In this episode Trent shares what’s going on at home and at his church, reflects on his conversation with Tom Jump, and explores issues related to the philosophical discipline of epistemology.
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
What a wonderful way to start your week, here on The Counsel of Trent podcast. I am your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn. Before we get started though, I had two things to share with you.
First, I have a YouTube channel, and I really hope that you will go and check it out. Now, I have older channels on YouTube. They’re the Trent Horn channels. There’s one Trent Horn channel that has no videos on it and has like I think 24 subscribers, and then an even older one than that when I started doing videos.
I think the last video I uploaded there was seven years ago, and that was before my time here at Catholic Answers. I thought about starting my own little apologetics apostolate. That’s when I thought, “There’s the big guys over at Catholic Answers, and I want to do something to help out too,” so I came up with this idea called Defense for the Faith. I was doing these little workshops and seminars in Phoenix, Arizona where I live that I would go, and I think I went up to NAU, Northern Arizona University, gave a talk up there, and I would go to churches and on weekends I would give these free apologetic seminars. I thought, “Along with this, I’m going to upload apologetic videos to YouTube and just try to do that.”
I think if you search for Trent Horn on YouTube, you can find it. It has about 1,400 subscribers or so. But the last episode I uploaded there, it wasn’t even an episode, it was just kind of random videos that I was making, was about seven years ago. One of the videos that’s there, you can check it out if you want this week, because eventually I’m going to be taking that channel down for reasons I’m going to explain to you here shortly. It has my very first YouTube apologetics video.
I remember it was a while ago, so it was like eight years ago, there was someone who did a video. It was something like I hate religion but I love Jesus, or why I love Jesus but I’m not religious. It was your classic Protestant, non-denomination, hip, young, rapping guy. I saw this video on my birthday. I was out at a birthday dinner with friends, and I said, “You know what? I should respond to this.” I went back home in my bedroom and I set up my Canon XL2 MiniDV camera. It was a giant camera that I used to use to film weddings. I put it on a tripod and I put another camera on a tripod to get a multi-camera set, and I wrote a little kind of rap song to do my counter rap. It kind of turned out on. In a future episode here on the podcast, if you haven’t heard it and you don’t check it out on YouTube, I’ll share some of it on here. I guess I have some dope rapping skills.
Also, there’s another wonderful video online. My kids watch Thomas the Train obviously because they’re toddlers, and there’s this video online of somebody showing that the Thomas the Train theme song works when you overlay it on any rap song. I’m not going to necessarily play the whole thing, because some of those rap songs have morally offensive lyrics in them. That’s why my dad always used to say, “Trent, you know there’s a reason that rap rhymes with crap, don’t you?” Thanks, dad.
But the Thomas the Train theme actually works for any rap song, because it’s at 100 beats per minute and you can easily overlay it. The number one comment under that video on YouTube is, “OF course Thomas the Train can rap.” No. The comment was, “Of course a train can lay down dope tracks,” like an audio or a music track. Ha, ha.
My video is on there. That’s on my old Trent Horn channel as my response to that. I will archive it. I’m not going to let it go away, but the channel that I’m starting, I just started it about a month ago, is the Counsel of Trent YouTube channel. Go to Counsel of Trent. Just search Counsel of Trent on YouTube and you’ll find it.
I was trying to just find my footing and figure out what should I do on YouTube. I want to be on here. I want to help people. I feel like I’m getting in late in the game. Everyone else, everybody’s on YouTube now, but I wanted to offer something. That’s what I’ve always tried to do with my work, my personal apostolate, my work at Catholic Answers. I want to offer people, especially Christians, something to build up their faith that other people are not doing.
There’s actually a lot of Protestant YouTubers, young guys who have their own YouTube channels that they start to defend either Protestant Christianity or mere Christianity, which would just be belief in the existence of God, the resurrection and divinity of Christ. I saw on YouTube, they all got together and had this big apologetics empire retreat. Like 20 young YouTube guys all got together and had this big retreat. I was thinking, “Oh, man. I’d love to get all of the Catholics together who are on YouTube doing apologetics and are out there to build one another up.” Maybe we will do that in the future.
But I saw that, and then I looked in the Catholic world, and I’m thinking, “Well, what can I offer people?” I tried different video formats, and one that seems to have been working on the channel are my rebuttal videos. What I do is I just go online and I find a popular video that is critical of the Catholic faith, or the Christian faith, or Christian morality, and I watch it and I have a screen in-screen. I have my webcam on me and I just offer my critique and commentary. What I’ve started doing now with them is I make a little PowerPoint presentation with quotes and with evidences to reply.
