In this episode Trent sits down with John DeRosa of the Classical Theism podcast to breakdown what he considers to be one of the best debates in which he’s ever participated.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. Welcome to Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answer’s apologist and speaker Trent Horn. I’m very excited today because we’re going to do a debrief of my debate with Ben Watkins from Real Atheology. This was a debate that I took part in a few weeks ago at the first annual Capturing Christianity Conference. This conference is part of the Capturing Christianity ministry, put on by Cameron Bertuzzi. Now Cameron is Protestant and the ministry is focused primarily on defending Christian theism, in a very intellectual way. I think his motto is exposing the intellectual side of belief. He’s actually very friendly to Catholics. He’s actually very interested in Catholicism and learning about it. He invited me to come there originally to be a speaker. I was going to be the only Catholic speaker but then schedule change up, I ended up being the debator at the conference.
Trent Horn:
They wanted to kick off the conference with the debate on the existence of God. I debated Ben Watkins, was very excited to do that. Just to break it all down, which I’ve been doing, a lot of times when I do a debate or dialogue, I’ll invite someone and we’ll break down the subject matter that was covered, so we can go even a little bit deeper into that. Today my guest to help us do is John DeRosa the host of the Classical Theism podcast. John, I’m going to turn it over to you. You can ask me whatever questions you like and offer any thoughts you had on the debate.
John DeRosa:
Well, Trent, thank you so much for having me here for the debrief. I did not catch the debate live, but I watched it on YouTube with enthusiasm. I was so excited for it and I thought both you and Ben did a great job of putting on a solid debate with a lot of philosophical engagement. Nice work even on short notice. I drew up a couple of questions here, but we’ll see where it takes us as we get into the content here. My first one was this, because you’ve been debating God’s existence, at least since I want to say around 2011 or 2012, you’ve debated God’s existence many times. What do you think if anything made this debate different than those other ones?
Trent Horn:
Well, I think what made it different was that my opponent was actually knowledgeable of the best defenses for theism. I’ve done debates before in the existence of God, I debated Dan Barker, twice on the subject. My very first debate was on the existence of God. And really prior to this debate with Ben, the best debate I did have on the subject was with Alex O’Connor the Cosmic Skeptic. But even there, I think there was room for improvement in that I put forward a case. Usually John, when I do these arguments and I put forward my case and it’s not simply just copy and paste from William Lane Craig or something like that. My atheist opponents, they just don’t touch the arguments. I know that Dan Barker never touched my philosophical arguments, both times I debated him.
Trent Horn:
He just said, that’s just words. Alex basically ignored them and just talked about animal suffering for most of the debate. My opponents never really engaged the actual substance in my case, but I knew that’d be different with Ben, because Ben is one of the hosts of the Real Atheology podcast. He prides himself, really everyone at Real Atheology prides themselves on not being like the new atheists. They believe you should engage the best case that theism offers. And you should do so without ridicule, without snide, dismissiveness, that you can actually engage the arguments and show where they think the arguments go wrong. I did a lot of preparation for this debate, knowing that Ben would bring a substantive case of his own and that he would go after the weakest elements in my case. His eyes wouldn’t just glaze over, not know how to handle it. He would zero in on what he thought were the weakest points. And I knew I’d have to be ready for that.
Trent Horn:
In fact, I checked out some of the resources at Classical Theism podcast. Those are also a big help, because Ben is one of the few atheists who’s actually studied classical theism, Thomas Aquinas. And so that made it also very fun and very fruitful as an engagement.
John DeRosa:
I totally agree. It was nice to see your opponent engaging the arguments philosophically. I think Dr. William Lane Craig likes to use this word. He says, a really good debate has what’s called clash. When you have one argument going against another, they’re not just safely ignored. What I thought we would unpack next is some of the lines of argument that you and Ben used and then go into those in some detail. Your opening, like you said, had three main lines of argument and some of them you had presented before, but I like it because you always put a new spin on it, some new emphasis. What did you include or emphasize that you hadn’t really done previously?
Trent Horn:
Every time I do debates, it’s funny, you had people like William Lane Craig whose openings are usually very similar. He does change them based on each opponent. Sometimes he changes things up for fun. I remember on a podcast, he talked about how he debated the late astrophysicist, Victor Stenger, on the existence of God. He’s also a lesser known new atheist. He decided to use the cosmological argument. And Stenger-
John DeRosa:
Ontological.
