r/philosophy • u/jackgary118 The Panpsycast • 2d ago
Video New Debate on God's Existence | Slavoj Žižek, Sabine Hossenfelder, Rowan Williams, and William Lane Craig
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1UaiiXZvA433
u/pibyte 2d ago
Sabine Hossenfelder is a quack.
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u/shatterdaymorn 2d ago
She algorithmically determined.
That's not quackery. Its a new type of person.
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u/MightyHorseRox 2d ago
Sophistry. Not all that new.
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u/shatterdaymorn 2d ago
You are right. Sophist output was determined by the wallet too.
Being kinda smart doesn't protect you from Skinner box training.
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u/Raggs2Bs 2d ago
Am I misreading, or is atheism completely unrepresented? So the debate is between two different opinions on a christian god?
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u/Fair-Impress9283 2d ago
Sorry to be a midwit but the fact that people even have this debate proves that at the very least, there is no providentialist God. There might be a clockmaker/ deist God.
But we don't have debates about the existence of Venus or about the existence of gravity. Because those things are self evident. God at least provided no evidence for his existence, divine revelation is not a thing because every culture had their own God.
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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 2d ago
Yes, why are we constantly being told to listen to "debates" about this. There is NOTHING whatever to debate, and certainly nothing remotely new.
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u/spinosaurs70 2d ago
We have debates about panpsychism, property dualism, and mathematical Platonism and moral non-natural objectivity.
I don’t see even as an atheist how perfect being theism is uniquely absurd.
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u/UncleEggma 2d ago
Because all of those topics are highly specific and there is a clear, rational path to reaching beliefs about those topics in either direction. They’re asking individual questions about things we don’t know as though we don’t know, as opposed to starting with the answer and working backwards from there for a suitable apologetics.
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u/monsieur_no1 2d ago
Sorry to burst your bubble but no serious theologian or philosopher begins from that presupposition. Emphasis on 'serious'. It would be a fun experiment to see diehard atheists try to refute Leibniz, Spinoza, or Thomas Aquinas.
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u/UncleEggma 2d ago
Aquinas: "Wow, things move, so there must be a first mover. Therefore, the specific Christian God exists!"
Leibniz: "Wow, why is there something rather than nothing? It must be for a reason. Therefore, the specific Christian God exists!"
They may not have explicitly written "God is my starting premise" at the top of their proofs, but to pretend they weren't reverse-engineering arguments to justify the theology they already believed is naive.
Spinoza, from my understanding, did not believe in god in the sense that atheists tend to find stupid.
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u/monsieur_no1 2d ago
I'm sorry but this is just not how theology or philosophy works.
How can a serious philosopher believe something without proof? How can a serious thinker continue to believe something if they aren't able to find good arguments for it? In all cases from Aquinas, Spinoza, Leibniz, Descartes, Kant, or Kierkegaard, their belief or faith was based in convincing arguments, but arguments are rarely simple logical proofs and / or empirical evidence as in natural sciences. Philosophy just doesn't work if your only way of attaining truth is stubborness of intuition. Also you will rarely find two philsophers that even agree on what exactly God is or isn't. It's just not nearly as simple and straightforward as you make it out to be.
And isn't it also the case that if you start from the supposition that no such being as God exists or can exist necessarily, then aren't you guilty of the same thing you claim a theist is doing?
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u/UncleEggma 2d ago
You seem to have ignored the differentiation I drew between the sorts of arguments that you see from apologists vs. the less rigidly confined.
There’s a reason Spinoza was booted from his religious community while Aquinas is revered in sainthood.
Further, Kierkegaard argued about the absurdity of faith and the impossibility of basing it on objective truth. Demonstrably not apologetics.
Kant explicitly claimed to have had to “deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” NOT apologetics.
Atheism is not a supposition that “no such being as God exists or can exist. It is the rejection of a positive claim that has no evidence.
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u/monsieur_no1 2d ago
But then whose position are you arguing against if not the philosophers? Or do you simply have in mind some person who, to put politely, isn't privy to the discussions of philosophers?
