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In this episode, Trent answers a wide variety of questions from his patrons.
Narrator:
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. And I want to give a big shout out and thanks to our supporters at trenthornpodcast.com. Some of you have been supporting the Council of Trent since the very beginning, what is it? Three or four years ago. You’ve been faithfully supporting us each month, and that’s what has allowed us to grow from just a humble audio-only podcast, to doing a few rebuttal videos every few months on YouTube, to eventually being fully on YouTube. And then you got me out of the master bedroom closet into this studio and who knows where maybe we’ll grow and increase our reach from here and doing all this, of course, to glorify God, to serve his church, to help people to know the love of God and the salvation that is found in Jesus Christ.
I’m just so grateful that so many of you trust what we’re doing here and you want to partner with us to do that. And so very big thanks to you all and as a special thank you, I want to do a patron only Q&A today. So if you want to take part in future Q&As, like this one, other private special events that we host at our conference every year actually in California at Catholic Answers in September. Last year we had a patron only lunch and talk, and that was really fun. I love meeting people and if you’re a patron and you come to the conference, you can be a part of that too. You can also get access to our Catechism studies series, New Testament studies series, all that and more at trenthornpodcast.com. So I ask our patrons every few months or so to submit questions, anything they want.
I think we have all theology and apologetic questions today. Only one question is not apologetic related, but I am still happy to answer it. So let’s jump right into them. The first question, well, the first few actually deal with apostolic succession. So here’s the first one. “Why does everyone use Acts 1 as a proof text of apostolic succession in the Bible? Prior to me joining the church last year, I’d always understood the choosing of Mathias as their way of replacing Judas as the 12th apostle. They even had requirements where they needed to have witnessed the resurrection. Having 12 was necessary because Jesus said there would be 12 thrones ruling over the 12 tribes of Israel and Heaven and Judas’ fate was questionable at best, it wouldn’t necessarily follow. This is a proof of apostolic succession because the office of Apostle did not get passed down to modern day.”
So I agree with you that Acts 1:20 in and of itself is not proof of the entire doctrine of apostolic succession. There’s hardly any scripture versus that are proof of an entire doctrine. Though it’s interesting that Protestants will try to say the second Timothy 3:16-17 is an entire proof of soul scripture and not all of them will, but some will do that since obviously we’ve been talking about solo scriptura recently. But what I would say is that replacing Judas with Mathias, it’s not just the case like the 12 apostles, the 12 were like a basketball team, and now one of our players is gone. He went to jail or something and we got to get a ringer in to fill that spot. That’s not how it’s phrased because Peter quotes the Psalms to justify electing Mathias and in particular the Psalms say “Let another his office take.”
So it’s not just that they were down to 11 and they wanted 12 apostles. It was that Judas had a particular office as an apostle and someone else filled that office or that throne, that particular office that had been designated for Judas. Now the questioner is right that the office of Apostle has not continued into the church’s history. I will say though, some people conflate the 12 with the word apostle because it’s true that Mathias was selected to replace Judas to replace one of the 12. And one of the requirements is that he was part of the ministry, the earthly ministry of Jesus from the beginning. But this was not a requirement for all apostles, right? Because Paul is an apostle, he was not a witness of Jesus’s ministry. Barnabas was an apostle. Acts 14 refers to him as him as an apostle. He was not a witness of Jesus’ ministry.
So the 12 was a very distinct subset below the broader office that we would see in the early church of Apostle. Now what we’ve seen, what the magisterium teaches and we understand from that is that the office of Apostle did not continue, but the authority of the apostles, not their exact authority, qua apostle, but apostolic authority has continued in the bishops. So we know that by the time the office of Apostle ended at the end of the first century, beginning of the second century, we see this in Saint Ignatius of Antioch, the church, the hierarchy, the sacred order in the church is a threefold structure of bishop, priest and deacon and their hierarchical with bishops overseeing elders or priests. And so once the apostles are gone, the bishops are left to carry on that mantle of leadership, not exactly, but still with apostolic authority.
And so actually lumen genium, there’s a note of explanation for the dogmatic constitution of Lumen genium from Vatican 2, and this is what it says. “The parallel between Peter and the rest of the apostles on the one hand and between the Supreme pontiff and the bishops on the other hand, does not imply the transmission of the apostle’s extraordinary power to their successors, like the ability to write scripture for example, nor does it imply as is obvious equality between the head of the college and its members, but only a proportionality between the first relationship Peter Apostles and the second Pope bishops.” So I would agree that Acts 1:20 does not prove apostolic succession, but it does show the understanding that these offices like Apostle could be transferred to other people. Now, the office of Apostle itself ended with the closure divine revelation, which by the way, go back to sola scriptura.
