00:07:26.460built on the backs of the eons of human history i think it would propel us towards the answer yes
00:07:36.460um i don't think that it may evidence is a hard word because the the standards of evidence are
00:07:43.300different than the standards that make us believe something to be true or false evidence is
00:07:47.900in my understanding of evidence makes it completely rock solid and i just don't think
00:07:52.240the metaphysical works that way um uh what could you explain what you mean by evidence because i
00:07:58.020think evidence is anything that increases the likelihood of proposition is true okay i like
00:08:02.140any like one percent is still evidence okay so i would say that the majority of human history
00:08:09.420accepting the existence of belief in metaphysics would make it you know would be at least one
00:08:18.740percent in the favor of there's probably something to it i think respecting the wisdom of our
00:08:24.660ancestors is a good place to start on believing in accepting truth i think listening to people
00:08:33.460that you respect and that you understand have a relationship to where you understand where they're
00:08:38.020coming from and them sharing their experiences with you of metaphysical reality would lead me
00:08:46.260towards placing credence in it as a concept and specifically and this is something that i always
00:08:52.820suggest to people when they come from a an atheist or an agnostic background
00:08:59.860is when you start any form of ritual work or any any prayer or any offering
00:09:05.540i don't feel that you have to go into that with a firm belief but i do ask that people go into
00:09:10.100that with an open mind and an open heart and that they reach out and that they see what happens
00:09:14.900and very often people feel very much like in a way something reached back and i i certainly
00:09:21.300felt that to be true in my life but the main question is like how do you differentiate
00:09:30.980imagination from reality because when you say like you felt something reach back when i watch
00:09:35.940a scary movie at night and i have the lights out i i feel like there's something in the dark looking
00:09:42.020back at me even though there's not i can go over there turn the lights on nothing's there and so
00:09:46.500we humans have these sensations of a hyperactive agency detection where we'll
00:09:51.940we'll feel agency in things that don't have agency people think that a monster under the bed shot guy
00:09:59.220lurking in the shadows um the lion in the bushes like if you hear rust in the bushes you're afraid
00:10:05.140because you think it's a lion when it could just be the wind um and the group of people who thought
00:10:12.020it was a lion and ran away every time survived and the group of people who are more skeptical
00:10:16.980and they're going to wait to see if like wait for a scientific test to find out if it was a lion
00:10:21.300were the ones who got eaten and so our inbuilt evolutionary biases give us this tendency to
00:10:27.700think there are agents in lots of things where there is no agency like a monster under the bed
00:10:34.020and so why would this be an example that's different from that or if we know that this
00:10:39.780is the case how do you filter out those examples where we do know it's just our psychology playing
00:10:45.220tricks with us well i think a lot of that comes with maturity and experience i think that you
00:10:50.740know whatever age or period of human development those fundamental instincts get get honed you know
00:10:59.140i think when somebody first goes in the woods the first time then yeah every rustle in the bushes
00:11:04.180must be some animal either it's what they're hunting or it's what's hunting them or
00:11:08.420certainly but the more seasoned you are the more often you're in the woods the more you can
00:11:12.420differentiate what rustling sounds like a big animal what sounds like a squirrel what might
00:11:17.620just be the wind and i think the same is true for for the others if you're watching a scary movie
00:11:22.340you're artificially stimulating that uh that impulse within yourself to feel like you're
00:11:28.660being watched but very often it's a very valuable skill if you find yourself in public and you feel
00:11:33.140like someone someone's watching you i would say chances are somebody probably is
00:11:39.540so i don't think you ever shut those things off i think you use your dis or i i don't think it's
00:11:44.820good to shut those things off i think it's good to use your discernment over your life and your
00:11:49.380life experiences and you know hone those and keep you know hone those towards the directionality
00:11:57.220science would typically say that since we know that that methodology is unreliable that our
00:12:04.420brains can't really tell the difference very well we can't count that as evidence we just go
00:12:08.040like nope it doesn't count we got to find some different way to assess is this a reliable
00:12:13.740sensation or is it a figment of our imagination that's we have novel testable prediction double
00:12:19.000blind studies control groups these things have over time been able to filter out which things
00:12:26.620are just human imagination in which things are correspondent to reality and so from my perspective
00:12:33.660i would require something more along those lines rather than um feelings that we have
00:12:39.980because i don't know of a reliable way to hone those feelings and contexts
00:12:45.300that have ever worked or ever been able to correspond to those higher level tests that
00:12:51.520science does because when people say um that they can hone their psychological skills in such a way
00:12:58.480to detect um astrology homeopathy uh dowsing etc etc it always fails we tested against science
00:13:06.460double line control studies always fails and so i've never seen cases where simply being able to
00:13:12.720hone psychological skills has given anybody any access to the fundamental nature of reality
00:13:18.900um beyond chance essentially um and so i would go ahead go ahead oh no what i was going to say
00:13:27.720with that is but we do every day on things that we trust that we don't require evidence for
00:13:35.040um we deal with relationships with people to where we build trust relationships based on our
00:13:41.140experience of that person and oftentimes based on our intuition based on past experiences on
00:13:49.220whether we feel we can trust a situation or not and uh we've learned to use that and it's certainly
00:13:56.660not infallible but i think that people have learned to use that in a way that's been very
00:14:03.700beneficial it's not always right but i think that it's been a useful tool and on the scientific
00:14:11.060studies um and i don't claim to be any sort of a scientist that's that's certainly not my claim
00:14:16.980But I found very often that. As a premise, I don't. I believe you can't out science truth. Truth exists and science is an attempt to understand or to express truth. But things are true whether we're currently able to scientifically quantify or explain them or not. True things are true objectively, I think.
