How One of My Smartest Critics Returned to Faith in God

In this episode Trent sits down with former agnostic Joe Schmid  ⁨@MajestyofReason⁩  to discuss his reversion to Catholicism.

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Transcript

[00:00] Introduction: Joe Schmid Returns to Catholicism

Welcome to the Council of Trent. My guest today is Joe Schmid. For Majesty of Reason. You may have heard that Joe has found himself back at the Catholic Church. Back in the Catholic faith. I have titled this episode. One of my smartest critics is now Catholic. We’ll put an asterisk there, but I’m very excited to be able to sit down with you because we have had interactions over the past few years before this.

Joe has his channel Majesty of Reason that previously he had covered philosophy and religion from an agnostic perspective, offering very high-level analytic philosophy takes on arguments for and against God. We’ve gone back and forth, but now you’ve been sharing with people that you have. You’ve returned to Catholicism. We’ll get into that. But first, welcome the Council of Trent.

Thank you so much for having me. I actually do have a Responding to Trent playlist. That’s how much I have responded to you. It’s just hilarious being here, being on. I mean, we were always on the same team, right? We were always just trying to pursue truth together. But like, now, like really on the same team in some sense.

So that’s pretty fun. And that is helpful. That’s why I am I’m excited to have you here to be able to talk because I remember I forget when, but it was like a few years ago that this kind of started. I mean, the very first book I ever wrote was Answering Atheism. That was back in 2013. I’ve always had an interest in trying to engage in philosophy of religion, arguments for and against God, and try to do it in a pretty somewhat rigorous way, I would hope.

Now I put forward these arguments, and then I noticed this other channel, The Majesty of Reason. And here’s someone going through with a well laid out PDF responding to the arguments that I made and the thing that I appreciated about your work when I would go through is like, oh, this is not like just regular atheists respond to me because I’ll see other atheists, and mostly it would just be them.

Their response is like crossing their arms like, well, maybe it could be this or what about this? Or I don’t know, but you’re citing peer-reviewed papers, you’re citing J. L. Mackie, you’re going through a list of pointing to other philosophers and someone who hasn’t myself has a master’s in philosophy. Seeing where you’re going to, I’m like, oh, this guy knows this stuff.

So I guess my question, though, as this was going through this turned into a pattern where I would put forward an argument for theism or engage atheism. You’d make a reply to me. I always thought to myself, I’m like, how did I turn into this guy’s philosophical punching bag? Because I noticed I didn’t see too many other. I’m like, I didn’t see like Frank Turek or like a lot of other like Christian, when it would be the I was like your favorite theist to want to like, go after which I was like, oh, okay, you must like going after me some reason how to I guess it turned into that a little bit.

[02:39] Why Joe Responded to Trent’s Arguments

How did that happen? I think it was a few things. One was like the scope of topics that you talk about, or like the kind of topics that you talk about. So they were just things that I was really interested in and just doing, like active philosophical research on. Right. So like models of God, classical theism versus non-classical theism, like more classical type cosmological arguments for God’s existence or just the Kalam and various other things like I do active philosophical research on.

Right. So that was one thing is just like you and like lots of others who are actually taking the philosophical research from people like Alexander Pruss, Josh Rasmussen, Richard Swinburne, some of the best theists and like Robert Koons. You know, I could go on and the list goes on and on and on. And you were just taking them and bring them down for a popular audience.

And I was interested in those topics. I was researching them. So just the topics that you covered was one reason. I guess the second reason is just like the way that you covered those topics, right? So you always did them in an ironic fashion in a way that was like not tribalism. You’re not trying to like bash the other side or say that everyone who disagrees with me is automatically evil or irrational or like demonic or something like that.

And so that was like a very or treating. Yeah. Treating it like the dumb atheist. Right. Yeah. My favorite I’ve seen some people on X who will I’ve certain Catholic accounts that traffic in the inflammatory and they’ll say things like atheists are so dumb, how could anyone be an atheist? And I would, I would write under them something like, would you have my friend Ben Watkins on from real?

Why don’t you have him come on your show and just you don’t have to debate him just talking about atheism or I know it. Agnostic. Joe Schmid. Why don’t you talk to him, see if it’s dumb and it’s so funny. I feel like when you don’t know very much, you get this bombastic confidence. But when you read the literature and see everything that’s out there, you definitely are much more measured when you respond to people.

Yeah. And I mean, you just at the very least you show love towards the other person. I sort of saw that in you. I saw your non-tribal approach and that was yeah, that was magnetic. And that’s the sort of a sort of person that I wanted to interact with and not other sorts of super condescending, super tribal approaches to these debates.

[04:45] Charity, Knowledge, and Christian Apologetics

So. Well, I appreciate it. And if that helped to ease your path back into the Catholic faith, then I’m super grateful. And that’s something I am always trying to share with people here on the show. And when I give talks, I always tell people I would rather have an evangelist who has maximal charity and minimal knowledge, versus an evangelist who has maximal knowledge and minimal charity, because if you interact with a Catholic who is maximum, it makes me think of I love I cannot out with you about stuff.

By the way, I might do that paper by by Freddoso and Flint. Omnipotence. It was called Maximal Power. Yeah. It’s like, you know, the talk about like, maximum charity. But if you think like if you interact with someone who’s like that and they don’t know a lot or they can’t answer your arguments, but you’re still really impressed with their behavior and their disposition, somebody else can come along and be like, oh, and here are all the reasons.

And it’s like, oh, okay, great. But if you meet someone who’s got all these arguments, but man, they just rub you the wrong way with their attitude. I feel like that’s a lot harder to repair when you’re sharing the faith. I don’t know if you. Yeah. No, I think that’s right. I mean, we should still distinguish between like, confidence level and just like the way with which you put ideas that you communicate with people and that you treat others.

Right. Like, I think we can be very confident. Yes, very, very confident that God exists, that he established the Catholic Church, that Catholicism is true and whatnot. And in fact, I think we can like show that’s the case through various arguments for theism and miraculous arguments for Catholicism and whatnot that we can get into later. But that’s different from like treating those that you disagree with, right, with a kind of hatred or condescension or mocking or things like that.

And I just think manifesting the love of Christ others is something that certainly I need to work on. I’m a work in progress, but I think we all should try to work. That’s all of us. That’s our whole lives. But that’s why I always try to live by second Timothy 225, where it says that we are to correct, correct opponents with gentleness and kindness so that they may be rescued from the snare of the devil.

Right. And so I think that when you have that, it’s helpful. And I’ve learned a lot from you in your above, and it has helped in my own path and trying to grow as an apologist and as a philosopher. It was funny. I remember once I did my I did a reply to Stephen Woodford because he made a video saying like, theism is irrational, and even when you were an agnostic, we both disagree with Stephen because in order to be an agnostic on the existence of God, you have to hold that at least theism is rational, even if you even if you don’t accept it.

Because that’s why you’re because if something’s irrational, you’re not going to be undecided about it. You clearly reject the thing that’s irrational. Rather, it’s just, well, I’m just undecided between two rationally competing worldviews. So I replied to him, it was so funny. He replied to me, you would say things like, well, yes, Trent does adequately rebut Stephen’s argument, but I could do this.

And I’m like, I’m like, yeah, I know. Okay, now I’ll get to your argument. I did my best to, you know, have his stuff, but I appreciate it. So, you know, it’s like what proverb says iron sharpening iron. Right. And that’s super helpful. And we’ll nerd out more like we can turn out as much as we want. Like, you were helpful for me in kind of my progression on the like on the Kalam argument, whereas now I basically have instead of like the classic argument that like William Lane Craig defended, now I’ve kind of transitioned to which I would I would say that I well, even back in the early days, I was more about the sequential argument versus the primary actual infinite argument for the past. But now, thanks to your criticisms and reading other things, and why the article you share with me why theists shouldn’t be causal finitude. Yeah, yeah, I’m like, oh, this is great. It’s helped me to see, oh, this is my new argument that’s more rooted in a causal case, things like that.

So that’s why I’ve been super grateful from seeing your work pointing in different areas. So that so that’s how for everyone listening we’ve interacted and now it’s so funny. People always asked me like, do you think X person will ever become Catholic? Any X person will ever convert. You know, these critics I respond to and people had asked me that about you, and I had said I am hopeful.

I had a lot more hope with you than other people. And I will tell you the moment why? Well, there was one moment I remember you were talking about divine hidden, and you’re analogy for understanding how one could have interaction with God while not formally knowing God. And so overcoming the hidden objection. You made an analogy to the Last Battle by C.S. Lewis.

[09:16] Divine Hiddenness and The Last Battle

If you want to catch people up on that. Yeah. So I think there was there was someone in the story named Emeth. I think that’s Hebrew for truth. Yes. And Emmett was serving Tash to kind of evil character his entire life, as it were, but sort of at the end of his life, or maybe in the eschaton or something.

He meets Aslan and of course, Emmett. He didn’t actually know that he was kind of serving evil his whole life. And in fact, like his heart was in the right place. He was, you know, as it were, good faith, you know, he was trying to trying to serve beauty, truth and goodness to the best of his knowledge. And he finds out that he was mistaken about that.

And he sees Aslan and he’s like, oh, no. Yeah, right. I’m cooked, I’m cooked. So he’s he sees Aslan and he’s like, you know, he’s like bowing down and he’s all humble and whatnot, which is already showing that he’s got the sort of dispositions that are like actually loving beauty, truth and goodness and loving the kind of Christ figure there.

He just has. He just he just has some cognitive errors. Right? Right. He just has some like non culpable cognitive errors. So then when he finds Aslan he’s like I’m I’m not worthy to be in your presence. Basically. That’s kind of what he says. And he’s like I’m sorry. I’ve been serving Tash all my days. And Aslan lets out, lets out this big roar and like, of course Emeth freaks out.

He’s like, oh no, I’m about to be condemned like this. This is terrible. And Aslan says, you know, I account all the service that you gave to Tash unto me, because nothing that’s done like in good faith it can be done to unto Tash. And so I counted on my service. And so then he’s kind of in a relationship with Aslan, and in fact, he was kind of in a relationship with Aslan the whole time.

He just didn’t really know it. He was kind of in a sort of implicit relationship. So that’s just like an illustration of something that is like one approach to divine hiddenness. You know, one approach of divine hiddenness is problem of like, well, why are there so many people who don’t seem to know that God exists? Why does God seem hidden to so many people?

Well, maybe for at least some people, they are at least in some kind of implicit relationship with God’s existence. And maybe that can come to fruition at the moment of death, where they can kind of have a more explicit recognition that they were pursuing God the whole time. Or maybe you can appeal to certain things in the afterlife.

We have to get a little bit careful about, like, is this a salvific relationship? And then can there be salvation by implicit faith? You get into the technicalities or the nitty gritty details, but the point is just that people can be in some kind of interaction which is valuable and which sets them up for, at the very least, some kind of relationship.

Well, it’s a way of answering. So this is a somewhat newer argument, philosophy of religion from Schellenberg saying that if if God Schellenberg sorry Schellenberg saying that if God exists and he’s perfectly loving, then all rational beings would have this explicit relationship. And then to say, well, no, an all good, all loving God could allow creatures maybe to have just this implicit relation with him.

He has, at least temporarily. Right, exactly. And he just needs sufficient reasons. And maybe the fact that some people are currently in a state of not knowing that God exists. Maybe not. Maybe it does allow for other people to make a significant difference in the lives of others by sharing the truth about the gospel, by sharing arguments for and against God’s existence, by showing and manifesting love across deep ideological barriers, by like, you know, like, think about my story, right?

God permitted me to be about a decade of away from the faith, away from belief in God and whatnot. But like, look at the various goods that are coming about as a result of that, like forging relationships. Perfect bridge. Right. Let’s go to that. So take take us to the beginning. I want to get I want to get the background to where you where you started.

[12:50] Joe’s Catholic Upbringing

So you grew you grew up in a Catholic family, right? I did, yeah, right. Tell us about it. Yeah. So I grew up very devout Catholic. My family is super based, super, super into the Faith devout. Indeed. Very much so. So, yeah, I mean, I went to Catholic school K through 12th grade. I remember, you know, I was I was totally into it.

I was praying every day I was frequenting the sacraments, you know, my, my school would have mass three days a week, and then I’d go with the family on the weekend. On Sunday. Right. You know, I remember in fourth grade, I got my iPod touch for the first time. And, you know, of course, I downloaded various other things like Doodle Jump and this like game where you can, like balance ice cream that falls and you have to, like, miss the frog and whatnot.

It was really fun. But I also, as I said, I downloaded Instagram and I found myself on all these like really kind of robust platforms for like debating questions about religion and abortion at the time because my parents are, you know, super pro-life, also very based, you know. Okay. So this would be like mid, mid 20 tens, fourth grade, I would have been tens.

That would have been 2010. Okay. So beginning of 2010. Yeah, right. So that’s also like kind of Reddit atheism and people go back in time. It’s so funny how things have changed. It’s like when you look at like the online landscape now in 2026, like even especially who are younger may not know like in like the 2010 era.

Way different. Oh my gosh, totally different. So you know, I was entering this kind of fierce battleground, but somehow I found myself on platforms that actually people were like engaging in pretty substantive, good faith back and forth dialog about these topics. And, you know, in like fourth grade and fifth grade, sixth grade, I would just debate on that all the time.

Yeah. And that kind of just cut my critical teeth, cut my argumentative teeth. It trained me in the argumentative arts and ultimately set me up to become a professional philosopher. And, you know, my dad was in the fourth grade, I was playing. Yeah, you got to start. I was doing I was doing fourth grade playing pogs, and I had a great eight ball slammer and everything, but.

Okay. Yeah, you got precocious. I love it, but you’re you’re but. Well, you know how good I was. I mean, you have the desire for it, right? The only thing I was trying to do was clear out fourth grade. I was trying to clear a 96 exits on Super Mario World, which I still did. All right, if you look at my response to redeem Zoomer, people can see I still know the secret backdoor star World route to Bowser.

Okay, so forth. So end of elementary school. You’re getting into philosophy, arguing about these big questions. Yeah, I mean, my dad from even kindergarten because it’s a private school. We don’t have like a bus. So my dad would actually drive me to and from school every day in carpool. And he’d always play Catholic radio to and from school.

So I would hear people you were probably on there, like, or somehow you probably came up on whatever we were listening to. And so people were always calling in and debating about the faith, and people would object, people would respond. So I was that was always in the air for me. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. And then we also had theology classes basically every day taught by Orthodox Dominicans.

So, you know, I was just trained to think about kind of philosophy, religion, theology from a very young age and, you know, maybe around seventh, eighth grade, because Catholics thankfully love science. So my Catholic school was totally cool with teaching us evolution and the overwhelming evidence in favor of it. Right. And that was kind of like I encountered the first sort of wobble in my faith at that point because I was like, how am I to mesh this with the Genesis story of Adam and Eve?

