Of course, atheism. But in any debate with the deluded, they will claim it’s the other way around. Flat Earthers will claim the rest of us are deluded, that believing in a spherical Earth is irrational, and so on. So someone not already up to speed might not be able to tell which is which. It is of course possible for both parties to a debate to be deluded and irrational (picture the Lizard Theory folks debating MAGA fanatics over whether Donald Trump has been replaced with an illegal alien space lizard—because then he’d not be a natural born citizen and thus be ineligible for the Presidency). But even then, you still need to know how to detect that. Here I will run an analysis on one exchange over this question regarding theism and atheism online, to tease out the distinctions a critical thinker needs to be able to identify.
Setting the Framework
First, some definitions. A delusion is any continued belief in something the evidence against is overwhelming (psychiatry exempts majoritarian cults, i.e. culturally acceptable delusions, but that has no epistemic relevance). An irrational belief is any belief held for fallacious reasons, which can include reasons of false evidence or false attendance to evidence, since those are often maintained fallaciously. Reliably nonfallacious reasoning will immunize you from most false facts; while the remainder you will be able to escape once the error or deception misleading you comes to light—which you can maximize the probability of by being constantly on the look out for exactly that, which is The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking. This is why science is so successful.
This means the irrational party to a debate is the one whose conclusions depend on fallacies. Not the one who merely deploys a fallacy; since, if you removed all fallacious lines of reasoning the conclusion still holds, their conclusion is still not fallacious, and so their belief remains rational (this is why learning how to steel-man a position is so important to successful critical thinking). Whereas if you removed all fallacies and there is nothing left to keep the conclusion probable, you are then looking at an irrational conclusion. Then, if after being shown this you don’t change your belief, you are delusional. You are then probably trapped by motivated reasoning or emotion-driven blindness to disquieting facts.
This happens a lot if your very sense of identity (who you are, personally or socially, or the meaning you assign to life itself, what your purpose is, even your faith in the reliability of your judgment or competence) is threatened if your beliefs are false. In result your brain will protect those beliefs against all refutation. And you might not even be able to notice this is happening, because your brain will tell you to deny it, or not see it, or distract you with something else. Delusion is literally a psychological trap. And by immunizing you against all evidence of itself, it becomes a hall of mirrors from which you might never escape. For an example of how trap beliefs can lock you into a delusion, see my Vital Primer on Media Literacy (and then study how a mass media delusion-engine caused the Rwandan genocide).
Finally, it’s important to distinguish between delusional disorder and mental illnesses. One can be technically crazy, but not a babbling lunatic eating grass. In fact almost all mental disorders leave the subject entirely competent in every other aspect of their lives and reasoning; they misfire only in the one very narrow domain that demarcates their disorder. So, for example, someone can have a pathologically paralyzing fear of worms—and thus be officially insane—but unless worms are around, they are entirely normal, capable, reasonable people. And even when worms are around, their irrationality will only be triggered in respect to the worms—or any attempt to push back against their irrational reaction to the worms, because one of the defining features of delusions is that they defend themselves against attack (that is what makes them a delusion, and not just an erroneous belief).
So we should be wary of Problems with the Mental Illness Model of Religion. But we still need to acknowledge that we are not dealing with rational argument when engaging delusional people; we are dealing with a mental disorder that cripples their cognitive ability in precisely the one domain being argued over (whether it’s worms, ghosts, elections, or gods). We can be sympathetic to that, particularly when they are making every sincere effort to be reasonable. But you’re probably not ever going to cure them. In general, people escape delusionality only when self-motivated to do so. They have to get themselves out. Which requires their own motivated self-exploration.
Moreover, that someone is delusional can be explanatory, but it is never useful as a criticism in and of itself. If you are using claims of their delusionality alone to dismiss what they are saying, you are probably the one who is delusional. Only after establishing a belief they maintain is false, and on abundant evidence, can you explain its persistence with a hypothesis of delusionality. But you cannot refute their belief on the mere grounds that it is a delusion. You also cannot use the persistence of a delusion to claim the deluded are incompetent in any other aspect of life or thought, or character.
That said, let’s proceed.
Setting the Context
In May of 2023, Stephen Woodford (of Rationality Rules) produced a nine minute take on “Theism is IRRATIONAL … here’s why” that was part of a prior debate on the subject, in which he lays out the basic reason why the only popular theism there is is irrational (as opposed to alternative theisms hardly anyone believes in—though some do). He defines the popular belief as “an all-powerful and all-loving God exists, which entails that he has unlimited power and will always act as to create the greater good.”
This is true. Indeed, the attempt of believers to deny it is itself irrational, and even a sign of delusion, since, after they insist that is not the theism they believe in (in order to escape the emotionally threatening fact that it is irrational to believe it), they will go right back to preaching and believing in the very God they had just denied. But a more common tactic for escaping this cognitive dissonance is to agree this is the God they believe in, but that the evidence in fact is compatible with it; but, as Woodford notes, that belief cannot be maintained without fallacy, which is why theism is irrational.
The same holds for that other attempt to avoid the facts, by denying their belief and then resuming it once the momentary intellectual threat has passed: that, too, is fallacious (involving equivocation and goal posting). Then continuing to hold this belief even after this has been shown you is delusional (which is why we must not Misunderstand the Burden of Proof here: in practice, atheism generally has already met that burden; theism has not).
Woodford then capably summarizes a standard Argument from Evil (via Classical Theodicy and then Rowe’s Argument from Gratuitous Evil), rejecting which is one of the principal irrationalities of theism. Woodford is on a short clock (this was an intro to a timed live debate), so he can’t hit every nuance and crawl every rabbit-hole. But to understand why his position is correct, see my own deeper dives in Is a Good God Logically Impossible? and then Ten Ways the World Would Be Different If God Existed. And although the latter argues independently of God’s being good or evil, for an example of what a genuinely good creator might do differently, see How Not to Live in Zardoz.
The gist of Woodford’s point is that the only way to escape the cognitive dissonance of any disquieting facts of reality and remain a theist in the only popular sense is to insist that no gratuitous evil exists, that every horror and injustice (every single one) “must be for the best somehow.” But there is no rational way to maintain that premise (see Justin Brierley on Moral Knowledge & the Problem of Evil and Justin Brierley and the Folly of Christianity).