00:14:43.460um and so i think that by whatever tool you use to come to them the the important part is that
00:14:51.340you're you're accurate not that you can you know show your work as you'd say in math class
00:14:57.200i'm not sure i understand that you can't out science truth i think that's an interesting
00:15:03.740catchphrase um but it's like knowledge is a justified true belief it's how it's defined in
00:15:11.720philosophy. And it's not just a true belief. So even if you believe something that happens to be
00:15:17.000correct, unless you have a justification for it, then it wouldn't be counted as knowledge. It'd be
00:15:21.980called a lucky belief. So like if they use this, the example of a broken clock, broken clock is
00:15:30.600right twice a day, but it doesn't mean you should trust the clock. The clock is pretty unreliable
00:15:34.86099% of the time. And so the ability to show your work, as you put it, and to have some kind of
00:15:41.920rational justification for your belief is an integral part of what counts as knowledge. And
00:15:47.480without that, it doesn't seem to count as knowledge at all. And so I don't think I would agree that
00:15:52.940simply believing something that's true is rational. Because in order to have a reason to believe it's
00:16:01.560true. You have to have a justification, not just happen to be right without a justification.
00:16:07.600But track record is a form of justification. If someone happens to be lucky over and over and
00:16:16.320over again, the more often that they're lucky, and I use lucky to buy into your analogy, but
00:16:21.720the more often that they're lucky, the more reliable their luck is, I'd say.
00:16:27.000whether you know I think that we live in a day and age that isn't entirely fair to you either
00:16:35.440in this because of the corporate nature of a lot of science you can find studies that tell you
00:16:43.320very often contradictory facts because of parameters and because of you know chicanery
00:16:52.880that's gone on in the studies which makes it really hard to rely on that
00:16:59.840well i'm not sure i would agree i'd say that there are different studies that are done from
00:17:04.400different perspectives to highlight different facts but none of the facts are contradictory
00:17:08.160they all agree they just seem contradictory when you phrase it in a certain way like if you say
00:17:13.840that the number of people who have died from malaria in the past 100 years in a particular
00:17:20.000city has gone up by 600 percent and and that sounds like a lot but really it was just it went
00:17:26.000up from one person to six people um if the study of the focus if the focus of the study is the
00:17:31.920percentage that it's going up obviously it looks higher than it is but it's still true that went
00:17:35.360up 600 it's just a smaller number than what you would expect we've we've seen this recently in
00:17:39.360the with the covet studies though depending on if they were as the recording data number of deaths
00:17:46.480from covid record depending on where you're at people who died with covid people who died
00:17:53.200of complications that may have included covid and people who you know legitimately died of the
00:17:58.640disease depending on the study that you read those numbers were radically all over the place
00:18:05.120and that's just with a very cursory you know analysis that i was able to do and that's you
00:18:10.000not exhaustive at all. That's because usually whether you die at a particular time, COVID very
00:18:19.840rarely kills you ever. It's comorbidities that kill you. And so COVID is usually never the cause
00:18:24.780of death in and of itself. And so the way that medical professionals assign cause of death
00:18:31.880were standardized by like the CDC. And so if you're using the CDC metric, you give it a specific
00:18:36.400answer, but they're all true. They're all still using the same data. You just have to know how
00:18:41.320to read it. I've known people in the death reporting field that are required to write
00:18:49.600down cause of death COVID when it's a suicide and the person had COVID. My whole point is during
00:18:59.860that we all heard different statistics over and over and over again on the news. The truth is the
00:19:05.960truth regardless whether those studies are honest attempts to tabulate the truth is a question
00:19:13.320and then how close they came to achieving that goal is also a question but i don't think any of
00:19:19.960those are beyond reproach and i think that we saw a vast disparity in that but i i'm not trying to
00:19:27.320debate you about the covid i just wanted to say that science truth is perfect science is not
00:19:35.160perfect science is an attempt towards perfection but the truth is out there and exists and we're
00:19:41.660trying to approach it through different means science being one of those means
00:19:45.500right but i would say that's i don't know of any method that gets closer i think that
00:19:52.760you can't get perfect truth your goal is to have a justification that's the highest accuracy you
00:20:00.820can get. And as far as I know, the most reliable source of justification is science, novel,
00:20:05.000testable predictions. And I don't know of another methodology that comes anywhere near it.