Trent Horn:
Sorry. Yes. Thank you, John. Yeah, because he always uses the cosmological argument. He decided to use the ontological argument just for fun for kicks, and Stenger had no idea how to reply to it because he wasn’t familiar with it. Craig later says, he saw Stenger in the restaurant after, looking solemn, he’s like, you didn’t use your same five arguments, Bill. You changed it on me. I apologize, I have these new earbuds here, they keep popping out. It’s hard sometimes I’ll use, I see you got your nice little apple earbuds. I bought these new ones, John, because sometimes when I’m recording things, my computer will switch over to the microphone on my earbuds. It’s so frustrating. I’ll get what I think is a really good interview and have my great microphone set up and then I hear it through my iPhone earbuds.
John DeRosa:
Listeners of my show will know I’ve done that as well where the guest sounds great, but then I’m talking to the computer, that just happens with podcasting.
Trent Horn:
You didn’t switch one thing. I bought one so that it is metaphysically impossible for it to switch over into my earbuds. Maybe not logically impossible, metaphysically impossible. Inside classical theism joke there. With my arguments in this debate, I used similar opening that I did with Alex O’Connor, but I wanted to streamline it and I also wanted to bulk up some of the cases. I wanted to run with three arguments, the argument from motion, the argument from the finite past and a moral argument for God’s existence. And so I like the argument from motion because I think that it gets really close to solving what is called the gap problem. This came up in the debate a little bit. How do you get from a cause of the universe to the divine attributes?
Trent Horn:
I think the argument from motion, once you unpack it, it does a really good job of showing you a being has divine attributes more so than other arguments, though you got to really pump up that argument to get there. And that’s what I tried to do in this debate. For example the formulation of the argument I gave in with Alex O’Connor was a bit more informal. I really strengthened it up for Ben and I added things about actualizing existence in order to avoid certain kinds of objections he might make. They were implicitly in the other argument with Alex, but I wanted to bring them out explicitly in this debate. Then on the finite past I combined the paper pass or thought experiment I used last time with Hilbert’s hotel. I hope someone will find it to be fun that I did that. I managed to combine both of them, so that thematically they worked the same, and I think that makes it a lot of fun.
Trent Horn:
With the moral argument, I thought about doing more research on this. I really want to find that one feature because most philosophers aren’t big fans of the moral argument for God’s existence. They don’t think it works. You can have morality without God. I agree you can have conventions, you can have moral rules. It’s hard, but I like to find, maybe there’s a specific feature of morality that really lacks any naturalistic explanation. That’s why I picked things like human equality, human exceptionalism. I also picked them because I knew that Ben would have to embrace a repugnant conclusion, because in his previous debates, that’s the other thing when you do debates. Ben’s a smart guy, so you got to always watch your other guy’s debates and see what he does and uses.
Trent Horn:
I figured, hey, if he’s going to bite the bullet on infanticide in his debate with Dr. Christopher Kaser, I want to see how that fares in our debate. Not as a trap, I didn’t mean it as a trap or anything like that. But to really show that naturalism leads to conclusions about the human person, that almost everyone will reject. And so if you’re more confident in those moral intuitions, the naturalism, then you should just reject naturalism.
John DeRosa:
It was very unique, the moral case that you may made at the end. I thought your argument from motion, that was very cool in the argument from causal finitism, where you thematically brought things together. That was really neat. But then the moral argument presented, it’s not the standard one that people are used to, that, well, something like, without God you don’t have an objective moral standard, but we know there are objective moral values and duties. Therefore we have to pass it to God, that’s not what you were doing. You’re trying to pick out features of ethics and moral experience that we recognize and say what better explains them. Could you just tell us a little bit more about that again and why human equality, how that gets us there?
Trent Horn:
What’s interesting here is that other contemporary philosophers have started to notice that this might be one of the most promising ways to revive the moral argument, is to say, okay, we’re not trying to explain morality fully because many philosophers bark at that idea, but maybe there’s certain features of morality that naturalism is insufficient to explain. Another variant to this is called the moral knowledge argument, which says, okay, even if there are these objective moral truths, it seems like we come to learn them apart from our five senses. And if you say, well, maybe we evolved to believe these moral truths. That’s such a ridiculous coincidence that evolution could have caused us to adapt to all kinds of things, to behave in all kinds of ways. And yet there are these necessary moral truths that exist, and we just happen to evolve in the right way to correspond to them?
