Talking God and Morality with the Atheist Who Broke Jordan Peterson

In this episode Trent talks about God and morality with atheist Danny Philtalk.

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Danny Philtalk (00:00:00):

You’re probably in the wrong YouTube video.

Jordan Peterson (00:00:02):

You’re really quite something you are.

Danny Philtalk (00:00:03):

Aren’t I? But you’re really quite nothing. You’re not a Christian.

Jordan Peterson (00:00:06):

Oh yeah, I’m done with him.

Jay Dyer (00:00:09):

You equivocating again. Look, can we bring this back?

Danny Philtalk (00:00:13):

And this is why I think normative ethics is kind of a meme.

Trent Horn (00:00:16):

No, no we should have these universe lab salutes.

Danny Philtalk (00:00:19):

To me, it just kind of kicks the can down the road. The point is that, okay, if God explains those facts in some way or ranges those values or properties in that way, then what fixes the divine psychology in that way? But it’s even stranger for me to take what’s classically understood as a universal, like a property and say that some entity is identical to that property and that gets to the divine simplicity stuff, which I can’t make sense of.

Trent Horn (00:00:45):

Welcome everyone to the Council of Trent. My guest today is Danny Philtock. If you are on TikTok, YouTube, religious debates, you may have seen him there. And a year ago, you might have seen him all over social media with a viral clip of him interacting with Jordan Peterson. We’re going to talk about atheism, online apologetics, religion, all that and more. Danny, welcome to Council of Trent.

Danny Philtalk (00:01:06):

Yeah, thanks for having me on. It’s already been a year, huh? Since all that.

Trent Horn (00:01:08):

Yes. When I went to get the clips, and I’ll show everyone the clips as we discuss them, I went, I looked at the date and I was like, I can’t believe it’s been May 2025, but it’s been just a year since then. And still, I just have it in my head just I have a lot of Jordan Peterson memorized in my head because he’s so memorable. It’s just like, I haven’t told you that, have I? No. Why don’t you go clean your room? Why are you here?

Danny Philtalk (00:01:32):

I feel like he’s about to do that to me.

Trent Horn (00:01:34):

Yeah, he was about to do that. So why don’t you give our listeners and our viewers just a little bit of background on yourself, who you are, what you believe, and what you’ve been doing in the online space.

Danny Philtalk (00:01:45):

So my name is Danny. I’m really interested in philosophy, specifically philosophy religion, but the other branches of philosophies are just not as fun to talk about or debate about sometimes for other people. So I focus on a lot of the philosophy of religion. I used to be a Christian. I deconverted in 2020. So rather recent, at least it feels recent. And when I was a Christian, I liked doing apologetics. And when I’m an atheist, I like doing the, I guess counterapologetics is what you might call it. But I also have an academic interest. So there’s a sort of rhetorical debate, bro part of my content. But then sometimes I settle down and get into the nitty-gritty of the academic stuff as well. So primarily interested in philosophy, religion. Yeah.

Trent Horn (00:02:26):

Okay. And when did you start doing sort of this online content?

Danny Philtalk (00:02:29):

Probably in 2017. I started making a lot more content in 2021, but I was around online. I had some small presence from 2017.

Trent Horn (00:02:39):

So before 2020, before you deconverted, were you making Christian content or just

Danny Philtalk (00:02:43):

More like more

Trent Horn (00:02:44):

Neutral content?

Danny Philtalk (00:02:45):

I was just talking to everybody that was willing to talk. I’m one of those, I like to debate and most people don’t like to debate, especially debate about religion.

Trent Horn (00:02:53):

Yeah,

Danny Philtalk (00:02:54):

Sure. So I was just looking for people, anybody that would just be willing to have the same sort of conversations I wanted to have. So that’s kind of when it started.

Trent Horn (00:03:01):

And then since your deconversion, I’ve searched online, you’ve done a fair number of does God exist debates, atheism debates, and you’ve kind of gotten into that sphere. What kind of took you into that direction of wanting to debate that subject?

Danny Philtalk (00:03:14):

Well, I had just debating the atheism stuff. Well, I was really interested in Christian apologetics and what got me into philosophy rather seriously is William Lang Craig, actually.

Trent Horn (00:03:28):

Birds of a feather, but I remember him the OG William Lane Craig debates before they were ever on YouTube. So when I was in my first encounter with Craig, I love that we have this in common was in, I want to say it was in 2001. So for me, I had to go and scroll through a website called The Secular Web and read transcripts of his debates with atheists. And then they started getting more uploaded to YouTube in 05, but that was after I had converted. But it seems like you probably just got to see him doing his Craiginess and all those debates.

Danny Philtalk (00:04:00):

Right. I started seeing clips of him and Ben Shapiro and that got me into some of the debate stuff. But Craig kind of brought the rigor that I didn’t have at the time. I was a young Earth creationist.

Trent Horn (00:04:12):

Were you like an evangelical?

Danny Philtalk (00:04:14):

Yeah, yeah. I was Southern Baptist. And so Craig pointed in the right direction you might say, because I think he’s a serious academic. So yeah, started with that. Then I found myself on the other side wanting to debate the same stuff. Now more recently I like philosophical theology. I like some of the in- house debates even though I’m not in the house.

Trent Horn (00:04:39):

Well, yeah. And we’re going to talk about that later in the interview because I found that fascinating. I always find an interesting atheists who study theology. Frankly, there’s a fair number of theologians that I think are actually just atheists, but they enjoy the subject and they still like getting a paycheck, frankly. Of course, there are many great theologians who are also very fervent believers. But yeah, I always find it interesting when they’re atheists who just have an interest in the theology stuff, which can actually make sense. We’ll talk about that here in a second. So you’re doing that and then you ended up going on Jubilee for a … So Jubilee, for people who haven’t seen these things, and I’ve talked about them in my previous episode, how debates became dumb because I don’t particularly enjoy the format, but I see its usefulness in getting a lot of views.

(00:05:22):

So Jubilee will do these surrounded episodes for people who aren’t as familiar with them. You get 10, 20 people around one person and people rush to a chair and they get like three minutes to debate the guy until everybody else in the other chairs votes them out. And so you were there, you were invited under a particular pretense of debating of atheists debating a Christian and then things went a little askew. Why don’t you fill us in on your side, the inside of this, what happened?

Danny Philtalk (00:05:49):

Yeah. Well, before I do, you said something about the format of Jubilee. I want a quick comment about that. Yeah, sure. I had the same attitude. I thought Jubilee was a terrible format for debate. Sort of changed my mind about Jubilee because I think that it got a lot of people interested in topics that they wouldn’t otherwise discuss. Like my dad, for example, started looking into more of the kind of debates, the philosophy of religion, that kind of thing. And if Jubilee didn’t like … It’s like a conversation starter. I agree with you that as far as making progress, there’s probably none there right then and there, but it’s interesting how it brings up topics that people now people now have a dispatch to talk about.

Trent Horn (00:06:32):

Yeah. And I can see the utility there. And I think debates in general can’t really solve these complex issues, but they serve a useful purpose in helping people get interested in the subject and then dive deeper into it. So that’s why I still appreciate a debate that’s good faith and people actually get from both sides and really learn from it and not just one person using debate tricks on another person. I cannot stand that. And so I worry though in the Jubilee format, it’s just really so hyper concentrated. It turns into rhetoric and debate tricks, but I have seen some good interactions. I actually met the gentleman who was for the vegan debate that I think that they recently had and I think they had just a very … It was very cordial interactions. It doesn’t have to be a bunch of tricks. But yeah, I think though it’s an interesting format.

(00:07:22):

I mean, I’d be open to it. We’ll see what happens in the future. How’d you get into it and what was the

Danny Philtalk (00:07:27):

Story there? Yeah. So they invited me a friend sort of said, “Hey, you should probably invite this person.” And then that’s what they did. I accepted. They did say it was one Christian versus 20 atheist. The story goes that Jordan Peterson didn’t and or his team didn’t get that memo and he says now that that was never brought to his attention. However, I and many others recall before they started filming, they announced, “Welcome to one Christian versus 20 atheist.” And I remember Jordan Peterson giggled and said, “Haha, some people don’t think I am.” So he did know the title or the title of the video. Now, I don’t think he’s lying. I actually, there’s a part of our clip where when I ask him what video, do you know where you are, the title of the video or something like that, he looks down and tries to read what the … Wait, no, we’re here for Jordan Peterson versus 20 atheist and it didn’t say that.

Trent Horn (00:08:33):

There was something on his desk in front of him?

Danny Philtalk (00:08:35):

Yeah, he was a piece of paper and he looked down to verify,

Trent Horn (00:08:39):

Okay,

Danny Philtalk (00:08:41):

Look, no, I’m not supposed to be the person. So he might’ve

Trent Horn (00:08:44):

Been confused.

Danny Philtalk (00:08:45):

I think he was confused. Now that’s compatible with being negligent or sort of absent minded. So I don’t think he’s lying about … I think he is confused. However, given they announced

Trent Horn (00:08:59):

It beforehand,

Danny Philtalk (00:08:59):

I would probably place a little bit of blame on him unless … He went on the George Jankos and blamed Jubilee almost completely. I think that was unfair in my opinion given my experience there. But yeah, everybody was under the impression they had just done the one atheist versus 20 Christians, right? Yes,

Trent Horn (00:09:18):

With Alex.

Danny Philtalk (00:09:19):

Right. So everything’s in line with doing the one Christian versus 28th. Yeah,

Trent Horn (00:09:23):

Because I had heard from other people who were there. You don’t know who it’s going to be you’re debating. You just show up and people were speculating who it might be.

Danny Philtalk (00:09:30):

Is

Trent Horn (00:09:30):

It going to be this Christian apologist or that Christian apologist and trying to prep because you don’t know who it’s going to be and then it turns out to be Jordan Peterson and that led to this moment which went pretty viral on the internet. So I’m going to play it for our listeners now and then we can chat

Danny Philtalk (00:09:46):

More about that. Are you familiar with

Jordan Peterson (00:09:48):

Their doctrines?

Danny Philtalk (00:09:48):

Somewhat. Okay. How did they regard Mary?

Jordan Peterson (00:09:52):

Why are you asking me that?

Danny Philtalk (00:09:53):

Because you’re a Christian.

Jordan Peterson (00:09:55):

You say that. I haven’t claimed that. Oh,

Danny Philtalk (00:09:57):

What is this? Is this Christians versus atheist?

Jordan Peterson (00:10:00):

I don’t know. You don’t

Danny Philtalk (00:10:01):

Know where you are

Jordan Peterson (00:10:02):

Right now. Don’t be a smart ass. Either you’re

Danny Philtalk (00:10:04):

Christian or you’re not.

Jordan Peterson (00:10:06):

If you’re a smart

Danny Philtalk (00:10:07):

Ass. Oh, either you’re a Christian or you’re not. Which one is it?

Jordan Peterson (00:10:09):

I could be either of them, but I don’t have to tell you. It could

Danny Philtalk (00:10:13):

Be you. You don’t have to tell me. I was under the impression I was invited to talk to a Christian. Am I not talking to a Christian?

Jordan Peterson (00:10:20):

No, you were invited to-

Danny Philtalk (00:10:22):

I think everyone should look at the title of the YouTube channel. You’re probably in the wrong YouTube video.

Jordan Peterson (00:10:26):

You’re really quite something you are.

Danny Philtalk (00:10:27):

Aren’t I? But you’re really quite nothing. Right? You’re not a Christian. Oh yeah,

Jordan Peterson (00:10:31):

I’m done with

Trent Horn (00:10:35):

Him.That’s quite the burn there.

Danny Philtalk (00:10:37):

It’s quite a spectacle. When I first watched that, I was like, oh my gosh, am I being too aggressive? I didn’t know how it would come across to other people.

Trent Horn (00:10:46):

I mean, you were genuinely surprised. And this is something that while I appreciate some of Jordan Peterson’s insights, that has been a perennial complaint of mine and a lot of people the ambiguity of discussing important issues that while I agree, talking about the question, does God exist? Yeah, if the word God means something radically different between two people, you should probably clarify what you mean by that word first, but if it becomes we can’t know what any words mean, what does this mean? What does that mean? Have I told you this or not? Yeah, it becomes frustrating. So were you having just kind of a genuine sense of frustration trying to engage him?

Danny Philtalk (00:11:26):

So I think this is around between the 45, 50 minute mark, maybe 53 minute mark. This

Trent Horn (00:11:30):

Was the third prompt and we can talk about the prompt a bit because I wanted to see where you were going because you brought up Catholic stuff and that interests me. His prompt and in Jubilee, they give four debate prompts the Central Guy gives. His was everybody worships something. So that’s where in the context of what you were discussing with

Danny Philtalk (00:11:47):

Him. Right. But I had to sit through the first 50 minutes of that recording and a lot of the stuff he was saying, the way he was treating people, I was getting charged where I was getting more and more frustrated listening to the other previous interactions. In the first interaction, I think it was a friend of mine named Cade, he was- Oh, Kate Bradley. Yes, yes. Other

Trent Horn (00:12:10):

Guests of the show.

