the ultimate awakening of mankind, the moment when science and these new political institutions finally allowed for dogma and tradition and faith-based thinking to get completely tossed out of the way of progress, you know, to finally get this snowball of reason rolling downhill at a critical speed.

But then there's other historians of philosophy that disagree. They say that that snowball of reason that you're talking about that finally reached critical speed, yeah, that's been rolling ever since the beginning of the Middle Ages. These people say that once religion and Aristotle developed their monopoly on human thought way back then, it was back then that reason started chipping away at this giant monolith. You know, they were slowly but surely making chips in the armor, and eventually they brought it all down.

The Enlightenment really should be seen as just the culmination of efforts by brilliant thinkers for over a thousand years. There are other people that think that the Enlightenment was fueled by religion, by the Counter-Reformation of the Church.

There are even people that think that the Enlightenment was propaganda. It was a complete myth, that these thinkers weren't actually that noteworthy, that they were just being propped up by people to add legitimacy to this new way of thinking that was coming around. But regardless of what the truth is about the Enlightenment, it was a massively transformative period of time that is distinguished from others, in my opinion, by the attempt to abolish superstition in all areas of thought.

Now, one person that was attempting to abolish a very specific type of superstition was the guy that we ended the show with last week. His name was Bishop Barclay. Now, Barclay can be seen as someone who's aiming to abolish superstition when it comes to the way that we perceive things with our senses and the natural world. After all, isn't the veil of perception a possible superstition when you think about it?

As we talked extensively about last time, philosophers from the dawn of empiricism have realized this. They realized that what we perceive with our senses is not reality as it truly is. There's some deeper reality underneath, and what we perceive is actually the crude outline of reality that our sense organs create for us. You know, a map of the world. Perfectly useful to us when it comes to survival, but far from actual reality.

This is known as the veil of perception, this problem that we have that we'll never be able to interact with that real reality. The only thing we really have access to is an idea of reality created inside of our mind's eye. Well, Barclay asked the question, why do we even need to assume that? Why do we even need to assume that there's some fundamental reality underneath that's causing all these ideas? After all, the only thing that we truly interact with is this idea of reality.

How can we be sure that our ideas of reality are not the only things that truly exist? In other words, let's end this potential superstition that the cause of our senses perceiving the world in the way that they do is some different, more real reality underneath. Berkeley is what is known as an immaterialist idealist. Now, contrary to people like Descartes and other people that lived around this time who believed the universe was comprised of multiple substances, including mind and matter,

Contrary to him, Barclay was a monist, and he believed that one substance made up the entire universe, and that one substance is mind. He didn't believe in material substances like many other philosophers. After all, as Barclay would argue, he's an empiricist. All knowledge is derived from sense experience, but we never actually experience this supposed more real world that's out there, do we? So how do we know it exists? Maybe the best way to get to the bottom of Barclay is to ask this, uh...

this very generic question that i'm sure we've all been asked multiple times but it's something that barclay had very real thoughts on if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to watch it fall to the ground does it ever actually fall now barclay would say that in theory

If there really was nobody or no thing around to perceive it, then that tree wouldn't even exist. But it doesn't really matter to Barclay because he believed that there is one entity that is always watching that tree. One entity that is perpetually aware of everything in the universe and that entity is known as, you guessed it, capital G-O-D, God. Then he drops the mic. No further questions, Your Honor.

You know, I've thought about this a lot. We could spend a lot of time fleshing out his full system. You know, he has a great theory about true reality is comprised of spirits, both God as the chief spirit and many little finite spirits. But I thought about it, and ultimately I think the real contribution that Barclay made to philosophy is by being the first in this line of thinking. And just real quick, most of the meat of his view of the universe and his story of how it all interacts with each other

The main goal behind it is that it's trying to preserve the idea of God. It's trying to make God not only the creator of the universe, but the all-powerful entity that endlessly provides us with our perceptions and is intimately involved with everything in the universe all the time. In other words, don't even think about saying that God isn't necessary in your worldview, because he is. And in this way, he may have run into the same problems that Leibniz ran into with his monadology.

I personally don't think that it's worth your time to talk about his individual system, at least on its own. I think that we can compare it to future systems, but I think what we really need to do is understand that Barclay's main contribution was that he had a really unique insight that gave rise to this tradition known as idealism. And trust me on this, there are far more fascinating people that we can use to delve deeper into idealism than

and I'm just going to be honest, it's going to be Immanuel Kant. That's several episodes. It's coming very soon, and it's going to be very nice to be able to contrast Barclay's view with Kant's view. But one noteworthy thing that we really do need to talk about about Barclay, one really interesting one, is how did he arrive at this line of reasoning in the first place? I mean, why question the physical world? Why question that reality supposedly exists underneath this outline of the world that our senses draw on?