Trent Horn:
Many people find that very implausible, which is why they reject the necessary moral truths even exist. They reject that kind of moral realism. That’s one version. That’s not the version I focused on. Another version is on moral obligation versus just good and evil, but moral obligation, the nature that I’m obliged to help and assist others and act in certain ways. C. Stephen Evans has a good book on that, God and Moral Obligation. What I wanted to focus on was an argument, this came up a lot, John, in my early years as a pro-life advocate. I would debate abortion on college campuses and I would get be people to admit, look the unborn is a human being, human beings have a right to life. It’s very clear there’s no morally relevant distinction between unborn humans and born humans. And then people would say, well, so what, why should I believe humans have a right to life at all?
Trent Horn:
Now a lot of people just take that as a given. Well, it’s just a given. But if you’re not willing to do that, then where do you go? Because many philosophers who try to argue for rights, base it in personhood. And if you base it on personhood, you almost always leave infants out of the game. So then if you believe that an infant, a human adult, a human infant, but a mature pig, mature pig does not have a right to life, but a human infant and a human adult do have a right to life and they have intrinsic value. What explains that? The only property they seem to share is that the humans have human DNA and the pig does not. But under naturalism, why does DNA matter? It’s just nucleotides. Now you could get under naturalism that there are certain properties that matter like rationality or consciousness, it’s a brute fact that those things are valuable.
Trent Horn:
But I’m just finding it very hard on naturalism to say human DNA as a brute fact is valuable compared to other DNA. I don’t know how you would get there, but it seems like we do accept that. Especially if you have a very strong intuition that infanticide is wrong. That’s why in running with that, I wanted to show not only that human beings are valuable, but that we have equal value. If our value comes from our cognitive abilities, then if we have more or less cognitive abilities, then we’d have more or less value. Now some philosophers may say, well, okay, no, it’s not your cognitive ability per se, it’s just your ability to be rational. You either have rational ability or you do not, even if you have it to a high degree.
Trent Horn:
A first grader in Stephen Hawking would both have the property of rationality, to which then I’ll say, but you’re still going to leave out the infants and disabled humans. And so running through with this. And then I ended with just another one I thought about exploring later, which is, there are certain intrinsic evils and certain things related to moral responsibility, that if natural is true, there’s no real qualitative difference between you, me, a lightning bolt, a tiger, we are all matter in motion, hence does moral responsibility arise for us. Well we can understand reasons. Okay, well, why is that morally relevant if our understanding itself is just a physical process? I threw that in there too, because I thought it would be fun. I felt like five arguments, I felt I was not overwhelming, Ben. I felt like he used three arguments and I used three. One of them was had some variance, but I felt they were manageable. He did a very good job. He had replies at the ready for all of them.
John DeRosa:
Well, that’s what I was going to say, is, well, first of all, I found it very cool the moral argument that you presented because at the very least strategically it’s going to require your interlocutor to put their own moral theory on the table. We’re presenting these features of ethics that we can see as well explained by classical theism or theism. And if you’re going to say naturalism explains them, well, you’re going to have to explain that. And so later in the debate, Ben did actually have to explain his moral theory and there were some interesting back and forth on that. But getting to that other point you just made, what I liked about this debate, is none of your arguments got ignored. He had at least something to say about all of them and he even brought up these terms I thought you could explain, would be useful for folks.
John DeRosa:
Each time he would go through, he would say like, this is an undercutting defeater or this is a rebutting defeater and he used that throughout the debate. I think he might have mischaracterized one of them, which I don’t fault him for, because when you’re speaking quickly and going fast, you guys packed a ton in just seven minutes and five minute rebuttals. You guys were packing a ton in there. But what do these terms mean, undercutting defeater and rebutting defeater?
Trent Horn:
Yes. I also want to comment that Ben and I, we didn’t share our opening statements verbatim, but we did let each other know what arguments we were planning to use, because that just makes it more fruitful. Then we’re more prepared and we’re capable of offering a substantive response. When it came to Ben’s rejoinders to me, his rebuttal, this is philosophical jargon people might miss. I actually define it more in my rebuttal video that went up on August 30th, a reply to Joe Schmid and his criticisms of my case for theism. Basically defeaters are things to show that there’s no good reason to believe a statement is true or there’s reasons to believe it’s false. A defeater tries to defeat a claim, right? We’re going to defeat the claim. How could you do that? You could make someone doubt that it’s true, but it could still be true or you could convince them that it’s false.
