Transcript

Recently, atheist Alex O'Connor sparred with 20 Christians on the popular Jubilee program, Surrounded.

And in today's episode, we're gonna see what Christian responses worked and which were less effective at defending God's existence and Christ's divinity.

And, on an interesting side note, I applied to be one of the Christians for this episode back when it was announced as a round table with an unnamed atheist.

To get on the show, you had to send an audition tape.

So I included a recent endorsement of my ability to have productive dialogue from none other than Alex O'Connor.

Here's part of what I sent them.

To set the stage, you've debated Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Piers Morgan, Sam Harris, Destiny, professors, bishops.

How did their debate styles vary?

And who was your most formidable opponent?

The most formidable?

Um, the, the guy that I just mentioned, Trent Horn.

I debated him years ago and I remember at the time thinking, like, Wow, that was powerful.

Because at the time I'd been debating a lot of people.

There was a lot of, like, shouting and putting down and this kind of thing.

And Trent came in very calmly and put forward what are very good sort of arguments for the existence of God, very powerful, very difficult to respond to.

And he did it calmly and politely, but effectively.

And I remember coming away from that thinking like, Wow.

Unfortunately, I was not selected to be on the show, but I can still give you my thoughts on the exchange, which I would say overall went in Alex's favor.

He was poised, calm, and asked questions that put most of the Christians on the defensive.

And the Christians exhibited a wide variety of approaches to engaging him, some of which were better than others.

I don't wanna be too harsh on them though, because this would be a very difficult environment for any Christian apologist.

Though I will say, actually some of them are not actually Christian, as you'll see coming up soon.

Alex brought up tough issues and you only have a few minutes in that environment to respond while everyone else around you is considering to vote to have you swapped out if they don't like your answer on one of these four topics.

They are: suffering makes God's existence unlikely, God commanded genocide in the Bible, there is insufficient evidence for Christ's resurrection, and Jesus never claimed to be God.

And by the way, if you enjoy these episodes, be sure to click the subscribe button, and don't forget to visit us at trenthornpodcast.com in order to support our channel to help us grow and engage in new projects.

Instead of going through what each of the speakers said, I'm gonna present a general survey of their responses and what I think were the best approaches to moving the conversation forward on these topics.

To begin, the least effective approaches were those that took way too long to get to the point or avoided Alex's main argument.

For example, one of the guests went down a red herring about the historicity of the virgin birth that never addressed Alex's objections about the resurrection.

And when he spoke another time on God allegedly commanding genocide in the Bible, he went on a long analogy about the P. Diddy abuse scandal that never went anywhere, so he got voted off.

Another woman named Lori went up to defend the claim that Jesus claimed to be God, but she focused entirely on how the Old Testament prophesied Jesus's crucifixion and Messianic status.

Yet you were enthroned as the holy one, you are the one Israel praises.

I- like, what are you looking for here?

Well, basically if you go on, it basically describes crucifixion to the T.

Sure.

Written 800-

But can I, can I, can I just stop you there because it, it do- like-

R- No, no, but Let me finish.

Written 800 years before crucifixion ever even happened.

It even gets into the .

Wh- what has that got to do with Jesus claiming to be God?

Well, what this has to do with it is I believe that the entirety of the word of God, just like in John chapter one, The Word became flesh-

Sure.

and made its dwelling amongst us.

Yep.

I believe the entire Bible points to Jesus being the Messiah.

I, I agree with you.

So that, that is my point.

We-

The Messiah is not the same as God.

Jews didn't believe that the Messiah was going to be God.

Well, it- Okay, pause.

Sorry, Lori, you've been voted out.

So you don't wanna waste time getting to the point, you wanna directly address the argument being presented.

And one young woman, who may be Catholic given her Our Lady of Guadalupe shirt, not only failed to directly address Alex's points, but my heresy alarms were blaring at what she did say.

Learning more about our God that Knowing, like, what happened in the Old Testament-

Mm-hmm.

He needed to have a representative to humble Himself during these trials of the early beginnings of the Old Testament.

