However, I've never grabbed onto Dawkins atheism as much as come to believe that the ways things "live" is much more diverse and amazing than we can even imagine.
Obviously I haven't read the book (yet) but here's the NYT promo interview https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/16/science/free-will-sapolsk... : In his latest book, “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will,” Dr. Sapolsky confronts and refutes the biological and philosophical arguments for free will. He contends that we are not free agents, but that biology, hormones, childhood and life circumstances coalesce to produce actions that we merely feel were ours to choose.
Just because you don't have free will doesn't mean your behavior is not affected by your environment.
It can also be a self-reinforcing behavior, as giving credit can also in turn benefit you later.
Again, just because everything is predetermined doesn't mean there aren't complex dynamics in motion, ones which greatly influence behavior and the chances of making a decision. Understanding these dynamics can also influence how you behave in the future.
Edit:
It seems that I am saying "if you kick a raccoon, it will run away". And you are saying "whether I kick the raccoon or not has already been determined".
In this case, my analysis is helpful/useful while yours isn't. My analysis can influence your future behavior (e.g. if you run into a menacing raccoon in the future, it will increase the chances that you will be able to defend yourself properly), especially if you didn't know this before, while your analysis probably doesn't affect behavior (except to promote apathy perhaps, which is likely even detrimental).
[ Disclaimer: I know nothing about raccoons, it was just an example ]
It doesn't mean you are wrong, it's just that saying "everything is predetermined" is not a useful way of looking at the world. It's like saying "white paint is white", which is not very surprising.
Strictly speaking, it's not even quite correct: quantum mechanics tells us that, even though the universe has (deterministic) physical laws, it also behaves randomly at a fundamental level. However, that does not change the fact that we don't have free will (since we have zero control over the randomness).
But it's conceivable that some of our decisions might be affected by quantum randomness (this is even obvious in some contrived, but realistic Schrödinger's-cat-like scenarios).
Scientific predestination? /j
Just like you can't say a criminal is not guilty of a crime without free will, because the concept of crime exists within the same subjective context as the experience of the criminal choosing to commit a crime. Choice and will still exist, they are just not "Free" in the sense of being determined by something outside of physics and its resulting emergent systems.
It would be like arguing that a waterfall does not exist and is not beautiful because if you look closely enough at it all you see are numbers representing the states of molecules and velocities.
Meaning does not require "free will", and the very concept of a will being "Free" is absurd since a resulting choice is either completely random (And thus not really anyone's will) or is determined by prior states and circumstances (the things that make you you) and is thus not really "Free".
Calvinists certainly didn't think sinning was good, just because people had no choice.
Nobody would say a robot helping you isn't better than one that harms you, simply because it makes no choice.
A machine programmed to write a great book is a good machine! Sapolsky should be credited and recognized!
Arguably, you're disproving your own point by eliciting a reaction that's not rational according to someone's belief system.
Right?
We all should do exactly as evolution encourages us to do in any situation.
What makes you think we don’t?
Whether or not you have free will, punching someone in the face is likely to have consequences. That is your reason to consider whether or not to do it.
If we assume you have free will, it provides you with the opportunity to actively make the choice that will get you the best outcome.
If we assume you do not, then that won't alter the outcomes, nor the reasons to prefer one choice over the other, the only thing that has changed is whether or not the choice you made was a genuine choice or would always play out the same way if we somehow was able to rewind time.
That the outcome would be the same given the same input and same state of your mind does not mean there was no reasons not to act a given way, only that you had no agency in which outcome you actually end up with. But the state of your mind would be a factor in that, and a belief that your decisions has no effect on your future outcomes so it doesn't matter what you choose to do certainly would make you less likely to end up with good ones. Whether or not "rewinding time" would let you make different "choices" does not alter that.
At a high level, the argument is that free will is an illusion that is highly constrained by your environment. In fact, your own example of punching him in the face only serves to support their case. You’re not free to randomly punch people in the face in most places on earth.
Now, I will likely be punished for that, but that doesn't make me incapable of doing it.
People commit crimes all the time, dude. If they have no free will, there is absolutely no justification for punishing them.
I think they are conflating free will with freedom and capability and it sounds a bit off the rails.
Even organisms that clearly lack free will (like bacteria) will respond to stimulus.
