Biola University
Tim and Rick have a civil disagreement with atheist philosopher and popular YouTuber Tom Jump. They explore dynamics of religious belief and factors that influence belief toward or against God. They illustrate how we might have a civil disagreement on issues involving theistic belief and religious conversion.
Transcript
Tim Muehlhoff: Welcome to the Winsome Conviction Podcast. My name is Tim Muehlhoff. I'm a Professor of Communication at Biola University of La Mirada, California. Thank you for joining us on the Winsome Conviction Podcast. I'm not alone. I have my good friend, co-host, co-director of the Winsome Conviction Project, Dr. Rick Langer. Rick?
Dr. Rick Langer: Thanks, Tim. And I am a Professor here at Biola as well, in the Biblical Studies and Theology Department. And as Tim mentioned, we work together on the Winsome Conviction Project, where we're trying to do things to help promote more civil discourse and better understanding across divisions and divides we have about really important areas of conviction.
It's often easy to disagree about mere matters of taste, even I'm a Denver Broncos fan. I live in the land of people who like the Chargers and the Raiders around here. And these are my arch enemies, right? But the bottom line is, we really don't have that many outrageous or difficult conversations about our football teams. They're kind of matters of taste.
But when it comes to things like, well, let's just be blunt, religion and politics, it's different. And we tend to have a very hard time crossing those boundaries. So Tim and I have been having a fun conversation with Tom Jump, who is an atheist and has been active in his own YouTube channel debating people and talking about these sorts of issues that really do engage some of the areas where it's really hard to have a disagreement. So we've had a great conversation with him and wanted to continue that by talking just a little bit more about some of the things that have been a challenge for him in terms of Christian belief, because of course, Tim and I do have Christian beliefs. So there's a big gap there. So Tom, thanks for joining us for these conversations.
Tom Jump: Absolutely. Thanks again for having me on. I really appreciate the opportunity.
Dr. Rick Langer: One of the things that I was intrigued by that you mentioned in terms of your own story of growing up in a Christian context and being disappointed with God because of struggling with deep depression, asking what seemed like very kind of simple, modest requests, so to speak, of God and not having those prayers answered, and really ending up going through a process where you kind of lost your faith. You didn't go immediately into atheism, but you kind of went through a bit of a wilderness, so to speak, until you found some of the atheist arguments that ended up kind of making sense to you.
So we had talked a little bit about that, and one of the things that I got to thinking about this was, let me just frame it this way and I'll let you respond to this. It seems clear to me that what you experienced was, what I'm going to call for the moment, a failure of your God construct. In other words, you had a way of understanding and having a set of expectations about God, and God did not deliver.
And it seems to me like that could be a bit like the failure of a bridge. It can fail because there's no such thing as bridges or construction really doesn't work to cross big divides like you have for the Golden Gate Bridge or something. Or it can fail because you fail to construct a good bridge. The failure could be of the construct or the failure could be of the concept, if you know what I mean. And it seems to me important to separate those two things.
And so, that was what was going on in my mind as you were talking about some of that. And I was just... It sounds like defeated expectations that you had were things about God just intervening at a minimal level to provide just basic, in your case, basic love, relationships, something meaningful, some positive contributor in your situation. And let me just pause here and let you respond to both my general idea of that and then also those details, make sure they're right before I go ahead.
Tom Jump: All right. Yeah, I think it sounds right. I'm not exactly sure.
Dr. Rick Langer: Yeah. So let me just run with that a little bit. One of the things that is interesting that I've noticed, now I was a pastor for 20 years before I became a professor so I spent a lot of time talking with people who were experiencing any variety of things, very much depression included. And people would often come to me with doubts or questions about God. And one of the things that seemed to kind of haunt people was defeated expectations.