Okay.

For the sake of time, I really need Jesus claiming to be God.

So, my point is that He sent Jesus to be that human figure to represent God so He could humble Himself in His own creation.

So where does Jesus say that, I am that person.

I am God.

When he claims to say, I am the light, I am the way, follow me.

I am your God.

When h-

He d- well, He says, I am your God.

I am the light.

I feel like with-

Sure, He says that, but Y- you just said, I am your God.

I don't think Jesus says that.

My apologies on misrepresenting, like, the whole entirely of the words in that verse, but He's still claiming that He is the light-

Sure.

that has that connection-

Yeah.

to that higher God.

Absolutely.

And I feel like with that connection-

That connection to that higher God?

Yes.

That He is in that physical form.

So if, if there was a virgin birth it was known about?

For the sake of time-

Mm.

and for the sake of flags, I just want to emphasize that Jesus is that human God form, that He needed to humble Himself so He can truly understand how humans work in this creation.

I just wanna know how, how you know that that was Jesus.

I want to, I wanna emphasize that as well.

Just put, by the very teachings that He said and how His talk-

All right, pause.

You've been voted out.

Please return to your seat.

Thanks.

Some of the other participants threw important Christian doctrines under the bus to make their job easier, but they still ended up getting run over by Alex's tactics.

For example, in the section on genocide in the Bible, one self-proclaimed progressive Christian said this.

If you look at scripture, I mean, I think that God is ultimately always pulling us toward greater levels of justice and we look into this story in history, like I think people are recording a potentially historic genocide that they are trying to make sense of in their religious worldview, and so they're superimposing language for God.

And do you think that God commanded this to happen?

I am not super interested in that conversation, but I would say potentially.

Okay, because for me, the problem is that if you have God explicitly commanding this to happen

Okay, pass.

I think you're asking the Bible to do what it wasn't intended to do, is what I would say.

Sure.

Now, you can make the case that the commands in scripture that sound like genocide were not literal commands carried out in history, but exaggerated warfare rhetoric.

It's not easy in a format like this to make that case, but it is one option.

What you should not do though is flippantly act like the difficult passages don't matter because you just have a really low view of scripture or essential doctrines.

If you take that approach, a skeptic can still ask why you bother believing any of the faith when you already reject so much of it anyways.

It's common among liberal Christians to think they don't need apologetics because they only choose to believe the stuff in the Bible that's easy to agree with, like a wise teacher sharing the golden rule.

I cover this problem in my episode on the emptiness of liberal Christianity, where you can hear a Unitarian minister making this claim to the late atheist Christopher Hitchens, and Hitchens' ensuing smack down of a response is great.

It seems to me that you're generally referring to fundamentalist faith of various kinds.

Now, I'm- I'm a liberal Christian, um, and I don't take the stories from the scripture literally.

I don't believe in the doctrine of atonement, that Jesus died for our sins, for example.

Do you make any distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?

Well, only in this respect.

I would say that if you don't believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ, in other words the Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and that by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you are really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.

Well, I- I disagree with that.

I consider myself a Christian.

You also see this liberal approach in how some of the participants answered Alex's use of the problem of evil against God's existence, because they denied that God could've made a world free of suffering, and so he's sort of just stuck managing this world.

Well, the first part is I don't agree with the whole setting up the system part.

So I'm not one of those theists that believes that God does this select and pick idea of creating worlds.

I don't think that God actually creates worlds.

I think that God lets worlds develop according to a certain way, but because God can oversee an overarching narrative, he knows exactly how he can redeem anything.

Jacob Hansen, who I previously debated on the Book of Mormon, also appeared in this exchange, and he got to sit down with Alex for an extended discussion at the end of the episode, where Jacob claimed that Mormonism has a more rationally defensible conception of God than Christianity.

Jacob's claim is grounded in Mormonism's rejection of one God having created the world from nothing and being all powerful in doing that.

Instead, Mormons believe there are countless numbers of men who become gods that create worlds with men, who then become gods and continue the process.