I’m halfway through my series on Pastor Mike Winger, but then I was like a squirrel. I was like that dog that saw the squirrel. I’m like, “Squirrel,” and I just ran off and got distracted by these Bible videos, these videos that are critical of the Bible by a channel called Holy Koolaid run by Thomas Westbrook. I’ve got some of those on there dealing with the historicity of the exodus, how to understand the book of Joshua when it says that the sun stood still in Joshua chapter 10, how could that be and responding to Westbrook’s criticisms of that.
If you want to go and check that out, and I really hope that you will, just search Counsel of Trent. It has the Counsel of Trent logo on YouTube. Because if you search my name, you find my old YouTube channel, and it took me like a week to get back into that thing because I hadn’t been … I hadn’t logged into it in like eight years. I forgot the password, and they didn’t have password recovery. Finally I figured out how to get in, so I’m going to eventually close down my other YouTube channels as being defunct. I’ll archive the videos and save them and probably upload them on Council of Trent as bonuses every now and then.
The main one’s going to be The Counsel of Trent YouTube, and I want to focus on these rebuttal videos, because I don’t see Catholics. That’s one thing. I haven’t seen Catholics really do this. I think a lot of people have found it really helpful, because they hear these arguments and they wish like, “Oh, if Trent Horn were here, what would he say?” Well, I’ll tell you, because I’ll do these videos. I want to keep doing these videos.
guess what. I need your help to do that, because it takes up part of my work time, and everything we do here at Catholic Answers has to be funded. We fund the radio drive. We fund the magazine through subscriptions. Everything has to be self funded, so including everything that I do here through The Counsel of Trent podcast, including the YouTube expansion, I need your help. I hope that you’ll go to trenthornpodcast.com and become a monthly subscriber. For as little as $5 a month, you make it possible for me to do the videos, do the podcasts, and to give you access to bonus content.
One piece of bonus content I’m going to add is that if you are a patron to the podcast, one, you get the ability to comment on the episodes. No one else gets to. It’s a closed community, and you can interact directly with me there on the podcast. Then number two, you can listen to the audio versions of the YouTube channel. If you like having it as part of your audio feed or your podcast feed, I will upload the audio version of my YouTube rebuttals at trenthornpodcast.com, and if you’re a subscriber, you get exclusive access to those audio MP3s to be able to listen to, put on part of your podcast feed, have lots of fun there.
Definitely go check that out. I hope that will be helpful for you all. Trenthornpodcast.com or go to YouTube, search Council of Trent, become a subscriber. Would love to keep making these wonderful rebuttal videos.
Now, on to today’s show. Three elements I wanted to get into, a personal update, quick reflection on my dialogue with Tom Jump, and then I want to talk about epistemology, which was a big thing in my dialogue with the atheist YouTuber Tom Jump.
First, I wanted to start with the personal update because I haven’t done one of these in a while on the podcast. I know you guys like to think, hey, what’s up with Trent? Well, I will tell you. First, the reason that my podcast was late today. I try really hard to keep a schedule Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, 8:00 AM episode is right up ready to go. I love it especially when I’ve scheduled out episodes for like three weeks and they’re in the queue and I can just kind of sit back and like, “Ah, they’re done,” and then focus on other research projects and future podcast episodes.
But I was going to record yesterday, and I woke up yesterday, I walked around the house, I sat down on the bed, and then my back just instantly went out. I’m like, “What is …” Like it had gone out in a way I had never felt before. I ended up lying flat on the ground and was even like struggling to breathe at one moment. Like trying to breathe was hard. I was like, “Oh, man. This is really scary. Lord, you’ve reminded me of my mortality. From dust you’ve came and from dust you call return.”
I mean when your body starts to fail you, and now I’m crossing that threshold. I’m 35 years old. I’m getting into the second half of life where like the car starts depreciating in value. You get away with the first half of life, you can run on broken parts and you don’t notice. But I’m thinking to myself, “What is going on here?”
I mean my back has gone out before at certain times, like when I bend, usually when I bend to pick up the kids. “You hold me, dad. You hold me, dad,” or, “You hold me, Don.” My two-year-old Thomas, he’s not able to say dad. He says Don. “You hold me please, Don.” Who’s going to say … How can you say no to that? I don’t even care. I hope he’s like 23. He’s like, “Hey, Don. I need you.” Like, “Sure thing, buddy.” I hope he never grows out of that.
I’ve pulled my back out like lifting and picking them up or twisting the wrong way, but this one was just a mystery. I went to a wonderful chiropractic place called The Joint. Highly recommend it if you have one near you. There’s one in Arizona. Got some here in California. They don’t take insurance. You go. It’s a five minute wait to see a chiropractor. He snaps you back in place, and it’s 40 bucks, and you’re out the door. That’s helped.
