Why Faith Is a Useless Epistemology | The Best Of The Atheist Experience

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]All right. 33 minutes later.

[00:00:02]>> Let's let's get back to atheism. What do you say? I say we should. Here, who who do you Where do you want to go first for calls? Um I'm kind of liking number six.

[00:00:10]>> Number six it is.

[00:00:12]Fred in Michigan, you're on with Don and Matt.

[00:00:15]Hi, how are you guys doing? Hi, thanks for your patience.

[00:00:19]Yeah, no problem. I was listening to that whole thing and man, heart heart felt uh thing to say, opening up. So Yeah. Uh kudos for you to for putting it out there and you know, just being a bleeding heart, I guess, you know.

[00:00:35]Um Those Those are the ones that work.

[00:00:39]>> [laughter] >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, for sure.

[00:00:42]Uh I guess so the question I wanted to ask uh cuz I just recently found your guys's show not too long ago and uh I got to say a lot of the clips I'm pretty nervous about like uh getting cussed at and yelled at and shouted [laughter] at and all that, but uh That's a good That's a good way to prevent me from doing it.

[00:01:03]>> [laughter] >> Uh I I I just hope I'm not one of those guys, you know, so anyway. Uh so I was just curious um how it is that we can dismiss the Bible as [snorts] the evidence for God? We can't.

[00:01:23]So I'm actually working I I'm I >> the answer I expected. I'm sorry. Yeah.

[00:01:27]I'm actually working on a video for my Atheist Debates channel that that addresses the nature of evidence and how we qualify things because I've said it before and other people, you know, atheists say, "Well, there's no evidence for God." And then people are like, "Well, what about the Bible?" "Oh, that doesn't count."

[00:01:40]Um there are good reasons why we say that, but I think it's confusing people about the nature of evidence. So I'm putting together a video that that discusses this in more detail, but I'll see if I can shorthand this.

[00:01:53]Okay. To whatever extent it counts as evidence, it is still insufficient to warrant accepting of the propositions.

[00:02:02]And it's like if the proposition was Matt strangled Don.

[00:02:11]Coming forward and saying Matt is a person who exists is not evidence for the proposition that Matt strangled Don.

[00:02:18]Neither is saying Matt has hands and hands are required for strangling.

[00:02:22]That's still not evidence that I strangled Don because those those two things are true whether I strangled Don or not. And so when we talk about evidence for a proposition, first of all, we need an actual proposition proposition. A lot of times we just say evidence for God, but what we really mean is evidence that warrants concluding that a God exists.

[00:02:43]And so Or that a particular God exists, right. And so what we see is in something like the Bible, these are the claims.

[00:02:53]You need evidence for the claims and these are not prima facie claims where the claim stands on its own merits. So when you say, you know, uh Jesus walked on water.

[00:03:04]That's a claim and there's nothing in the Bible that could ever substantiate acceptance that that claim is true on its own.

[00:03:15]There's certainly the, you know, various attestations to this happening count as sort of anecdotal evidence, but it's not like that would be could be or should be convincing and not even apply. In matter of fact, most of the Bible would be thrown out as hearsay if it were in a court. And so when I say it's not that I get to disregard the Bible, it's that the Bible is on its own is not sufficient.

[00:03:39]I see.

[00:03:41]Um Well, okay, so then I guess that >> Before you Before you jump in Go ahead.

[00:03:48]Go ahead. Uh Go ahead. There's also this idea that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And, you know, the existence of a God is an extraordinary claim and so we're looking for for big evidence of this. We're we're looking for something really solid, something really obvious.

[00:04:07]Um you know, that that that, you know, some path to this conclusion that's that's going to be convincing to everybody.

[00:04:15]Uh that's the kind of thing we're looking for.

[00:04:18]Mhm.

[00:04:20]Okay. I mean, that makes sense.

[00:04:22]Uh but at the same time, you know, sometimes I'm I'm left with that feeling of, well, if not the Bible, then then what, you know? Yeah, but that's not the problem. That That's a problem to take up with God.

[00:04:35]What kind of God wants people to accept that he exists and presents insufficient evidence for it?

[00:04:42]Sure. And the way I was always presented that with uh concept was that, you know, faith in a in a sense was the ultimate test, right? Like you said, it it can be rather challenging um when you take in all that science has discovered up to this point, you know, the the fact that we know here we are with all these billions of trillions of atoms and billions of stars and and we're the only planet with life on it, maybe, but That's a pretty big maybe.

[00:05:15]Yeah, again, we still have to discover life in somewhere else.

[00:05:20]>> So So the fact that we don't know of the fact that we don't know of life somewhere else is is completely unsurprising since our ability to explore somewhere else is incredibly limited and has only existed for a short period of time anyway. But >> Yeah, this is true.

[00:05:32]>> Getting back to this this issue of faith, um there's two different connotations, well, there's more than that, but there's two different usages of of faith. One is like the Hebrews 11:1 where faith is the evidence of things unseen.

[00:05:45]And then there's another usage which is just faith just means confidence.

[00:05:49]Now, looking at like the When you say that it it becomes essentially like a matter of faith, the type of faith you're talking about where you have confidence in something in the absence of sufficient evidence, is there any position that you couldn't justify by appealing to faith like that?

[00:06:11]>> [sighs] >> If I'm being honest, you could have faith in things that are not true. Like eventually like eventually there have been times throughout history where we had faith in things like bleaches being able to, you know, cure you of a headache. Yeah. Which we over the course of history and time and experimentation, we were able to figure out that no, that's completely erroneous and of course that's not how it works anymore. And >> But but if we hadn't if we hadn't had the ability to to to investigate that and and either debunk or confirm it, then we would still be believing it on faith. Which So you can you can exercise faith in in such a way that you can be confident in something that is true and you can do it in a way where you can be confident in something that's not true.

