Joe Schmid

speaker

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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

like stare into like a time orb or crystal and see what happens in a thousand years.

No, he's sort of outside of time.

And if we model God's kind of cognition on the model that I just mentioned where he just has a kind of direct access to the facts themselves, well then actually it's our making the decisions that we do which explain why God knows what he does.

And so if what God knows is sort of explanatorily dependent on the facts themselves, then we shouldn't be holding it fixed in evaluating our abilities because it's explanatorily downstream of our abilities.

And so, no, the fact that God knew from all of eternity, timelessly, what exactly we're going to do does not remove our freedom or anything like that.

I mean, it's almost like God is kind of out there just watching us do what we're doing.

And me watching you doing what you're doing

removing your freedom or anything like

It's certainly not making you do what you do.

So I just think none of these objections that you raised are successful.

The thing is, God is not an unnecessary explanatory entity because he provides the best explanation of the very striking and fortuitous coincidences that we see built into the very fabric of physical reality and the connection between conscious reality and physical reality.

So we talked earlier about the fine-tuning of the constants and the laws of nature.

There are various constants and laws of nature that govern various features of the universe which need to be strikingly fine-tuned.

They need to take on very narrow, they need to take on values

very narrow range in order to allow for life to exist or anything interesting to occur.

And then even once that happens, there's no guarantee that the creatures which develop will have these strikingly harmonious and fortuitous and orderly mental lives that actually make sense and which enable lots of profound goods.

It's no guarantee that you'd even get conscious creatures at all.

And then these creatures are finding themselves with very significant moral knowledge about the world, even though the moral facts don't play any role in the evolutionary process.

So I really do think that there are so many facts that theism

offers the best explanation of.

Showing 141–160 of 235 · page 8 of 12