Atheist TRAPS Christian On Human Flourishing

[00:00:00]So firstly, I never found Pascal's wager compelling just because if you did that and God does exist, God knows you're doing that. So like it's not going to work. Hey everyone, welcome back to the channel. Genuinely glad you are here for this one because this conversation is something else entirely. So, what we have here is Thomas Walker Worth, an objectivist, philosopher, and author, sitting down with Caleb Woodbridge, a Christian thinker, and the two of them are going head-to-head on one of the oldest and most loaded questions in philosophy.

[00:00:33]What is the real foundation of morality?

[00:00:35]And does God have anything to do with it? Thomas is coming in with Einran's rational framework. Caleb is defending the Christian worldview. And the clash between these two is genuinely fascinating to watch unfold.

[00:00:52]Do yourself a favor and stay all the way through this one because the second half of this debate is where things get really sharp and I have a lot to say about it. Also can drop a comment and let me know where in the world you are watching from right now. I always love seeing where this community is spread across the globe. So say hello down there. All right, let us get into it.

[00:01:13]saying that let's try to turn man into an angel or into God into this in my view invented concept that doesn't have a reference in reality whereas the objectivist view is be the best human being that you can recognize that human beings have this rational faculty we have an emotional side as well we have the ability to integrate the two and to use that evolutionary advantage of the rational faculty to grow to thrive to flourish and and achieve a fantastic future >> I think one one question I have on this is you know you say be the best man you can be or we should pursue these things.

[00:01:48]I mean obviously there is there is a nature of man whatever that is but I suppose one one big question for the sort of Randian philosophy is whether I ought to pursue my rational self-interest is there a sense in which there is a moral obligation because we often think about morality in terms of obligations but do am I am I obliged once I've realized that I am a rational being to actually follow any particular course or could I could I sort of choose to sort of embrace the absurdity of my existence >> essentially. Yes. You're obliged by the nature of reality. So objectivism is is not a creed that you have to follow like that. There there are not the the objectivist virtues are not orders of faith, articles of faith. Um so it's not a categorical imperative like you say you referenced earlier. It's not a set of things you must do because somebody says so. It's a set of things that you need to do if you want the right outcomes, if you want to flourish as a human being. It's a hypothetical imperative.

[00:02:49]>> Not even that. It's well in the sense yes it's hypothetical in the sense if you want to flourish if you want to suffer and die sure don't. But like you know but it's it's based on on the assumption that you want to flourish that everybody wants happiness and prosperity which I think the vast majority of people do without severe mental illness or or other factors getting in the way of that. Um Rand um can in looking for an objective source of morality morality Rand settled on on the fundamental fact that life forms have a choice between living and not living and and that that's the source of of objective morality. Now that doesn't just mean being alive. Life in in the objectivist concept is not just life is not just the state of having a heartbeat and and you but physiological functions.

[00:03:37]Life is living as the entity that you are, functioning as the entity you are.

[00:03:42]I often say that a lion is not living as a lion in a cage. And in the same sense, a human being is not living as a human being if he's not or she's not exercising his rational faculty and and achieving meaning and purpose in life.

[00:03:54]So I think this was a a philosophical error that manifested during co when you we we implemented these widespread lockdowns that basically stopped human life for for 2 years for the sake of saving lives which really meant prolonging suffering for people who are already at the ends of their lives and in great suffering. Now there are a lot of practical steps that should have been taken to protect those people in in different ways that weren't.

[00:04:20]The philosophical failure there was to recognize that we were in fact destroying life because we were prioritizing keeping somebody's heartbeat going over letting people live their lives and and live as human beings and destroyed countless you young people's like you know early life and and all sorts of other things business money you loads of prosperity and human life was destroyed and there was a lot of suicide and things like that because of that because of that fundamental error I think so it's really important to recognize that life means living.

[00:04:51]>> This is the argument that religious debaters almost never want to engage with honestly because Thomas is not coming in here with just an opinion. He is coming in with a framework and that framework is what makes this so compelling to watch.

[00:05:09]Here is what you have to understand about what Thomas is actually saying.

[00:05:13]Most moral systems, not religious ones especially, hand you a list. follow this, obey that. And the assumption baked into all of it is that the list comes first and you come second. Thomas completely flips that. He is saying morality is not something imposed on you from the outside. It comes from understanding what you actually are as a human being and what you actually need to survive and flourish. And Thomas said it so cleanly. He pointed out that objectivism is not a creed you follow like articles of faith. It is not a set of commands from an authority. It is a set of principles that follow logically from the nature of reality. If you want good outcomes, if you want to actually flourish, these are the things that lead there. That is a fundamentally different structure than religion. And most people have never even stopped to notice that difference. Then he drops this line about a lion not living as a lion in a cage. And honestly that image just stops you cold because you know it is true the moment you hear it. A lion in a cage is biologically alive. Its heart is beating. But something essential is gone. And Thomas is saying the same logic applies to human beings. A human being who is not exercising reason, not building meaning, not pursuing purpose, that person is not really living either.