This presumes a very specific sets of views on morality. One might argue that it makes whatever reaction you feel like justified, because it was not a choice. Certainly if we can't punish you for hitting someone, we can't punish the person you hit if they hit back.
Others would argue that while it would remove the moral justification for retribution, free will or not does not need to affect the moral argument for punishment as a means to reduce the chance of reoffending or even general effects on the rest of the population.
Free will only affects whether or not you had any immediate control over what you did, not on the effects it had on society, nor to what extent you pose a future risk or whether failure to punish you affects the future risks to society from others, all of which are factors in peoples views on the extent to which punishment is moral.
Convince yourself that you actually do have free will by not feeling that urge.
I dont give my water-heater a pass for staring fires because "it cant help it". The water-heater is the problem and fully to blame. It should be fixed or replaced.
By what metric would I be a "bad machine". And who put you in charge of deciding what "bad machines" are?
> The water-heater is the problem and fully to blame.
Nonsense. Water heaters are not sentient beings with free will and cannot be "blamed" for anything. Perhaps the designer can be blamed, or perhaps the homeowner who didn't maintain the water heater can be blamed, but the water heater itself, having no free will, can't be blamed (or punished) for any behavior it exhibits.
I mean, you don't see people putting defective water heaters in prison, right? Why not? Because they have no free will, and are thus deemed incapable of committing crimes..
My metric is machines that punch me in the face are bad, and I put myself in charge of deciding it. If enough people agree with me, we can make rules and hire cops to stop the machines behavior we don't like.
>I mean, you don't see people putting defective water heaters in prison, right? Why not? Because they have no free will, and are thus deemed incapable of committing crimes..
I'm not proposing putting it in jail, just repair or replacement. On the other hand, people don't ignore their water heater starting fires because "it was designed that way" or "it is a product of its environment and mistreatment".
I saying it is irrelevant if the water heater has choice or not. It is simply a problem that needs to be delt with either way. Blame isnt mutually exclusive. The water heater could have a defective design, poor maintenance, and as a result be defective itself.
I don't have to believe it has choice or there is a tiny man inside it to go about fixing it and stopping it from burning down my house
If you don't have any free will, you're not "deciding" anything. "Deciding" implies that you have choices, and that is just what you do not have.
Right?
> On the other hand, people don't ignore their water heater starting fires
Of course they don't. But they don't blame it in the same way they'd blame a person who intentionally set their house on fire, or even a rat that chewed wires and caused a fire. The person would be imprisoned, and the rats would be exterminated. Neither of those makes sense unless there's free will involved.
Not in the free will sense. It is a decision in the sense that when presented two or more options, I take and action and select one based on my preferences. Free will isnt required to take an action when presented options. I can program a robot to go towards the light, and then put it in front of a light and dark hallways. It doesn't need free will so select/choose/decide to go down the one with the light.
>Of course they don't. But they don't blame it in the same way they'd blame a person who intentionally set their house on fire, or even a rat that chewed wires and caused a fire. The person would be imprisoned, and the rats would be exterminated. Neither of those makes sense unless there's free will involved.
I think that depends a lot on the person assigning blame. I think both of those make perfect sense. If the rats were robots with no free will, I would still want them exterminated because they are destructive robots that chew wires. If some arsonist lit my house on fire, I might still want them improsoned. Not because they chose to commit arson, but because they are an arsonist. They are just another destructive robot, like the rats, or the water heater. Fix, replace, and sometime make an example for the other destructive robots.
If none of them have free will, "making an example" can't possibly make any difference.
Arguing that changing these inputs can't make any difference without free will is equivalent to arguing the output of a deterministic function can't change if its input changes.
Here is an example of a function for which that is wrong:
f(x) -> x
And? If there's no free will, there's no choice about "changing the state of the world", either.
Right?
> It's a 100% deterministic function, yet its output changes with its input.
Not if there is no choice about the value of x.
There is no choice only doing.
There is no choice involved, but what is the current state of the world over time still changes. You don't even need mutable state to model this, just the progression of a calculation where the output of one step becomes the input of the next.
> > It's a 100% deterministic function, yet its output changes with its input.
> Not if there is no choice about the value of x.
Here is a program using the earlier definition of f:
result = f(1)
result2 = f(result + 1)
This is what is meant above with "yet its output changes with its input". Perhaps you're struggling with the use of "changes" to apply to multiple different executions of the function.