Danny Philtalk (00:12:11):

Yes. There was a point where he just snapped at him for no good reason. Some of the interactions with Parker, with I think the line to the Nazis one, I was just so annoyed and it carried over into our interaction. So it was leftover frustration from the other conversations that led me to become more disposed for that, for that kind of behavior. So going back to your original question, there was also the frustration that he was sort of like, “Oh, here, here’s your definition. What’s your definition of worship?” And then I felt like there was a sort of changing going on. There was a few times where he interrupted me, but that was no big deal. People interrupt each other in debates and it’s not a big deal, right? But yeah.

Trent Horn (00:12:56):

But I think it was just kind of an odd … If I were to go in there as the Christian engaging for atheists, that’s not a prompt that I would necessarily choose. I don’t really care. Everybody worships something. What does that mean? I mean, to me as a Catholic, I would say worship means giving something it’s worthship. And so I agreed with Peterson when he was talking to you that there are varying degrees of worth we ascribe to things. Some things are more worthy than other things, so we give more reverence to more reverential things and less reverence to things. And I think that the point he was trying to make with you is that, because you were saying, “Well, look, you’re interested in Catholicism. Do Catholics worship Mary?”That’s when Protestants have always leaping on me because I made a clip that got taken out of context where I said, based on an older definition of worship, technically yes, but that’s a definition we don’t use anymore.

(00:13:49):

But I think Peterson was trying to say, “Yeah, but everybody has a highest thing.” But for me, it’s like, okay, well, everybody has something that’s highest in their life they give their most reverence to. For Christians, it’s God. For non-Christians, it’s going to be something else. Okay, that doesn’t really move our conversation forward. That’s where I felt like the prompt wasn’t that

Danny Philtalk (00:14:07):

Interesting. No, I agree with you. What I was getting at was this, first of all, I didn’t like any of the prompts. I think all the prompts were pretty much garbage, but that prompt felt like rage bait because he knows that atheists, the way they interpret the word worship is a very religiously pumped term. We don’t want to say that we worship anything. He knows that and it’s sort of a rage baity prompt. And so what I was pushing for is, okay, well, look, no, no, there’s nuances with respect to the word worship that Catholics have. And there’s like, I think four, Latria, I can’t remember the other three, right? Latria. Yeah.

Trent Horn (00:14:46):

Dulia for the saints, hyper dulia for Mary because she’s the best because she’s the mother of God.

Danny Philtalk (00:14:52):

What I was expecting him to do was start to, well, look, this is the way they want to characterize how this term and stuff like that. And then I wanted to point out, well, you’re being so charitable to Catholics in the way they want to use the term and how they use the term, but why are you not doing the same thing with atheists? Because you know atheists don’t use the term that way in a way where they are just fine with comfortable with saying, “Yeah, I worship stuff.” So in other words, it’s sort of a double standard or a kind of special treatment that he would have for how Catholics might understand the term and he’s not extending the same charity to atheists because we don’t want to say we’re worshiping things either.

Trent Horn (00:15:25):

And I think that’s fair and that’s why we should just let people use words how they fairly reflect what someone believes. I mean, there’s some atheists who aren’t nihilists. They don’t think anything really has worth and they’re just really depressed or maybe they’re not depressed. They retreat into a kind of weird cynical dark humor about it, which I don’t think necessarily should. But then others who could see a worthiness and nature and awe in it, something that’s awe inspiring, worthy of, or reverence even to human things that they’re inspired by without considering it to be divine. So the question is though, is there a maximal thing to give worship to that would have divine properties? And that’s what we would disagree about. And so we’ll get into some of those arguments. Well, one fun thing that might help us get into some of those arguments about what points to God and what doesn’t might be morality.

(00:16:16):

And to kick us off from that, I thought it would be fun. So May 2025, you debate Jordan Peterson on Jubilee. Then a month later, you’re on Pures Morgan Uncensored and you’re there with Parker and I don’t even want to call it a debate. It’s really more of a circus. I mean, that’s just what that panel show has really become with Jay Dyer and Andrew Wilson and you guys are all over the place. At one point you’re talking about the existence of God. The next is whether the word retard is a slur or not. It’s like, okay, I don’t know where we’re going with this. So I want to pick up a point where you two are debating with Jay primarily, then Andrew swoops in and Jay is making an argument for God based on morality and morality being objective and then you guys offer a reply that I don’t think really God answered.

(00:17:03):

So let’s play that.

Jay Dyer (00:17:05):

Then you can’t say anything is morally wrong. There’s no ought from an is.

Parker (00:17:09):

Wait, I can say something is morally wrong under my perspective. You’re misunderstanding subjective morality.

Jay Dyer (00:17:13):

You’re not giving me a question.on why it’s long morally objectively if I can also counter it.

Parker (00:17:19):

Can I ask you this question? Do you think that morality is true dependent upon God’s stance or independent of God stance?

Jay Dyer (00:17:25):

Ultimately it’s grounded in God.

Parker (00:17:27):

Okay. So it’s subjective.

Danny Philtalk (00:17:28):

God is a subject. Yeah. God is a subject.

Jay Dyer (00:17:30):

No, that’s not a subjective argument. The argument- God is a subject. The argument is that it’s objective. And the fact that a person makes an argument doesn’t make the argument subjective. Your argument is subject. Subjectivism.

Parker (00:17:42):

Is God a subject.

Jay Dyer (00:17:43):

Two different things. It’s a category

Parker (00:17:44):

Error. Is God a subject athletic category error?

Jay Dyer (00:17:48):

It’s two different categories. A subjective argument. We’re two different

Danny Philtalk (00:17:52):

People too.

Jay Dyer (00:17:54):

A person who’s a subject making an argument. Those are two

Danny Philtalk (00:17:57):

Different parts. The point is that God is a subject. He’s not an object. We’re subjects. We understand morality in terms of God.

Jay Dyer (00:18:03):

You’re quivocating again. But can we bring this back. No, you want

Parker (00:18:07):

To run away? Wait, God having his particular view on morality is no different than me having my view because we’re both subjects. What is Jay? What is a subject? Jay, what is the subject?

Jay Dyer (00:18:18):

You’re equivocating on the fact that the subject is making an argument versus the argument being- That’s a philosophical category here.

Parker (00:18:26):

Jay. This is like talking

Jay Dyer (00:18:28):

To children. It’s

Parker (00:18:29):

A category error you

Jay Dyer (00:18:30):

Idiot.

Parker (00:18:31):

I gave you the youth row dilemma. I asked you if it’s true dependent upon a stance or independent of a stance. You said it’s dependent upon God stance.That’s subjective by

Jay Dyer (00:18:37):

Definition. I said that the argument for Christian ethics is not a subjectivist ethic and because God is a subject that doesn’t make the system subjective. That’s an

Danny Philtalk (00:18:48):

Equivocation error. What does subjective means, Jay? What does subjective mean? What is subjective? Purely

Jay Dyer (00:18:52):

Relative to the individual.

Danny Philtalk (00:18:55):

So

Parker (00:18:56):

True dependent upon a stance.

Danny Philtalk (00:18:58):

Is God an individual?

Jay Dyer (00:19:01):

That doesn’t mean that the ethic is subjective. It’s a subjective ethic. You’re just rephrasing. It’s not individual.You’re substituting the word individual for subject.

Danny Philtalk (00:19:11):

I’m asking you’ve got as an individual. Yes or no, Howard.

Jay Dyer (00:19:14):

That doesn’t mean that the ethics is subjective.

Danny Philtalk (00:19:16):

That’s

Jay Dyer (00:19:17):

A system of- Who’s running now?logical argument that’s different. Let me bring Andrew. Andrew, you wanted

Trent Horn (00:19:24):

To … Andrew, you wanted to get in here.

Jay Dyer (00:19:26):

Jay’s getting cooked, so he’s got to go. What are you going to say? Jay’s going to cook.You’re making a dumb mistake.

Trent Horn (00:19:32):

And then as I recall the rest of it, and I was curious to see, oh, how’s Andrew going to save this? And I think it just goes back to whether it’s okay to call people retards or not.

Danny Philtalk (00:19:40):

Yeah. But we didn’t agree to that topic, by the way. That was an ambush topic.

Trent Horn (00:19:44):

What did they tell you this was going to be about?

Danny Philtalk (00:19:48):

Mostly they said jubilee and they did say something about sexual ethics or gay pride. They did not mention anything about the R word or anything like that. I didn’t want to talk about that. That’s not something I ever would want to debate. I don’t want to debate about that. So I don’t think Parker wanted to debate about that either. So yeah, that was unexpected. But yeah, no.

Trent Horn (00:20:09):

Yeah. And then it doesn’t go anywhere, but I think you guys were actually making some good points and something that I’m concerned about because it’s interesting and maybe you can sense this a bit. Do you think the quality of the debate between Christians and atheists, the arguments that are traded, at least in the popular online sphere, things that are kind of going more viral, has gone downhill since when you started watching those William Lane Craig debates.

Danny Philtalk (00:20:37):

You see, it’s hard for me to say. A lot of Christian apologetics has shifted their attention to Islam and I think heresy and even Mormonism. Atheism

Trent Horn (00:20:50):

Is not as popular

Danny Philtalk (00:20:51):

Anymore. Not as popular anymore. And within those discussions, there’s I think a divide. There’s the conversations that involve people like I think Matthew Adelstein, Joe Schmidt, you’ve engaged with Joe Schmidt, I believe. There’s that kind of- There’s the

Trent Horn (00:21:07):

Higher level.

Danny Philtalk (00:21:07):

The higher level. But

Trent Horn (00:21:08):

I was talking about popular.

Danny Philtalk (00:21:09):

Popular. Stuff

Trent Horn (00:21:10):

That’s getting the

Danny Philtalk (00:21:10):

Reach. Because

Trent Horn (00:21:11):

Craig

Danny Philtalk (00:21:11):

Was- We’re popular right now on the atheist side on …

Trent Horn (00:21:14):

On the eighth, probably Alex. So I think Alex O’Connor does bring a higher level and that allows him. But when I look at

(00:21:22):

Seeing who’s here on Piers Morgan defending the existence of God with a moral argument, it’s basically Jay and Andrew using essentially presuppositionalism or a very basic moral argument where they’re not seeing and you two are deploying the euthephro dilemma, which would be an appropriate thing. So just to catch our audience up and then we can go back and forth and maybe extend the conversation a bit. The idea is that, okay, if morality … Morality can’t be objective unless it has some kind of objective grounding, otherwise it’s subjective. And your guys’ objection was, well, if you ground morality in God, God is also a subject with preferences and desires. So you just kick the can back to just another subjective point. Either what God says is moral and so God could command any kind of crazy thing to be moral, which would be totally subjective, or God’s commands are in line with some of the moral standard beyond him, which means it’s not really rooted in him.

(00:22:19):

It seems like that was the point you’re trying to make to Jay. And for someone who would seem to know so much about epistemology and philosophy seemed to go right over his head.

Danny Philtalk (00:22:28):

You’re right. That’s a good point. He touts himself as a philosophical guru, but then didn’t really … I mean, I think there are responses to what I said, right?

Trent Horn (00:22:36):

Yes.

Danny Philtalk (00:22:37):

He didn’t give any of them.

Trent Horn (00:22:39):

Yeah. He’s just saying, “Well, you’re confusing a subject and individual, but you’re not. ” So the question is, if God is the ultimate foundation for morality, how is he and how do you answer the Euthepro dilemma? So it’s either is something good and my answer to the dilemma is that it would be a false dilemma. I think there are ways around it. I know the reply to the false dilemma reply. The false dilemma is that it’s either something is right or wrong just because God says so, which would be like a divine command theory. It’s just based on God’s will or God issues commands because of a preexisting moral order beyond him. I would say that it’s not that what God commands is good or that God’s commands are good, but that God and the good are identical. And so I think that’s a way that you can get through the dilemma that God is the only kind of being who can be good by nature.

(00:23:32):

Actually, I’d have to explore this with Jay because this gets into more of an advanced philosophical concept of people like divine simplicity. So the idea-

Danny Philtalk (00:23:41):

Which he doesn’t accept, right?

Trent Horn (00:23:42):

Well, I would say no. I mean,

Danny Philtalk (00:23:44):

Depends- And he’s not the tomistic sense of-

Trent Horn (00:23:46):

Not the tomistic sense of- Sorry, let me mute that there. At least not the timistic sense, no. So the idea here would be, I think a lot of atheists will have problems. They’ll think, well, if you ground morality in God and God just said, go out and essay these people, because I essay babies or do something like that. Got to use words so I don’t get the algorithm to chop me up here. Most of us would say, “Well, no, that can’t be right. And if you think God could command these things, you’re a crazy person.” So there’s got to be some standard beyond what could constrain God. For me as a classical theist, I think that good and evil are identical to being and that something is good when it possesses being and that it becomes evil or bad when it loses being. So even in the non-moral sense, when we think about like, “Oh, we had a bad crop this year.” The crop didn’t do anything morally wrong.

(00:24:35):

It’s just missing nutrients that it needs to actually function as a crop. Or if you think of a bad person or even like a bad poker player could either not know when to bluff when they need to bluff, they lack skill or they lack integrity to play the game fairly. So I see the privation view of good and evil.