I’m back in the office right. My back’s a little sore, but that seems to have put it back into place. Just pray for me to have continued recovery on that, but that’s the reason. I was going to record everything on Monday and then with my back going on, I was just shot.
That’s why I missed my radio show, Catholic Answers Live. I was so distracted with the pain I figured, “Oh, man. I’m never going to be able to handle …” Especially if it’s a show where I’m doing dialogue with people who disagree with the faith, I’ve got to be really mentally on my toes. Just sitting there for two hours, I did not think I could do it. Thankfully, Jimmy Akin, friend, mentor, love having him here at Catholic Answers, he covered for me and I’m very grateful for that.
Second personal update. At our church, at Holy Angels, first I go to a Byzantine church, Holy Angels Church in San Diego, California. I’m super excited, because listeners of the podcast have been coming for the past few weeks. Like every other week, a visitor has come who heard about the church on the podcast and wanted to check it out. That’s super exciting, because I love sharing this church with people. I mean it has been a true joy and light in my life. There’s the document for Vatican II on the Eastern Catholic Churches called A Light of the East, and it has been a light in my life. I love the reverence. I love the singing, the communal atmosphere.
What’s funny is it’s a small church. There’s only about like 40 of us at Divine Liturgy. It feels really modern and really ancient at the same time. It feels really modern like I always thought like, oh Protestants, they get to have their little small Baptist country church, and I’ll never have that because Catholic churches always have like 200 or 300 families, or 1,000 people registered, which is fine, which is great. But here, it has a very small, intimate feel to it.
It’s a little modern in that sense, but then it also has it’s ancient. There’s no instruments. Guess what. There’s no pews. We took the pews out. We got the carpet replaced, and our pastor has not put the pews back. We’re trying it out as a trial run to worship without pews. That is the way that the church that Catholics worshiped for 1,400 years. People didn’t have pews. They stood or they kneeled on the floor. In the West, the posture of reverence was more ended up being kneeling. In the East, it was more standing.
What we do is we stand throughout most of the liturgy. There are some pews and chairs for people who are not as ambulatory, for the elderly, for nursing mothers. There are some chairs and pews if you need them, but the center area is just absent. It’s great. Like kids can kind of wander a little bit as they need and then come back to their parents. But we’re actually more communal together and it feels like we’re all worshiping together as a part of the liturgy, the work of the people. Whereas when you have a pew, it feels like this is my space. This is my area. Stay out of my area. You’re in your area. I’m in my area. Kids feel more distracted I think in pews than just when we were there, we were standing.
Now, the service is long. At least now we have more announcements. It ranges anywhere from an hour and 10 minutes to in Lent it can be as long as an hour and 40 minutes. But it was beautiful. I loved just standing, the communal activity.
During the homily, we sat. He invited us, you could stand if you want to, but everyone sat on the floor. That was a neat experience to sit on the floor. You’re like, “Oh, a bunch of adults sitting on the floor.” Well, yeah. It felt like being at the Sermon on the Mount. It felt like here is the teacher, here is the rabbi, rabboni. Here is the teacher giving us the word. It felt like I sat at the foot of the master. It’s like sitting at the Sermon on the Mount listening to Jesus speaking to us. It was just a humbling and wonderful experience.
The pews are gone. If you happen to visit San Diego, I would enjoy seeing you. Because guess what. There’s only one Byzantine service on Sundays. It’s at 10:00 AM. The Melkites have the church, the Melkite Mission has it at 11:00. But you can stop by. You can say hi to me. I’m usually there. I try very hard not to travel so that I can be at Divine Liturgy on Sunday.
But I would encourage you just to go and check it out and see if you like it. We had people who visited and they want to check out a Byzantine church back home. It was just beautiful. Just I love it. It’s like when you go see a really good movie, you’ve got to tell everybody about it. If I told everybody about something like 1917, which is an awesome movie by the way, it definitely deserved best cinematography at The Oscars, I’d tell people about my parish. I’m just super excited about that.
All right, so that’s the personal update. Let’s move forward. My conversation with Tom Jump. I thought it went fine. Tom is an interesting guy. He’s a fast talker. That’s for sure. He’s done a lot of these different conversations. I felt like I could’ve pressed him a little bit on certain points, and I think that’s something, that is a personal weakness of mine. In conversations, I’ve noticed either on Catholic Answers Live or when I engage other people that I have a hesitancy to not put people’s feet to the fire when I should. I don’t know. That might come from a people pleasing mentality that I have.
I think that when you go, you or I go and share our faith and evangelize to other people, we have to take into account the personal weaknesses we have in our conversations. What are yours? I know a lot of people who’ve talked to me, they said their weakness is putting people’s heads in the fire and not letting go and wanting to thump them in a conversation, and yet they feel like their conversations aren’t very fruitful because people just get mad, and it gets heated, and it gets tense.