[00:07:06]And what I care about is whether or not we have good reason to believe that something is true, which is why when I talk about faith, I say that faith is the excuse people give for believing something when they don't have a good reason. Because if I ask someone, "Why do you believe this?" and they have a good reason, then they give that reason.

[00:07:22]When when we're talking about scientific facts about the universe, nobody says that they take it on faith, you know, that the that the sun is at the center of our solar system.

[00:07:31]They They present the actual evidence.

[00:07:33]>> Yeah, not now. But that's that's the reason I use that example is because people >> People Yeah.

[00:07:40]There There are people who think that reasonableness corresponds to truth and that's something I try to correct people on when I can. At one point, given the all the available information, it was reasonable to conclude that the sun went around the Earth.

[00:07:58]That And yet it's wrong. So it's entirely possible to be reasonable based on evidence, based on what you see, and still be wrong. And so knowing that that's the case, it makes it even more repugnant to me to for anybody to ever appeal to faith because knowing that our best efforts looking at the best available evidence, we could still turn out to be wrong, to then take an extra step and say, "You know what? There's not sufficient evidence for me to make a conclusion, so I'm going to make a conclusion anyway."

[00:08:29]That is that has to be a bigger mistake than following the evidence to an error.

[00:08:36]Mhm.

[00:08:39]Yeah, I I When you put it that way, yeah, I can't help but agree with it, so. Well, damn, now I can't really yell and cuss at you or anything.

[00:08:47]>> [laughter] >> Why'd you have to go and be so reasonable, damn it? I always try to approach things with an open mind and I I definitely, you know, I I approached calling you guys today with with the idea that you know, I wasn't going to you know, hold on to these beliefs so strongly that I wasn't willing to listen, if that makes sense.

[00:09:08]>> No, no, it absolutely does. And And it's honorable. And we appreciate it and hopefully, you know, this call will not only let you know, but let other people know that that's how we are we are as well. When I stopped believing, it wasn't cuz I got mad [snorts] at a God, it wasn't because I was like, "Ah, screw the church." Or you know, it was I I was actually trying to be the best Christian I could be and to answer the the logical reasonable objections that people raised against my religious beliefs. And I didn't choose to give up religion. Believe What I believe or what I'm convinced of isn't a choice. It just reached a point where I was like, "Wow, all those good reasons I thought I had turns out uh they're not good reasons." And my position still is not if somebody I I was having a conversation with one of my one of aunts this weekend and um I I was explaining to her that you know she believes in God and an afterlife and I don't.

[00:10:03]I'm not saying she's wrong about whether or not there's an afterlife. I'm saying that I'm not convinced that she's correct and I am taking a step further for the people who There are people every time I say that who cringe. Well, you're not being honest cuz you are saying they're wrong.

[00:10:19]I am saying that when you give me your arguments, if I find fallacies there, I think your reasoning is wrong. I think you believe without good reason, but that's still independent of whether or not you are factually correct or not.

[00:10:33]I [snorts] see.

[00:10:34]And for me Oh, go ahead. All of this rests if there is a God all of this rests on the shoulders of that God. That God you'd have to think stuck us down here, gave us a brain, allowed us to understand logic and reasoning and evidence and figure out what what is real and not real to the best of our ability in this world and for the single most important question has left it with insufficient evidence to reach the conclusion.

[00:10:57]That is not a good being, that's not a wise being and I think it's an argument for why that being almost certainly doesn't exist at least as portrayed.

[00:11:07]Sure. I'm just curious though cuz I have given some thought to that idea of like why would why would he do this and then you know, kind of leave us to our own devices.

[00:11:18]>> Sure.

[00:11:19]And it was just one of those things you know, when you start looking into say quantum mechanics. There's a an aspect of quantum mechanics known as superposition and then when you begin to look at that all particles before you observe them will be in any and all states that they can possibly be within a given probabilities.

[00:11:46]Now, there's a a fringe theory based on that we call the called quantum consciousness. I already I heard somebody I trying to remember his name now.

[00:11:59]Michio Kaku I believe was talking about it and um Or I'm familiar with that name. I don't know if this is what he was talking about. Go ahead. Oh, okay, fair enough.

[00:12:09]Um And that got me thinking, okay, so if if at the universal level we can assume that anything that is exists exists because we observed it, then could it simply be that the reason God only wants us to believe in him be like that's the sole reason for all of this is because without that he would cease to exist.

[00:12:39]Sounds like a pretty weak God to me.

[00:12:43]It it doesn't It certainly doesn't match It certainly doesn't match up with an an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God if if if we stop believing him and he goes away.

[00:12:54]There are some science fiction stories where that is a premise. I couldn't I couldn't tell you what they are.

[00:13:00]Yeah. Oh, okay. And on the quantum mechanics stuff I'm not going to dig in because I have perceptions and I have no expertise there and I have perceptions that that aren't consistent with that.

[00:13:10]Okay. At the end of the day even if you were correct the time to believe that is after it's been demonstrated to be true and not merely because you can't rule it out as a possibility.

[00:13:22]I can agree with that.

[00:13:24]That's a good point.

[00:13:26]Well, Fred, you're my new favorite person.

[00:13:28]>> [laughter] >> Wow, okay, cool. At least until we get to you know another caller.

[00:13:33]>> [laughter] >> Sure.

[00:13:34]But I I appreciate that. I appreciate you calling in and um Yeah, no problem.

[00:13:39]If you come up with more stuff or have other thoughts or or questions feel free to