(00:24:56):

So for me, goodness then is the possession of being. So if you maximally possess being, you would not have any privations or absences and so then you would be good by definition. And so I think, oh, well, that could be the explanation for why, because this is like when William Lang Craig says, “Well, God just is the good. God is the standard.” A natural reply is, “Well, how do you know that? You’re just assuming that. ” But I always treat it as, oh, if God is by definition infinite being, and that’s how we understand good and bad or good and evil. Oh, so that makes sense. In fact, here’s from the Catholic catechism, paragraph 271, very interesting. It talks about omnipotence and that’s the only divine attribute in the creed, which is it’s like, oh, it’s the only attribute mentioned. And it says in 271, “God’s almighty power is in no way arbitrary.” And then it quotes Aquinas.

(00:25:47):

“In God, power, essence, will, intellect, wisdom, and justice are all identical. Nothing therefore can be in God’s power, which cannot be in his just will or his wise intellect. “So if I was there, and I think I make a different moral argument than what other Christians would make, I would say if morality is objective, if there is a being who just is goodness itself,

(00:26:07):

Oh, that explains where we get the objective foundation. That might be a reply I might go with. I don’t know what you think of that.

Danny Philtalk (00:26:12):

Yeah. So to say that it’s not God’s will or commands or stances that grounds the good is God’s being or God’s nature that grounds the good, that is a realist position, meaning that it’s not subjective. And in that conversation, I mean, there are proper usages of the term subjective for example, or subjectivism, moral subjectivism. A lot of people think that that implies relativism.

Trent Horn (00:26:37):

No, yeah. It

Danny Philtalk (00:26:38):

Doesn’t,

Trent Horn (00:26:38):

Right? T help catch people up and I love doing this because it’s also fun. It’s like a little philosophy seminar for people because people confuse these terms all the time and they think, oh, nothing’s subjective. Oh, if you’re a Christian, you can’t believe in subjective truth. That’s not true. For example, I’ll give you an example of a subjective truth. Mint chocolate chip ice cream is the best ice cream. It’s true depending on who utters it. For me, that’s false. It tastes like toothpaste, but there are people, that’s true. But the statement ice cream melts at room temperature, well, that’s objective because it’s not dependent on who utters the statement. So I would agree that there are subjective truths and there are objective truths. The question is when we look at morality, and I think a lot of this can point to God as an argument for God, how do we understand moral statements?

(00:27:30):

Are they subjective truths or are they objective truths and people will disagree. So I guess how do you understand morality?

Danny Philtalk (00:27:37):

So I guess I have the spirit of an interiorist. What are we asking when we’re asking about the nature of morality or goodness right and wrong, good and bad? Is that a question about how people use the terms? Well, studies show that people use the terms in all sorts of ways. Sometimes they use it in subjectivist ways, sometimes they use it in non-subjectivist ways. Sometimes they’re expressing their emotions, sometimes they’re not. So I think that the sort of empirical research suggests that everybody is just saying it’s not kind of indeterminate what people mean by these terms. When I use the terms, I’m often talking about people’s values, whether it be my own or people that agree with me or someone else’s. However, I sometimes use the term in naturalist ways. The point is that the language is used in all sorts of ways. Now, if we’re asking, are there moral properties out there as independent of any sort of commitment or attitude?

Trent Horn (00:28:35):

There would be moral facts that are true even if the human species went extinct.

Danny Philtalk (00:28:41):

Yeah. So I don’t believe in any of that. I think that for me, it depends on what we mean by moral, but if moral … Let’s just use the word moral to mean right and wrong, good or bad with respect to behavior.

Trent Horn (00:28:55):

I would say morality refers to actions that are worthy of praise or blame.

Danny Philtalk (00:29:00):

Yeah, we do, but would you say if I did well on my test that I deserve praise?

Trent Horn (00:29:05):

Yeah, because you did morally good things in order to do those goals.

Danny Philtalk (00:29:12):

But if I made mistakes on my test, would you say I was morally blameworthy?

Trent Horn (00:29:16):

No, not if you made a mistake.

Danny Philtalk (00:29:17):

But you could still blame me.

Trent Horn (00:29:19):

I could … Well, it depends. You

Danny Philtalk (00:29:21):

Can blame people for not doing well on a test. They didn’t study.

Trent Horn (00:29:24):

Yes. You could blame them if they did something that was of moral wrongdoing. That’s why I mean, I have children. That’s why I always say to them, “I don’t care what grade you get as long as you tried your best.” And so there that relates to the blame would not be just on the making of the mistake, which could just be a simple cognitive error, but it’s the fact that the mistake was made because you did something you shouldn’t have done, like a party all night instead of studying, or you didn’t do something you should have done. So I do the idea of non-moral praise and blame, I think we would just have to have Very more metaphorical definitions of praise or blame. If we praise the lion for getting the antelopes, good job, buddy. It’s like, well, he’s really just responding more to nature there.

Danny Philtalk (00:30:09):

It’s

Trent Horn (00:30:09):

Not like what we think of with humans.

Danny Philtalk (00:30:12):

I guess I just want to point out that there’s a set of actions and behaviors that are more closely tied to morally blameworthy. And then I think being blameworthy in general could encompasses more actions. There’s practical mistakes. We make practical like, oh, I should have left five minutes earlier so I could go to the bathroom. And we blame ourselves for not doing that.

Trent Horn (00:30:35):

Sure. And I think that once again, you can assign blame to things that’s necessarily non-moral, like I said, metaphorically. We talk about a building collapse and we blame a structural failure on a certain hinge point or something, but it’s not moral blame. We’re just pointing where something has gone wrong.

Danny Philtalk (00:30:52):

Right. I think that’s what I’m trying to say is that there’s blame in a generic sense and there’s like a moral-

Trent Horn (00:30:58):

But I think we know what we mean by morality. We mean good and evil, the ability to choose or not choose. But I do think this idea of moral blame and moral praise, even if we’re not sure what counts as that, there are things where we do know what counts as that. And we see that as distinct from other things that happen in the natural universe, even things that cause harm, lightning bolts, tigers, floods. We don’t ascribe moral properties to those things causing harm, but we do ascribe it to humans and that’s very interesting. Yeah, I know. And so trying to explain that, that’s moral philosophy.

Danny Philtalk (00:31:32):

Yeah. So you asked my general view about moral facts. I usually- You’re

Trent Horn (00:31:37):

Skeptical of those.

Danny Philtalk (00:31:38):

Well, I’m fine with there being moral facts. I just don’t really understand what a moral fact would be as independent of a person’s value or commitment. So to understand that I should do something or you should do something as independent from any sort of commitment or will or attitude or stance, it’s very hard for me to understand. I might be able to understand institutionally similar to how we understand chivalry. I think that it’s a stance independent fact that chivalry is associated with damsels and distress, but it still seems somewhat constructed to me. Even though it might be stance independent, that the damsel from the dragon is chivalrous. It still looks somewhat

Trent Horn (00:32:20):

Well, I agree with you that there’s going to be different cultural reflections of universal values. And so I think that every call, and this is an observation C.S. Lewis made when he was defending objective morality in mere Christianity. Or no, it was abolition of man. Yeah, I think it was abolition of man where he talks about this. How there are these that even though cultures are all very distinct, they still have common threads within them, even if they reflect it differently, that every culture values courage is better than cowardice, for example. So there’s a praiseworthy value and there’s a vice that’s opposite and that’s universal among cultures. Even though what counts as courage, there’s different things that might be folklore or sociological elements of different concrete actions. There’s still the base value. So when I talk about moral facts, I’m just saying there are these truths independent of human opinion that are binding upon any rational agent that can recognize that truth.

(00:33:25):

So one would just be it is always wrong to violate a person. We’ll say sexually. I can’t say the R word. I don’t want to get clipped on here, but it’s always wrong to essay someone. You must never do that. And I see that as, yeah, that’s just a fact that we all have to follow.

Danny Philtalk (00:33:49):

I’m fine to accept that fact, but it’s just not going to be independent of a stance.

Trent Horn (00:33:53):

What do you mean by that?

Danny Philtalk (00:33:55):

Meaning that there are … So the subjectivist view is that there are moral facts, but absent an agent’s commitments or values, those facts cease to be factual. They no longer have a truth value. The truth values somehow depend on those values or stances. So if there are no agents at all, then there would be no moral facts.

Trent Horn (00:34:21):

I don’t think I agree with that. For example, I would consider the fact an adult tyrannosaurus wrec is always more than three feet tall. And I would say that’s true, even though there are no terenosource wrecks today.

Danny Philtalk (00:34:36):

There’ll be stance and independent.

Trent Horn (00:34:38):

Yeah. And

Danny Philtalk (00:34:38):

I think

Trent Horn (00:34:39):

Morality is stance independent.

Danny Philtalk (00:34:40):

Right. But I think that I don’t accept that … I’m fine to say they’re moral facts or they’re facts about what you should or shouldn’t do, but they’re going to be dependent on a stance. Those are the sorts of facts that I understand. Absent the kind of constructed … There’s a version of realism. If you’re going to treat morality like an institution like jewelry, there might be a kind of stance independence there, but I feel like that’s not what moral philosophers want to talk about. Well,

Trent Horn (00:35:05):

I think your view, because it sounds like you’re saying you lean towards anti-realism

Danny Philtalk (00:35:09):

And

Trent Horn (00:35:09):

Subjectivism, but you couldn’t, but your view could not allow for that there is … And not just a fact, but it’s one that it’s a normative categorical imperative that we have an obligation to obey. And if we disobey it, we are blameworthy. Even if we live in a culture that disagrees with that fact. And there are cultures who think that essay or violating people, maybe it is justified if they’re weak or helpless or the spoils of war or something like that. It seems like your view couldn’t really say there are these universal categorical commands. So that it’s even more than a fact, it’s like a command.

Danny Philtalk (00:35:47):

It’s good that you’re distinguishing universal and categorical subjectivists can hold to universal morality. It’s not going to be categorical. Categorical, if you brought up a categorical imperative, those are unconditioned. They’re not dependent on stances.

Trent Horn (00:36:03):

Because you, with your view, you could probably have what are called hypothetical imperatives. You could have a view of something like this. If you want society to be well ordered and safe and enjoyable to live in, you ought to make it illegal to essay other people.

(00:36:22):

And any atheist, not anybody could have that if you construct the hypothetical where I think, and I think there’s many, because the problem is you’ll have people, you’ll have Christians who will say, oh, well, atheists can’t have morality. Well, I just gave you an example right there. And it depends what you value. And it’s like, okay, well, I value a society where I don’t have to look over my shoulder when I walk down an alley, especially if I’m a woman. So we would want this. And so we ought to do that. I think it’s much more mysterious though if independent of these things, there are these categorical imperatives so much so that, oh, if you engage in this evil, you could bring about a lot of good. And that’s where I think a lot of people, let’s run this a litle bit more, who take the anti-realist position, they want goodness, they’re pro morality and they usually adopt some kind of utilitarianism.

(00:37:16):

I don’t

Danny Philtalk (00:37:16):

Know how you feel about it. I’m not utilitarian.

Trent Horn (00:37:18):

Oh, you’re not. What would you call … Do you have a system? Are

Danny Philtalk (00:37:21):

You still working that out? I’m sort of on the ship of … I kind of look at normative ethics as sort of a giant meme, right? What? Yeah. I mean, you could say that maybe many of my positions, I care about happiness, but there are things that I care about that don’t have to do with happiness. I think general- Like what? Well, there’s the typical utilitarian objections about like, well, if you enslave … And they have responses to this, but it starts off with like, if you enslaved 1% of the population and greatly maximized happiness for that, would you commit to saying that’s a good thing? I would say, well, no, I care more about not having slavery than I do about maximizing happiness.

Trent Horn (00:38:06):

It’s just a fact it’s always wrong to enslave people.

Danny Philtalk (00:38:08):

Well, yeah, generally speaking, you could always create … And this is why I think normative ethics is kind of a meme because-

Trent Horn (00:38:14):

No, no. We should have these universal absolutes. Let’s have them. But

Danny Philtalk (00:38:17):

You could

Trent Horn (00:38:17):

Always construct a crazy episode. Don’t ever essay people. Dude, well, if you saw me on, I went on whatever recently and with Aridite and this came up actually and Brian was kind of pushing me on this a little bit. He asked me to save the whole human race, would you commit adultery? Yeah.

Danny Philtalk (00:38:37):

Yeah. An example like that. Yeah. And

Trent Horn (00:38:38):

I said, no, I am not going to do evil so good may come. And Brian was skeptical of that.

Danny Philtalk (00:38:45):

And

Trent Horn (00:38:45):

I said, “But Brian, here’s the problem. Once you open that door, there’s no closing it. ” And I said to him, “Would you essay someone to save the human race?” And he’s like, “Oh, I don’t know if I want to say that on

Danny Philtalk (00:38:55):

Camera.” If to save over eight billion people to essay one person, I don’t know if I psychologically bring myself to do it, but I would hope I would.

Trent Horn (00:39:05):

Don’t do it. No, don’t say that. No.

Danny Philtalk (00:39:07):

Say eight billion. Well-

Trent Horn (00:39:08):

Don’t do it.

Danny Philtalk (00:39:09):

If all eight billion people are going to heaven right after, then maybe I wouldn’t, right? But let’s say they’re … What if we were to stipulate something like this? Let’s suppose if I don’t do that, these eight billion people die and they all go to eternal conscious torment, you still wouldn’t do it?

