Joe Schmid

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235 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 3 Sep

Joe Schmid’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Pints With Aquinas · Answering 7 Arguments For Atheism | Joe Schmid | Last Call Ep. 30 · 3 Sep 2026 podcast

It just seems like theism offers a better, more unifying explanation where we can explain all these crazy, striking, fortuitous coincidences that occur and that are built into the very fabric of natural reality.

So it just turns out that lots of the fundamental features of the physical universe themselves kind of cry out for explanation, and that you have to appeal to something outside of the universe to explain

do.

Precisely because we do understand things, and we see that theism is the best explanation of the data.

Yeah, so I think one of the main problems with this argument is just one of the main problems for the problem of divine hiddenness, right?

Which is that it seems like there may very well be plausible goods that religious diversity enables, such that God is justified in permitting there to be religious diversity.

So what are such goods?

Well, again, the good of making a difference to the lives of other people by evangelizing, by helping them come to discover truths about God and the fundamental nature of reality.

with caution and care and love and philosophical rigor and scientific rigor in fact as well.

So I think basically being able to spread knowledge of the truth is itself a deeply profound good that is enabled by some people not yet knowing the truth and in fact having various false beliefs.

So that's one response that I'd give to this.

And of course, another thing to say is that just because various people have beliefs that are resulting from culture or influenced by culture, it doesn't mean that those beliefs are in fact false.

And in fact, maybe there's significant evidence for them.

And in fact, that's what I would say about Catholicism, where we just have significant evidence for the truth of Catholicism from various vindicatory miracles, where God is going out of his way to put his divine stamp of approval on distinctively Catholic doctrines.

So that's another thing that I'd say.

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

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

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 1 plus 1 equals 17, or, like, make square circles.

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