And I began to realize there's kind of two different ways you could draw expectations from your Christian faith. One would be things you might call an extrapolated expectation. God is good, God is omniscient, and God is all-powerful. And therefore, if there's a good, all-powerful God, He knows my suffering. And therefore, if He's truly good, He has the power and would have the will, because of His benevolence, to intervene on my behalf. So if God isn't doing that, He must either not be omniscient, He must not be benevolent, or He must not be omnipotent that He can't do anything about it. ut somewhere there has to be a break like that.
So you have a clear expectation. It defeats the syllogism, so to speak. And so, you conclude out of a process like that that there is no God. And I've talked to a lot of people who have had that sort of an experience. And like I say, it's kind of extrapolating the expectation. Or you read a verse in the Bible that says, "Make your requests made known to God, and cast all your anxieties upon Him because He cares for you," but you don't have that happen. And those are what I call extrapolated expectations. And it's pretty common for those to be defeated. God doesn't do what you expected.
Tom Jump: So my initial thoughts are I think those are two separate things. One is the philosophical justification for a disbelief or something, which is a conclusion based on syllogism or whatever. And I think that that mostly doesn't happen. I think very few people are affected by that. I think they will justify their change with those after the fact, because there was a study done on people on how they justify the decisions they make, where they gave them a bunch of pictures and say, "Pick picture A or picture B." And then, they'll put the list, they'll put the things you picked in a pile, and later they're going to ask you, "Well, why did you pick this one or why did you not pick this other one?" And they're going to slip in some of the ones you didn't pick. And they found out that people are going to justify even the ones they didn't pick as ones they picked for certain reasons.
Dr. Rick Langer: They people drum up a reason to give an account.
Tom Jump: Yep. Exactly. And so, people will make up reasons of why they changed their mind. And so, one of the reasons are these syllogisms like, "Oh. Well, I expected an all-powerful being to do X, and He didn't. Therefore, I stopped believing." Really, it's more emotional than that.
Dr. Rick Langer: Yeah.
Tom Jump: My conversion away from theism was more just because God didn't answer my prayers. It's kind of like trying to talk to a milk carton. If the milk carton does not talk back, eventually, whether you realize it or not, you're going to stop believing the milk carton has a consciousness. You're going to just be like, "It's just a milk carton." And that's kind of what happened for me and my belief in a God. I was trying to talk to this non-spatial, temporal milk carton, and it never talked back. It never did anything, good or bad, of any kind. And so, I just eventually just ceased being able to believe there was such an entity there. And the emotional facts of because I was in desperate need of certain kinds of responses just made that process significantly faster.
Later on, when I got into the philosophy and I could actually analyze the philosophical arguments and make the syllogisms to understand why they're justified, I think that's a separate topic. I think there is a justification for saying that an all-good, all-powerful being wouldn't drown babies or something along those lines. And so, given the context of the Old Testament, if it's true and the world was flooded, you definitely can kind of rule out an all-powerful God from that one, because there's logically possible alternatives that are less immoral, something along those lines.
But I do think those are two pretty much unrelated questions of why people initially do leave, which is more emotional, and then the justifications they give, with which are these logical ones which aren't usually post hoc in some way.
Dr. Rick Langer: Yeah. I think I'm inclined to agree with you on that. At the very least, how related the two tracks are I think may be a subject to debate, because I think there are some connections. But I think you're right. There's two different things that are often going on there.
And one of the things, and this is perhaps more of a comment for our listeners even than for you, Tom, but one of the things that strikes me with that is that there's a second way of generating your expectations, so to speak. When I think of this biblically, Christianly is, "What do I expect of God?" I can kind of do a philosophical reasoning approach to that, or I can do a read-the-story approach to that, where you suddenly discover, and this is awkward, this is hard when you read the Bible, but you realize, "Oh. People asking God, 'How long, oh Lord? How long are you going to basically not answer a prayer? How long are you going to defer intervention?'"
And you suddenly realize, "Wow. There's a huge portion of the Psalms, all of all kinds of imprecatory Psalms, but also Psalms of lament and things like this. You find that being a common cry of the prophets, "How long?" You read the book of Lamentations, and you see Jeremiah asking those kinds of questions.