This isn’t even the only reason Christianity (in particular) is irrational and thus delusional (see Christianity Is a Conspiracy Theory). Likewise Islam or any other popular theism (they are all just as weird, fallacious, and contrafactual). But it’s a good example to focus on if you only have nine minutes. Woodford even includes Emerson Green’s Argument from Soteriological Confusion (anticipated in Loftus’s Outsider Test for Faith), pointing out a particular evil (that God has not competently communicated the path to salvation); and the Darwinian Argument from Evil (well laid out by John Loftus in Ch. 9 of The Christian Delusion); and Stephen Law’s Argument from an Evil God, showing the irrationality of apologetics itself by demonstrating it would succeed in defending belief even in an evil god, thus negating any rational basis for believing in a good one—and of course we can note, by contrast, that all the evidence remains better explained (with fewer epicycles) if we posit no god at all (see, for example, Bayesian Counter-Apologetics: Ten Arguments for God Destroyed and A Hidden Fallacy in the Fine Tuning Argument). Then we don’t need weird explanations for the strange behavior of any supposed supercop kinglord; every good and evil we observe is then expected as simply a natural outcome of things unguided.
Delusional Christians are threatened by things like this. And so they have two options: flee (don’t watch videos like this or anything like them; demonize their authors and promulgators; or forget or lie about what they said) or attack (make the threat go away with elaborate defenses, i.e. apologetics, thereby denying you are irrational by deploying yet more convoluted irrationalities that can emotionally sate your need to believe you are rational after all, just like any flat-earther or lizard-conspiracist or mandroid or MAGAnt). You can also try doing both. But when you have defined your identity as a public defender of the faith, you really only have the attack option. So it’s all hands on deck.
Thus we get the two-and-a-half-hour reply to Woodford’s short video on Capturing Christianity the very next month, “It’s over guys. Theism is dumb. This atheist finally proved it. Time to pack it up.” hosted by Cameron Bertuzzi (whose shows I’ve engaged with before), with “two PhD Christian philosophers,” Perry Hendricks and Andrew Moon (yes, that Andrew Moon). So this will be my primary subject of eristic analysis today.
Can We Redefine Rationality?
No.
But the deluded must try.
The first section of their response video was devoted to trying some apologetical semantics to move the goal posts regarding what gets to count as “rational,” and it was handled mostly by Moon. But Moon is being pedantic. He incorrectly takes Woodford as giving two different definitions of rationality, but that’s not the case. Woodford starts with a colloquial definition (a rational thought-process is one “in accord with reason or logic”) and then expands that definition with a more precise accounting of what that means. Rather than grasp that this is what Woodford was doing, Moon distracts himself on a pointless tangent mired in irrelevant trivia. This is a common delusion defense: don’t hear what was actually argued; hear something else instead, attack that, and then satisfy yourself emotionally that you just dispatched what was said. But you haven’t. You’ve just spun wheels.
It’s important to note here that you might call that a “straw man” fallacy, and you’d be correct. But I want to focus on the eristic question of why people (and Moon in particular) ever deploy such fallacies. Often people assume it’s deliberate (and thus dishonest), or just a mistake (like, mishearing someone). It’s not. It’s a deliberate machination the brain deploys to avoid confronting something uncomfortable. Its deployer might not even know this is happening. Their brain simply convinces them that this is what was said, and therefore this is a satisfying reply to it. That’s the difference between intentional deception (or mere error) and delusion. The entire nature of a delusion is that it is a subconscious death-loop, where the brain does not accurately report reality into the subject’s conscious perception; it transmits a conveniently false memory of what they have just heard argued, so that they can straw man it. But being delusional, they are not consciously aware that their brain has done this.
Moon and company genuinely believe that he has correctly analyzed what Woodford said. But he hasn’t. And it can be very difficult to get them to admit that (indeed we will soon see Bertuzzi try and fail at that in real time). Their brain’s delusional architecture will meddle with their cognition in every way possible to prevent them from recognizing this.
Here, beginning around minute 6, Moon falsely describes logic as deductive. In fact inductive and probabilistic logics are more common and are the principle logics employed in all empirical sciences (including history and journalism). By falsely imagining that Woodford meant by “reason or logic” simply “deductive logic” is delusional. Moon did this (and ultimately no one corrected him) even though Woodford said reason “or” logic, thus making clear he is employing a broad and not narrow definition, and thus obviously did not mean what Moon misrepresents him as meaning. Woodford even later expands on what he meant to ensure this was doubly clear. In no way did Woodford ever mean rationality was restricted to deductive logics.
Moon, Bertuzzi, and Hendricks have simply deluded themselves into believing he did. And in result they produced the mere appearance of catching a fatal error in Woodford’s argument—which doesn’t exist. This is very similar to the semantic trick of answering someone who says they “proved” a point inductively by changing the meaning of “prove” to deductive proof and then showing they didn’t deductively prove their point, and “therefore” we can conclude the point has not been proved. Equivocation fallacies are a common delusion defense, and we see it happening right here.
Moon then says (in minute 9) that some theists take their belief in god as “a starting premise” and that this therefore bypasses Woodford’s definition of rationality. But that’s false. It is not rational to start with arbitrary empirical premises. A rational premise can only be a premise arrived at by some valid and sound logic. You can’t just “start” with any premise. All premises must be justified. This includes the premise that beliefs must be rational, and even premises regarding what is and is not logical, and so on down the line (see my Epistemological End Game and The Argument from Reason for all the rabbit-holes on this point).
Alvin Plantinga’s argument that God can be a “properly basic belief” is itself an irrational argument. The delusional will readily cite each other in defense of their delusion, and irrational arguments easily pass review in theology for this very purpose. But it’s all the worse that Woodford’s argument kills even god as a properly basic belief. Because rationally, PBFs can be empirically refuted. As even the infamous grifter William Lane Craig had to admit, “If I become aware of some defeater of one of my properly basic beliefs, then I must give it up.” And Woodford has outlined a rather potent defeater. So Moon is not even being rational when suggesting that properly basic theism can remain rational in the face of Woodford’s argument. It’s just a handwave—to make a problem go away, by convincing yourself that you’ve defeated it, when in fact you’ve said nothing even relevant.
