Something's certain. We don't do cold opens or soft starts here on the big conversation.

Alex.

Well, I am glad to begin on a point of agreement with you, Ben, that, yes, if there is no God, there is no free will.

But I think that's because of the truth of the latter of those statements.

I suppose the biggest criticism that I've made of you

in a video response that I made to the atheist delusion. And this show does seem to have an

extraordinary capacity for putting me face to face with people that I've been talking smack about

online. So thanks again. By the way, I should say it's a great video and everybody should watch it

if they haven't. Well, I'm going to put that in the description, I think, that glowing endorsement. The principal disagreement that I think I had with you, Ben, is that there was a subtle, or not so subtle implication in my view, that yes, with no God, there's no free will. But somehow having God can solve this problem. I mean, you said a moment ago that you don't think you can establish God's existence through reason alone, but assuming that you do believe in the existence of free will, you think it's a real thing that you have. Yes. And simultaneously saying that if there is no God, then free will makes no sense. Yes. That does read to me like an argument for God's existence, such that in order to either say that there is free will, in order to say that there is free will, one must believe in God. And that does strike me as an argument for God's existence. I mean, to slightly curve that, or to kind of stand off the rough edges there, I would say that the argument I made is an argument for something extra natural. Now, you can call that God or not God, but the thing that I'm making the argument for is that you cannot get from a materialist Darwinist universe to free will. That is not possible. So I know that the way you solve that is that you say that there is no free will. That's right. And what I'm saying to you is you don't act that way. I hear this all the time. People say, look, you may say there's no free will, but you don't act as though that's the case. I suppose that I'm just confused as to what it would look like for somebody to act as if they believe there was no free will. I mean, the very argument that there is no free will that I subscribe to, at least one of the various forms that it takes, is a sort of Schopenhauerian view that you can do as you will, you just can't will

what you will, and that you are essentially just a biological machine reacting to its internal

and evolutionary drives. That's what's happening. Now, call that nihilistic, if you like,

that's a separate question, but as to the question of how this would make one act, the idea that this might cause us to sort of lay around in bed all day or something, the very mechanism that I think is responsible for eliminating the possibility of free will, that is the drives that make people do what they do. Like I say, do exactly that. Make people do what they do.

They make them get out of bed in the morning. Why do you get out of bed and go and make your breakfast if there's no free will? So you go and get breakfast because there's no free will and something is driving you to do that that's outside of your control. For sure. So the, so to get back to the nihilism point, we should kind of put aside. So that means that this conversation is essentially worthless in any sort of real sense.

I mean, effectively, we were

driven here by evolutionary biology and environment to have this conversation. Everybody who's

watching this is driven by evolutionary biology and environment to have a particular reaction to that

thing and ever round the cycle goes.

That seems like a very purposeless life.

Maybe that's – maybe – again, I'm drawing from a realm that is not evolutionarily biologically

connected.

The word purpose is really – teleology obviously has been taken out of the realm of science

pretty thoroughly by atheists and by many people in the

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