This is really interesting. He may have arrived at a place where he wanted that underlying reality to not exist because he was trying to preserve the idea of God. And here's where he's coming from. Remember, Descartes and Locke and many other thinkers believed that the universe is made up of multiple substances. One of those substances was matter. Now what Barclay was worried about are what are the implications of saying that matter is a substance? Once we say that matter is a substance where its existence explains itself,

What is to stop the scientific community, and the world for that matter, from just removing God from the equation? I mean, who's to say that if matter is a substance that God didn't just create the world and leave it to work itself out on its own? Berkeley must have initially wanted to create a worldview where matter wasn't a self-sustaining thing. It needed God there to constantly maintain it and interact with it. And what he eventually arrived at when he's in that thought process is, why do we even need to assume this physical stuff exists at all?

Pretty interesting to consider. So ironically, Barclay's fighting on this battlefront to try to end superstition when it comes to the way that we perceive the world. And fighting on a completely separate battlefront, one that was attempting to actually cut the legs out from underneath Barclay and his religion, was a guy named Voltaire. And to sum his views up mildly...

Voltaire wasn't a big fan of the religion of his day. Alright, like many of the thinkers living during times when the church had considerable power, there is a lot of room for interpretation when it comes to Voltaire's precise religious views, and there's all kinds of interpretations. But if you read all of his work, it's pretty clear that the people that have strong opinions on this are cherry-picking from different places in his life. It's a constant evolution throughout his life.

But it's definitely not certain things. At first he declared himself a deist, then throughout his life he kind of changes into a theist. And maybe what I should say is that it's very clear he believed in a necessary, eternal, spiritual being. You know, the god of the cosmological argument. But it's also clear that he took his belief in God way too seriously to ever relegate it to a single religious viewpoint. Especially with all the nonsense that he thought was going on at an operational level during the time that he was alive.

Some people look at Voltaire, they read his stuff, or at least little pieces of it, and they try to pretend that he wasn't, you know, he wasn't that far away from being a Christian. But it's definitely not that cut and dry. And some people would say that it's very clear on the other side, and they would point to passages like this one, which is from a letter that he wrote to Frederick II. Quote, "...Christianity is assuredly the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and the most bloody religion which has ever infected this world."

Your Majesty will do the human race an eternal service by extirpating this infamous superstition. I do not say among the rabble, who are not worthy of being enlightened, and who are apt for every yoke. I say among honest people, among men who think, among those who wish to think. My one regret in dying is that I cannot aid you in this noble enterprise, the finest and most respectable which the human mind can point out."

Now these soft, caring words weren't just reserved solely for Christianity, all right? He said things about Islam that, I mean, if I repeated them on the podcast right now, somebody would die in an embassy overseas if I repeated some of the stuff he said. But he was deeply entrenched in a world that was very different than our world. And just to illustrate how deep this goes and how much he was consumed by this stuff...

it was very common during his time to be anti-Semitic. Voltaire was anti-Semitic, but he was anti-Semitic for much different reasons than everybody else around him. See, most people in the time of Voltaire were anti-Semitic because they looked at the Jews as the people that killed Jesus. How dare they kill Jesus? Let's be mad at them now. And just to give some perspective, Voltaire hated the Jews, not because they killed Jesus, but because they made Christianity possible at all.

That's how deep he was into this, all right? That's like inception anti-Semitism. That's like anti-Semitism inside of an anti-Semitism. And it's easy for us to project our time period onto Voltaire. Why is Voltaire so resistant against the religion of his time?

Well, you got to understand, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam of his day is much different than what they are in 2014, all right? And during his lifetime, they represented something bad to him. They were the very powerful, extremely well-funded, enormously popular embodiments of his two biggest enemies, really, superstition and intolerance. They represented those two things.

It's clear if you actually read his words that his intentions were really good. He wanted toleration when it comes to religion. He thought that God was just much more than what these three religions had laid out so far, and he wasn't satisfied with it. He even goes so far sometimes as to refer to some of them as collections of fairy tales.

