Three Arguments for Christianity： Ontological, Moral, and Historical
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Summary
In this episode, I discuss the three steps that led me to believe in the Catholic faith, and why I am a Catholic. I also talk about the problem of "infinitesimal mathematics" and how it relates to our understanding of mathematics.
Transcript
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So about a year ago, the science fiction author, John C. Wright, posted a three-step argument arguing for the Catholic faith.
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And I found it very influential. If I can find the specific article, I'll link down to it below.
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I'd like to provide my own version of that, based upon the arguments, the process that brought me to the Catholic Church.
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And it's the three steps, my three steps, are the ontological argument, followed up by the moral argument, and finally, the historical argument.
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And I've mentioned Gödel's incompleteness theorem before, okay?
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And there's other issues that come along that have the same core problem, inadequacy.
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The halting problem is one of them, although it applies more to...
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Well, in my mind, in the philosophical sense, it applies more to the mind, and what is the mind, although it is about computers.
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But I'm going to stick just to Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
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I could make this a lot more complex, but I want to boil it down to the points.
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If you use logic, if you use rationality, if you believe in debate, if you believe in the scientific method,
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And it's kind of hard to wrap your head around.
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But Gödel's incompleteness theorem relies upon it.
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Because it's actually a very complex mathematical formula that, heck, is above my understanding of mathematics.
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But what it boils down to is that the math that we use, okay, everything that, the Cartesian coordinate system,
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the arithmetic that you learned in school, the math that goes into both Boolean algebra,
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which is the basis of electronics, and is nearly indistinguishable from the philosophy of logic.
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The only difference is the philosophy of logic has a few extra parts that we don't really use in electric circuits.
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Now, in high school, you probably learned about the whole set of numbers, which is 1 to infinity,
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and the natural number system, which is all numbers positive and negative.
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And I hope I'm not getting that backwards, actually.
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I might have the whole and the natural backwards, but regardless.
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You see, all of these are sets of axioms of statements that are taken to be true.
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We're going to say, you know, we're going to create a system by which 2 plus 2 equals 4.
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You know, we're going to say it's a base 10 system.
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We're going to have axioms such as, you cannot divide by 0.
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Because as soon as you start dividing by 0, the entire thing falls apart.
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All math stops working if you allow dividing by 0.
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So that's one of the axioms that we use in day-to-day set theory.
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And, of course, there's other aspects of this as well.
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And I'll give you a brief example of this, which I'm completely stealing from Eliezer Yudkowsky.
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And so you put the infinite people in your infinite rooms.
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But now a second bus of infinite people shows up.
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Because you have infinite rooms, you ask everybody to jump over one's space.
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So the first infinity fits into all of the odd-numbered rooms.
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And the second infinity goes into all of the even-numbered rooms.
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Okay, and this is not just some sort of mental trick or puzzle or riddle.
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These are actual mathematics that you do need to use to accomplish certain things.
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So all of the math we use has certain assumptions, certain axioms, certain statements that are taken as a priori truths.
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You know, without this math, this camera would not be working.
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The electronic circuits would not exist without this math being existentially true.
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And so Gerdel went out to take all of the true math that we know.
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Because we can prove some of it, but we can never prove all of it.
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He tried to demonstrate that the math that we use is consistent and coherent.
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That it does not contradict itself, that it all fits together.
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You know, he tried to basically take all of this stuff and wrap it into a circle that would prove itself.
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You know, that this circle demonstrates that the circle exists.
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And again, this is not prove like a scientific proof, okay?
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You didn't prove that the old battery was dead.
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For all you know, an invisible gremlin could have been messing with your car and it just happened to leave at the same time.
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We can always discover something new that tells us the universe works in a completely different manner than we thought that it worked.
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When you prove something mathematically, there's no more argument.
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Okay, you're never going to take a logical syllogism and prove it wrong.
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You know, but you're never going to prove a syllogism wrong.
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And so, if you use logic, if you believe in the objective truth, if you believe in science,
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then you are taking as a matter of faith that there is a supernatural entity that declares math to be true.
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Doesn't need to have any political or moral opinions.
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And ergo, not something we can directly observe.
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Because you need to assume its existence before you even get to the whole testing and proving thing.
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Everybody that is an atheist, skeptic, rationalist, scientist, etc.
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They believe in that supernatural God that just said one word.
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And just made all of that fact before the universe began.
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Before there was time for before to happen within.
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That it needs to be contained in a greater container.
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And so, our entire understanding of the universe is predicated on the supernatural existing.
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If you believe in math, you already believe in a supernatural entity.
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You believe that there is more to reality than what we can directly observe.
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And as soon as you start to acknowledge the existence of the supernatural.
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Could he have been a bit more than just a God that says two plus two equals four?
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I'm going to, very soon, I'll have the live stream for the backers of my Patreon.
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And one of the things I'm going to be talking about is the composition of one of the shots I use.
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And composition, you can't really put your fingers on it.
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And yet, if you get it, you can talk reasonably about it.
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And that kind of suggests that maybe there's a supernatural truth to beauty.
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It's still something that we're learning about as a species.
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That it requires this faith in the supernatural.
