It’s open mail-bag time and for this episode, Trent is taking all your questions on atheism and proofs for the existence of God!
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic answers.
I have letters. Well, they’re more like emails and social media comments, but I have them for today.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. And today we have questions for open mailbag. The subject theme today is open mailbag atheism, which is appropriate because in about two weeks here at the end of the month on July 30th, I’m going to be doing a debate hosted on Pints with Aquinas, with Matt Fradd on atheism, Does God Exist, with Alex O’Connor, who is the Cosmic Skeptic. It’s a very popular YouTube channel. He just did a dialogue with William Lane Craig. He’s a very smart young man who goes to Oxford, very excited to be doing a debate with him on this subject. So I thought it’d be nice to take care of some atheist questions you all have been having. So this is a good topic period for us to address.
If you want to submit questions, by the way, if you want to get your questions answered here on the podcast, or you want to leave comments to directly interact with me, send messages, get access to bonus content, get a free mug if you’re a gold-level subscriber, check that all out at TrentHornpodcast.com. All the questions you hear today come from our supporters at TrentHornpodcast.com. If you want to be a part of the Open Mailbag episodes, get sneak peeks of upcoming content. I’ve just released actually clips from my new Catholic Answers School of Apologetics course, Evidence for Catholic Moral Teaching. That’s available as bonus content that we have at TrentHornpodcast.com. Go and check it out, and at the very least, please consider leaving a review on iTunes, Google Play. People have been leaving some very nice reviews lately. I’ve been really enjoying reading them, seeing what people think of the podcast. And I appreciate it. So please continue to do that.
Also, if you support me a TrentHornpodcast.com, it’s easy to get a hold of me to send feedback and also corrections because as they say, “Pobody’s nerfect.” You know, nobody’s perfect. I get things wrong. And I did a Free for All Friday recently on dinosaurs. And this is always a risk that I take, by the way, when I do Free for All Fridays. Because I love scouring the internet, encyclopedias books to share a wide variety of topics with you, but I cannot possibly be an expert on everything. I try to learn material. I try very hard for all of you, but nobody can be an expert in everything. So every now and then, the real experts come about and will let me know the little things I got wrong here and there. And an expert in paleontology sent me some corrections when it comes to dinosaurs. He was very nice about it. Very gracious, very supportive of the podcast, but I thought I would share some of that with you.
So before we get to open mailbag, very quickly, he wrote, “You mentioned spinosaurus living 200 to 245 million years ago in the Cretaceous. That’s actually the Jurassic period.” Ooh, stinger. I should have known that one. “Spinosaurus actually lived a short time in the late early Cretaceous period, 112 to a hundred million years ago.” I knew it was Cretaceous. I don’t know why I wrote 200 and 245 million years ago, but that’s on me. You talked about one of my favorite prehistoric crocodilians, deinosuchus. Yeah, deinosuchus is awesome. He’s scary. “You mentioned that some tyrannosaurus bones have bite marks that were attributed to this giant crocodile, but those bones were probably from a different tyrannosaur dinosaur, gorgosaurus or albertasaurus.
I love how they name dinosaurs, by the way. I wish I could get out there and you know, find a dinosaur. Be like, “Trent, you found a dinosaur. What we’re going to call it?” “How about a humongousaurus?” “That’s kind of childish.” “Fine. Trentosaurus.” “That’s better, call it that”
Says, “Deinosuchus died out before the appearance of T. rex at the end of the Cretaceous, but T. rex could have been at risk from one of his descendants lurking in the water or some other unknown species new to science. Also, deinosuchus wasn’t really an ancestor of today’s crocodiles, but a close relative of today’s alligators. And finally, when talking about Tyrannosaurus’s color,” because I said the dinosaurs could have had lots of different colors than what we understand them to be, he said, “we got to remember he’s a predator. Land predators tend to have hues of brown, gray, or black to help them blend in with underbrush so they won’t be seen. So making him purple like Barney would be quite a stretch. If you want, T. rex have some flare, then restrict those colors to the face and to an extent the throat for more naturalistic approach. Because that’s how birds, birds have colorful feathers and other colorings more on their face to attract a mate, maybe not their entire body.” So thank you for that. And if you want to get in touch with me for feedback, future questions or Open Mailbag episodes, be sure to go to TrentHornpodcast.com.