00:20:10.980And so in the case of personal experience, personal experience seems to be incredibly
00:20:16.680unreliable. You mentioned that there are some cases where we do trust our personal experience
00:20:21.220and our intuitions. And that is like, if you saw a murderer or something, that's perfectly
00:20:26.880legitimate evidence in court cases and history where people saw they said somebody killed
00:20:31.700somebody else or whatever historical accounts but in both legal and historical epistemology
00:20:38.960it's never evidence to have a testimony of miracles magic mythical creatures paranormal
00:20:44.380supernatural ufos none of those things are counted as evidence that they actually exist
00:20:49.120because of the prevalence of psychological errors in humanity and so i agree that there
00:20:56.640are cases where you can trust personal intuition and personal testimony in cases of things that
00:21:01.480already have been empirically demonstrated but in the context of things that have no empirical
00:21:05.940demonstration like gods or magic or miracles it doesn't count for anything it's not if you go into
00:21:12.140a court of law and say i saw a ufo they just throw it out or a god or a god's uh killed this guy with
00:21:17.660a lightning bolt or something they just throw it out because eyewitness testimony isn't reliable
00:21:22.720in those kinds of contexts. And so I don't think those would be count as something like science as
00:21:30.220a way to get closer to truth. And science would be the more reliable way to go here, even though,
00:21:36.500of course, you can try to manipulate data and try to manipulate statistics, still going to be more
00:21:40.360accurate than trusting personal experience in this context. I could see why you feel that way. And I
00:21:46.240think some of this is why I initially had the reluctance to use the term evidence, because
00:21:50.840there does tend to be a courtroom standard that's applied and if my evidence is sentencing you to
00:21:58.200harm then yeah the standard needs to be much higher if my evidence is to get you to give
00:22:04.360something a shot that could make your life better the threshold's much lower if i say hey try this
00:22:10.840pizza it's good you risk very little by giving it a shot and maybe it's great my thing that my
00:22:17.320example that I mentioned on ritual is hey if you don't know if you're uncertain or if you would
00:22:22.600like it to be true give it a shot and see if you find truth in it and I think that's the starting
00:22:29.240point so you know the the the premise was is it uh like does it make I think that the that I was
00:22:36.520invited on was like does it make sense to practice house a true and to me it does so the starting
00:22:42.520point of i feel a very strong religious need that need wasn't satisfied by christianity because i
00:22:49.240felt that was morally unjustified yet i still needed to fill it so i looked to my ancestors
00:22:56.360i said what did generations of people like me believe before christ i took that as a starting
00:23:03.880point to develop my own relationship with the gods and my life has dramatically improved
00:23:12.520in proportion to the involvement in Alistair Truth that I've had.
00:23:17.400And I genuinely believe wholeheartedly that when I reach out
00:23:22.960and I participate in the gift cycle with my gods, that I'm blessed.
00:23:27.500And I think that I am satisfied with the payoff in my life
00:23:33.120because of that relationship that I've chose to engage in.
00:23:36.840And so are a great many people that I know that share the faith with me.
00:23:42.520Well, sure. I wouldn't say it's unjustified to practice any particular belief system. I think if it makes you happy, go for it. But I'd be more interested to know, is it true, is my question. And I would want to know, what is the method to differentiate imagination from reality?