These beings find themselves in a world beyond their full control, so they are mere super creatures rather than the one true god, the infinite act of being.

You see this in Jacob's repeated references to human beings becoming as God is, i.e.

becoming literal gods.

And notice here that when Jacob says we have to suffer so we can know injustice just like God knows it, that's because his god first learned about all of this when he was a mere man.

It is by passing through this realm that we have the experience of injustice that allows us to know what injustice is.

But why do we need to know what injustice is?

Because how else can you come to be like God?

Kind of like the Adam and Eve story.

There's the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

So what is justice?

How do you define justice?

This is also why Mormons refer to the fall of Adam and Eve as a fall upward, necessary for God's plan.

The Book of Mormon says, Adam fell that men might be, and men are that they might have joy.

For more on other problems in Mormonism, check out these other episodes on my channel.

Jacob's point was essentially that Mormonism has a better explanation for evil because the Mormon god does not have control over certain natural laws, because under Mormonism, God, or Heavenly Father as they call them, is just one of the gods, he's not the ultimate foundation of reality.

God in Mormonism is merely one of the characters in reality.

Jacob has to do this because he previously spoke about God bringing about greater goods that we are unaware of, like how a dog may not understand the pain of a vaccination shot, but the dog is still better off from this evil that he doesn't understand.

Now, that's not far from the classical theist answer for why God allows evil.

But then Alex asks a followup question.

But if you had the opportunity to- to not have that dog need the shot and you gave them the shot anyway, you created the need for the shot and then gave them the shot and caused them to suffer when you didn't need to give them the shot in the first place, that would be, that would be wrong.

But in LDS cosmology, God doesn't, God- God does not create the conditions that are, where the shot is necessary.

That's what we need to prove.

You're correct and you're correct on creedal Christianity, it does.

And that's the biggest flaw with it.

In my dialogue about Catholicism and Mormonism that was hosted on Jacob's channel a little while ago, we also discussed how Mormons do not accept that God is truly all powerful.

'Cause what's the problem with evil?

If God is all knowing, all powerful, and all good, why is there evil?

Like couldn't God do something about that?

And one approach to answering the problem is to say, Well, yes, God would want to get rid of evil, but there's- there's certain things restraining him from doing that.

Almost, I don't mean to be crude, but it's like the Mormon perspective is like, Well, God's doing the best that he can.

I, and I think that is-

But it's not enough.

I think that's exactly right.

So under Mormonism, God is kind of saddled with an imperfect universe that He didn't create and now He's doing his best to manage the situation.

Jacob then tries to turn the conversation around on Alex and make his own case easier in the process.

Well, let me turn this around because the- while I think that you- you bring up some objections there, my claim is-

Mm-hmm.

is that we have a better capacity to handle this than the creedal Christian model.

Sure.

Okay, so- so-

And so would- would you agree with my claim that we have a better model than creedal Christianity?

I don't- I don't know because I don't know enou- 'cause we've only been speaking for 10 minutes.

Uh, there- there are probably things that it deals with better and things that it deals with worse.

For example, you know, I've- I've- I've spoken a ton on my show about the Gnostic cosmology, which I think does a lot to do away with problems, like the problem of evil and the weird sort of seeming imater- immateriality of Jesus in some passages and stuff.

But there's a lot of problems with it too.

Mm-hmm.

There's a ton of problems such as like-

Yeah.

God's providence and the nature of why the is created.

All of these ideas are oftentimes I think created because they better account for certain things over others.

Don't think that's necessarily the case with Mormonism, of course.

But yeah, I'm sure in some cases it does better and in some cases it does worse.

In this case, I- I don't think there's anything more to explain the suffering of animals.

Jacob's being shrewd here by asking Alex if, at the very least, they could agree Mormonism has a better answer than Christianity, even if Alex still finds the Mormon answer unsatisfying.

But Alex is not willing to say that it does because Mormonism might only be better in certain respects, but not better overall.