And now, on to the questions today on atheism. The first questions come from our gold-level subscribers. They get first access to submitting the questions and they get a special mug, should be on their way. Hopefully three to four weeks, you will get your mugs.
All right, here’s the first question. What do you believe is the weakest legitimate argument for God’s existence? And why do you pick that argument?
Now, I love the qualifier “legitimate argument.” Because you can have arguments for the existence of God that are really terrible arguments that only exist as maybe straw men in the minds of atheists or they’re not arguments, but they’re just reasons that move people. But it’s not like an argument you’d put forward in a debate or a philosophy journal. So the idea that I lost my car keys and I have no idea where they are. So I prayed and look, here they are, therefore God exists. Well, lots of people lose their car keys every day and you’ll probably find them where you last looked for them. Those kinds of, not illegitimate reason, but a legitimate argument for the existence of God.
So if I were to look at them, I might look at something like Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli’s 20 Proofs for the Existence of God. In their book, The Handbook for Christian Apologetics, which was later re-themed and given an addition called The Handbook of Catholic Apologetics. But that was originally published by a Protestant press, IVP Press. And it was just about Christian apologetics, but it had two Catholic authors.
Little side note. That was one of the very first apologetic books that I ever purchased. I remember I went to Borders, so that dates me, and I was trying understand the Christian faith. So I looked in the Christian book section and there was this nice, sleek copy of handbook of Christian Apologetics by Peter Kreeft and Father Ronald Tacelli. And I just dove into it and I love their writing style, their systematic approach to the issues. And I loved that little chapter, 20 Proofs for the Existence of God. Now it wasn’t a comprehensive treatment. I mean, my goodness, many of those arguments deserve their own book to properly flesh out. But for me being in high school, trying to understand the issues, I really appreciated just going through these 20 arguments.
And even at that time, I knew there were some that seemed really strong to me and others that seemed kind of weak. So when you look at the 20 Proofs to the Existence of God, the weaker ones tend to show up more at the end of the 20 proofs, like Kreeft starts off with Aquinas’s five ways, the kalam argument, the moral argument, design. And then as you get more to the end of the 20 proofs, they start to get less and less persuasive. So I think number 20 is not even an argument for God. It’s just Pascal’s wager. It’s just, belief in God is prudent so you should do that. It’s not really an argument for the existence of God at all.
Number 19 is the argument from common consent. What are the odds that so many human beings are wrong about the existence of God? How could all of these people be wrong? Now to his credit, Kreeft and Tacelli do try to address common objections to these arguments. And so one objection to that is, “Well look, Dr. Kreeft, Father Tacelli, people were wrong about the position of the earth and the sun. People believe that the sun went around the earth when actually the earth goes around the sun. So people were wrong about that for a really long time. How do you know people aren’t wrong about God?” And Kreeft and Tacelli, I love the analytic rigor couched in poetic language that they use in their response. Go pick it up. You can actually probably read the essay itself at peterkreeft.com. If it’s there, I’ll leave it under the show resources at TrentHornpodcast.com.
But they say in their reply to this objection, essentially, “Look, people at least experienced the sun, the earth and motion. They experienced those three things. So the earth, the sun and motion are real. They just attributed the motion to the sun when they should have attributed it to the earth.” And they say, “Much the same way people experience God, and maybe we might be attributing things in an incorrect way, but that experience is something that can’t be denied.” Now I think an atheist could fire back and say, “Oh yeah, people experienced God and they wrongly attributed to a real existence, tin God, when they should just attribute it to their own minds.” So an atheist could reply to that counter reply very quickly.