00:24:03.040and you mentioned that there's different standards of evidence and uh i would agree like for a
00:24:08.800hypothesis you can use whatever you want you can just shake a magic eight ball you can come up with
00:24:12.560a hypothesis perfectly rational but how do you show does that hypothesis correspond to reality
00:24:19.040and that standard of evidence doesn't correspond to reality is the higher standard the like legal
00:24:23.920standard science standard whatever i don't think you can say something not the standard for engaging
00:24:31.840in an action the standard for imposing that action on someone else might be that higher standard
00:24:38.240but i think we do things at a much lower threshold a lot um there's a saying that i think is
00:24:46.560is applicable to not let perfect be the enemy of good i think when we grapple which
00:24:54.880theologians and philosophers have always done with the bigger picture and the greater meanings
00:25:00.080in life just because we can't arrive at perfection doesn't mean we can't rely or we can't arrive at
00:25:08.640some good things that take us closer than we currently are and improve our lives
00:25:15.680sure but things can improve our lives without being true
00:25:18.720and so the fact that something would improve our lives wouldn't indicate something's true
00:25:22.560it might imply that something is true how is that to me that sounds like uh in philosophy
00:25:33.600appeal to consequence fallacy the fact that something's good or has a good outcome therefore
00:25:37.920it's true doesn't really follow like things can have a good outcome without being true all the
00:25:42.080time um they can but just because it's a philosophic rule of debate doesn't mean that
00:25:54.720it's ironclad um many of those fallacies
00:26:01.920they're a fallacy in the sense that they are not absolute but it doesn't mean they're not good
00:26:06.720indicators um you know appeal to authority an authority of something telling you something
00:26:12.480when you know less about it is a pretty good place to start that something you know there
00:26:17.680may be something to it um i think that's how most humans start certainly as children and young
00:26:23.680adults is trusting people who've who've been there before and who've you know testified to
00:26:28.560it's worked well for them um the benefits that i've received in my life because of my relationship
00:26:36.240with my gods. I'm certain that you could propose many alternate explanations for those things.
00:26:48.660Yet, I have engaged in the gift cycle and I have benefited while doing that. It implies to me that
00:26:57.480the two are related. I see the commonality when others who share my faith have engaged in a
00:27:03.520similar situation. My life is full of meaning that it did not have before. I am a better person than I was before. I am benefited in a great many ways, and it correlates pretty directly with my involvement and my interaction with my gods. One of the things that we see as the gods acting in the world is, is synchronicity. When synchronicity occurs,
00:27:33.920disproportionately or when you notice auspicious things continuing to occur to occur at auspicious
00:27:42.240moments we very much believe that that's the gods you know acting and revealing themselves
00:27:49.440in some way or the ancestors or other metaphysical folks beyond the veil
00:27:57.280certainly there's a million other explanations but when they add up
00:28:01.120and they have a level of consistency that's more credence towards believing that there's
00:28:07.360something intelligent behind them well that's something i would uh have issue with because
00:28:14.480from my understanding appeal to consequence fallacy um coincidences those things are
00:28:21.920things that humans look at and try to find meaning in all the time like when if you look at a clock
00:28:26.480and it says 3 33 pm or whatever you're like oh it's a pattern you see this there's 3 3 3 this is
00:28:31.840special but really is just a survivor bias because you just don't remember all the other times you
00:28:35.920look at the clock and it's like 2 45 or whatever um and so we see patterns and they stick out to
00:28:42.000us in our brains because our brains have been designed to look for patterns and it's not and
00:28:48.560so that we we every time we look at the clock it says 3 33 or something it's like wow this is
00:28:52.560really special but when we actually compare that to um the rest of the data it's not special at
00:28:58.480all it's just it's just we think it's special that those particular instances stick out to us
00:29:03.760um and seem statistically relevant because it's what we remember what what comes to our mind when
