Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Alex O’Connor vs Glen Scrivener: Epic Debate or Failure to Communicate? || SLP633

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Alex O’Connor vs Glen Scrivener: Epic Debate or Failure to Communicate? || SLP633 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that you can point to like the gay rights movement, to feminism, even to industrial abortion, and still say that, you know, ultimately.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, it's no, but but there's some Christian influence going on here.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: You mischaracterize me there.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: You mischaracterize me there, quite quite substantially there.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: But I just want to give my take on why the conversation broke down at certain points.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: And from my point of view, I think it's down to two words.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: Justin has hosted the second of his series of uncommon ground conversations.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: The first was between Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: The second is between myself, Gauntless Gargoyle, and Alex O'Connor, sexy Lucifer himself.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: I get that phrase sexy Lucifer from Alex.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: I was texting him last night when the video came out, and I was like, how come your headshot on the thumbnail gets to look like you are Alex freaking O'Connor?
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: You have ice in your veins.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: And my headshot just looks like I'm saying, hmm, would you like a cookie?
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I I don't know what I don't know what my look is.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but yeah, and then he texted back to me.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: He says, Yes, they seem to have gone for sexy Lucifer for me.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that uh absolutely uh nails the look.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: And it's getting quite a lot of uh comments underneath the video.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: This might be the most talked-about feature of the debate.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: So far, I I am recording this about 18 hours after the video has gone live.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Glenn Scrivener from Speak Life.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: Are you subscribed to the channel?
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: There are a thousand things we could discuss coming out of this dialogue between myself and Alex O'Connor.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe we'll do further videos about this if people think it's interesting.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: But I just want to give my take on why the conversation broke down at certain points.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: And from my point of view, I think it's down to two words.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: We missed each other at points because I think we misunderstood what the other person meant by unthinkable and unfalsifiable.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: And it all started right at the very beginning when Justin asked Alex, can you steel man Glenn Scribbener's position and say what he thinks?
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: Listen in to a tremendous description of my position, which I think gets everything right apart from one word.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: And let's see if you can guess what the one word is.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: It seems to me that that Glenn is proposing what has come to be quite a popular view at the moment, especially among Christians, but also among some secular historians, that Western civilization, um Watson all, as it were, the good stuff, the bad stuff, just the nature of the West is more thoroughly indebted to Christianity than at least has been given credit for in the past, you know, sort of hundred or two hundred years in academia and enlightenment thinking, that what we often perceive of as secular advancements against church doctrine and religious thinking uh is in fact a blossoming of the Christian spirit.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: So when we look at things like uh enlightenment values and freedoms and equality and all of these kinds of things, and we think of them as you know, enlightenment thinkers asserting these against religious influence, they're actually secretly wearing Christian clothing, hence the air we breathe, because we don't even notice that it's there.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's been so successful, in other words.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: Did you catch what the one word is?
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's the word blossoming.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: That everything we see in the West is Christian in an undifferentiated sense because it's all just a blossoming of the same thing.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's one way of seeing the Tom Holland thesis.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think that's particularly accurate about his thesis.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's certainly not accurate about a confessional Christian's thesis.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think there are things that are Christian, there are things that are non-Christian, there are things that are post-and anti-Christian.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: Nevertheless, the whole thing has been shaped by Christendom, and that's why I say this.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: How's that, Glenn?
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's an exceptional description of Tom Holland's view, I think.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so Tom Holland, um one of those who's absolutely popularized this thesis in his 2019 book, Dominion.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I th I think he and I would disagree on on certain things.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: I I think he would more own the word blossoming that you used, that uh enlightenment values are a blossoming of a Christianity that was sort of in inherent in that progression.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: I think I would I would make a slightly more modest claim on that on that point and just say uh that those developments were unthinkable without Christianity and have drawn on some profoundly Christian intuitions in the developments that they make.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think one of the issues that that I have back and forth with Tom over is um is everything Christianity?