So the argument from common consent, that’s not a good argument for the existence of God. It’s just a good argument to take seriously the existence of God. To show the existence of God is not like Santa Claus, it’s not like Harry Potter, not like Batman, not like fairies, it’s not like… And there are people, actually, who did believe that fairies existed. I think the guy who wrote Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, he believed in the existence of fairies. But you don’t have similar cryptids, unicorns, other creatures, you don’t have this kind of universal experience. Even if you have a lot of people who will say fairies or unicorns existed because they read about it in some kind of medieval literature, they only believe it because they read it in a book. They won’t say that they had a personal experience of these mythological creatures, but there is universal accounts of personal experience of the divine. And so that’s something that needs to be really taken seriously.
I would say the weakest legitimate argument, if you look at Kreeft and Tacelli’s 20 Answers series is the argument from common consent: how could all these people be wrong? Well, lots of people can be wrong about things.
Another one would be the argument from desire. And I know our CS Lewis fans out there might not enjoy hearing me say this. This is one that he popularized. But the argument goes like this: that nature doesn’t give us desires in vain. So if we desire, if we have a natural desire for food, food exists. If we have a natural desire for reproduction, reproduction exists. You might be alone on a desert island, but at least reproduction is possible. There’s someone out there even if you can’t meet them or reach them.
So nature gives us these natural desires and it doesn’t give us these desires in vain. This goes all the way back to Aristotle, I think. So we have a natural desire for perfect happiness. We have this natural desire to be perfectly happy, but nothing in this world can make us perfectly happy. Therefore, there must be something in the next life to make us perfectly happy, which would be God or eternal life with God, therefore God exists. So that’s the argument from desire. Now, actually there is a book length defense of this argument. I actually haven’t read it, but maybe I’ll give it a shot if I have some free time after my debate because I’m getting ready for that.
And also another debate I’m having an August. Well, one debate on the deuterocanonical books of scripture and the other is going to be a dialogue with a Protestant on sola scriptura. And this particular Protestant is very, very interested in Catholicism. He’s a prominent Protestant on YouTube. So I’m really looking forward to that. Pray for that dialogue. I’m very interested in the spiritual fruit that may come from it. So maybe after all that is said and done and our new baby’s on the way in September, maybe if I’m up late with the baby, I’ll read this book. It’s called The Apologetics of Joy by Joe Puckett, Jr. The subtitle is A Case for the Existence of God from CS Lewis’s Argument from Desire.
So this is a book length treatment of the argument and maybe Puckett Jr. addresses this objection that I have, but I would just say this. I can think of examples of natural desires that do not have any kind of corresponding object in the real world. So some people say, “Well, I have a desire to fly by flapping my wings.” And what the defender of the argument from desire will say is “No, that’s not a natural desire that people have.” Or if you have a desire to wield Thor’s hammer or fight among the Avengers, it doesn’t mean Avengers really exist. That’s not a natural desire universal to the human condition, therefore there’s no corresponding object in the real world to satisfy it. However, there is a universal desire for perfect happiness. And so there is therefore a corresponding object, maybe not in this life, but in the next life with God.
Here’s my counter example of that. I believe there is a universal human desire to change the past. I mean, think about it. No matter what culture you live in, I’m sure that there are people who have thought they wish somehow either through a wish or time travel, whatever it may be to make it so that they did not do something bad in the past that they regret. So there’s a universal desire to change the past, to have undone something we did. That’s got to be, I believe, a real universal human desire. But of course not even God can change the past. Even St. Thomas Aquinas is very clear that nobody can change the past, not even God.
So if that’s the case, there is a counterexample of a universal human desire for something that we know is metaphysically impossible. So that could just show that our desires, it doesn’t necessarily follow from them that the things we universally desire do exist. Now, maybe Puckett Jr. has replied to that, I don’t know. If I check out his book and I do see a reply to that, I will update it here on a future episode of the podcast.