00:29:10.080but when we compare it to the actual data it's not statistically relevant and so
00:29:14.560all of those cases where we see these synchronous synchronistic kinds of effects we have to compare
00:29:21.600and say is this really there or is it just our brain seeing things that aren't there so we have
00:29:27.760to compare does the result happen at a higher rate than chance or is it just chance rate um and so no
00:29:34.080we don't i mean you you may want to and you may choose to but we don't have to do that we can take
00:29:40.960those things at the face value that we feel they are we can act accordingly and we can gauge the
00:29:47.600results we don't have to arrive at perfect truth on them in order to do that we can choose to do
00:29:54.400that and we can choose to do it consistently by doing so i think a lot of us have had our lives
00:30:01.040drastically improve well sure i would agree with that i mean i'd say the same thing about christians
00:30:06.720or hindus or muslims or any particular religion they believe in their religious faith they believe
00:30:13.920that they're getting signs from their particular gods and or deities or whatever thing they believe
00:30:20.480in and that gives them sensations of hope and meaning and purpose and guidance that they then
00:30:26.800use to gain an emotional benefit from but i would want to say that until you can show that all of
00:30:34.640the things you're saying are at a higher rate than chance i don't think it's rational to believe from
00:30:39.600my position i want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible
00:30:42.960and if we can take the data that you're presenting and compare it to whatever scientific methods we
00:30:51.260have and show that nope it's just the exact same rate as chance even if it had a benefit in your
00:30:55.520life i'd still think that would essentially prove it to be false because it was just the same as
00:31:00.060chance and so i don't see the connection between the statistical data and the benefit both of
00:31:08.020those things seem to be a dubious basis for belief from my perspective, because I want to believe
00:31:14.100as many true things and as few false things as possible. Well, I suppose some of that's just a
00:31:20.700question of, I don't know, hierarchy of values or what you're shooting for. I mean, certainly,
00:31:28.340I think we would all say that we want to believe true things and not believe false things. But
00:31:32.500as far as the hierarchies of values in people's lives, many of us would say that one of the
00:31:39.680highest values is to have a meaningful life and to be successful in your life, to be fulfilled
00:31:46.940with your family, with your position in your community, with your relationship to the world
00:31:53.100around you. A lot of those things, I think, come before, I'd say, a courtroom standard of
00:32:00.700evidentiary truth for a lot of people. You may not be one of those people, but I do think that's
00:32:05.520true for a lot of us. Would you say that simply because people put it before,
00:32:15.340if we can demonstrate that it happens at the same rate of chance, that it's rational to place it
00:32:21.340before? So like I can put my faith in a lottery ticket or whatever, and I could potentially win,
00:32:26.280but does that mean that i was rational to to buy a lottery ticket i would say no it's the
00:32:32.660probability you're going to win is very very low so it's not rational to buy a lottery it's not
00:32:37.120rational to go to a casino um and the fact that many people gain meaning and purpose and value
00:32:44.800and money from doing this um doesn't mean it's necessarily a good thing so like say somebody
00:32:50.420had the religion of the the Vegas casino and they said I adopted this lucky
00:32:59.780rabbit's foot and I take the lucky rabbit's foot into a casino every time
00:33:03.240I see the stars align or whatever and I win occasionally about a thousand
00:33:07.760dollars and he says that this has benefited his life quite greatly he's
00:33:14.300gotten money he's being unhappiness has become more fulfilled and as a
00:33:19.180scientist i'm going like well that's nice i'm happy for you but if we compare your success rate
00:33:25.200to the success rate of everyone in general the success the ability for you to make a success in
00:33:32.440this particular instance isn't isn't a thing that's outside of the realm of chance some people
00:33:39.360are going to win in fact casinos have to pay out uh in a slot machine has to pay out 80 cents on a
00:33:44.580To back to people and so we know that some people are going to win
00:33:48.720Does that mean that you're lucky rabbit's foot?
