My new YouTube video about atheism

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I you want, can you post a transcript of it? I have a hard time understanding your English (I'm a non-native English speaker too).

I always assume I speak English well. Maybe that's not the case, though.

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Hey, guys!
I am Teo Samarzija from Croatia, and one of the most popular videos on my YouTube channel is my video about atheism in Latin. I've decided I will add some English comments to it. In Croatia, over 95% of the population consider themselves religious, and I do not share that belief. In fact, I think belief in God, as God is usually conceived, is even more irrational than belief in astrology or Flat Earth.
People I know often accuse me of being an atheist because I want to sin. Now, if a Muslim or a Jew said that, I'd understand what they mean. After all, their religion is full of rules you supposedly need to follow in order to get into heaven when you die. But I don't understand how can a Christian say something like that with a straight face. Christianity was basically founded by Saint Paul, a serial killer who received a revelation from Christ telling him all his sins will be forgiven if he spreads that word. If anything, Christianity is a religion of those who want to sin. Many people in Croatia also associate atheism with all the horrible things communism has done to Croatians. Well, in my opinion, as I will later explain, what the New Testament has to say about politics has way more to do with communism than what atheism suggests about politics.
Now, why did I make that video in Latin? Well, it's the language associated with the Catholic Church, and 86% of Croatians are Catholics. I wanted to show that I am not ignorant of it, as many religious people think of atheists. Also, I wanted to say that I am nostalgic for the good old times when apologetics was a lot more intellectual than it is today. A few centuries ago, apologetics such as Thomas Aquinas were trying to argue that science supports the existence of God. These days, it's obvious to the apologetics such as Ken Ham that science is a threat to religion, so they try to deny science. And I also think what science says strongly undermines there being a creator God. Not exactly that the theory of evolution strongly suggests that God doesn't exist, you can still say evolution was a tool, but the fact that there were multiple mass extinctions. The vast majority of species that existed on Earth didn't evolve into species we have today, they died out in one of those mass extinctions. That strongly suggests evolution isn't really moving towards some goal and isn't used by God as a tool to create advanced forms of life.
Anyway, let's get started with the video...

Well, yes, many people feel insulted when you talk about religion if your religious views differ from theirs. However, like Neil de Grose Tyson said, being insulted isn't a sure sign somebody is trying to trick you. You should try to talk about various topics in a way that doesn't insult people, however, that doesn't mean you should always avoid topics just because some people are offended by them. Reality stays there even if we don't talk about it.

I think the existence of terrorism is one of the best arguments against the existence of God. See, atheists often ask religious people, if there is a good omnipotent God, how come are there so many religions around the world, almost all of them false. Religious people generally give two responses. One response is that God needs to give people free will, and not letting people choose their religion would be a violation of free will. An obvious problem with that response is, if religious knowledge violates free will, does any knowledge then somehow violate free will? The other problem with that response is, well, where is free will in somebody being a terrorist because of a false religion? The guy who controlled that airplane on 9/11 attacks, he was afraid that, if he doesn't kill all those people including himself, he will end up in hell for eternity. It's not really that he chose to be a terrorist, he was under imagined threat of hell. In what sense would God revealing himself to that terrorist and telling him it's not God's will for terrorism to exist be a violation of free will? That would be giving that terrorist free will. The other response religious people sometimes give is that other religions aren't completely false, that God reveals himself under a different name to different cultures. But what when it's not just the difference in the name, or the difference in the name at all? What when Allah reveals himself to one person telling them murder is wrong, and to another person to tell them to be a terrorist? Now, religious people usually respond with, "Well, such revelations are rare. They may be evil spirits or hallucinations.". Well, then, if we know some revelations from God are false, why not assume all of them are false? Furthermore, revelations advocating violence, while relatively rare now, were a normal hing thousands of years ago. Thousands of years ago, human sacrifice was a normal thing. Why do revelations seem to get more sensible as humans get wiser? Makes no sense if you assume God is real.

That was essentially the same argument as used by Essence of Thought, a popular atheist and feminist blogger, in his series "Refuting Divine Revalation", and partly in the Thunderfoot's series "Why do people laugh at creationists?". Thunderfoot, a popular atheist and anti-feminist blogger, called my attention to this verse at the beginning of the Acts book, and, when you think about it, it's actually hularious. Like Thunderfoot said, that statement is literally as stupid as saying that the sun going red at sunset is a sign of God. Because moon going red during lunar eclipses and sun going red at sunset happen for the exactly same reason. It takes a lunatic to make such a statement, and Luke, the physician who wrote the Book of Acts, clearly was a lunatic.