Bertuzzi almost gets this, but fails, in minute 10, when he suggests maybe Woodford is using logic in some non-academic way to include other ways of reasoning. This is false. Inductive logics are still called logics in academia (including “fuzzy logic”, “bayesian logic”, and “informal logic”), so the distinction he’s calling in here doesn’t exist. There are occasions in academic literature when contextually “logic” means only deductive logic, but only when context establishes that is the narrow sense being used; but broadly, non-deductive logics are still called logic. But it’s also moot, since Moon simply dismisses Bertuzzi’s point (and gradually wears down his will into agreeing with him), changing the subject to insisting you cannot know empirical things “by logic alone,” which simply redefines logic as solely deductive again. He pulls this yet again with an equivocation fallacy equating even the word “reason” (in Woodford’s phrase “reason or logic”) with “deductive logic” and thus actively avoids acknowledging what Woodford really said.
Moon thus completely blanked on Bertuzzi’s point, did not explore it at all, and immediately reverted to the straw man fallacy he started with, as if none of that happened. And everyone, including Bertuzzi, went along with it. It’s astonishing to watch. But this is how delusion operates. It’s simply delusional to think Woodford meant by “reason or logic” knowing things “by logic alone.” Obviously he meant logic as applied to data. He even outright says this. So this cannot be rationally gainsaid. It is indisputably what Woodford meant (it’s exemplified all throughout his video). So to dispute it is irrational. While to continue to dispute it even in the face of evidence against it is delusional.
Bertuzzi doesn’t push back much on Moon here (nor is he at all alarmed by its delusionality), and instead comes up with his own irrational reason to dismiss Woodford’s point: that “to be rational is to act in accord with reason” is circular. But all definitions are circular—literally by definition. Bertuzzi has confused an argument (for which circularity can be a defect) with a definition (which must ultimately be a lexical tautology, stipulating what you shall mean by a word). There are dozens of ways to “argue” over which definition should be in play or really matters (see 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong), but “your definition is circular” isn’t one of them. This is why it matters that Moon has already falsely framed Woodford’s presentation as giving “two” different definitions of rationality: now Bertuzzi has been misled by that into thinking “rational means in accordance with reason” is defective because “reason” remains undefined; but that was the entire point of what they are falsely calling Woodford’s “second” definition: it’s actually an explication of the first definition (with “an example,” as Woodford literally says), the very thing Bertuzzi is inexplicably complaining that Woodford didn’t provide.
Wildly, Moon blows right past this and keeps returning to his original straw man of Woodford’s argument, and then after showing Woodford actually saying that his example of reasoning from evidence is an example of what he meant by forming beliefs in accordance with “reason or logic,” they keep on with the false frame of this being a “different” definition than his first one. No, it’s an explication of his first one, communicating clearly that he means reasoning logically from data (“evidence”). So they have burned fifteen minutes of clock on a completely irrelevant pedantry. But now they are forced to deal with what Woodford actually said this “second” time.
Moon starts by setting another false frame—that because what’s rational to believe is relative to the evidence available (so, as Woodford notes, people in the past had many false beliefs that were nevertheless still rational), therefore theists can hold a rational belief in God because they have secret information not available to the atheist. This is neither true nor relevant. It is not relevant because Woodford is citing publicly available evidence (so Moon cannot say theists just “didn’t know” all that evidence; and even if strangely they didn’t, they do now, so they cannot continue claiming ignorance). And it is not true because there is no relevant evidence Moon can have that he cannot communicate to Woodford or anyone else.
Notice this delusional framework operates by a convoluted series of illogical steps of reasoning (rationality of belief can be relative, which is true; therefore the rationality of theism is relative, which here is a non sequitur; therefore theists are rational, which here is another non sequitur). All to get an irrational conclusion (that anyone’s theism remains rational even in the face of all the evidence Woodford points to) and thus maintain a belief in the face of abundant evidence against it. Which is a delusion. The convolutedness of the inference allows overlooking its gaps (each conclusion is handwaved into existence from the previous one, without any demonstration, much less a rational one). Which makes it an ideal delusion defense.
In minute 18 Moon digresses on another strange irrelevancy, falsely claiming evidentialism does not adhere to reason (“if you take out the reason part, then it’s just a definition of what’s called evidentialism”). Evidentialism does not “take out the reason part.” The entire point of evidentialism is to draw inferences from data in accord with reason, exactly Woodford’s definition. Amusingly (for any empiricists reading this), Moon mentions here that he rejects evidentialism, and Bertuzzi asks him to give some reasons why. The reasons he gives are weird, and reflect a poor capacity for semantic analysis.
For example, in minute 19 Moon says he can’t tell sometimes what the evidence for something is; but semantically evidence can be defined any way you want, so long as you aren’t leaving anything out that has epistemic relevance, or including anything that does not. So Moon is more admitting to not knowing how evidentialism works than to it being false. But the example he gives is that sometimes a thing can be evidence for itself, like that you are having a thought at a given moment (as distinct from whether the thought is true, for example). He is talking about Cartesian knowledge. He seems confused about how anything can be evidence for itself. But better philosophers are not confused by this. That’s literally the definition of Cartesian knowledge.
There can be a semantic confusion between “facts” (or “data” or “observations”) and “evidence.” The word evidence can be used as a mere synonym of facts or data or observations. But when one means “evidence” in the narrower sense of a fact or datum (or body of facts or data) that makes some claim epistemically more likely to be true, then, well, that’s what evidence means. This is one of many reasons why the only sound epistemology is Bayesian (If You Learn Nothing Else about Bayes’ Theorem, Let It Be This). After all, if a fact does not make a claim more likely, then it clearly lacks any virtue we ever mean to signify by the word “evidence.” And the only logically coherent way a fact can make a claim more likely is by being more likely on that claim than on any alternative claim that negates that claim. Which is simply a description of Bayesian likelihoods. Which generate all priors (as all prior probabilities are simply the posterior probabilities of prior runs of the same analysis, whether completed consciously or not). Since prior probabilities and likelihoods are the only probabilities relevant to the epistemic probability of any claim (a point I formally demonstrate in Ch. 5 of Proving History), and their only logically valid combination is defined by Bayes’ Theorem (as has long been formally proved as a fact of deductive logic), it’s really just Bayes all the way down (see, for example, The Gettier Problem).