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And you see, this is my second argument that eventually leads to Catholicism.
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One of the brilliant statements in Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back, I believe.
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You know, Luke asks Yoda, is the dark side stronger?
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It's faster, it's easier, but it's not stronger.
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And this is, I've brought this argument up in the past.
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In one moment, you know, go buy a gun and then go walk down to the mall and go shoot a bunch of people.
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And you will do more evil in an hour than you can pay back in a lifetime.
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If you devoted the rest of your life to trying to heal the hurt that you caused, that's not enough.
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You know, it would take an infinite number of lifetimes to heal the pain that you caused by doing that.
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In one moment, you can do more evil than you can ever pay back.
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And in fact, I think all of us have already done that.
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The cruelty we showed to one another in high school.
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We've all done very bad things to other people.
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And maybe just not, I'm not saying you murdered somebody or raped somebody.
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But you've hurt people in a way that you can never repay it.
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You can never take away the injury that you did to that person.
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Not if you devoted the rest of your life to it.
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Evil can just tear down, destroy, and break things.
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The amount of suffering that exists in the world.
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And if you make an honest, moral accounting of yourself, and everybody you've hurt, everything
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you've screwed up, everything you've failed at, you're not able to pay for it.
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And so, in ancient times, you know, the Jews, they used to sacrifice the scapegoat.
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They'd say, the goat, we're gonna put all of our sins, all of the evil that we did to
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one another this month, we're gonna put it onto the goat and send it out into the wilderness
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Other places, other religions, you find similar practices.
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Human sacrifice and cannibalism, these are inherent to our species, because we are such
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nasty people to one another, that we can never pay back the debt.
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And so we need to take that, we need to take that guilt and put it onto somebody else, an
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If you look at Hollywood culture, you see this playing out all the time.
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Where you get somebody like Britney Spears, or whomever, you get one of these teen idols.
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And everybody just worships them like a god, you know, when they're a kid.
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And then when they get older, and they're in a rough patch, they become a laughingstock.
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And if you go back to Ireland, you had the kings that would be married to the land, and if
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you had a bad season, if you didn't get enough rain for your crops, well, put the king to
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So all of a sudden you can see why having God himself, that completely good and innocent
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God, condemned to hell and bleeding blood for that moment on cavalry.
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You can start to see why that would be necessary.
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And only the death of the true innocent, who knew our temptations, could possibly pay back
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There isn't a lot of evidence that Christ existed.
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No amount of evidence is going to convince somebody that doesn't understand why Christ
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But it's enough to convince somebody that finally sees that he needed to.
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You know, Christianity is the only religion that can be scientifically disproven.
00:18:07.860
You go climb up Mount Olympus in Greece, and you don't find the Greek gods.
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You know, you go back and it's like, well, the Bible's not completely accurate.
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And if you go to a good church, they really hammer this home.
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If Christ did not live, die, and then live again, if he did not rise from the dead, then our faith is in vain.
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If there was not a historical Christ, not some moral teacher, okay, not some guy that performed a few miracles, that, you know, cast a few magic spells.
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No, a man that died on the cross for our sins, and then rose from the dead, and then ascended to heaven.
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Maybe we keep the New Testament, because it's got some cool stories, and it's got some good homilies in it.
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And if that didn't, if it's based upon a lie, if it's based upon a fable,
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then everything else he said in his life, his whole life was wasted.
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And if you're a Christian, that's what you believe.
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Not that he was a great moral teacher, but that he was God incarnate, and that he died for our sins.
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People, people were not stupid 2,000 years ago.
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You know, you say, oh, yeah, yeah, this guy totally got raised from the dead.
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They'd say, yeah, and I've got some swampland in Greece to sell you.
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And in fact, if you read, if you read the Gospels, time and again, the apostles doubt Christ.
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Because, like, this, this stuff doesn't happen.
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You know, it's like, okay, yeah, we understand that, you know, cult of Mithras, you get high, and then you douse yourself in blood while, you know, people are beating on drums and chanting.
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Really cool experience, and you see some trippy stuff.
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And even after the resurrection, at first, they didn't recognize him.
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Which, again, it's a really weird thing to put in there.
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Because you would think that if you just saw your friend get put to death, and then you ran into him, you'd be, you'd be shocked.
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Where I was, I was back in high school, I was dating a girl in, um, the next town over.
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And I was just walking through the hallways of my school, in between classes.
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And she was just standing there in the hallway.
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And I kind of looked at her, and I knew that I knew her from somewhere, so I just kind of nodded at her, and I kept walking.
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Fifteen seconds later, it comes to me that that's my girlfriend.
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You know, like, why would, you know, she lives, you know, like, a half hour away.
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Why would she be at my school in the middle of a school day?
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And so those, those bits, where after the resurrection, you know, they don't recognize Christ.
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And then, and he's like, why are you guys upset?
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That if you were trying to create a cult, if you were trying to pass this off,
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this is too idiosync, idiosync, idiosyncric, sin-trick.
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It doesn't fit if you're just trying to put together a really good story.
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But when you start talking about something that, something impossible that actually happened,
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I might expand that into a larger philosophical work at some point.