Like, how does that work? You know, like hundreds of millions of years, kind of gradual development. But like, what does Genesis seem to depict? It’s like God created in seven days. So first, it’s just a textual question is just is the meaning of this text correspond to what we see in reality? Right, exactly. So this was something is great.

I’m just wondering how do I mesh these beliefs? And, you know, I just I talked with some of my teachers and I just researched things a little bit further, and I found the work of, like, Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project in his book like The Language of God. And I found the BioLogos Institute.

And I was like, okay, you know, I can see and, you know, I started reading up on how actually, you know, the Catholic Church is totally, totally its teachings, totally compatible with evolution. And actually like lots of popes, more recently, I’ve been super open to it, including in like official church documents and whatnot. So I was like, okay, you know, there’s there must be some way to make sense of this.

And so looked into it further and I was like, oh, okay. Maybe God guided the evolutionary process and then maybe he like, you know, picked two of the ancestors in a kind of biological human organism population and then endowed them with like an immortal, immaterial soul, rational intellect. And then they fell. And there are even more liberal proposals than that.

But I was like, okay, you know, I can see how to mesh this with my faith. And in fact, like if you look and even going back to people like Augustine, people have looked at what is Genesis. And it’s like it’s almost like mythopoetic history. There are like elements there, historical elements in there, but there are also lots of like in the technical sense, like mythical elements, poetic elements that are meant to illustrate certain theological truths.

I was like, okay, this actually isn’t even intending by the texts own lights. By its own, it isn’t intending to be a kind of strict and literalist historical account of right, at least in all of its details of human origins. So I was like, okay, I sort of survived this first wobble in faith. This is around eighth grade.

But, you know, I’m like, it sort of shook me up a little bit. So sure, that’s that’s up until eighth grade. Now the deacon version comes in ninth grade. I don’t know if you have further questions about my Catholic upbringing, but no, I think so. If we place it through there. Yeah, and that would have been around that time for you would have been around like the beginning of my getting a feel for being an apologist of Catholic answers, because that’s what I was doing in the early 20 tens.

[18:19] Evolution, Suffering, and Deconversion

So you get you get to high school and then you get another challenge. Yeah. So I mean, actually pretty much all throughout ninth grade, I’m still like super into the faith, you know, like I’m like going up to my theology teachers after class and like talking with them about all this stuff and, you know, reading about the faith and whatnot and just thinking about it deeply.

And I’m still totally into it. But maybe nearing the end of ninth ish grade, you know, I started hanging out with some, some friends who were we always talked to him, debated about politics as well. So I was into that. But we, you know, were kind of questioning things a little bit skeptical. And we started questioning the faith a little bit.

We’re like, I think the thing that really got me was thinking more deeply about the evolutionary process. So I just started thinking more deeply about, okay, even if I can mesh this with the Genesis story, it just seems to be so fraught with suffering. You know, the evolutionary process. It’s just like hundreds of millions of years of animals just ripping each other to shreds and preying on one another and parasitizes one another, and just seemed really difficult for me to mesh that with the view that, like, this was the providential working of an all powerful, all knowing.

So now it’s not a textual problem. It’s a variant of the problem of evil. Yeah, it was a problem of evolutionary suffering that kind of kickstarted it. And so then I’m starting to debate with these friends near the end of ninth grade into the summer before 10th grade. We’re then starting to like, watch a bunch of YouTube debates and whatnot.

I started like looking at some of the New Atheists a little bit, and then, you know, they’re emphasizing this, like disorienting contingency to your religious beliefs. Like, hey, if you had grown up elsewhere, you would have believed other things. And it’s like, why do you believe what you do? You’ve just been taught this your whole life, but what exactly are your rationale for the argument from geography, right.

And it’s always hard. It’s just like if you see something in the past that kind of took you in, and then later you’re like, how was I taken in by that? Right? Yeah. I guess if I was born 3000 years ago, I, you know, I wouldn’t I wouldn’t be a Christian. But I also probably wouldn’t believe in a globe earth either, like, you know, but it’s although one could one could try to steal man that argument and it would get you back to Schellenberg.

Divine hidden is that God would find a way that everybody knows about him in some form. But it’s always funny. It’s like you knock down the shallow one, then something stronger comes and you got to face it. But. But it seems like back then you’re starting to be taken in by like, okay, I have questions and now there’s all these other doubts starting like, oh yeah, I think it’s just basically one by one, everything just started crumbling.

I mean, like as I looked into these debates, I started finding all these like biblical problems. There seemed to be like, problematic passages in the Old Testament that I was really struggling to make sense of. And then there were all these like lists of like, putative divine, putative biblical contradictions. And so I found that and then I’m thinking more deeply about, like, the problem of evil.

And I’m starting to find all these theological arguments and just like, you know, just even as, like a psychological point, not even like the rational force of the points that some of the new atheists raised. But as I was like watching some of these compilations, like Richard Dawkins destroys Religion and like just these cringe compilations, at the very least, it starts like, I mean, of course, there are various psychological factors, you know, like I liked being this like kind of vanguard intellectual kind of playing the skeptic and like, oh, yes, I have this.

I’m among the enlightened few who have, like broken away from the dogmatic upbringing and, you know, like there are all these poor benighted folk around me who haven’t kind of become enlightened. So there’s certainly that kind of teenage, I think, especially when you’re young, when you’re a teenager. But even for older people succumb to this, it can be hard when you see someone who smartness and or intelligence is just a defining feature of them in general.

And so you think, oh, well, here’s someone I just respect for being intelligent in general, and they’re ridiculing religion. And so I already kind of looked like you look at, you know, Dawkins’s biologist Hitchens is Christopher Hitchens is just a very erudite literary critic, like a lot of these people. Who will you seeing? Oh, I respect them for their intellect.

And now they’re ridiculing this. You want to, like, follow them in things. And I think that’s just a natural impulse. That’s why I think it’s very important for Christians to cultivate a life of showing people that we can be intellectual, yet humble and relatable for people to see, like for someone to see, like with a Christian, to impress, not just a whole holy.

They are like, they’re really smart. Here’s a and there’s a lot of like Christian philosophers I say really embody that people you’ve already mentioned people like Alex Pruss, Josh Rasmussen, like when I went to capturing Christianity, when I debated Watkins a few years ago, capturing Christianity was a ton of fun. I was brought in at the last minute because they had a guy to beat him and dropped out.

So I go and we had a great exchange, but I remember going to dinner at the Mexican restaurant the night before with all the speakers, and I just got to sit next to Josh, and we just started going, going at it, and it’s like, finally someone who can run on the treadmill with me and we’re just, you know how it is when you when you meet someone who’s also in the philosophy circle and you’re just throwing arguments back and forth and citing people, and when you meet and you’re like, whoa, this guy is smart.

And it’s like, I think it’s so important. I really hope, and I think that you especially could help cultivate that for people like for Christians to have, we should have a reputation, not even just for it shouldn’t have to be picking charity or knowledge. We can have both really should. But so you’re going through this though, and you’re seeing these people and you’re kind of taken in by that rhetoric.

Yeah. And I mean, a lot of it just there are these psychological factors at play, as I mentioned. Like I like feeling like I was among the enlightened few. You know, I liked being like among the, like the, the critics around, you know, just like pinpointing all the problems and other people’s beliefs and just like, even psychologically for, for me, let’s call it being a teenager.

Yeah, I know exactly. But also just like, psychologically, you know, when you’re young and you’re taught to believe these things, like you oftentimes aren’t given, like the direct, rational grounds, you know, it’s not like I was walked through all the evidence for, like, Padre Pio, mystical charisma, for instance. You know, I was just, like, taught to believe this sort of here’s the story, right?

Like, yeah, here’s the story. This is what we believe. We do this, do it, you know? Yeah. And so when I started learning that, you know, oh, there really are all these other religions out there, you know, had I been brought up elsewhere, like, it just psychologically affects you? Yeah. It makes you think that you didn’t have particularly good rational grounds for accepting what you did.

And then I was getting all of these mounting considerations against the ISM. And maybe what solidified it was coming across the work of Paul Draper, who actually was one of my letter writers for grad school. I love Paul so much, but in high school, I sort of watched this debate between Jeff Lowder and Frank Turek on like, which best explains reality, naturalism or theism.

There is a tad bit of a lopsided debate. Someone who is who’s someone who edits a popular journal of philosophy, popular level articles on philosophy of religion is well versed in them. And Frank, as much as I like them, you know more of a popular speaker and evangelist is not meshed in the same thing. Yeah, so there was a big disparity there.

And just like the Bayesian method wowed me, I was like, whoa. We can actually think really rigorously about these things. We can use, like actually math because I love math at the time. We can actually use math and apply them to these arguments. And so then that kind of, yeah, I graduated from the kind of New Atheism into a kind of philosophical, a little bit of trivia on that, by the way, one time when I was doing Catholic Answers Live, we were doing why Are You an atheist?

And we were doing Colin and this guy calls Jeff and he starts talking about, well, I think we have to understand naturalism and the prior probability, and this would be my reasons. And I say in the mic, is this Jeff Lowder. And he’s like, yes, yes it is. But like I but I recognize it from this just the same like the terminology.

And that’s so fun because especially if you’re into because I see a lot also reflected myself and you like. So when I was ten years old, I was in the Young Astronomers Club and like, we got to go on a field trip once to Pasadena, California, and we got to see the Cassini spacecraft. They were like, they’re all in the white suits, the white bunny suits, putting it together.

and so the idea like, oh, I love like math and science and like, you can apply it to these arguments. And when you do like Bayes theorem, probability theorem, it’s like, it’s like a crazy thing. It’s like that Jackie Chan oh mind blown meme when you because you can apply Bayes theorem to just like, you know, what’s you know epidemiology.

It’s a six. And like you start looking at the world, it’s like you’ve unlocked something to understand how the world works based on these things that people kind of intuit but they don’t fully grasp, you know, prior and post probability. And when you see it. These are things just people, like, barely intuit in their own lives. It’s almost like for you it’d be like, oh man, I’ve unlocked something.

Yeah. And that’s that’s exactly what it felt like. And so just encountering the kind of. And after I encountered Jeff Lowder, I went into the work of like, Paul Draper that he was citing. I started reading this stuff and, you know, Paul Draper’s talking about, like, evolutionary animal suffering and various other things. And so then that just kind of like solidified my deconversion.

So by the maybe somewhere around 10th grade, I don’t know exactly when, but I became a kind of naturalistic atheist. I was like a metaphysical naturalist. I positively said, yeah, doesn’t exist. Naturalism is the best explanation of reality and lost my faith. So that was the whole kind of deconversion process. Okay, so you do that and then you then you graduate high school.

[27:30] From Atheism to Agnosticism

And when I’m not quite graduated, when I started becoming agnostic. So actually. Oh even before that you. Yeah. Oh. Because I made an assumption that you had shifted into agnosticism a little bit later. So you’re hard atheist in high school, but you don’t leave high school a committed atheist? No, I don’t have those there. I mean, listen, I one thing that my Catholic education instilled in me was just a love of truth.

I don’t know exactly how to describe it, but somehow that was just badgered into me. It’s just like truth is something like sacred, you know, like you need to pursue truth at all costs. Like, and that’s sort of like what the martyrs are, you know, like we’re given all these martyr stories and like, no, they wouldn’t they wouldn’t even give the pinch of incense to the, the emperors or the false gods or anything like that, like, no, Christ is Lord and I will die for that, you know, and because they’re even willing to die for the truth instead of and they’ll forego, like, all these temporal, worldly goods and pleasures and whatnot.

So it’s just like truth is sacred in Catholicism. And that always kind of just it always just captured me and somehow that was instilled into me. So I was always like, you know, I’m on this intellectual journey and I’m not going to just like, end it now. Now that I’ve become an atheist, like, I still need to pursue truth and I could be wrong.

Like, maybe it’s helpful, like some more some other Christian institutions you might have gotten the feeling of what matters most is believing this thing we’re teaching you. And but maybe it was helpful in your journey that it’s just even if it wasn’t like, even not necessarily what we’re teaching you, but you should believe it. It’s the truth that matters.

We’re convinced this is the truth. But above all else, you should follow the truth. And that’s good. At least that was like, instill that, you know, there’s an objective truth to find somewhere, right? And so for that reason, I just never really stopped the inquiry. So the inquiry continued even after I became a kind of like, as you said, like hardened atheist or anything like that.

Yeah. So then, you know, I persisted in that state and, you know, I debated friends and tried to convert them and talked with like, my theology teachers and like, was still reading all this stuff. And I went on, like, the Internet Infidels and the secular web and like all all this stuff and reading and still watching debates like William Lane Craig and various other people.

And then in the summer before senior year, I stumbled across a YouTube channel called Worldview Design, and I was like, oh, this is really interesting. Josh’s. Josh. Josh I didn’t know that at the time, but I was like, I watched one of the videos and it was just like this animated video about this new contingency argument. And I was like, whoa.

I’ve never come across this. This is interesting. And in fact, like, unbeknownst to me. So this is, you know, this is in 2018 or so. This is like, right when their book Necessary Existence by Pruss and Rasmussen their book Necessary Existence is like coming out which contains like all these new and interesting cosmological arguments from contingency. And it’s like Josh is actually like popularizing and publicizing his like, totally new philosophical arguments.

And he’s just doing that for a popular audience. Right? It’s like I’m like, whoa, this is a cutting edge research that I’m just watching. And this is so cool. And I and I, like I had some objections, but as I watched more and more like he was responding to some of the objections and I still had some other objections in the background, but I was like, whoa, this is like a philosophically rigorous, robust theism and theistic arguments that I haven’t really come across.

So I binge watched, like, all of his videos that summer. Yeah. And I after I did that, I was like, I’ve got to reach out to this guy. So I, you know, I find whoever this is like Josh, doctor, Josh Rasmussen. Like I type a little email to him and I’m like, dear, I still have the email. And he’s like, Dear Doctor Rasmussen, this isn’t like like July of 2018.

I’m like, do you Doctor Rasmussen? I just finished binge watching all your YouTube videos and I found it really interesting. I have some questions that I’m hoping you can help me with them. So then I just list off my various objections to his arguments, and then he responds super cordially and kindly and lovingly with like really rigorous responses, like a really long email.

And so then I respond in turn with a really long email, and then he responds in turn with a really long email, and soon enough we’re going back and change. Good. We’re going back and forth for like dozens upon dozens of emails. Like, he’s just giving me so much time as this random high schooler that he didn’t even he’s never even met.

Yeah. So we just forged I forged a relationship with Josh in that kind of way. And you know that continued up all the way through my senior year of high school. And I was just talking to him about all my objections and going back and forth about his arguments and whatnot. And, you know, he was pointing me to his book, Necessary Existence.