Now, next episode, we're going to be talking more about Voltaire. And I'm sorry the episodes have kind of been crisscrossing lately. There's a lot of history I want to go into next time, too, to give us context about the Enlightenment. But right now, I want to talk about one of Voltaire's works in particular that can give us some insight into what it was like in France during his time period. And it's called Letters Concerning the English Nation.

Let's talk for a second about why Voltaire is writing this book in the first place. Voltaire was French, as I just said. France during this time period was kind of just sitting on the sidelines, and they were watching all these nations around them. One nation after another would fall into civil war, and they would rebuild themselves and reform themselves into what was becoming a much more modern structure of government, one where the individual has rights, one where the government's role is to serve those people in various ways.

France hadn't had a revolution yet. England did have a civil war already. They had three, in fact. Remember when we were talking about Thomas Hobbes, we said that he was smack dab right in the middle of the English Civil War. Well, that was one of three that ultimately yielded the better system of government that Voltaire is analyzing here. The point is, Voltaire saw the writing on the wall, all right? The people of France knew revolution was coming. The question was when. And Voltaire saw the model that the English people had erected, and he loved several elements of it.

look after all with their new system from his perspective england was churning out great thinkers left and right i mean john locke francis bacon sir isaac newton etc look why can't france have a couple of polymath geniuses he wanted to create a society that would yield people like that

And this is the problem that Voltaire was faced with when he was writing this book, Letters Concerning the English Nation. Now, the book is made up of a sequence of letters about different subjects, kind of like small essays about them. They're said to be letters. But he actually writes at the beginning of the book, in kind of an advertisement to the reader, that these letters about the English nation are not what you would typically get from something written about the English nation. It's far from a tourist manual, all right?

He makes it very clear. He says, look, don't read these letters concerning the English nation expecting me to tell you how beautiful Stonehenge is or, you know, other various sightseeing excursions that you'd go on if you went there physically. He says he's not there to go sightseeing. He's there on a very clear mission to understand elements of their culture and how they differ from France. And although he would never say it explicitly...

In fact, he wrote this book as though he was someone else. He was in England finding and recording the great things about the English nation to give the revolutionaries in France a sort of framework to work from when they were designing what the country would look like after their revolution. Let's create a society that is going to produce more locks, more bacons, more Newtons, more Hobbes, and others, obviously. Really, if you think about it, this is the best kind of book about travel there is. This is the wisdom that comes along with traveling.

I'm sure we've all heard people say that if you want to become a more cultured or wiser person, one of the really great things that you can do is to go travel around the world, see other cultures. I mean, we've all seen, at least in the movies, somebody come out on the other side of a world tour, and they look like a changed person for the experience. They become wiser. They understand the differences in cultures.

But in reality, it would be very easy to travel the world and not learn a single thing. I mean, you could go from one tourist destination to the next, just looking for the nearest gift shop to try to prove to your friends that you went there getting the decorative coffee mug. And you could come out on the other side not learning a single thing about how cultures differ from yours. This is the kind of information that Voltaire was going there to try to consume. He wasn't going there on a holiday, as they say in Europe. Now, one of the things Voltaire notices right away when he gets there

And it seems like we're running out of time, so I'll have to pick this up next time. But he notices how incredible their system of religious toleration is. This is a big point over his career of writing. And there's a selection of one of the letters where he talks about an experience he had in a marketplace where crowds of people that come from completely different backgrounds and very different religious views are all peacefully shopping and doing business with each other. Just no quarrels at all.

In the writing, he marvels at how everybody just gets along famously when they're doing business with each other, and then they all, at the end of the workday, go home to their respective beliefs and they live their lives as they see best. And it's from here that Voltaire makes a very interesting point about religious toleration in government. He asks himself, why do these people get along so well? What he eventually concludes is that it's probably because there are so many options available.

He says that if there was only one religion allowed in England, the government would be completely arbitrary at that point. I mean, why do we need it at that point? It either becomes unnecessary or it becomes superseded by the religion. He goes on to say that if there were only two religions allowed, then they would be cutting each other's throats, as he said. You know, constantly competing, constantly at odds, jockeying for power.

It kind of reminds me of the way Republicans and Democrats do things in American politics. We only have two choices, really, so they're constantly at odds with each other. But Voltaire says that because there are so many religions coexisting simultaneously, that everyone gets along. And no one religion ever feels that threatened by another religion. Religious toleration may ultimately be a way to attain peace between them. It's a very big idea, and, uh...

