From the blurb:

“Two AIs — ChatGPT, the believer in God, and DeepSeek, the atheist AI — go head-to-head on the existence of God. From the fine-tuning of the universe to the source of morality and the eternal perks of belief, who makes the stronger case? Watch as seven AI judges score each argument and reveal the ultimate winner.”

Speaking as a philosopher, I thought the arguments mounted on both sides were quite good, but there was very little that I hadn’t heard before. Speaking as an English teacher, on the other hand, I was highly impressed with the quality of the rebuttals, on both sides. Although I’m a Christian, I have to agree that DeepSeek won the argument. However, one commenter who observed the debate thought that the two sides didn’t get to the real nitty-gritty: the existence of consciousness itself as evidence for God. (This is an argument which impresses philosophy student and blogger Matthew Adelstein, as well.) Finally, it seems that debating is another skill in which AI can outperform most humans.

Thoughts?

Recently, the Youtuber Skydivephil (whose real name is Phil Halper) posted a 24-minute video critiquing Christian philosopher Michael Jones (who goes by the moniker Inspiring Philosophy) regarding the problem of animal suffering. Viewers can watch it here:

Michael Jones, Than Christopoulos and philosopher Trent Dougherty (who has written a book on the problem of animal suffering, in which he acknowledges its gravity but argues that animals will be abundantly recompensed in the afterlife and that God will also endow them with reason, and that once they are able to understand the spiritual significance of what happened to them on Earth, they will retrospectively consent to the suffering they were compelled to endure on Earth) then posted a two-hour point-by-point reply to Halper, which can be viewed below (the first hour is more than sufficient to get the overall picture of what they’re saying). I thought their reply was rather unfair on several points; hence the title of this post.

Here is my reply to Michael, Than and Trent:

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Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has posted a video about a new paper on arxiv.org, titled “How to Make a Universe” by Paolo Bassani and João Magueijo, which proposes that small random changes to the “constants of nature” (perhaps one should call them parameters rather than constants) – such as the strength of gravity, the strength of the electromagnetic interaction, the masses of particles, and the speed of light – would eventually cause them to reach a settled state of equilibrium where they no longer vary, in pockets of the cosmos. The initial random changes in the constants of nature would allow energy conservation to be violated, and would therefore permit the creation of matter out of nowhere, without needing to appeal to the notion of a hypothetical “inflaton field” (for which there is no experimental evidence). It should be noted that the authors of the paper do not propose that our universe is uniquely optimal. All they are attempting to explain is why the constants of nature aren’t changing now. The authors’ proposal bears some resemblance to Lee Smolin’s hypothesis of “cosmological natural selection”, which postulates that new universes are created inside black holes. The authors make no appeal to black holes in their paper. However, they write (bolding is mine – VJT): “As in biological natural selection, some random mutations produce Universes with matter, others do not, or worse, produce negative energy/matter. One therefore needs the mutation game to be turned off and stability to establish itself to make sure any possible gains are preserved.”

Hossenfelder acknowledges that the authors of the paper still have some explaining to do: “They just assume that the constants can change somehow.” Nevertheless, when commenting on the work of one of the authors (João Magueijo), she adds: “I don’t know if he’s on the right track with this, but still it deserves being taken seriously.”

The authors summarize their conclusions as follows (bolding is mine):
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Christian apologist Cameron Bertuzzi is a busy beaver. On January 30, 2025, he posted a video titled, “Millions Saw This Miracle — Why Do Christians Ignore It?”, in which he discussed an alleged series of apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Zeitoun, a suburb of Cairo, Egypt, which were witnessed by hundreds of thousands of people (including Christians and non-Christians alike) in the late 1960’s. Now, less than a week later, he has put up a new video, titled, “The Best Evidence for Christianity… Isn’t in the Bible?!”, in which he argues that the evidence for Christianity based on the Marian apparitions at Zeitoun is stronger than the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus from the New Testament, and challenging Protestants to face up to this fact:

Readers who watch the first six minutes of the video will get the gist of it. Later in the video, Bertuzzi rebuts Protestant arguments that the apparitions might have been demonic in origin.

In response to Bertuzzi’s latest video, I posted the following message:

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