There’s no scripture in the Bible that says the office of Apostle is no longer a part of the church. You have Mormons who believe in apostles. You have some Pentecostal who believe there can be living apostles today. It’s possible Jesus could have kept appearing to people and designating them to be apostles like he do at Paul and Barnabas. The Bible never says he stopped doing that or that the office of Apostle ceased that would belong to sacred tradition that we know the office of Apostle no longer exists, instead. We have the offices of the bishop, priest and Deacon, we have another question here dealing with apostolic the succession and says, “How does apostolic succession work in the case of a bishop who has been appointed by a governmental body? Also, what would happen to those priests who were consecrated under circumstances which were condemned by the Pope?”
So this kind of relates to the lay in vestiture controversy of the Middle Ages and a little bit to some parts of the world today where bishops are not entirely free to have religious freedom. The biggest example would be China. So the question is that if a governmental authority, if a secular authority ordains a bishop, that person is not a bishop that is invalid. A bishop can only be ordained by other bishops. If just a king or a prince says, “Okay, you are going to be the bishop of this area.” Nothing happens because that secular ruler has no spiritual power to confer ordination. But it is possible. We saw this a lot in the Middle Ages where a secular ruler could task a religious authority like a bishop to say, I want this guy to be the bishop of this region of my kingdom.
And the bishop would usually comply because in the Middle ages, bishops and Abbots and other religious leaders often had secular ruling authority. So you go through the Middle ages, the age of Christendom, church and state were highly overlapped. They weren’t identical, but there was a lot of overlap between them. So you could have a bishop being someone who has secular authority over a certain area, that he has responsibilities that a vassal or a Lord has placed upon him to administer, like administering certain lands, making sure certain laws are being carried out. Then he would have religious authority from others who are superior to him. So there’s going to be a balancing act there. And sometimes secular authorities would, during this lay investiture controversy, would say that they would want a particular person to be a bishop or not. And so as long as a validly ordained bishop ordains the person to the episcopacy, it’s still valid.
Now, there could be cases where it is done validly but not licitly. And so you have to also see this, how is this in accord with something like canon law. Now so today, bishops cannot be ordained without permission from Rome without permission from the Pope. And so you have the question about what about bishops that were validly ordained in China, for example, but they were illicitly ordained at the behest of the Chinese government. And I think that in 2018, yeah, 2018, Pope Francis recognized these Chinese bishops that the Pope could still say, “Well, this wasn’t done licitly, so we might not recognize their authority, for example, or recognize them to be in communion with the church.” But in 2018, he did recognize that of the Chinese bishops who were ordained, they were in communion with the church even though it was done illicitly without the Vatican’s permission in that regard.
So the bottom line there is with apostolic succession that throughout history, and even today, there can be other factors that can influence a decision of who gets raised to the episcopacy. But as long as it is done validly that’s the most important question. And if a secular authority tries to do it, well then nothing’s going to happen. Let’s see here. “How do we connect John 2:4 woman to Genesis 3:15, Jesus called other women, women or woman like in John 4:21, the woman at the well, I thought God only called Eve and Mary woman.” Well, we have to remember that in the ancient world, the title woman, like when Jesus calls his mother woman or he calls the woman at the well, woman, that is not a rude term. It would be today if we said that. “Woman what are you talking about?” That would be rude.
It was more on par with the title or Mrs, like ma’am. It’s a miss, ma’am, more of a gentle term to refer to woman to woman. So now the question is saying, “Yeah, but I thought that only God called Eve and Mary woman.” Well, no, it’s true that Jesus refers to other women with the title woman, at least the woman at the well as a type of polite affection towards this individual that he’s reaching out to. But I would say what makes it strange is that in John’s gospel, Jesus’ mother is never called Mary actually, she’s called woman or the mother of Jesus. And so how Jesus refers to her that if I talk to a woman who’s not related to me, I might say ma’am, I might say miss, but if I said that to my own mother, it’s a little bit odd. It still can be an affectionate term, but it seems odd that I wouldn’t just call her mother or I wouldn’t just call her by her name for example or call her mother.