Man, I can't wait to talk about Volterra more. I got all excited here. All right, so this is the end of the episode proper, if you will. And if you want to turn it off now, I fully understand. But I need to announce the winner of the Amazon gift card this week. Lots of awesome entries, by the way. And I want to let you guys know I'm saving several of them as backups for future weeks, like if they go along really well with whatever episode we're doing on that week.

But that said, I'd like to thank everyone who asked me questions this week, and I would like to beg you to please keep sending them. We're giving out a new Amazon gift card every single week, so keep coming up with them. Keep sending them in. Have your entries in for this week before next Monday evening, and I look forward to hearing from you.

All that said, the winner this week is @JessicaMMore. She asked over Twitter, "I am Steven West. Could you assess Bill O'Reilly's proof of God's existence using the tides? My husband, I love your show!" Well, of course I can! And thank you, by the way, for the compliment. Do you really love my show? Do you guys really love my show? I don't know if you do. But I'd be happy to talk about Bill O'Reilly and his "tide goes in, tide goes out" theory.

In fact, I oftentimes wish that I had a YouTube channel. I think about this sometimes. Like, I feel like if there's something that I'm actually good at, it's identifying fallacies and weaknesses and arguments. It's something I've practiced immensely over the years. And sometimes I look at these people that have YouTube channels where they do that. They take somebody's argument, like Bill O'Reilly's, "Tide goes in, tide goes out," and they break them down and they point out the flaws in them and they argue against it. I feel like I could be really good at that. Don't you guys think? No?

No, I wouldn't be. So yes, I would love to assess his proof of God's existence in quotes, even though I'm pretty sure it's more of a defense of a belief in God. I don't think he's really proving anything. He's just kind of justifying his beliefs. But for anybody who hasn't heard it before, let me find the video real quick. He says it in multiple different interviews, but there's one with Richard Dawkins that I think would work swimmingly for this occasion. There it is.

So here's the video for anybody that hasn't heard it. It's the brass tacks of Bill O'Reilly's tide goes in, tide goes out, proof of God's existence. I should mention Senator Schumer's book is called Positively American.

In the personal story segment tonight, do you believe in God? Increasingly, fewer Americans do. According to a Pew poll, 12% of us do not have a belief in a higher power, up from 8% in 1987, and that group includes agnostics. In Europe, the rise of atheism and agnosticism is stunning. According to a Zuckerman study, in Sweden, as many as 85% of the population are nonbelievers. Japan, 65%. France, 54%. And in Britain, 44% do not believe in God in Great Britain.

Who is now is a man who understands that position, Richard Dawkins, the author of the mega-selling best book, The God Delusion. I think it takes more faith to be like you, an atheist, than like me, a believer, and it's because of nature. You know, I just don't think we could have lucked out to have the tides come in, the tides go out, sun go up, sun go down. Don't think it could have happened.

We have a very full understanding of why the tides go in, the tides go out, of why the continents drift about, of why life is there. Science is ever more piling on the evidence, piling on the understanding. But it had to get there. I understand that you, you know, the physiology of it, if you will, but it had to come from somewhere. And that is the leap of faith that you guys make, that it just happens.

Well, a leap of faith, you don't actually need a leap of faith. You're the one who needs a leap of faith because you are actually, the onus is on you to say why you believe in something. There's an infinite number of gods you could believe in. I take it you don't believe in Zeus or Apollo or Thor. You believe in presumably the Christian god, Jesus. See, Jesus was a real guy. I could see him. Yeah. You know, and I know what he did. And so I'm not positive that Jesus is God, but I'm throwing in with Jesus.

rather than thrown in with you guys, because you guys can't tell me how it all got here. You guys don't know. We're working on it. Physicists are working on it. When you get it, then maybe I'll listen. Well, no, I mean, if you look at the history of science over the centuries, the amount that's gained in knowledge each century is stupendous. In the beginning of the 21st century, we don't know everything. We have to be humble.

we have to in humility say that there's a lot that we still don't know. And you know, being humble is a Christian virtue. Well, of course it is. All right, when you guys figure it out, then you come back here and tell me, because until that time, I'm sticking with Judeo-Christian philosophy and my religion of Roman Catholicism, because it helps me as a person. Ah, that's different. If it helps you, that's great. But that doesn't mean it's true. Well, it's true for me.

You see, I believe that. You mean true for you is different from true for anybody else? Yeah, absolutely. Something's either got to be true or not. No, no. I can't prove to you that Jesus is God. So that truth is mine and mine alone. But you can't prove to me that Jesus is not. So you have to stay in your little belief system. You can't prove that Zeus is not. You can't prove that Apollo is not. I saw Apollo, man. He was down there. He's not looking good. Now...

