For those who aren't familiar, Bruggencate is a Presuppositional Apologist, which Wikipedia defines as "a school of Christian apologetics that believes the Christian faith is the only basis for rational thought. It presupposes that the Bible is divine revelation and attempts to expose flaws in other worldviews."

In other words, his book o' fairy tales says it's the ONLY TRUE book o' fairy tales, therefore everything else is wrong, because it says so in his book o' fairy tales.

Well this was painful to listen to; I made it only to 21:52.

One thing Matt touched upon in the portion I listened to: knowledge is a subset of belief. I do wish atheists would admit that their belief in science is belief, but (very importantly) it differs from religious belief in that science actually delivers and religion does not. When religious types argue that science must be a religion because people believe in it, the most effective rebuttal is that there are practical, demonstrable reasons to believe in science, but none to believe in religion. Basically, the question is why you believe, not whether it's belief.

blah blah blah epistemic sophistry
Apologists bring this shit out (like the ontological argument) in order to change the topic and impress people without philosophy degrees. Anyone who has read Descartes has already heard this shit and knows the standard responses.

Matt, with pragmatism FTW! Go deflationary theory of truth!

I figured them out.

People like this think that their thoughts manifest and work exactly like real feces. Let's reduce it to mechanics.

1.) Ape sits behind podium smearing feces on itself proclaiming "you can't touch me, I am covered in feces."

2.) Other ape comes up and says "you're an idiot who has covered himself in feces."

3.) Feces covered ape shits in its own hand and throws the feces on the other ape, then proclaims "how dare a shit covered ape judge me, I am clean because now you are not."

4.) Grossed out ape leaves territory and doesn't come back.

Now, apply this to thought constructs, philosophies, religions, and ideologies, and this is how they all behave when their minds are engaged on topics like this.

1.) "I believe in God and since you believe in reality, you must believe that my reality is whatever I say it is, therefore true."

2.) "Just because you believe it doesn't make it true."

3.) "You're a solipsist, you don't believe in reality outside your head, whatever you think you believe you think is true! So you must be wrong!"

4.) "Fuck this, I'm out. Idiot."

Not going to watch this. Rating anyway.

I watched the whole thing. It's really quite nice if you're interested in this sort of thing. Matt delivers a *spectacular* beatdown.

tl;dr summary

Sye: In order to know anything for certain, you have to presuppose God.

Matt: I don't know anything with absolute certainty, and you haven't said how God knowing things with certainty translates into you knowing things with certainty.

Sye: God can do that because he's God. I'm going to try and pretend that you're saying you do know things with absolute certainty because I don't and position other than my own enough to give an meaningful response to it. ::jerks off for half an hour::