00:33:51.760Has some correspondence to reality that it's actually telling us about luck. Well, no, that's no if it was doing that
00:33:58.220Then you'd see some kind of disproportionate amount of success rate not an exactly proportional success rate to the statistical data
00:34:04.240And so if I'm trying to compare which model is a better description of reality
00:34:09.180I think the scientific one is a better description of reality in this context and if I want to believe what's true
00:34:13.600I should probably believe the science one, the science interpretation, rather than the lucky
00:34:17.320rabbit's foot interpretation. And I don't see the difference between that example and
00:34:22.820your faith and other faiths in this context. You know, I think that raises some interesting
00:34:28.900points. You're proposing a data set that's infallible and includes every other person
00:34:40.240that goes into a casino under the same circumstances um but the only variable
00:34:46.800variable being the rabbit's foot what if the gentleman who had the rabbit's foot
00:34:53.520is consistently unlucky in his own life and his life has been a series of failures
00:35:00.480at the moment he gets the rabbit's foot things start looking up and he starts winning
00:35:06.400he goes to the casino he wins more often than he loses gets his life together is successful
00:35:12.640and is happy i would say there's something that has to do with his rabbit's foot and so would he
00:35:17.040and his inability to demonstrate it to you would not make it any less true or any less reasonable
00:35:25.680for him to believe why not because from my perspective it would it would be like if the guy
00:35:34.000believes that it has an effect and he's had this changes like he's unlucky his whole life
00:35:38.720gets the rabbit's foot and he wins occasionally but then we tested against the data and show that
00:35:43.280it's not statistically different from any of the other cases where casino payouts are registered
00:35:51.280that seems like a very good reason for him to doubt in his rabbit's foot rather than continue
00:35:56.320with the belief that it's actually a rabbit's foot or he'd like give the rabbit's foot out
00:36:00.000to other people so you do these people win at this rate or um test different casinos different times
00:36:05.200do a controlled study where he tests has the rabbit foot goes in 10 times doesn't goes in
00:36:10.480without the rabbit's foot and they measure the exact amount of money he gambles the amount of
00:36:14.400money he wins and we do this 100 times in a row why would he be that he's winning and he's happy
00:36:20.880why on earth would he do that um to verify his belief that it corresponds to reality so i would
00:36:28.000say that um if he did that that would prove one way or the other if his belief was true or if it
00:36:36.800was just chance and if he and i would want to know that i would want to be like is this something
00:36:43.680some fact about reality that i'm talking about or that i'm experiencing or is it just a psychological
00:36:49.520phenomenon in my human brain um and that would be important i think for most people well you know
00:36:57.360know, I don't know if it would for most people. I think that, you know, certainly it would for you.
00:37:01.920And I think as a person who's a self-described atheist, I think that, you know, those folks
00:37:09.340probably would be very important for because that is a self-identifier that you guys have
00:37:17.820have chosen to label yourself with. I think for people of faith, not as much. And I don't think
00:37:24.840it's it's due to, you know, gullibility or anything else, I
00:37:29.180think the efficacy of the situation in their life that
00:37:32.940they found to be working works. And by continuing to act as
00:37:41.080though it doesn't, there's a certain amount of impiety in
00:37:44.040that that might negate its continuing to work. And I mean,
00:37:49.040we're talking about a rabbit's foot here to put it in a, I
00:37:52.080don't know, more mundane context. But if you have a genuine faith relationship in your God,
00:37:57.820and it is benefiting you in ways that that you are truly appreciative of, if you are constantly
00:38:03.920trying to disprove it through, you know, whatever, whatever, double blind testing or whatever you
00:38:11.020choose to do, I think in and of itself, that would negate that trust relationship and damage
00:38:19.340the efficacy of your relationship. I've seen a lot of people that, again, make perfect the enemy
00:38:28.240of good and spend their entire life testing to try to get 100% ironclad proof of a belief or
00:38:38.360value system. And I've seen them waste their entire adult life. You know, my uncle's like
00:38:43.380that. My uncle was died at 50. And he was one of those guys that, you know, in the in the 70s,
00:38:49.420he really prided, he really prided himself on always searching and, you know, questing after
00:38:57.060truth or whatever, but his life never improved because of it. He never got any closer to it. He
00:39:05.720just was able to, to his satisfaction, disprove a whole lot of things. He died alone and unhappy
00:39:14.380and unfulfilled. There's a lot of people of faith that when they feel they're in a beneficial faith
00:39:20.820relationship, and they believe wholeheartedly in what they're doing, they don't forever try to
00:39:28.160test that because that's not something we typically do in relationships. And therefore,
00:39:33.700they're happy and fulfilled and have you know very beneficial lives
00:39:42.580which sure i would i would agree that we don't do that in relationships because we
00:39:47.060have examples like if you love your wife or something that's something that's uh like in
00:39:52.660a courtroom something very mundane we have that we saw somebody saw that guy murder that guy or
00:39:56.820saw a dog yesterday going across the street or something but if someone said they had a relationship
00:40:01.460with an alien, or some kind of being from another universe or something, that would
00:40:07.840be very different than saying you had a relationship with another human being from Albuquerque
00:40:16.360And so there's that statement that many scientists, philosophers have used, you should proportion
00:40:22.440your beliefs to the evidence or something along those lines.
00:40:26.540And so if the extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence would be another good one.
00:40:32.480So if you have a claim of a relationship with a being that is beyond humanity and we have no scientific evidence of any such being, then I think that the standard of evidence of you should look for to justify that belief would be higher than one of a claim that you have a relationship with your wife or whatever.