And whatever the philosophy and theology is, the bottom line is the experiential part of people of faith historically has been full of those moments. And actually, a big part of faith is figuring out how to navigate those moments successfully. And if you just walk into the Bible reading what kind of human experience is discovered there, you end up with a really different set of expectations about what might happen within your own life than if you'd say, "Huh. Let me take these three attributes of God and extrapolate."
And as I think you pointed out, they simply are two different tracks. And I do think that it's helpful to have that clear in people's minds to say, "Yeah." Whatever the story is of our philosophy, it often washes really differently than the narratives we see when we just look at scripture itself. Not talking to T. Jump, the atheist, but just talking to Jeremiah. So that to me is an interesting... Any comments you have on that before I move on to some other things?
Tom Jump: Yeah. There's two things there. One is if you read the Bible and read the diversity of different ways God reacted to different people, some He did pretty instantly. He hardened Pharaoh's heart. That didn't take very long. He flooded the world. That didn't take very long. He turned what's her name to salt. That didn't take very long. So He does instantly give responses occasionally. And some, He gives delayed responses, some He gives positive things, some He gives negative things. And it seems like the diversity of potential interactions creates an unfalsifiable criteria, that anything that happens to you, you can say, "Well, this is what God meant to happen, and there's no way to falsify that God was actually doing something or not doing something here." Which I would consider a bad epistemology. I don't consider that to be a reliable way to do things.
The second thing is I don't really think that people create expectations for God. I don't think that's a thing. I, again, think that's more post hoc. I think that people's belief is more kind of like a pain threshold, where if you interact with someone enough, there's this spectrum for any individual. If you interact with this person, they will like you in five minutes. If you interact with this other person, it'll take five days. This other person, it'll take five years, et cetera. And so, different people have different levels of requirements of interaction before they really trust and care about you. And when you pray to, say, a milk carton, some people will stop believing in five minutes, some people five years, et cetera.
And I think the same thing applies to the Bible here. It's not that people have created these expectations, it's more that the way their brain works because of who they are, their neurology, is going to mean that they require a certain level of interaction to have faith or trust in anyone or anything. And since God does not interact at a particular level, there is a certain demographic of people below some threshold who will never be able to believe or trust in such a being because it doesn't interact at the amount that their brain requires for them to trust in.
And so, I don't think it's that they've created false expectations, I think the expectations they've created are a reflection of who they are as individuals and the amount of attention they need as individuals to feel valued enough to really engage in a relationship. And so, I think that, again, that whole... One of the things of saying that people have created expectations and they haven't been met is a kind of thing that I think Christians do that is in a similar vein as the trans women or not women, where it's kind of making a judgment on those individuals rather than reading in the fact that that is a representation of who they are and the kind of interactions they need to feel valued.
Tim Muehlhoff: And the only thing I would say about that, Tom, is that the vast majority of the world has expectations about God, a higher power, that are being met. This is something I mentioned in my conversation with you, that roughly 85% of the world's population believes not just in God, but a organized religion, and that that has been true of humanity since the beginning of time. Now that's what's so wild about our conversation, Tom, is I find that a really interesting fact that gives me pause, that we have been inherently religious since the dawn of recorded history. And that doesn't give you pause at all. It doesn't seem like that gives you any type of pause, that the vast majority of humanity conceptualizes God, has expectations, and feels relatively those expectations are being met.
Tom Jump: No, for the same reason that poor people tend to buy more lottery tickets. It's that if you are in a desperate emotional situation, you tend to invest more in long shots out of necessity, because you don't have... You need a long shot. Whereas people who are in a more stable position like wealthier nations, Norway, Japan, Denmark, Sweden, et cetera, very few of them are religious. So they don't invest in the same kind or don't have an emotional need for the safety net of a God, whereas people who are in impoverished countries, which is the majority of the world, as you pointed out in our last conversation, are still in a very harsh situation. And so, the fact that they cling to this safety net, emotional safety net, is a very rational thing to do, in a way. And I don't find it surprising one bit. I would find it surprising if we solved all of our needs, cured death, no longer needed food, and people continued to remain majority religious, that I would find very surprising.