Trent Horn (00:39:27):

If other people do wrongdoing, it’s not necessarily my responsibility to obviate the wrongness of their wrongdoing by doing what is intrinsically evil myself. Now, obviously if there’s an evil-

Danny Philtalk (00:39:40):

Was God commanding Abraham to do evil with Isaac.

Trent Horn (00:39:44):

Was he commanding him to do evil? He was commanding him to do something that would have been evil if it had been carried out.

Danny Philtalk (00:39:51):

So he commanded … So did Abraham have the obligation? Well,

Trent Horn (00:39:55):

No. The problem there with the sacrifice of Abraham and Isaac is that if life is something that God gives us, that if our right to life is just related to the fact that life is a gift from God and so we as human beings can’t take life from one another, but God can take life from us. So for example, it would not have been evil for God to just strike down Isaac with a lightning bolt because he gave eyes to life and he can take the life away. The question is, can God deputize someone else to do that?

Danny Philtalk (00:40:29):

But he commanded that, right?

Trent Horn (00:40:30):

Yeah, he did command

Danny Philtalk (00:40:31):

It,

Trent Horn (00:40:32):

But it’s within God’s right to take human life.

Danny Philtalk (00:40:34):

That’s fine.

Trent Horn (00:40:35):

So it’s not evil for God to command Abraham to

Danny Philtalk (00:40:39):

Do- I don’t mean to suggest-

Trent Horn (00:40:40):

What he has a right to do.

Danny Philtalk (00:40:41):

I don’t mean to suggest, although that might have been what was implied to suggest that what God’s command was evil so much as did God command for Abraham to do something evil. In other words, would it be evil for Abraham to sacrifice his son?

Trent Horn (00:40:57):

It would have been evil for him to do that if God had not commanded it.

Danny Philtalk (00:41:02):

Okay. But the fact that he commanded him, and if you feel that-

Trent Horn (00:41:04):

I’ll give you an example. So let’s say I’m a student at a school and there’s a principal and the principal has the right to cancel classes for the day and he says, “Hey, Mr. Student Body President,” which I was actually in high school,

(00:41:16):

“I want you to announce over the intercom, school is canceled today.” So it’d be fine for me to do that if I had the principal’s permission, but if I went and did it on my own authority, that would be wrong. So in scripture when child sacrifice is condemned, it’s condemned because the people who are engaging in it did not have God’s permission to do that. Now, I think it is very important also that when we look at the story itself, I think that Abraham is operating, this is a test of faith for him to see that he does believe in God’s promise that Isaac will be the son of the promise. And so in Genesis 22: five, for example, Abraham says, “I and the boy will go off and we will come back to you. ” Then later the author of Hebrews says that the reason Abraham went and did this is because he believed that God could bring Isaac back from the dead, even if he did do this because God won’t go back on his promise of what he’s given to Abraham.

(00:42:10):

So I see that as more of underscoring the importance of Abraham’s faith and being a model for other people. But going back to the bigger question though about, you see where I’m concerned, you’re like, “Well, I’ll ask say one person to save eight billion.”

(00:42:25):

But then look what ends up happening. You could just start raising the numbers and doing all sorts of horrible things to the millions to save the billions and then we’re back to enslaving 1% for 99% to be happy. There’s no logical stopping point.

Danny Philtalk (00:42:41):

I guess I don’t quite understand. So let’s take something, we can go back to essay. If you insist on the SA example, that’s fine. So lying, do you think there’s an absolute prohibition on lying? That’s what

Trent Horn (00:42:52):

I also got asked about on whatever too. I’m not fully decided about … I believe lying is wrong, but we-

Danny Philtalk (00:43:00):

But not absolutely.

Trent Horn (00:43:01):

Do you think there’s a- I believe lying is wrong, but what constitutes the evil of lying that can be hard to define sometimes. So there’s different ways of defining it. Some people hold a view, lying is always wrong. I might hold the view and I lean towards this view. I’m not fully decided. It’s a tough cookie to crack that-

Danny Philtalk (00:43:23):

Well, we can move on from it. No,

Trent Horn (00:43:24):

No, no, that’s fine. What I would say is that just as I can cause physical damage to your body to save your life, if you’re having an allergic reaction, I can cut open your trachea to help you breathe. I can cause damage to your body to save your life. I could cause damage to your beliefs to save your life and that’s not necessarily

Danny Philtalk (00:43:44):

Being wild. So how does that work in SA example? So you’re harming one person, you’re doing damage to a part of humanity to save the rest. How’s that?

Trent Horn (00:43:51):

Because I think that there are some acts that while causing bodily damage is not intrinsically evil, I do think some particular kinds of acts are intrinsically evil and

Danny Philtalk (00:44:03):

One- By intrinsically evil, you mean absolutely evil, like in every case. They

Trent Horn (00:44:06):

Are always wrong and must never be done. And one of those would be engaging in sex against someone without

Danny Philtalk (00:44:14):

Their consent. I’m going to do this to you, but so a normal- Not without

Trent Horn (00:44:17):

My consent,

Danny Philtalk (00:44:18):

You won’t. Well, we’ll see. What about a moral dilemma where you’re restricted two options, essay one person, essay 10?

Trent Horn (00:44:28):

You mean I’m going to do one of those two things?

Danny Philtalk (00:44:32):

Right. I mean, I can make it to where it’s impossible to refrain.

Trent Horn (00:44:37):

Yeah. And I think what I would say in those situations is that I would reject it as an impossible hypothetical. It would be impossible- I’ll finish. Okay. I would reject it as either an impossible hypothetical or one where if I’m truly forced to do something, I will just choose the lesser of two evils against my will. Like if someone hooks me up to an essay machine and they say, “I’m going to push the button, it’s going to be one or 10.” That’s basically a trolley problem, what you’re envisioning here. Then I would say, “Well, I’m not really choosing. You haven’t given me a choice. I will just pick the lesser harm I am inflicting against my own will.” If I’m not allowed to refrain and not engage at all.

Danny Philtalk (00:45:13):

Right. So you would say the trolley problem, you’re not making a decision there.

Trent Horn (00:45:17):

In the trolley problem?

Danny Philtalk (00:45:18):

Because you compared my morally element to the trolley problem. I didn’t know because you’re saying you’re not making a legitimate choice in my example where you’re saying one or 10.

Trent Horn (00:45:28):

Well, in the trolley example, so the trolley is going and right now it’s going to run over five people or it’s going to run over one person if you switch the track, what do you do? The problem here is that you are in sort of a forced option. If you don’t do anything that’s kind of like choosing five people, or if you do do something, it goes to one and the classical reply from someone who has an ethic more like mine would be that I foresee the death of the person I’m going to run over but I don’t intend it. And if they survived, I would be greatly relieved-

Danny Philtalk (00:46:04):

Sorry, repeat that again.

Trent Horn (00:46:06):

I foresee that one person will die, but it’s not something I intend. My intent is just to not run over the other five. And so here’s the difference then with the trolley example, because there’s another variant case. If your morality is just, well, just pick the least harmful thing, then the variant would be the fat man on the bridge and that would be there are five people on the track and there’s Fat Albert. And if you push Fat Albert off the bridge and he lands on the tracks and the trolley hits him, he’ll die, but he’s big enough to stop the trolley. In that case, I would not push Fat Albert off the bridge, but most people who have just a utilitarian ethic and would just run over one instead of five, they’re really compelled to push him and it’s hard for them to see the difference between the two cases.

(00:46:55):

You see what I’m saying?

Danny Philtalk (00:46:56):

Yeah. So this goes back to why the normative ethics stuff, it looks like, so if I was presented, you have to, let’s say there’s a chip in your brain that if you don’t make a decision, you’re going to essay everyone. So the decision is to essay one person or 10 people, I would say I would choose to essay one, otherwise I get 11 or 10 essay people. Yeah.

Trent Horn (00:47:13):

And I agree with you that if I am forced by another agent to do a heinous thing with my body, I would prefer the less harmful thing.

Danny Philtalk (00:47:21):

Do you think you would do the right thing in that situation by essaying the one?

Trent Horn (00:47:25):

That I would do the right

Danny Philtalk (00:47:26):

Thing? Was that the right thing to do in that context?

Trent Horn (00:47:28):

I would say it’s only right in the fact that I’m just given two options. My body can do

Danny Philtalk (00:47:32):

A- So is it right in some way?

Trent Horn (00:47:34):

It’s right in the sense that in some cases we have choices between a lesser of two evils, but in those hypotheticals, you’re being forced to do

Danny Philtalk (00:47:45):

Something where

Trent Horn (00:47:45):

Normally you can choose to refrain from doing something.

Danny Philtalk (00:47:48):

Yeah, you make it a hard choice, but I mean, it depends on what you mean by … I mean, you still chose, right? By force, meaning that you would prefer a case where you had the fourth option, no one gets essayed, but you’re limited in some way. But the point is that it seems like you’re agreeing that the right thing to do is the lesser evil, which means that you don’t think there’s an absolute prohibition against it.

Trent Horn (00:48:09):

No, no, no, no. I think that in these cases though, I’m being forced to do things. If I’m being forced to do … You could take murder, you could take any other example of me being forced. If I am forced to do something intrinsically evil, then I would prefer to do the less harmful thing, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not … It’s still wrong. The

Danny Philtalk (00:48:28):

Wrongness

Trent Horn (00:48:28):

Is the fact that I’ve been forced to do the evil thing.

Danny Philtalk (00:48:31):

But did you do something wrong?

Trent Horn (00:48:32):

Did I do something wrong?

Danny Philtalk (00:48:33):

Yeah.

Trent Horn (00:48:34):

No, I haven’t done anything wrong because I’m forced to do

Danny Philtalk (00:48:35):

This.

Trent Horn (00:48:36):

I’ve only been given

Danny Philtalk (00:48:36):

One choice. It’s not absolutely wrong.

Trent Horn (00:48:37):

It is absolutely wrong.

Danny Philtalk (00:48:38):

Absolutely. I guess I don’t understand your point.

Trent Horn (00:48:40):

No, no, no. The act itself, we have to talk about what the acts are. The act of choosing to murder or essay, those things are just always wrong. You should never choose … There we go. You should never choose to do them, but you’re giving me hypotheticals where I am forced to do them and my only choice is which of them I’m going to do. So I think my view is not inconsistent.

Danny Philtalk (00:49:06):

So what you’re saying- My view

Trent Horn (00:49:06):

Is that it’s always wrong to choose to do them.

Danny Philtalk (00:49:09):

Okay. So then it sounds like what you’re saying is that in cases where coercion’s a factor, it’s permissible to do the lesser evil.

Trent Horn (00:49:19):

No, not necessarily that it’s permissible. When you’re coerced to do evil, there’s a difference between culpability and the wrongness of an act. So you could have a morally wrong act. So for example, a woman who chooses to get an abortion who is told it’s just a clump of cells and her boyfriend says, “I’m going to throw you out on the street if you don’t go. ” Then there’s another woman who knows this is a baby and she just doesn’t care, doesn’t want to be pregnant anymore. Both of those acts are wrong. It is wrong to end the life of a human being before they’re born, but one is much less culpable than the other because of ignorance about the humanity of the unborn coercion, things like that. So there is a difference there, the wrongness of acts, but the guilt a person has for choosing an act will depend on circumstance, intent and things like that.

Danny Philtalk (00:50:06):

Okay. I am fascinated by this. I know you had other things to want to talk about, but I didn’t want

Trent Horn (00:50:11):

To reply. But I find because for me, I think, and we can talk about other … I want to get into your atheism too,

Danny Philtalk (00:50:17):

By

Trent Horn (00:50:17):

The way, but I think morality for me, it points a lot to God for a variety for me. And for a lot of those things, because even when we’re talking, I feel like you have a desire People will make different moral decisions and we want to compare that to, did you make the right decision? Did you do the right thing? And for me, that really points towards these overarching categorical imperatives, universal commands, whatever you want to call them, that urge us to do that which is right

Danny Philtalk (00:50:49):

Beyond

Trent Horn (00:50:50):

Time, place, and culture. And there’s other elements related to morality too, even beyond that, that I think do point to God.

Danny Philtalk (00:50:57):

It might actually be easier to talk about it in terms of this. Let’s say I found out God exists, unless I found out that all the empirical claims about miracles and what Jesus did and how Rosemont, I found out were all true. My moral view, my ethical view rather, wouldn’t change. So let’s say Jesus appears right before me and says, “Okay, I need you to follow me. ” Kind of the Paul Saul Paul thing, right? Yeah,

Trent Horn (00:51:22):

Sure, sure.

Danny Philtalk (00:51:23):

Okay. Okay, fine. What do you want me to do? Well, you need to sell all your possessions. I’m like, okay, so do you think I should sell … Now I’m like, Jesus, can we talk about Metathera for a second? He’s like, “Fine charge.” Okay. So when you say that, do you think I have the obligation to sell all my possessions? He might say yes, right? Well,

Trent Horn (00:51:42):

If God gives you a direct command to do something, if he gives you in particular direct command by divine revelation.

Danny Philtalk (00:51:50):

All right. And so Jesus, Jesus would say, “Yeah, you have the obligation to sell your possessions.” I’m like, okay, is that obligation understood in terms of what you want me to do?

Trent Horn (00:52:01):

Is you Jesus

Danny Philtalk (00:52:03):

In that sense? Yes. I’m talking to Jesus. So Jesus telling, you should sell all your possessions. I’m like, I have that obligation. Yes. Now is that true because you want me to do that or is it true in virtue of something else? Now, how would Jesus respond?