The point is the same: If you assume a purely predetermined universe, it by no means means behaviours can not be different at different points in time, because inputs to a given process are different because of what has gone on before.
No change or choice in the sense you're using it is required.
If I put shade in front of my light seeking robot or a plant, it will change what it is doing.
For that matter, a soccer ball doesn't need free will to move when I kick it. It goes from being at rest to in motion because something new happened to it.
Nonsensicality, criminality, judgment, quality, all go out the window if we are all just puppets on strings.
You seem to assume that a lot of judgements we make of actions require that the actions have been made "freely". But we judge things that we all agree does not have free will behind them all the time. E.g. we judge the weather.
> Nonsensicality, criminality, judgment, quality, all go out the window if we are all just puppets on strings.
None of them go out the window. The morality of how we approach some of them are affected. E.g. I do strongly believe that any judgement of peoples actions morally should account for their lack of ability to act otherwise, and that this e.g. makes punishments or reactions based out of a desire for vengeance entirely immoral, and that punishment in general should be based on an assessment of how to minimise the harm to society as a whole - and that includes taking into account harm to the person you're punishing, but that does not remove the need for judging criminals because criminals still affect society irrespective of how they make their decisions.
It does mean that from my point of view a punishment is only justified if you can show that the harm from imprisoning someone sufficiently mitigates risks of harms to society that sufficiently outweigh the harm we do to the person we imprison, and that would certainly affect how you deal with those you imprison, and when you use prison sentences, but it would not end imprisonment.
And we are just puppets on a string. I feel comfortable making that statement firmly, because nobody has ever even come up with as much of a definition of "free will" that isn't compatibilist (that is, an illusion over predetermination, though many compatibilists would get irate at me describing it as an illusion) or otherwise does not in any meaningful way make actions "free", much less posited any remotely testable hypothesis for what such "free" decisions even would be that would let our minds influence them without any cause and affect that isn't some mix of deterministic and randomness that we have no meaningful influence over. The burden is on those who believe in free will to, for starters, define it in a logically coherent way other than just arguing in the negative by insisting we're somehow different from all other matter and energy we've observed.
If you can give me an example of someone putting "the weather" in jail or forcing it to pay a fine, please do so.
> criminals still affect society irrespective of how they make their decisions.
That's entirely not the point. If the criminals have no free will, punishing them has no effect whatsoever on society. They had no choice but to commit their crimes, and they will have no choice as to whether or not to commit future crimes, regardless of what punishment is given to them.
Irrelevant. We don't put every human we judge in jail or make them pay a fine, or indeed have them put in front of a court either. Most of the time we either just glare at them or tell them off or otherwise express our disapproval.
> That's entirely not the point. If the criminals have no free will, punishing them has no effect whatsoever on society. They had no choice but to commit their crimes, and they will have no choice as to whether or not to commit future crimes, regardless of what punishment is given to them.
This is blatantly absurd. What you are arguing here is effectively that a different input applied to a deterministic process can't affect the future output of that deterministic process. You can disprove that by flicking a light switch and observing that the light comes on. The light has no free will, and the process is deterministic, and yet the output is different when you apply a different input.
In a fully deterministic universe, you were always going to flick that light switch, and so seeing it as a "change" is a point of view not an actual argument for agency. But when you do the light did not have a choice to remain off. With an entity - like a human - with more state, the relationship is not always remotely as predictable, but the notion that changing an input can't produce a different output than would have been produced if the input hadn't been changed given a deterministic universe is equally absurd.
[If we add space for actual randomness as one of the inputs or state, we may not be able to say it was "always what was going to happen" but we would be able to say it'd always be what was going to happen given the same set of randomness (and randomness does still not help with the free will argument, so that distinction is not particularly relevant to this subject)]
I am arguing nothing of the sort. If there is no free will, there is no choice about the value of the input.
> The interview Dawkins had with the Indian metaphysician (I forgot the name) made me realize how blinded Dawkins is by his material-reductionist belief system. Dawkins appeared to have no idea what the man was talking about because his belief system could not compute the meaning of what the man was trying to explain to him.
I did not see that at all on the above fragment, maybe at the end a little. It was mostly two men having an interesting conversation albeit at different metaphysical levels and, especially Dawkins, trying to find a common ground.
The video is called "Satish Kumar schools Richard Dawkins" which is ridiculous and leading.