Dr. Rick Langer: Let me go back to your milk carton illustration. This is kind of following on what Tim asked, but just in a slightly different angle. When you give that illustration, I'm kind of like, "Wow. I literally don't know anyone who talks to a milk carton." I'm sure there are people like that, but I literally don't know and never even heard of anyone who talks to a milk carton. So it seems like kind of a bad analogy for trying to figure out what people are doing when they pray, because I'm like, "It's kind of a non-starter," back to Tim's point, where you have 85% of the people, and even in modern countries, you have people who are praying very much in the United States at 90% levels, who will find themselves praying to God regularly.
So do you think you have a slightly better analogy option you could come up with than like a milk carton or a UFO or a unicorn that just seems completely... I literally know no one who thinks that way, but I know almost everybody who does include prayer as some sort of viable option. And what is going on in a human soul that we do operate that way seems puzzling to me.
Tom Jump: Sure. Volcanoes, stars, horseshoes, hurricanes, meteorites, planets, the wind, fire, water, air, the ether, every single one.
Dr. Rick Langer: So I'm getting your drift.
Tom Jump: Okay.
Dr. Rick Langer: Yeah.
Tom Jump: So the point is just that the milk garden was meant to represent an object which people can imagine has some kind of sentience or consciousness or ability to interact, and people will pray to it in an effort to engage with that consciousness. And the point of the milk carton is that it's something we know that does not have consciousness, but the analogy was meant to show that some people will continue to pray to it for longer before they lose belief in the milk carton's consciousness than others. And so, some people, it'll only take five minutes and they'll stop. Some people, it'll take five hours. Some people, it'll take five years. And so, the point there was to illustrate that different people have different needs emotionally for the amount of engagement that require for them to believe in the entity. And it wasn't specifically the milk carton, really. It didn't matter.
Dr. Rick Langer: Yeah. I guess I'd just say the same thing about volcanoes. I don't know anybody who praised a volcano. I know that people have, I'm just saying I'm kind of looking around now and I'm going, "That isn't around, but I still have 90% of people around me who are praying to a God." And so, all those seem kind of weird disanalogies, but that's okay. We don't have to solve all these things here and now. I sincerely was puzzled by where that one is going, and I think it may just end up at that point, that you have a perception of how those things work that differs from mine. But I'm like, "Man, it just doesn't seem like..."
Tom Jump: Well, I would like to try one more time.
Dr. Rick Langer: Okay.
Tom Jump: So the point of that analogy was not the object. The milk carton didn't matter.
Dr. Rick Langer: No, I get that.
Tom Jump: It's just an arbitrary object that is not conscious.
Dr. Rick Langer: Right.
Tom Jump: The point of the analogy was people will try to talk to something, and the rate at which they will continue to try to interact with this thing is different for different people. And it doesn't matter if it's a milk carton or an imaginary friend or someone who they think is on the other side of the planet or a broken internet connection. When you're on a call and you say, "Hello? Hello, are you there?" Some people will say hello more times than others and continue to try to bridge the connection before hanging up. So the only part of the analogy there was that different people take different amounts of interaction before they give up.
Dr. Rick Langer: Right.
Tom Jump: Now, that was the only part. The milk carton, literally not a part of the analogy that was relevant whatsoever.
Dr. Rick Langer: Yeah. No, I totally get that. I'm just saying the weird thing is that you have people who keep doing this for an entire lifetime, like with your phone call message, I totally get it. At some point you burn out on your phone calling. I've never met anyone who says, "Hello, hello?" for their entire life. It seems like we have vast quantities of people that... So I'm puzzled. What's the difference about God in those stories? That doesn't make God true. I simply marvel at how different it is about how persistent the God thing is compared to all these other inanimate, non-sentient, non-responsive objects.