Many people I know think that, although Bible may not be scientifically right, the Bible, or at least the New Testament is morally and politically right. But, see, it isn't. That is, unless you believe in communism, it isn't. If we take what's attributed to Jesus in the New Testament to be actual Jesus'es words, Jesus was a communist, it's just that the word communism wasn't coined back then. If you say that the wealth inequality naturally increases over time, that the war is a solution to the world's problems, that taxes are ethical and you despise private property, then you are advocating communism. Be it under another name, it's still communism. There is somehow perception that Jesus advocated freedom and pacifism, that's not what the New Testament teaches.
A lot of people think Jesus was against death penalty. Well, the Gospel of John says he was against death penalty for adultery. And it's questionable whether that part was in the original Gospel of John, rather than a later addition. But even if we assume it's real, it tells us only that Jesus was against death penalty for adultery, it tells us nothing about Jesus being against death penalty for murder, which is what modern debate about death penalty is about.

A lot of people think the Bible has been mistranslated and that the apparent disagreements with science come from those mistranslations, or even that the Bible predicted some amazing scientific discoveries, but it got lost in translation. And, you know, I understand the appeal of such hypotheses. In fact, I myself have put a lot of effort into my alternative interpretation of the Croatian toponyms, available on my website. I hypothesize that, for instance, the name "Issa", the ancient name for the Vis island, meant "spring" in some stage of the Illyrian language, and that that escaped those in antiquity who tried to etymologize that name, Strabo and the anonymous scribe who wrote the inscription on the Roman forum in Issa. Strabo suggested the name Issa might be related to the name Antissa, a place on the Greek island of Lesbos, and the anonymous scribe suggested the name Issa comes from the name of the Illyrian king called Ionios. But, you know, I think having such hypotheses about the meaning of the Bible verses is rather arrogant. There were literally hundreds of Biblical scholars in antiquity who knew Ancient Greek and Hebrew way more than anybody knows today, so, if the Bible really contains amazing scientific knowledge, how come nobody of them noticed that? Furthermore, why would an omnipotent and good God allow his word to be mistranslated? Why doesn't God reveal himself every now and then with a non-corrupt version of his message in a widely understood language? Or why didn't he write a text that was easy to translate? The Bible is not only hard to translate, in fact, some parts of the Bible have obviously been corrupt. A good example of that is the prophecy by Ezekiel about the destruction of the city of Tyre. Two things to suggest this is not an inerrant word of God. First of all, it obviously didn't happen, Tyre is still right there where it's always been, it wasn't destroyed at the time of Ezekiel never to be rebuilt again. Second, it's not all clear from the context whom the word "they" refers to. That strongly suggests the Book of Ezekiel we are reading today isn't exactly the same as Ezekiel wrote it. Why would God let that happen to his word? This also severely undermines all the supposedly fulfilled prophecies, how do we know they weren't added into the books after the fact? And, yes, the Bible is very unclear about quite a few things that matter ethically. Is abortion morally right? The Bible is not clear about that? Is eating meat if you have a choice what to eat morally right? Again, the Bible is unclear. I am not saying the Bible didn't get some things amazingly right. Like, the advice not to consume meat and milk products together makes perfect sense if you consider that heme iron from red meat causes colon cancer and that omega-6 acids increase that effect. But, you know as they say, a stopped clock is right two times a day. We also need to consider what it got wrong, like claiming that mildew can be treated with bird's blood in Leviticus 14:52. The undeniable truth is that the Greek and Roman philosophers got way more science right than any supposed holy book. And even what those holy books got right, they could have copied the works of those philosophers. Yes, Saint Paul did write in First Epistle to Corinthians in chapter 15 that stars are way more far away than the Sun is, but dare I suggest he was simply familiar with the work of Aristarchus from 300 years earlier? And so on...

Now, many people, including many atheists, consider Richard Dawkins to be a bit anti-intellectual, and they consider quoting him to be a way to discredit yourself. I don't think so. I think Richard Dawkins made a good argument asking theologians to justify their field as a legitimate field of study. What has theology done useful? Theology is basically divided into natural theology and revealed theology. Natural theology has thus far only given us bunch of pseudological arguments for the existence of God, and I think everybody will agree the vast majority of them fail after a very short period of scrutiny. You don't need to be an atheist to think Pascal's Wager is one of the worst pieces of philosophy ever written. And revealed theology is based on the obviously false premise that a text full of contradictions and obvious nonsense is a word of God. Or, better say, it's a bunch of guesses about supernatural that claim to be based on the Bible, but most of them obviously aren't. And they have had a horrible impact on the society. Burning witches, for example. Also, as Richard Dawkins points out, quite a few theologians in the 19th century, though I don't know if it was most of them, were against searching for cures for some diseases, because they argued they were a consequence of sin. And this is not limited to Christianity, this went way back to the Ancient Greece, where Aeschilus in Prometheus Bound said no man has ever discovered any medicine. You might say this argument is based on the utilitarian theory of truth, which is philosophically very problematic, that truth of some statement has nothing to do with its usefulness. But I don't think it is. If you assume there is a God that reveals himself to people, you'd expect theology to be useful, right? But it isn't. What does a theologian know that an average person doesn't? If we take knowledge to mean justifiable true belief that's not based on a coincidence, as most philosophers today define knowledge, the answer appears to be nothing. In what other academic field do the basic tenets of that field depend on the culture? That's not to say some other academic fields aren't as nonsensical as theology is. Gender studies are rather similar to theology, equally dogmatic and unscientific.