All right, here’s the next one. What’s the most effective way to engage an atheist in the problem of evil question? Also, how do we answer atheist when they give rebuttals to common problem of evil defenses? For example, I tell an atheist that much of the evil in the world occurs because people have free will. The atheist replies with something like, “If it’s all about free will, how do you explain tragedies that are nobody’s fault, such as tsunamis famines, et cetera?” Or I tell an atheist, “God permits evil to occur to bring about a greater good.” The atheist replies, “How come God is allowed to permit certain evils to occur, like abortion? That if we turn the blind eye to them, we would be held morally accountable.”
So two observations for this. One, notice that the atheist, I’m not going to give a whole retrial of the problem of evil. I may do that in a future episode. But notice what happens here. If you say, “Well, evil exists because of free will. We have murder and rape and other kinds of evils because God gave man free will and sometimes we abuse our free will.” Notice here that this person’s atheist friend accepts that there is a solution to some problems of evil, such as moral evil. You say, “What about moral evil?” Well, God has a good reason for allowing moral evil. One example may be free will. And here, in many cases, I’ve known many atheists when we talk about the problem of evil, they just grant that, “Okay, God could have a good reason for allowing moral evil, because free will is really good. But what about natural evil? What about all these natural evils like starvation or hunger or the deaths of animals? Freewill doesn’t explain that.” But notice what’s going on here. The atheist is saying God has no good reasons for allowing this kind of evil in the world. And then the Christian offers a good reason: free will. Then the atheist says, “Okay, that explains some evils, but not others.”
But here the Christian does not have to say, “Okay, well here are the good reasons for natural evils to exist.” He can. But he can also say, “Well, look, you’re the one who is saying, God has no good reasons for allowing evil in the world. And yet I gave you one big example of a good reason. So if there’s one good reason, the existence of a good like free will, maybe there are other good reasons you haven’t thought of yet.” Remember the problem of evil is not a Christian argument that we have to defend and mull over. The argument from evil is an atheist argument. The burden of proof is on them to show God could not possibly have any good reasons for allowing evils that exist in the world. And so when we offer some good reasons like the existence of free will that shows, “Look, even if there are other evils, I cannot explain why God would allow them. If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, how could he be restricted from bringing good from that kind of an evil?” So we always have to focus on that. And there was a lot of questions on evil in the open mailbag that were sent to me.
Another person said, “I’ve been wondering if God exists. Why would he create things that can harm us, such as the sun being able to cause skin cancer or poisonous animals.” We also have to remember that the full solution to the problem of evil is not strictly a philosophical solution. It’s also a theological solution. The catechism says that the gospel provides the fullness of a solution to the problem of evil. Now if you think about it, even if you have poisonous animals or the sun being able to cause a skin cancer, God created human beings with preternatural gifts. We were protected from disease, from death, from injury. So it may have been the case that before the fall of man, when we had these preternatural gifts, that not only were our souls filled with God’s grace, but our bodies were given this kind of protection so that the sun merely warmed us. It didn’t cause skin cancer, venom didn’t cause these deleterious effects.
And so that when we fell away from God, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, once again, the Handbook of Christian Apologetics, highly recommended. They imagined two metal rings hanging from a magnet. And if you turn off the electromagnetic flow, both rings fall away so that when our souls fell away from God, our bodies fell away as well and we’re susceptible to these harms in the world. Whereas if we were created with these preternatural gifts given to us while we still had friendship with God, we may not have been as susceptible to these kinds of harms.
And as I talked about in my book Answering Atheism, there are many good reasons to imagine why natural evil would exist. There could be other goods for human beings like compassion. You can’t have compassion without suffering. Heroism and courage. You can’t have courage without danger. So a world with natural evil can allow those other moral goods to prosper. In a world with finite physical beings, as some of them increase in goodness, as the lion gets more good, the zebra will get less good because it’s being eaten. That’s just the nature of creating physical entities that interact with one another.
But let me jump to this other part of the question. Because another Open Mailbag question covered the same ground. Our questioner, remember he asked “How come God is allowed to permit certain evils to occur that if we turned a blind eye to them, we would be held morally accountable?” Here’s another question that follows that same line, “I have a question about a version of the problem of evil that I’ve never heard of before. BC Johnson,” and I was like, BC Johnson? That’s familiar. Oh, Atheist Debaters Handbook, one of my first books on atheism I ever bought. And I looked over and it’s right up there in my bookshelf.