This seems to be something more deliberate going on in John’s gospel to call back to Genesis 3:15 Eve, who is the woman who will crush the serpent’s head, the protoevangelium. So I think we could see something a little bit more deliberate in the context of Jesus’ relationship to his mother and how his mother is described in John’s gospel. Right. The next one, “What are your thoughts on Catholic integralism?” I’ll be short on this because I have not read a lot about Catholic integralism, but I still thought I would answer the question because it’s fine. Even I haven’t fully read up on it. My basic understanding is Catholic integralism seeks to craft public policy so that the state orders the populist towards not just temporal goods like human flourishing, like lack of poverty, for example, but also to genuine spiritual goods. And so it would make the case that the state has a role and that we shouldn’t just think that the state has no business towards spiritual goods whatsoever.
It would be indirect. It would be opposed to ideas of complete separation of church and state, for example. And I would say in principle, I could understand it would be great to have a state that orders people towards all that is good, both spiritual and temporal. I like that idea, but at the same time I’m very skeptical as to how we get there. I hear a lot of interesting talk about what a Catholic republic or what a Catholic kingdom, even like a monarchy, a Catholic country, what would that look like? And that’s interesting, but I’m kind of more interested in what is the step-by-step to get there. And I don’t see another way to get there besides changing the populace’s opinion through conversation, through media, through evangelism primarily. I don’t see any other way that you can get to something like that. I don’t know of any legislative or executive shortcut to have a Catholic country.
The will of the people will be known, even if something’s a dictatorship, eventually the will of the people will be known. So I’m a little bit skeptical of it, but as I said, I’m not an expert on it, so I’m not going to have, “Oh, this is really bad.”, or “It’s dumb.”, or, “Oh, it’s great.” This is the most that I know I’d be interested in reading about it more, but it lies a little bit outside of the scope of the apologetic work that I’m more interested in doing. But maybe I’ll take a look at it if I have some time coming up for sure.
All right, next one is “We often cite free will as a necessary condition for truly loving God and also as a reason for why moral evils exist in the world, which generally speaking, I find intellectually satisfying, but I don’t see a logical contradiction or a violation in God’s omnipotence for him to have actualized a world where everyone retains their free will but never chooses to sin. Similar to the blessed Virgin Mary, do you agree that such a world is logically or metaphysically possible? If so, why do you think God chose to actualize a different world where people do sin?”
Yeah, this comes back to addressing the problem of evil. If you go down the route that like Alvin Plantinga a ghost down, and I think William Lane Craig has taken this approach that they claim it’s not feasible for God to actualize a world, to create a world where everyone freely chooses to do good. This would be Plantinga’s idea of transworld depravity, that we as creatures have something called counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. And so there’s just some people, no matter what situation you put them in, they’re just going to do evil. And so there is no world God could create where everybody freely chooses to do good. And I might have endorsed this at one point in the past, but I’m skeptical of that.
I don’t see anything metaphysically impossible about God creating a world with one person who exists for 15 minutes, who only does what’s good. I think God could easily make a world like that. And I think he could also make even more complicated ones where people only choose to do good. But I do think that God is not obligated to create a world where there’s no evil. He’s not obligated to do that because if God created a universe without sentient creatures, it just had meteors and asteroids, that would be a world without evil. But we might say, “Well, it would be even better if God added more good to that world like sentient creatures.” But then there’s limitations, sentient creatures feel pain, for example, pain’s a bad thing. It’d be even better if we had creatures with free will. Now you might say, “Okay, well can’t God make a world where it just so happens all the sentient creatures never feel pain? And it just so happens that all of the creatures with free will only choose to do good.”
Well, there could be other goods. And this has been compelling for me to explain why God would create a world where people abuse their free will. Because I think a world, and I’ve said this a lot, but I think it works. I think a world that journeys, and this goes from the Catechism. A world that journeys from imperfection to perfection is better than a world created perfect because in imperfection to perfection, you still get perfection. You get infinite unending perfection, but you also get goods that you can’t have anywhere else like courage because there’s danger, compassion because they’re suffering, forgiveness because there’s wrongdoing. Now, I am not saying that those evils must exist eternally. I agree in heaven. We’re not going to have courage, compassion, or forgiveness because we won’t have the bad things, but we’ll have them now.
And it’s important for our spiritual development. And I think that those goods to be promoted and evil to be conquered does make it worth it, especially if God compensates everyone through his omnipotence by righting every wrong. As the book of Genesis says, when Abraham was arguing with God about Sodom and Gamora, Abraham says this line, “Will not the judge of the whole earth do what is right?” “Will not the judge of the whole earth do what is right.”