One of the most popular and probably oldest arguments for atheism, dating back to pre-Socratic philosophers, is the existence of evil in the world. The argument is basically that if there is an omnipotent, good and omniscient God or gods, we'd expect there to be no evil, there will be no suffering in the world. Like Epicurus said, are Gods able to end the suffering but are not willing to? Then they are evil, and that's quite an unacceptable conclusion. Are Gods willing to but not able to end the suffering in the world? Then they are not omnipotent, but God is by definition omnipotent. Are they able to and willing to, but don't know how to? Then they are not omniscient, and, again, that's a hardly acceptable conclusion. And if you don't see why, ask yourself, what's the point of prayer if God is either unable or unwilling to help people, or doesn't know how to help them. Now, Matt Dillahunty, one of the atheist bloggers who are most educated on the topic, considers the argument from evil to be a very weak argument, as basically an argument from ignorance, and that it's only successful because it's intuitive. Well, I don't think it's an argument from ignorance any more than "If the Earth is not round, why do ships appear to sink as they pass over the horizon?" is an argument from ignorance. The existence of evil is an empirical matter, much like the Earth being round is, and you usually can't have an a-priori argument about an empirical matter. When it comes to empirical claims, we need to weigh the evidence, rather than search for mathematical proofs. Ships disappearing bottom first is not proof the Earth is round, but it is strong evidence the Earth is round. Similarly, the existence of suffering in the world might not be a proof that a God doesn't exist, but it's strong evidence God doesn't exist.
The most common response religious people give to the existence of evil in the world is that God needs not to interfere with free will, and evil is one of the necessary downsides of having free will. I think this argument is the same form of reasoning used by the Flat-Earthers to disregard the evidence. Flat-Earthers say ships disappearing bottom first as they pass over the horizon is caused by waves. Well, you can explain some instances of that in that manner, but you cannot explain all of them that way. The same thing happens when there are no waves. Similarly, you can perhaps explain the Holocaust as a consequence of free will, because it was an intentional genocidal policy. But you cannot explain the greatest tragedy of the 20th century, the Great Chinese Famine, that way. Great Chinese Famine wasn't intentional, it was caused by the government believing pseudoscience called Lysenkoism and trying to improve the agriculture using it, making things a lot worse. Why would God let that happen? And this is before we get to the natural evil. A lot of suffering is caused by earthquakes, and earthquakes clearly aren't caused by free will. You can perhaps explain some evil as being caused by free will, you cannot explain all of it that way.
Furthermore, the existence of suffering, as we now know thanks to modern science, long predates the existence of will. All the birds and almost all the mammals feel pain, but only humans have will, other animals behave by instincts rather than by reason. The ability to feel pain probably evolved separately in birds and mammals. Now, there are some mammals that don't feel pain, such as naked mole rats, but that's probably de-evolution. I think we can safely assume that 55 million years ago, at the time of the first mammals, some animals felt pain. And they were dying of painful accidents and cancers long before free will existed. When did free will come into existence? The last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees lived 7 million year ago, so, unless you assume monkeys also have will, you can perhaps push the emergence of will to around 5 million years ago. For 50 million years, there was suffering and evil, but there was no free will.
And there is an even deeper problem with this Free Will Theodicy. If there is an omniscient God... how can there even be free will? Free will can also be used as an argument against the existence of God. Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote entire books trying to rationalize the existence of free will with the existence of an omniscient God, but like most theology, these are just ad-hoc hypotheses. The apparent contradiction between an omniscient God and free will significantly undermines theism.