“BC Johnson claims that the theodicy of God allowing an evil to occur for a greater good doesn’t work because it would render our moral actions innocuous. He uses the example of an arsonist burning down a house. He said that no theist could be justified in stopping the arsonist because they could be preventing God’s providence. What if God is trying to work a greater good through the house burning down? What if me stopping the arsonist actually deprives the family of God’s grace? BC Johnson claims that this makes the theodicy of allowing lesser evils to procure a greater good an invalid theodicy. So how would you respond to this, Trent?”
Well, I’d make an analogy. Consider the analogy of an undercover investigation. So imagine you see a crime happening. You see a crime, you think, “Oh, I should report this crime to the police.” So you go and report the crime to the police because you don’t know anymore. Now imagine an undercover investigative officer. He’s trying to bus like a huge drug ring and he sees a small-time drug deal go down and he watches this and he’s going to follow them. And he’s trying to get more evidence to bring down the whole drug ring. Just because you are obligated to report a lower-level drug crime to the police, it doesn’t follow the undercover investigative officer is required to do the same thing. He has knowledge you don’t. He understands the bigger picture. So if you were to say, “Well, it’s not bad that I didn’t report this because that undercover officer didn’t report it.” The undercover officer would say, “Look, dude. I know a lot more about this than you do. I’m going to allow this to go on so that I can ultimately bring down the whole drug kingpin, the whole ring. You don’t have that knowledge so you have to operate based on the moral duties, the legal duties that are given to you, and that means reporting crimes.”
And so if you carry that over then for us as human beings, God’s providence would work. If an arsonist is going to burn down a house, God’s Providence is also going to be able to work through the moral duty I have to either stop the arsonist or to report the arsonist for the crimes that he’s committed. But God has infinitely more knowledge of the situation and so he’s justified in allowing certain evils to occur because he can definitely guarantee bringing good from it because he’s all-powerful and all-knowing. Whereas I am limited and finite, I have to follow the moral duties that God gave me when it comes to preventing evil. God, however has no moral duties. God has no moral duties because he’s not beholden to anyone else. He’s perfect goodness itself. God nearly acts in correspondence with his character and he is the source for all moral duties that we may have.
All right, here’s the next one. “One of the arguments in favor of the second premise of the kalam argument that the universe began to exist is the argument that the past must be finite, since a beginningless past would constitute an actual infinite, which would be absurd. However, it seems that if one holds to the belief that only the present moment exists, the past series of events is not actually infinite since past moments don’t exist. Thus, do you think that presentism undermines this philosophical argument for that of the kalam?”
I’m not going to go deeper into these terms like “presentism” and “theories of time” because sneak peek, in a week or two, I’m going to do a whole episode on theories of time and how they relate to God. I’ll talk about presentism, eternalism the A theory of time, the B theory of time. It’s going to be a deep dive. It should be entertaining. I want to teach you guys about this fascinating subject. I stay up late at night, if you’re on my social media, you’ll see I did a whole poll about this. I’m up till midnight, one in the morning, reading about it. I’m fascinated by it. I’m going to break it down for you guys.
But at least for this argument, here’s how I can summarize it for you. Presentism is the view that only the present exists, past and future do not exist. Eternalism would be the view that past, present and future are equally real. People who defend the kalam argument usually, like William Lane Craig, are presentists. They believe only the present moment exists. Craig says that you can’t have an actually infinite number of past events. The past cannot be actually infinite. And he gives two separate arguments for that. One, that actual infinites are impossible and you can’t have them in reality, including an actually infinite number of days in the past. And the second argument, which is independent of the first, that you can’t traverse an actual infinite, time cannot proceed through an actually infinite number of days to arrive at the present moment.