We also differ in the sense that you feel that religion has been a bane, B-A-N-E, to civilization, and I feel atheism has. And I will point to the worst mass murderers in modern times, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, all confirmed atheists, all people who wanted to wipe out religion. Now, I know you can point to the Crusades and you can point to Al-Qaeda right now. I mean, it's there, and there's no question.

But I say I'm thrown in with the founding fathers of the United States, which saw religion, spirituality as a moderating influence, as a good thing if people embraced the true tenets. The founding fathers of the United States were secularists above all. Some of them were religious, some of them were not, but they were above all secularists who believed in keeping church and state separate. They had to because of the oppression in Europe. That was what they were, precisely. Almost all of them.

They all said a prayer before their deliberations. In their letters, and I have almost all their letters, they all referenced the deity. Our Declaration of Independence references heavily. But they saw it as a moderating influence because the federal government at that point couldn't control

the country and they said you know people follow jesus then the country's going to be better it may well be a moderating influence as for hitler and stalin and so on i mean of course hitler by the way was a roman catholic no he never was he was raised in that home yeah well he rejected it early on we can we can dispute that um stalin was an atheist no question uh but

Stalin did the bad things he did not because he was an atheist. I mean Hitler and Stalin both had mustaches, but we don't say it was their mustaches that made them evil. I don't think they had any moral foundation, any of those guys. I will say... I don't either. Your book is fascinating and congratulations on your success. Thanks for coming on in here. Thank you very much indeed. Wow.

I honestly forgot how crazy it got. The reason Bill O'Reilly's argument is so ridiculous is because it pretends to prove the existence of the Christian God. I'm going to break this down and really explain why I think that. With his tide goes in, tide goes out, he doesn't ever really even come close to presenting a case for why it's reasonable to assume the existence of the Christian God. He just gives his own pathetic...

fallacy-ridden hackneyed abortion of the cosmological argument trying to prove the existence of a completely different God and then hoping that you don't notice. And look, this is why if somebody says to you that Bill O'Reilly is a philosopher, you know, people ask me all the time, who are the modern-day philosophers? The modern-day philosophers are the modern-day philosophers. Look them up. Bill O'Reilly is not a philosopher. And if anybody ever says to you that he is,

I want you to do yourself a favor. Find the nearest piece of paper and roll it up into a circle and just grab them by the back of the neck and say, "No!" Swap them on the nose. "No, no, no!" I mean, philosophers in the 5th century BC, in antiquity, were thinking about issues clearer than Bill O'Reilly is thinking about them in 2012 or whenever he recorded this video.

But look, he doesn't care. This really doesn't even matter. Bill O'Reilly isn't paid to be a philosopher. He doesn't actually care if his argument holds water at the end of the day. His job is just to get through the next 60 seconds of television and to keep people's eyeballs glued on the television screen. He doesn't actually care if his argument is worth anything.

You know, I'd like to preface all this by saying a couple things. I like Bill O'Reilly, all right? And you guys can hate me for that. But I don't dislike the guy personally, and I don't even dislike what he does. I feel like he's widely misunderstood by people. I feel like people see little snippets of him, or they see him hold one ridiculous fallacy-ridden position, and they think that that's who he is. They think he's a moron, and they jump to a conclusion, and they don't like him on a personal level. But you gotta love what he does, all right? If you watch him for a while...

And look, let's not, let's call a spade a spade. I don't watch Bill O'Reilly on a regular basis. But if you watch him for longer than a couple weeks, what you eventually realize is that as the host of a show on cable news, he takes a lot of unfavorable positions. He puts himself in bad positions against people that are supposed experts on some panel, and then he defends those positions. And he may not actually agree with all the things that he says, but he gets the discourse started, you know?

So if you think of Bill O'Reilly as a catalyst for discourse, or as a person that's getting discussions going, how can you not like what he's doing? I mean, after all, what would I have to rail against today if Bill O'Reilly didn't say this completely ridiculous thing to Richard Dawkins a couple years ago? Now we can talk about it and point out the junior high level flaws in the way that he thinks about things.