Tom Jump: Well, I think that goes back to what Tim was saying, that when I brought up the fact that more poor people buy lottery tickets because they're desperate and they need a long shot. Many people in the world are suffering and in need of some kind of security of this hope for life after death, this hope for eternal justice and morality. And because they are in need of that, they are more likely to cling to a belief in a milk carton that hypothetically will provide these things. And so, that's the reason why people will remain religious and are more likely to be religious in more impoverished countries. And as you solve hunger and as you solve death, once we do solve death, the amount of religious people is going to drop significantly, because we no longer have those crutches that we need a safety net for.
Tim Muehlhoff: But, Tom.
Tom Jump: The reason people do is because of the safety net.
Tim Muehlhoff: If Francis Collins were here right now, the head of the Genome Project, America's scientist, or William Lane Craig were here, I find... That'd be a hard argument to make with a William Lane Craig, Thomas Aquinas, Leibniz. I suspect they're going to want to come back at you pretty quick to say, "So you think because of my desperation, I've come up with these philosophical arguments as just merely a desperate ploy?" See, that to me is where I start to... That's where it starts to go south a little bit for me is, we have some amazing intellect scientists, pick any realm, and you've got people who believe in theism.
Dr. Rick Langer: And perhaps more relevantly on that, is just to say, I think if you look at the statistical base of the United States and ask the question, "Are people who are theists more likely to be desperate, poor, impoverished, or whatever?" I'm like, "Not really." Usually, religious belief and practice is an indicator of better mental health and things like that. It isn't obviously exclusive, but there's certainly people who are traumatized by their religion. There's certainly people who are absolute geniuses who are religious. But it seems like a great big bell-shaped curve in the middle isn't actually a bunch of people who only believe in God because of how desperate their situation is, but they're actually just doing fine and still believe and worship God and find it to be an extremely meaningful part of their life. And those are the people I'm missing with the milk carton thing. But again, we can let that one go because we're probably going to... Well, any other comments you want to make on that before we leave that part?
Tom Jump: Yeah. So there's a few things. One is that this is meant to be the populace, the reason that the vast majority of the population would more likely believe than not believe, so the fact that there are some outliers wouldn't be surprising.
Dr. Rick Langer: Right.
Tom Jump: Secondly, Francis Collins' conversion story was he saw a waterfall that broke into three shapes, and he identified that with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So yes, I think that most likely his justifications are a kind of crutch, too. But I think that the more important thing, even in America, the less educated people are more likely to be religious. So yes, the more impoverished you are, the more likely you are to be religious. The more educated, as you go up the academic ladder, the less religious people there are. Same is true in scientific fields. But the important thing there is that if we could solve death, do you really think most people would still be religious? Because I think, no. I think if we're done with death, no one needs to believe in heaven anymore.
Dr. Rick Langer: Oh, yeah. I do think people would be religious still. In other words, I think there's a great big positive benefit of religion just on an ongoing basis. In fact, Tim and I are now getting officially old enough that we hang around with people who are dealing with cancer, maybe it's Stage 4 cancer, looking at the prospect of death in the eye, so we spent a lot of time thinking about religion connected to death. But for most of my life, I lived in kind of blissful, almost willful sometimes, ignorance of the idea that my life might one day end, and I was just sort of enjoying the presence of God in the middle of my daily life. It wasn't a solution then, and seemed to be true of an awful lot of the people around me as well in my churches and places where I worked and served.
Tom Jump: I think it'll be interesting to see the future, what happens.
Dr. Rick Langer: Yes.
Tom Jump: But I'm willing to make a bet that as we solve death, there will be less and less religious people.
Tim Muehlhoff: We're going to make that bet with you, Tom, right now, and we will check in every year until Rick and I can't check in anymore.
Dr. Rick Langer: There you go.