I digress here only to defuse the false framing of Moon, who asides on Plantinga’s pseudoscientific epistemology at this point, in minute 21. To the contrary, our epistemology needs to be science-based because science has accumulated an immense amount of justified knowledge; and here, scientifically, we know a great deal about “intellectual” knowledge (intuitions, apprehensions, felt truths; what Moon calls “intellectual seemings,” and what Plantinga weirdly called “impulsional” data), and it does not support anything Plantinga did with it (for a corrective see What Does It Mean to Call Consciousness an Illusion? and my sections on the science of intuition and emotion in Sense and Goodness without God). All cognition is constructed (as explained in Was Daniel Dennett Wrong in Creative Ways?). Which means internal (felt) data is created by the brain in an effort to simulate and compute what is going on in the brain. It does not have access to the outside world (other than is already mediated by sensory data). And it is not reliable for that purpose (it is not even entirely reliable as an internal report, either, as it can malfunction and misreport in many different ways—delusion being a prominent example).
This is the lesson humans had to learn the hard way, until we invented the counter-intuitive methodologies of science, critical thinking, and formal logics and mathematics, to correct for all the ways our reliance on “intellectual seemings” went wrong (see The Argument from Reason and Why Plantinga’s Tiger Is Pseudoscience). Moon also incorrectly includes “all bachelors are unmarried” here as this kind of knowledge; it’s not, it’s propositional, and more particularly lexical, knowledge. He also incorrectly includes “objects cannot be all black and all white” here, but that’s actually a synthesis of sensory knowledge (we test it by running the description on the same hardware as we use for vision) and propositional knowledge (given The Ontology of Logic). Philosophers often screw this up, by confusing their failure to explore why they believe a thing (or how they came to believe it), with that belief being a mere intuition. This is really just bad analysis. But I digress.
Now we’re in minute 22, and Bertuzzi segues into another irrelevant analysis of the different ways evidence can be “available” to someone (e.g. immediate and with ease, or distant and with difficulty). That doesn’t pertain to any point Woodford made. But Bertuzzi is using it as a delusion defense to somehow escape from what Woodford said. Moon then enables this tactic with an even more irrelevant digression on epistemological internalism and externalism, none of which pertains to any point Woodford made—except in that Wooford already made this very point about availability of evidence and its relation to rationality, and with an example they are supposed to be discussing here but have completely forgotten about (yet they just listened to it only a few minutes ago!). Instead, they take exactly the opposite lesson from what Wooford said, that people who don’t know something cannot be irrational for believing something that that inaccessible knowledge would correct, and claim instead that he said that even people who don’t know that thing can still be irrational because of some expectation that they are supposed to know it. That was in no way Woodford’s point.
Woodford appeals solely to universally available knowledge; he is not talking about cultists in some isolated commune who have been denied access to basic facts of the world and its history. Yet Bertuzzi just straw manned him as saying otherwise, so as to escape what he did say. Remember, Woodford’s example was of people in the middle ages believing miasma theory, who had no easy access to data that would later confirm germ theory instead. So by lacking easy access to it, their belief remains rational. I cannot explain how Bertuzzi missed this—the only actual and totally clear point Woodford made—other than Bertuzzi being a victim of delusionality. He does not want to know what Woodford actually said. And so his brain is building a delusional architecture of convoluted (yet entirely impertinent) reasons to dismiss it. And his guests are reinforcing this error, not correcting it.
One could digress here on the moral obligation to access accessible knowledge before making important decisions (a point we’ll see even Bertuzzi himself make in a few minutes), but that would also have nothing to do with Woodford’s argument, because he is not talking about theists actively avoiding learning facts about the world; and few theists are actually doing that anyway. Bertuzzi instead digresses on the fact that most theists haven’t carefully considered their belief, but that is not relevant to Woodford’s argument either. Even those theists know about the evils Woodford references, and that their God is supposed to “always act as to create the greater good” in spite of them (because there aren’t many actual analogs to Cthulhu cultists today). And yet they are still arriving at their belief fallaciously. Which is what makes them irrational. Strongly believing in something you haven’t at all examined the justification for is irrational.
Moreover, the reasons these “average” theists will give for believing will be even more patently fallacious than Woodford is giving credit (their reasons I dare say even Bertuzzi would admit are bad reasons), which is precisely what it means to say that theism is irrational. Which is why most atheists are agnostics (as per Who Is an Atheist?): they do not commit to any belief about the gods, precisely because they have not examined what would be justified to believe about them. And yet, when one does examine that, it is atheism, not theism, that survives all rational justification tests. This is the actual point Bertuzzi is supposed to be responding to—because he is no “run of the mill” theist who can claim to be ignorant or unintelligent or never to have thought about why he believes. Theism is irrational because even people like Bertuzzi continue to believe it.
That is Woordford’s argument. And Bertuzzi is evading it with an apologetic—a red herring fallacy of complaining about all the other theists who are irrationally believing for no well-examined reason at all. That’s still irrational (so it makes no counter-argument to Woodford’s thesis). But it’s also irrelevant. Woodford’s point holds only if even well-examined theism persists yet is rationally found to be false; and Bertuzzi himself is immediate proof of that, so he cannot deny Woodford has a point here. Certainly not with all this pointless pedantry about defining rationality or expecting Woodford to address even less rational theists. Neither is responding to the point. Both are distractions. And distraction is a delusion defense.
We see this even when they move on in minute 34 to Woodford’s inclusion of “average” theists, which Woodford describes as “leaning on intuition, authority figures, and cognitive bias,” where, even after hemming and hawing for almost half an hour, they fail to acknowledge he’s right: substituting these methods for “forming beliefs in accord with reason or logic” is irrational. Woodford could have digressed (had he time; he didn’t) on the irrational epistemology of “average theists.” But it’s unnecessary because the evidence he is laying out is already known to average theists; so if they fail to respond to that evidence rationally, they are already by definition irrational.