Trent Horn (00:52:15):

Well, I always don’t want to presume what my Lord and Savior would say in these conversations, that’s fine. I had to take hazard a guess here. It sounds like you’re asking Jesus to answer another version of the

Danny Philtalk (00:52:29):

Ether- Of the

Trent Horn (00:52:30):

Youth of pro, yes. … of the youth of dilemma. And I would say that Jesus himself might answer similar to me or maybe I would answer it similar to him would be the more appropriate way to phrase it is Jesus would say, “You are obligated to do this because I want you to do this because it is good for you and I know it is good for you because I just am goodness itself. And I knew you from the beginning of the universe when I ordered the creator of the whole universe and knew you would exist and knew in the plan of creation, this would be the end for you that reaches the fulfillment in this divine plan.” Okay.

Danny Philtalk (00:53:11):

And here’s my response to Jesus then. And maybe I know, I don’t mean to- And

Trent Horn (00:53:16):

I think also he would say, I have that authoritative.

Danny Philtalk (00:53:18):

Okay. This is what I would say to Jesus. And this would be my honest response if you said that. It would be like, I don’t know what you- Care with your words, but go ahead. Oh, there’s nothing blasphemous. Don’t worry. I’m like, I would tell Jesus, I don’t know what you mean by good here, but here’s the deal of Jesus. I care about what you want and because I care about what you want, I’m going to sell my possessions. I don’t know what you mean by good, Jesus. All I understand is that I desire to be in line with what you want me to do. And why isn’t that sufficient for morality?

Trent Horn (00:53:46):

Well, I think it actually can be.

Danny Philtalk (00:53:48):

Or a subjectivist.

Trent Horn (00:53:49):

Well, it’s not necessarily subjectivist because there’s objective hierarchy. So I will do things like what my boss wants me to do because I care about what he wants. But if my boss tells me to cheat on the taxes at work, I’m not going to do that because there’s a higher authority above him. There’s the government that tells me, you’re not supposed to do that. And I care about what they want. Well,

Danny Philtalk (00:54:09):

The reason why I voted … I think you misunderstood. So

Trent Horn (00:54:11):

For God, so I would say if your answer is, so for me, I do. If God gives me a command, I will say, Lord, I will do that because I want to follow your commands.

Danny Philtalk (00:54:23):

Right. That’s what’s generating the obligation.

Trent Horn (00:54:25):

But the reason I want to follow God’s commands is because he is the highest good objective objectively of all things.

Danny Philtalk (00:54:33):

See, I don’t understand that. I do understand that number one, I care about how Jesus is as a person. Let’s say he all has all things virtues. I want to emanate that. I want to be like that. He’s my creator. I’m interested in that. The point is that what’s generating the obligation, it’s always awkward. Well, let’s say you’re at church or at Mass and you’re fellowshipping and you’re talking about, and then someone brings up a behavior and you say, “Yeah, you shouldn’t do that. ” But then they say, “Well, I’m not a Catholic.” It’s so suddenly much harder to tell them that they should do differently because among Catholics, you have a kind of shared value system. When a person on the outside is hard, you have to do a lot more work to get them to recognize that value system. So in the same way with Jesus, look, okay, Jesus and I share values, right?

(00:55:29):

I want to be like him. He wants me to be like hidden. And from there, that generates my obligations to follow him. Now, if I told Jesus something like what Satan would say, Jesus tells me, “Sell your possessions.” And I say, “I’m not interested.” Well, I’m not interested in what you want or what you value for my life, not interested. I feel like Jesus would just like, okay, fine, there’s nothing to talk about. I don’t think there’s a deep philosophical dispute there.

Trent Horn (00:55:56):

Not quite the Jesus that I know.

Danny Philtalk (00:55:58):

Well, I mean, but he gives them over their desires. And if I imagine Satan and Jesus talking, I feel like there’s not much to disagree over. They’re just like opposed, like a sports team. Well,

Trent Horn (00:56:11):

See, I think once again, never going to have this kind of a conversation on Jubilee, but this is good because we’re getting closer together. And I think what you said, subjectivist, objective, morality, we can start to blend it together because you see, oh, well, there are some commands that are issued to me that I ought to obey. I do want to, because I care agent X told me to do something. I care about what agent X has to say. And I think that I would agree with you there because if the agent X is God who is just perfect being goodness, knowledge all … Yo want to be a moral person, correct?

Danny Philtalk (00:56:57):

Yeah. I mean, I would say that.

Trent Horn (00:56:58):

Yes. And I would say morality is doing good and avoiding evil. Then it would follow if there is a reality that just is perfect goodness itself, then I have a universal obligation to ascent to that reality because if morality’s about doing good and God just is the good, well, then I ought to desire to do whatever God wants me to do.

Danny Philtalk (00:57:24):

Yeah. But when someone like me says that I want to be moral, I want to be a good person, there’s a set of standards that I have for myself. I’m committed to being loving, fair, just and those commitments to those virtues generate obligations for myself. Yeah.

Trent Horn (00:57:40):

You sound a litle bit like a virtue theorist a little bit.

Danny Philtalk (00:57:43):

Well, you’re right. But I mean, I could care about happiness. I’m not trying to subscribe to particular normative theory here. We’re kind of talking about Meta ethics. The point is this, that for me, when I say I want to pursue the good, I’m reflecting about a set of commitments that I have for myself, commitments about happiness, virtues, whatever it might be. And so in the same way, if I want to be like Christ, then I’m going to have all these obligations as to what I should do as a Christian. But if I don’t want to be like Christ, if I want to be a Satanist, God forbid, or something like that, I really don’t think there’s much for … I mean, what? God just dunks you in the line like a fire throws you into the abyss and that’s the end of the story. I don’t think there’s a deep philosophical dispute there.

Trent Horn (00:58:26):

But because I agree that in the moral life, a lot of times it isn’t a deep philosophical dispute. You’ll have a choice in life to do good or evil and people will choose evil. I believe that God gives grace to every single person to choose good and to choose him, not necessarily equal amounts of grace, but enough to be able to recognize him and to choose to do good. And that in the moral life, yeah, it’ll come down to, am I going to do what’s right or am I going to do what’s wrong here? And I think people who listen to God will go towards right, even if they don’t know that it’s God objectively or consciously.

Danny Philtalk (00:58:56):

Like he creates this in a way we’re disposed to desiring him. Is that what you mean or in something different?

Trent Horn (00:59:02):

Well, in Romans 2:14- 15, Paul says that even the Gentiles who don’t know the law of Moses on the stone tablets, they do know the law of God written on their hearts or their conscience. And so God is able to reveal that to people and so they are able to make those choices. And so for you, you’re saying, well, yeah, I want to be a moral person. Being moral means following practicing virtues A, B, C and D.

Danny Philtalk (00:59:25):

Having commitments to those things is what generates the moral obligation.

Trent Horn (00:59:29):

But first you have to say, oh, well, these virtues are what I ought to follow. Maybe you’re not using an awe, you’re saying

Danny Philtalk (00:59:38):

You have a desire. I’m saying the aut is derivative of the commitment, right? So the point is that if I don’t have commitments to love, peace, doing the fruits of the spirit stuff, then I don’t see an obligation to that. But

Trent Horn (00:59:47):

Can you say that somebody else who takes your thinking but just chooses different-

Danny Philtalk (00:59:52):

Right. So they have commitments of all the vices.

Trent Horn (00:59:55):

Yeah. So for example, and I’m not talking about some caricature of an evil person, like somebody who’s just like Gordon Gecko, greed is good, or of the sense of if someone’s down and out, it’s not my responsibility to help them. So you said, “Well, I desire to be a moral person, and so I’ve picked these commitments and I’m going to follow them.” And this guy says, “I desire to be a moral person and I pick these commitments and I’m going to follow them.” You don’t really have an objective standing to say that he’s being evil and you’re being good. You’re just following just different commitments.

Danny Philtalk (01:00:27):

I might not have an objective standing, I have the standing, right? There’s ways to communicate with those people and you do it all the time with the consistency test.

Trent Horn (01:00:33):

Well, all you could say is what you do makes me upset and I don’t

Danny Philtalk (01:00:37):

Like it. No, no. With the abortion debate, it doesn’t matter whether they’re subjective or something. If they end up being subjectivist, you just show them, okay, name the trait, right? What exactly is the difference between an infant and a fetus? And what happens there is that … Did you want to say something?

Trent Horn (01:00:52):

No, because I see what you’re saying. Yeah. So if someone disagrees with me about abortion, one way to refute a false moral view is to show it’s

Danny Philtalk (01:01:00):

Inconsistent. That their commitments are incoherent.

Trent Horn (01:01:03):

Correct. And here’s what can happen though in that situation. I think Peter Kraef tells a joke about this. He was arguing with feminists once about abortion and he told them there’s no difference between abortion and infanticide. And they said, “Dr. Kraef, you know what? You right.” And he said, “Oh, are you going to be pro- life?” They say, “No, now we’re just pro- anfanticized.”

Danny Philtalk (01:01:20):

Yeah. You know Michael Tulley’s paper? Yeah.

Trent Horn (01:01:23):

Oh, I’ve got some picks. Maybe I might be able to flash them on the screen here. I had a fun little impromptu debate with Tooley when I was doing a pro- life evangelism tour at CU Boulder, actually. We talked about all kinds of fun stuff. But yeah, so I have Tooley’s book, Abortion and Fantaside and others. So the problem is there’s these other … And that’s where I worry about a subjective ethic where I love from this theistic view of seeing that there’s this objective moral standards of universal, that it’s not just about, “Oh, I just need to show this competing system is inconsistent.” I can say no, it’s totally consistent, but it’s also totally evil because there’s these universal rules everybody’s supposed to follow.

Danny Philtalk (01:02:04):

Subjectives can say that other people’s commence are evil. They just can’t say that it stands independently evil.

Trent Horn (01:02:08):

It’s

Danny Philtalk (01:02:09):

Evil with respect to their values.

Trent Horn (01:02:10):

All you can say is, “I think it’s evil.”

Danny Philtalk (01:02:15):

I can also say it’s evil. I can say both.

Trent Horn (01:02:18):

Well, but it’s evil relative to what you think.

Danny Philtalk (01:02:22):

Right. Yeah. Relative to my values.

Trent Horn (01:02:24):

So it’s short because from your perspective of saying something is evil, that’s like saying it’s near. It’s near, well, near what? It’s a subjective reference there. Whereas I can just say, it’s just evil. It’s wrong. No person should ever choose this.

Danny Philtalk (01:02:40):

I can say that too. The point is that the word evil or wrong, realists don’t have a monopoly on that. Anti-realist can use those terms, they’re not committed to it being an objective sense of evil. So while it may be true that I don’t think it’s stance independently evil, it’s evil in the stance deepened way.

Trent Horn (01:02:58):

So I don’t know if you’re familiar with J.L. Mackey. Yes. So he was a error theorist. He believed that there were moral claims people make, but they’re always kind of an error because there’s nothing they objectively track to. And what he said was that if there were these stance independent moral properties in the universe, he said, “Well, if those things did exist, they would be such an odd cluster of properties. It would be so bizarre for them to exist.” Yeah,

Danny Philtalk (01:03:25):

These as evidence for theism.

Trent Horn (01:03:26):

Unless an all powerful God

Danny Philtalk (01:03:28):

Created them. Yeah. That was a sad part of the miracle of theism. I disagree with … I remember reading that. I’m like, “Really, Mackey? No, no.” So suppose I’m wrong and there are these moral facts that exist in categorically. I mean, to me, it just kind of kicks the can down the road. The point is that, okay, if God explains those facts in some way or ranges those values or properties in that way, then what fixes the divine psychology in that way? So to me, you’re kicking the can down the road in my opinion.

Trent Horn (01:04:00):

No, I wouldn’t say so because for me there’s also, and it’s not just the question of murder essay, just the common evils that people bring up. I’ve had in many conversations on things like sexual ethics, for example, I will run the consistency test like you propose and I will get to some very unpleasant sexual behaviors that I don’t want to even repeat here to not get a strike on the channel that involve consenting adults or consenting animals that they can consent to playing Frisbee. They can consent to all kinds of activities that don’t cause them pain, for example. I find that if there are objective, because I think some people could say there are moral realists who are atheists. I think people should

Danny Philtalk (01:04:48):

Understand

Trent Horn (01:04:49):

That.

Danny Philtalk (01:04:49):

Yeah, there are a lot actually.

Trent Horn (01:04:50):

I agree. And in fact, I was reading Jeffrey J. Louder sent me, he’s an atheist, old school, been around Secular Web for a long time. He sent me a introduction chapter and a book on God he’s writing on the moral argument saying, even if I buy that murder and essay are objectively wrong, there could be other objective non-religious reasons to explain that based in human nature, based in harms of conscious creatures, things like that. But Lauder, he actually quoted me in the introduction saying, “But there’s these newer apologists like Trent Horn who will pick very disgusting sexual behaviors that don’t necessarily involve non-consenting people that I will admit might be difficult for an atheist to say, here’s why that’s objectively wrong, that it’s just we find it disgusting, but that’s not really a great foundation for morality unless there was an overarching divine plan for something like sexuality and it’s not just a variant of something we see in the animal kingdom.