Many theologians think the best argument for the existence of God is the Anselm's ontological argument. Now, to avoid confusion, there are many arguments in apologetics called ontological arguments. There is the Anselm's ontological argument which we will discuss later.
Then there is the dialectological argument, also sometimes called ontological argument, and dialectological argument basically asks if there is no God, how is talk and reasoning in general possible? Why does the universe obey the laws of logic if there is no God? The response to that I can think of is a rhetorical question how does the existence of God explain that? Why does the universe, if there is an omnipotent and benevolent God, who sometimes intervenes in this universe, appear to strictly obey the laws of logic? Why it is that, if you burn fossil fuels, you cause global warming? Why doesn't God intervene to make it impossible? Why it is that, if you eat meat from infected animals, which may not even have symptoms, you can cause global pandemic, kill hundreds of thousands of people and destroy the world's economy? Why doesn't God intervene to prevent that? See, this is almost like when Flat-Earthers use the horizon appearing to rise with you as you climb as an argument for the Earth being flat. Even if mainstream science couldn't explain that, that wouldn't be an argument for the Earth being flat, because the Earth being flat doesn't explain that either. It's not a tu-quoque fallacy to point out that your opponent's theory suffers from the exact same problem that your opponent complains about in your theory, tu-quoque fallacy is pointing to an unrelated problem.
Another argument called ontological argument is the Thomas Aquinas'es argument about the degrees of properties. If an object has a property to a lesser extent, then there exists some other object that has the property to the maximum possible degree. Some people are powerful, therefore there supposedly must be an object that is absolutely powerful, and that's God. Some people are good, therefore there must be an object which is absolutely good, and that's God. But let's apply that logic to something else. Some things are cold, therefore, there must be an object which is absolutely cold. And, of course, there being an object that's absolutely cold would contradict the third law of thermodynamics. See the problem with that argument? Richard Dawkins suggested that Pascal was joking when formulating Pascal's Wager, and I dare suggest Aquinas was joking when formulating that argument. Aquinas was, as well as being a philosopher, he was also a comedian.
Now, arguably the best ontological argument for the existence of God, and, according to many philosophers of religion, the best argument for the existence of God altogether is the Anselm's ontological argument. Now, there are many variations of the Anselm's ontological argument, some even involving formal logic, but the basic logic always goes something like this. The first premise is that God is easy to imagine, and that somehow means God exists in some possible worlds. The second premise is that if a God exists, he is a perfect being. The third premise is that if something is perfect, then it has to exist in all possible worlds. The forth premise is that our world is one of the possible worlds. And the conclusion is that God exists in our world as well. I can see how somebody can find that argument convincing, however, I think the first premise is a subtle fallacy of equivocation. Just because it's easy to imagine a perfect being, doesn't mean it exists in any possible world, any more than it being easy to imagine a mathematician constructing a square with the same area as a circle proves that a method to do so exists in some possible worlds. Or it being easy to imagine there being a computer program that solves the Halting problem or tells me for an arbitrary polynomial whether it has integer roots proves such things are possible. I guess that to somebody who hasn't studied atheist philosophy, the first premise sounds acceptable. But to somebody who has and who knows about the omnipotence paradox, not quite. The omnipotence paradox basically asks if a God, who is by definition omnipotent, can limit his own power. If he can't, then he is not omnipotent. If he can, then he is also not omnipotent because he can't lift those limitations he ascribed to himself. The only way to escape the paradox is, like Thomas Aquinas said, to suppose God is omnipotent in this world now, but might not be so in the future. That God can create a rock so heavy he himself couldn't lift it, but such a rock doesn't exist currently in this world, and thus God is accidentally omnipotent. But then, is God still a perfect being? No, he isn't. Thus the ontological argument still fails.

So, I haven't talked anything about whether I think Jesus existed or whether I think souls exist. Well, I don't have overly strong opinions about those things. I think the person named Jesus from Nazareth probably existed, but that little can be known about him. The gospels clearly aren't historically correct. There is no evidence of the census at the time of Herod in Judea that the Gospel of Luke is talking about, and there is also no evidence of the Massacre of the Innocents that the Gospel of Mathew is talking about. Something like that missing from the historical record would require an explanation. As for the story of crucifixion, I'd say it's probably made up as well. Philo of Alexandria was, around 40 CE, writing a book against Pontius Pilatus, and, while he mentioned quite a few bad things Pontius Pilatus had done, he didn't mention that he crucified anybody. Kind of a hard detail to miss. Jesus is really in between Moses and Muhammed in this regard. If you suggest Muhammed didn't exist as a historical person, you sound silly. If you suggest Moses existed as a historical person, you sound silly. When it comes to Jesus, both sounds plausible.
As for souls, well, the case one cam make against souls is not as strong as the case one can make against God. The best argument I've heard against the existence of souls is that, as they are commonly imagined, as something that is invisible and otherwise undetectable, but can see and hear, sharply contradicts quantum mechanics. Namely, quantum mechanics teaches us there is no such thing as a passive observer. When an electron is seen, it stops behaving like a wave and starts behaving like a particle. So, if we imagine souls as something which can't be seen or otherwise detected but it can see, we are contradicting quantum mechanics. It's not quite as strong argument as the omnipotence paradox against God is, but I think it's still relatively strong.

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It must be a great comfort to know that you’re so popular among the worldwide community of Latin-speaking atheists.

Boru

It's not a worldwide community. We are mostly in southern Europe.

Way to get your message out, then.

Boru