So I picked that up. He was pointing me to the work of Alexander Pruss. So I started reading the principle Sufficient Reason of Reassessment from Alexander Proofs. I started reading his other books, like Actuality Possibility in Worlds, and I started just like delving into proofs. And I love that you, by the way, were at a point your senior year of high school.

You’ve leapfrogged into high-level graduate philosophy, because if I had met someone like you, even now, if I met a high schooler in your position, I would have referred them to what’s funny, he says in 2018, because it was a year later, Josh released his popular level book, How Reason Leads to God, which is a very solid book and great, great for your, I would say, your average high schooler who’s interested in this, but you’re going right for the.

Yeah, and listen, I don’t pretend to have understood everything, but you were excited about, you know, and I was excited and I just I was like, whoa, there’s this whole new world, you know, when I felt I felt that way in my studies are trying to want to go deeper. Philosophy, religion. For me, that was when the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology came out.

So for me, that would that was about ten years before your time. That was like my first taste of like, oh, an anthology of really thick, you know, theistic philosophy. I think they came out in like 2008 or 2009. And I remember when it came out, I was a college student. I couldn’t afford it. It was like 150 bucks.

So I so I downloaded a pirated PDF on the internet and I always felt guilty afterwards. So now I’m glad I have a real copy on my shelf to like, pay them back now that I have it. But like I love that. Like seeing that you’re seeing like oh and now but but like the proofs and Koons and Rasmussen stuff.

Yeah. That wouldn’t come out that a lot. That’s it took another decade for that to come out. Yeah. So I just it opened up this whole new world of like new and interesting theistic arguments, like all these contingency arguments and like modal arguments from contingency. And then I started reading up on like, Josh’s stuff on like arguing for a kind of distinction between mind and matter, you know, so like, mind is not ultimately reducible to or identical with material goings on in the physical world.

And I was like, oh man, there actually are some interesting and plausible arguments here, but I have various objections and I still got the problem of evil, and I’ve got all this stuff. And then I, you know, I picked up, Alexander Pruss’s book Infinity Causation and Paradox. And so I got into all the causal stuff and I was like, okay.

Whoa. There’s a lot more to theism than I thought. The ism has a lot more going for it. And also, you know, just like these little different, like higher order points were just like sprinkled throughout. So this isn’t like first order evaluation of the evidence, but like these higher order points about like peers and about my fallibility and about like the fact that there are lots of these, like, really smart, intelligent theistic philosophers who are able to kind of answer a lot of my objections and whatnot like that in and of itself.

That kind of higher order realization was like, okay, I think I was a bit premature in concluding that God doesn’t exist. And so then that kind of happened throughout maybe the course of 12th grade as I was reading these books and I was talking with Josh, like almost nonstop. Thank you. Josh. Yeah. And yeah, at the very least, by the end of 12th grade, maybe by the beginning of freshman year of college, I was like, okay, I’ve got to be an agnostic.

So it was it was a combination of new and interesting first order arguments for theism that were starting to pull on my mind. Yeah. Together with these higher order considerations about the fact that there are these really smart people with whom I disagree and who can kind of basically just like Mogg me, you know, in a debate. Yeah.

So it was those sorts of things that really got me questioning my, my atheism. And then I was like, okay, I need to suspend judgment and I’m just going to go on this kind of inquiry, this journey to try to find whether or not God exists. I mean, that’s been my all consuming pursuit my whole life. So it becomes so you move to more.

And that’s why, like, for me, if I engage people who are atheists like I do, try to be realistic and trying to move people, and I think it should be very realistic. Say, look, you should go from a confidence that there is no God just to like, I don’t know, treating it like you might treat the question of extraterrestrial life in the universe.

It’s like you wouldn’t just like, no, of course not. For most regular people, you’d be like, oh, I don’t know. But I think the New Atheists, I think what’s hard is like, you know, in the 2000 and the 20 tens, it’s like you have the new atheists and then maybe more popular level, especially evangelical apologists rebutting, and it gets caught in this sort of loop.

And like, you go and I remember reading secular Web Internet Infidels, that was back when when I started reading that in my conversion, I’d say it was around 2001, I didn’t I found some audio of Craig debates. I think I read like the Craig Washington debate. The transcript of it not nearly as much access as like stuff that you had, but it’s just the same, like Kalam, fine tuning, very basic moral argument.

And we’re dishing it out and like all the other interesting stuff, is just like a tumbleweed. But now these are the philosophers. Bring it in and just, yeah, just be able to say, hey, there’s a lot out there. You should really approach this. The question of God, really from more open minded perspective. It’s it’s not just a silly idea, like it’s a the idea of there just being an infinite, complete ground of reality.

That’s a normal thing to at least have as an option out there. Yeah. And I mean, just as like a social proof, like, I mean, the vast majority of humanity has believed in such a higher power, you know, like, am I saying that all these towering intellects of history have just been like, silly or ignorant or something like fixing the I might do an episode on this soon.

We could collaborate. That would be fun. On retooling the argument from common consent, right? That is one, because I think there’s another. I don’t know if you identifies as an atheist or agnostic with Emerson Green. He, you know, he’s a non-religious YouTuber and he’s even said, like the argument from common consent, the idea that, you know, lots of people believe in God and lots of people usually aren’t wrong about things.

It’s it’s a stronger argument than people give it credit for. Now, people can overplay their hands. I read, I think when you were going through I loved your episodes, and maybe one day I’ll do a full response to them. For people who go on, Majesty a reason you can see Joe’s channel. He has like an 11 our video on all the arguments for God surveying them.

I’m sure you’ll revisit at some point. Yeah. I mean, so when this video is out, this, you know, my full blown comprehensive case, we’ll link to it. Yeah. So everyone, I don’t know how long it is, but maybe it’s gonna be like six hours or something where I just comprehensively defend theism and then all the, like the miracles for Catholicism.

And then I like address the biggest objections, at least that I had towards Catholicism. So everyone should check that out. It’s almost like my renewed comprehensive case for my current beliefs, so people should check that out if they’re interested. Sorry, I wanted to. Oh, absolutely. So we’ll make sure. Be sure people are listening. If you want to see Joe’s full case is full conversion full click below.

We’ll have the link to that. Be sure to go and check it out. But I remember when you were going through your your 11 hour, your 11, our video, I think it’s actually 12 hours. It’s 11 hours like 55 minutes. Totally. Yeah. 100 arguments about common consent pointing to a pure a article about it. And I think the main objection that guy made was the problem is that belief in monotheism may not originate from common consent.

That could be the result of missionary activity that spreads it. It doesn’t. Monotheistic belief doesn’t necessarily originate spontaneously. You know, it’s disparate cultures, things like that. So that’s why I take the common consent argument and say, well, at the very least, I think this is a very strong argument against, like materialism, that there’s that human beings of spontaneously across cultures recognize that, you know, there’s more than just the material or something like that.

I’m not I’m not going to make claims about how strong it is, but like, at the very least, like it should affect your prior. Oh, it should make these majority of humanities believe something, including towering intellect from the past. You shouldn’t think it’s like a silly, like ludicrous, like absurd hypothesis from the get go. Like, at least have some.

Don’t be dismissive like there had to be. There’s some kind of reason you should investigate what that reason was. You could find out the reason was bunk. Sure, whatever. But it shouldn’t. It’s not just like some kind of because people will make comparisons to fairies or to other cryptids, things like that which have nowhere near as universal belief as like especially not just universal, but like you said, among people when you read, you know, even if you read like earlier philosophers, you know, people respond who responded to human people like Paley, people even going up to Copleston and all the others like, oh, there’s there’s a lot here.

Not to mention Aquinas, of course. Yeah. I mean, you could just like, do the whole litany like Maimonides have a very he’s a coin as a Guston Anselm look like you could just go, yeah. All these towering intellects who, if they were alive today, would totally, like, mock most of us. So. Yeah. Anyway, so then, like, is there something there?

[40:23] Why Joe Chose Philosophy

So now by the end of senior year, you’re at an agnostic position and you’re just kind of exploring the philosophy around it. Right. So then I go into college, I actually I, I worry about being able to get a job in philosophy. So I was like, okay, I’ll major in biology because I loved evolutionary biology. I just thought it was so fascinating.

It’s all major in biology, all minor in philosophy, and I’ll just have philosophy as like a, you know, a side gig. That’ll be fun. But then I don’t know. And like the first, at the end of my first year in college, I was like, okay, on the one hand, I’ve got these classes where I’m like, no disrespect to biology.

Like, I love biology, but I’ve got these classes where I’m having to memorize the reproductive parts of a plant. And on the other hand, I’ve got like investigating the fundamental nature of reality and like whether God exists and like whether there’s an afterlife and whether we have souls, like there’s like a clear winner here in terms of which one is, like, more interesting to me, to you, what you’re wired for.

Because some people, they want to know about the plants, maybe, and go for it. It’s God’s creation. It’s beautiful. And we need people because, you know, you can find out, like potentially, you know, we’ve found out so many cures for things by people just investigating, like, you know, worms and like flies and whatnot. So I’m all for it.

But for me, I was like, well, you weren’t wired that way. No, I’m not wired that way. So I was like, okay, I can’t do this biology thing. And I had some to like to teachers out there and, and like professors, like if you’ve got a student you think can make it, tell them. Tell them like, I think you can make it in a discipline because it’ll affect them.

So I had some teachers along the way who are like, Joe, I think you can do it. I think you could get a job. And so they’re so like, okay. And the thing is, if I had you as a student and seeing the work like I see your work and responding to me, for example, and like, oh, when you were responding to me, I mean, I had students like I was teaching at Holy Apostles, I had philosophy undergrads that I was like grading papers, things like that a lot.

I mean, a lot of people, I would say, yeah, you can pass this class, but you probably are not going to be a philosopher. But I would have told you, if you’re in my class, yes, you can be a philosopher. It was funny. Is I understand your concern, by the way, because when I was doing my undergrad, I got an undergrad in history.

I was going to become a history teacher. I loved philosophy, I thought I would just get a minor or maybe like a double major in it, but I never thought like, oh, what do you people ask me? Like, what are you going to do with a philosophy degree? I’m like, probably be unemployed. Contemplate the fundamental nature of reality.

Like, you know, I’m basically going to exercise and manifest and cultivate intellectual virtue and like, that’s more important than, you know. And I’ll do that even if it costs me, you know, like, right. But so there’s a but there’s a legit concern. I know a lot of people what’s hard with philosophy, I always I’ll put it this way, like when you’re in undergrad class and you go to Chem 101 and the teacher starts talking about chemistry, there’s rarely someone who stands up and is like, oh, I know chemistry better than this teacher.

Let me give you my thoughts on chemistry. People are usually nervous and just taking notes, but like philosophy, freshman intro philosophy, there’s always just some yokel. Oh, I understand that. Like, they think they’re already experts in it when they get to the way more. That happens in like, philosophy than in like a hard science, because people think, although I think it’s hard because philosophy is a universal discipline.

I think it was Alvin Plantinga who once defined philosophy. Well, he said it was it’s thinking really hard about something, although I think he, he fine tuned to to bet to something like ask answering, attempting to answer questions that everyone asks. And I think that’s a good definition of philosophy. Like what makes it different? Not everybody asks, what are the fundamental parts of this plant?

Like people in indigenous tribes don’t ask that. But even in indigenous tribes, they’ll ask questions like, what am I supposed to do? Where did everything come from? What am I? So there are questions. No matter what culture you are in, the culture will ask those questions and it is the job of philosophy to answer them right. And you found yourself in college.

I want to answer those questions. Exactly. And there you go. So yeah, now we’re basically in college. I mean, I’m after my first year, I decide I’m going to pursue philosophy. It’s it’s too cool. And it’s basically like, I don’t know, in some sense, you know, our intellect is like the highest part of us. You know, it’s the highest faculty that we have.

It distinguishes us from animals and the rest of the material created order. And so like I was like, oh, man, this is sort of like what I was made for. Just like, think about the fundamental nature of reality very rigorously and cautiously, with kind of systematic rigor, and just try to try to find things, try to better understand the nature of reality.

Yeah. So. Going back to the kind of story I persisted in a state of agnosticism, basically up until maybe my the end of my first year of grad school, going into my second year as well. So like, you know, I would get some arguments here and there, some new and interesting arguments for God’s existence that I would think, oh yeah, maybe these have some force throughout, like my second year of college, my third year of college and my gap year and grad school and whatnot.

I get some arguments for two years and I thought, oh, yeah, these are interesting. Maybe they pull me a little bit, but I would also like to lose some arguments for theism that I thought previously were plausible. So, you know, like I kind of had a 180 turn where I was like, oh yeah, I find some of these arguments for causal inference implausible.

But then I was like starting to lose those as I went on and studied further and then like, you know, same thing with atheism. I’d maybe I’d start to gain some arguments that I thought were kind of plausible for atheism, but then I’d lose some argument that I thought were plausible for atheists. So like, yeah, there were some shifts here and there, but for the most part, things were kind of stable.

You know, I was in a kind of stable agnosticism up until I don’t know exactly when, but maybe the beginning of my second year of grad school or something like that. When when did you start the channel? Was that for this? It was it was a Covid baby. So it was actually April 20th, I remember for 24, 20, 2020 say, oh, same for Council of Trent.

[45:51] Starting Majesty of Reason

It was I remember I uploaded something in my office like we’re closing down the office, hopefully for just a few weeks. That lasted a lot longer than I realized. And that was about when Council of Trent started up. Okay, so you started the channel though. Yeah. But you were an agnostic when you started your channel? Yes. Right. Yeah.

I mean, I started that in my, I think maybe my 2020. Let’s see, I graduated high school in 2019. So that means 1920 would be my freshman year in college. So this would would have been the end of my freshman year in college. Oh sorry. The channel okay. So while you’re so while you’re an undergrad, you’re doing Majesty of Reason and you’re, you’re an agnostic during this period.

So what motivated you want to do the channel? I’ve always just, you know, you wanted to get out there. Yeah. I want to get you want to be your philosophy and like, I want I want to defend my ideas in the public sphere. I want to, like, convince other people that I think are important. YouTube is the public sphere, right?

Exactly. YouTube is the public sphere. And also it’s just like there are so many reasons, like I already had like, you know, I wrote this like informal book called The Majesty of Reason A Short Guide Critical Thinking and Philosophy that I just self-published. And I was like, okay, you know, I could sort of talk about that on the channel.

I already had a blog which was called Naturalistic Inclined because I was a naturalist when I made it in high school, and I just blogged about arguments and whatnot and philosophy. And then Josh, it’s so funny, actually, Josh, when I was emailing him and starting to get into his work, he was like, I suspect you’re going to you’re going to change the name of your blog.