Danny Philtalk (01:05:47):

I’m not so sure. I mean, so let’s take an incestuous case where there’s no chance of reproduction, so we bracket those concerns.

Trent Horn (01:05:59):

Sure.

Danny Philtalk (01:05:59):

I mean, okay. Yeah, I wouldn’t-

Trent Horn (01:06:01):

I’ll give you a case like that. So guys, a sperm donor makes 200 kids and these two guys fall in love and they find out they’re half brothers and they’re adults. They were product sperm donors doing this stuff, which is one reason I’m like, ugh, that’s bad. So they want to have a gay relationship and they’re half brothers and they like each other and they’re not going to reproduce. Normally when we say incest is wrong, it’s because of grooming and family trauma and power dynamics and things like that. But this is a case where we wouldn’t have any of that.

Danny Philtalk (01:06:38):

So let’s say I’m against that. Okay. But then God comes down and says,” I’m against that too. “I’m like, ” Okay, what is God doing for me if he were to come down and say, Oh yeah, this was against my design.

Trent Horn (01:06:51):

“Because he literally made the design.

Danny Philtalk (01:06:52):

But why would that matter to how I should think about it?

Trent Horn (01:06:55):

Why would that matter?

Danny Philtalk (01:06:56):

To how I should think about it.

Trent Horn (01:06:58):

Because if we understand God to just be perfect goodness itself, God is just the

Danny Philtalk (01:07:03):

Stand- What does goodness mean in this context?

Trent Horn (01:07:04):

Goodness would mean attaining the end, one ought to attain, reaching the fullness of being one ought to

Danny Philtalk (01:07:11):

Have- So some kind of riskitilian and Tilo stuff.

Trent Horn (01:07:14):

That’s one way

Danny Philtalk (01:07:14):

To look.

Trent Horn (01:07:15):

Well, but I mean, be careful. We don’t want to … What do you mean by the word good? It’s a fair question to ask. We also don’t want to over ask in things. I think that it’s fair that if … It’s kind of like going back to the euthro dilemma, it’s like, oh, well, how can God be the standard for it? It’s like saying, well, what makes a meter a meter long? Why is a meter

Danny Philtalk (01:07:38):

This

Trent Horn (01:07:38):

Length?

Danny Philtalk (01:07:39):

Okay. You’re analogizing to asking about what good means?

Trent Horn (01:07:43):

Yes. So that it’s identical to God himself. So the meter, it’s not just an arbitrary thing and it’s not trying to locate something else in the universe. It’s that the reason originally a meter was a certain length was because there was a bar exactly that long in France and everything that was a meter was just reflective of that. Well, how do you know the meter bar is a meter long? Because that’s what it means to be a meter. Now it’s measured with the decay of Kelsius Adams to be more precise because the meter bar, it shaves because Adams fall off it, psych thing there. So when it comes to God saying, well, why does it matter? We say two half brothers shouldn’t have sex with each other. I don’t like that. That’s gross to me. And God says, Hey, I’m perfect goodness itself. I created the universe and I created sex with a certain plan and part of my plan was for family members to not do this with each other.

(01:08:34):

That’s not what sex is for. And also that non-procreative acts are a distortion of sex. Oh, well, I guess it makes sense why I’m disgusted by it because the creator of the whole universe is perfectly good made this and he is determined here’s how it ought to go. And when we act in accord with that, there’s a dissonance and a problem with

Danny Philtalk (01:08:53):

That. I know what you were saying there. I mean, I would understand the question, okay, oh, God created me and created at least to some extent how my psychology works. So that explains why I find that wrong, but you didn’t say that exactly. So again, I would think, okay, so suppose God comes and says, or a different God, let’s say I’m non-Christian God. Okay. Did you want to say-

Trent Horn (01:09:17):

No, no. And I don’t mean to interrupt at all because I agree with you that if God is just a superpowered individual, I think the objection will have

Danny Philtalk (01:09:25):

A lot of merit. Is God being identical to the goodness is doing a lot of work, but that’s precisely-

Trent Horn (01:09:30):

It’s very important

Danny Philtalk (01:09:31):

To me. To me, that statement is very much like this. It’s like saying water, clearness is the essence of water. I just don’t know what that means. At least the platonist who takes goodness to be some kind of abstract object in the platonic realm treats it like a universal or form is independent of the world of sense and concrete perhaps as the modern Platinus want to say. That is already weird, but it’s even stranger for me to take what’s classically understood as a universal, like a property and say that some entity is identical to that property and that gets to the divine simplicity stuff, which I can’t make sense of. But whatever, suppose that’s my fault, maybe I’m conceptually impoverished, right? I don’t understand that. I’m just saying that God saying the phrase, the English entitce, I’m goodness itself and I am against that just as you are.

(01:10:23):

I’m like, okay, that’s fine. But if that was absent, the thing is that I would still disapprove of it whether he appeared to me and said that statement or not. It doesn’t add or make it worse for me that God expresses his disapproval. But it sounds like

Trent Horn (01:10:37):

The ultimate standards for morality, it’s either going to be your finite inclinations towards certain ethical commitments or values and then other people do the same thing and you’re at a standoff to say who is right or wrong in this regard when it’s just different preferences.

Danny Philtalk (01:10:57):

But how does theism fix that?

Trent Horn (01:10:59):

Because God carries more ontological weight than just human beings.

Danny Philtalk (01:11:04):

And that’s explained by him being identical to what’s classically understood as a universal goodness, right? Which I can’t make sense. I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean.

Trent Horn (01:11:12):

Well, could there just be this thing we call goodness that’s objective, that’s beyond us but we’re ordered towards?

Danny Philtalk (01:11:19):

I mean, I can’t really make sense of that, honestly. Again, to be fair to you, this is a classical sort of move, kind of Aristotelian natural teleology. There’s the temistic take on that. I understand what an end is or purposes as understood in terms of a stance or a commitment, right? But when people say that their ends or goals or telos or purpose or goodness as independent of any of that, it’s like saying that there’s pain but there’s no agent. I don’t know what pain state would be absent an agent.

Trent Horn (01:11:54):

Well, pain is just described as a loss of equilibrium in a sentient creature.

Danny Philtalk (01:12:03):

It requires agency. And I’m not saying it’s exactly analogous. I’m just hoping you understand why I feel I don’t understand it because it’s as if someone said, “There’s pain in this room, but there’s no one here.”

Trent Horn (01:12:14):

Well, I agree. That’d be like saying there could be goodness if there were no universe. Yeah, sure. I agree that that would be nonsensical because for me, goodness and being are identical. So if you had a state of affairs where there was no being,

(01:12:28):

There would be no goodness. But for me, goodness and evil are intimately bound up in being and it’s organization propagation and how beings relate to one another. So I think that when there’s more of a possession … Now it’s not just being, it would also be being in a core with certain natures. So you could be a being, you could acquire … You don’t necessarily become good. If I weighed 500 pounds, I had more being, but I’m not necessarily more … In fact, I’m probably less good as a human being in accord with the nature that I ought to have, the proper relation I should have with food, things like that. So I think that if we’re going to have … I think that this classical view of morality and theology, it can help to shore up the gaps or we desire this objective universal grounding for things without it necessarily being just an ad hoc or a because I said so.

(01:13:26):

That’s what I’m hoping when I’ve been going in this direction. Otherwise, I think eventually though, everybody’s going to have to find some kind of ultimate foundation and it will be a because I said so. The question is, who can cash the biggest check to say that’s normative for everyone?

Danny Philtalk (01:13:41):

So to rewind, do you think goodness is a universal?

Trent Horn (01:13:44):

Do I think it’s a universal? I think that’s one way that it can … I think the better term would be what’s called a transcendental, like goodness, beauty.

Danny Philtalk (01:13:54):

Do you think redness is a universal redness?

Trent Horn (01:13:57):

Yeah, I would say that redness is something that is universal, that is instantiated. And in fact, there’s actually arguments for the existence of God based on universals.

Danny Philtalk (01:14:06):

Right. I think that’s one of his fourth or fifth ways, right? Isn’t something like there’s a kind of a platonic vibe to one of Aquinas’s ways, but I forget.

Trent Horn (01:14:15):

The fourth way, yeah. The fourth way is a litle bit like that. In Ed Fazer’s book, Five Proofs the Existence of God, his fourth way is called the Augustinian Way, and that kind of goes into that element.

Danny Philtalk (01:14:26):

Influenced by Plato. But

(01:14:27):

The point is that- Go ahead. We want to say that redness is a universal because it can be instantiated in different objects, that apple’s red, the car is red, they both instantiate red. So then it seems like goodness works the same way if it were a universal, right? Okay, so that action is good. So you offered to accommodate me here. I think that’s good. My mother gave to charity, that’s good. So you have the same predicates. So to me, it functions like a universal and then the added ton of, I guess I think this is the temistic view, but it’s Augustinian view to say that that universal is now an agent. It’s like to me saying that the redness is the car.

Trent Horn (01:15:08):

Because I think goodness has a moral and non-moral property, which makes it a little weird because if redness is universal, firetrucks are red, applers are red, stop signs are firetrucks are red. There’s no normative claim if I have a firetruck, I got to paint it red. Some of them are weird and they’re yellow and I don’t like it. But with goodness, goodness can be instantiated in non-moral properties and moral properties.

Danny Philtalk (01:15:31):

Okay, I’m fine with that.

Trent Horn (01:15:32):

And so I think what gets weird there is not just that I have just some kind of universal floating out there that gets instantiated in actions and it happens to pop up, like the color red happens to pop up, but that I am obligated to produce goodness in various situations and also overall just as a human being. So a good book related to this you might find, I definitely recommend you check out, but I see Steven Evans, it’s called God and Moral Obligation. And so he talks about how even if you had morality, even if you had an atheistic moral realism that you could have naturalistic accounts of goodness, it’s much more difficult to have a naturalistic account of the universal obligation to be good in the first place

Danny Philtalk (01:16:19):

Yeah, I would agree that that’s harder to account for under naturalism. That’s why I say

Trent Horn (01:16:26):

It’s not a mere universal.

Danny Philtalk (01:16:28):

Yeah. And I think there’s versions like I think Parfit tries to eliminate some of the ontology stuff while still holding on the principles. When

Trent Horn (01:16:36):

I crack open

Danny Philtalk (01:16:36):

That

Trent Horn (01:16:37):

1,100 page monster reasons and persons.

Danny Philtalk (01:16:41):

I had to go through on what matters years ago. And you said that we’re obligated to pursue this goodness, right? That sense of obligation is still mysterious to me. But the point is that if all the work is being done in this claim that God is identical to the good or good of goodness, there’s a big conversation for us to have in order to get me to understand that. But I guess with the Jesus point it just meant, look, Jesus, I don’t know what you’re saying there. Maybe I’m conceptually impoverished, but look, I care about being, I like what you’re about, I like your message, I want to be like you, so I’m going to sell my possessions and follow you. And I think that’s all that’s required for me to understand the idea that I should sell my possessions. I think that’s all you need.

Trent Horn (01:17:24):

Do you go through a mental checklist to make sure that what you like is something you should like?

Danny Philtalk (01:17:29):

Yeah. Sometimes I have competing desires. Sometimes it’s coherent for me for subjectivists to say I shouldn’t like that because we have competing values. We are conflicted beings. There’s the biblical distinction between flesh and spirit and then you get that from Plato, I think, or at least it looks like very platonic between what reason, appetite and spirit or restaurant. So you get conflating values and then you can have statements like that. Yeah.

Trent Horn (01:17:53):

But then, so does that mean you have an overarching value

Danny Philtalk (01:17:56):

To

Trent Horn (01:17:56):

Tell you which of the values you ought to pick?

Danny Philtalk (01:17:58):

So you have your strongest value. So the smoker has a value to smoke and a value to quit smoking and they got to have a second order idea about which value should win out.

Trent Horn (01:18:08):

What’s your overarching value?

Danny Philtalk (01:18:10):

For smoking?

Trent Horn (01:18:11):

No, for your choosing your different things that you do value that might be competing.

Danny Philtalk (01:18:16):

I might have multiple. I don’t think that I have one big one. I mean, generally I value family and friends more. I value me then I value strangers. There’s a kind of hierarchy. So there’s like me, family and friends, those are probably their wellbeing.

Trent Horn (01:18:36):

I don’t know. So that’s the overarching thing. It sounds very kinish. So if that’s your value system, would you agree with the proposition all human beings have equal dignity or deserve equal rights?

Danny Philtalk (01:18:54):

Okay. So by equal rights, should everybody’s interests be considered? That’s

Trent Horn (01:18:58):

Not the same question.

Danny Philtalk (01:18:59):

Okay. Well, that’s how I understand Singer. So Singer has a paper on, I think, animal ethics and he goes into what it means to say men and women are equal and such, right? Is it the fact that we don’t have the right to abortion? Does that mean that we’re not equal to women? No, because it doesn’t make sense to apply abortion to males that can … So the point is that what it means for Singer, and I think I agree with him, to have equal rights is that our considerations for what we want are equally considered. And so we’re not interested in having abortions which are not capable. Women are, right? So then for Singer, that’s something to consider if they have equal rights to men.