“How would you answer this question in general as briefly and clearly as possible, why do you trust the Bible?” Well, I trust the Bible because at least the New Testament documents that describe Jesus and other documents around that time historically, I can at least get a bedrock from them that Jesus existed. He had followers, he was crucified, his followers believed he rose from the dead. And the best explanation for that is that he really did rise from the dead and vindicated his claims to having a divine identity, to being God, to being God incarnate, the promised Messiah.
So because of that, then I can trust Jesus and that I can see from these same historical documents that Jesus established a church, he established a leadership hierarchy to continue to promote his message. And so I can trust this church as being the repository of that depository of faith. And I can trust the Bible because the church teaches that it is infallible. It’s the word of God. These particular books are the word of God. And then I would also add on top of that, I have a lot of confirmatory evidence from archeology, from textual studies that the Bible’s text has been preserved and that the Bible is reliable and accurate in what it describes.
At the very least, it rivals ancient historians on reliability inaccuracy, but I feel like I can also trust it further being infallible or inherent because of what Christ Church says about scripture. Let’s see a little bit more. What’s the next one? “What are your thoughts on entrusting children should my wife and I pass away to family members who are not Catholic?” Yeah, this is something we’ve had to discuss, and we have two families selected in our will to have custody of our children if both of us die. And the thing is, you don’t want to think about it, but this kind of stuff happens. I remember, it must have been a year or two ago, Ben Arbor was a really nice, really solid Christian philosopher, did a lot of work on the ontological argument, and he had been on Cameron Bertuzzi’s Captioning Christianity. I’d read some of his work.
I never met him, but I read his work and then I found out one day he was leaving, I think he was leaving a party with his wife. They were backing out of a driveway and their car was hit by a street racer and they both died. And so I’ve heard of these stories as not, I know people know of people usually I know more of widows and widowers, but I know of cases where both parents have died simultaneously and have small children, and I want to make sure my children are protected financially, emotionally, but of course spiritually, who will I trust… When I chose to marry Laura and I encourage anyone to follow this advice by the way, if you’re going to marry someone, ask yourself, would I trust that person to raise my children if I died? That’ll root out people that aren’t super great for you real fast in the marriage discernment process.
So would I trust them to raise my children if I were to die? A good question to ask of a spouse. And a good question, of course to ask If you do die, who will you set aside to raise your children? Ideally, it should be somebody who promises to raise them in the Catholic faith. Of course, that’s the ideal. Not everyone has it. Some people have really great extended Catholic families and they’ve got a boatload of relatives to pick from. Other people, maybe you’re a convert. Maybe you’re both converts and you don’t have any Catholic relatives. In that case, you might have to look to trust… And this is going to be really hard. It’s going to be really hard to select someone outside of being a blood relative. But at the same time, you should always judge that and ask, “Well, what is in the best interest of my child?”
And each person is going to have to make a judgment call on this that maybe you have an upstanding Protestant family member and you don’t know anyone else or let’s say you have a really good Protestant family member, but you have a Catholic family member who’s Catholic in name only barely goes to mass and leads an immoral life. Well, in that case it might be better for them to be raised by Protestants and telling them, “Hey, I would really appreciate it, at least if you took them to mass or shared the Catholic faith with them.”, than having them raised by someone who would be absolutely neglectful and is really Catholic in name only. So obviously I can’t give an answer that would work for everyone, but I would say in making this decision, the question that should always be at the forefront is “What is in the best interest of my child?”
Not “Is this going to hurt my family member’s feelings? Is this going to make things awkward with certain people?” But “What is in the best interest of my child?” And what is in their best interest is to be raised in the fullness of the Catholic faith. And maybe you have to step outside of family and go to really trusted friends or spiritual mentors, I would just say is have these conversations now before odds are nothing’s going to happen, but something does happen and you’re dying and it’s racing through your mind what’s going on? You’re going to be grateful you took steps to take care of everything if the Lord calls you home. So that’d be my advice there.
All right. I think this is number nine. “It seems unlikely that anyone could commit a mortal sin, grave matter, full consent, full knowledge if they had full knowledge of the consequences include a life in hell. Therefore, no one is capable of committing a mortal sin. What is the flaw in the argument?” This argument is actually similar to an argument David Bentley Hart makes in his book Defending Universalism, and he defends a universalism that says, “Assuredly, we can have absolute confidence every person”, at least every human being. I don’t know if Hart also includes the demons and the devil in this. He might, I’m not sure, but “that every creature is going to spend eternity with God in heaven, that they will all eventually be purified or repent after death.” And now the church has condemned universalism, but there’s different arguments that are made.