My error that I sometimes fall into is I’m almost, I don’t know, too gracious. Like I just don’t want to critique people as much. I also had a hard time following Tom a little bit, because he used words and descriptions in kind of idiosyncratic ways. I’d noticed that in his previous conversations, but even for me, I was trying to just follow his line of thinking. I’ll cover some of that line of thinking as I move here when I talk about epistemology and philosophy.
Otherwise, I think it was a fine conversation though. It was a good lesson and role model I think for anyone to see how these things work. But honestly, when it comes to me growing in doing this … and I want to be encouraging to you. I do not want you to think I can’t go out and evangelize people or have conversations because I can’t do it like Tim Staples, like Jimmy Akin, like Trent Horn. Yeah, sometimes I don’t feel like Trent Horn every day. I’m still growing in my conversations, and that’s okay. I want to model for people how we can have these dialogues even when they don’t necessarily go the way that we want them to, even when we’re still learning how we can address different people, because people are complex and varied, and we just should try to reach them as people.
But at the end of the way, when it comes to me and maybe not holding people’s feet to the fire or being as aggressive in a conversation as I would hope, honestly for you, for advice I’d like you to take from me, if you have to choose between having a good argument and a good demeanor, I believe it’s better to choose a good demeanor. Now, the goal is to not have to choose, is to have good arguments combined with a winsome and gracious demeanor. But if you have to pick between having just a rock solid argument that just refutes somebody but if you have to present it in an aggressive, unbecoming way, I don’t think that’s ideal. I would rather have someone go out and have a great demeanor and an argument that’s not presented as fully developed and needs more.
Because here’s the thing. If you present someone an argument that isn’t fully thought out or isn’t complete, you could always add to that later. Like let’s say an atheist speaks to a Christian or a Protestant speaks to a Catholic and a case is presented to them that’s underwhelming. Okay, whatever. But then, if someone else later down the line can add to that, it’s easier to add to that and give someone the full case. The previous underwhelming case won’t come back to haunt you as much, because, “Oh, I get the full picture right here.” It’s a lot harder if someone just has a super bad interaction with someone in the past and then meets a gracious person later, because the memory of that ungracious, aggressive, belligerent person is liable to haunt the conversation a lot more.
Do you see what I’m saying? That it’s easier to make up a bad argument with better arguments in the future than it is to make up a bad personality with better personalities in the future. Because think about that. Like we remember when people are rude or mean to us. We hold grudges. That’s what human beings do. For me, that’s my personal tidbit as you are growing in this and talking to people, but ultimately at the end of the day for all of us to get better at this, we have to just do it. We have to just do it over and over and over again, and we learn and grow as we go through that.
But ultimately, I still think we had a really good conversation. It was very pleasant. We didn’t interrupt each other. I think that we did reach some important points for people to be able to consider.
One thing that I think we need to consider is the issue of knowledge itself. I think this is going to become more and more apparent as you have more … when you have more conversations with atheists, and I’ve brought this up in a lot of my conversations, because I think it’s not about, “Well, here’s my really good argument for the existence of God,” because if this other person doesn’t think an argument is even capable of doing that, then it doesn’t matter what kind of argument I show them. If they’re of the mindset that philosophical arguments are just sophistical tricks …
Sophistry is a word that means using words in a clever or deceptive way to make your point, wordplay if you will. If you go back to the time of Socrates and Plato, the ancient Greek sophists engaged in sophistry and people hired them to argue their cases before magistrates. They’re kind of the precursors of lawyers. Now, I know many ethical Catholic lawyers in the vein of Sir Thomas More who do not engage in sophistry, but there is a kernel to that when you think of lawyers who will go out there and will bend the truth or be unethical to get their way. That’s kind of sophistry.
Some people, when you share the faith with them, whether they’re atheist, Protestant, whatever it may be, they may hear arguments, complex arguments, and think, “That’s just a bunch of sophistry. I don’t have to … That couldn’t possibly be true.” You can’t prove something like God with just something as simple as an argument. You need the collider, the particle accelerator in Geneva. What is that? The Hadron Collider. My brain is blanking here for a moment.
Oh, that was the other thing this week in personal update. Laura went out of town to visit her sister, so I got to be Mister Mom for the weekend. I don’t know if there’s any dads on here that can appreciate being Mister Mom for the weekend when the missus is out of town. Laura was super nice to me. She said, “Here’s how you make the food. Here’s how you do this. At the end of the day, just do your best. Do what you have to do,” and then she left. I’m like, “Okay, guys.”
