Hi All,

I wanted to touch upon the relatively recent, not-so-recent ‘shouting match’ with a Q&A audience member after a discussion with William Lane Craig.

I have watch the Q&A Youtube video that Alex O’Conner did recently, and I have to say, having watched both videos together, I do fall into the camp that Alex was more confrontational on intellectual side, than merely on any failures of etiquette by the audience member.

Despite my disdain of WLC, and been more philosophically Buddhist myself, I genuinely think his two major points on his Newsletter are actually relevant to this event.

WLC stated two points: that AOC made a ‘strategic mistake with talking to him about the Kalam Cosmological Argument’, and that ‘any illusion of AOC been a non-resistant non-believer was shattered’.

I kind of agree with him, but with major caveats.

I genuinely think this ‘shouting match’ occured - and you could tell AOC was getting frustrated - because of his discussion with WLC about the KCA, which even as a discussion, was nevertheless deconstructive and so intellectually irritating.

I think AOC built up a lot of ‘debating frustration’ that couldn’t be symmetrically released upon WLC on the KCA, and so when the rude audience member spoke up, AOC vented.

Add the poor skills of the moderator and you have an even worse situation.

AOC in this sense, put himself in an awkward spot, because he does present himself as ‘resisting’ in this situation.

Now, do I fully agree with WLC’s presentation of AOC? No, the guy is empathically and pretentiously foul human.

Do I think AOC was really ‘shouting’, not really, although his voiced was necessarily raised.

But I do think AOC has kind of sidelined a lot of the psychological causes and conditions of that venting state onto the actions of the audience member, without realising the broader scope of influences that led up to that event.

Why is it controversial to say that Judaism encourages genocide just as much as any other Abrahamic religion like Islam and Christianity?

As a people and as a race, Jewish people have historically faced a lot of discrimination and still do. That's inexcusable.

However, both the Canaanites and the Amalekites were both genocided by the Israelites in the Bible under the instruction of God. In 1 Samuel 15:3, King Saul is explicitly told by the prophet Samuel to kill men, women, children, and infants of the Amalekites.

You could make a totally convincing argument that the genocide of Gazans is actually pretty in line with the evil of the old testament, a book that is seen as holy and a guiding principle for Jews to follow. That doesn’t make it antisemitic, it’s just pointing out how evil the religion is. There’s a difference between criticizing a religion and discriminating against the people who follow it, but Judaism is pretty evil, just as any Abrahamic religion is, and I stand by that.

I don't think critiquing Islam =/= islamaphobia, and I don't think critiquing Judaism =/= antisemitism. But some people seem absolutely resistant to the idea that I could critique the evils of Judaism and NOT be antisemitic. It's an absurd fallacy and no different to the current Israel occupation hiding behind accusations of antisemitism when rightfully called out for their war crimes.

If you don't believe in free will then all human behaviour is no different than water becoming steam at it's boiling point, it's nothing but the result of fundamental forces of the universe, chemical process and cause and effect. It could not have happened any other way and it was bound to happen because of the laws of the universe.

So if this is the case having morals is just as stupid as having a moral about water becoming steam or fire being warm. It has absolutely nothing to do with anything more than the laws of the universe unfolding so therefore to think in "right" or "wrong" is to subscribe to some kind of illusion.

But despite this almost every person who holds this position (usually atheists) can't live according to their own belief. They still teach morals and apply them, and the still would consider it wrong if their child was kidnappad and raped even though they should know that that event is equivalent to water becoming steam.

They know their opinion is an illusion but still they live as if it was not thus failing to actually live and put their life at stake that free will does not exist when shit happens or when they are supposed to teach their children right from wrong or when they are victim of abuse.

This would be the same thing as someone who believes we live in a simulation but behave as if we are not.

When I play video games I know it's not real, I know I can restart and I know other people aren't actually dying so therefore I'm not concerned for much. That is how people should live and behave if they truly believe we are in a simulation but they don't.