And this is similar to one of heart’s arguments, is that “well, look, you can’t be held responsible because you’re not rationally choosing hell because hell is infinitely bad. Only someone who is totally out of their mind would choose hell. Therefore, they can’t be culpable for their decision, therefore, nobody’s culpable. So nobody can go to hell actually, because if you chose hell, you would basically be insane and insane people can’t be held responsible for their actions.” And I would say this kind of argument is faulty because it assumes that to act irrational means you lack culpability. Now, it confuses irrationality and insanity. Insanity is when you lack the ability to distinguish good from evil, that you lack even your rational faculties. You’re not even acting in a rational way. You’re not making rational inferences of any kind. Think about an insane person who’s just rambling. They’re not making logical inferences, but you can be irrational while making logical inferences. You’re not totally lacking rationality. Like if you tell someone “You’re being irrational about that.” Well, they’re not drooling on the floor just like mumbling words to themselves.
They’re thinking, but they’re making all kinds of errors in their thinking in the process. But there’s also true inferences that they’re making in the process that ultimately every sin we commit goes against reason. Every sin is a crime, not just against God, but against reason. If we’re perfectly reasonable, we wouldn’t sin because we would have the full truth and God is truth. So just because someone is irrational, all sin, all evil is irrational in some respect, but you can still recognize the consequences of I actions. You can still distinguish good from evil and you can be culpable for choosing to be irrational in that respect. It happens all the time. If we borrow this argument, we couldn’t say that… Life in prison is a terrible punishment for someone and someone who would commit a crime. There’s all kinds of crimes that if you were just thinking rationally at your desk, like let’s say 40 years in prison for drug smuggling, I watched a lot of Locked Up Abroad recently.
I think I’m talking about that soon on a Free For All Friday, by the way, heads up. That if you were in no rational person would risk 40 years in prison just to make like $1,000 drug smuggling. But some people can still be overcome by greed, and they shout down that rational part of the brain and they shut down the rational thinking part or they shout it down, they ignore it. And so you can still be held culpable, at least punished in some way. So I don’t think that works. And in fact, Ed Feser, in his review of Heart’s book, he makes a similar reply.
He says, “Hart argues that since rational creatures are made to know and love God, any choice against God is irrational from this. He infers that no one is culpable for such a choice and thus cannot be damned. But the inference is fallacious, that a choice is irrational does not mean that it is not culpable. Furthermore, if a choice is non culpable because it is irrational, how can we be culpable for any bad thing that we do given that bad actions are always contrary to reason? How can we deserve even finite punishments? And if we can’t, then why do we need a savior?”
So yeah, I don’t think this argument works though I am open to the idea that the reason hell is eternal is because people in hell perpetually reject God and grow harder and harder in their hearts and refuse to repent, and their punishment is perpetual because their sinning is perpetual. And if you were to take them and put them into heaven, they would walk right back to hell giving God the one finger salute basically, that they would hate it, that to them hell would feel pleasant and heaven would feel torturous and think about it, right? Evil people, really evil people, they kind of recoil being around goodness, and they feel almost a comfort, a painful comfort in the trappings of evil that they’re a part of.
“Hello, Trent. I have two questions concerning God’s timelessness. If God is timeless, then he’s not in time and interacting with his creation on a personal level. If Jesus is fully God, fully man, then will he be in time and out of time simultaneously? Wouldn’t that be incoherent?” No, I don’t think so. And I think a good way to resolve this is if the B-theory of time is true, if past, present, and future are all equally real, though I’m open to the block theory of time, that time is dynamically and growing. Past is real. Present is the edge of the block. The future’s not real yet, but let’s just say B-theory is true, past, present, future.
It’s all equally real. So if God in a flash creates the universe, in a flash he creates it and he does that, then all moments of time are equally real to God and his eternal now, paragraph six under the Catechism, and he interacts with every moment of time, but from his one timeless perspective because all the moments are equally real to him. He’s out of time, but he can relate to and understands and perceives every single moment because he possesses all of his eternal life in one perfect eternal now. CS Lewis gave this analogy. He said, “It’s similar to how you an author could in a flash of inspiration, think of the entire story of a book just like that. And he could think of it and perhaps at one point in the story insert himself in as a character and then leave the story later on in the book.”