Like the first day I tried to make their food, and I make scrambled eggs, and jelly toast, and french toast. Okay, I can do this. I make it and they say, “That’s not how mom makes it. Mom doesn’t do it this way.” If there was a Yelp review for mom’s kitchen, I think this past weekend it got like zero stars. “Hate the new management. Doesn’t know how to make french toast. The french toast …” Like when my wife makes french toast, it looks like perfect restaurant cut up squares with the right amount of cinnamon and sugar on it. When I try to make the kids french toast, it just looks like a piece of bread covered in scrambled egg.
I’m like, “Okay. Guess what, kids. We’re driving through McDonald’s to get hash browns and fruit and yogurt parfait. Then, we’re going to go kill time at the museums, because there’s stuff to entertain you, and when we come back, it’s going to be Pixar movies. We’re going to throw on Disney+, and I won’t feel bad because my job was just to make sure you didn’t die.” How did I get on this tangent? Well, whatever. We’ll get back to knowledge and philosophy arguments.
At the beginning of the conversation, Tom and I were talking a lot about knowledge and how do we know what’s true. Tom has a very restricted epistemology. What is epistemology? Epistemology is a brand of philosophy that’s dedicated to discovering how we know things and what makes certain things true, particularly how we know something is true or false. It deals with knowledge, episteme. Knowledge, the study of knowledge, of understanding things.
Tom has a very rigid epistemology. He says he only knows two things that are certain, that he exists and whatever you can prove through testable predictions empirically. As I pointed out, that’s actually not that much, because in science, people will do these experiments with human beings and how they respond and not be able to replicate them, so at best that just means you have certain knowledge or really only knowledge that you exist, because if you didn’t exist … Even if you doubt your own existence, who’s doing the doubting? That comes from Rene Descartes, who said “[Latin 00:23:10], I think, therefore I am.”
Tom’s like, “I know I exist, and I have confidence in what science can prove through a testable prediction.” That if I predict something and it comes out over and over again, we know water boils at 100 degrees Celsius at a particular altitude. We know the atomic makeup of different elements. That’s it. He said he wasn’t an empiricist, which is someone who only believes in what science can tell us, but he was extremely skeptical of metaphysical arguments.
Now, I think that that’s important, because if you don’t believe in the power of metaphysical truths to demonstrate things, you’re not going to get to the existence of God. That’s why I encourage you in your conversations, I tried to press Tom on this, that just because you see a miracle done routinely or something that violates the law of nature, we used the example of a gold bar appearing in my hand every Saturday at 3:00 PM, that does not prove the existence of God. I mean how do you know it’s not an alien that has a matter manipulation device creating that? All you could prove from that is that there is some unknown cause to discover behind this repeatable event in the world.
Plus, also we shouldn’t expect there to be an empirical way to define God. God is not something that is subject to empirical, empirical means one of the five senses, or scientific investigation, because God is not made of matter. He doesn’t exist in the universe, in the space time universe.
That’s why in the conversation I kept bringing up, how do we determine if immaterial things exists, things like numbers, things like moral truths? Tom himself is a moral realist. He believes there are moral truths, and the truth for him is just you shouldn’t impose your will on other people. Like that’s a fact. Okay, well where does that fact exist? I think he ultimately said, well, he’s not sure. Maybe it’s just a brute fact.
But that’s just odd if there’s a certain particular fact about how we ought to behave compared to all the other moral facts related to how we might behave. Such as, like I gave the example the weak are set to serve the strong no matter what. That’s a moral fact, but I believe it’s false.
Now, it’s interesting which moral facts are true, which are false. It would seem that ultimately what makes morality the way it is, is that it flows from a person. It flows from a perfect and morally good person. Morality can’t be just some kind of impersonal law of nature, because morality doesn’t dictate what does happen. It dictates what should happen.
That’s why it’s important to separate discovering if God exists from the scientific process, because science can’t tell us. Even if you did an experiment to try to how God exists, a valid scientific experiment has to be double blind. If you do an experiment like with medicine, for example does this drug treat somebody, when you do that, it has to be double blind for the experiment to work. Usually you’ll give one group of people the drug and another group of people the placebo, and even the experimenter can’t know which is the drug and which is the placebo because he might interact with the patients differently. If he knows he’s giving them a placebo, he might act weird around them because he knows he’s not giving them the real drug.
Definitely the patients can’t know. You’re doing an experiment on them like, “We’re going to see if his drug works, but you’re getting the placebo.” Because the problem is sometimes there’s something called the placebo effect, that if a person thinks that they’re getting a drug, they might get better anyways. But if they know they’re getting a placebo, they might feel like they’re getting worse, because they think they don’t actually have the medicine itself.