Alright, but now that I'm done saying what I think about him personally, let's take the personal element out of this altogether. Because my job today is to do what Jessica Moore asked me to do. And that is to rebuke his arguments that the tide goes in, tide goes out, therefore God exists. Now I'd just like to preface all of this with the fact that I would consider myself to be an agnostic. I'm not trying to attack the views of Christians around the world. Look, especially ones that are intelligent enough to listen to this show. Alright, you guys are fine.

I'd just like to make it clear, I'm not trying to attack what you believe. I'm trying to attack what Bill O'Reilly believes. That's what I've been asked to do.

Now let's talk about the first thing that Bill O'Reilly says to Richard Dawkins in this video. Okay, he starts out by saying, I think it takes more of a leap of faith to believe what you believe in than to believe what I believe in. Because of nature. You know, I just look around and I just can't believe that we just lucked out that all this happened. How convenient that all this just arose out of happenstance. It just erupted out of nothingness one day.

I just don't think it could have happened. Tide goes in, tide goes out, sun goes up, sun goes down. Never a miscommunication. How do you explain it? You know, you believe it just happened one day. And I think that's more of a leap of faith. His basic argument is that it's more of a leap of faith to believe that the universe just arose intelligently out of nothing as opposed to it being created by some force.

So let's take Bill O'Reilly in bite-sized chunks, because I honestly think this is a tactic that he uses. He throws so many fallacies out there in rapid-fire succession that people just kind of listen to him, and they're disoriented, and they're in this fog because they don't know which one to attach themselves to and to try to disprove first. I honestly think it's a tactic that he uses. He uses so many fallacies all the time to just disorient people.

And if you wanted to take just this two-sentence block and you wanted to identify exactly what fallacies he used, one would be the appeal to probability, right? Because something seems like it probably would be the case, it therefore is the case.

And the other one that he uses is, oh yeah, of course, one of my favorite fallacies to talk about. The always delightful fallacy of false equivalence, where he takes two things that have a few qualities that are similar to each other, and he pretends because of those similarities that they are identical things to each other.

So if you look on YouTube and you try to find these religion versus science debates that they have, they got a bunch of them, and all of them are some variant of one of the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse, as they're called, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, and they're pitted up against various cardinals and bishops and religious authorities. If you look up those debates and you watch them, this distorted argument that Bill O'Reilly puts out here is one of the most common ones that you're going to find.

What Bill O'Reilly is doing here is creating one of the most abhorrent false dichotomies that I've ever seen a functioning adult make. And he does it on live television. Bill O'Reilly is a self-proclaimed Catholic, and he believes in the Christian God. And what he's saying to Richard Dawkins is that as a self-proclaimed atheist, the only thing that he can claim to believe in is the alternative viewpoint, that something came from nothing.

Bill O'Reilly talks about going outside. He looks at things in nature that seem to be perfectly ordered. Perfectly ordered for humans to exist in, right? Things like tide goes in, tide goes out. Sun goes up, sun goes down. Never a miscommunication. And he concludes that, well, I just don't think we could have gotten that lucky. Why does this seemingly ordered framework that we call nature exist like this?

Now in this case, the words nature and universe are completely interchangeable. For Bill O'Reilly to ask the question of why an ordered nature exists, which is what does exist, he's asking why does the universe exist? Then he goes and points out that it takes a much larger leap of faith to believe that it just happened, that it just erupted out of nothingness one day, than to believe that something created it.

Something created it. Now I'm gonna come back to that, but I'd really like to wallow in this for a second. I want you guys to realize that the real warped part about the way that Bill O'Reilly's arguing here is that he's using this, "I think something created the universe," to then justify every single other thing that he says throughout the remainder of the video. Him making the case that something created the universe is supposed to add legitimacy somehow to the God that Bill then defends and speaks on behalf of for the rest of the interview.

Well, let's talk about the philosophy behind this, right? Let's talk about this very interesting and intelligent question that they're talking about, about the beginning of the universe. Did it arise spontaneously or was it created by something? And when we ask the question, why is the universe here? Or what caused the universe to come into existence in the first place?

You can obviously believe in many things, but there's far from a consensus on this matter when it comes to philosophy or science. It should be said that science definitely seems sold on the idea that the Big Bang is what happened at the beginning of the universe, but they don't really know why it happened or what caused it to happen. They're still working on those questions. But if you wanted to try to arrive at this mystery on your own,

There are two common positions you could take in the modern world that are definitely going to leave you intellectually respectable at the end of the conversation. Now, one of those positions is the one that Bill O'Reilly is attaching to Richard Dawkins in this interview. That position would be, as David Hume pointed out, as many other thinkers after him obviously pointed out, they ask the question, why does the universe need a cause in the first place? Don't we just assume causality when it comes to everything?