[00:06:44]They are just existing. And here is where it gets really interesting. Thomas connects this directly to a real philosophical error that played out on a massive scale. He argues that when societies chose to stop people from working, from building businesses, from living their daily lives, all in the name of preserving biological survival, they actually destroyed life in a much deeper sense. Young people lost years, livelihoods collapsed, mental health deteriorated, and the philosophical failure underneath all of that was treating a heartbeat as the same thing as a life. That is a point that cuts across political lines and it is one that I think deserves far more serious engagement than it usually gets.

[00:07:34]And um and so just as you you can tell the difference between a flourishing flower and a struggling one. You know, the the the implicit goal of human life is to be the human equivalent of the flourishing bush with with all the flowers out is, you know, you want to be a be the the the rational being that you are, the specific individual that you are fully and successfully and and that's the the proper goal of life.

[00:08:01]>> Is that account something you resonate with?

[00:08:04]>> Yeah. So, I I think I think that sense of flourishing is is deeply important.

[00:08:10]Um uh one of the early church fathers said that the glory of God is a human being fully alive. Um and uh so I think that um all of that yes I I would I would resonate with with that description of the importance of of human flourishing. Um I think uh just coming back to that question of uh well what do we know what a what what's the standard of what a human being should be like if if we're falling short of that where I'd point to that is uh is to the person of Jesus as the the perfect human being. uh and uh I think it was Aphanasius in uh on the incarnation used the uh the idea of if you have a portrait that gets spoiled then you get in the original subject so that you can redo it and correct it and if we're made in the image of God then we get God in to sit his portrait again and so uh by God becoming a human being uh that's him showing us in in his life in his sacrificial death in his resurrection that shows that it's not the giving up of something for a lesser value but to achieve something of a greater value. Um uh that for me and the historical basis for that that would be for me grounds in uh objective fact and objective history uh that we do have a hope that is uh beyond death that is resurrection that is restoring the human image to something more fully alive. Um so obviously then you're getting into questions of historicity uh reliability of um uh the New Testament accounts and so on. But when it comes to the specifically um yeah Christian uh grounding for that that's that that's where I'd uh uh go with that. you're you're uh reminding me a lot of bla1 Pascal as well who who I think stands in that Austinian tradition talking about the duality of man and he very much thinks that we are we are wretched precisely because we were glorious so he kind of like flips this kind of pessimistic anthropology on its head and says you know okay maybe it's true that Christianity has often emphasized the wretchedness of man but only because there is that sort of original blueprint obviously another big idea that Pascal had was that it might be rational in some sense to wager on God. So I I wanted to ask you Thomas, you know, to what extent could it or to what com to what extent do you have to have confidence that there is no God to uh to hold to this kind of Randian perspective? Because obviously a lot of people have found that uh the evidence, you know, more or less compelling. Um, and there does seem to be this this great promise, this great offer that Christianity has. And Pascal's perspective is that maybe we should maybe what what is rational to do is to bet on that future interest. So, do you have to be sort of totally confident that God does not exist to take on this rational self-interest in Ran's thought?

[00:11:25]>> Now, watch what happens when Caleb responds because this is where the debate gets genuinely fascinating. Not because Caleb wins, but because of how he tries to compete with Thomas's framework. Caleb actually agrees that human flourishing matters. He says it himself that sense of flourishing is deeply important. And then he brings in this quote from an early church father saying, "The glory of God is a human being fully alive." And look, I will give Caleb credit. That is a genuinely beautiful line. It sounds like common ground. But here is the thing. The moment Caleb agrees that flourishing is the goal, he has already stepped onto Thomas's philosophical territory.

[00:12:11]Because now the question is not whether humans should flourish. The question is how we know what flourishing looks like.

[00:12:18]And that is exactly where the two world views split hard. God Caleb's answer is that the standard of human flourishing is the person of Jesus. that Jesus is the perfect human being and that by becoming human, God is essentially showing us what full humanity looks like. Now, educationally, this is actually rooted in a serious theological tradition. Athanasius of Alexandria writing in the early 4th century made this exact argument that the incarnation was God restoring the human image that had been distorted.

[00:12:55]It is not a casual claim. It has serious historical depth behind it. But here is the problem for Caleb's argument. Thomas has already established that for something to function as a moral standard, it has to be grounded in evidence and reason that integrates with everything else we know about reality.

[00:13:14]And Caleb's standard requires you to first accept the historicity of the New Testament, then accept the resurrection, then accept a very specific theological interpretation of who Jesus was. That is an enormous chain of assumptions before you even get to the moral framework itself. And then the host raises Pascal's wajer. the idea that maybe the rational move is simply to bet on God because the potential reward is so enormous and you can feel where this is heading because this is one of the most famous philosophical arguments for belief and Thomas has heard it before and what comes next is one of the sharpest moments in this entire debate.

[00:13:57]>> So firstly I I never found Pascal's wager compelling just because if you did that and God does exist, God knows you're doing that. So like it's not going to work. But >> so that that never sort of flew for me.

