Eric: All rabbits are white Matt: Here's a brown rabbit Eric: Well, that's begging the question

Eric is a guy who continually describes the rabbit he will pull out of the hat, without pulling a rabbit out of the hat.

Suming up Eric's speech : "Here, let met use another analogy to show you how much i don't understand that subject".

"I take the position that knowledge can start with a belief that you don't have to verify" You are fully forgiven for spitting your coke at that point Matt

It's funny how theists get totally freaked out by the idea of determinism, yet are completely fine with an omniscient, omnipotent & omnipresent god that by definition has determined how everything will happen in the universe.

Eric's whole position (summed up in his closing statement) is "a soul exists and in absence of a defeater of my assertion, my position is right." Seriously!? Wtf!

Jim: Hi Eric Eric: You're begging the question. (takes nervous sip from water bottle) Jim: What? I just said hi. Eric: You're begging the question. (takes nervous sip from water bottle) Jim: Why do you keep saying that? Eric: You're begging the question. (takes nervous sip from water bottle) Jim: OK... this is just getting annoying. Eric: You're begging the question. (takes nervous sip from water bottle)

The entire opening by Eric can be countered with: A single magnet can't contain a video therefor the hard disk can't contain this debate. He's wrong. Also 7 being a prime number is not a belief, it's a fact following from the definition.

"There is no reason to believe in multiple souls..." There isn't any reason to believe in 1 soul.

If Eric Hernandez says 'begging the question' one more time... Matt handled that very gracefully, because I was getting mad at him after about the fifth or sixth time.

Hernandez likes to use analogies that sound good to him but make no logical correlation to the subject.

Straight away, Eric admits Science can't investigate the 'soul'. Alright, well, debates over. If its untestable, then there's no reason to believe it. Thanks Eric!

OMG listening to Eric is painful. Matt did so well putting up with the lying thiest.

Does anyone else think these debates are like watching a fight between Muhammad Ali and a 4 year old girl? Im starting to actually feel sorry for the religious side these days. I have not watched a debate that felt like a fair fight in a very long time. I understand why these debates are a good tool for people who are undecided but as a contest...its a slaughter.

Does Eric even know what "begging the question" means? He says a counter example begs the question. WHAT?.

How many words can Eric say without saying anything at all?

Matt: “I want to believe as many true things and a few false things as possible.” Eric: “that’s a infinite regress. Anyway here’s some other shit I don’t know anything about” Matt: *spit takes his coke*

I should like to formally apologise to Sye Ten Bruggencate if he reads this. I was under the impression that we was the biggest pain in the ass that Matt might ever debate. I now fully admit I was wrong. This was almost painful to watch at times.

Eric has no idea what question begging is.

It is amazing to me that religious people know so much about the soul which is something, that cannot be touched, observed, analyzed, felt, heard, or anything else.

I almost fell out of my chair laughing when Eric said he has a human body because he has a human soul and a dog has a dog body because it has a dog type of soul. Great stuff. 😂

Appearantly, dishonesty and mr. Hernadez went well together, because he was extremely dishonest and evasive. Thankfully Matt called him on that and he was unable to even remotely prove his points. I greatly admire the patience Matt managed to display.

I am an ICU neuro trained nurse. For many years I worked on a large ICU neuro unit in a large hospital in England. Most of the patients on the unit had suffered some form of brain injury, be that a bleed, a clot, an infection or a form of trauma. I can categorically say that the unit had many many instances where people reported an almost complete change in the person who had the brain injury. In the debate Eric Hernandez makes a statement about how a wife who had suffered a brain injury would still be that persons wife. Well I can tell you know I have see both husbands and wives who have had partners who have suffered brain injuries, say that they are not the same person. The issue is not always that the partner of the person who suffered the injury no longer recognises the person in front of them, the person who suffered the injury likewise may no longer have any connection to their partner. Many ICU patients suffer from something known as ICU psychosis (the trauma of having an injury and being treated on an ICU a unit) and so a lot of patients are followed up after their treatment on the unit has finished. I have seen everything from young adults who have returned home and they walk into their room to find out they used to like a certain sport, a certain type of music, a certain hobby, certain tv shows, and had certain types of friends. Guess what, sometimes none of it fits into what they like anymore. To hear a mother and father, say very clearly that their daughter is a different person is a hard thing to hear. Depending on the part of the brain you suffer your injury, depends on the way it may effect you. I think it's very disrespectful of Eric Hernandez to claim that a person who has suffered a brain injury is the same person. They may look the same, they may have the same name, but they can be completely different people. He should go and spend some time working with people who have had brain injuries and their significant others. He can watch the agony that people go through when they realise that one of them has been changed that much that they can no longer live as a couple. It's true that some patients only have a small changes after certain brain injuries, maybe foods that they like, maybe social activities, but others have almost a complete change. There was a really interesting case about a guy who started to perform horrible actions. It was later discovered that he had a tumour growing in his head and when it was removed he went back to his normal self.