Trent Horn (01:19:45):

Well, no, but that sounds like, but we don’t always take beings considerations equally and in some cases it would be morally wrong to do that. So I would say for example, like an infant and a pig who are acting at the same cognitive levels probably have an equal interest in living, but that doesn’t mean we should treat keeping them alive. We shouldn’t treat their interests equally. We should treat them very unequally, but only because of just a biological fact that the infant is a member of a human species.

Danny Philtalk (01:20:20):

Or

Trent Horn (01:20:20):

An arbitrary fact that they’re human.

Danny Philtalk (01:20:23):

I’m no animal rights activist or vegan, maybe I should be. And I think that the vegans and I have a strong point, but I think that the fact that the pig wants to live, which it seems like it does, is actually, I think there might be a failure on the part of society to not consider that. So I would go in that direction, that’s singer’s point, I think in part.

Trent Horn (01:20:40):

Right. But I met Singer once actually in 2008, so he gave a talk at Arizona State University, then he’d get a private Q&A session and I was invited to go because I was with the student pro- life group, so they thought it’d be fun to have me there.

(01:20:54):

So I go and I asked Singer a question. I said, Dr. Singer, my parents had an elderly dog and he was peeing all over the place and no one’s going to adopt him. Is it okay to euthanize that dog? And he said, “Well, if the dog was very burdensome, then yes, it would be permissible to do that. ” And I said, “Well, what if it wasn’t my dog? What if it was my six-month-old disabled brother and he caused the same amount of burden and nobody wanted to adopt him? Could my parents euthanize that six-month-old disabled human?” And he didn’t really want to answer. And eventually he said, “If it caused the same amount of burden, then yes, it would be justified.”

Danny Philtalk (01:21:33):

Yeah. Well, he’s a utilitarian, right? So he might be committed to something like that. When you asked me, you were talking about equal rights, right? And so you might want to explain what that

Trent Horn (01:21:44):

Means. But what I’m saying is that all human beings have a equal moral claim to a particular good or particular actions of other humans. So no human being should be directly killed, no innocent human being should be directly killed.

Danny Philtalk (01:22:06):

So by equal rights, you mean does- That

Trent Horn (01:22:08):

Would be the right to life or no human being should be tortured, should be inflicted pain just for inflicting pain upon that.

Danny Philtalk (01:22:17):

Can you help me reset the conversation? You brought equal rights and that’s going to be- Because

Trent Horn (01:22:21):

You were talking about overarching values for

Danny Philtalk (01:22:23):

Your moral

Trent Horn (01:22:23):

System and you just listed off-

Danny Philtalk (01:22:25):

Right. So there might be a case where I, while I might care about what some stranger, what their considerations are for their life, I care more about my families, right?

Trent Horn (01:22:36):

Right. No, and I agree with that. You have an obligation to provide for your family first before you provide for strangers. But I would say that under my worldview, when I’m trying to explain these other moral facts that we have, and so one of them being that … So in a naturalistic worldview, you might say, “Oh, well, other human beings, how they ought to be treated is really only in relation to how much they affect my own life.” And so there’s people

Danny Philtalk (01:23:03):

Close people- Those naturalists are committed to?

Trent Horn (01:23:05):

Well, I’m saying that’s a consistent view one could hold as a naturalist,

Danny Philtalk (01:23:09):

That

Trent Horn (01:23:09):

My moral duties to other humans only goes so as far as how they’re related to me or the moral value that they have.

Danny Philtalk (01:23:17):

Whereas

Trent Horn (01:23:17):

I would have the view that all human beings have equal human rights and they have equal dignity. They ought to be treated as intrinsic goods and not just instrumental goods towards some other animals. Yeah.

Danny Philtalk (01:23:30):

There’s a version of that that I would accept. I mean, again, I’m going to have competing values, right? There’s going to be a point where something is more valuable than a human. People talk about the right to free speech, right? I’m like, okay, well, maybe there’s a lot of parameters there, so I might consider someone’s life over their freedom of speech, but that doesn’t mean that I think I’m completely disregarding the fact that they have a right to speech.

Trent Horn (01:23:51):

But my concern would be that if we are, because you’re talking about maybe you should be a vegan, maybe you shouldn’t.

Danny Philtalk (01:23:57):

Probably should be.

Trent Horn (01:23:58):

Well, because I think many naturalists, like Sam Harris, for example, will say that morality is rooted in promoting the wellbeing of conscious creatures and that morality is really intimately bound up in that.

Danny Philtalk (01:24:11):

So

Trent Horn (01:24:12):

There’s not really a way to morally violate a rock, for example, but conscious creatures, aware of pain, things like that.

(01:24:19):

Where I worry about though is, well, but we don’t make moral assessments just based on, oh, is this being conscious or not? So like the pig in the infant, if you were lost in the wilderness, everyone, most people would say, yeah, it’s fine to feed the pig to the infant, but you never, never feed the infant to the pig, even if it’s your prize winning pig that makes you a lot of money or something like that. But I think naturalists have a very hard time explaining why there would be that particular moral duty, even though we’re treating, even though you’re supposed to treat people’s interests, give them all consideration, even though the pig and the infant have

Danny Philtalk (01:24:56):

Interests. Well, what about naturalism makes that difficult exactly?

Trent Horn (01:24:59):

Well, why would you say that in a case under naturalism, if you just consider people’s interests equally, if patient X and patient Y have equal interests and you can feed X to Y, why not feed Y to X if they have equal interests?

Danny Philtalk (01:25:20):

Well, if they have equal interests, you wouldn’t feed … Well, how’s that not enough just to say that you shouldn’t feed one to the other at all You shouldn’t feed pigs to children and you shouldn’t feed children to pigs.That’s Singer’s point.

Trent Horn (01:25:32):

No, that’s right. Well, you could take that example, but I would say though that people would also find that morally blameworthy that if you allowed your infant to starve to death, would it be wrong to allow an infant to starve to death because you didn’t want to feed a pig to them?

Danny Philtalk (01:25:48):

Oh, I would prefer the infant to live over the pig.

Trent Horn (01:25:52):

That’s not what I asked.

Danny Philtalk (01:25:53):

Okay. So I misunderstood.

Trent Horn (01:25:55):

No, my question is just, is it wrong to allow an infant to starve to death because you didn’t want to feed a pig to that infant?

Danny Philtalk (01:26:02):

Oh, so yeah, that would be wrong.That’s what I meant to say, that I care more about the child than the pig.

Trent Horn (01:26:07):

Okay, but would it be wrong to feed the infant to the pig to keep the pig alive?

Danny Philtalk (01:26:16):

Yeah. Given that I value the child more than the pig, I wouldn’t do that. Yeah, I would let the pig die.

Trent Horn (01:26:22):

Now, why do you value … Now here’s where it goes back to that it’s just because you reach the correct moral conclusion because you just happen to value the child more than the pig.

Danny Philtalk (01:26:32):

Happen to? Yeah, that’s my psychology.

Trent Horn (01:26:34):

You happen to. You do. It’s the case that someone else

Danny Philtalk (01:26:37):

Could have- I don’t think it’s like an accident, right?

Trent Horn (01:26:39):

Well, in the sense that you have that view, but someone could have a very similar moral system and say that you shouldn’t feed either or you could do both.

Danny Philtalk (01:26:47):

Yeah. And you and I wouldn’t care about that moral system.

Trent Horn (01:26:50):

No, I would say it’s wrong.

Danny Philtalk (01:26:51):

Yeah, me too.

Trent Horn (01:26:52):

But I would say it’s wrong, not dependent on just that it … Because I feel like when you say wrong, you just mean contradicts your system. And I would say when I say wrong, it’s not merely that it contradicts what I believe.

Danny Philtalk (01:27:04):

God’s system.

Trent Horn (01:27:05):

No, it contradicts what a person ought to believe.

Danny Philtalk (01:27:08):

Which is a function of God’s system, God’s goodness, right? And then we get into what that is all about, right?

Trent Horn (01:27:14):

Yeah. But I think that you’re using the language when you say wrong, you really just mean disagree.

Danny Philtalk (01:27:23):

I mean, you shouldn’t do it or I think it shouldn’t be done.

Trent Horn (01:27:26):

Or you mean you don’t like that they do it and so they shouldn’t do it because you don’t like it.

Danny Philtalk (01:27:31):

Well, the word like, I mean, again, there’s a sense of if like just means what I value, sure, right? I disvalue X, Y, Z. So in a sense, it ought not happen if that’s what is meant by like. Now we do talk about opinions. So there’s like the sort of opinions that we’re indifferent to other people having, right? Often we use … Opinion is used in all sorts of ways, right? But when we say, oh, this is just my opinion, we’re trying to signal to other people that we don’t think that we don’t have commitments or values that they should accept what we’re saying. I think my opinion is that Marvel sucks. I’m tired of Marvel movies. I’m getting tired of Star Wars now thanks to Disney, but that’s an opinion, meaning that, look, I’m indifferent to whether you accept that or not right now.

(01:28:13):

When we’re not indifferent to people accepting our values, we don’t usually use the word opinion.

Trent Horn (01:28:18):

Yeah, but I guess because for me, someone could go and watch a terrible movie and I might even say you shouldn’t watch that. It’s a waste of your time,

Danny Philtalk (01:28:27):

But

Trent Horn (01:28:27):

I don’t think they’re doing anything morally wrong necessarily. It’s just something I say, “Oh, you shouldn’t do that because I think it’s bad aesthetically or whatever it may be. ” That’s a lot different than feeding an infant to a pig.

Danny Philtalk (01:28:40):

Well, yeah, in terms of our typical reactive attitudes, but the normative sort of logic is the same.

Trent Horn (01:28:48):

No, but I think that we’re not seeing the explanation of the weight that’s involved and the categorical nature of it, that in saying that everyone has an obligation to value, you ought to value humans as having special value over non-human animals, even at equal cognitive levels. I would say that’s another example of a moral fact that once again, it’s a really weird moral fact. It’s really weird if there are moral facts that are related to a particular biological species because let’s say, and this is another kind of moral argument, kind of a secondary moral argument based on moral knowledge. So it’s the idea that even if there are atheistic moral facts, it’s really weird if they track onto things that could have been weighed, because if there are moral facts, they’re unchanging.

Danny Philtalk (01:29:41):

I don’t accept that.

Trent Horn (01:29:43):

Well, if moral realism were true and there were these very basic

Danny Philtalk (01:29:47):

Moral facts- There are particulars that are realist, for example. Yeah.

Trent Horn (01:29:52):

I would say most people, if they’re considering the statement that there’s a moral fact, you ought not torture people for fun, if that could just change and it wouldn’t And especially randomly, that wouldn’t be objective anymore.

Danny Philtalk (01:30:04):

No, again, all that’s required for objectivity is not universality because there’s a distinction between universality and objectivity because you could imagine a crazy chaotic moral world where the moral facts, the truth values of the moral facts change every second and their stance independent. Moralism would be true in that world. But if the moral facts are held constant, not only do you have moral realism, but you have a kind of absolutism, universalism. I want to use those terms distinctly. The generalist particularist debate is different than the realist anti-realist debate as I see it.

Trent Horn (01:30:35):

Okay. Well, I think we’ve sussed out enough here of people seeing objective morality, classical theism and grounding these certain universal moral norms and other subjective views and the different ways of going about that. So we have a little bit more time. I wanted to cover, I was quick from May to June. Now this is to July 2025. You did a debate on do Muslims and Christians have the same God, but you’re an atheist and you still have a view on that. What’s your answer?

Danny Philtalk (01:31:04):

I would say very probably yes. I mean, obviously there’s a sense in which I don’t think there’s no God, y’all are not really referring to anything. But the point is that you could talk about if I were to hold to the commitments of a Christian, what would I be committed to? And I think that they would be committed to thinking that Muslims are referring to the same God, that Christians are worshiping. And I don’t think there’s so much philosophy that goes into that. I think it’s an empirical question for me. The point is that Muhammad and his followers were referring to, were capturing Christian commitments and talking to Jews and Christians about God.

Trent Horn (01:31:44):

They got it from them.

Danny Philtalk (01:31:45):

Right, right. And then they were trying to say, okay, this is the update. Y’all have it wrong. This is the better account of God’s nature and blah, blah, blah, and revelation. And I think that for Christians to say, well, no, you don’t have the theology right is to kind of imply that they are referring to that God and just misdescribing it. Now, when you look at the modern conversations, the more recent conversations between Muslims and Christians and even amongst Christians themselves or Mormons, they say, “Well, my God, your God.” It’s like they’re referring to different things. So there might be cases in which it looks like they’re trying to refer to different things, but historically speaking, I think that Muhammad was attempting to pick out or picking out what the Christians were onto and just redescribing what was going on.

Trent Horn (01:32:36):

Yeah. I just found it really interesting. I mean, that debate was interesting for a lot of reasons. I covered Trentoherty’s crash out in the debate. Did he ask you to debate with him or how’d you end up tagging with

Danny Philtalk (01:32:48):

Him? You know what? It might’ve been the reverse. Oh,

Trent Horn (01:32:51):

You

Danny Philtalk (01:32:51):

Asked him. Yeah, because he wanted to do more online stuff and I’m friends with the owner of that channel. His name is JP.

Trent Horn (01:32:58):

JP,

Danny Philtalk (01:32:59):

Right. Yes. And so I’m like, “Hey, can I bring Trent?” So I felt bad because I set Trent up with that debate and Cleave, there’s a whole story. So on the bottom left, in that debate, it shows bisexual atheists. And I was doing that because Cleave and his friends and Jay Dyer, they call him me Gatheist and all this stuff. So I kind of wore it as a badge of like a star.