And it was so funny because, like, it actually happened because I like I read his work like he had a confidence in his, like a kind of subtle confidence in his arguments that they would convince me that, like, they actually kind of did and they made me an agnostic. So I changed it to Majesty of Reason. After this quote from Bruce Spinoza, what altar of refuge can a man find for himself when he commits treason against the Majesty of Reason?

So I always thought that like, reason was just this kind of it’s something that’s like owed honor or respect, and it’s almost like majestic, you know, it almost needs a more fitting word for it. It’s this Lagos. Yeah, right. If you will. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And yeah, I just and that goes back to just finding truth sacred, you know, like this is, this is really like a recurring themes.

I look back, it’s like this, this the sacredness of truth and reason and whatnot. Just it’s majestic and beautiful character. So yeah, it’s I changed the name and in college or something like that, or maybe at the end of high school. And then agnosticism just persisted up until maybe my beginning grad. Well, something like the second year of grad school.

Second grad school. Okay. Something around there. But we could talk about what kind of led me to what kind of kickstarted the shift to that and then. Absolutely, absolutely. Because, I mean, this would have happened. I mean, you had been had your channel, you’d interacted with some of my work. I’d seen that you had gone on other channels.

Sometimes you’re taking shots at the argument, sometimes you’re taking shots at atheistic arguments. But then when you’re getting through about second year of grad school, things start to click a little bit more out of agnosticism. Was it was it back just to theism, or was it kicking you towards the in particular? It was a really gradual shift. Okay.

[48:54] Moving Gradually Toward Theism

So like I just gradually started like inching towards theism, just like very gradually over the course of maybe my second year. And the reason is because, I mean, there were a few reasons, I think there are maybe three primary ones. First, I started losing some of my objections to the fine tuning argument. I previously had certain objections, and I was like, those don’t really seem to work.

This actually does seem to be a good argument. And I was like, oh man. Okay, I don’t care about these electrons in love. That doesn’t disprove anything. Right? So then my second, the second thing that sort of made me gradually shift towards season is like, there’s this new and interesting argument that’s being published by or that was published at the time by Brian Cutter and Dustin Crummett called the argument from psychophysical harmony.

And that came out in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, and it was forthcoming at the time. But like they had the paper up on PhilPapers. And so I read it and I was like, And I was really, like, clawing, I don’t know, I was trying to like, pinpoint holes in it for the longest time, but it just nagged at me, just this new and interesting argument for God’s existence, just from the seemingly fortuitous way in which consciousness pairs up with the physical world.

So that. And then also, maybe around my second year of grad school, I just came across here and there. It was only sprinkled in, but I just started coming across some, like, seemingly powerful reports of miraculous, supernatural and natural phenomena. At the time, I didn’t really take them too seriously, but it was like hard for me to, like, rule them out.

Like they were all these seemingly honest people testifying to things that happened super recently and perfectly, totally conducive perceptual circumstances where these people, like, seem honest. So those three things together, losing some of my main objections to a pretty powerful argument for theism, finding this new and interesting argument for theism together, some other interesting arguments like nomological harmony, and various other things that like Brian Cutter and Dustin Crummett, some others were working on, and then also just like sprinkling in some testimonial reports, including some like medically documented healing cases and various other things where it’s like, oh man.

Like maybe, maybe there’s something going on. It’s like hard for me to rule these out from the armchair. I’ve got all these speculative reasoning, but like, I don’t know, this person is testifying to, you know, just like a cup. Just like last week, just like when they were talking with someone who was purportedly possessed, like the cup would just go up and then fly across the room and it would shatter on the wall.

And I was like, okay, that’s something that’s hard to be wrong about whether or not that happened. Yeah, this isn’t because I think a lot of times people talk about spooky things or aliens and things like that in the midst of the night, and I woke up and this crazy thing happens. Well, that could just be sleep paralysis, for example, illumination.

But it’s like you were clearly awake, aware of your surroundings, not under the influence of some kind of multiple people in the room. You see the exact same thing, and they’ll come and testify to that sort of thing. And it’s just like. And then like, you see this sort of thing being testified to over and over and over again by people who are within deliverance ministry, by people who’ve been through deliverance ministry, by people who are like, just, you know, like a hospital staff worker, like being reported in like official government report, seeing these sorts of things.

It’s like, am I really going to like I started shifting in my seat, you know, so like those those things together, the kind of philosophical side and starting to get some little sprinkles of some, like supernatural phenomena that was hard for me to write off made me like, okay, maybe there’s a little bit more to theism than I thought.

You know, it’s funny, I feel like a lot of atheists sometimes when they hear these things, they don’t realize that they’re kind of in a little bit of a circular reasoning that they will say, well, I’m an atheist because there’s there’s no good reason to believe in miracles. And then when people are given Miracle Association reports, it’s like, well, I don’t believe that these miracle reports actually happen.

You know, because I’m an atheist, there’s no God that causes this. So it almost, I feel like turns into a kind of looped explanation where, like, you know, I disbelieve miracles because I’m an atheist. Then when I’m presented with the evidence or I’m an atheist because I don’t think there are miracles, but then when I’m given miracles, I write them off because there’s no God that causes these things.

There’s the point that this is similar to a point that, like G. K. Chesterton makes, where it’s like, you know, why don’t you believe in miracles? Because, like, there’s no good, like no good reason to think that. But then you’re just you point out to like, these testifiers and like all these seemingly and not just testimony, but like, also like medical documentation and pictures and all that stuff, but also just like you point out to the testimony, it’s like, why don’t you believe these people?

It’s like, oh, because they’re, they’re they’re crazy or they’re stupid or they’re unreliable. Well, why? Oh, because they believe in miracles. So it’s like this, like circulating. There’s like, you don’t believe me because you don’t believe miracles. It’s like, this is a kind of circularity that G. K. Chesterton pointed out, which is kind of funny, but. Yeah, but and just the idea that I feel like a lot of, like the New Atheists and other people will create and I think this has been helpful.

And I think there’s a I’m hoping that there’s a lot of people who, you know, fall under the sway of atheism and agnosticism and secularism. I’m hoping that, like the New Atheists and what they’ve kind of devolved into, which I would say, like Matt Delahunty sort of turns into, like the logical end. If you stick to that kind of new atheism that you, you basically end up having a really unrealistic, unworkable epistemology.

That is, when you’re presented with all of these reports, I feel like a lot of them just take Hume when it deals with miracles and just create this impossible evidential bar to surpass that. I could only believe in a miracle if everybody on earth observed it at the same time, or something like that. So much so that you get like Dillahunty saying things like claims aren’t evidence.

It’s like the most mind numbingly like, if you know anything about epistemology and philosophy is just a giant face palm for someone to say something like that, that like, I feel like a lot of these atheists, it’s like, well, I’ll believe in God. When a peer-reviewed journal says God exists in science or something in nature, it’s like, come on, people.

It was like, I’m not going to believe, even if there’s multiple people that saw this paranormal thing happen. Not good enough, right? But then it’s like, okay. But by that standard, if that is your standard for believing things you can’t believe, like almost any historical facts or just anything, you would have to be totally agnostic about the world around you.

But they don’t live like that. They only apply that standard to religion because they don’t want to believe it. I don’t mean to be too brash to them, but I think it’s true for a fair number. Well, I mean, it was certainly true for me. So we’ll get into like the more personal side of things. But in any conversion, you don’t just need to change of mind, you need to change of heart.

And so I definitely want to get back to, of course, later for what exactly caused. But you’re seeing things that are making in your head. You’re being like, oh, this is concerning. Yeah. Exactly the way you put it there. It’s concerning concerned. It didn’t convince me. That’s the thing. It didn’t convince me initially. I’m just shifting in my seat at this point, you know, around maybe something like my second year of grad school.

I’ve got these arguments, and, you know, I just I want to be cautious. I want to be careful. I want to investigate these arguments. I’m like starting to correspond with like, Brian Cutter. I’m having him on my channel and whatnot. I’m like thinking about these arguments like, what could I object to? I’m consulting my friends. Turns out like they’re being starting to become convinced of theism, like Matthew Adelstein name was woolen, but because of lots of these arguments and I’m like, And I’m consulting others. And the objections just I try to proffer certain objections, but they just get like swatted down and whatnot and was like, that’s not really a plausible objection. So like very gradually this was a really gradual process. I’m like starting to lean towards theism. And yeah, I mean, I guess going through the second year of grad school, like it started like ramping up, like the force of some of these arguments.

I remember I actually interviewed still up on my channel. I interviewed in person, Brian Cutter, about the arguments from psychophysical harmony and harmony. And I was like throwing all these objections to him and worries that I had and whatnot. But he was just able to like very forcefully and cogently respond to them. Yes. And so actually that night, this is at like a conference, I went to bed and I was like, oh, maybe God exists after all.

So I was like, Maybe God, maybe you exist. Maybe. So I was like, really? I was really starting to open up, starting to shift. And at the time that was kind of like exciting because I thought that would have been like like given my plausibility structures at the time, that was like good news. I thought, you know, there’s like a perfect being at the foundation of reality who loves me, who’s probably gonna, like, reward everyone with like, an everlasting, beautiful life and whatnot.

Like, I just, I a lot of my kind of plausibility structures had, I guess, imbibed a more kind of like liberal Christianity type view of God where, you know, like it’s kind of universalism and like the Bible is like super unreliable, but still it’s like, you know, full of good stories and like, Jesus was a good guy or something like that.

You know, that my plausibility structure is aligned a little bit more with that. So I saw just like even generic philosophical theism and like a good light. So I was like, you know, this would actually be good news. You’re starting to believe in the god that many secular philosophers would like to exist, right? Or at least starting to lean that way.

It’s funny, I didn’t actually like, really kind of say that I believed in God until after until I got so much miraculous evidence because, like always in the background, the problem of evil was just there and it was just nagging at me and it just felt so forceful. Transit just felt so forceful, of course. And it was just, you know, I just had lots of mounting evidence for theism.

[58:06] The Problem of Evil and Animal Suffering

But also, just like this seemingly Ganesha, an objection to theism, do you think also so your particular problem of evil, it’s always interesting to see what what sways people. And part of that psychological of things that people have different affectations for, I guess like I think, for example, you have a particular affectation for the suffering of animals, which is why why you’re a vegan and you’re still you’re still committed to that.

And so a instance of whereas other people, they don’t have as many affectations. So the gratuitous suffering of animals may not be what pushes them away from God. It could be rather some kind of virtue of suffering involving humans, where you might say, oh, well, philosophically, we can human suffering. We can imagine a lot of goods for that.

And like, you know, they can develop and manifest virtue. And it gives us opportunities to help one another. And like that can cultivate relationships for all eternity. And it was like, I don’t know, it was like plausible under theism that God might be able to give us an afterlife where the goods can be sorry, where the evils can be defeated, such that the evils are actually kind of integrated into this narrative whole, such that the whole is actually better because it included the evil in question, and the people in the afterlife come to actually kind of like endorse the kind of life that they lived and they wouldn’t wish away the evils.

And it is an imperfect world. Becoming perfect has more goods than a perfect world. Yeah, exactly. And so, like, I could see, you know, like some reasons why God might permit human suffering, human wrongdoing and whatnot. But, like, when I thought about the animals, it’s like, it’s not like the pig is there, and it’s like, oh, yes, I’m going to call it like virtue in response to this suffering.

And it’s like, I love that. I love that you’re a pig is basically Swinburne. Well, because it’s like I’m imagining a cognitively sophisticated pig. And Swinburne is very cognitively sophisticated. That is true. Yeah. So like, I don’t know, it just had a particular force on did like, I mean, the Holocaust, like I would read about the Holocaust, I would read about like particularly horrific instances of suffering.

And I just got this like sense that, like, you know, no good God could allow that, you know? So like that, that was a palpable influence on me. Sure. But yeah, I just felt like there was this big, monstrous objection to theism that was really hard. And I didn’t really have a good, really hard to respond to it.

I didn’t have a good response to it, but I was like starting to mount my arguments. Well, it’s like, imagine a seesaw, right? And so for your evidence is the problem of animal suffering is weighing it down. But people keep dropping things over here and it’s starting to turn the sea salt. Exactly, exactly. And that’s that’s really how it felt.

[1:00:30] Miracles, Deliverance, and Supernatural Evidence

And so then maybe again, somewhere around the second year of grad school, maybe nearing the end, I start to get inundated with evidence for miraculous phenomena. And just like supernatural and natural phenomena. Yes. Yeah. So, I mean, I think it started out just like with because I’ve always been like good friends with Cameron Bertuzzi. Right. And so it started out with him making videos about Our Lady of Zeitoun and just like demonic phenomena, where he just like, invites on different exorcists and other people in deliverance ministry and like psychiatrist, like Doctor Richard Gallagher and just various other people who just testify to things where like seemingly it’s like very hard for them to be honest

or like mistaken about it, honestly mistaken where these people have lots of professional credibility. Right. And where basically if, if anything remotely resembling their testimonial reports happened, it’s like naturalism is just like demonstrably falsified. So like, it’s like, you know, and I could just like divine from the armchair that these guys are all mistaken and or there’s some kind of like significant conspiracy theory or people are just like confabulation on cosmic proportions, like they’re like, even though they’re, like, totally psychologically sane and normal in every other context.

Just for for our listeners here, I’ll include links below. I’ve covered some of this in previous episodes, but you have instances where thousands or tens of thousands of people see an extra mental phenomenon outside of themselves. The miracle of the Sun at Fatima in 1917 would be one the apparitions of Our Lady of Zeitoun, at a Coptic church in Egypt in 1962 is another you’re referring to, along with also just the reports you mentioned about, you know, deliverance ministries, groups seeing supernatural events occurring around possessions.

So you’re adding so just to catch up, our listeners, a lot of things you’re referring to, which I’ll link to below, it’s it’s like, oh, wow. It’s really hard to explain all this in a even Dawkins makes a equip about that. and The God Delusion, I think about the miracle of the sun that it’s just like it’s pretty hard to explain how like that many people could be hallucinating the same thing.

Right? So like, you know, again, just at the start, it was like demonic phenomenon. Our lady is 18, 18. Hundreds of thousands of people witness this. We have like medical documentation for like healings of blindness, muteness, paralysis, like palpable tumors, gangrenous fingers coming back to life. So a dead finger coming back to life, like all, all different sorts of that things we have.

Like, it’s just so much like converging evidence in these cases where it’s like it’s I’m really starting to shift in my seat now. But again, I’m not I’m still not at theism. I’m just like starting to lean towards these and I’m getting more and more uncomfortable. Yes. and like again, as I just research further, one thing like that Cameron did, which was really good, is he was just like pressing me.

Joe. He’s like, Joe, what is your explanation? Give me an explanation. Like actually say something, right? Like put your foot, your feet on the line. Yeah. I was like, okay. So I was like flailing about for like implore, like really implausible hypotheses that could explain. I was like, yeah, okay. Granted, these are implausible, but like a miracle is also super implausible, right?

