r/CosmicSkeptic

I have heard many times and I have seen a few videos where Alex is great at steelmanning his opponent positions. This appears to be only done with arguments he knows he can defeat or for anything besides atheist arguments.

In the video linked it doesn't take Alex long before he starts to diss on atheists by giving their arguments in some of the weakest forms. Here is one example:

>“Consciousness is clearly a mystery, and I think that when you speak to most atheists, you might rub up against a kind of materialist, emergentist, oh, consciousness is just something science hasn’t explained, it will get there one day. I’m not like that. I think consciousness needs to be taken seriously.”

Just because I say I don't know and that science will one day find the answer doesn't mean that I don't take it seriously. Neither do the scientist that are constantly studying consciousness.

This was a trash statement which is usually made by some amateur but not by someone as educated as him. Unfortunately this isn't the only example as I have pointed out about his video on statements that atheist need to retire. I'm left only to conclude that either he is doing it intentionally to get a good interview/engagement or that he can only defeat the weakest examples of atheist arguments.

Name the Trait" (NTT) is a logical argument and Socratic dialogue style used in vegan ethics to challenge the moral consistency of eating animals. It asks meat-eaters to name a specific trait that humans possess which justifies not killing them for food, while simultaneously allowing that same action against animals.

Hi all!

So my dad has really been on me recently a 20m to reconsider my stance on God. I am very much not outspoken about my beliefs in my family as I tend to share different opinions than my parents. (I am an atheist and moderately conservative, while both my parents are somewhat religious and liberal. I am really not trying to get a political conversation going I just included this for context so whether you agree or disagree with my political stance please disregard that) My dad has been telling me recently to reconsider my stance on God as I obviously don’t believe in a God nor in an afterlife. What is surprising is that my Dad has always been fairly against religion, Christianity more specifically but does believe in a god. Growing up he always mentioned his doubts of Jesus, and I was only confirmed as a Roman Catholic for my mother’s sake. Just today he asked to confirm if I don’t believe in God and then questioned how the universe and things like the sun have come about. Obviously, I don’t really want to spoil my relationship with my father that is also already rocky so I just responded that I didn’t know and quickly changed subjects. He then proceeded to tell me to reconsider my stance on god along with calling me an idiot and dumb for being an atheist. I really didn’t want to ask him how he could be so sure that God had created the universe due to the tense situation.
I just am reaching out to this sub to see what my response maybe should be. I am a big fan of Alex’s content and it is the main reason that I actually turned to atheism but I do have trouble articulating some of his points even though I often agree with them.

Does anyone else ever get the sense that fine tuning as an argument assumes a very narrow range of changeable values? Like if the unviersal constants can vary, why not the laws of physics themselves? Why are the equations rigid while the values change? What great physicist has created a model of all of the variations and identified where atoms can form? How do we know atoms are the only possible structure that can cause things to exist?

It feels like for the fine tuning arguement to work, you have to accept some things as necessary, like the equations that govern physics, while assuming other things are not, like universal constants. Without doing this, we cannot make statements of probability, or how narrow the odds were everything landed just so. Without this assumption we are just looking at a subset of possibilities close to this one.

Alex denies the correspondence theory of truth in favor of the deflationary theory, and whenever I've heard his reasoning for this it's been this one specific argument. The premise is that whether you say "The sky is blue" or "It's true that the sky is blue", there is no difference in the meaning of the statement. And since you can remove the "it's true" part without changing the meaning, he concludes that truth must not be a very meaningful concept.

The thing is, while those two sentences do in fact mean the same thing, that's because the concept of truth was already implicitly involved in the statement "The sky is blue". Putting "it's true" at the beginning merely makes that more explicit in the wording, but doesn't change the underlying semantics at all and is ultimately redundant. The word "is" already contained the idea of it being true, and if you thought it was false then you would say "isn't" instead.

Once you take this into account, the conclusion doesn't actually follow. Nothing about these two sentences meaning the same thing indicates that the concept of truth is any less real, meaningful, or objective.

**Social murder** is a concept used to describe unnatural or premature deaths that occurs due to preventable problems in social, political, or economic systems, rather than the direct violence often associated with the term.

Alexio loves to ask, "but what is gravity? All you've done is describe what gravity DOES." I am really curious as to why he thinks there HAS to be a THING. Why can't there just be functions. Operators. Structural realism. Sure, this doesn't jive as well with his preconceived notions about panpsychism and "indivisible units of consciousness," but I don't think he should dismiss it outright. And even if THINGS do exist, what makes you think that we could even begin to determine what they are, epistemologically.