As Alex says, the Gnostics might have an easier time explaining evil in the world because early Gnostic theology believed in a good god and an evil god.

So that explains the existence of evil, but it raises even deeper questions that early Christians exploited about how a good god could be God in any meaningful sense and still be thwarted by an evil god.

And it isn't just Mormons and Gnostics who defend a limited god in the face of evil.

Process theology, based on the work of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, says that God changes in response to what creatures do, and God merely has a power of persuasion over the world rather than complete sovereign control over the world.

In 1981, Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote the famous book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, that claims God hates evil as much as we do, but God isn't powerful enough to stop evil.

Kushner applied this theodicy to the death of his own 14-year-old son from a rare genetic condition.

He wrote, Even God has a hard time keeping chaos in check and limiting the damage that evil can do.

If God is a god of justice and not of power, then He can still be on our side when bad things happen to us.

Why do we have to insist on everything being reasonable?

Why must everything happen for a specific reason?

Why can't we let the universe have a few rough edges?

A similar approach can be seen in the work of Philip Goff, a non-theist who recently embraced liberal Christianity.

Goff did so because he said that fine-tuning of the laws of physics shows our universe has a life-centered purpose, which is incompatible with atheism.

But Goff also thinks the amount of evil and suffering in the world is incompatible with classical theism.

As a compromise, Goff says that God exists and created the world, but God is not all-powerful.

However, this approach to the problem of evil doesn't work because it either faces the same objections the traditional theist faces, and so it provides no advantage, or it reduces God to such a lame concept that faith isn't worth it in the first place.

So on the one hand, even if God is not all-powerful, most Christians who believe in a limited god would at least say that God is still very powerful.

But if God is at least powerful enough to be called a god worthy of worship because He arranged huge aspects of matter, energy, and physical laws in our universe in ways that are beyond our understanding, then God has enough power to remove some gratuitous evils or to eliminate many particular instances of evil that we observe, even if God, under this view, can't eliminate all of them.

An atheist can just reframe the problem of evil by saying, If an all-good, very wise, very powerful God exists, why didn't he intervene in a simple case of so-called gratuitous evil, like using His power to slow a running child down so the child isn't hit by a bus?

Now, a liberal Christian might say that God does that all the time, but in some cases, God just can't get there in time to stop the evil.

But that seems either like an arbitrary limit and one wonders how they know that's the reason.

More importantly, though, it reduces God into a superhero who just has good days and bad days, not a real god.

However, if the limited god chooses to allow these bad things to happen even though he has enough power to stop them, this same explanation can be applied to an omnipotent God allowing all the evils we observe, which removes any supposed benefit liberal Christianity has over classical Christianity.

The only way to save a limited-god defense against the problem of evil would be to keep reducing God's abilities so He isn't culpable for any evil at all.

But once you subtract God's power enough in that way, the thing you end up worshiping hardly deserves the title of God at all.

In fact, the god of some liberal Christians is so impotent, he can't even do what you and I can do.

Many years ago, I had a conversation on the podcast with a minister who defended process theology.

Remember, under this view, God only persuades or draws out the universe.

He doesn't really have direct control over it.

So I asked this minister if God could perform a very basic act, like pick me up from inside my house and move me outside of it.

So- so God has-

Prior to -

He has power over the universe.

He can organize it to make it h- how he desires.

So God couldn't make you six-foot-five, but could he pick you up and put you outside of your house?

Oh.

I'm thinking of the story of Jonah there.

Um-

Mm-hmm.

I would say, uh, you know, I, I've never thought about it in that way.

Um-

If God can't pick you up out of your house, then it makes sense to say he can't pick you up if you're about to be hit by a truck.

God hates when that evil befalls you, but there's nothing this puny god can do about it.

Answers to the problem of evil that neuter God's power don't give a defense of God at all.

They just propose a form of atheism where there is no supreme being, but there is some creepy person who watches our universe like it's a TV show and feels sad when something happens to a character he likes.

The atheist, B.C.