Debate's have become less about who made good points etc and more like a pokemon battle of debate tactics.
steelmanning, devils advocate, etc
Truth. Falsifiable truth.
Everyone knows that reductive approaches are limited. It's in the name. They are a tradeoff. Obviously the world is complex and so intuitively you want to embrace complexity, but the more you do this the more your theories become non-falsifiable and therefore not even wrong, severely limiting their scope because most important truths about the world are falsifiable. This is why spiritualism, mysticism, and religious metaphysics failed so completely to discover the wondrous scientific truths underlying our world, even though these things were supposed to be in their weelhouse. The temptation of the non-falsifiable was a poison apple. Once eaten, the plausible overwhelmed and crowded out the true, and they were never able to build physical knowledge reliable enough to stack, let alone stack high enough to discover that we are all made of star stuff and other such wonders. Truth turned out to be stranger and more beautiful than fiction -- the real conceit was in handing the reins to our imaginations when the world around us exceeded our imaginations so thoroughly.
Speaking of which, the neuroscientists figured out how engrams work. It's beautiful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5trRLX7PQY
And what's there to understand? An ivory tower of connected ideas which are not falsifiable!
On the same note: I'm glad I don't understand the nuances of zodiacal signs.
Thankfully I was born an Aries so I'm rational enough to not believe in that junk.
I think it depends on what you deem "important". There are many truths that I relied on just this morning alone which aren't "falsifiable" in the like Popper-derived sense. In my own head I call these "contingent truths", things which are true of the world by mutual convention or by the accumulation of human history. For example, my name or the name of my spouse; the designation of the gravel patch on the corner of our block as an area for my dog to pee off-leash; the presence of paint on the road which keeps my bike separate from cars. In some sense these are all material truths, properties of things in the world which have a falsifiable flavor (like "color" or "mass"). But I do think that their contingent nature, the fact that they are products of human decision making, taste, and history, gives them a different character than what most people keep in mind when they say "falsifiable truths" (scientific statements about the world). On a cosmological sense the latter type of truths are definitely "more important", but on the scale of things that actually determine the quality and shape of my life it's contingent truths which dominate. Spiritualism and mysticism proliferate in part (IMO) because they promise a bridge between the two scales, they reconcile the personal and the cosmic. I feel like Dawkins-era materialism has failed to have similar dominance because it only plays on the cosmic domain, and more often than not scoffs at modern attempts to explore the world of contingent truths (I don't meet many Dawkins-ites who are interested in the modern approach to sociology, which I think has done a pretty creditable job trying to deal with the contingent nature of social dynamics). Moreover, contingent truths are rapidly becoming an important area for multiple fields: many modern problems of engineering and science have contingent faces (infrastructure, big tech, medicine, AI). Being unable to provide guidance for negotiating, or even really a basic vocabulary of, social reality is an enormous hole.
I say all this because I do consider myself a material-reductionist, or at least have been aggressively so in the past, but have been left kind of cold by how the movement has developed. It seems too shell-shocked by the culture wars of the 80s-00s and is unable (or no longer able) to act with the sense of openness or curiosity that I think is required by genuine truth-seeking. This is why I'd imagine you see so much criticism of it recently, not because the ideology is fundamentally wrong, but because its standard-bearers are no longer able to push it forward in a way that the meets the needs of the moment.
You are either a scientist, and live in the perpetual darkness of never knowing anything for sure, only occasionally pierced by a pale ray of weak light of uncertain knowledge; or in the land of the mystics who conquer the god-given truth with their every breath. Make your choice.
And stop bragging for dog's sake. We haven't got a clue how the world works. And we are busy destroying it so fast we'll never know.
When he tries to argue about metaphysics or argue through religious arguments on god he's only just ok at it and loses because he's doesn't have the home team advantage he has in biology.
It might have been more interesting in a time/culture bubble where evolution wasn't taken for granted or the belief in God wasn't known to come with a lot of cognitive dissonance baggage. A bit of cool trivia here and there but overall it felt like a celebratory piece written for the already converted.
Which, ironically, feels a bit like someone releasing a determinist book today.
If not I'd love if you could find it
What has atheism to do with the "ways things "live"?
Likewise, philosophers such as Giulio Tononi with his Integrated Information Theory are edging towards panpsychism, the idea that everything possesses a shred of consciousness. This, too, is a somewhat religious stance.