The point is when you do scientific experiments, you can’t tell people … Now, you can tell them they’re in an experiment, but you can’t reveal the entire experiment to them. Otherwise, it doesn’t work. When it comes to God, if we do an experiment like does God answer prayers, the experiment is invalid right at the start because God is omniscient.
He might say, “We’re going to do an experiment. Does God heal these people? God didn’t heal these people in this prayer experiment, so God doesn’t exist.” Well, God might be up in heaven saying, “Yeah, I’m not going to take part in your little experiment. Don’t test me. That’s not what I do,” or he might say, “I know you’re doing this experiment, but there’s a little lady in Nepal who said, ‘Lord, please help the people who have no one to pray for them.’ So these people in your prayer experiment that have no one to pray for them, that lady in Nepal who’s super holy asked me to help people who are not being prayed for, so I’m going to do that. I know it messes with your experiment, but I don’t care.” My impersonation of God is a little bit saucy there. But yeah, so I think that shows the limitations of using an empirical approach to try to prove whether or not God exists.
Let’s talk about epistemology and truths. Those are the empirical truths, but there’s also metaphysical truths, things that we know are true even without doing an empirical investigation. I gave several examples, like nothing creates itself. There is a causal order or framework. In fact, the reason that if Tom and other atheists like him seek testable predictions to know that something exists, it’s because they believe in the causal order itself. They presume there is a causal order and there is a way to explain things. But I believe that if you follow that chain of causation back, you get to some kind of ultimate cause or necessary foundation. That’s what he and I were doing when we talked about the ultimate foundation of reality and what it means for that to be necessary.
Well, let’s go through these different kinds of truths, and I think that you’ll see what we’re talking about. Let’s talk about knowledge. All right, what is knowledge? That’s what epistemology deals with, and philosophers aren’t in agreement about what knowledge is. They know what its basic elements are, but they don’t have a complete description of it.
The most basic description of knowledge is that it’s justified true belief. We say, how do you know you know something? Like what if an atheist comes up to you and says, “Do you believe God exists?” “Yeah, I believe God exists.” “Okay, do you know God exists?” You might think, “Well, do I know it? I believe it, but do I know it?” Yeah, you know God exists. I know God exists. You can know something. Knowledge does not require 100% certainty. All that knowledge requires, the most basic definition of knowledge is that it’s justified true belief. That’s called the JTB theory of knowledge.
Now, this is a basic element. It’s not the complete definition, which I’ll make clear here shortly, but knowledge is justified true belief. If you have a true belief that is justified, you can usually say, not always, but usually say that that’s knowledge. Your justification does not have to be 100%, because you don’t have 100% justification for anything in life except for like mathematical truths or, “I think, therefore I am.” But we have pretty high certainty for a lot of the things that we say that we know to be true.
It has to be a true belief. You can’t have false knowledge, and it has to be justified. If you say something like … Like I’m sitting here in my office right now, and there’s no windows in my office. I’m in the middle of the building. I say, “It’s raining outside,” but I don’t hear it raining, I don’t see it, and I open the door and it turns out to be raining. You couldn’t really say that I knew that it was raining. You can’t really say that I knew that, because it was just a lucky guess. It wasn’t justified in that way.
There’s another example of this kind of false knowledge. It’s not knowledge, but it’s an interesting thing. It comes from a book by Harry Frankfurt, who is a philosopher. It’s called On BS. Now, it doesn’t say BS on the cover. On Cow Poopy. I’ll call it that, okay? Because whenever on SoundCloud it says, “Is there explicit language in this podcast?” I’m always trying to hit no. If you notice in previous episodes I bleep out profanities and things like that. On BS is the actual title. We could call it On Cow Poopy or On BS.
Now, you might think that’s kind of crude. Well, Harry Frankfurt is a really good philosopher. He’s got some good stuff on the free will, on the issues of free well. He wrote this book back in 2009 through Princeton University Press, and he talks about a phenomena he calls BS.
What is BS? It’s not lying, but it’s almost like a kind of lying. If you say to me, “Hey Trent, where’s my umbrella?” and I have no idea where the umbrella is, I might just say to you, “It’s on the lawn,” even though I have no idea if that’s true. I just put it out there as true almost like a joke. Now, that’s not lying. It would be lying if I saw the umbrella on the bookcase and I said to you, “It’s on the lawn.” That would be lying, because I know where it is.
