Uploaded March 2022 | Updated September 2026, 24 minutes ago
Full video here: youtu.be/PCxEhj25qQQ
Skeptical theists maintain that gratuitous suffering is an illusion. Yet, we commonly trust our moral faculties to distinguish between suffering that is necessary and unnecessary -- we often judge that the elimination of certain cases of suffering wouldn’t prevent any higher goods or bring about any greater evils. In other words, we make the judgment that it would be unambiguously good to eliminate some specific cases of suffering in our world. But skeptical theists must maintain that we are wrong in every single judgment of this kind. This implies that humans suffer from a powerful and pervasive cognitive bias. Our faculties misfire in this way all the time! This is certainly a strange and unexpected way for God to design our faculties. But to make matters worse, the mirage of moral randomness has led legions of nonbelievers away from God and salvation. The appearance of gratuitous suffering -- which would supposedly disappear if God had instead designed our faculties to be aimed at truth -- contributes immensely to the apparent moral randomness and seeming indifference of the world. Skeptical theism is predicated on the idea that God has created our minds such that the world would seem morally unintelligible to us. This means that legions of unbelievers have missed out on salvation because God decided to create this pernicious illusion.
We haven't begun to scratch the surface of the conflict between skeptical theism and the notion that we have trustworthy moral faculties, and I hope to expand on the ideas in this clip sometime soon.
Excerpt from CA81 Skeptical Theism. Full episode here: youtu.be/PCxEhj25qQQ
https://linktr.ee/emersongreen
Full video here: youtu.be/PCxEhj25qQQ
Skeptical theists maintain that gratuitous suffering is an illusion. Yet, we commonly trust our moral faculties to distinguish between suffering that is necessary and unnecessary -- we often judge that the elimination of certain cases of suffering wouldn’t prevent any higher goods or bring about any greater evils. In other words, we make the judgment that it would be unambiguously good to eliminate some specific cases of suffering in our world. But skeptical theists must maintain that we are wrong in every single judgment of this kind. This implies that humans suffer from a powerful and pervasive cognitive bias. Our faculties misfire in this way all the time! This is certainly a strange and unexpected way for God to design our faculties. But to make matters worse, the mirage of moral randomness has led legions of nonbelievers away from God and salvation. The appearance of gratuitous suffering -- which would supposedly disappear if God had instead designed our faculties to be aimed at truth -- contributes immensely to the apparent moral randomness and seeming indifference of the world. Skeptical theism is predicated on the idea that God has created our minds such that the world would seem morally unintelligible to us. This means that legions of unbelievers have missed out on salvation because God decided to create this pernicious illusion.
We haven't begun to scratch the surface of the conflict between skeptical theism and the notion that we have trustworthy moral faculties, and I hope to expand on the ideas in this clip sometime soon.
Excerpt from CA81 Skeptical Theism. Full episode here: youtu.be/PCxEhj25qQQ
https://linktr.ee/emersongreen
![Why I dont care about logical fallacies [Full Podcast Episode]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/p4wDWMzvkA0/mqdefault.jpg "Why I dont care about logical fallacies [Full Podcast Episode]
Take a look at nearly any book on critical thinking and you’ll come across a list of fallacies: ad hominem, argument from ignorance, appeal to emotion, appeal to authority, post hoc ergo propter hoc, god of the gaps, and so on. The problem is that many of these “fallacies” closely resemble good lines of reasoning. Overreliance on fallacy lists – common practice in the skeptic community – fosters shallow criticism, distracts from the substance of an issue, and doesn’t even accomplish the ostensible purpose of demarcating good and bad reasoning.
I’m hard on skeptics in this episode, but that’s because I used to lean on this crutch myself. Over time, the usefulness of this approach struck me as less and less credible, and talk about fallacies tapered off. Fortunately, philosophers like Maarten Boudry and Michael Huemer, whose work you can find below, explained in clear terms what is so unhelpful about this mode of thinking. “Fallacy theory,” as Boudry calls it, is only one feature of a shallow, facile mode of philosophizing, one which isn’t very conducive to a genuine search for truth. I would suggest that one way of improving the quality of our discourse would be to lay off the fallacy accusations a bit. It would lead to a more fruitful search for knowledge and understanding.
After the first five minutes or so of big picture criticism, the bulk of the episode is dedicated to concrete examples, focusing on the ad hominem fallacy, ad populum, “correlation does not imply causation” – the post hoc ergo propter hoc (or cum hoc) fallacy – and begging the question.
https://linktr.ee/emersongreen
The Fallacy Fork: Why It’s Time to Get Rid of Fallacy Theory - Maarten Boudry https://maartenboudry.be/2017/06/the-fallacy-fork-why-its-time-to-get.html
Playing Fallacy “Gotcha!” - Maarten Boudry https://maartenboudry.be/2018/01/playing-fallacy-gotcha.html
Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy - Michael Huemer https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Reality-Value-Mostly-Philosophy/dp/B091F5QTDS
The Fake, the Flimsy, and the Fallacious: Demarcating Arguments in Real Life - Maarten Boudry, Fabio Paglieri & Massimo Pigliucci https://philpapers.org/rec/BOUTFT
Twitter @waldenpod
Transcript https://emersongreenblog.wordpress.com/2022/04/21/logical-fallacies/
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Consider supporting at https://www.patreon.com/waldenpod
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/ Timestamps /
00:00 Introduction & the Big Picture
05:31 Post hoc ergo propter hoc
07:36 ad hominem
16:36 ad populum
19:19 Begging the question
23:27 Conclusion")