I personally see no hard problem and believe only certain systems harbor consciousness. The magic element is simply evolution. Evolution, an open-ended optimizer, crafted everything in a singular run.
Consciousness exists to safeguard the body and ensure self reproduction, it is the inner optimization loop, the outer one being evolution. That's the link I see between them, they work together and each one is creating/supporting the other.
We can think of consciousness in it's most simple terms as an experience of any number of bits of data.
If we are to accept that we ourselves have experiences, which we must lest we go down a fun pathway to madness (that I highly recommend for those excited by the prospect of existential crises), then there is no reason to accept that "lower" life forms do not also have experiences.
This chain of reasoning follows down, down, down, into what we may think to be simpler and simpler experiences of being. Down to the insects, and then the microbes.
There comes a point where whether something is alive or not becomes more about its ability to create cogent copies of itself, which certainly does not feel like a requirement of having an experience.
Beyond that lies the Earth, the wind, the rain, the basic elements our ancestors have respected and reverred for millenia in societies that did not invent the patriarchal dichotomy between subject and object that teaches us the unfounded "fact" that there are some things called "objects" which have no experience of reality, that we the "subjects" may control entirely.
Get deeper into intuitive practices, and one may have experiences of interacting with so called "objects" in ways that suggest a deep union between subject and object.
A union that precludes the separation our hectic monkey minds have been taught.
It is as if every particle of this universe is "alive" in its own writhing way, at different scales. All feeling the subtle vibrations of others.
The burden of proof is on those that say that consciousness "stops" at some point and the entity becomes an object, yet a mechanism has never been found.
The belief in fully unconscious objects, is then, faith based.
The "hard" problem of consciousness is only a problem when you want it to be.
If you interpret the word that way, it becomes completely uninteresting and, as you explore, makes us no different from some germ or collection of molecules.
We are a collection of germs and molecules. We share a lot of commonalities with the units we are composed of. That doesn't make us "no different" than them, when taken as a whole. It certainly doesn't have to make us or the world uninteresting.
It's only naive, over-confident people jumping into conversations they don't understand who define it as something else.
We can also talk about cognitive abilities, sentience, etc., but these are distinct concepts from consciousness and it's extremely valuable to maintain that distinction if you want to have productive discussions.
What? As "experiencing bits of data"? That's ridiculous, a stone experiences bits of data as scratches on its surface. You could say that it "experiences its environment", but that's semantics and has almost nothing to do with human consciousness - or at least with the interesting parts of it.
Philosophy of mind scholars have been very consistent about this for the longest time. I would recommend reading some of the literature they have produced to become more acquainted.
However "interesting parts of human consciousness" as you put it are still outside the realm of consciousness per se, and can be more adequately described as "cognition", "awareness", "agency", "sentience", etc. Each concept is distinct (but related) from the others and it's unproductive at this point in our collective development of theory and study to lump them all under a single umbrella term.
Consciousness is a relatively boring question when limited to this definition, but that just means you need to change your language to remain comprehensible, not to redefine words that already have very precise meanings.
I can give you my personal thoughts on the matter, they may align more closely to yours than you may initially assume. As a quick note, complex systems are interesting primarily because they encode features of their environment in their physical makeup, kind of like your rock example. Rocks can't really "do" anything with that information except roll and crack differently than if they didn't have those scratches, but when you really drill down into this phenomenon, there's no bright line between the encoding of scratches on rock surfaces and slightly more complicated systems like river deltas changing the path of water in response to upstream flows (a kind of analog computer encoding the history of its "experiences") or even more complicated systems like lineages of organisms encoding their experiences in DNA via natural selection based on the history of its (the lineage -- not each individual organism) interaction with its 4D environment. None of this really has anything to say about what rocks or river deltas or organisms or whole lineages are experiencing according to the definition of consciousness above, and it seems impossible to access any kind of scientific evidence one way or the other, which is most of the reason that scholars (Chalmers) came up with the "hard problem of consciousness" to at least acknowledge and refine the difficult questions still facing us in this field of study.
I'm sure I'm butchering something about this interpretation in the decades since I've read it.
My point is this seems to be a similar problem where it's equally difficult to imagine that consciousness is something that arises from sufficiently complex systems, as it is to imagine its inherent to all systems.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying I'm not certain you're right. I can see it either way.