This evasion includes their explorations of the different senses and roles for intuition in minute 36, which isn’t relevant to Woodford’s argument, because he is identifying as irrational a fallacious inference from intuitions. Woodford’s video does not go into anything else about intuition, so one cannot infer from this video what position he takes on rational inferences from intuitions. The only point at issue is whether theism is a rational inference, not whether it is an intuition. So discussing intuition has no role to play here. Yet they distract themselves with it anyway.
Ironically, though, Bertuzzi concludes this with the point that because intuition is admittedly at least fallible, “it’s important to really think clearly, as clearly as you can, about these these difficult cases, when it comes to these big metaphysical questions, like does God exist.” Translation: it would be irrational to believe in God without careful examination. To believe without having done any of that would entail some fallacy of reasoning, and thus not be rational. On this I am sure Woodford would agree. So Bertuzzi is really scoring his own goal here.
But that’s still a distraction. Because Woodford is talking about readily available information, not obscure facts; and he shows that even the unsophisticated theist (while importantly also the sophisticated theist) is not reasoning from those facts without fallacy. Bertuzzi wants to complain that the average theist doesn’t know sophisticated arguments like Rowe’s Argument from Gratuitous Evil. But Woodford’s point is that Rowe’s Argument from Gratuitous Evil is what it looks like to reason without fallacy from the information he presents, which entails theists are not reasoning without fallacy from the information he presents. It does not help to say “but they don’t know how to think rationally,” because that’s still what it means to say theism is irrational. Usually one would want to save theism from this by arguing, “Yes, but people who do know to think rationally get the same result, so the result is rational even if the average person isn’t believing it rationally.” But Woodford has closed that door here, too. They never get it back open.
They instead burn clock rehashing all these same distractions over and over again. Much of what they go on about in the second quarter of their video isn’t wrong. It’s just irrelevant, for all the reasons I just surveyed. Almost an hour in, and they simply have not responded to Woodford at all.
The same failure continues in their last ten minutes (starting around minute 2:10), where they continue to try evading Woodford’s definition of rationality, yet all Moon does is completely ignore the fact that almost all knowledge is probabilistic—particularly the kind of knowledge Woodford is talking about. Contrary to what Moon attempts to argue there, it is never contradictory to say that it is probable that any given sentence in a book is true and that it is probable some are not. In fact the one proposition entails the other. For example, if a book contains 1000 sentences, and each one has a 99% chance of being true, the probability at least one of them is nevertheless false is 1 – 0.99^1000 = 1 – 0.000043171247411 = 0.999956828752589 or 99.996% (rounded). So it is coherently true that “every sentence in the book is (probably) true” and “(probably) at least one sentence in the book is false.” Moon is simply ignoring inductive logic. Yet, irrationally, Hendricks and Bertuzzi are impressed by this.
Woodford said a belief is irrational if it is not in accord with “reason or logic,” which simply means, if it is arrived at by fallacious reasoning. None of Moon’s distinctions affect this point. For example, in minute 46 they discuss when “authority figures” can be trusted, but they ignore every relevant issue regarding when and why authority carries epistemic weight, and so make no point relevant to Woodford’s argument (for example, see On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus and You Know They’re a [Good|Lousy] Philosopher If…). And around minute 44, Moon tries making a distinction between “internalist” and “externalist” rationality that doesn’t use that word the way Woodford did, so it doesn’t have anything to do with what Woodford said. You cannot change what a thing is by changing what you call it. So trying to play a semantic game whereby you get to call fallacious reasoning rational is purely apologetical—it is trying to make the real point go away, by making an irrelevant point instead.
That’s typical behavior for the delusional. It’s not typical behavior for the rational.
A Short Stop at Faith
This does not mean, however, that these theists are “just” irrational, as if they were just stupid (they aren’t) or as if their ability to reason always malfunctions in every aspect of their lives (a point pertinent to their closing discussion around minute 2:15). They are irrational—but only in the sense that they have committed to irrationality in defense of their delusion (and accordingly convinced themselves it’s not irrational). This is why it is important to note the fact that they are delusional. Like all mental disorders, delusionality is specified. There are delusional “people” in the sense of persons prone to nothing but (or at least a high frequency of) delusional reasoning (such as fantasy-prone personality and conspiracy-prone personality). And even theists recognize them when they meet them. But generally, people are only delusional with regard to their specific delusions. They are not delusional reasoners in any other aspect of their lives. So although saying theism is irrational does entail saying theists are irrational, that does not entail saying they are irrational “people” as in reference to a personality trait. They are only irrational with respect to their delusion. That’s why it is a delusion. But understanding that requires admitting that theism is a delusion. Only then can you separate that from the rest of a person’s life and reliability and thus assess them correctly as a person.
Accordingly, I won’t digress as much on their interlude on faith (beginning around minute 58) because the semantic debate they walk through here is again not relevant to Woodford’s argument—and they even admit it isn’t (“he doesn’t really, it’s not like central to any the rest of the video, like, he doesn’t even bring it up in the rest of the video”). I think because they were atomizing his video’s script, they didn’t notice its function was as an enhancer to the previous list of bad (irrational) reasons to believe (and in particular, to believe every evil they know “must be for the best somehow,” the actual context here), and so it didn’t have any other role in his argument. He means people who insist “there just must be a good reason” for every evil, simply because they “have faith” that there is, and can’t point to any evidence that that reason exists or is even likely. So their digression again wasn’t on point. But they even concede this so it’s not a defect of their case.
As they explain, like most words, faith can have many senses depending on context, including just “confidence,” which can include rationally justified beliefs (hence, as Hendricks says around 1:02, “faith is supposed to be responsive to evidence”). Hence their attitude toward faith is rational. But in context Woodford clearly meant the specific sense of faith used as a reason to believe, and not as an outcome or description of belief. He has in mind pop arguments for god (and, most pertinently, God’s allowance of evil) that do amount to fallacious assertions like “God exists because I have faith he does,” or “God must have good reasons for allowing all evils because I have faith that he does,” and other kinds of fideism, like even the empirical fideism of William Lane Craig, whereby faith becomes information that can trump evidence (but still can’t trump reason)—so it’s certainly a thing (even if uncommon). But it’s clear no one on Bertuzzi’s episode endorses that use of faith anyway, so they really have no relevant disagreement with Woodford here. Both sides agree faith is not an argument.