Now, this question holds that well, if only the present moment exists, then you don’t have to worry about an actually infinite past being impossible because the past can never be actually infinite because the past doesn’t actually exist. So this objection would be more against the first argument that you can’t have an actually infinite past, than the second argument, which is you cannot traverse an actual infinite. Because it could be the case that even if past events cease to exist after they take place, you still have the problem of traversing them and getting to the present moment.
It’d be like a man who is running along steps. And after he finishes stepping on a step, the step disappears. The question is, could he run across an infinite number of steps and then open the door to my office? So once he finishes running across those infinite number of steps, each step disappears after he touches it, will he ever open the door to my office? I look at the door to my office. I’m thinking providentially, somebody is going to come in here and have a question for me. But he won’t, he can’t complete that infinite series. You can’t traverse an infinite in that way even if the previous steps all disappear and no longer exist. So this objection to the kalam argument dealing with presentism, it wouldn’t affect the second argument that Craig makes, which is based on the impossibility of traversing an actually infinite number of days. It’d be more dealing with the idea that that actually infinite history could not exist.
Here’s Craig reply. His reply is basically that it doesn’t matter if the past events don’t exist anymore. They did exist at one point and they form an actual infinite that is impossible. And they form for example, a record. So even if the past events don’t exist, they still exist in the sense of a being a record of the past. And they form something that would be impossible given the state of affairs that we have. So he writes, “The nonexistence of such things or events is no hindrance to their being enumerated. So at a beginningless series of past events of equal duration, the number of past events must be infinite for it is larger than any natural number.” So it’s that record of those events and their effect on the present moment that is the big concern for Craig.
I will say, however, that it’s not the case that you only have the option of the presentist who defends the kalam argument and the eternalist who thinks past, present and future are equally real. As I’ll talk about in the future episode that I’ll do on theories of time, there’s a view called the Growing Block theory of time, which holds that past and present are equally real. And so time kind of grows like this big spacio-temporal block, a four-dimensional block. So here Craig’s first argument could really be strengthened that you can’t have an actually infinite number of things if all the past events have some kind of equal real existence to them in this growing block. We’ll talk about that more in a future episode, as I get into a very heady episode of the Counsel of Trent podcast, but one that I will help you to hold onto the rails of reality and not go too far over your heads.
And speaking of William Lane Craig, here’s another question. “Are you aware of any debates with atheists where William Lane Craig actually lost the debate?” Now Craig is my role model when it comes to debates. He’s the one… Studying him, I saw that the rule in debates is that you need to prepare. The more prepared you are, the better you will usually fare, but it’s not a universal guarantee because some people out there are very smart and they’re really good at engaging in debates.
I think one reason Craig has done very well in debates on the existence of God, is that when he goes out there and people ask him to go to university campuses to debate philosophy professors, there are professors out there who are very smart who defend atheism, but they’re just not skilled at debate. You can be a very smart person, but when you get on the debate stage and you just start rambling or speaking extemporaneously, you’re going to do poorly. That’s why Craig is a polished machine when he does it. And so when he engages people, it’s very rare when he engages people who get the better of him. But it’s usually people who are very polished themselves.
Three examples I can think of are one on Christianity with Keith Parsons. Parsons is an atheist and a philosophy professor, but he had a delivery that almost felt like a preacher, kind of. So he really kept Craig on his toes. That one I would almost call kind of a draw. But two where I felt that Craig did not do as well or even lost would be one debate that he did with the physicist Sean Carroll. I think the problem here was that Craig was defending his kalam argument and he was trying to show how modern physics shows that the past is finite. But here Craig’s got to be careful. He’s a melocipher… A philosopher. I was about to say “he’s a velociraptor.” He’s a philosopher. See, I have the dinosaur things still stuck in my head.