It is incredibly strange how an ignorant Christian approaches the Bible. It is approached as truth, but also literature, but though it is approached as literature it isn’t approached as a kind of historical or fictional literature. In fact, the way in which the Bible is approached as literature, is idiosyncratic.

A Christian reads the Bible and finds comfort and hope in it. The reading he does is a literary reading of the text (because the actual historical study of the text would destroy the Christian’s reading of the text, if he was honest about the evidence he encountered).

Interestingly enough, I still read the Bible the way these ignorant Christians read it, except I do not share in their willful ignorance, or supernatural presuppositions.

As literature, the Bible is an astounding book, but as a historical document, it’s a compilation of deception and confusion— the ignorant reader assumes all kinds of premises that have nothing to do with its actual context or content. (This is perfectly acceptable if we’re reading it as literary fiction, or philosophically, but it’s not acceptable if we’re trying to comprehend its cultural context and meaning).

I find the topic of the Bible as literature utterly fascinating— because I find the Bible as literature entertaining and thought-provoking (in an idiosyncratic way). Just like one can innovate all kinds of insight through the interpretation of Greek myths, I find the Bible as literature to function exactly the same way.

It’s strange to realize that Christianity is entirely founded on humans reading the Bible as true literature (both of which are biased presuppositions). What this means is that all this exegesis that has exploded on the scene, isn’t actually what captivated the masses, what captivated the masses was and is the Bible as “true literature” (that it has been read as one uniform book with one theology— which is a false assumption on the part of the reader).

[This motions to the immanent destruction of Christianity (from within), something Luther never could have realized when he hyper-focused Christianity on a kind of rational approach to “the Word.” Because, you see, this leads Christians to rationally scrutinizing what they read. You will ask, “how is it rational?” The answer is because they use the law of non-contradiction (within the presuppositions of their theology) to stand as judge over their theological interpretations. They use one scripture to correct another scripture, not realizing they’re practicing reason’s exacting form. And, they believe that because “the Bible is absolutely true,” any scrutiny of it will only further affirm this. Thus they have primed themselves to fall right into the trap of Rational Critical Scholarship, which shatters their folk assumptions about the Bible, they very thing that Christianity as a religion is based on.]

Reading the Bible as literature is a very different experience from studying it historically. Christianity cannot survive the latter, and this new reformation of rational critical scholarship has now entered Christianity’s consciousness. Apologists have starting responding to it, which winds them ever deeper into the destruction of the authority of religious content, and the shattering of its folk form.

I think their only hope is to pivot back to the Bible as literature, and to embrace the epistemological relativism of modern philosophy, which thereby allows them to make their case pragmatically against a world collapsing into nihilistic despair. (Though this approach already surrenders the truth of Christianity from the outset).

But this nihilistic collapse is ideological, it’s not substantive, it’s created by philosophy and sustained by philosophy. Science knows nothing of this nihilistic despair, and shatters it at every turn.

Christianity, above all else, needs men to read the Bible as true literature. If this falters, which is now presently happening due to rational critical scholarship, then Christianity will collapse from within. Men will no longer be able to read the Bible as true literature, holding a set of folk presuppositions, but only as another form of mythology. This is great for the secular world, but it is a death sentence for Christianity.

Human consciousness is now at the last stage of Christianity, where it becomes just another myth in a pile of myths. Those myths represent this same process of sublated consciousness playing out in other civilizations. We are now at this stage in our civilization process— we are transcending the mindlessness of our own myths.

Does this mean new false Gods will be born? I suspect they are already born! But one thing that can save us from repeating this process, at least in the minds of a few, is not just to transcend the myth (content) of Christianity, but to identify and transcend the psychological, authoritarian form on which Christianity and all other myths have been based.

I think it was a recent episode, but I can't find which specific one. There was this part about someone listening to two different conversations at the same time through headphones where one conversation played through the left speaker and the other through the right. The point of the experiment or exercise was that if you ask the person to focus on only one conversation this is possible to do, so you can pay attention to or focus on one of them at a time selectively even though the exact same physical input is happening to the eardrums and so on.

Something along those lines basically. Does anyone recognize this? Which episode?

I'm listening to the Ross Douthat interview and am not sure I'm going to continue because he just presented an argument that Alex should have known was scientifically incorrect and pushed back on. Instead, Alex just agreed with him.

