It reminds me of the old question, can God create a rock so heavy that He can't lift? So what do you have to say about that, this argument from the incoherence of the concept of God?

Yes, there are lots of different arguments along these lines.

One of them is, as you said, like the stone berg ox.

Can God create a stone that's so heavy that He can't lift it? But, I mean, philosophers have long understood that the way that we should understand omnipotence is not the ability to do, like, literally anything, like for instance, make one plus one equals 17 or, like, make square circles.

No, omnipotence is something like the ability to do anything possible.

And it's just not possible for there to be a rock that's too heavy for an unli- unlimitedly powerful being to lift.

So it's no challenge to God's omnipotence.

If the universe can be explained without appealing to God, then adding God may be an unnecessary explanatory entity

Yeah.

Um, so I, this...

Going back to the kinda story, I persisted in a state of agnosticism basically up until maybe my fir- the end of my first year of grad school and going into my second year as well.

So, like, you know, I would get some arguments here and there, some new and interesting arguments for God's existence that I would think, "Oh, yeah, maybe these have some force," uh, throughout, like, my second year of college and my third year of college and my gap year and grad school and whatnot.

Uh, I'd get some arguments for theism and I thought, "Oh, yeah, these are interesting.

Maybe they pull me a little bit." But I would also, like, lose some arguments for theism that I thought previously were plausible.

So, you know, like, I kind of tr- had a 180 turn where I was like, "Oh, yeah, I find some of these arguments for causal fairness and plausible," but then I was, like, starting to lose those as I went on and, um, studied further.

Mm-hmm.

[laughs]

"Oh, no." And I remember, I, I remember going through it and I was like, by the end, I was like, "Oh, no.

Catholicism might be true.

That's not good.

That's not good." So like I can tell you some of the things that I sort of discovered when I was looking through that.

So like he goes through five Eucharistic miracles: Lanciano, Buenos Aires, Tixtla, Socorro, Legnica.

Different continents, different time periods.

Yeah.

Hmm.

It's not like there are, uh, active agents, active government agents targeting people.

It's just like an act of omission.

It's negligence.

So, like, the course of evolutionary history would indeed, under this view, we'd expect it to take a kind of indifferent-looking, uh...

It would- we'd expect it to have an indifferent-looking character.

So, like, why might God do this? Like, doesn't this seem to be, like, an irresponsible policy on God's part? Like, uh, doesn't that seem to be kind of implausible? Well, I don't know.

But yeah, I wanna hear the alien thing.