00:40:54.240and i think that the correct epistemology is the kind that tries to destroy all beliefs i like i
00:41:01.900like that i like that analogy you used that we should try to prove it wrong as much as possible
00:41:07.780because we have this inbuilt bias to want to believe things that make us happy and the way
00:41:13.100to overcome that bias is to try to um destroy all the things that make us happy scientifically at
00:41:20.760it's not literally and if we can't do it that's a very good justification to believe it's true
00:41:25.880that's why the scientific method works and i think that more people have been made happy
00:41:30.600because of that method than any other method like this method of trying to destroy false beliefs
00:41:36.120is how we got the penicillin and anti-vaccine vaccines atomic energy nuclear energy wind power
00:41:49.480solar light discoveries like all of these things where somebody said that guy's wrong i think that
00:41:55.960that theory is wrong i'm going to try to disprove it and that's the entire history of science which
00:42:00.920seems to have made more people happier than literally everything else combined ever as far
00:42:04.360as i can tell so one of the points i wanted to make earlier is i think
00:42:19.480coming at it from an objective rather than a subjective angle is yields different conclusions
00:55:34.320it's hard to answer. And it's not because I'm closed off to the concept. I think it's important
00:55:43.440to reevaluate why you believe things perpetually. I think you learn things either way that way.
00:55:50.800It's hard because my faith is very sincere. So it's hard for me to
00:55:54.880imagine a situation where it wouldn't be true for, okay. So for an example,
00:56:00.700when I was a much younger man I did I was a Christian and I believed in Christianity
00:56:07.000but as I mentioned about altitude it's not just believing in the existence of my gods
00:56:12.120it's being in a relationship of loyalty to them well with Christianity it's not that I rejected
00:56:18.300a belief in a deity that ancient Jewish people worshipped and named Jehovah or some variant
00:56:27.040it was because fundamentally i felt the god of the bible was for lack of a better term a bad person
00:56:33.620and if that were the case regardless i did not want to be associated with that person that i
00:56:41.080felt was morally inappropriate so if fundamentally i learned of my gods that all of the things that
00:56:48.680i felt were true about their character were somehow fundamentally untrue or different then i
00:56:54.660that would change the nature of our relationship i don't think it would cause me not to believe
00:56:59.300they exist but it would change the the relationship that we're in in terms of loyalty
00:57:07.780do you not think that the norse gods for example are bad just like the christian
00:57:12.580god is in some sense because they do equally as bad things some sometimes
00:57:16.580no i don't think they do equally as bad things and the other thing is there's no
00:57:21.380So Abraham ism is very unique in the fact that it's a literal faith, and within its own tenants, it says that everything written in the Bible is divinely inspired and useful for variety of purposes, and it's all the word of God, or that the Quran is the word of Allah, or whatever that case may be.
00:57:46.020no our lore is a collection of stories that teach us truth through poetic descriptions of things
00:57:53.380but i don't think it's a chronological listing of specific actions that take place in a in a
00:57:59.860historical sense i think those actions are mythic and take place in mythic time and i
00:58:04.420think they're described in a poetic way um so in that sense i can't hyper analyze a story from the
00:58:13.300eddas and claim that it's you know divine writ and that specifics of our god's behavior is
00:58:20.180inappropriate now there's characters in the eddas that you can like loki every character
00:58:25.700everything that he does is malicious to one degree or another is and is an agency for chaos
00:58:32.660so whether i believe he did the exactness of that that behavior i certainly know that the totality0.60
00:58:39.780tells me he is a force of chaos that seeks to break trust with the iser and so i make a judgment
00:58:46.660that way but i the engagement of whether of the literal truth of a book is i think what makes that
00:58:53.940a very very different standard gotcha um martin asked does matt believe in the separation of church
00:59:05.380state that it should be or that it exists uh that it should be i believe um
00:59:18.340that's a social contract issue in the society that you're in when society was homogenous
00:59:25.540no i think they function as one in the same because i think our gods are fundamentally
00:59:29.700the tribal gods of our people um when you're in a multicultural state like
00:59:36.340many of many modern states i think you've got it you've got to re-examine that
00:59:46.500that's a no you think there should not be separation between church and state
00:59:50.020no it's a condition it's a depends on the condition the homogeneity or not homogeneity
00:59:54.980of the people who find themselves in that state to tomorrow decide america needs to be a religious
01:00:01.380state and then to pick the relatively you know the population that you're going to choose whose