Matt: I don't think you can be absolutely certain about anything Eric: Are you absolutely certain? Matt's patience is awe inspiring

Eric has a great debate style: When someone offers a counter example, tell them it's begging the question to dodge the objections.

If science can't answer if something exists then we can't know if something exists. The rest is conversation.

Since an individual atom does not have a temperature, there is no such thing as temperature.

Came here after watching AronRa have to listen to his crap hoping Matt had debated him as Matt is the perfect guy to rip this nonsense to bits. Was not disappointed.

I usually don't think that one side "destroys" another side, but Matt seriously outclassed Eric. All Eric could do was make assertions, and then claim false logical fallacies. Eric does not understand what begging the question is. At all.

When you're stuck for an answer and you want the burden on you shifted?...... "You're begging the question!" I win!

In summary Erics arguments for a soul - 1) argument from ignorance 2) argument from ignorance 3) argument from ignorance 4) argument from ignorance 5) argument from ignorance 6) argument from ignorance 7) argument from ignorance "Thus we have good evidence for embracing substance dualism" uhhh no you didnt ever prove this "If Matt wants us to believe otherwise then he must provide a case for his own" shifting of the burden of proof "and if he doesnt give sound arguments to disprove my arguments then the rational person is within his rights for embracing the existence of a soul" again shifting the burden of proof. However Id agree with this sentence if you removed the word "rational"

Hearing Eric repeat "You're just begging the question" over and over feels like watching magician who just learned a trick and hasn't taken the time to practice it so he knows the mechanics or even how to perform it well.

Oh my god. These are pre-school arguments about consciousness.

I'm here from the future, Hernandez debated Aron Ra recently on the same topic, and his script... sorry I meant argument hasn't changed a bit. Funny how common that is with apologists.

Matt: *says something* Eric: so what you're saying is

I love how he begins by saying science can't ask/answer the question but then literally tries to support by invoking scientists who believe in souls lmao

Eric actually did a wonderful job of putting me to sleep. I'll have to listen to him again tomorrow night

Every time Matt takes the podium: "Hmmm... where to begin untangling this web of confused bullshit we all just listened to..."

I always like the WLC-ish tactic of: 1) Make a lot of syllogisms at the start as my "argument". 2) Ignore when I'm asked to demonstrate or give evidence for my premises *cough* assertions, or to rework my argument from ignorace fallacies. 3) Repeat that I made all those syllogisms so I win. 4) ??? 5) Profit.

I'm watching this for the second time and every time Eric speaks i hear my son when he was 5 years old. me: go put your pajamas on. my son: i already have clothes on. me: I'm telling you to put pajamas on. him: i already have clothes on. grrrrr!

While granted this is probably old news, I just can't get over the fact that in the video your opponent posted he actually edited out the audience applause following both your intro and rebuttal while leaving all applause directed toward him intact. I can't tell whether he'd be better as a fiction writer or used car salesman.

This was just painful. Eric keeps trying to seem like he understands these concepts, but ends up argumenting against himself 🤦‍♂️

I'm not even mad at Eric's opening. I'm *impressed* by how much *stupid* he managed to squeeze in those few minutes. That must have taken some serious effort.

Its like arguing with a child. I'm glad Matt didn't have any sharp objects within reach, he may have left in handcuffs.

A while ago, I watched William Lane Craig vs Lawrence Krauss, and someone commented on the video that Krauss talks about Astrophysics and Science, and Craig talks about words. This reminded me of that comment so much. This Eric guy just talks about words.

Eric eats nothing but word salad for lunch everyday

Hernandez: You refuted my point, so instead of admitting it, let's just move on.

Ironically, the color blue does have “weight”. “Blue” is defined as the specific nm wavelength of visible light falling between roughly 400-750 nm. Weight is the gravitational effect on mass, with mass being a condensation of energy. While it may not be substantially large, the energy of a wavelength of blue light intrinsically has mass, can warp space time, is affected by space time, and as such is effected by gravity, giving it a weight. Eric needs to step out from his philosophical bubble and learn about the world around us. He keeps using those words and phrases and I do not believe they mean what he thinks they mean.

Will you be doing a deconstruction of this debate, as you did with the debate with Sye? It'd be nice to be able to play it back at half speed, so to speak, and cut through some of the pseudo-jargon he used. I admire your patience and discipline.