Tim Muehlhoff: And I think, sadly, we're going to hit that quicker than you, Tom. Hey, Tom, very quickly, so I appreciate your candor on your channel to say that you cannot prove God does not exist. And we're in that camp, too. We can't prove He exists, of course. But you can't prove that He doesn't. So what is it that gives you the most confidence? Is there... Rick and I would both have certain arguments and personal experience with God, feeling like we have experience Him. But what would be the thing that gives you confidence that the atheist perspective, is there an argument, a particular viewpoint that you just find like, "Okay, this is my go-to that really does solidify things for me."
Tom Jump:Yeah. It'd be the difference between discovered properties and asserted properties. Pretty much all the arguments come down to this. An explanation of any phenomenon is better explained by a combination of discovered properties than of a hypothesis that includes any asserted properties. God's properties are all asserted properties: nonphysical mind, omnis, all the omnis outside of space and time. None of those have been confirmed. And so, the positing a God as existing is about as equivalent as positing a leprechaun or Santa as existing. All the properties of those things are also asserted, not discovered, the magic of Santa, the magic of the leprechaun, all asserted. There's no discovered properties in that thing.
And so, any hypothesis that you posit that is all asserted properties, it is rational to believe is purely imaginary. It's a figment of people's imaginations. You're completely justified in believing if somebody has posited a hypothesis of primarily or all asserted properties, you're really rationally justified in believing it's purely a figment of their imagination. And for that reason, I think all God concepts are probably imaginary.
Tim Muehlhoff: Can I make a quick comment from a communication perspective then I'll kick it over to my philosopher friend?
Tom Jump: Sure.
Tim Muehlhoff: Remember we had that great exchange? And I encourage the listeners, go back and read segment one of our discussion with you. Remember that thing at the very end where I said, "Hey, Tom. What is it that Christian communicators do that kind of rankles the atheist community?" And you gave some, I think, great suggestions. Let me be candid and say what rankles the Christian community is when our belief in God gets put in with leprechauns and Santa Claus. So just from a purely... Like when you say that, I have to take a deep breath, take a sip of my coffee, and go, "I'm with the Winsome Conviction Project." So that's an interesting communication point of that's a hard one for our community to take, because it feels... Do you understand how we feel like that feels belittling?"
Tom Jump: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. So I think I actually mentioned that in our last conversation. I said, "Most Christians think that this comparison is an insult, and I don't mean it that way." The reason I say this is because I think there is an actual one-to-one correlation here, which is about the ontology of the properties of the thing. So what God is made of is asserted properties. And what leprechauns are made of is asserted properties. So the comparison I'm making here isn't meant to be an insult, it's meant to be a literal comparison.
So just like how many people on the left will just immediately be triggered by someone who says, "Trans women aren't women" without actually considering the logic behind the arguments, I think that many Christians do the same thing when they hear God compared to leprechauns without actually considering the logic of the argument. So again, the logic of my argument here is that both of those things are made of asserted properties, and asserted properties aren't rational to believe in.
Tim Muehlhoff: But I would only say that it's the sender/receiver. So you get to send your message however you want to send it, but for me to receive it, if the goal of this, which I believe is your heart, if the goal of this to have productive conversations, if you're sending it in a way that puts up an immediate emotional roadblock, then I think I would try... If I did something that I knew really rankled you, but I thought it was a legitimate argument, but I just knew that it put what we call communication noise, I think it'd be incumbent upon me as a communicator to find a way of presenting this that didn't create immediate communication noise and distractions. So that's just coming from the Communication Professor side of me, is that you're creating noise as you're trying to make the argument. And I might want to try to find a way to make the argument without creating the noise that I have to work through to focus on your argument, if that makes sense.
Tom Jump: A quick question on that. Can you name something that is made of only asserted properties that we could compare to God that you wouldn't find insulting?
Tim Muehlhoff: Let me just say this real quick. Rick?