01:00:07.860religion decides it fundamentally violates the relationship that we're all in as americans
01:00:14.340if we were living a thousand years ago and we are all a particular germanic tribe
01:00:19.860then yes that faith should be part of this state that is that tribe and we see that with most
01:00:25.700ancient cultures all right um mr creanian asks matt are your gods be god's beings
01:00:35.220independent of a living mind to think of them yes
01:00:43.620um do they live inside of space-time or like because the christian idea is that's outside
01:00:47.780space time is it like are they like being still in the universe somewhere
01:00:55.780again i i premised earlier i'm not a i'm not a scientist so i don't want to misspeak but
01:03:09.920no name asks what else in your life causes you to have a lower epistemic bar like you do for the
01:03:22.600thoughts? Um, well, I mentioned, um, relationship wise, you, I tend to
01:03:35.500approach a relationship with a person from a place of trust until I know
01:03:41.440different base. My valuation of them on how they've treated me in the past to
01:03:49.840predict how they will treat me in the future. I mentioned I did that with this show. I do that
01:03:57.480with anyone I meet. I do that. I'm assuming this isn't a trick question. I'm assuming this is a
01:04:04.680forthright question. I'm assuming that you're a reasonable person. I'm assuming all of these
01:04:09.740things as an initial assumption because that's my default setting in a relationship. If you were to
01:04:16.620come back on the side with with comments that would that would change that then then I would
01:04:22.140I would change my my setting accordingly gotcha Abigail asked can you read my mind I'm zero
01:04:30.780interested in gods or not but I do have an innate curiosity and yearning and was I born lacking
01:04:36.960colorblinds or something I think referring to it like a god so this would be a great testable
01:04:41.040prediction if you could read somebody's mind that would be great evidence for sure no I I wish I
01:04:45.420I wish I could say yes and prove that to you. That would be awesome. There may be somebody out there that can do that, but I'm not that guy. I would venture, though, if, if you do feel something, but you're uncomfortable with divinity. One thing that I think is very approachable is ancestor reverence towards your loved ones that have passed. That might be fulfilling to you if you were to open yourself in that way.
01:05:15.420Gotcha. Vlad, the stoner asks, do you believe your religion is the correct and true religion and why?
01:05:23.600I don't believe that my religion negates other religions. I think that when there's a religion like Christianity, Islam, or current Judaism, that demand theirs is the one true faith and everything else isn't true.
01:05:41.340that's not what i believe that's not what else the true believes so i don't know how to answer
01:05:48.760your question other than i believe that my faith is true i think that it is the correct
01:05:55.060faith for people of european descent i don't think it negates other faiths except for faiths that
01:06:05.080suggest they're the only truth and i think it negates them in so much as they aren't the only
01:06:11.380truth but up to that extent gotcha uh no name asks so all the bad things yahweh did were poetic
01:06:19.100metaphors or i think he's asking like you could interpret christianity that way just like you
01:06:23.520said like you interpreted your religious belief that way well i don't think that i don't think
01:06:29.380that you can because it's always been a core tenet. Okay, so I don't want to overspeak.
01:06:35.380There are Gnostic Christians that may say that. But if your Christianity means accepting the0.84
01:06:42.340Bible, then the Bible within its own text says, you know, disclaimer, this is all completely0.65
01:06:48.980100% true. And that's always been a foundational tenet of that same with with Islam. I believe0.99
01:06:59.360that Yahweh existed before organized Judaism, and I do believe that it was originally one of several
01:07:07.480Semitic tribal gods. So I think in maybe that very original sense, that corpus of lore that
01:07:16.300we don't have access to, maybe you could take it that way. But I think that in the way that
01:07:21.800Christianity or Islam has been presented to me, they have put themselves at that standard. There0.97
01:07:27.320has never been that claim amongst the religious texts of my faith. Gotcha. Matt asked, so nothing
01:07:36.360could convince you that your gods don't exist, only that they were immoral or change your
01:07:41.120relationship with them? I mean, it's hard to say that an unknown circumstance couldn't happen that
01:07:50.620would you know the curtain goes back like haha it was me all along um I don't know I mean
01:07:57.580the circumstance seems preposterous to me that that something like that could occur
01:08:02.980but I don't want to be so ignorant to say that's not a possibility what I do say is I currently
01:08:09.580feel 100 certain that my gods exist all of the facts of exactly how and exact mechanisms I'm
01:08:19.560up for for you know um refining my understanding of that i don't claim to know all of that but i
01:08:28.840do know that when i reach out to odin odin he a being that answers to odin hears me and um has
01:08:39.320participated in a gifting cycle with me the particulars of that are up for discussion but