So he imagines the book instantly, and in that instant also includes every moment in the book where he has been inserted as himself as a character into the book. I think Cervantes does that in Don Quixote. Not the flash, but he inserts himself as a character in his own book. Other authors do this. So I love Lewis for the analogies he comes up with to help people to understand that. “Are unbaptized people satans, is there really any free will around who gets called back to God? Is it from others’ prayers for them?” Well, in one sense, yes. If we are not baptized, we are under the dominion of the devil. We’re subject to him. We lack sanctifying grace. The devil is called the God of this world. Now, that does not mean every single unbaptized person goes to hell. That does not mean that because God’s grace is more powerful than the devil, God can save whoever he chooses, paragraph 1257 in the Catechism says “Salvation is bound to the sacraments”, but God is not bound by the sacraments. He can save whoever he pleases.
But I do think it makes sense to say that we are under the power of the devil in a way that we are no longer under that power. When we are baptized, we are still tempted by the devil, but we’re not under that power. We’re not what you might call children of the devil, if you will, that when we’re baptized, we become children of God. And we see this language used in the first epistle of John. 1 John 3:10 says, “By this, it may be seen who are the children of God and who are the children of the devil. Whoever does not do right is not of God, nor he does not love his brother.” Now, if you are a child of God, if you’re baptized, then you commit a moral sin. You don’t suddenly become a child of the devil again, your baptism isn’t revoked, but you do fall outside of communion with God.
And so you do. If you die in unrepentant mortal sin, you kind of become an adopted child of the devil, so to speak, in forsaking your inheritance in the new covenant. That’s why it’s important that if we commit a mortal sin to be reconciled to God through the sacrament of confession. But if you are not baptized at all, yeah, you lack that devil mark, you lack sanctifying grace. That’s why at the baptism of infants, an exorcism is preyed over the child to drive away the evil spirits, to drive away the devil who has one last hold and would want to do everything in his power to prevent this child from being baptized. I love when I see baptisms in our Byzantine church that we attend it. It’s just great because one, they go on for 40 minutes and you have churching, it’s just, and the priest, he blows over the baptismal water how God’s spirit goes over the waters in Genesis.
And he says a lengthy exorcism for that reason. Oh, by the way, I got to say something. I thought about saying this on Twitter, and maybe I’ll clip this episode, I don’t know, maybe I’ll put it on Twitter. And I’ve seen some people saying this about me and I ignored it for a while. Maybe I’m going to bring it up now because I talked about my Byzantine Catholic church. Some people have said that I don’t have the right to say, “Oh, the Novus Ordo, the new mass is good.” I can’t say anything positive about the new mass or even encourage people to become Catholic because I’m like a bait and switch salesman. I’m like, “Oh yeah, you should become Catholic.” As if they act like I secretly hate the new mass and I bailed on it to become a Byzantine Catholic.
And so because of that, I shouldn’t say anything about the new mass at all. I shouldn’t say the Novus Ordo is good. I shouldn’t even say that it’s valid, well, that’s just a matter of truth. Of course I can say that, but I can’t have any opinion about it. And others who are non-Catholics might say that I’m kind of a shifty bait and switch salesman because I want people to become Catholic, but nearly all of them are going to be a part of the Nova Soto. They won’t be a part of the Eastern Catholic Church. And I’m not canonically eastern. I just attend the Byzantine Catholic Church. But here’s why I think that criticism doesn’t work. I don’t attend a Byzantine Catholic church because I hate the Novus Ordo or I dislike the Novus Ordo. I attend a Byzantine Catholic church because I love the Byzantine liturgy.
I love the very specific aspects of that liturgy. It’s why I attend it versus other eastern rite churches, which I also love. It’s why I attend that instead of the traditional Latin mass, which there is a traditional Latin mass near here, and I don’t attend that. Even when I’m unable to attend the Byzantine Divine liturgy, I don’t go to another Eastern church or the TLM, I go to a Reverent Novus Ordo because there’s many things I also like about the Nova Soto. I don’t hate it. I don’t think it’s bad. Are there Novas Ordo masses I’ve been to that are absolutely cringeworthy? You bet. But if there’s so many, many masses, you’re going to come across ones that are not as reverent in their worship. When you have a particular rite or style of worship that’s very, very limited. There’s not many of them. It’s easy to kind of keep the quality control up.
But I don’t attend the Byzantine liturgy because I hate the Novus Ordo. I attend Byzantine because I love Byzantine. And when I’m unable to attend Byzantine, let’s say we’re sick and I got to just do the quick back and shuffle. Also Byzantine, I don’t go when I’m sick because we’re all huddled together in this church standing really close, It’s very easy for me to get people sick there. Whereas in the Novus Ordo, if my family’s sick, but I don’t have symptoms, I can just hide in the back away from everybody and still be able to go to mass if I’m not showing any symptoms. So I’ll go to the Novus Ordo one that’s reverent, one that I find beauty in. So I find beauty in any valid reverent liturgy, whether it’s a Byzantine Catholic church, whether it’s traditional Latin mass, whether it’s other Eastern rights, and whether it’s Novus Ordo, Anglican, Ordinariate, Zaire rite.