[00:14:10]But uh but to answer your your question, um in objectivism, God is regarded as um what philosophically I would call an arbitrary assertion. Um Richard Dawkins often uses the analogy of the celestial teapot. like, you know, if I if I hypo hypothesize um the the existence of something that you can't disprove and I say it exists, you know, what's to say it doesn't? And his point there is that the burden of proof is on the person asserting the claim, not on the person denying it. And in objectivism, arbitrary assertions have no philosophic way. They just don't exist. So like if if something is not presented with objective evidence supporting it that integrates with all of the remaining evidence we have. So it's not just you you say here's a thing and here's a book that says it exists. It has to integrate without contradiction with the totality.

[00:15:03]So it can't involve human beings walking on water which isn't possible. Like it it you know without some kind of very compelling explanation of how that's worked. Like you there's and I do think that there's no such thing as the supernatural. Uh like anything beyond nature doesn't exist. Nature is that which exists. So if somebody does walk on water there's a means. There's a meth there's a mechanism for how that's happened. you know, if there were entities that could do the things that Jesus is said to have done, if if those entities do exist, which they might out there in the universe, there's a means for how that happened. Um, so, you know, those the existence of God in in the objectivist view is is a assertion that doesn't require consideration because it it it's arbitrary. And um and so you you can reject those assertions without needing to you can effectively say I know he doesn't exist because there's no evidence for him existing. Like a thing that has no evidence for existing doesn't need to be considered as potentially existing.

[00:16:00]>> So you you only need to consider those things for which you have evidence. Now there's all sorts of things for which we have evidence that might not exist. Uh a good example of this is dark matter.

[00:16:07]Like I I as a sort of amateur physics enthusiast, I don't think dark matter actually exists. I think I think that's going to come out at some point in the future. But but there's evidence that suggests it might or something is there causing those discrepancies in the masses of galaxies versus uh you know how massive they should be as far as we can determine. That's probably just an error in math. But at the moment, you know, the there's a theory that gives rise to the idea that that you know, dark matter may exist or dark energy or things like that. So so that those concepts exist in the realm of things that there's potentially evidence for, but we haven't found out enough to confirm or not. Um God in the objectivist view like any other arbitrary assertion exists in the realm of an idea with with no philosophic standing uh or you know basis in evidence and reason and as such yeah I would say I I am also beyond that I'm confident that God in the Christian conception doesn't exist because I consider his exist his nature contrary to the nature of reality >> an entity of complete knowledge of of I don't think that's it I don't think that can integrate w with reality as as I know it and understand it. So in that sense, yes, I I would say I'm confident that God doesn't exist. But God is such a wide and nebulous concept. There's other forms of of God like the deistic conception of God or you various other deities that people believe in that may hypothetically be possible in a metaphysical universe that I just don't have evidence for. So, I'm not going to say that for all of the gods anyone's ever believed in, but for the allseeing, all knowing >> version of God, like that to me seems completely contradictory to the world I live in and see and and perceive every day. Oh, Thomas did not even hesitate.

[00:17:46]And that is what makes this moment so satisfying to watch because Pascal's wager sounds clever on the surface. It sounds almost mathematical. If God exists and you believe, you win everything. If God does not exist and you believed anyway, you lose nothing.

[00:18:05]So why not just believe? It has been used for centuries as a kind of intellectual shortcut to faith. And Thomas dismantles it in one sentence. He said he never found it compelling.

[00:18:16]Because if you actually believe in an all- knowing God and you are only betting on him strategically, then that God knows you are faking it.

[00:18:26]The wager collapses from the inside. You cannot trick an omniscient being into giving you paradise. The entire logic of the wager depends on God being unaware of your reasoning, which is the exact opposite of what the Christian God is supposed to be.

[00:18:43]Thomas is not even arguing against the existence of God yet. He is showing that the argument itself is incoherent on its own terms. And then Thomas builds something even more powerful. He explains that in objectivism, God is what philosophers call an arbitrary assertion. And this is the part that I think people do not fully appreciate. An arbitrary assertion is not just an unproven claim. It is a claim with no connection to any evidence at all. And Thomas makes the crucial distinction, something like dark matter, even if unproven, has observable effects that point toward it. There is evidence that something is there. The Christian God, in Thomas's view, has no such footprint in observable reality. And then Thomas goes further. He says he is not just neutral on the question. He is actually confident that the Christian conception of God all knowing, allseeing, limitless in every direction is directly contradictory to the nature of reality as he understands it. Because everything in reality has identity. Everything has boundaries. Everything has a specific nature.

[00:20:00]And a being that is unlimited in all directions simultaneously does not fit that pattern at all.

[00:20:08]You have to understand what Thomas is doing here. He is not just saying I do not believe in God. He is saying the specific God that Christianity describes is logically incompatible with the universe we can actually observe.

[00:20:26]That is a much harder claim to dismiss.

[00:20:29]And Caleb for all his genuine intelligence in this debate does not get a clean answer to it. So what do you guys think of this? Leave your thoughts down in the comments. Please like and subscribe and I will see you in the next video.