There’s like some kind of suspension of laws of nature or something like that. So I had ways to try to push back. But as time went on, I just got more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more evidence for miraculous phenomena. And you don’t want to dig yourself in with a bad epistemology, because I think it’s like Bart Ehrman and his debates has said, like the definition of a miracle.

He says a miracle, by definition, is the least is just whatever is the least probable explanation for a phenomenon which already begs the question to say, oh, well, the miracle is just whatever is least likely to be true, to explain something rather than a more classical definition of oh well, it’s the suspension of the laws of nature for a deity to communicate a sign or a message of some kind.

Because if you already define it as just like, you know, it’s just what doesn’t happen, well, of course it’s not going to happen. Exactly. So like these miracles are mounting and mounting and like, again, I’m still not quite a theist. And it’s it’s only after getting introduced to like Eucharistic miracles. And then I start like investigating those and like after I read like Serafini’s book, but and then I started watching the debates between like the skeptics and people like Matthieu Lavagna and various other people.

And I started reading up on what some of the best skeptics online are saying, and then reading up on what Ethan Muse is putting out. And it’s like, oh, man. Like, actually, the skeptical objections aren’t that good. Yeah. And then so Eucharistic miracles come in and there’s like other Marian apparitions now that are starting to come in and flood me with evidence like Fatima and Lourdes and various other things.

So actually, I only became a theist and I was still only like 70% or 80% confident in theism. After seeing like looking at all the demonic stuff, looking at Zeitoun in tremendous depth, looking at Eucharistic miracles, examining the debates there, and then finally Caleb Jackson, who does lots of he’s a Protestant currently, currently. We’ll see where things go.

He was doing work on, like Lourdes and various other medical medically documented healings. It was only after reading some of his forthcoming stuff on Lourdes that I was like, I just read that stuff and I was like, okay, I can’t explain this away. Like, we have cases. It’s just insane. You look at the Lourdes stuff. So there’s like a Saint Beluga article, which goes through some of the more recent ones, but just we have overwhelming medical documentation for things that are just naturalistic, inexplicable.

So like just to give you two examples in like the 19th century, what’s her name? Pieter De Rudder, this is one of the officially recognized Lourdes miracles. She had this, like massive gaping ulcer on her leg. It was about 12.5in from like the bottom of the knee to the ankle and like the skin was totally off and you could even see exposed like muscle and tendons and whatnot.

So this massive gaping wound we have like a medical like report, medical documentation a week before she goes to Lourdes, describing it in like grotesque detail from her primary physician. Week later, she goes to Lourdes. She goes into the bath with she has like a bandage around it. She goes into the bath, she comes out and witnesses around start seeing like the bandages shrivel and they come off and there’s new pink skin over this gigantic gaping like, gash like wound, this ulcer.

And like it’s like, oh my gosh. Okay. So like gigantic ulcer, no gigantic ulcer. And so then we have like a testimony from the people there who saw it with their own eyes. We have like tons of different testimony that like the church collected concerning this, she went back home. We have like a telegram about this. She went back home to the see the primary care physician a week later after she went to Lord.

And he writes like she’s healed. It’s like, what is going on? It’s like week before, week later. Medical documentation, another case. Marie Lemarchand. This is another one of the official Lourdes cases where she has this, like lupus vulgaris, with gigantic ulcers that are like eating away at her face. Yeah, yeah. She goes to Lourdes, enters the baths, and once again she comes out with new pink skin all over her face.

And again, we’ve got like, it’s like a, it’s like a dozen testimonies to this and like, medical medical reports. It’s just insane. Yeah. Like, these are the sorts of things that we’re talking about, like demonstrably not naturalistic, explicable and like, it’s hard to be wrong about whether there’s a gigantic, like, ulcers all over someone’s face that you saw just immediately go away.

Right. So I was like, really shifting in my seat and just looking into the evidence there. I was like, oh man. And there were other medical documented cases and like Protestant services and whatnot that I was like, okay, God probably exists at this point. I wasn’t I wasn’t ready for Christianity yet, but I was like, okay, maybe 70, 80% likely that God exists.

Notice I was only 70 or 80%, but hey, it’s better than 50. Still very still very good. But it’s so funny you weren’t ready there because the primary thing motivating you are very distinct Christian miracles, and you’re still hesitant about Christianity when it’s you. The point of the miracle is to try to communicate that message. But you’re like, at least there’s something here.

Yeah, there’s something fishy going on. It’s like, I don’t know the exact explanation, but it seems like, you know, God exists. He cares about us. He’s healing people. And I’m getting like, all these new, interesting arguments for God’s existence. Well, what’s interesting is, if you at least are aware of theism, this actually short circuits a common atheist. I think a lot of atheists, and this happened to my discussion with Alex O’Connor on premiere.

Unbelievable. When we talk about the resurrection, when I said, you know, one of the evidence resurrection is these like Marian apparitions. I think to borrow Bayesian reasoning, that is something you would really expect if the resurrection hypothesis is true and the resurrection hypothesis is not true, those things would be very unexpected. And Alex is kind of like hand wave them away.

He’s like, okay, but let’s not talk about Marian apparitions. Let’s go to the more like I’m like, well, you still gotta. So and I think what atheists will say is, well, look, there’s all kinds of people make paranormal claims and they can’t all be true. So I guess they’re all just false. And I think that’s the way they try to like, sidestep these kind of miracle claims.

But what’s interesting is you could take your approach and be like, okay, I’m at least there’s just a god. At least there’s a god doing all this stuff. We’ll figure out the theology later. Yeah, but we definitely shouldn’t be atheists, right? Exactly. I was like, I certainly can’t hold on to naturalism anymore. Right? So I was just like, okay, naturalism is gone.

[1:09:27] Eucharistic Miracles and the Pull Toward Catholicism

Yeah. So at the very least, I want an atheist, like, watch this. If you see this by these things, like, okay, if you convince you to be a Christian, you should really be skeptical of naturalism right now, right? Right. Yeah, exactly. So at this point, you know, I’ve come across Eucharistic miracles, which I mean, themselves were like, if I accept these, it seems like it’s like really powerful evidence for Catholicism because I was like a Catholic priest prays over some bread and it turns into suffering myocardial tissue.

It’s like, what am I supposed to do with my life? Then what kind of message is being communicated is this boggles the mind to discern what exactly what would be communicated? Yeah, so that one was. I didn’t quite accept them. I wasn’t just I just wasn’t ready, you know, because it just it would require Catholicism. And I was not ready for Catholicism.

I not ready for Catholic. I believe that’s a t shirt that should be given to every person who goes to Osseo. I was not ready for Catholicism because it is like this big cathedral of a thing, with 2000 years of history and theology behind it and well articulated thought of beliefs. I reminded of a. It was interesting, though I remember that Graham did a review of J.P. Moreland, a book he did on like evolution, creationism.

And there’s a line in there when he talks about theology and he says, honestly, though, the Catholic Church is probably the best developed and most developed theology in all of Christianity, even if he gives you a little bit of kudos there. It’s like, yeah, but there’s a lot there. You’re like, oh boy. Yeah. I mean, a lot of it seemed like a lot of commitments at the time.

Yeah. But also just like if I were to become Catholic, I would have had to change my life in a lot of ways. And for you, though, return and return, you have to admit that I was like, wrong, that my parents were right the whole time and that like, you know, like all that super embarrassing stuff. Even though I just started, I’ve been publishing stuff like actively criticizing the Catholic model of God and Catholicism.

[1:11:13] Psychological Barriers to Returning to the Church

Like for like such a long time, I would, I would rather stay here and eat from the pigs trough than return to my father’s house. Right? Exactly. Yes, exactly. So I was like. And also just like it had so many teachings that are like these hard sayings like, there is such a thing as hell, homosexuality impermissible, or at least, you know, acting on homosexual tendencies, impermissible teachings, the sexual ethics teachings about eschatology.

Yeah. Those were those are the two biggest ones, the sexual ethics and the eschatology. I was like, it’s just it can’t be, right. Like this stuff. It’s so implausible and also just so great against my moral intuitions. And also it’s just like this huge, seemingly huge, complex edifice that I’d have to buy into. I just I was not ready and I did not want to be Catholic.

And I had so much resistance, so many psychological barriers. And again, I just have to very significantly, radically change my life. If Catholicism were true, it’s like it’s like a huge big ask. Yeah, yeah. And I have to like, get rid of certain relationships that I was in at the time and various other things like that.

I could not it was really tough. It was really tough. I couldn’t couldn’t get myself there. And so this is where, like, you know, the intellectual factors are building and building and building the psychological for Catholicism because all these miracles, they seem to be vindicating distinctively Catholic doctrines, which we can get to.

Yeah. But I just had so many psychological barriers in the other direction and like genuine rational barriers in the other direction, cause I had so many objections to hell, I had so many objections to the to the morality that the Catholic Church teaches. I had so many objections and whatnot. So, I mean, there are a few places we could go next.

I mean, it’s like, how exactly does the intellectual side which culminated in the conversion? And then there’s like the personal side and whatnot, which is kind of like almost like seamlessly interwoven with the intellectual side. We’ll teach them both out. I want to tease, though, because you’ve got all these. Was it just seesaw is turning with all of the positive evidence, because I find one way, and this is a way that I find helpful, both intellectually and personally, dealing with the problem of evil.

I mean, it’s an approach similar to what Brian Davies offers in his 2006 book, The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil, which is basically like, you know, if I mean, you could do it with anything. Problem with evil argument is just if gratuitous suffering exists, God does not exist. The atheist will say there is gratuitous suffering, so there is no God.

But you could just run a modus tollens and say, well, yeah, if if gratuitous suffering, therefore no God but God. So the suffering is just not fortuitous that whatever we think it is, it doesn’t exist because we know God exists. And so whatever we think is geared to is it just it isn’t. So like, is that kind of like when it comes to the problem of animals suffering since they developed complex?

It’s like I’m like, it’s not billions of years of suffering, but yeah, millions. I’ll give you when they have complex nervous systems that arise through evolutionary process. You know, so there’s there’s a stuff there is suffering there was it for you like, okay, but we know God exists. And then was it maybe some other like theodicy to help explain that to like, get that boulder out of the way?

Yeah. I mean so it never it as in the problem of evil never quite went away and it’s just it should never it should never go fully away for believers. Right. Yeah. Because it’s there. It’s a problem. Yeah. And it was really just a matter of like denting its evidential force so that I could appreciate the just overwhelming evidential force of the miracles and the arguments for theism and whatnot.

So it’s I think I was sort of getting, getting to the place where I like, I could see myself kind of accepting theism and kind of just dealing with at least some evidential hit from evil, but just mitigating the evidential hit through a huge disjunction of different things that one could say. So like Trent Doherty has this book on animal suffering.

It’s called The Problem of Animal Pain and The Odyssey for Creatures Great and Small, where he proposes that like, there is a kind of afterlife for animals. And it’s not saying that Narnia theology, it’s not saying that they’re actually going to enjoy the beatific vision. But like, you know, the line will lay down with the lamb and the eschaton.

So, like, why can’t God just make those very lions and lambs that exist if they have if animals have mental states that persist through time, then maybe they could still persist in the next life somehow. Right? Right. Exactly. So maybe God could like, reconstitute them or something like that, and then basically bring about a some kind of defeat of their suffering that they experienced while on Earth.

And again, it’s like, sure, that may seem implausible to the atheist or something like that, but firstly, when we’re evaluating arguments, we need to look at how probable is the evidence conditional on theism, and then how probable is the evidence conditional on atheism or naturalism. So we actually can assume that, like in the background, when we’re trying to assess how probable the evidence is under theism, we can assume that God exists.

And like if he can give like a good afterlife to animals, like, why not like God’s a perfect being. He’s motivated by considerations of value. And just like bringing about good things, like he perceives the good and then it’s motivated by the good. So like, if God couldn’t do it, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem terribly implausible that he might do it again, may seem implausible, but like, it seems like that’s something that God could achieve.

So I don’t know, it’s like to quote Peter Griffin, He’s Jesus. He can do anything. Right. Exactly. So there was that. And then there’s this new paper by Brian Cotter again, Brian Cotter, he’s huge in the story. He’s one of my favorite philosophers. Yes. There’s this new paper by Brian Cutter and Phillip Swenson on the omission theodicy, which basically gives like yet another even like separate explanation for animal suffering.

Basically, like there are agents who just culpable omitted to guide the evolutionary process in a benevolent direction. And there are all sorts of reasons why that’s actually not terribly unlikely, conditional on theism, that they go through in their paper, which we don’t need to get into. But like, okay, now I can basically get like disjunction either story or Phillip Swenson and Brian Cutter story.

Or maybe there’s some like there’s some secret third thing that I’m not aware of, like it’s given the vast cognitive chasm between God and us, it wouldn’t be too surprising that maybe there are some reasons that God has for allowing this stuff, of which I’m just not privy or I’m not aware. And that doesn’t destroy natural theology. I’m not saying like, oh, I’m totally in the dark about all of God’s reasons.

No. Or I’m told that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying you do not want to go to hyper skeptical themes. That would be a very bad, bad way to go. I don’t want to do that, but it’s like a very modest, skeptical theism. It’s like it’s just not hopelessly unlikely that maybe there are just reasons that God has of which I’m unaware and which justify this.

That’s not like a terribly unlikely hypothesis, given the cognitive chasm between us. And given that just puts a cap on the force of the evidential problem. And I’ve always thought for someone who, if they find it at least, like, okay, I can see the plausibility in replies to two examples of allegedly gratuitous human suffering. Well, I mean, if God you say, oh, I can see how God could bring it about.

Even though there are stark qualitative differences between humans and non-human animals, there are still a lot of similarities and enough including like the persisting mental states and things like that. If God is all powerful enough to overcome the evil that affects human organisms, really, what’s to prevent him from doing that for the non-human organisms? Yeah. And so I’m just getting this huge disjunction of things that are like, each of which is actually not like hopelessly unlikely, conditional on theism and the like.

The disjunction actually like, makes it not terribly unlikely that there would be animal suffering. So we’ve got like I was also becoming aware of certain multiverse odysseys like there Multiversity Odysseys. There’s like the animal afterlife that is proposing. There’s like this modest skeptical theism. There’s like this Brian Cutter, Phillip Swenson type omission theodicy approach. I was like, there are so many different approaches.

And like, if someone’s lupus is basically like instantaneously being healed, like, okay, maybe that’s while the boulder’s been chipped away enough, the seesaw can tip the other way. Exactly. So like, I was just chipping away at the evidential force of evil. Yes. and then I just got so much overwhelming evidence on the other side, I was like, okay, I can see myself just accepting this.