Not only does Hendricks outright say this (contradicting Craig by saying faith should be changed by evidence), and with Bertuzzi’s approval, but it is also ironically demonstrated when Moon denies that Hebrews 11 argues for any kind of empirical fideism as Woodford quotes it doing. Moon is so valiantly keen to reject that use of faith that he gets his own Bible wrong. Woodford was indeed reading the verse he quotes from Hebrews 11 correctly, and it is indeed endorsing something like the empirical fideism of W.L. Craig. See my discussion in Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 236–40; and for some context, see my discussion of early Christian epistemology in A Primer on Christian Anti-Intellectualism, and in even more detail in Ch. 5 of The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire (with support from Chs. 9 & 10 of Science Education in the Early Roman Empire). (Since Moon never understood they were supposed to be discussing inductive rather than deductive logic, I suspect he was also blind to “inductive” fideism as a problem.)
But after all that, over an hour in, and they still haven’t gotten rid of Woodford’s application of the word rational. Which leaves us with the actual argument they are supposed to be responding to: does evil prove theism irrational. And the same tactics come in.
Can We Redefine Evil?
No.
But Woodford’s whole point is that the delusional will nevertheless try. And so they do.
Even the average low-rationality theist tries twisting their minds into believing even the most horrible and irredeemable evils “must be for the best somehow.” Because they have to in order to maintain a coherent belief—because only coherent beliefs are rational, and theists need to believe they are rational (since there aren’t many theists left today who are openly committed to being irrational). That this is what even the most sophisticated theists also do simply clinches Woodford’s point. Their apologetics might be far more elaborate and convoluted and riddled with fancy words than the average theist’s, but it is no more rational (even if it is a lot more intelligent and informed—since knowledge and intelligence are not the same thing as rationality). And that is why theism itself is irrational. There is no rational path to it in the face of the data Woodford presents.
Nevertheless, the attempt to escape their cognitive dissonance here begins at 1:09. Hendricks first burns clock on a moot distinction over the conditions for an evil to be gratuitous. He claims there are two: the evil must not be necessary for a greater good; and the evil’s prevention must not generate a greater evil. These are analytically identical propositions, so the distinction cannot matter to anything Woodford argued. Preventing a greater evil is a greater good. So there is really only one condition for an evil to be gratuitous: it can’t be “for the best somehow,” exactly as Woodford puts it. So we get more wheel spinning in lieu of a reply. When Woodford said that an evil is gratuitous if it “does not serve any greater purpose or lead to any greater good” he is already covering everything Hendricks just wasted five minutes on. (You will notice by now most of their arguments are like this, a convoluted well-poisoning fallacy, a kind of “Argument from Greater Erudition,” whereby rather than attack Woodford’s argument, they attack his supposed knowledge or competence, and confuse that with having dispatched his argument. This is irrational. And I find it is an extremely common delusion defense.)
It is then that, starting in minute 1:14, and illustrating the same delusion defense of straw manning to evade the actual (upsetting) argument, Hendricks commits the same error as Moon earlier did, by falsely framing Woodford’s argument deductively (as “God’s existence is actually incompatible with gratuitous evil”). But Woodford presents the argument inductively. He makes this quite clear by immediately using Law’s Argument for an Evil God to illustrate that mere compatibility does not suffice to answer his argument—because that’s also true of an evil god, since we can make all the same excuses to explain every good in this world on the belief god is evil. Woodford also uses statements of probability throughout. For example, Woodford closes by saying God is “made to appear very unlikely to exist,” and in his introduction makes this clear by arguing that all gratuitous evil can only be dismissed by insisting it “must be for the best somehow” (an example of logical compatibility) but that there is no rational reason to believe that. So he does not argue that this excuse (it “must be for the best somehow”) is logically impossible, but rather unwarranted (on existing evidence), which is an argument to probability. Inductive, not deductive. (For a more thorough discussion of this distinction in respect to the Argument from Evil see Is a Good God Logically Impossible?)
That is also a very common delusion defense we find from defenders of the faith: to falsely “change” what they just heard from a probability argument to a possibility argument, then note that a possible compatibility exists, and then claim they have rebutted what was just said. But they haven’t. They have emotionally sated their fear by convincing themselves they did. But non-delusional observers will notice they didn’t even address the argument at all, but rather demonstrated Woodford’s point by simply insisting “it must all be for the best somehow.” Exactly as he predicted.
Objective observers see the theist here committing the possibiliter ergo probabiliter fallacy: that “it is possible” these evils “are for the best somehow,” therefore “it is probable” they are, and so it can remain probable that their god exists. This is fallacious. But they actually convince themselves with this fallacy, just as we see Hendricks, Moon, and Bertuzzi doing right here on this episode of Capturing Christianity. And reasoning to a conclusion by fallacy is by definition irrational. They are being irrational. Hence their theism is irrational. It’s truly a face-palming moment when theists actually prove Woodford’s point in their own desperate attempt to refute him. But here we are.
Woodford’s actual argument is also not an argument from intuition as Hendricks falsely claims (another delusion defense), but from simple observation: it is an observed fact that the evils he lists exist (and, to revisit our previous point, this is known to almost all theists today; so they cannot claim ignorance of it); and it is an observed fact that no likely explanation for them exists (there is no evidence that they are necessary for anything, and so no rational way to conclude that they are—and this absence of an evidence-based reason is also known to almost all theists today; so they cannot claim ignorance of it).
Woodford’s case covers two irrational responses to this evidence: the admission response, and the evasion response. The “admission” approach is when a theist admits they do not know how these evils “are for the best somehow” but goes on believing anyway. That is straightforwardly irrational. The “evasion” approach is when a theist claims they do know what the reason is, and maybe even give some cockamamie excuse for the noted evils, something that they just made up on the spot or heard or read somewhere. But there is no evidence that that made-up excuse is likely. Often there isn’t even any evidence that it is coherent, either with itself or even the theism it is supposed to defend or other facts in evidence; but certainly there has never yet been any evidence for one, either. So to then believe it anyway is irrational. Thus, either way, theism is irrational.
Do they ever respond to this, Woodford’s actual argument?
No.
Yet they go on believing anyway. Hence theism is irrational.