Johnson, put it well, Such a god, if not dead, is the next thing to it, and a person who believes in such a ghost of a god is practically an atheist.

To call such a thing god would be to strain the meaning of the word.

So, those were some approaches that were less effective in the dialogue, but what were some of the effective approaches?

When it comes to the problem of evil, I appreciated the Christian who pressed Alex for the standard of morality Alex uses.

This is why Alex said his argument is of a form that avoids many Christian responses.

Specifically, Alex says he is just offering an internal critique based on suffering.

So, even if a critic like him doesn't believe in objective evil, and Alex certainly does not, he's an expressivist, he could believe that if Christianity were true, then there would be less gratuitous suffering.

And since there isn't, it follows Christianity is not true.

If I had to reply to this quickly, I would say that you cannot only focus on suffering to determine if God does or doesn't exist.

The fact that someone weighs 600 pounds makes it very unlikely they're a world-class athlete.

But if other facts are true, like that they won a sumo wrestling tournament, then that fact about their huge weight no longer has, well, huge weight.

Likewise, if the classical arguments for God do work, then that proves any suffering we see is not truly gratuitous and the all-powerful God can always bring greater good from any of these evils we observe, even if we can't personally see what that good is.

I would also have pressed Alex's analogies that assume that if we would stop animal suffering, then God would stop animal suffering if he existed.

And since he apparently doesn't, that means God doesn't exist.

The animal kingdom is part of the fallen world.

They are part of the fallen order.

Do they feel pain?

I don't know.

I, that's, that's more of a good question.

I don't know necessarily where they-

What's your confidence level?

Like, if I started strangling a dog in front of you, would you stop me?

Yeah, I think, I think that I have a, an obligation to prevent the death of living creatures.

Not, not death.

No, I'm not gonna kill it.

I'm gonna sort of-

Well, even, even if-

Deadpool-style, keep it alive.

Yeah.

Just so it can suffer more.

Yeah, sure.

Would you stop me from doing that?

Yeah.

But why?

Uh, because I believe that God wants us to protect the created order.

But as I noted in the debate Alex and I had on Pints with Aquinas a few years ago, his analogies can go in the other direction.

You can make an analogy from how humans are justified in allowing animal suffering to show there could be good reasons for God allowing animal suffering.

For example, if human beings left planet Earth for another planet, most of them would not destroy the Earth and all remaining sentient animals after they left so that those animals would not experience pain.

They'd see value just in those animals existing, even if they do suffer pain, and that there's value in that instead of creating a replica with fleshy robots designed to look like animals.

But that real animals can only exist in a world where their being increases or decreases in their interactions with one another.

And it's a good thing if these beings exist.

Or to make the analogy more like God's active creation, I doubt Alex would object to us terraforming a newly discovered planet and introducing life there that eventually evolves over the course of billions of years even though there will be suffering in that process, when we could have chosen not to terraform that planet or not to create life at all.

This especially answers atheists who say that God should not have created anything if the only thing that was feasible for God to create was a world that had some suffering in it.

The things that are created, they justify their own existence in the goodness of their very being.

My answer to Alex in a nutshell would be that if he's willing to grant that God can have good reasons for allowing human suffering, like free will, and we can have good reasons for allowing some animal suffering, then what's to stop an all-powerful God from having good reasons to allow animal suffering?

For more on the problem of animal pain and suffering, I recommend interviews on the Classical Theist podcast that deal specifically with this subject.

When it came to the question of genocide in the Old Testament, I thought the second guest who Alex engaged was one of the best guests in the episode and was very poised in giving answers to a difficult subject.

Frankly, that's tough to address in an environment like this.

And your best strategy may be to point out that Alex's moral theory rejects the objective wrongness of genocide and his gotcha is just merely based on him feeling yucky about mass killing.

Personally, I find the non-literal approach to these texts to be helpful.

And one can make this case without becoming a full-blown progressive Christian.

For more on that, see Jimmy Akin's position on this in a recent episode of Intellectual Catholicism I'll link to below.