BS is not lying. BS is just saying things that you have no idea that they’re true and you’re just putting on this kind of front. Okay? But if I said to you I was BS’ing and they said, “Where’s the umbrella?” I say, “It’s on the lawn,” and you go out on the lawn and it happens to be there, I didn’t know it was on the lawn. That was just a fantastic lucky guess. All right.
it has to be justified. You have to have a good reason. It doesn’t have to be 100%, but knowledge has to be justified in some way. But like I said, it’s not 100%. Like if you know that someone … I knew she was going to come to the party. Why? Because she told me. I knew her middle name is Margaret. Why? Because my friend told me that. A lot of our justification comes from reliable testimony, sense perception. How do I know there’s a dog across the street? Because I saw the dog.
Now, Tom Jump said we’ve had empirical experiments to prove that dogs exist. Yeah, that dogs exist, but not this particular dog. I can’t do an experiment with a testable prediction to prove that there is a dog across the street right now. All I can say is, “Well, I have a sense perception of it. I have no reason to doubt my perceptions,” so I say that I know there’s a dog across the street. That’s a justification.
Now, sometimes, here’s the problem. Why wouldn’t justified true belief just be synonymous with knowledge? Because there are philosophers who have discovered that you could have justified true belief but it still wouldn’t be knowledge. Edmund Gettier put forward these things called the Gettier Counterexamples. They can be a little difficult to explain and get. There’s one that actually comes from Bertrand Russell, who discovered the problem decades before Gettier but he didn’t name it.
Here’s the situation. Suppose you’re at home and you’re wondering what time it is, and you look across your parlor. Well, no, sorry. You’re visiting a friend’s house. You’re visiting a friend’s house. You’re wondering what time it is. You look across the parlor and you see an old grandfather clock, one of those wonderful old fashioned grandfather clocks. You see that the clock’s hands say 3:40. Your friend asks you, “What time is it?” You say, “Oh, it’s 3:40.” He’s like, “Oh, okay. Good.” You walk out the door, and your friend looks at his cell phone, and he’s like, “Okay, good. It’s 3:40.” You’re like, “Oh, yeah.” You say, “I can’t believe that grandfather clock still keeps time.” He says, “Oh, no. It’s broken. That clock is broken. It’s stuck on 3:40.”
But here’s the thing. Now, I ask you this question in that situation. You said it was 3:40 looking at a broken clock pointing at 3:40. Did you know it was 3:40? Well, I think you would say, no, it was a lucky guess, but it really wasn’t a lucky guess, now was it? It was something that you were justified, because normally when you look at a clock, you could … because any other time, you are justified, you can know what time it is by looking at a clock. But here, you had justified true belief, but there’s still something problematic that kept it from being knowledge.
Philosophers, they’ll disagree about that kind of thing. They’ll disagree about knowledge in that respect, but the idea here is that knowledge has to be some kind of justified true belief, but there can’t be infinite knowledge chains. If we just say, “Oh, the only thing I believe is what I can prove scientifically,” the problem is … or you make a testable prediction. First, how do we know what testable predictions to do? Okay, we have to make a testable prediction to figure out what the best testable prediction is. Anything you make, if you say, “I have to have scientific proof for it,” then if you believe something, well where’s the proof for that? Where’s the proof for that? Where’s the proof for that?
If you only believe in things that you have other evidence for, you have the problem of infinite regress, which I brought up with Tom that I think he kind of glossed over. You need to have foundational beliefs, things that are just true because they’re true. They don’t need any other supports. These include things like indefeasible beliefs. Remember like I look at a dog. I could be wrong about that being a dog across the street, but one thing I can’t be wrong about is that I am having a perception of a dog. In philosopher speak, we would say I am being appeared to dogly. I might be wrong. Maybe it’s a coyote, or maybe it’s an animatronic robot. But I can’t be wrong about the fact that I am having the perception of a dog across the street.
Other things are analytics truths. These are statements that are true by definition, so they are necessary. They have to be true. No matter the way the world is, these statements are true. They’re true if you just know the meanings of the terms involved. That would include things like no bachelor is married. Horses are mammals. Those are necessary truths and they’re analytic. All I have to know to know that no bachelor is married is true, I just have to know what a bachelor is. It’s a necessary analytic truth. You discover it by analyzing the meaning of the terms in the statement. Or horses are mammals. That’s a necessary truth, and I know it. If I just know what a horse is, I can know horses are mammals. I can know that that statement is true.
Now, what some philosophers will say is they’ll say, “All right, if God’s existence is necessary, why can’t we make that same analysis?” They’re say that the statement God exists or a necessary being exists is not like no … is unlike no bachelor is married or horses are mammals. I can know what God is but still not know that he has to exist. I can know what a necessary being is but not know that a necessary being has to exist in the world as it is right now. They’ll say it’s not as obvious as no bachelor is married or horses are mammals, and that’s a classic objection to the idea of God being a necessary being. They’ll say there’s only necessary truths, but not necessary beings.