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: Like, like literally everything, is is every blossoming, is every development, are we still in the same species?
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: If we've evolved, you know, to have six, you know, six fingers instead of five, is it still Homo sapiens?
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: If we've um got to a Christianity um that that is now okay with infanticide and abortion, are we still is this still is this still Christian?
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um I I I see Tom actually sort of drawing more of a circle, more of a line now than he did when he wrote Dominion.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think he might say blossoming.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I think 2019 Tom Holland would say blossoming.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: I think I would say um ripple effects that um is unthinkable without.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, with Christianity as the stone that drops into the pond.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't think the modern West is simply uh a blossoming and a further blossoming and a further blossoming of what Christianity is.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: I do not identify the West with Christianity.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: The West might need Christianity, Christianity does not need the West.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: And Western Christendom is not the only flourishing of Christendom out there in the world.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: What's more, Western civilization is not the same thing as Christianity, not at all.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: There are many things within Western culture that are disobedience to the way of Jesus, and I tried to make that clear both in my book and I've tried to make that clear in this discussion.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: But I think there's a caricature of the Tom Holland thesis that is very widely believed, and it's not really what Tom thinks, and it's certainly not what confessional Christians like I think.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: Now, right from the beginning of this video, I do affirm that Christianity has been so pervasive that the places we've gotten to are unthinkable without the Christian revolution.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: Do you see the difference?
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's like calling a culture post-industrial.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: You can be a post-industrial economy.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: That does not mean you're an anti-industrial economy.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's just that your economy is thoroughly marked by passing through that epoch of industrialization.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: In the same way we are a post-Christian society.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: Some people want to date the time at which we became a post-Christian society.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: You might want to date that to the 1950s, you might want to date that to World War I, you might want to date that to 1776, you might want to date that to the 16th century, you might want to date that to the 10th century.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: There are different denominational and cultural and political reasons why you would date things in those ways.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: But sure, we are a post-Christian society.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: But post-Christian does not mean anti-Christian any more than post-industrial means anti-industrial.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: In my book, I talk about all sorts of things that are unthinkable without the Christian Revolution, including trans ideology.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: Trans ideology is miles from Orthodox Christianity, but it is unthinkable without some of the building blocks that Christianity has taught the West.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: So my position is that trans ideology is far less than Christian.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: Alex, when he heard me say unthinkable, thinks that I think that trans ideology is more than Christian, which I'm not saying at all.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: Here's one place where I think there is a misunderstanding.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if the thesis is just that Western civilization has been greatly influenced by Christianity, it's like, you know, you know, of course.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: But the idea, as you worded it earlier, Glenn, in fact, you you sort of um put it more strongly than I try to characterize your thesis, that these kind of developments would be unthinkable without Christianity.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: Perhaps we can dig into what certain post-Christian developments are unthinkable without the road that they've gone through that is Christendom.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: I think this is where we missed each other, and I'll leave it to the viewer to this to decide it probably is my failure to communicate.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: It might be Alex's failure to understand my position.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's probably a little bit of both, but I don't think that unthinkable means that trans ideology is more Christian.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: But what I'm saying is that trans ideology has been marked by centuries of Christianization.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not at all obvious that we would get to the gender ideology of some people in the year 2026 without having gone through a whole bunch of Christian developments.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: That doesn't mean we're still within the parameters of Orthodox Christianity once we arrived there.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: We left the boundaries of Orthodox Christianity some distance ago.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: But that's what I mean by post-Christian developments being unthinkable.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: I say something like that in the debate here.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: Something that is not a universally positive development is that rights are now considered separate from obligations.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: There's all sorts of discourse around rights as a sword as opposed to rights as a shield.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: The protection of the weak seemed to be the origin of this idea of the inviolable worth of this person, so this person's rights cannot be traded off against the communal greater good.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so rights as a shield was very much at the at the heart of things.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think this is another example of ways in which Christian intuitions have been taken in post-Christian directions, um, in ways that are unthinkable without Christianity, but are not what Christians are saying.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I say post-Christian developments are unthinkable without Christianity, but they are not what Christians are saying.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: I had said, but I've clearly failed to be clear enough, that I don't believe that all these things are a blossoming of Christianity, as though those things can be called Christianity.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think those things are far less than Christian, not far more than Christian, even though they are unthinkable without the Jesus Revolution.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: The secular is definitely a Christiany kind of a thing that gets developed into separation of church and state, that gets developed into the freedom of religion, that is now taken to mean the freedom from religion, and we're all secular people now.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um that that is we're we're we're some considerable distance from the Christian origins at that point.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: But that kind of development is unthinkable outside of the Christian trajectory that that gave us that.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: And therefore, of course we're in a society um we're in the only society on the planet that's ever thought of itself in in religionless terms, right?