"A single quark cannot contain a belief, and it's not like you can put more of those together and fix the problem." Look at the fundamental parts of a Toyota, screws, spark plugs, wires. A single spark plug cannot contain "a road trip to visit my family", and it's not like if you put more of those parts together you fix the problem. Ergo, taking a ride is irreducible, ergo my Corolla has a divine soul!

Eric made some of the worst arguments in debate history. As expected in such a debate.

I can almost feel the mental, "oh shit, I'm debating Sye again" when Eric started his talk about truth and obtaining it. Poor Matt.

I'm amazed by the amount of fallacies, non-sequiturs, unjustified assertions, and leaps of logic Hernandez makes. Most of his analogies fall apart and disprove his own position under the slightest scrutiny. I think one of the best examples to show his failures are his CD analogy. "If you scratch a CD, you don't damage the music, and you won't have new music emerging." But you undeniably do. He seems to believe that an ephereal concept of a piece of music exists, and a CD is just accessing it. This is obvious nonsense. The only meaningful way a CD holds music is in the physical inscription which a player can 'read' to play the piece of music. What the player plays *is* the music on the CD. If you scratch the CD slightly, it won't produce the same music anymore. If you break it, it doesn't hold music anymore. What would it even be supposed to mean that a broken CD still contains music? Where is it? Will it go away if you grind it to dust? In both the mind and the CD, he keeps conflating concepts with the actual. CDs don't hold an abstract concept of a piece of music that persists after the CD is gone. They simply *are* a physical pattern that results in composition of sounds. The brain doesn't hold an abstract concept of a person that persists after the brain is gone. It simply is an arrangement of neurons and cells that when working result to thought processes. I wish someone would nail him on this. The best way I've seen this question presented was by XKCD. "If you take apart the LEGO building, and put the parts back in the box, where is the building now?" The concept of a soul just creates more questions than answers. Where does a soul come from? When and how is it created? I would ask how a physical process of a human growing from embryo to thinking child creates a soul, but I suspect his answer would just be "God makes the soul". If Hernandez concept of a soul exists in the same way a story exists after no more people remember it and no books contain it, then it is meaningless and indistinguishable from something that doesn't exist.

Eric "I can not be divided." When the corpus colosom is severed, it cretes two consciousnesses

Wow that static. RIP my eardrums, Christ.

"science can't prove the existence of truth" What a dumb statement is that? "Truth" is just a concept we came up with to bring order into our thinking. It doesn't "exist" in any proovable in any detectable way.

Hey! A new video on thanksgiving! Thankful for you Matt! You've been a big help to me.

Matt, your level of patience with him is truly remarkable.. It's not Sye level, but damn..

15:30 - this whole argument about dividing identity - what he's *ignoring* is that if you divide a table in half, you don't get two 50%s of a table. A table has certain uses, certain requirements for what makes it a table, and neither half of the divided table can fulfil those uses to any degree. Half a table can't hold up your drinks, keep magazines in place, etc. 'Table' is a thing that cannot be meaningfully divided, by the exact same logic he's employing.

Matt: "Id debate god if he showed up" xD @Matt Dillahunty you are pure genius

Eric needs to take some time to research two key concepts: "Emergence" and "The Non Sequitur Fallacy". Also, congrats on being one of the only people to make Matt laugh in a debate! Not even Sye could manage that!

Eric Hernandez COMPLETELY missed EVERYTHING that Matt said in his opening statement....

Debate: Does the soul exist? No. End of debate.

Sometimes we listen to understand, and other times we listen to respond. Eric Hernandez spent the entire conversation NOT listening at all.

"Rearranging atoms won't give you consciousness" Yes, it does, it's called brain.

Eric has his own copy of this debate on his channel. He also edited in his powerpoints in, which I think makes figuring out where his premises fail so much easier.

Eric: Opens by stating there cannot be a scientific debate regarding the existence of the soul. *About 30 minutes later* Also Eric: Cites UC Berkeley psychophysicist who used the word soul in his scientific research and providing no further context. Sorry, bud. We cannot use that, this isn't a scientific debate.

1:17:27 I opened up my computer, but I couldn't for the life of me see my vacation photos in there. There's clearly something transcendent amiss.

"that thing is a dog because it has a dog soul" .....what a jem in the crown that is the human intellect

I believe in the Soul. And its Godfather was James Brown.

This might be one of my favorite debates I've seen Matt in. I know it can be rude, especially during a debate setting, to be as expressive as Matt sometimes was, but seeing his face on Eric's 'arguments', along with his complete confusion at the 'points' Eric made is sometimes just as good an indicator at your opponent's level of debate as a spoken answer is. I truly cannot wait for this Debate Review.