Their delusion has prevented them ever even hearing the actual argument Woodford made, so they never have to actually confront it. They swap out what he said with something else, and then defeat that easy target instead (like “conveniently” confusing deductive with inductive logic, or “possible” with “probable,” or deploying a bunch of irrelevant wheel-spinning about “intuition”), and conclude they’ve answered Woodford. And they fail to see what they did because they are delusional. Their brain has done the swapping out, and isn’t reporting that to their consciousness. So they genuinely think they have answered Woodford. But they haven’t. And all non-delusional observers see this. While they will always deny it. Because that’s what a delusional brain always does. That’s what makes it a delusion.
There isn’t really any sure way to break through this. Something at some point has to crack one of the panes in their hall of mirrors, allowing them to realize they are in a hall of mirrors, and then start a serious self-checking mode to look for delusional thinking in themselves and escape it. From interviewing those who did escape, I’ve learned that what cracks panes typically is some strong values conflict (which I’ll say more about in my concluding remarks). But knowing what delusional thinking is and how to detect it should be helpful for this as well. And that is why these tools are essential to critical thinking generally. We could all be delusional about something. So we all need to run this self-check mode on a regular basis, on every important belief we have. It’s like running your anti-virus software on your home computer, to detect malicious takeovers of your system and clear them. Otherwise malware hides itself; and so, too, will a delusion.
Their Last Desperate Examples
Hence, for example, around 1:29 Bertuzzi spins the “soul building” excuse, which non-delusional people know doesn’t rationally work on any of the examples Woodford gives—which is why Bertuzzi never shows it working on any of the examples Woodford gives, least of all the animal suffering example, despite claiming he “could” (he never does). As Loftus has already demonstrated (in The Christian Delusion), it would get Bertuzzi in some really weird weeds trying to explain away. We can also make a corresponding “soul crushing” excuse for an evil god, thus reactivating Woodford’s appeal to Law, demonstrating Bertuzzi’s entire approach is irrational.
But we can also introduce all the evidence that demonstrates the excuse’s inability to work even on straightforward human suffering, e.g. soul building random children with Leukemia and random women with mutilation and rape, rather than the jaunty adventures and refreshing struggles akin to a good G-rated movie, is self-evidently evil if any other person did it (and there is no available reason why God gets a pass on this assessment). There just isn’t any need for child Leukemia or mutilating rapes to accomplish any worthy goal one could label “soul building.” So the excuse fails to make these evils necessary. Which is the very conclusion any rational thought process would land you at. But no. “It all must be for the best somehow.” But hell if we can explain how. Which is again confirming everything Woodford said. So Bertuzzi has no actual response to Woodford here—just the “concept” of a response, which Bertuzzi irrationally believes counts as a response. That’s delusional.
We all know that brutally torturing animals and children and even adults to make them better is monstrous, not “good.” Because we know you can make people better in far better ways—because millions of parents and friends and teachers and therapists and philosophers are already doing that, and have been for ages. It would be even easier if you, being their creator, built them that way. But even as-is, I need just contrast the horrors of boot camp depicted in Full Metal Jacket with my own experience in boot camp to directly see that one actually built my “soul” up more and without any of that gratuitous brutality and inhumanity. So Bertuzzi is not providing any rational reason for the necessity of the evils Woodford lists. Yet Bertuzzi has emotionally tricked himself into thinking he is.
This same collapse occurs to every other “theodicy” Bertuzzi lists in minute 1:30: Woodford correctly classifies all of them as “it all must be for the best somehow,” and correctly describes all of them as void of sufficient evidence to make any of them even remotely probable. Their being possible is completely irrelevant to this argument. But in all two hours of this video, none of these three theists ever figures that out. They only ever address the Logical Argument from Evil Woodford never made, so as to completely evade the Evidential Argument from Evil he did make. And that’s why they believe in God. Which is why theism is irrational—exactly as Woodford explained.
Of course the approach of these theists all across the last hour is just like all delusional conspiracy theorists: to build their hypothesis into an unfalsifiable thesis. There is no conceivable evil God could ever permit that would ever disprove his hypothesized compassionate and just intentions. Since all evils are then tautologically “for the best somehow,” their hypothesis can never be disproved—and that means it can never be proved, either. Because it is only by sincerely failing to disprove a thesis that you can ever make that thesis probable—so by blocking any means to disprove it, you have removed any means of making it probable, too. This is reflected in Woodford’s use of Law’s Argument from an Evil God: since the same tactic works for an evil God, and thus gets results exactly contradictory to theirs, their method is rationally incapable of ascertaining if their (or indeed any) God exists or not. Their method is designed to evade all disproof. Which is the fundamental attribute of a delusion. Expectedly, when they do get to Law’s argument, around minute 1:51, they completely fail to understand any of this.
But it’s more important to focus on the lack of evidence for their excuses. They keep jumping from “it’s possible” to “it’s probable” with no evidence bridging that gap whatsoever. Imagine Jeffrey Dahmer trying that out in a court of law: “Why, your honor, it’s possible I was forced to kill and eat all those people to save the Earth from a collision with a life-ending comet, so you cannot find me guilty” or, indeed, “I had to eat them in order to make me, you, and them, a better person.” There is a reason those things sound ridiculous. And that same reason transfers to God, indeed with even more force, because, unlike Dahmer, God has more resources, wisdom, and invulnerabilities than Dahmer, and thus would never “have to” force anyone to be killed and eaten to stop a comet or make anyone better (see Ten Ways the World Would Be Different If God Existed). God always has fewer excuses than human criminals in the dock. Not more of them. This is a logically inescapable fact. And thus any attempt to escape it is illogical. (For an excellent and wide-ranging demonstration of this being especially the case for Christianity, see Richard Schoenig’s new study Where Christianity Errs.)