When it came to the resurrection of Jesus, Alex's approach revealed how some basic arguments can backfire.

Like how this Christian appealed to the apostles' martyrdom, but could not cite specific historical evidence that the apostles were truly martyred.

How do you know that they weren't lying, for example?

Because they were executed for it.

So, for ins-

How, how were they executed?

Um, some of them were executed by being sawed in half.

Some of them were executed by being beheaded.

How do you know that?

Well, through the, obviously the tradition and the historicity of the church.

Well, those are two things.

There's tradition and there's historicity.

Every single other death of the apostles relies solely, solely-

Yes.

on church tradition.

There is no historical evidence that they were martyred and certainly not that they were martyred for their belief that Jesus was res- resurrected.

In fact, even according to church tradition, the only person, the only disciple, the only apostle that was not martyred for his faith, do you know who it was?

John.

John, the one who makes the most theologically fantastical claims of all of the apostles.

This is why I said in my episode on the martyrdom argument that in order to prove the apostles sincerely believed in the resurrection, we only have to prove they were willing to be persecuted and killed for the message that they were preaching in order to demonstrate their sincerity.

Now, some of the other Christians focused on the reliability of the gospels in order to prove the resurrection happened, which leaves you open to having to defend skeptical attacks on the gospels, which Alex provided in spades.

When, when Jesus is on the cross, there are two thieves next to him, right?

Mm-hmm.

What do they say?

Uh, one says, uh, I will One condemns him, and one says, Don't condemn him.

That's what happens in the Gospel of Luke.

In the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Matthew, which are earlier, both of them mock him on the cross.

Yeah, I don't see that being an issue.

You don't see that as being an issue?

Why would that be an issue?

Because, because this is quite an important theological point that's being made.

Jesus is forgiving his enemies right before his death.

This seems to me, if the earlier gospels, Mark and Matthew, say that this didn't happen, that, and explicitly says that the people who were on the cross next to him were mocking him, this is a story that Luke has invented.

But what is, what is- Now, why would Luke invent a story like that to make a theological point- But what is- which tells us that the gospel writers are willing to invent things in order to make a theological point?

I think you're just assuming invention there.

Okay, pause.

Now, this contradiction isn't difficult to answer because both thieves could have mocked Jesus and then Dismas, the good thief, repented, changed his mind, and asked Jesus for forgiveness.

And getting something wrong though does not prove the gospel authors invented things.

If I asked a regular person to write a biography of George Washington, they'd probably repeat the story of Washington saying he can't lie after chopping down a cherry tree.

That's a later legend.

It never happened.

But that error in their biography would not disprove the far greater number of basic facts such an author would get right about George Washington.

But this is why I prefer to focus on the minimal facts approach to the resurrection that would ask Alex to explain why the disciples claimed to see Jesus after his death, including in groups.

If Alex agrees that testimony alone can establish Jesus was alive when he saw Pontius Pilate and that testimony alone established Jesus was dead after coming down from the cross, then testimony alone can establish Jesus was seen alive again after that fact.

Finally, when it comes to Jesus claiming to be God, I'd remind Alex that this is a natural claim, not a supernatural one.

Anybody can claim to be God.

Rising from the dead to prove it is another matter.

So, we don't need extraordinary evidence to prove Jesus made this claim.

In fact, Jacob Hansen made a good point that Alex was willing to concede that the gospel authors and Saint Paul thought Jesus was God.

If that's true, then isn't it plausible to say one way all these authors got that idea is because it comes from the same source, Jesus himself, even if from Alex's perspective Jesus was incorrect about his identity?

Ultimately, videos like the Jubilees Surrounded series show why conversations on huge philosophical questions don't go well with a grab bag of guests under a strict time limit.

That's why I'd prefer to have Alex and other critics of Christianity here in the studio to have a long-form dialogue about these important questions.

I want to thank our patrons at trenthornpodcast.com, whose support has allowed us to redesign the studio to do just that.

If you want to help us bring guests on for the show, please support us at trenthornpodcast.com.

Thank you all so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.