Ross is talking about different ways people can come to religious belief, here's the transcript:

>ROSS: So that's one movement you could make another movement is through um the you know highly provisional but also highly suggestive things that we observe in the you know the weird zones of modern science, right? In quantum physics in particular, right? In the apparent evidence that is highly contested and debatable but sort of there nonetheless, right? that there is some kind of interaction between consciousness and matter where the observer the sort of perception measurement and sort of conscious awareness seems to collapse contingencies into actualities.

>ALEX: Yeah.

>ROSS: Right. Which is certainly not something that scientists in 1847 or 1877 would have confidently expected and very smart scientists have been trying to wrestle their way out of that interpretation.

>ALEX: Yeah.

>ROSS: But that's there. It's it's interesting, and again it is the kind of thing you would expect if mind were sort of important primary and meaningful. Um and it connects you again to religion and religious arguments in various ways.

This interpretation of the double slit experiment is completely wrong. It has aways been wrong. Waveform collapse has only ever been tied to consciousness by people who misunderstood what the scientist who studied this phenomenon were saying. It's mind-blowing to me that Ross doesn't know this since he's literally using it as an argument for how observing nature can lead us to God. And apparently Alex is unaware of this as well!

For anyone interested, here's how the "conscious observer" idea got started and then rejected by the very person who first considered it.

• 1801: Thomas Young conducts the first double slit experiment. He concludes that light is a continuous classical wave. It passes through both slits simultaneously. It physically interferes with itself. No collapse or measurement problem exists.
• 1927: Physicists like Niels Bohr introduced the concept of wavefunction collapse. They stated that the quantum wavefunction collapses due to the physical act of measurement by a macroscopic apparatus.
• 1932: Mathematician John von Neumann showed mathematically that the entire physical measurement apparatus also obeys quantum laws. This created a chain of interactions that technically doesn't collapse until it interacts with the external environment.
• 1960s: Physicists like Eugene Wigner speculated that a conscious mind is what ultimately breaks this chain and forces a collapse. Wigner later rejected this idea.

The overwhelming consensus among physicists is that physical interaction, causes the wave pattern to disappear. No mind is required. In fact, this has always been the scientific consensus.

It saddens me that so many people, even well read ones, are confused about this. I blame whoever first coined the term "observer" in this context, since it seems to have confused a great number of people for many decades now. But people like Ross and Alex should know better, especially if they're going to espouse these ideas and use them as the foundation for arguments.

This video is full of nonsense; what could the statement "An ultimate objective can be correct" mean? There's no reason why it would mean anything, so clearly moral statements are meaningless. And there's also the fact that we don't all have the same ultimate moral objectives. Contrary to the widespread misconception, "morality" and "ethics" are interchangeable words. The correct definitions of morality are as follows: 1. The branch of philosophy or subject concerned with how you want all sentient beings to be treated by all rational agents (including yourself), when you are in a completely impartial state of mind, that is, a state of mind which makes the issue of whether it's you or someone else deciding what to do in the scenario in question irrelevant. 2. A set of ultimate objectives regarding the matter mentioned in the first definition. 3. The faculty that consists of your set of ultimate moral objectives.

The important thing that all sets of ultimate objectives that are designated moralities by the agents whose sets of ultimate objectives they are have in common is that the fit the second definition given above. All such sets of ultimate objectives advocated by rational agents are of profound sociological importance.https://youtu.be/3X0OiWs\_2dA

If we accept that free will is an illusion (I do), I find it hard to justify procreation while knowing some of those humans will have a tragic experience through no fault of their own.

It feels a bit like trying to justify sacrificing some humans in order to perpetuate the cycle of life.

It’s quite depressing, but I can’t convince myself that the experience of many good lives outweighs the experience of some bad lives.

If philosophical belief isn’t established differently from theological belief, then what’s the difference?

Philosophy’s (p) must be justified differently from religion’s (p).

If this isn’t the case, then the two have the same form.

If a theologian tells me that God is the foundation of all truth, and a philosopher tells me that dialectic is the foundation of all truth, these had better have different processes of justification, if they’re not the same isomorphic form.

We ask the philosopher, “how do you know that dialectic is true?” If his answer doesn’t rise above the authoritarianism of a philosophical assertion, then how does it differ from the authoritarianism of theology?

If both forms are traced back to unfalsifiable authoritarian premises, then both have the same epistemological form.