He’s a philosopher, philosopher of time and space and he’s well-read in physics, but he’s not a physicist. So he needs to be careful that when you go up against someone who was a legitimate expert in a field that you are not, they can just sound like they get the better of you because they’re very confident. And Sean Carroll’s one of those people. So Carol had some very good rejoinders to crack on some of the issues related to physics. And because Sean Carroll is one of the most famous physicists in the world today, he’s got those bona fides that people will naturally trust a bit more than William Lane Craig. Also, Sean Carroll is very affable. He’s a good communicator. This is just as university philosophers can have a bad time defending atheism, when Craig debates other physicists or engages them in public dialogues, they can just be awful when it comes to communicating science to people and so they don’t make their points very well. But people like Sean Carroll are very good communicators so they do well in their debate. So I thought Craig didn’t do as well in the Carroll debate.
One that almost everybody seems to agree that he lost or just had a very poor performance, was the Shelly Kagan debate. This was Yale University professor Shelly Kagan. I’ve listened to Kagan stuff on morality and also he did an open lecture series on death. Fascinating course, I definitely recommend it. Kagan is a very smart guy. So Kagan and Craig debated the issue of morality and Kagan was just very well-prepared and was able to pin Craig down on issues and offer very clever rejoinders. So here’s one atheist review of the debate that I found to be humorous. The atheist said, “Whenever the apologetic [inaudible 00:27:48] three, one 6,000, William Lane Craig is brought up by atheists, it’s usually conceited that Craig definitely lost the debate on morality with philosopher Shelly Kagan. Kagan details his arguments so clearly and in such an accessible manner. He starts off by making sure the audience knows that people have been talking about morality without mentioning God for a very long time, such a thing isn’t even atheistic, too. It’s just that people have been trying to knock down moral frameworks forever and a lot of times they forget to think about how maybe some celestial super-being might play a role.” So go and listen to that debate and that dialogue, it’s fascinating.
Though another atheist, Luke [Mulehauser 00:28:23] does get the point that Kagan stylistically does well, but he never actually answers Craig’s questions about moral ontology, which is the ultimate foundations of morality. He sidesteps them. He gives a moral theory, but not an ultimate foundation for that theory. But because he’s charismatic in his approach and he has these great rejoinders to Craig, like Craig at one point talks about how Christian morality makes better sense of ethics involving animals and that Christians have more of a reason to be kind to animals, Kagan threw him off-base by saying, “Well, if you’re so kind to animals, are you a vegetarian?” And Craig kind of fumbled a bit in his response to that.
And of course, the man is not perfect. As someone who’s done over a dozen debates, it’s always funny, I’ll talk to people. They’ll say, “Oh, you should’ve done this in that debate. You should have done that in that debate.” And I say to them, “I agree. I should have done X. I should have done Y.” It’s easy to do Monday quarterbacking. Hindsight is always 20/20. So the thing with debates, what’s hard about doing debates is you really only learn by doing them. I mean, you can do mock debates and practice and read, but the real, only way, you can learn from them is by doing them. So as I’ve done debates, I’ve done over a dozen now. I want to keep doing them. I think they’re important. There’s not a lot of Catholics out there doing them, but there is a learning curve when you do them and I just trust in God. But ultimately, he’s the one who decides if I’m going to do debates or not. I pray, and so far he’s given me the green light. Maybe he won’t do that forever, but he’s given me the green light on that. And I want to just do his will and carry that out to help bring people to know Jesus Christ.
Here’s the next question. “You said before that everything must either be necessary or contingent. Would you then say the Trinity is necessary or could God have existed another way?” So I’ll say yes, things are either contingent or not contingent. They either could fail to exist or they must exist. They either depend on something else for their existence or they exist as a part of their own nature.
But the Trinity, is the Trinity necessary? People said to me, “Would it be possible for God to have been only one person and not three people?” No, because the Trinity are three divine persons who share the divine essence, who share the divine nature. God is necessary. There could have been no universe where God did not exist and there could have been no universe where the Holy Spirit or the Son or the Father did not exist. So these three divine persons share the divine nature and they are all necessary. It is necessary that God is three people. Now that is a truth, however. We know from divine revelation… There is an article. If I find it, I’ll put it on TrentHornpodcast.com. It was an article by Edward [Phaser 00:30:48] written a while ago against Richard [Swinburne 00:30:51] who tried to prove from reason that God must be a Trinity. And Phaser says, “No, you can’t do that. You’re not going to get that from reason. We only know the Trinity is a mystery. Not because it’s unknowable, but because it’s unknowable from the light of human reason alone.” We can know God exists from human reason. The first Vatican council is very clear on that. But we would not know that God is a Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, if that revelation had not been made known to us.