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: I think that makes sense.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you think that makes sense.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: I I might be in the wrong here, um, but just notice what Alex does at this point.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Can I ask you a question?
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like one problem I have with this is that it seems like basically anything that the West like does or is said to do can in some vague way be traced back to the Bible or the Christian tradition in one way or another.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if that's not the case, because that would be a little bit too weak of a principle, what would be a falsifying condition?
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like, if there was something that were true in the West, something that people did, something that people accepted morally Is there an example of such a thing that would make you say, okay, that's not grounded in Christianity?
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: In a in a way that you don't think I could pull a similar trick of sort of saying, ah yeah, but like, you know, this biblical story or this church tradition or whatever, like can you think of an example of something society could be doing that would disallow you, that would falsify the idea that it's Christian in origin?
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: Alex takes me to be seeing everything in Western civilization as Christian in an undifferentiated sense, which I think I've gone out of my way to say is not the case.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: So he brings up the question of is there a falsifying condition for my thesis?
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas I think the shoe is on the other foot.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: I think what we'll see is that Alex's position is far more the unfalsifiable one, because his is based on a counterfactual history of what might have happened without Christianity.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: My position is trying to look historically at what has in fact happened.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: But if the question is, what is it in Western society that is non-Christian?
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, well, here's my answer.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: Can you think of a single example of something the West could be doing that would make you say, actually, no, that's definitely not Christian?
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: Oh.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: Industrial scale abortion?
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: That was one off the top of the head.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: I could I could mention many, many more.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, right.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: So if like and you don't think the West is doing that?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: So when you say that's not very Christian.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: So when you say that Western civilization warts and all is indebted to Christianity, this is an example of a massive part of Western modern Western culture, which is which has got nothing to do with Christianity, it's actually contra Christianity.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: One hundred percent.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: But many people, if you ask people on the street, I think popular consensus, especially in the UK, is that abortion is is fine, at least up to a certain point.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: It seems to be a settled issue here.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: So the air that those people are breathing is profoundly unchristian.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Which I say in the book.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um and what what I say in the book is what's fascinating at that point is that they are doing what is I I consider to be a pagan practice for some profoundly Christian reasons.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: And and, you know, uh it's healthcare, right?