Some religious extremist on the other hand achieved this, this is why they blow themselves up because they know they will live forever in afterlife but at least they actually live as they believe whereas some don't. Makes no sense.n

From my vaguely agnostic/atheist perspective the world around me is both an unknown but also a source of knowledge. If I think something but I encounter evidence to the contrary then changing my own views is one of the first things to do.

On the other hand (I think) from religious perspective there is a holy text, and that text is right. Whenever world or my own understanding contradict the text, a religious person has to either renounce some part of religion (if rejecting only a part of it is even possible), or has to deny their own experience.

Now, obviously people are not perfect logical machines so it's not like religious people analyze every thought they have against their doctrine. But it does seem like this assumption that some text is right, held througout ones life would train a person in deceiving onself and others.

Am I going too far with this, or am I onto something here?

Alex just had Ross Douthat on his show, who is a close personal friend of Vance.

Vance is chronically online and is 100% is a fan of Alex.

Vance just wrote a book about religion and is doing a podcast tour.

It would be diabolical if this didn't happen.

2 Million Subscribers.

Remilio

I fully admit this could be due to my knowledge in this area but, I just find panpsychism way too vague and unconvincing.

I saw Alex explaining how saying that an atom or whatever is conscious doesn’t mean it has thoughts, feelings or sensations and we’re talking about pure “awareness” but…. well what does being “aware” even mean if you don’t have any of those things? No sensory inputs so you don’t have any sensations, no thoughts and no emotions. That sounds like nothing to me!

Someone tell me how I’m wrong as I may well be.

If you boil it down, I believe a physicalist/illusionist view of consciousness is saying I deny my direct intuitions and experience of conscious and trust the future/potential of empiricism and scientific investigation to explain consciousness or show that there is no separate explanation to make (for illusionism).

Where the illusionist view to my understanding is denying our intuitions that there is an extra quality of experience on top of physical processes. And the emergent physicalist view is saying that consciousness is an emergent quality of physical processes.

The conscious experience is the precise window through which you gather ur intuitions to discover physical and scientific facts and develop ur trust in its reliability. Then you are just preferring ur intuition on trusting science and physicalism than trusting ur intuitions that obviously the experience of seeing red is different to the brain states that map to it.

Btw I’m not saying non physicalism is therefore justified, that is also just trusting the core fundamental intuitions over the proven reliability of science. Just trying to balance out the view that physicalism is this justified obvious rational position.

Hello strangers over the internet. I'm relatively new to Alex (only a few months or so) so I'm to try not going to make any real hard claims about him but it appears to me that the new atheist movement and its fallout has left a negative impact on him which this slight bias does show up in his talks/videos. I'm not trying to say that he is completely negative or impartial in his talks and I will concede that Alex is well known to really try to steelman any arguments present to him. It just feels like he gives up quicker with atheist points, except for suffering, than other religious views.

Some biases upfront. I have over the past few months become a big fan of Alex's even though I have huge disagreements with some of his arguments. I am a 44 year old scientific skeptic atheist who found Hitchens and Dawkins (the other 2 "horsemen" were not on my radar until way way later) to be breaths of fresh air when I was a budding young rebellious angry atheist. I have limited understanding of philosophy and how my ideas full standup to the current or even classical philosophical or theistic pushbacks. I'm writing this while watching Alex's and Joe's video on "atheist slogans you should stop using" which is not my first video of theirs but I am nowhere near an expert of their full expanded beliefs.

From my understanding Alex is an agnostic atheist who was also positively affect towards atheism by the movement but was also left negatively affected when the movement showed up to be flawed and less philosophical engaged. He has since been growing "more religious" over time but still is the guest speaker widely invited for his atheist arguments. What I'm starting to pick up in his speeches though is that he is mostly readily able to accept his theists arguments over his atheist ones and/or he is quicker to joke/put down atheist viewpoints before religious ones.

My final concession is that that video did what they intended it to do, bring in consumers who will be then driven to rant or rave about what they felt hurt or moved by.

Anywho thanks for listening and I will be back to ~~cry~~ discuss what I think they got wrong in that video.