If I see people, the African rite usage of the Western mass and people are dancing and cheering and praising God, I think that’s beautiful. As long as it’s done, it’s valid and it’s done with the spirit of reverence. I like it. So just my 2 cents in there, because people have been bringing that up and I don’t know, maybe I’ll clip this and put it online. I’m not sure. All right, so moving on. Here’s the one that’s the non-Catholic question, “Trent, since you’ve admitted to binge watching the entire show Colombo, a series I greatly enjoy. Have you watched the TV series, Monk, another Favorite?” Yes, I have. I really enjoy Monk with Tony Shalhoub I think as Monk, he plays an obsessive compulsive detective who has really bad OCD, but that makes him really good at spotting details of crime scenes that other people don’t see.
So I love Monk is one of the few series where I felt like it never jumped the shark. It was really good from the pilot to the series finale, I think that it’s great. I really enjoy that show. “If yes, did you enjoy Natalie or Sharona?” Thanks for all you do. Natalie and Sharona, these were two characters that Monk had a personal assistant, like a secretary slash assistant, a woman to help him interact with others because he has such bad OCD. The beginning few seasons was Natalie, this kind of Jersey type girl with more of an attitude. And Sharona was a bit more empathetic, but could still put Monk in his place. I like Sharona, I just thought she was nicer and she’s nicer to him, but still firm. So I like Sharon. I think both Laura and I would agree on that. So there’s my one non-Catholic question.
All right, let’s see here. “As silly as it may seem, my husband partly left the church because as a teen, a priest scoffed at this very real question of his, which I have been attempting to engage since we met. Could the Terminator go to heaven or be saved? He says, one needs to see the T2 directors cut to fully engage this.” I haven’t seen Terminator 2, the director’s cut. So hopefully I don’t miss any context, but I’ve watched Terminator 2 a lot. It’s an awesome movie. “Similarly, what about Data from Star Trek, the Next Generation? I appreciate your learned responses and your previous answers regarding AI, your willingness to take questions seriously.” I do take it seriously. If a being is capable of loving God, of understanding who God is and loving God, it would seem cruel if that being it was not possible for them to go to heaven.
If we met aliens, for example, the extraterrestrial life forms and they were like us, like the Vulcans, and they could understand God and they came to believe in God and believed in Jesus Christ, would we baptize them? Well, the church might have to have some theological meetings about that. But the fact that they aren’t homo sapiens shouldn’t prevent us from sharing the gospel with them. And so this is kind of a similar case here with artificial intelligence. Is it the case that Data from Star Trek or the Terminator are just they are… Okay, sorry. By the way, that’s a jump cut. My wife called me so I forget what I was saying before. Ah, jump cut. Yeah. When it comes to artificial intelligence, we should ask, “All right, well, is this a conscious being like an extraterrestrial, like a Vulcan? Or is it more like Siri?”
You can get computers, ChatGPT, you can get AI to seem like it’s conscious, but it’s really difficult. How could you tell the difference between a machine that is self-conscious, is alive, is self-conscious and has its own consciousness versus a machine that is flawless at pretending to be conscious? I don’t know how you could tell the difference. You really can’t. So that’s why I would lean into the philosophical tradition that the only beings that are conscious, the only beings that are alive are going to be those that have a soul. So only those beings that are composed of living matter, that are animated by a rational soul, those are the only kinds of beings that could have eternal life. And so beings that are just made out of computer parts and circuits that are not animated by a soul, I would say that they cannot have eternal life and that they cannot have consciousness either like you or I have.
So I would say also that to answer your husband’s question about this, you might say, “Well, how could you say it’s impossible? You could watch a movie and it seems clear in the movie they are conscious.” Just because you can watch it in a movie doesn’t mean it actually is meta physically possible. It could actually be impossible no matter our technology. So take the Terminator series. The Terminator series is fun, it’s got great time travel elements, and you watch and you think, “Yeah, if they had the technology good enough, you could do time travel.” But when you start really thinking about time travel, it starts to become clear. It’s what happens in Terminator and most time travel movies is not metaphysically possible to go back in time to change the past and then to affect the very same timeline you left from. You could go back and maybe create a new timeline, but the idea of trying to go back and really changing the same timeline, you create paradoxes where you never create the time machine in the first place.