And then another just higher order realization that I had is like, lots of the arguments for atheism aren’t probabilistically independent, such that they don’t actually compound in force when you put them together. So like once you once you update or once you take into account the evidential force of, let’s say, one instance of particularly horrific suffering, right? Or like a collection of instances like the Holocaust.

Once you update on that, sure. These will take some kind of evidential hit, and we can mitigate that evidential hit in various ways. But then once you have that in the background that God is allowing something like that, it that’s then going to it’s not going to be nearly as surprising. Then once that’s in the background, that there would be other bad things in the world.

And like a lot of the atheistic arguments are just like, oh, here’s a bad thing. Oh, here’s another bad thing. Oh, here’s another bad thing, or here’s another suboptimal thing. Yeah we know. And those aren’t. Yeah exactly. We know after we updated on the first instance. And so and then that basically. Yeah. Again we might take an additional hit.

But then the view the package that you then have is going to be theism together with God’s going to have to have some sort of story for allowing that particular horrific instance of suffering. But then given that God has that story, it’s not terribly unlikely that he would have stories to explain to these other things. So these, these, these problems, these arguments for atheism, including like divine hiddenness and religious diversity and confused whatnot, they’re not actually probabilistically independent.

And that’s different from theism, because, yeah, if you multiply instances of gratuitous suffering or hidden ness, it doesn’t make the problem worse for theists markedly. But if you multiply the number of miracles for naturalists, that does markedly increase the problem of maintaining that. Yeah, like explaining Eucharistic miracles won’t help you explain Padre Pio, right? It won’t help you explain Zeitoun.

Yeah. And even if you explain those, you’ve still got fine tuning. You can’t shuttle your explanations from one to the other. They are. They’re independent and they build the force more, right? Exactly. So then I was starting to see that, like theism offers this like really attractive, elegant, unifying explanation of like dis unified phenomena in reality, like fine tuning and like the fortuitous pairing between consciousness and physical states and the fact that we have like, moral knowledge, even though evolution easily could have gone astray under naturalism.

And like the moral facts, don’t even play into the explanation of our moral beliefs under naturalism. And so then, like, I’ve got those sorts of considerations, the fact that there are any contingent things at all and like, I’ve got all these miracles which are just stacking up one on top of another, which are seemingly probabilistic, independent, and theism just offers this like beautifully elegant, unifying explanation of all of these.

And then there’s just like one class of anomalies which we can significantly dent in evidential force by taking this disjunctive approach. And at that point, I’m like, okay, there is a lot going for a simple explanation. It’s not ad hoc, right? It’s like there’s just a being with every perfection at the fundamental nature of reality. Extremely simply, compactly specified, highly uniform, highly.

It’s not like, oh, the being knows everything except for the number of blades of grass on some particular lawn. Like that’s like a hopelessly arbitrary ad hoc I. Well, that’s like Rasmussen’s argument from limits a little. Exactly. And I just think that significantly affects the prior probabilities such that, like, actually theism is like a live, serious option before even looking at the evidence.

And then it just unifies so much evidence exceptionally well. So then like, I’m really sorry, I’m like now really starting to lean towards theism. And at this point I’m basically like, yeah, after I, after I look at Lourdes and like Fatima is kind of there in the background, like nagging at me and kind of like thinking like maybe Catholicism is true, maybe Catholicism is true and the Eucharistic miracles are there nagging at me in the background which are like seem to be manifest vindication of like transubstantiation.

It’s like, okay, yeah, theism is true. and Christianity seems to be the most probable version of theism, given the miracles. And I wasn’t quite ready for Catholicism yet, though. So again, like we’re building up, there’s like Fatima, I started really appreciate the force of Fatima, started really appreciating the force of Padre Pio, which was the last kind of like the last domino to fall before my conversion.

And then just kind of like, alongside all of this, because I had all these psychological barriers. Somehow the Holy Spirit needed to remove those. Yeah. Because, okay, so he’s he’s getting in there and they’re starting to come down. Yeah. The psychological barriers are starting to come down. So like I’m starting to find of course some like reasonable things to say in response to my problems concerning hell and sexual ethics and whatnot.

But also just like, you know, very gradually I’m starting to there’s like a shift in, in, like mental perspective. There’s like a gestalt shift where you go from, oh, no, Catholicism might be true. There’s like a shift from that to, whoa, Catholicism is like Catholicism may be true. That’s being happy about it. Yeah, that’s that’s beautiful. This is wonderful.

So some sort of shift had to happen in, like, the heart. So maybe I’ll talk about, like, the heart shift and then we can talk about Padre Pio and whatnot. Well, you go right ahead. Yeah. What’s going on there? So, like, it’s basically two main things looking at lives of the saints and just watching some Saint videos and whatnot.

[1:23:44] Saints Who Opened Joe’s Heart

And then just like having some like almost like quasi religious experiences. So along this path I start like watching some videos just about saints. I don’t know how exactly I came across them. Maybe it was because, like again, like Cameron introduced me to like, Father Carlos Martins. And then I know he had this video on GabiAfterHours, which was on St. Maria Goretti.

So I watched that and after it I just bull. I bought my eyes out and I’m like, this is so beautiful. So St. Maria Goretti was she? I think she died at the age of 11, I think in like 1902 or something like that. So she’s this young Italian girl and she lives on a farm, and it was like next to another family who I think were like the farm owners or something that Alessandro Serenelli’s and I think his name was Andrew, Alessandro Serenelli.

He was like a 20 year old neighbor of the Goretti, and he took an impure liking to her. Right when she’s, you know, just this 11 year old girl. And as you know, it started with these, like, kind of sexual harassment type stuff, you know, like just comments that made her feel uncomfortable. But it was very evident that she was uncomfortable.

And she, you know, because she’s committed to purity. And so it started with comments. But like, gradually the efforts ramped up to try to get her to engage with her sexually. Right. And so one day when saint when St. Maria Goretti in her home, she’s home alone. Alessandro Serenelli’s next door, he takes this, like, sharpened knife like object.

And he goes. He goes to her and he puts it at her and he says, unless you do what I tell you, I’m going to kill you. And she says, no, I’m not going to give up my virginity. I’m going to remain chaste and I will die. This is not exactly what she’s saying, but this is, you know, going through her mind.

I will die a martyr for Christ, you know, for purity, chastity. And so he stabs her nine times. So much so that, like when he when he puts the knife in her, it’s like. It’s like this, like crude kind of instrument. Like sometimes it goes through her stomach and pierces the other side of her back. And sometimes he also hit her, her spine such that, like the knife thing, like, dented.

So he does that nine times. She drops unconscious. He thinks he’s killed her, so he leaves. She actually consciousness comes back. And so she’s like, in this dazed state. She’s like, she tries to get help. So she, like, crawls over to the to like the door. She opens up the door wanting to get help. She opens up the latch.

Andrew hears that. So he comes back and he thinks he finishes the job. So he stabs her five more times. And so she’s she’s bleeding there. And actually, it turns out she doesn’t even die from that. It was those five stab wounds that would eventually kill her of 24 hours later. Right. But so basically, for whatever reason, she didn’t die at that particular, like, right after being stabbed five more times.

I think maybe your family comes home or something like that. They have to call an ambulance. The ambulance comes and picks her up, and, she actually, she’s, like, super thirsty because she’s being dehydrated from the loss of all the blood and whatnot, but they can’t give her the water because, like, she’ll get, like, peritonitis or something.

The same sort of, you know, sickness that you would get if your appendix burst because, like, it would sort of go through like the perfect. Yeah, yeah. And it would go and it would just, it would exacerbate things. So I think there was a priest with her as well, either on the ambulance or maybe when she got to the hospital and, you know, the priest was like, you know, no one gave Christ water when he was suffering on the cross.

So will you offer this up for the salvation of souls? And she says, yes. So she from there she offers that up for this suffering for for the salvation of souls. And then, they also couldn’t. So they were going to perform surgery to try to save her when she gets to the hospital. But they couldn’t give her any anesthetic because they thought that just would have stopped her heart.

So she also, I think, was either asked or said that, you know, I’m going to offer up all this suffering for others. And so she didn’t let out any like, screams or anything, even though she could feel every single like suture, every single, every single move that the doctors are making on her, on her innards. They’re just, like, spilling out as she’s dying.

And then basically, right when she’s about to die, she says, I forgive Andrew’s Arendelle, and I want him with me in Paradise forever. And that she dies. Wow. Okay, so of course it is. It has been said the story. The story continues. Yeah. Love, love your friends and hate your enemies. I say to you, love your enemies and pray for them.

There is it’s it’s almost like a mini miracle in and of itself, but it’s evidential value. Exactly. And the story continues. So like Alessandro Serenelli, you know, he no one, no one. So of course they find out that he’s the one who stabbed her. And, you know, he goes he goes to prison like full of hatred in his heart.

He’s like, if none of this would have happened, if she just would have done what I told her, you know, none of this would happen. So she’s like, he’s like blaming her. He’s saying, I didn’t do this. She actually came after me. So he’s like lying and, you know, defaming and all this stuff, her and her image. So he goes to prison and he’s like super violent in prison.

He’s just full of hatred. But one night and he’s asleep, he has a dream. And Saint Mary appears to him in a vision, picking 14 white lily flowers from a garden and then handing them to him one by one, which, of course, is a sign of his number of stab wounds. The number of stab wounds was 14, 14 stab wounds.

So, of course, he interpreted this rightly as I’m forgiving you for each of those. Yeah. Radical forgiveness. So he wakes up, he’s like he’s convicted of his sin. He’s like, I need a priest. So he confesses to murdering her, and he just radically changes his life such that now there’s a cause for his canonization up and running. So he radically changes his life.

He’s like he starts like volunteering at different monasteries or whatever. And he’s, like, promoting her cause for canonization. And he goes to like her mother and he’s like, Will you forgive me for what I did to your daughter? And she’s like, listen, God has forgiven you. Saint Maria has forgiven you. So how could I not forgive you? So it’s just this story of radical love, radical forgiveness.

And it’s just so beautiful, like. And I was like, I want what I want, what she’s on, whatever she’s on, whatever she’s having, whatever is infusing this kind of divine life in her, I want that. Yeah, sign me up for that. So that wasn’t quite my reaction immediately, but I was like, this is it. Like, this is the stuff.

Yeah, this is the stuff. So then that was St. Maria Goretti and then another kind of saint who came along and who was intercession ultimately led me to just this change of heart and change of perspective was Saint Maximilian Kolbe. Yes. So, Gabby after. No. Is it GabiAfterHours? No no, no. So there’s just this video. It’s like.

It’s like a 7 or 8 minute video. Yeah. Not by GabiAfterHours. He has one on scene. Maximilian Kolbe. Which is very excellent. But there’s another one where it’s just like. It’s like a cinematic depiction of what happened to St. Maximilian Kolbe. So, you know, he’s praying at his whatever it’s called, monastery or whatever. And so he, he’s a 20th century saying he’s putting out like he’s fighting back against the Nazis because, you know, they’re peddling all this disgusting anti-Semitism and whatnot, and he’s pushing back against that.

But one day the Gestapo show up at his door and he’s like, we hear that you’ve been, you know, peddling anti-Nazi propaganda. You’re going to Auschwitz. So he goes as a political prisoner to Auschwitz, and one day someone in his squadron or whatever escapes Auschwitz. And so as a kind of collective punishment, they get all the people in his squadron together, make him line up, and they say, we’re going to take ten of you to go to the starvation bunker, and there you will die, will starve to death.

So the Nazi guards are going through and they’re like, you, you, you. And they eventually get to someone who, you know, he’s like tearing up as they come to him and they say you. And then he starts breaking down. He’s like, no, I’ve got a wife, I’ve got three kids. And I’m never going to be like, Franciszek Gajowniczek.

I think something he’s like, yes, I’m never gonna see them again for my child. I’m never gonna see them. And so he’s crying and they’re like, shut up! And they take him. And so Maximilian Kolbe breaks rank, goes up and says, take me instead. Take me instead, starve me. He’s got a wife and kids. I’m just a priest.

Take me. So they do. The reason, of course, we know about this is because that guy in God’s providence survived Auschwitz, reunited with his child, and he was a guest of honor at Maximilian Kolbe’s canonization ceremony. And he was, like, speaking there. He was invited by the pope and whatnot. So this is how we know his story.

And so, you know, St. Maximilian Kolbe’s taken to the, you know, the starvation bunker and, you know, there he’s like preaching to his fellow people who are being starved. He’s like praying with them. I think he was probably even like teaching them the rosary and whatnot. Yeah. Such that they all can, can have, like, a happy death, you know, in a state of sanctifying grace.

And so he’s teaching them, like, forgive their enemies and whatnot. And he was actually, I think, the last to go. He wouldn’t die. So they had to come and inject like carbolic acid or something into him. Yes. And then he died. So like, oh, and actually early on, like he early on in his life, he had like a vision, I think, of, of Mary, who appeared to him and offered him like two crowns, a white crown and a red crown.

And I think she explained to him that, like the red crown represents martyrdom and the white crown represents purity. Which do you want? I think he said, I’ll take both. Why not? Why not? Why not? Both? Right. So that story, man, it’s like a convicted. What’s kind of a greater love hath no man than this. Than a man lay down his life for his friends.

So I was like, again, whatever he’s on, I want it, I want that. That’s the sort of life that I want to lead. And so it’s like those Saint stories that were at least significantly responsible for me, just like opening up to Catholicism and lots of other Saint stories as well that I well, maybe not lots, but like at the very least, like St. Damien of Molokai, you know, like, volunteering to go to this leper colony, like the sickest, the most downtrodden and the poorest place that no one wants to serve.

And he just goes to this Molokai is at, like a Hawaiian island. It was a leper colony. Hawaii? Yeah. So leper colony. And he goes there. Of course, it’s basically a death sentence, but he, you know, gives them the sacraments. He evangelize, he prays with them, and he’s there with them. He comforts the sick, he’s there with the afflicted, and he succumbs to leprosy and he dies.

So, like, look at these saints, that God is like raising up and look at these like, exemplars, like, again, I want what they’re on. So that opened me up. And then I also just had like these quasi religious experiences along the way. So like, you know, I, you know, I still am like a wicked sinner. And at the time I was even a greater wicked sinner, and I was just being convicted of my sin.

Like I would just be like sitting in the gym, for instance, and I would just get like, feel waves upon waves. I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s like it wasn’t like linguistic. I didn’t hear a voice in my head, but I just felt it in ways like, you could be a saint, you could be a saint, you could be a saint.

So I just felt this, like, really weird, ineffable, palpable call to sainthood that was like washing over me. That’s how it felt. And I was also, at the time, just being convicted of my sin. I was like, you know, I really do have it in me to cooperate with God’s grace, to not open up this adult app and do a particular activity.