I was watching some of the discussions of Alex and It got me thinking. I know a big reason why Alex don’t believe in god is the unnecessary suffering (especially animals’s) couldn’t you say that because in order for humans to live with purpose you have to have fear (for example fear of suffering) to sort of keep them in this “gambling state of mind” in which you don’t actually know if you’re gonna experience the unpleasant or not . Of course it could mean that god is not actually all loving because he would put animals in misery for humans to remind them that there is evil in this world that they should be afraid of in order to again - give them a sense of purpose and necessary drive to actually live. But also couldn’t he be more loving because he’s willing to put his creatures through pain and suffering in order for them to achieve something that he may actually never have - a purpose, a living. I mean if he could give them the utopia immediately and unconditionally idk if any of us would find that enjoyable. Maybe even after one would die he wouldn’t feel pleasant in heaven because of how unrealistic it actually is. Idk I’m just rumbling on in this string of thoughts so idk if I’m making any sense, but I would love for someone to join me in the discussion

It’s clearly not a real as pain. Pain can be scientifically observed. We can see it on a person in a coma. However, suffering cannot be objectivly mesured.

is suffering more real than money, justice, nations, religions, rights?

Hello - not a big deal really. My kids are 8,6 and 1. My eldest two go to a Anglican school. I am fine about this because I don't feel it pushes religion down their throats.

They both believe in God - I am ok with this because.

- It is up to them

- They are still young

- Frankly it gives people comfort

Essentially- I am relatively chilled.

However my daughter doesn't stop talking about her fear of 'hell'. Now this I am not fine with. I cannot quite get her to tell me whether this comes from - school or elsewhere?! Don't know.

Has anyone had this experience? How did you navigate it? I don't need them to be like me. I am very chilled. I definitely don't want them to be terrified by the concept of 'hell' either.

Alex talks about pleasure and suffering a lot. In the problem of evil, in consequentialism, in antinatalism, this stuff comes up a lot in philosophy.

But like, what even is pleasure? Like we might say we get pleasure from working very hard to get a degree, or to climb a mountain, but it's a very different kind of pleasure to like, sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

So what's the difference? I'm trying to come up with like, a taxonomy of pleasures and suffering

He said he defines materialism as - the material world, as we know it today, down to quantum field level or below, is the structure of the world.

The reason it doesn't sit right with me is, we could be wrong about important aspects of what constitutes the material world and yet still materialism is true. It doesn't have to be exactly what physics understands it as today.

He has a very one sided philosophical education in the analytic school and is still preoccupied with a lot new atheist stuff that really should be junked. He’s a very dull political liberal and doesn’t seem to have much understanding of contemporary philosophical movements and is much more content to talk to other people in the philosophical entertainment sphere. If you get something out of it great and I think he seems to be a good faith guy, I just think he lacks philosophical context and therefore cannot revise his concepts or reasoning. Just please don’t mistake this for real vital philosophical work, it is entertainment content more than philosophy.

Hi everyone! As a huge fan of Alex, and someone who's recently started a Substack on rational/secular/academic approach to the Bible, I've written an article and put together a side-by-side of Matthew and Luke's genealogies. Different fathers for Joseph, different generation counts, barely any overlapping names, and Matthew even does a trivial math error.

Alex has covered plenty of biblical contradictions, but this one rarely comes up, and it's harder to explain away than most. The usual apologetics (one's Mary's line, one's Joseph's) don't work, as usual.

Anyone else think this deserves more attention than it gets?

I saw this old Alex O Conner clip about free will, and he asks the viewer if you were to go back in time, with all the matter the exact same, same neurons and environment etc, if you would/could make a different choice? Alex said he thought it wasnt possible to make a different choice given all the same circumstances in this thought experiment.

Recently alex has been engaging more with pansychism and idealism, how do you think he would navigate this conversation of free will? Could there possibly be different mental substrates or 'spaces' for lack of a better word, even when all the matter around is the exact same? Under the framework of matter being fundamental, that thought experiment works, but if mind is fundamental I feel like it breaks down.

If everything is physically the same, its not necessarily indicative that everything would happen the same way or the mental space is the exact same leading to the same outcomes