This aligns fairly closely to what happens when we train ANN's utilizing attention based learning. We see that new emergent capabilities arise. We simply haven't built attention based multimodal training courses yet. I hope we never will.
What I find hard about that is that it would seem that consciousnesses are discrete -- mine is distinct from yours. I'm also probably the main consciousness in my body (or I wouldn't be able to type this). But "everything" isn't discrete.
If the sea is conscious, what about every individual liter of water in it? What about every drop? If the drops end up in my body, does it still have consciousness?
It may seem that way, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is that way. After all, our brains do an incredible amount of filtering and modulating to deliver our conscious experience such as it is, unified and discrete. If it is as fundamental as the panpsychists believe (and I don't count myself firmly among them, but I have to entertain the possibility), it seems possible, if not likely, that there is a good deal of fuzziness and overlap in and among systems of consciousness.
Plenty of theories have been proposed. Maybe the universe expands and contracts again and again, each time with slightly different cosmological constants. Or maybe there are infinite universes and, unsurprisingly, we happen to exist in the one which was suited to our existence. Or maybe everything is just one giant simulation.
What I find fascinating is that, once you remove the culture-specific veneer, these questions and our tentative answers are part of the same pursuit that centuries ago would have taken the shape of philosophy or theology.
I can't agree with that. Maybe our brains are not big enough, or complex enough yet to really understand what is going on with such complex systems.
Evolution may be the mechanism these complex systems exist, but it doesn't explain how they work.
Even the simplest artificial evolutionary algorithms have created integrated circuits with features we can not understand or explain.
And part of the reason is physical properties of materials, and quantum stuff. The evolutionary algorithm doesn't understand those things, just puts them in some working configuration by chance.
Anyway, my point is that we can't also use evolution as a catch-all explanation. Complex things are complex, and they require proper understanding, an engineering understanding, not just the handwaving arguments of philosophers.
About consciousness: hardest problem ever. I don't think we will be able to understand it, because we have it and it becomes a kind of strange loop.
Failing to do so will put you in an infinite regress of finding lower-level explanation forever, which in turn would explain precisely nothing.
Even hardcore materialists do this epistemic step: the quantum foam is the given of existence, made out of nothing else other than itself, and whose excitations give rise to the fundamental particles.
So, given that we are already committed to such epistemic step, what would be the problem of choosing another ontological primitive and see how we fare?
What is the logical argument by which consciousness ought not to be chosen as an ontological primitive?
I am not sure why you think that panpsychism would be a religious stance? What's religious about assuming that the only _given_ of existence is in fact fundamental? And I'm not even arguing for panpsychism here, since I don't find it tenable. But at least it's not materialism, which I would argue is the maximum form of abstraction and therefore religious in nature.
Not all theistic belief systems do this (I don't think Christianity has a widespread belief that plants have a soul, for one example), and believing in a God indeed does not prevent you from questioning the physical world with a scientific mindset. And even many atheists believe in souls (you don't need to believe in a God to believe in the metaphysical after all).
But still, the two concepts aren't entirely orthogonal. Certain religious worldviews are mutually exclusive with certain interpretations on life. And if your interpretation of life conflicts with the locally prevalent religion that might cause you to become an atheist.
In practice, people who identify as atheists - such as Dawkins - affirm that there is no god. That's a belief.
Is that wrong?
Religious people can't even agree on what this God concept is supposed to be, but they can make fine distinctions in the ways people don't share their belief in it.
There are others (like agnostic Bart Ehrman) who have the education and decades of study to comment on this history of religious thought.
Just because religion and credulity have been with us a long time does not give them any special status with regards to truth or proofs.
It has been years since I read his books, but let's say he says, "We all know it is extremely unlikely that a dead person came back to life, much less physically ascended into heaven? Where is this place heaven?" That might sound cutting to someone on the side of Dawkins, but to those who are religious he sounds like a simpleton, as if their religion hasn't already given them an answer to such elementary questions.
On the other hand, people steeped in religious tradition know all the arguments and counter arguments and can contest religious claims in a way that has a greater chance of breaking through. For instance, it is 100% obvious and undeniable to most Christians that Jesus claimed to be God and that his disciples also believed that. Bart Ehrman has an entire book [1], based on historical precedents and writing contemporary to early Christianity, as well as having spent years reading the Gospels in its original Greek, which shows that that "obvious" narrative was alien to early Christians.