Trent Horn (01:33:26):

Because you identify as bisexual.

Danny Philtalk (01:33:27):

Right. Well, I mean, yeah. And so the point of that, it’s not like I go around announcing that. I was asked on Pierce Morgan and that’s the truth. So the point is that they’ve been making fun of me ever since. And so I just put it there as a preemptive like, “Fine, I’ll own the badge. I’ll give you what you want because instead of really replying to my arguments, they just like to talk about my sexuality like weirdos.” But Trent didn’t know that. We

Trent Horn (01:33:49):

Call that an ad hominem.

Danny Philtalk (01:33:50):

Right, exactly. And Trent Doherty did not know that and didn’t … Yeah, so it was unfortunate.

Trent Horn (01:33:57):

Yeah, because they were getting after your case. Well, I think Cleve was trying to make the case of Trent Doherty, look, his view is wrong because he has to resort to teaming up with an atheist who has a sexually immoral framework, whatever you want to call it. And so clearly Trent is wrong in that regard. And it’s so funny you reached that conclusion because I actually reached the opposite conclusion that if I was having a theological dispute with a non-Catholic, like a Protestant, for example, and we’re both debating about what a scripture passage means or a theological idea and an atheist comes along and he looks at the data and he says, “I think the Catholic is right about this. ” To me, that’s like a vote in my favor because I’ve got an uninterested party who doesn’t have a dog in this theological fight.

(01:34:46):

They’re just interested, okay, what does this data point to? They’re not worried about trying to get it to their side. They have no side. In fact, when I was in college, this would’ve been 20 years ago I used to give talks on the issue of abortion with a woman who she was identified as a lesbian and an atheist

(01:35:07):

And we would give talks together. And to me, that was a big way of showing people, I think that’s evidence for the truth of my position, that it’s not purely theological.

Danny Philtalk (01:35:17):

And it also models behavior because I want people to be able to … Look, you can actually agree with people that historically haven’t agreed. There’s a question about whether the Romans copy pasted the Greek- Gods. Greek gods. So what’s the Zeus equivalent? Jupiter. Jupiter, right? Jupiter. Yeah. Are those the same God or not? I think that’s an interesting question. Maybe they’re not, maybe there aren’t, but the point is that a Christian, an atheist and Muslim could have an opinion on that, whether they invented different gods or they were just renaming the gods that the Greeks were.

Trent Horn (01:35:51):

And what I was saying earlier in the show when I said that you have an interest in philosophical theology, that’s actually not that far off for an atheist to want to research and look into. For example, most people who are scholars of Plato are not Platonists, but they know everything about Plato and what he thinks and can analyze that belief system and see what’s true or not true in understanding it. And so Mike, I would encourage, and that’s what I’m really trying to do because I want to share my faith. My goal on this channel is to reach the most number of people who are the furthest away from Christ.

Danny Philtalk (01:36:27):

I’m glad to hear. Here we go. Pretty far away here.

Trent Horn (01:36:30):

And here you are.

Danny Philtalk (01:36:31):

But

Trent Horn (01:36:31):

That’s why even it’s so funny. I know people will be like, “There was no owning. Oh, they’re just talking about stuff.” Well, that’s how it goes.

Danny Philtalk (01:36:38):

Yeah, this is preferable.

Trent Horn (01:36:39):

Well, it takes … And to move people towards these important worldviews, it takes time to inch forward, say, “Oh, well, let me clear up this about the worldview. Oh, we’re actually not that far apart.” That is my goal, is to reach the furthest number of the most people who are the furthest away, because that’s why it’s hard for me. I see a lot of now it’s like Catholic Orthodox Protestants all fighting about things online. And I’m like, guys, the majority of people out there, especially even among Gen Z are not religious. It’s like people have not looked at any pew, polls or anything. They just think, “Oh, everybody’s Christian now. We got to figure out which Christianity is true.” That is not the case at all, right?

Danny Philtalk (01:37:17):

Right, right. This is a point that I make about … So I’m quite critical of these anti … I mean, I obviously disagree with Muslims about Islam and stuff, but I feel like a lot of Christians … Maybe I just want the attention too, I don’t know. But a lot of Christian apologetics resources are being spent on Islam and that’s fine. They cite things like it’s a huge religion, but what percent of those are English speaking? If you compare-

Trent Horn (01:37:41):

Well, globally, but we’re talking about where U2 is being watched in America and Europe.

Danny Philtalk (01:37:45):

It’s actually a small percentage. I feel like, and I’ve tweeted about this or whatever you call X’d about it. I feel like if you really care about evangelism, you cannot ignore the nuns. I think Christianity’s losing, or at least the last, maybe they’ve kind of consolidated a litle bit, but there was about a last decade, y’all lost some brush to the nuns, right?

Trent Horn (01:38:11):

100%.

Danny Philtalk (01:38:12):

And so you are, but many of these anti-Islamic people I think are pointing their guns at the wrong direction.

Trent Horn (01:38:21):

I mean, worldwide, it is something to be concerned about and I want to do more on that. But to me, when I look, especially with young people now, there is a lot of ear religion, but I find for me, if I want to get someone to move along a path towards maybe conversion to Christ, I would actually be really excited, even if they identify as an atheist, that they’re doing what you do and they just explore philosophical theology. I find the deeper you can get into that, you can see, oh, it’s not just skydaddies and flying spaghetti monsters. And these are real substantive, especially real substantive answers to pressing philosophical problems. So I think one thing I guess I would love to do, and I guess, hey, if you do it, I’m even happy with that. And I think Alex O’Connor does this and this helps that if there’s non-religious people, I want to get them at least thinking about the big questions because that is, I think, a good prelude to then start thinking about God because, oh, there’s at least an intuitive sense where he does answer some of those big questions.

(01:39:27):

Now, you may not think it’s a sufficient answer, but it makes sense when he starts getting slotted in there.

(01:39:31):

So I guess part of my goal might be just getting younger or religious people just start thinking about big questions.

Danny Philtalk (01:39:37):

I don’t

Trent Horn (01:39:38):

Know if that makes sense.

Danny Philtalk (01:39:39):

That makes sense. I can see why you’re saying that. I would agree that if you’re right about everything, that’s probably a good goal. I sort of see these questions like, should people study organic chemistry? I think organic chemistry is extremely important, very, very important. Without it, we wouldn’t have all this nice stuff, right, probably. But should people study it? I think that’s a matter of your goals. So questions about God, I sort of used to think that that’s one of the most important questions in the world and maybe if you’re don’t unsettle in the question, I think questions like, “What’s going to happen after I die? Do I need to do anything to make sure I’m right with that? ” I think those are pretty big questions. Well,

Trent Horn (01:40:21):

I would take it this way. I don’t think everybody should be an organic chemist, but I think everybody should be a philosopher.

Danny Philtalk (01:40:30):

There’s a version of that that I agree with.

Trent Horn (01:40:32):

Not getting a PhD, but I think it was Alvin Plantinga who once defined philosophy as the attempt to answer … Actually, I’m paraphrasing this. I’ll do my best here. Philosophy is the attempt to answer the questions that everyone asks. So not everybody asks, people on North Sentinel Island off in India are not asking questions about organic chemistry, but they might be asking, “Where did everything come from? What should I do? What’s the purpose of life? Who am I? Why am I here? What happens after I die?” Another example. So I find that philosophy that’s, oh yeah, philosophy is … And all those questions, now there’s technical ones people don’t ask, theories of knowledge,

Danny Philtalk (01:41:15):

Stuff like

Trent Horn (01:41:16):

That. But the most basic things in philosophy really do boil down to questions everybody has asked

Danny Philtalk (01:41:21):

Themselves.

Trent Horn (01:41:22):

And so I think that people, anyone then should start to approach those questions. And I think it’s those, because especially a lot of them, yeah, who am I? Why am I here? Why is there something rather than nothing? What ought I do? Do I have to do things in life? I find theism starts to slowly creep in when you think

Danny Philtalk (01:41:40):

About them. I think it’s a respectable opinion. Although the more I do in philosophy, the more I feel like pilot, I guess.

Trent Horn (01:41:47):

Like Pontius Pilate?

Danny Philtalk (01:41:49):

Yes. You want to

Trent Horn (01:41:49):

Wash your hands of it?

Danny Philtalk (01:41:52):

What is truth? He

Trent Horn (01:41:54):

Says s in passion. Well, it would be Latin because he’s probably Latin. Because he’s a Roman procurator. So Vititas, Quetis, truth, what is truth? No, you’re doing philosophy. You getting like, there’s so many answers. I can’t even figure it out.

Danny Philtalk (01:42:09):

Right. It’s such a … And I’m not discouraging anybody from getting into philosophy, but the more I get into it, the less I feel like I know. And so it becomes overwhelming. And one of the most frustrating things about philosophy, I think Josh Raschmuson said something like this too, is that for any position you take, you’re going to find someone smarter that has the opposite.

Trent Horn (01:42:29):

Have you read Josh’s book, How Reason Can Lead?

Danny Philtalk (01:42:33):

I read some of his other stuff, but I’ve skimmed through book.

Trent Horn (01:42:36):

Josh isn’t- I’ve talked him few times. He’s a nice guy, very solid philosopher. And I would definitely recommend that how reason can lead to God because yeah, if you think, oh, and I think this is a problem online. People think, “Well, if I choose to believe this and I can’t defend it in an X space, I’m not going to believe this. ” Well, then nobody could believe anything.

Danny Philtalk (01:42:56):

Right, right. I think that’s the point. And

Trent Horn (01:42:57):

People get paralyzed. Well, I’m not going to believe. Well, no, don’t do that. Just follow your head and heart. Let both of them guide you on that. We’re not strictly purely logical beings. I think there’s an affectation in the human will that will pull us towards … And that’s where I said about transcendentals when you pursue truth. So I think that truth, goodness, well, beauty, not every philosopher thought beauty was a transcendental. Some did. Truth, goodness, beauty being, they are all just different ways of looking at the same reality of when we find that which is true, it’s going to be good. It will not lack the being it ought to have. It’ll be beautiful. That which is beautiful is good. So in pursuing the truth, you’ll also sometimes find it will all, “Oh, well, this is a beautiful and elegant system, that this lifts my heart beyond the mirror material to see that this is right.” I think

Danny Philtalk (01:43:54):

People

Trent Horn (01:43:55):

Should follow that instinct too.

Danny Philtalk (01:43:57):

I mean, you and I come from very different … There’s a kind of sense of metaphysics. There’s a debate about the anti-metaphysicians and then the metaphysicians. So obviously there’s a sense of metaphysics where no one can avoid doing metaphysics, but it seems like you’re partial to the scholastic tradition. I’m not a logical positivist, but I flirt with them. I want to eliminate all of that stuff and just kind of look at science and such, right? Oh,

Trent Horn (01:44:27):

And I’m not a rigid scholastic. I think Aristotle should have gone out and counted horses’ teeth instead of just trying to reason how many that were there or whatever was that issue that he had. But I do think that especially even things like modern science, when you have these broader metaphysical frameworks of understanding the fact that experiments can be replicated, there are laws of nature that are uniform, there are many elements of science that metaphysics can help us to see. And then even taking that, going back further, when you look even the fine tuning of the universe, things like that, I do think it actually leads to a lot of these metaphysical questions.

Danny Philtalk (01:45:10):

Yeah. And I guess to kind of wrap on that, with philosophy, I think humans are generally worse at philosophy than other … If you look at the philosophical progress over the last three, 4,000 years or whatever, it’s not been as conclusive as some of the science stuff, but I do think at the same time that- That’s

Trent Horn (01:45:32):

Because science is easier.

Danny Philtalk (01:45:34):

Yeah. And also I think if you practice in the way that you can practice an instrument, you can practice doing philosophy and so that’s encouraging is that in pursuing philosophy, I’ve gotten better at addressing some of the questions, how to talk about the questions. While there’s no really established facts in the body of an academic philosophy, there are views that people say, “Oh yeah, that’s the wrong way to go about it.

Trent Horn (01:46:01):

” Oh yeah. Philosophy, we’ve made this progress saying, “Yeah, that doesn’t really work, but we have solutions here.” So I would encourage for yourself and for listeners, if you like philosophy and you want to understand God from a believing philosopher standpoint, well, Rasmussen’s book, How Reason Can Lead to God is a good one. I would recommend for philosophy, Brian Davies is a philosopher who has a book. It’s just called Philosophy of Religion.

Danny Philtalk (01:46:28):

Yeah, I think I actually have that book. Yeah, it’s pretty good. It’s been a while since I looked at it.

Trent Horn (01:46:33):

See if it’s the fourth edition. He’s got the newest one out, but that’s one that walks through the arguments methodically. I think it can be very helpful. So while we’ve gone on for a bit, I enjoyed the chat and I think that this shows that we’ll have to do another one in the future and maybe get on because you’re not just an agnostic, you are an atheist. We didn’t get into your arguments for atheism, but we’ll just have to do that another time.

Danny Philtalk (01:46:54):

Thanks for having me, Trent.

Trent Horn (01:46:55):

Absolutely. Thank you guys for watching and I hope you all have a very blessed day.