I mean, yeah, on the surface, it's a very counterintuitive thing to say. It doesn't make any sense to us as humans. But if we just completely discount the possibility that the universe didn't need a cause, that it might have just sprung into existence spontaneously, aren't we projecting our humanity onto the universe there? Why should we do that? I mean, we're half a chromosome away from a chimpanzee. Okay?

Can we really expect that we're born into the world with all the hardware we need to fathom the origins of the universe? The universe is much bigger than us as humans, and this point of view would say that we should suspend judgment on it. Let's not assume that it needed a cause.

Now, the other way of thinking is to believe that some sort of creative force brought the universe into existence. And the thinking behind this one has to do with the giant causal chain. And just real quick, let me explain what I'm talking about there. We all needed a cause to come into existence. Everybody listening to this. I needed a cause. And that was my parents many years ago. That fateful evening. I'm not going to...

Let's stop talking about that. You needed a cause, your parents needed a cause, their parents' parents needed a cause, Charlie my dog needs a cause, every blade of grass needs a cause, a rock, every moose frolicking around in the Yukon Territory needed a cause. If you go back all the way to the very beginning of the universe, then it stands to reason that if everything in the universe needs a cause in order to come into existence, why should the universe as a totality be any different?

These people argue that there must be some sort of creative force behind the origins of the universe. Now, as humans, this makes total sense to us. Like I just got done describing, we see it all around us. Things need a creator to be brought into existence. And this seems to be the point that Bill O'Reilly is arguing for, that something created the universe. But hold on a second. This is far from proving the existence of the God that Bill O'Reilly has in mind, right? Let's make this very clear right now, all right?

There is a massive, massive distinction between making a case for some sort of creative force behind the origin of the universe, you know, some metaphysical faceless blob that brought all of this into existence, this ordered nature,

There's a big difference between proving that something created the universe and calling that something God, as Plato and many other philosophers did. There's a big difference between that and proving that that something is also a monotheistic God, a God that knows you by your first name, that has a plan for you, that intervenes and changes the course of history from time to time, that he has a set of behaviors that he wants you to follow, that has hands and a voice and all sorts of other things that Homo sapiens have, this anthropomorphized vision that the literature talks about.

that created this entire universe as some sort of elaborate moral proving ground. And depending on how well you navigate the adversity and temptations and whether you're nice to people that he throws your way, that determines whether you're going to get into the big VIP box up in the sky or whether you're destined to perpetually burn in hell like a ham and cheese hot pocket in your microwave. Big difference, all right? And what Bill O'Reilly is doing here in this argument is he's camouflaging himself.

He's pretending that the argument that he's having with Richard Dawkins in this video is the old intellectually respectable argument of, well, I believe the universe was created, and you believe that it just appeared out of nowhere, and I'm the crazy one? Huh? No, Bill. You're not crazy. But you are incredibly misleading to everybody watching you, and by the way, right there, you just used the appeal to probability fallacy to try to prove your point.

You aren't providing the existence of the Christian God, which is the one you spend the rest of the interview defending and speaking on behalf of, again. Bill O'Reilly is pretending that by making a case for why it's plausible that the universe was created, he therefore proves the existence of all the rest of the stuff he talks about in the video.

This is the fallacy of false equivalence that I was talking about. And there's obviously much more for Bill O'Reilly to prove on his side than what he's pretending there is. And make no mistake, this is a tactic, right? He's counting on you to not notice. He needs you to not catch this fallacy in his thinking.

You know what, I've rambled about this for too long, let's move on. So he's talking to Richard Dawkins later on in the video, and Richard Dawkins asks him the question, "Which god do you believe in?" I assume you don't believe in Thor, or Zeus, or Apollo, or any of the other thousand-plus gods that have been presented throughout human history. And Bill O'Reilly kind of cuts him off and he tells him which god he adheres to, and that is, he says, "Jesus. That's who I believe in. See, Jesus was a real guy. I could see him. I know what he did."