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: It is it's about bodily autonomy.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: But I asked you some for an example of something which you would say is not like uh not an example of the flourishing of Christianity.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: You said industrial abortion.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: When I've said, well, that means it's not Christian, you said, ah, but they're actually doing a very Christian thing.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no, they're not doing a Christian thing.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: You said that they're motivated by Christian principles.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: No, I don't think they're motivated by Christian principles.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um I I just think that the way you are able to forge some some quite pagan ends in a modern society, and there's lots of pagan stuff that we do, um, you do tend to have to use some Christian language in order to do it, or Christian-ish language in order to do something profoundly unchristian.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so once again then, uh like we've we've sort of landed on this thing, industrial abortion, which you say that to to buttress in in Western civilization, you need to use Christian language.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: What I'm looking for is a falsifying condition then, something which the West could be doing, which you which you could not make that argument for.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: It seems like it doesn't matter what you point to.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that you can point to like the gay rights movement, to feminism, even to industrial abortion, and still say that, you know, ultimately.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, it's no, but but there's some Christian influence going on here.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: You mischaracterizing me there.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: You mischaracterise me there, quite quite substantially there.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: I I think it's a totally pagan practice, which we are um heading full steam towards.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: I think euthanasia is not is another kind of pagan practice that you know it is is utterly in keeping with paganism, not in keeping with Christianity.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um but and uh even the reasons that are given for it, some some of them are starting to be uh reasons such as, well, you know, the the NHS is is creaking at the seams and and you know th this might be cheaper.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: Some of those sorts of um justifications are being given, which which are pagan kinds of justifications for pagan kinds of practices.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: I hope just slowing things down and um piecing together parts from different parts of the conversation um has clarified my position.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: I could have been clearer in the moment, and perhaps in my book I could have been clearer.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe I needed to put you know the last two chapters up front in the book.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: And if people are not reading to the end of my book, then I I guess I need to take that as a challenge to keep my readers' uh attention until chapters nine and ten, when I think I'm quite clear on this.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: But hopefully, sitting down in a studio, I've been able to be more clear uh than I was able to be in the middle of a back and forth conversation.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: At the center of the human story stands a man.
• 15:28
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• 15:32
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• 15:51
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• 15:55
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• 16:00
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• 16:03
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• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: Unthinkable is a word that lies at the heart of this debate.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: But there's another word that lies at the heart of this debate.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's the word unfalsifiable.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's a challenge that Alex has made to my position, that my position doesn't have a falsifying condition.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: He takes me to be saying that everything in the West simply is, by default, Christian in an undifferentiated sense, which I guess would make my thesis unfalsifiable.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: But here's what I do at this very stage in the debate is I try and throw the accusation back the other way and say, actually, it's Alex's position that is the unfalsifiable position.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: And here's how I try to do it.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: But you're looking for falsifiability when we're not talking about science.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: So falsifiability works brilliantly if you've got population A, population B, and a control group, and let's run the experiment and let's look at the results, and we'll we'll will A, B, C test it.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um you cannot do that with the past.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: You literally we we look back at the past, there is not A, B, or C past.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: There is only A.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that A has been 20 centuries of some some very profound Christianization.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: And we've come out the other end of 20 centuries of very, very strong Christianization.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: And the extraordinary thing is that we're able to so many people are able to think of Tom Holland's thesis as as wild or, you know, it it's an incredibly modest thesis, which I think is is quite obvious.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it's quite obvious to everyone else around the world.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: When everyone else comes to the UK, they're just like, well, I've come to a Christian country, haven't I?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: I think that.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: You think people people come to the UK and think, wow, how how profoundly Christian this place is?
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: Ugh, stupid Glenn.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: I was in the middle of actually doing a bit of a judo move and and throwing back the accusation at Alex.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think I was doing okay until I completely overstepped and like brought in this people who come to the UK think that they're in a Christian country.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um I didn't need to say that.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: I have no evidence for saying it.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: Even if there was multiple lines of evidence for this one claim, it wouldn't help me very much.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: I was actually onto a winner by um talking about the unfalsifiability thing with Alex.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: So there's one of the regrets that I have um for this conversation.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: Alex, a number of times, said that we would have gotten to our modern secular understandings of ethics without Christianity.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: He thought, for instance, that we would get to our modern understandings of feminism without Christianity.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: He says that here.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: You've got Joseph Hendrick writing the weirdest people in the world saying that it's it's precisely that chapter, and together with Matthew 19, is the Christian sexual revolution that has completely upended our ideas of the human person and of the individual and of equality.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't think you get feminism of the kind of variety that we get without this intellectual genealogy.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's it's it's a good thing.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think they would have done it anyway.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: We I think those women would have.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: They would have done that anyway.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: See, that's the untestable hypothesis, right?