Right. I have it within me, but I would still succumb to it. Right, sure. And like, with God’s grace, you know, like, I haven’t even touched that stuff. So you conversion. But you feel like it’s like I could be this other person. Yeah, I could be, you know, I could stop just living for myself. I was number one.

There’s the old me and the new me. I want to be the new me. I was, yeah, and I, I was number one, right? I was looking out for me first and foremost. I was, you know, just like hoarding wealth and, like, doing all this other stuff. And like, I just felt like this. I was convicted of my sin, you know, like, I couldn’t be a saint and I could stop all this stuff.

And so, like, those quasi religious experiences together with the story I call, I would call them religious, right? Religious. Yeah. Because I think a lot of people think like, unless I have a C, a burning bush or I, I levitate and fly around like Saint Joseph, you know, I’m not like, know a person because I’ve even heard other people like Ben Watkins.

Others say, well, you know, I would convert if I had a religious experience, but one not ought to set the bar so high that it’s like you can you can experience there is something that is resonating with me that is beyond me communicating a message. It’s not merely of natural origin and that can that moves and convicts people and that and a person should be free, especially in your case.

Say, I had a religious experience. That’s just that’s what they they are. That’s the most typical ones people do have. And they should listen to them. Right. I mean, as it happened, I didn’t quite listen to it, but it was just like, affecting, you know, I mean, I did listen to it, but like, my point is, like, that didn’t convert me at all.

Like, I still had to get through all these objections to Catholicism to hell or messy. Right. Exactly. Has to come together and Nestle come in their own time. Yeah, exactly. And I didn’t want to change my life in all those ways. So that was also just it took a process of God, just like working through me and like, again, like none of this is my own effort.

Like it’s God’s grace all the way through. Right. So yeah, then I those kind of opened me up on that kind of heart level to Catholicism. And then I think I started appreciating Fatima more. You know, Ethan Muse had his credibility post on the first post on Fatima and then like, even like the best skeptical attempt by Scott Alexander to respond to it, I just think has so many flaws that even points out in his follow up response to Scott.

[1:38:10] Fatima, Padre Pio, and Catholic Miracle Claims

And like even Scott’s admitting that, like, man, there’s like an impressive degree of convergence of their of like the experiences of what, like the 100, roughly 100,000 people who were there. Of course, we’ve got like roughly 150 million reports in English right now from like educated people, from all, from skeptics, from all these sorts of things. And he’s like, yeah, it’s about what you’d expect if there were if it was an objective event.

And then it’s like, you know, we’ve got all this photogrammetric analysis and we can see images of people with like selective bands of drawing, and all of them are testifying their clothes, like just very rapidly drawing. And then they’re like these healing miracles in connection with it. And like the craziest stuff going on. So much evidence is starting to pile up and pile up.

And then finally, Ethan Muse is working on his Padre Pio post. And before the post comes out, I just sit down with him for four hours and he just, like, systematically goes through the evidence. Yeah, and it’s just insane. You know, like they’re literally doctors who are like palpating his wounds like all all four of them with his his stigmata.

His his stigmata. Exactly. So he supernaturally reduplicated the passion wounds of Christ. And we’ve got like so many doctors of people see this, you know, like we’ve got photos and videos of this. Yeah, we have photos of him with his stigma. We have videos of it. And then like on the in like we have testimony from tons of different doctors and other people who like felt them palpate them.

Sometimes they were like centimeters deep. Sometimes they were like like you could feel a palpable void that some of the doctors like. Again, how are you honestly mistaken about that? And he’s like giving this super detailed description. He isn’t Doctor Festa, who examined them and talked about, like, I could feel a palpable void when he put his hands, when he felt them with his hands.

It’s like, how are you honestly mistaken about that sort of thing? It’s just like, not plausible. And then like, oh, maybe seven doctors, all of them mistaken about, okay. And then like, what about all the, like, the dozens of people who took his temperature, sometimes in sequence, using different thermometers, all of which gave naturalistic, inexplicable readings like of like 125 degrees, for instance, like, oh, and then what about, like, the odor of sanctity, which literally thousands of people like experience where like they were just this, like overwhelming, beautiful scent that would accompany him and sometimes his relics for literally years on end.

Right. Or that would sometimes just, like, spontaneously and instantaneously, like fill room or just come in waves and like, he just he’s losing like, so much blood all the time. And he’s like, he’s healing people with these insane, medically documented healings with, like, eyes themselves regenerating. Yeah. So it’s like, okay, just at the end of that conversation with Ethan, I was like, I can’t do it.

I can’t get myself to believe the conspiracy that I have to posit to explain away all this data and not just Padre Pio, but the Eucharistic miracles and Fatima and Lourdes and Zeitoun and all this stuff. Barbara Schneider well, the only way, though, Joe, is that to believe this miracle, the denial of the evidence, would have to be a greater miracle than the miracle itself.

And like it kind of is a thing. Is it is it is. The universe is just conspiring, just the biggest conspiracy to make it look exactly as if Christianity through and Catholicism is true. And I think that’s where you end up getting to a point. I think for many people in their conversions, it gets it gets to a point when I see especially a lot of your if a common thread I’m seeing here, miracle claims, cosmic fine tuning, psychophysical harmony would just be it I you have two options.

Either reality really looks like it was crafted for a particular grand story, and it was, or it really looks like it was crafted for a grand story. And it’s a giant coincidence. Gigantic. And it’s not just a giant coincidence. It’s coincidence upon coincidence, all incidents banding together. And it’s just, yeah, I couldn’t do. And I wasn’t going to risk as well.

Just like waking up and seeing Jesus and is like, why didn’t you believe? And I was like, well, you see, I just thought that all these doctors are wrong. And all the medical reports were fabricating. So one tiny cherry of Pascal’s Wager on top. Yeah. So Pascal’s Wager then kind of came in and it was like, Joe, you’ve got enough of the practical commitment, you got a job.

And that’s what the wager is for. It’s not for someone who’s just the hardened atheist. It’s for the person who is really even past 50%. The decision of there were like 5050. It’s like you want it to be true and you’re on the tipping point here. I just don’t step over. And it’s not just even if you don’t want it to be true.

I mean, like decision. Theoretically that’s the rational obligatory thing to do. Like actually think. Yeah. And that’s another thing. Just like if you sprinkle in Pascal’s Wager on top just to get you over the line for the practical commitment. Yes. Then it was enough. So yeah, basically at the it’s funny, I was initially convinced of Christianity like for for like a day like convinced of Christianity as a result of Padre Pio because like, dude, come on, he’s supernaturally duplicating the passion wounds of Christ.

The message is ambiguous. What could this possibly be? What could this possibly be saying? It’s like, I can’t look at that and not be Christian, right? And like, oh, the Mother of God is like appearing on top of like a Coptic Orthodox Church and like appearing to like Catholic children and telling them to pray the rosary and seeing like people, healing people and like obtaining specifically conversion to Catholicism and saying like, you know, I am the Immaculate Conception to Saint Bernadette at Lord’s, like only Catholics believe in that.

[1:43:03] Why Catholic Miracles Matter Evidentially

And then, like, you know, the Eucharistic miracles like seems to be at least the public ones seem to, with good evidence, seem to only be happening in a Catholic context, and it’s simulating exactly what Catholics believe in and not. You all got you guys zealous because it’s like like an ontological change. It’s being simulated. It’s like, I’m really excited about the work seeing in the past two years of what muse and yourself and other Catholics combining this evidence of kind of a new evidential apologetic based on more contemporary miracles.

So I’m really excited to see the fruit that will come from that, both for moving people to Christianity and to Catholicism. It’s something I’ve also been trying to work on as well, because I think just the biggest challenge I think coming would be able to say, well, there are other non-Christian miracles that have the same evidential value, but you don’t believe them.

So what do you do with that? Just be like us and reject it all. But I’ve been cataloging, going through a lot of them, and I believe that claim is actually false, that either the events do not have the same evidence, like the rainbow bodies of the gurus and the East. And because I went through Dale Allison’s book on the resurrection and he has a he has a lot of just peppered accounts and not in depth, but it’s just peppered through.

So you got to go back to the sources to see what what are people claiming just for the like? Lydia magruder YouTube channel has combed through what Dale Allison. Oh yeah. So definitely check out Lydia Grooves criticisms of that. Yeah, exactly. So I’m like, okay, it’s easy to make a lot of these claims. Like, well, there were a bunch of kids in England that saw gnomes driving cars in a swamp.

And I’m like, well, they were also sneaking around at night and we’re all high on themselves of just like childhood mischief. It’s a lot different, but I think what’s important and this will go through, and that’s why I love their apologists and philosophers and historians going through this like, okay, no, either these other claims, they don’t have the same evidential value, or maybe there’s other explanations to them within a supernatural world view.

I mean, at least from my research, they fall into three broad categories. One is they’re just like relatively easily naturalistic, explicable. So they just are natural explanations of the relevant phenomena. I mean, like this is the thing we do have to be very cautious, very careful in accepting miracles like the like for some of the Eucharistic miracles is like we’ve got two independent, blinded laboratories who do tests and like you can look at the images and compare them with like a textbook image of like a myocardial infarction.

And they’re like also doing tests. And it’s like both of them get that it’s AB, but both of them like they test positive for human evolution and that sort of thing. It’s like we have laboratory tests, we have photos, we have videos. We have like a photo of Padre Pio on the day of his death, where there are no scars at all anywhere on him, even though for what, five decades, he’s either like carving himself or apparently according to, like the magazine, like using carbolic because the skeptic would just say he’s inflicted the wounds.

But if that were true, we would see something impossible for him not to have scars at the end of his life. Yeah. Naturalistic. Inexplicable. Yeah. And of course, like also the self infliction hypothesis can’t explain basically any features of their morphology or their etiology or their changing through time. And then of course, you just got all the other miracles and whatnot.

And then like medical documentation to eyes being supernaturally regenerated in connection with like a mystical experience of Padre Pio, like you’re just going to like coincidence upon coincidence upon coincidence. It’s just not plausible. It’s not credible. It’s like, again, we got videos, photos, medical documentation, that sort of thing, like blinded laboratory analyzes. So, like, if you don’t have come to me, coming to me when you have that.

[1:46:21] Other Religions, Miracles, and Discernment

So like, that’s one thing I’ll say. So at least oftentimes in other sects or other religions and whatnot, there just are relatively, relatively plausible naturalistic explanations of the relevant phenomena. But secondly, even if there aren’t naturalistic, naturalistic explanations, it may very well be the case that God is performing certain signs in other religions, not in confirmation or vindication of distinctive doctrines that are incompatible with Catholicism, but just out of compassion for people like that’s what a healing miracle and a Protestant service is, right?

Yeah, well, Craig Keener has a two volume book on miracles, and they do happen in Protestant services. They happen all the time. We’ve medical documentation for them, of course, but that’s not that’s not vindicating distinctively a Protestant doctrine. A Protestant can heal someone in the name of Jesus, and there can be Eucharistic miracles. Yes, exactly. It’s not like we have.

It’s like we have Martin Luther appearing to people and saying, don’t pray the rosary and you need to. You cannot submit to Rome. We don’t have the closest. Yeah. The closest I found were apocryphal stories of pictures of Luther that thrown in a fire that didn’t burn, but they seem to be apocryphal and don’t have good historical. It’s called the combustible Luther.

But you’re right. If we. And that was. I mean, Ouija boards also don’t burn when you put them in. But anyway. Yeah, which could also explain, you know, if there’s demonic. And he was also, I mean, even pointed out like he also had certain interactions with the devil during his. But we don’t need to get into that. But that reminds but the Tyler McNab has it’s called like a C inductive argument based on Fatima as a paper on that, where he says, yes, if we had figures like Luther and Calvin appearing and giving messages like Mary gives in these circumstances, pray the rosary, get the Holy Father to consecrate something that’s outside of his jurisdiction

to a formal, consecrated religious act that somewhere outside of his jurisdiction, Orthodox and the Holy Father, the holiness of his office, and the father to the Universal Church, consecrate Russia to My Immaculate Heart. The Immaculate Conception only leave dogmatism, she she says, the Immaculate Conception, or whatever to the St. Bernadette, even I am the Immaculate. Even the Orthodox miracles, the unique ones, kind of come up short, like the Holy fire, like you even have higher ups admitting that’s fake.

Like, well, Jimmy. Jimmy Akin has a good video of that. You can go and check that out. But but back to the category. So like either the relatively easily naturalistic explicable or they’re not vindicating doctrines, incompatible Catholicism. So they could very well be divine signs. But just like, you know, vindicating the gospel, for instance, or God’s love for humanity, God’s love for humanity or just compassion, people out of God’s mercy, like, yeah, healings happen to Muslims when they pray to Allah because they believe in the same God.

Which reminds me, by the way, that the fact for you, when you’re in the brief period you’re going from theism before Christianity, like when I’ve debated people like do and Christians worship the same God. I don’t like that language, but I like that, you know, they’re both worshiping God. Like, even if you don’t have a complete knowledge of God, you can worship him.

That was like I had when I was dealing with Jay Dyer. And I was saying like, well, if Dyer’s view is correct, that like any worship of God outside of Christianity is demon worship, then if you were like a theist and said, should I pray God show me if you exist, I would have to tell you, no, don’t.

You’re talking to a demon because you don’t believe in Jesus yet. That’s silly. Of course you recognize God exists and you’re still trying to figure out all the attributes and nature of his essence. Yeah, I mean, we can refer you and I can both refer to one and the same individual, even if we have pretty significantly divergent conceptions of the attributes of that individual.

So, like, you know, liberals and conservatives have very different conceptions of Donald Trump. One of them is like orange man bad. And the other one is like, you know, this is basically like God incarnate. Yeah. Well. Well, no, but there’s like a liberal who would say, this is the fascist in charge, another who says he’s the kind of messiah.

Yeah. The good old sense reference distinction. Yeah. Yeah. So they have different there. They different like conceptions of the being, but they’re both referring to the being when a non-Christian is, you know, praying to God for a miracle. The difference there is in sense for them, but not referent. It’s the same creator of the universe they’re appealing to who might mercifully answer their prayer.

Yeah. I mean, like so long as they’re, you know, I mean, there are maybe certain like conception constraints, like, if you don’t think that this is like the creator, then presumably you might just be talking about a lesser deity or something like that. Yeah. There’s there’s certain things that are intricate to the package of belief because as you know, being well versed in philosophy sense reference, it does get in the degree of like teasing the two out.

So there could be that’s the second option. Then the third option is like, oh, it’s just it’s just natural. So it’s demonic forces doing it. And of course, you know, like within our tradition we have like we have various biblical tests by which we can tell whether or not someone is. Yeah. It’s not it’s not an arbitrary explanation we throw out there.