Now, I'm not positive Jesus is God, but I'm throwing in with Jesus rather than throwing in with you guys because you guys can't tell me how it all got here. You guys don't know. Now, again, if I was on the debate team here and I had to identify exactly which fallacy is in this statement that Bill O'Reilly just made,

Well, it's actually very easy this time. It's one of the most common fallacies that people use in arguments, especially if they have a double-digit IQ. And the exact type of logical fallacy that he used is called the argument from ignorance. It's the idea that because something hasn't yet been proven false, that that somehow, in his mind, in some twisted way, adds legitimacy to your beliefs, no matter what they are. So to take a page out of Richard Dawkins' book here, you know,

You haven't proven to me that the Easter Bunny doesn't exist yet. That doesn't mean that a giant fluffy rabbit hops around from house to house in April. But I think the more important thing is that if you just look at what Bill is saying here, he's absolutely right. Scientists do not know why the universe is here. They don't. But here's the kicker. Neither does Bill.

The ridiculous notion that because you don't know something, that thereby gives you carte blanche to fabricate some grandiose story to explain it and then hold it over everyone's heads and try to get them to act a certain way. It's completely absurd. All right?

By the way, this is such a bizarre way of looking at the world just as it is. I mean, knowing is just so important to him. It's not just having enough working knowledge to navigate the world, but total knowledge. That's what he needs. Doesn't matter where the information comes from or whether it holds up to scrutiny. Total knowledge. That's what we're going for. Otherwise, he feels really insecure, doesn't he?

He's so terrified of not knowing something that he's willing to just pick something and choose to believe it. The sad thing is, this is exactly what people do with their political beliefs a lot of times, and really their beliefs about most things.

At their core, they really want to feel like they know everything about something, right? But that's a really long process. That's very hard to do. It's a long, hard road of reading and thinking about stuff and admitting that you were wrong before and, you know, being humble. So instead what they do is they try to find some oversimplified take on things. It's a catch-all. And then they believe that it's the truth.

It's much easier to convince yourself that you believe everything than it is to go through the long, hard process of knowing one single thing. It's crazy how that works, and people fall into this trap of lazy thinking.

Let me move on. So the rest of the video is a conglomeration of Bill O'Reilly focusing on unrelated things as though they actually add legitimacy to his initial claim that the Christian God created the universe. Now, I actually watched several videos where Bill O'Reilly talks about his "tide goes in, tide goes out, sun goes up, sun goes down" theory, and he sums up his thoughts about the problem he has with science as a mechanism for arriving at truth pretty nicely in one where he says, quote,

My problem is that science doesn't advance the human condition in any moralistic way." The reason he holds Christianity higher than science when it comes to arriving at truth is because it aims to advance the human condition in some moralistic way, and that's a good thing for society. So what he's saying is, as long as something aims to advance the human condition in a moralistic way, he believes it to be true?

I can't believe that. I've watched way too much Bill O'Reilly to actually believe what he's saying here. I think he's mistaken about what his criterion of truth is. Just the other day, I heard him talking about Pythagoras on his show and Pythagoreanism. They aimed to advance the human condition in a moralistic way, and I don't see Bill O'Reilly dressing in a tablecloth and looking for numbers in the world. The gods of ancient Greece, Orphism, they aimed to do the same exact thing, and I don't see him following them.

You know, I even think about this. There are religious viewpoints that are mutually exclusive that both aim to advance the human condition in a moralistic way. So how can that be a criterion of truth? Islam claims to advance the human condition in a moralistic way. Why doesn't Bill O'Reilly believe in them? I'll tell you why he doesn't. Because that's not actually what he uses to determine what is true. I think what he meant to say is that I believe that this is true because I want it to be true. And when I follow the set of behaviors it tells me to, good things happen to me.

But here's the problem with that. You could apply that to anything. I mean, right now, I live in a world where children go to sleep starving every night in third world countries. I don't want to live in a world where children go to sleep starving every night in third world countries. I don't want to live in a world where, when they're going to sleep hungry, cans of Dinty Moore stew don't just magically appear in front of them so that they can eat. So does that mean that the cans of stew magically appear just because I don't want to live in a world where they don't?

What I want the world to be has absolutely nothing to do with what it actually is. And really, if you boil this down, what Bill O'Reilly is doing here is...

High school debate team tactics of the first degree. Let me break down step by step what Bill O'Reilly did in this video. And now all you guys can go out there and make millions having your own show on a cable news network, because apparently that's all it takes. Step one, make a completely unfounded statement. Step two, proceed to argue about something only quasi-related to it that has much more merit and is easier to defend. And then step three, pray that people didn't get much sleep last night. Pray that they don't notice the shell game that you're playing with them.

But I got plenty of sleep last night, Mr. O'Reilly. And so did you guys. You know, I've rambled about this for too long. Talk to you guys soon.