Everything else they try is just as illogical. The Sorites argument Hendricks pulls around minute 1:39 is illogical. That’s not how Sorites Paradoxes work (as Moon had to admit). The argument that we need Leukemia and animal predators and horrible rapes to teach us or give us the opportunity to understand they are wrong, or to prevent or punish them, or whatever (as Hendricks attempts around minute 1:46) is illogical. The entire existence and function of fiction disproves this assertion. We don’t need any woman or man to be brutally raped to understand the concept of it and thus why it is wrong, nor do we need the entire television series Elementary or Person of Interest to “be real” because of some notion that it is a greater good if their depicted crimes are prevented or solved for real than only in fiction. That notion simply isn’t rationally defensible (as Bertuzzi had to admit). The argument that God’s need to let us improve the world justifies all evils (as Moon attempts around minute 1:49) is also illogical. The entire point of gratuitous evils is that they aren’t necessary to fulfill any such goals, and Moon gives us no evidence they are (as Bertuzzi had to admit).
And so on.
After literally failing to come up with any reason justifying these particular evils, all three of them revert to arguing over whether it is possible that a reason could exist, which is right back full circle in their delusional death-loop of ignoring the actual inductive argument Woodford made (which requires them to show it is probable reasons exist, not merely possible). And so they get literally nowhere, while again fooling themselves into believing they addressed Woodford’s argument. This is what irrational belief-formation looks like, exactly as Woodford’s nine-minute video explained. The irony is lost on them.
Conclusion
And yet these are truly smart guys. So it is obvious from this analysis that we all need to install a delusion-detection kit in our brains, and remember to run it with some frequency. That is the most reliable way to prevent us being trapped in an irrational belief system the way Bertuzzi, Moon, and Hendricks are, or to escape one we might already be trapped in. Delusional belief systems are not limited to theism or religion or even the supernatural (for example, see my closing remarks in That Jordan Peterson Is a Crank: A Handy Guide). They can include entire political worldviews. MAGA is delusional; and so is Liberal Extremism. Likewise Woo and White Supremacism, even the entire worldview of RFK. Indeed every ideological bigotry is delusional, from cognitive sexism to Islamophobia. Some atheists even fall for flat earthism and alien lizard conspiracies, and can never be argued out of those weird beliefs. So being an atheist does not immunize us. We have to be as often introspective, self-vigilant, and self-critical as we would wish theists were.
The thing that happened in this exchange repeatedly—unconsciously straw-manning Stephen Woodford’s argument so as to subconsciously avoid ever confronting it—is not the only way delusions defend themselves. So there is more to learn than what I have covered here. Many of my articles on critical thinking subjects cover other examples. The last ten years or so I have been writing with a mind to collecting specimens for articulating an entire “method of error,” the toolbox that defends every delusion on Earth, since I find they are all defended with the exact same tools. So almost any of my critical articles now will not just debunk or refute something, but will do so by pointing out the error-generating methods people used to reach their overconfident false conclusions.
But in my experience, from my own interviews with and having surveyed the accounts of hundreds of escapees (from ex-misogynists to ex-theists), often the escape precipitates awareness of the need of these delusion-detecting skills, rather than learning and applying the skills first as the means of escape. Possibly because delusion motivates you to avoid either, as either having or using those skills is an identity-threat. So installing that anti-virus software may be hard to do. It can inoculate; but it will not as often succeed as a cure, the deluded being analogous to a schizophrenic whose voices tell them not to take their meds (only, not being schizophrenic, their inside voice never openly tells them this).
From my interviews and surveys (now backed by a lot of science: example, example, example, example), the common factor I see tends to be that crack in the mirror I mentioned earlier. Which tends to result from some values-conflict within their belief system, something so extreme the delusional architecture can no longer hide it. This can take many disparate forms, from the conflict between the actual fascism of modern Christianity and the social justice it supposedly teaches (because, Dear Christian: You Might Be Worshiping the Antichrist), to some conflict between what it wants you to believe about your friends and loved ones and what you actually experience from them (as you might detect in Randal Rauser on Treating Atheists Like People). It could be one issue that breaks the camel—like an abusive and corrupt church, combined with encountering the impenetrable delusionality of its congregants, and suddenly realizing you are one of them, and then having to account for that. Or realizing a religion too easily serves a provably false teaching (like “gay people are an abomination”). Any of these can “wake you up” and start you on a path of critical research that ultimately gets you out. But it can also be broader abstractions.
In respect to the argument from evil, a common vehicle for cracking the mirror I have seen is a strongly motivated need to square the supposed compassion of Jesus with the horrors of reality (like the Darwinian Problem of Evil). It does require that strong emotional need; if you are ambivalent or don’t care that much about it, you will never be motivated to even see or accept the conflict exists. Hence one might notice the best people tend to leave. Which is why the largest churches often boil down to the most awful people. But more common than that in my experience is a similarly strongly motivated need to square a superlative value for the truth with the lies and contradictions and falsehoods plaguing every popular religion now.
An ex-Christian friend of mine once described it like this (paraphrasing): “I was in a heated argument with an atheist once, and there was a moment when I realized the next thing out of my mouth in defense of my faith was going to something I just made up, and didn’t know was true. And that shocked me—it unnerved me that I was so ready to do that, and it made me re-examine why I believed any of the things I was defending.” The ensuing rabbit hole they were then motivated to go down resulted in a saga of discovery that led them out of their delusion. I have heard a very similar story from dozens of ex-believers (Muslims and Christians).
The common factor was always: a strong emotional need to square a conflict; and a sudden (often accidental) realization of that conflict. It’s in moments like that that a delusional person might slip and start to see the architecture trapping them; they start to see apologetics as apologetics, and not some legitimate means of answering questions or concerns. I do not know how to cause this. The emotional need must already exist (you can’t argue them into it); and the defenses a delusion deploys against seeing that a fatal conflict is real are highly effective and thus block most attempts at cracking a single pane (like Bertuzzi’s weird reference to Narnia satisfying him that God needs to horribly torture animals for hundreds of millions of years).
The most I could discern from my own interviews and audience polls is that persistent exposure to challenges (like this very article, or Woodford’s video) will have a rate of return. It won’t save everyone. It won’t even save a majority. But it will rescue a steady percentage. Not immediately. But by starting the first crack that makes the hall of mirrors visible to the believer, it starts them on a quest that ends in their escaping their delusion within a year or two. This may be why abandoning religion has been steadily draining the pews of world religions—wherever escape is politically and socially allowed. But because our brains were not intelligently designed, the process is slow, and billions of poor souls the world over will remain trapped in these delusions for far too long. As for why that is a problem, see Why Religious Belief Is Always Bad. Humanity could be doing better.