No. Like there’s Jesus gives us the fruits test. So you know them by their fruits. Right. So like, is it someone who is a serial liar, a serial fornicator, a serial adulterer who’s like, claiming that God, you know, you know who I’m talking. I know exactly who was literally claiming that a polygamy is like an abomination to God, but then is like having polygamous relationships, at least 33 wives.

[1:51:12] The Fruits Test and Catholic Divine Legates

And then he’s also like sacrificing a sheep to a demon. And then also he’s like, engaging in all these occult practices that are explicitly forbidden. And even though God commands the polygamous activities, he hides it from his wife and is not forthright about it, lies about it. Well, and I believe that is the weakest link in the Mormon case, that they’re they very much do not want to talk about the moral character of Joseph Smith, which is relevant.

Like we could have popes at a poor moral character. They’re not the prophetic, foundational elements of our faith. But if like if Jesus or even like Saint Peter and the apostles had these kinds of moral laws, they’re serial fornicators or liars. They’re like, you know, lying to people. They’re saying that like, oh, something is an abomination to God.

But then doing it and then the worst thing is Peter is a coward, but that actually provides evidential quality to say that the fact that he was willing to boldly make this proclamation, in spite of that moral defective, is of cowardice, is best explained by the truth of the testimony he’s giving, or is. But if yes, if they were just using it to try to game the system and do these horrible things, any non-Christian would bring that against them.

Yeah. And maybe suppose that they’re using like these occult seer stones to like basically dictate the relevant scriptures and whatnot. Yes. And like suppose, you know, like it wouldn’t be credible if, if that’s the founding of, of Christianity and that’s not and that’s not what these Catholic divine legates are like. They pass the fruits test like Jacinta, Francisco and Lucia.

The famous ears are like giving up their lunch for the poor. And they’re like entering lives. At least Lucia, the other ones die early, but like, even on their deathbeds, they’re like, reaffirming what they saw. And they’re like, offering their suffering up. And like Lucia Andrews, like seclusion. And she’s not seeking fame or anything like that. And like Saint Bernadette Soubirous is like, literally a saint.

And Padre Pio is like the most holy man since, like Christ, basically. Right. So like the Catholic, the Catholic divine legates, the people who are claiming to speak on behalf of God and then call forth signs in witness to their divine message, are indeed profoundly saintly individuals. They pass the fruits test in Scripture with flying colors. And of course, you can’t use like some sort of question begging, like some question begging criterion, because you might think, oh, it’s like confirming Catholicism or it’s confirming this, like, you know, acts of repertory satisfaction on behalf of others, like, no, that doesn’t that doesn’t make the fruits test a practical, practicable test so that you can know

who a divine legate is, because the Pharisees could have said the exact same thing. Oh, no, Jesus doesn’t pass the fruit test because he’s advocating for all these different practices that go against the Torah. So actually, actually, it’s really bad. But no, you’re presupposing the theology in the background to evaluate the fruits test. But know what Jesus is talking about is like, is someone like Mohammad or is the person like, you know, Joseph Smith?

Or are they like Padre Pio and Saint Bernadette, Cerberus and like Venerable Lucia and whatnot. So our our divine, our claim, divine legates, something where even a disinterested observer could note the moral quality. And so you don’t have to presuppose theological disputes from the like abstract, highfalutin theological disputes about what you may very well be mistaken from the get go.

Right. It needs to be a practical test. So that’s that’s like one like our our divine legates, people who are claiming to speak on behalf of God and promulgating relations. Revelations claimed revelations which God puts a stamp of miraculous stamp of approval on. They passed the fruits test with flying colors. They also pass the other test in Scripture.

Do it on May 13 or 18. Are the people claiming to speak in the name of God the Creator? Well then, the test that you, the test that you use according to do an army 1318 is whether the sign that they call forth comes to pass did did come to pass when it was predicted three months in advance?

Yes, indeed it did. Yeah. And then like, just like the demonic M.O. doesn’t really make any sense. These are just like, you know, this is like a lapsed Catholic country. People are like, falling to secularism and liberalism and whatnot. And like, its primary effect is to bring these lapsed and lukewarm Catholics and skeptics and atheists to Christ. And of course, this person is like telling, like obtaining conversions to Catholicism, like it’s just introducing a Christo centric prayer into an otherwise like Marian devotion, you know, like, oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins as hell.

It also has happened specially those most in need of thy mercy. So like they passed the fruits test, they passed the Old Testament test. They passed. I mean, also another Old Testament test is when Moses and Pharaoh brings in. Pharaoh brings in the magicians to try to mimic Moses’s signs. And they actually are able to to to do some, some signs that kind of mimic it.

But even in that context, God makes it clear he has Moses’s ra to swallow up the serpents. From that John is job, so God makes clear the superior efficacy of his power when there are competing signs. So then basically, like if you look at the total pattern of miracles, where does it look like the manifestation of the superior efficacy of God’s power is, well, it’s with all these Catholic miracles.

Yeah. It’s with like Fatima and Zeitoun and Padre Pio and Eucharistic miracles and all these like seemingly things that vindicate distinctive Catholic doctrines. Like God, God has failed to make the message clear cosmically. And in fact, he’s made it. He’s gone out of his way to make things actively unclear, to make religious truth inaccessible. If Protestantism, there’s no other religion that boasts any similar number in quality or quantity of miracle claims.

Because if because if there were, they would throw it in our faces. That’s always in the sign for me. Like when I am engaging like Muslim apologists or apologists in other religions, if they had the goods, they would show it. And this is the thing. Some people would be like, oh, well, there’s some sort of like selection effect going on.

Like the church is basically just mobs, everyone else, because it’s like it’s it’s so good at like record keeping and whatnot. And other people can’t keep records. No, I know, like dude for Eucharistic miracle, all the Orthodox bishops, all the Orthodox priests have to do is like handed over to a laboratory. Yeah, that’s all you need to do.

You don’t need, like, this complex bureaucratic system to do that. But no, you still don’t have like seems these public well, vindicated Eucharistic miracles. And also God isn’t limited by a selection effect. If God wants to get a message out there, he’s not going to be frustrated or thwarted by those pesky, pesky Catholics who can keep really good records.

It’s like the very fact that God hasn’t gotten the message out there for other religions is itself a testament to God’s vindicating Catholicism specifically. And this is the thing, the evidence for the Catholic miracles is just manifestly better than the evidence that we have for the resurrection. I’m not saying that the evidence for the resurrection is poor. That’s not what I’m saying, but it is.

If you disagree with that, if the listener disagrees with that, you are either uninformed about the Catholic miracles, like go read like literally like dozens upon dozens, hundreds of thousands of pieces of testimony evidence like videos, like again, the videos of Padre Pio medical documentation, blinded laboratory analyzes. You are either uninformed about the evidence or you’re irrational if you disagree with that.

No, this happened to me when I have my debate with Doug from Pine Creek a while ago on the resurrection, and he asked me about Fatima in the debate, as you know. Well, what do you think about the evidence for Fatima? And I said, in some respects it is better than anything. He acted like it was a gotcha.

But I’m like, well, no, it cannot be. Because while critics, skeptics might try to cast doubt on whether there were a group appearances to the apostles, it is impossible to cast doubt on the group appearances effort there. Recorded in a newspaper again. Oh Século was like days a few days later, like there’s photographs of everyone together. Yes, we have photographs and we know that it was raining going up there.

We have like tons of testimony to like the clothes rapidly drying. And we have pictures of them, like with, like dried clothes, even though we know from meteorological data that it was like pouring going up to it. It’s like, what are you talking about? And like photogrammetric analysis and like all these pictures like blinded laboratory analysis. So like to the Protestants listening like compare the evidence of the resurrection, which is good, but it’s nowhere near as good as the evidence for these distinctive Catholic miracles.

And that should give you extreme cognitive dissonance if you’re a prophet. Why? I wrote a book a few years ago called When Protestants Argue Like Atheists. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So yeah, I’ll give you I got into my shovel, give it to you when you leave. But as you go through, you will, it will once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

No. Because like because it’s the same methodology that is used to reject those miracles. And but what we can have a consistent framework. Right. And listen like I don’t accept like late dates and whatnot for the gospels and all the, all the critical historical scholarship. But like the mainstream, the going view is like, listen, we’ve got like, what, 4 or 5 testimonial reports from people decades after the fact, like four of whom are like copying each other verbatim almost, or like, you know, at certain points, they’re not probabilistically independent.

They’re like being reported, given to us like decades after the fact. They’re like, you think that’s compatible with like literally like hundreds, like hundreds of like 800th of thousands of people seeing the mother of God on top of a church. We have photographs, we have photographic evidence, we have photographic laboratory. We don’t have that for biblical. We don’t need it, but we don’t have it.

So if if the reports in Scripture move you based on that evidential quality. And that’s just always how it is when you’re assessing claims, it’s like, well, if I believe X because of evidential quality, Y and Z has evidential quality y plus 100 or 1000 or 10,000, I really should believe Z2 yeah. And we should distinguish evidential quality, evidential significance from like religious significance.

So like again, neither of us are saying for the audience, neither of us are saying that, you know, Fatima or look, there’s a tune or Guadalupe or Padre Pio or Eucharistic miracles or like all the other dozens of things that I could mention, neither of us are saying that those are more religiously significant than the resurrection. The resurrection?

Of course not. That’s the it’s like the most important event that has ever occurred that ever will occur basically. Right. So obviously that’s like far more religiously significant, but that’s distinct from how much evidence we have for it. There’s much more evidence that you talk to me on this day than like Peter talked to Jesus after his crucifixion.

There’s obviously there’s more evidence for this interaction than that interaction. But that interaction is, of course, much, much more important. But you’re right that the evidential quality is not a direct correlation to the religious quality. But if you do have high evidential quality for something and it also has high religious quality, you should let them go to get let them go together.

And don’t let a previous theological prejudice blind you to that. Right. So, well, I think we’ve we’ve come through a lot and this is we just scratched the surface. But I’m, I’m really excited to for people I think you could be a good down the rabbit hole for people. I’ll have the links below to your, you know, your your recounting of your conversion and also your interview with Matt.

[2:01:41] Joe’s Future and the Direction of Majesty of Reason

That should be up also where you go. And this is I love how this would be complementary because when you talk with Matt, Fred, you went through a lot of the arguments, more so if you guys want the media arguments, I’ll send you back there. Click the link below. But this is a nice with that to see how they come together.

Yeah, we covered the personal side. We covered some like the explanations of Catholic miracles. I didn’t really get much into the explanations with with Matt. So there you go. Yeah, I think this is nicely complimentary. Excellent I am excited. So I guess now well, what are my last question I guess is what are what what’s what’s in the future for you.

What lies ahead. Well, that’s a good question. As much as much as as much as you can know or reasonably guess about. Yeah. I mean, what is in the future. So I mean, there’s the channel stuff and then there’s life stuff. So life stuff, I mean, I’ve sort of just taken the path of least resistance so far. Like, you know, I just loved philosophy and I was like, okay, well, you’re finishing up your paycheck.

I’m finishing up my PhD. So I’m going into my fourth year at Princeton University and just doing my PhD on, like, harmony problems like psychophysical harmony. nomological harmony. Harmony, this cool like psychoanalytic harmony that I kind of working on and hopefully I’ll have hopefully I’ll have something coming up on that. So working on just the PhD, but like, yeah, what am I supposed to do with my life friend?

I mean, I do. What do you want to be a professor? Well that was do you want to be a philosopher? The thing is that was the it was the goal and still tentatively is the goal is just to become a professional philosopher and to, you know, go into academia, but like, you know, who wants to hire a conservative Catholic?

You know, like, especially in philosophy. That’s what I’m saying. It’s a very liberal, very secular, very atheistic discipline. But you know what’s nice? So if you get the right department of philosophy here, they’re also usually pretty eccentric people. It’s not like the light and fluffy social sciences like. Right. That’s true. And the thing is you’ve got you’ve got the goods.

Your your papers speak for themselves. Anyone can go search, search for you on PhilPapers. I mean, it’s just and you also have peer review due to the whole book on classical theism and things like that. Like, I mean, obviously you got to pray God will you need to go. It’s discernment. Right? So I just so far I’ve been following the path of least resistance.

And because I’ve been agnostic, I haven’t been in Catholic. So I’ve just been I haven’t been praying at all. But now I’m just hearing, like, what am I supposed to do with my life? Like, am I? Am I actually called to go into like, philosophy? It’s actually a period of discernment that I need to engage in. Like, I genuinely, I don’t know.

I mean, again, a path has been laid before me and I have certain talents. I’ll sort of tentatively follow that. But I need I need to prayerfully discern what I’m supposed to do with my life. So actually, I kind of don’t know right now. And I’m sort of just if the audience can pray for me, I would very much appreciate that.

Let’s ask them. I will ask them to certainly do that. But my personally, though, I would be thrilled if you and it doesn’t even have to be like a huge school or like a super liberal school. But I think of all people I know like to have a faithful academic out there, someone who understands, somebody who can speak to the faith well and not embarrass them.

I mean, the lowest bar for me is just don’t embarrass yourself when you talk about the field, the fact that you can that other philosophers say, oh, yeah, he really gets this stuff. So if you can be I mean, there’s people like I mean, Ed Fazer is a great Catholic philosopher. He teaches at Pasadena City College. You’ve got great guys who are down at Baylor, Alex Pruss, Frank Beckwith, wherever you may be.

Like being able to say, I am I am a because like, I don’t I, I don’t call myself a philosopher. To me, to be a philosopher, a theologian need a terminal degree in that subject. Unless you’ve proven yourself by changing the world, by writing a book. Yeah, like if you’ve proved yourself with something that changed the field, you get to call yourself philosopher.

Otherwise you got to have a terminal degree. So I like to do philosophy. I like to do theology. I’m not a philosopher. I’m not a theologian. You are a you’re a philosopher. You’re basically there. So to have a Catholic philosopher out there, I’d be jazz to see that where we end up. But God will lead you where you need to go.

Just got it. A certain got it. I mean, so that’s life. Discerning that. Discerning what my personal vocation is. My my profession. So. Yeah. And then. Yeah, for the channel, I mean it’s just going to like, I don’t know, just shift gears to talking about Catholicism and like, philosophy and like, arguing for theism and arguing for Catholicism and just like doing, you know, arguing against Protestantism and against Orthodoxy and those sorts of things.

So, yeah, that’ll definitely be a market shift in the direction of the channel. But as long as as long as it keeps its rigor and it keeps the faith and as long as and you have a good heart to keep it, but just remember, you’re going to be attacked a lot. That’s just how it goes in this territory.

[2:06:11] Closing Remarks

But I hope our audience will pray for you. And I am very excited to see what what comes ahead for you, Joe? Absolutely. All right. Thank you. Thank you guys so much for listening. Check the links below for more of Joe’s great work, check out his YouTube channel, Majesty of Reason and I hope you all have a very blessed day.