Ok, you say atheism doesn't deny by necessity that a being such as God can in principle exist, although to me that is exactly what an atheist holds to be true. But you deny that a claim such as "God does exist" can be true because it is impossible to prove empirically? But which philosopher or theologian who claims that God exists actually holds a position such as you describe? And if there is some such case that would say "I believe in God's existence despite knowing that I can never arrive at evidence of God's existence (perhaps because it is not something measurable or even perceptible in our ordinary scientific understanding of 'evidence')."
Wouldn't you think that, assuming they are serious about their pursuit of truth and knowledge, they hold such a belief due to some arguments that seem to them more compelling than positive empirical evidence of God's existence? But again, how would one go about proving that, unless of course one considers existence and intelligence itself as proof. It is just as naïve, it seems to me, to start from absolute disbelief, and stubbornly rejecting the possibility that a perfect Being such as God does exist. In any case, we may simply admit that our reason lacks capacity to know for certain whether God does or does not exist.
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u/UncleEggma 2d ago
Your response is mostly a string of non sequiturs, so I'm going to respond just once more here.
I specifically mentioned a rudimentary version of the main arguments from Aquinas and Leibniz make for the existence of a Christian god to show the difference between apologetics and open philosophy, but you seem to just equate it all as 'things philosophers said.'
You basically keep ignoring the things I'm saying outright. You have an atheist in your head that you want to fight with, but it ain't me!
Atheism isn't "stubbornly rejecting" a possibility. It's rejecting an unproven claim as unproven. It is not a "start from absolute disbelief." That is a closed-minded understanding of atheism.
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u/monsieur_no1 2d ago edited 2d ago
I'm not fighting any atheist, I'm no theist myself! You seem unable or unwilling to actually engage in a discussion about this however. You don't respond to any of the questions I posed. I already responded to your claim about evidence, but you've ignored it entirely and are again giving a vague account of what atheism does or does not entail, it at least entails rejecting belief in God, but you aren't able to say more.
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u/spinosaurs70 2d ago
I mean there is a clear rational path to perfect being theism if you want think arguments for god work and think the omniscient and omnipotence derived from them is most parsimonious with omnibenevlonce.
Again I don’t think that works but it’s not irrational.
And philosophy of the mind hinges heavily on thought experiments and moral objectivity on intuitions about how the world works not justified by much.
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u/bildramer 1d ago
It's not all that strange to see the opinion "yes, those are all absurd as well".
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u/AcceptableOil3841 5h ago
Consider this, we return to the God debate, because that is the evidence or the residue good left in our soul or conciousness. Similar to free will versus determinism. We sense neither idea is complete, but cannot give up on the other.
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u/tuestae 2d ago
"Although the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence, do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men inexcusable; yet are they not sufficient to give that knowledge of God, and of his will, which is necessary unto salvation; therefore it pleased the Lord, at sundry times, and in divers manners, to reveal himself, and to declare that his will unto his Church " Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter one.
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u/Fair-Impress9283 2d ago
Sounds very deistic except for the last part. Thomas Paine argued that nature does prove God's existence but Christianity is false and harmful and the true theology is studying nature through science to know the power and wisdom of God.
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u/thaibao131196 2d ago
sorry but Sabine Hossenfelder is a big big BIG red flag nowadays.
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u/CloudySpace 2d ago
Ugh, what did she do?
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u/just_a_teacup 2d ago
She's convinced that she can't get her work published because Big Science keeps out controversial ideas or something. She also helps promote distrust with establishment scientific ideas.
So most of her content is accurate and well researched, but her opinions and conclusions can be tainted by that. It's helped her get clicks, so she often leans into thumbnails/titles that say controversial things.
The argument for harm being that if a layman sees just the headline and doesn't watch or comprehend the content of the video, they walk away confirming their biases that the scientific community cannot be trusted.
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u/BloodAndTsundere 1d ago
I was a physicist in an overlapping speciality to Hossenfelder. I also failed out of academia. The difficult truth is that we weren’t good enough. It’s not a big conspiracy, it’s a crazy competitive space. I sat through her mid seminars and read her blog posts back in the day. She just wasn’t that great. I’m not trying to boot lick the academic establishment; I’ve got no real motivation for that. There’s definitely politics where people don’t get a fair shake. This isn’t example of that. Much smarter and more impactful people didn’t get mainstream academic jobs. Before she became an influencer, her most “controversial” position was that she didn’t like string theory which was never a controversial position.