Then how did you go back and do that? Why didn’t you notice the time travel the first way through when you were going through the timeline? It becomes a giant mess. So I would just say, I’m sorry to hear your husband left over this issue. I would just say to the person who asked this question, if your husband left because he didn’t get a great answer on these difficult sci-fi questions where we’re not sure how to apply the faith, you should check out Catholics who do take this seriously. But no, just to say we don’t know, just take the answer. We don’t know what would happen to the Terminator. I’m making the argument they wouldn’t go to heaven, but why not just take the argument, look, we don’t know. When we get to heaven god will sort it out for us. In the meantime, we do know you’re a living being with an immoral soul.
You should come to mass, you should go to confession. Nothing preventing you from that. So for your husband who’s struggling with this, just take that approach. Maybe we don’t know, but we do know that God made you and desires a relationship with you, that should be worthwhile. And then I would just say, check out Jimmy Akins Mysterious World Podcast. You could show a few the AI episodes and the sci-fi episodes to him. He might find Jimmy to be a kindred spirit in that regard. All right, here’s the last one. “What is your moral objection to a well regulated and life-saving market for kidneys, bone marrow, and similar organs whereby donors could receive in the words of the law, valuable consideration for their immensely valuable sacrifice?” I don’t have a moral objection to people being given valuable consideration. If you donate a kidney, for example, I don’t know, maybe you can get your name on a plaque somewhere in the hospital that you get a thank you from hospital staff or from a civil official thanking you for your service to others.
I think more where the question is dealing here is remuneration. Should people be paid? I think that’s being asked here, not just viable consideration, but should people be allowed to be paid for donating kidneys and bone marrow and other organs? Now, I do think it’s fine to compensate people for their time in proportion to the risks they take on in donating tissue. People get paid to donate plasma, for example, in blood. But there are rules that are related to that. But plasma and blood are, they are renewable parts of the body and they’re still strict regulations related to that. Like a kidney, you need your kidneys to live. You can live on one, but you’re in a really bad shape if something happens to the one that’s left. It’s nice to have a backup. So bone marrow and other organs, bone marrow is not as crucial as a kidney, but it’s still very important for your overall immunity and health.
And I would just be concerned that in allowing a market where people can be paid for this, it will lead to exploitation. No matter how well you regulate it. The poor will feel the pressure. If it’s like $20,000 for a kidney, a rich person is not going to do that because they know their kidney is worth more than $20,000 to them. A poor person, $20,000 could change their life and they may think “I don’t really need that kidney.”, and make a lifelong irreversible decision in doing that. That’s ultimately their detriment and it will fall on the poor to be exploited through this. So that’s why, I do lean libertarian in a lot of my philosophy, but I’m not someone who just believes in libertarianism full stop that the government has no role in promoting the common good. I’m caricatured like that online sometimes, but I don’t hold that view.
So I could see here a propensity for abuse in creating markets for organ donors. Similar to how I would say that surrogacy should be outlawed. One, because it’s bad for children to be brought into existence through surrogate wombs if it is for the parent’s benefit and not the child. Now, if you need another womb because Sally’s womb has suffered a problem and the baby will die and you transfer the baby to Mary’s womb, that would be fine, that’s for the child’s benefit. But if it’s just renting out a womb to facilitate IVF and treating children like a commodity, I think that’s bad. So I think surrogacy should be illegal, not just because it’s bad for the child, but it’s bad for women. And egg donation. There’s a great documentary, Eggsploitation you can watch online where you get college-aged women who are told, “Hey, you want to make $50,000? I know you probably got student loans to pay off.”
And they donate their eggs. And with hyper ovarian stimulation, it’s very damaging to their bodies. Surrogacy taking advantage of women, usually in developing countries where they are gestating a child, they’re forming that maternal bond and the child is then taken away from them right after birth. It’s dystopian and maddening and what it does to these women, it is exploitive. So no, I would be firmly against it.
I’m fine for basic compensation. You want to get your sugar cookie after you donate your blood, maybe a little bit of money for your Uber back home, that’s fine. But I think when you deal with kidneys and bone marrow, and especially surrogacy, uterine, and then of course gametes, I would love to outlaw sperm and egg donation. But we’re a long way off from that. But I think if you have something that can make people should be treating it a lot more seriously in society. All right, well those were our questions for our Patreon Q&A. That was a lot of fun. Thank you guys. If you want to take part in our next Q&A, definitely go to trenthornpodcast.com and thank you all for your support. God bless.
Narrator:
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