Dr. Rick Langer: Well.
Tim Muehlhoff: No, that's a great... No, Rick, that's a great question. What comes to mind? Anything comes to mind?
Dr. Rick Langer: Well, so I... Building things up from the way you distinguish these asserted properties versus, what was the other phrase you used from this?
Tom Jump: Discovered.
Dr. Rick Langer: Discovered, yeah.
Tom Jump: Discovered and asserted.
Dr. Rick Langer: Things that you would find. My sense of discovered when you're saying that is very kind of naturalistic, materialistic, kind of things that go bump in the night kind of properties. And I'm like... I remembered in my philosophy program, doing a thing on the ontological argument for the existence of God. It's never seemed very compelling to me. Even though I was a theist, I was like, "Yeah, that just is a squirrelly argument."
But I was reading some things where people talked about the difficulty of figuring out the nature of things like, what is it? The 13, I don't know how many prime numbers we found, but whatever. Let's say we found 13 prime numbers. Is there a 14th prime number? Well, that's actually an objective question. There's a reality about that, presumably. But where in the world would that 14th prime number exist? Does it go bump in the night? Is it in occupying some grand mind in the sky? If it's a discovery, where is that prime number lodged?
And you begin to discover a whole set of things that we have a really hard time giving a good account of. And some of these are mundane things like, "What in the world is time? It's a weird thing. Is time moving infinitely into the past or is it moving into the future? Is it not moving at all? What is time?" And we have all these sorts of things that are really hard to give an account of, but wildly important to us.
And so, I think there's a lot of things that kind of have an ambiguous status relative to your discovered properties and the asserted properties. I'm not sure that that distinction, it's handy, but I don't think it does as much work as you think it does. So that would be my concern with that response. I'm also noticing for us that we are at the end of our time. You have a... I'm getting a "hi" sign from my friend Tim here.
Tim Muehlhoff: But Tom, we're going to give you last comment.
Tom Jump: Oh, yeah, sure. So I think numbers are conceptual. They aren't property. So numbers are fully explained analytic things, purely explained. Time is physical. Einstein covered that one. That has been discovered. So space and time have been very demonstrably demonstrated. So I think those are both very well-explained. I think everything that we know of can be well explained in this context, which is why the vast majority of high leveled experts in the Royal Society and National Academy of Science are all very nationalist, because it does seem to explain all these things very well. And I think you would need to justify an epistemology in a new way that we haven't discovered yet in order to make those kinds of claims rational or at the same level as the physicalist interpretation.
Tim Muehlhoff: Tom, where can people find more of your information, perspective, your YouTube channel?
Tom Jump: Youtube.com/tjump. Please invite me to speeches and lectures and debates all over the place. I'm always looking for more people to talk with. I'm happy to go anywhere.
Tim Muehlhoff: Hey, here's what I appreciate about our conversation, Tom, is, and I would encourage people to go back to listen to segment one. We didn't just talk about content. We talked about the relational side of this whole journey. And I think both of those are really important. And I'm really glad that in these two segments, we didn't just talk about concepts, ideas, falsifiability, but we also talked a little bit about how to talk to each other. And I think both of those conversations are really helpful, and we would love to explore that with you more in the future if you're up for it.
Tom Jump: Absolutely, anytime, just let me know.
Tim Muehlhoff: Okay. Hey, thanks, Tom. And from now on, please refer to me as T Muehl. That's going to be my new handle, okay T Jump?
Tom Jump: I'm sure we can turn that into something dirty in the chat.
Dr. Rick Langer: Tom, please don't do that. Whatever else you do, please don't do that. Tim doesn't need that.
Tim Muehlhoff: Thanks, Tom.
Tom Jump: Absolutely.
Dr. Rick Langer: Thank you for joining us for the Winsome Conviction Podcast, and we'd encourage you to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, wherever it is that you may be getting your podcasts. And also, check us out at thewinsomeconviction.com website. Thanks for being here.