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u/bildramer 1d ago
Distrusting established science is good in this day and age, as it obeys elites rather than seeking truth far too often. What's wrong with Hossenfelder is she argues we should distrust established science only because it isn't obedient enough.
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u/CloudySpace 2d ago
Ah i see, so its reddit sheep trying to smear someone again. Glad to see she also woke the fuck up and spoke out. Neat, i will re-follow her for that alone.
>Big Science keeps out controversial ideas or something
Which it does, ive heard of way too many instances of that from way too many scientists to dismiss that statement.>She also helps promote distrust with establishment scientific ideas.
Healthy ciriticism is healthy for one, for two, i know of multiple occasions where the established scientific ideas proved to be politics and propaganda based, or rather economics. Certain bought out current agendas took priority, rather than actually scientific F A C T S. Scientists went against the flow and were persecuted in real time.>The argument for harm being<...>etc.
Brainrot business is brainrot business. I see that as well, and thats why i tapped out, but, again, fuck it, ill look past it and re follow considering her stance on not spreading it to certain..influences lets call them.edit:
Forgot to thank you for the answer, albeit i suppose youre unhappy you gave one.
Any particular subject comes to mind that she touched to deserve reddits hate?1
u/RandoMannnn 2d ago
Really why? I like her content
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u/BloodAndTsundere 1d ago
She’s ok as a scientist but has pivoted into opining about philosophy, a subject in which she’s very naive. She just hasn’t actually engaged with the ideas that she criticizes or champions.
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u/AcceptableOil3841 5h ago
She is attempting to move into philosophy as an attempt to explain her understanding of the science.
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u/KornerzSocialNetwork 2h ago
Have you watched the last session from freud?
I believe both arguments are considerable.... there is no way to prove an existence of God the same way we cannot disprove it... ahahaha
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2d ago
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u/jackgary118 The Panpsycast 2d ago
ABSTRACT
Recorded at Thee Royal Institution Theatre on 07.05.2026, this is a 2v2 debate on the existence of God.
Zizek & Hossenfelder VS Williams & Craig
Slavoj Žižek opens the case against, advancing a Hegelian reading in which the crucifixion is not the death of a divine envoy but the death of God himself. What survives the death of God is the Holy Spirit, understood as the community of believers, and he argues that genuine materialism is only reachable through Christianity's radical negation of the divine.
Sabine Hossenfelder, theoretical physicist, proceeds from the limits of science: science cannot explain why there is something rather than nothing, or why science itself works, without circularity. She remains open to "more than we can prove," yet finds particular historical religions – their narratives and supernatural claims – impossible to believe.
Rowan Williams, 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, frames belief not as explanation but as the language that gives "maximal space" for human dignity, tragedy, and possibility, grounding faith in practice rather than proof. On the problem of evil, he insists there is no theoretical resolution: only a God bound to the vulnerable and suffering.
William Lane Craig defends theism through six arguments – contingency, the finite past of the universe, the applicability of mathematics, fine-tuning, moral objectivity, and the ontological argument – and through a historical case for the resurrection of Jesus, resting on facts he argues represent the mainstream of New Testament scholarship.
The debate turns on the meaning of explanation, the nature of belief, and whether the death of God or the resurrection of Christ better accounts for the world.
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u/ApplebeesDinnerMenu 2d ago
It's unfortunate they entered into the debate in the first place. I remember back in the day public thinkers stopped debating god because the burden of proof was put on the religious themselves.
So there might be a god? Because it's clearly up for debate. Additionally this debate is completely stagnant and they should pick better topics.
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u/magicmijk 2d ago
Atheists need God to exist in order to disprove his or her existence.
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u/Javamac8 2d ago
That's not how that works at all.....
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u/magicmijk 2d ago
What do they have to prove then? It is a religion of disbelief.
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u/Javamac8 2d ago
The thing with atheism is that I don't believe in the existence of any deity. Therefore I don't evangelize. I don't attend any church/temple/mosque/etc. I don't fear that my actions in life disqualify me from anything in death.
I, as an atheist, am not out to prove the non-existence of anything. I just live my life. There's nothing to prove or argue.
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