Actually, he is very wrong. Fire IS smoke. Literally. When fire occurs it's because the carbon soot of smoke is heated to a point where it glows, like any solid object would given enough heat to bring its radiation past infrared. The edge of the fire is just the point at which, in that instant, the soot has cooled to the point where is it no longer radiating visible light. Because fire can be influenced by simple physical phenomena like the wind, we have definitive evidence that fire has a physical component and, in fact, fire IS smoke itself. When smoke is not produced you do not get a visible flame, as anyone who has every properly operated a Bunsen burner knows.

52:00 And did you freely come to believe that. Must *everybody* try the "Road Runner" tactic? Do people think that's, in any way, deep or useful? 57:53 Can someone please tell apologists that rhetorical tricks are not actually ways of making points? Is the entire field a practice in stealth trolling? 103:51 Yes, we know what a counterfactual is. If we didn't know the word, we'd still know the concept of a hypothetical scenario. So, we already know that. You don't have to explain the concept. In fact, it's insulting to the entire audience that you felt you needed to. This is another thing about apologetics that I find annoying, the need not only to go through the logic step by step, but to, each time, metaphorically say "you lift your right foot, you move it forward". 1:04:00 "Sure, but what does his knowledge have to do with my free will?" Please, apologists, wait for the actual argument to be made, so that you can respond to it rather than what you're projecting. 1:11:00 Yeah, other people have pointed it out, other people have commented to say this, so I'll say that I agree. We have the offspring of William Lane Craig and Sye Ten Bruggencate. He has managed to mix the worst elements of both, the one who wants to take years making you believe he's smart and the one who wants to make conversation impossible unless on terms that give him victory ahead of time. 1:17:00 He's going into this big thing on whether or not we see colors the same... and... in all honesty, I don't know. It is entirely possible, with no means of testing either way, that, while we see and are able to differentiate colors the same, we experience the individual colors differently. The question is.. so what what? And, excuse me, is the reason he repeatedly accuses Matt of begging the question that he only knows that phrase as something people accuse him of, considering that he regularly assumes, without making the case, things like that the brain cannot effect itself? I can't get much past 1:22:00 on this. Really, these are the core problems with apologetics in general. 1. It doesn't reason to reach a conclusion, it seeks out the reasoning to achieve a specific conclusion. 2. It doesn't care about anything but winning, therefore it sees no problem with whatever underhanded or self-serving methods, so it'll do anything to disrupt the conversation while retaining the image that it isn't. It's like that passive aggressive person who never technically breeches manners, but is still disrespectful at every turn, that then pretends that you're the bad guy for getting angry. Seriously, if a person values honesty or respect for others in even the slightest, the faith of an apologist should be avoided at all costs.

My immediate impression of this debate is that you can see the difference between someone who is repeating arguments he has read versus arguments he has arrived at. I have a philosophy degree, and one of the courses I took in my pursuit of that degree is Philosophy of Mind. There was very little that Eric presented that was not almost verbatim out of the textbook we used. Now, there is nothing wrong with using the arguments of others, but something that tends to occur when you do that is that you become befuddled when someone pokes holes in the argument and start claiming that the other person is ignorant or committing a fallacy (begging the question being Eric's favorite accusation) when in reality the person is just showing the problems with your argument. I hypothesize that this is because those who parrot arguments did not put the mental work into developing an argument, so they never had to go through the natural process of trying to find the holes in an argument before deciding that it makes sense. This can also be seen in Matt's debate about abortion with Kristine where she was simply parroting arguments that can come out of any textbook and became flustered when Matt challenged them. Other Thoughts: The red brick example: Red bricks appear red because of the chemical composition of the bricks. If you rearrange the bricks they will still look red, but if you rearrange their atoms they will not.(I also have a chemistry degree and when Eric used this argument, my mind started screaming that this is not how colors work.) Quarks not having memory: Computers can remember things on their hard drives. Not being able to split a soul: Matt's example of the split brain patient was basically a body slam there, but even without that computers work as a counter here as well. If Eric was right that you can't split a brain to get two people, I would argue that if I chop my laptop in half I also don't get two computers. That my computer can process and store information is an emergent property of it being assembled as a whole. Matt's 3 pronged question about free will was another body slam. Of course if a god chooses to build us knowing exactly what we will do with our lives then the only one with free will was god, we would be like dominos that god stacked and then flicked over. I give credit to Eric for having learned about a large number of arguments, but other than that he had a rather poor showing here. I do not think he fully understood the arguments he used and he essentially just called Matt a cheater every time Matt gave a rebuttal. Edit: One more thing, word trickery and games are fun, but when Eric said Matt could not prove that science was the best way to know things, it reminded me of the word game played when people say that the statement "You need evidence to prove a thing to be true" is illogical because you cannot give evidence for it. Yes, there is a bit of a point there but it is mostly just a kind of "gotcha" philosophy, not one that leads us closer to truth.