Here’s the last question. “How about the divine hiddenness argument? Not so much an argument against God, but an argument against a personal God who is active in our lives and wants a relationship with us. If this is so why does he not make himself more obvious to us? My brother has asked me this before. Do I really have a relationship with Jesus? I don’t know the color of his eyes or what his voice sounds like. Prayer seems like a pretty one-sided conversation. Is it really the Holy Spirit speaking or is it just my own intuition? In the Bible, there are all these stories of miracles and profits and visions. Why don’t all Christians experience these if Christianity is true?”
Let me go backwards through the question to answer that. First, stories about miracles and God interacting in human history and profits making these proclamations. When we look at the story of salvation history, they usually tend to form around covenant-making events. So we see that more with Abraham and the covenant he made with God, the events of the Exodus surrounding Moses forming a covenant between God and his people, the miracles involving around the time of David. And of course, obviously, Jesus and the final new covenant through which there will be no future covenants. We now have the new covenant, the universal covenant in the Catholic Church. So there may have been other miracles throughout church history given his private revelations, but they’re not binding upon the faithful to believe.
I mean, think about it. 99.999% of Christians have not experienced a miracle. Have not experienced a miracle in the sense of the suspension of the laws of nature. I’m sure many people have experienced God’s providence where God’s fortunate and extremely unlikely timing has come through in their life to make God known to them, but they haven’t seen somebody walk on water, for example. But what about this idea of a relationship with Jesus? I don’t know the color of his eyes, what his voice sounds like. I mean, we have relationships with people. Think about pen pals or instant messenger. You can still have a relationship with someone, even if you never know what they look like or what they sound like. Now the rejoinder here is yeah, but you’ve got concrete evidence of the words they want to share with you. If I pray in the adoration chapel and I hear words, is that just my own subconscious talking to me or is that god talking to me? If I don’t hear God’s voice, am I really hearing God?
I would say when God speaks to us, so this idea that our subconscious speaks to us when we hear a thought or a word repeated to us through our own voice, it’s not mutually exclusive. It’s not like it’s either our subconscious or it is God, it is one or the other. As is often the case in Catholicism, it’s not either/or, it’s both/and that God can speak to us in prompting our subconscious to think and to dwell about something and to move in the direction of that thought idea or decision and in the process become closer to God’s will. So I would say that God doesn’t move us like a life board.
So I would say that God doesn’t move us like a lifeguard does with a bull horn on the beach, “Out of the water, out of the water, swimmers only, kayak out of the cove.” I go to [Loya 00:34:08] Cove, there’s always a life guard going, “Kayak one, out of the cove.” God doesn’t speak to us in that way. Now in some very rare circumstances, people may have a personal experience of God or an apparition, but the vast majority of people, it’s not God yelling at us through a bull horn. He moves us more like a current in the water. It’s not like the lifeguard yelling at you in the water to get out of the beach. It’s more like you’re in the water and then you just notice you’ve moved along the beach. You’re like, “Oh, here I am. Where should I go?” And the current has moved you slowly and steadily. And I think God moves through our actions, decisions. And the more that we pray, the more that that current of his grace moves us so that our will more closely aligns with his will.
Hey, I love the questions that were submitted today. I wish I could answer all of them. There’s always so many good ones to choose from. Maybe I’ll get to some of them in a future episode, or you could submit more in a future Open Mailbag episode.
Thank you guys so much. Be sure to go to TrentHornpodcast.com for more bonus content, submit questions and comments on episodes. You all have been great. And I hope you have a very blessed day and check out at the end of the month, July 30th, my debate on the existence of God with Cosmic Skeptic on Pints with Aquinas, you’re not going to want to miss it. Have a blessed day everybody.
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