But when we say that God’s existence is necessary or that it’s necessary God exists, philosophers don’t mean that it’s some kind of analytic truth or a strict logical necessity in the sense that God exists, because a philosopher might say, “Well, if God exists is logically true, then the God does not exist must be some kind of logical contradiction.” They’ll say it’s not a contradiction.
Like for example, you and I could say no statement can be true and false at the same time. That’s called the law of non-contradiction. That seems true on the face of it because it’s opposite is just contradictory. It’s a logical contradiction. But people will say, “Well, there’s no logical contradiction in saying God doesn’t exist.” But remember, we’re not saying that God’s existence is strict logical necessity. It’s more of a broad logical necessity. It’s not an analytic truth. It’s not of a necessary synthetic truth. This in philosophy is called the analytic-synthetic distinction. I think it comes from Kant.
A truth is analytic if no bachelor is married. I know what a bachelor is, so I know he can’t be married. But what about synthetic truths? These are truths where you can’t just know the meaning of the terms to figure out if the statement is true. You have to synthesize other things you know about the world to discover if the statement is true. Most truths we deal with are these kinds of synthetic truths, and they are contingent. They could be true or false at different times in different places.
For example, that horse is brown. Tom is a bachelor. How do I know these are true? I can’t just read the statement. I have to know Tom. Is Tom a bachelor? I’ve got to know who Tom is. That horse is brown. Is the statement true? Well, I have to know what horse you’re talking about. It’s not analytic because I have to look at the world and compare it to the statement itself.
Most synthetic truths are contingent in this regard. They could change. The horse could be brown one day. It could get in the flour mill and be white the next day. Tom could be a bachelor yesterday. He could be married tomorrow. Those are contingent.
Some people might think, okay, there’s only necessary analytic truths, no bachelor is married, and contingent synthetic truths, Tom is a bachelor. But the problem is if God’s existence is not a necessary analytic truth, then you can’t prove logically that God exists. Ah, but we have something else. We have necessary synthetic truths. These are truths where if we look at the world around us, we can see that this state of affairs has to obtain in any world that might exist.
That’s what Tom and I were talking about when we talked about possible worlds and modal logic. Sometimes necessity and contingency means there are certain possible worlds this could be true, but a necessary truth is no matter what world exists, the statement has to be true. No matter what world exists, no bachelor is married. No matter what world exists, two plus two equals four.
Necessary synthetic truths, things you look around the world and realize, “Hey, wait a minute. This would be true no matter what world I lived in.” The prime example I gave in our dialogue was if something is red, it has a shape. But think about this. If I just know what red is, I can know what red is without knowing it has to have a shape. I know red is a kind of shade of color distinguished from other colors or a different spectrum on a frequency. But to say if something is red it has to have shape, when I think about it more, I realize, “Oh, yeah. If something has the property of being red, it has to have some kind of shape.” That’s a necessary truth.
Other examples would be the prime minister is not a prime number. The prime minister is not a prime number. I’ve heard that one a lot. The prime minister of a country is a human being, and a human being by necessity cannot be an abstract object like a number. But there’s nothing in prime minister or prime number necessarily that would reveal that. I have to kind of synthesize that from my knowledge of the world as I understand it.
Mathematical truths would be another example of these necessary synthetic truths. I would argue that the statement there must be a necessary being, or a necessary being must exist, or there is a necessary being is a synthetic truth that is necessary. It must always be the case because it explains the world around us. I could get into that more, but we’ve already gone on long today. We’ll save that for a future podcast. If you’re interested in that about necessity and a being existing that must be necessary, check out my episode on the contingency argument from a few weeks ago where I go into that in more detail.
Thank you all very much. I’m very grateful you all stuck with me for a little bit of a longer episode today. But hey, knowledge is power. Help us all out. Be sure to go to trenthornpodcast.com so that you can support the podcast and benefit from the extra bonus content there. Please pray. I’ve got a lot of other dialogues on the horizon that I want to go well, and pray that we get good guests.
There’s a wonderful guy, Matt Whitman. He is a super nice Protestant guy who visits different churches. He has the 10 Minute Bible Hour. A lot of people have emailed me saying, “Please go on his show. Please talk to him.” I reached out to him on Twitter and he’s interested. He’s really busy right now, but he wants to chat with me on the phone in probably about two or three weeks. Pray that that goes well, because I would love … I’d love for him to come to San Diego, check out, visit the Byzantine Catholic church here. I’ve told him, “Hey, here’s a church you haven’t been to yet. It looks orthodox, but it’s completely Catholic,” and now we have no pews. How fun to show him that and then have a chat with him about being Catholic and the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism. I hope that comes to fruition. Pray that it will. Thank you guys so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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