37:00 Except we now know that our memories are not data in an information retrieval system - or at least this is only partially true. It has been shown that every act of memory 'recall' is a process of synthesizing a new iteration of that memory from a group of fragmentary clues - literally creating a new experience of that memory with each recall process.

for every one of Hernandez' arguments, just insert the phrase "rational thinking hurts, therefore I have a soul"

At one point I started feeling bad for Eric, I don’t think he even understands how confused he sounds! especially with the car wreck analogy just shows how lost he is on this subject.

That was painful. :/ I am embarrassed to be part of a society where we still need to even be discussing the existence of a soul. It has so value... absolutely none!

Eric trips himself up in his own arguments repeatedly and continuously. He is only capable of setting up silly, incoherent scenarios and drawing unrelated conclusions from the scenarios. To be fair, he is masterful at that.

Seriously. Eric doesn't know what "question begging" means. He thinks it just means someone disagrees with you.

The greatest disservice you can do an idea is to defend it with poor arguments. At least I _suspect_ Eric's arguments were poor? I'm still picking through the salad of forced analogies looking for them. His attempt at cross-examining Matt on free will was also pretty dire.

The guy does exorcisms. Should have lead with that, then the debate would have ended early and we wouldn't be forced to listen to him fumble around with words he clearly doesn't understand. Grr.

39:00 - Eric completely defeated his own argument: you can change everything about a person by altering / damaging the brain. From memories, to preferences, to beliefs. That, *by definition,* is not the same person any more. In other words, there is *nothing* in common between the two. So, even if there is a soul, its function is *exactly nothing!* It's indistinguishable from something that does not exist. The soul is the stone in the "stone soup" children's story.

Hernandez: You're question begging Matt: You keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means.

The desperation required to justify fairy tales driven by a fear of death and an ending to existence. Why not just make the best of this life that we KNOW we have (no debate needed) for ourselves and those we share this world with?

Even in this sad venue versus a sad interlocutor, Matt is reasonable, patient, and the words he speaks actually make sense.

Matt, you MUST do a deconstruction and analysis of this one. I mean, I can't imagine how frustrating this must have been for you and doing an analysis might have to be considered as torture... but it kinda feels necessary!

At the end of the cross examination section it looks like even the moderator is tired of Eric's stupid arguments.

1:01:48 This bit is amazing... He leads Eric Hernandez down the rabbit hole with simple questions, then at 1:02:15 he has to change his position because he saw the flaw in how he has no free will given the responses he had to the beginning simple questions.

With only a little irony, I'd like to say Matt that you're a Saint to handle that without flying off the handle.

This was "here are some great concepts" (Matt) VS. "here are some people who said some interesting things" (Eric). Eric was really out of his league.

Hernandez seems to be doing the rhetorical/argumentative equivalent of magic. If you know the name of an argument, you harness its power, regardless of understanding.

"Mind cannot arise in a naturalistic universe." "Prove it." ...

I hope the pay check was good Matt. This is as painful to watch and listen as Sye's "debate".

It's funny this Eric guy accuses +Matt Dillahunty of fallacies when he doesn't know what the fallacies are

If there is a review video of this debate by Matt, I'd love to watch it (I can't find one). If there isn't, I would hope Matt might like to make one.

*Matt says anything* Eric: -"That leads to an infinite regress!" -"You're begging the question!" -"A purely physical body can't do that!" Eric's 7 arguments all boil down to an argument from incredulity fallacy. "X can't possibly be explained by a purely physical body/brain." is a *premise* in most of them. He never justifies why it can't, he simply asserts it. There is no rational reason to believe in a soul. Additionally, the obvious giant problem with the concept are the questions of where and how the soul comes from and why it attaches to brains in the first place. If brains are like a receiver or pilot's seat, why did the brain develop like that in the fist place? The only answer ever given is that a god made it this way. It's no wonder you make up a fantasy system like that if you're a Christian catholic and believe the Bible when it talks about it.

Save 2 hours of time, read this: Atheist: How can you be so sure a soul exists? Theist: I can safely assume.

"Demonstrate I'm wrong and I'll believe you." Love it.

Purple is almost exactly like the thing that gives you sunburn, only slightly longer.