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: That is that is to say, we've had we've had history A behind us.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to tell another story, however unlikely that that story is, and I think we would have gotten to here anyway via that other route.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: We haven't got to that other route.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: That isn't think it's that unlikely.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe I'm wrong, and maybe it's um unfalsifiable or unprovable, but maybe that is just the nature of history.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, in the same we were just talking about slavery and you know, why it is that in the Enlightenment, or around the time of the Enlightenment, you know, Christianity does it again, or maybe once again it's because slavery is also like like economically necessary for so many societies.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: And around about the time that we start developing farming technologies that might allow us to do away with it, suddenly the slavery gets a colonic.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not a good thing.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'm saying it was a connoisside to end the transatlantic slave trade.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: So they did it against their economic interests.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: You probably didn't hear me say a connoisseur there, but that's what I was saying there.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: Economic suicide, another way of saying it.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's a case of people asserting their own self-interest against oppressive systems and trying to put France.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: There were the economic arguments, and Napoleon said, no, actually, slavery is good for the economy, and so back it comes.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: Was he wrong to bring back slavery because it was good?
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: He he claimed that it was good for human flourishing.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: Whether it was right or wrong is separate from the question of whether it was indebted to Christianity.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell Whether he was right or wrong to bring slavery back.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I asked Alex a really simple question.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's pretty straightforward to say, should Napoleon have brought back slavery or should he have kept slavery abolished?
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: Alex's meta-ethical position does not allow him to say whether he should have done one or the other.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so Alex says, Whether it was right or wrong is separate from the question of whether it was indebted to Christianity.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the very point.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to call time.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well done, Justin.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we were an hour overdue at that point.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to have a 90-minute conversation.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: It ended up being two and a half hours.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: Thoroughly enjoyed it though.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that question, though, of unfalsifiability is really worth pressing into.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: To say that we would have gotten to a modern understanding of feminism.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, which feminism, which wave of feminism, and we probably need to check our watches for which particular gender ideology is in vogue in the Year of Our Lord 2026.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: But the idea that we would have gotten to here, irregardless of any kind of historical journey towards the Year of Our Lord 2026, that is very unlikely and totally unfalsifiable.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: But to give you an idea of how unlikely this story is, you know, Arsenal are top of the English Premier League right now.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: I could say, yeah, but they would be top of the Premier League, whether Mikhail Arteta was manager or not.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like, oh, okay, well, I don't know.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's it's unlikely, it's also unfalsifiable.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: And if I then added onto it, you know, if they hadn't signed Ezra over the summer, irregardless of that, they would definitely be top of the Premier League, and if and if and if, and I could like add up all those different counterfactuals.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: And if I was still certain that Arsenal would definitely be top of the Premier League, this is still not parallel to the idea that we would have modern ideas of feminism with or without Christianity.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: To to say that, that's a bit like saying Arsenal would be top of the league even if they were playing basketball.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, what are we even talking about?
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: The idea that we would have gotten to rights-based international law, the idea that we would have gotten to our just war theory, the idea that we would have gotten to gender relations or freedom of speech or the welfare state, or the the idea that we would have gotten to here without Christianity is like saying that Arsenal would be top of the league whether they were playing football or basketball.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's just it's like I don't even understand what you're talking about.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: I find it an absolutely unlikely story.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's totally unprovable, it's totally unfalsifiable.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought it was the Christians who are meant to be the ones who are telling unlikely, unfalsifiable stories.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: There's plenty more to discuss about this dialogue.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um by the way, Alex and I uh get on like a house on fire, and uh we've been enjoying one another's company and uh messaging back and forwards and meeting and chatting back and forwards.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: You'd never believe it from the thumbnail, but uh Gormless Gargoyle and sexy Lucifer really hit it off.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I very much hope uh that we can have more conversations about that.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: If you're interested in these sorts of things, why don't you give the channel a subscribe and maybe we'll talk about this dialogue again if there's interest in it?
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: But subscribe to the channel and we'll catch you on the next one.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: God bless.