Trent Horn:
Consider the claim, I have an elephant in my backyard. Things might make you doubt that’s true, is that that’s very uncommon. If you looked at my credit card statements, you’d find no elephant supplies. I live in a very small, not as small as California, but not a big enough home for an elephant here in Texas. But all those things would make you doubt, but it would not prove there’s no elephant in my backyard. Those are undercutting defeaters. Undercutting defeaters are easy to come by, but they don’t pack the wall up of disproving things. Rebutting defeaters on the other hand show a claim is false. If I say there’s an elephant in my backyard, you have a live stream webcam in my backyard and you see there’s no elephant. Maybe there’s even a thermal imaging cam. It’s not camouflaged. Well then there, you know that the claim is false.
Trent Horn:
Rebutting defeaters show a claim is false, undercutting defeaters show there’s no good reason to think it’s true. Unlike undercutting defeaters, a rebutting defeater, it’s harder to come by logically. But if you can do it, it really packs a wall up against the other person’s case.
John DeRosa:
I think that’s a good way to think about it. The way I remember it is like, this is me as my teacher trying to come up with memory tricks, but undercutting starts with a U and unjustified starts with a U, so an undercutting defeater aims to show that a claim is unjustified, that it’s not standing on good reasons or evidence, whereas a rebutting defeater like you said, attempts to rebut it or show that it’s false. And so just to go briefly into each of your arguments and then we’ll spend the second half of our time more on Ben’s case. He presented undercutting defeaters or purported undercutting defeaters for your argument from motion. He brought up a couple of those. He suggested that existential inertia as well as the idea that there is a quantifier shift fallacy.
John DeRosa:
He wasn’t saying that it shows that there’s no such thing as an unmoved mover or pure actuality, but that these undercut your argument and show that the conclusion doesn’t go through. Those were the undercutting defeaters for that argument. Should we go one at a time or do you want me to trace-
Trent Horn:
I’ll just briefly comment on those and then elaborate for people, because I did have to go quickly. The quantifier shift attempts to show that there’s not a single cause. Maybe there’s a bunch of unmoved movers, that you can’t just say, because every cause needs an unmoved mover doesn’t mean there’s one for all of the causes. The larger aspect of my case shows you can’t have infinite causal chains, is number one. So they got to be finite. They have to terminate and that they terminate and I made additional arguments to show they terminate in a single, purely actual cause. That’s why I brought up the actualization of existence, the potential to exist. I gave multiple argue arguments as to why there can only be one unmoved mover. I don’t believe it’s guilty of the quantifier shift fallacy.
Trent Horn:
Now because I talk about actualizing potential for existence, a common objection. This is something Joe Schmid and Majesty of Reason has been doing a lot of work on, is, well, if objects just can exist without needing to have their existence actualized, they have existential inertia, then you don’t need an actualizer and it’s an undercutting. If not, Ben thinks and Joe thinks it might also be a rebutting defeater. I talk about this more in my reply to Schmid on my August 30th video. Schmid is a prolific guy, I’m sure he’s got a bunch of other stuff that’s already come out since then. We’ll probably engage each other in the spring. But what I said was that, I guess what I would put out there is that this is a controversial answer in defense. I don’t know if I made this case in the debate clearly, but I would say that appealing to say, well, you can explain an objects continued existence, the object just explains its own existence, continuing existence.
Trent Horn:
To me that is as unsatisfying as saying, you can explain an object’s initial existence, that the object it just explains its own initial existence. The debate over existential inertia is like the debate over the question, why is there something rather than nothing? To which an atheist says, well, you don’t need God. How do you know that things just don’t have a necessary property that they have to exist? I would say that seems really strange. Why should I believe these contingent things have that property? And I laid out other argument. I also know that Ben and Joe are friends. I figured, when I’m going through doing debates, I always think, okay, if I were the other guy, how would I go after me? And if I were Ben, I would talk to Joe. I would go and look at Joe’s rebuttal that he did to me, way back when I debated O’Connor. If I were Ben, I’d say, look at this, Joe Schmid did a rebuttal of Trent when he debate Alex O’Connor, I’m just going to copy all this stuff down. That’s what I would do.
Trent Horn:
I just went through and looked at that and other objections, the objections he raised were the ones that I thought he would, so I tried to offer my own undercutting and possibly rebutting defeaters to his existential inertia objection.
John DeRosa:
I think you made some good points and I want to emphasize just a couple quick things. First of all, in a time debate like this, you don’t have time to address every permutation of every objection, you only have time to make a few targeted bullet points that you think get to the central issues. Of course, people can always come back, but you can only do so much in that debate. You’re not obligated to respond to every combination of objections, in written work and other followups, you can do more detailed responses, but the other thing-
Trent Horn:
Put forward your biggest answer, the most satisfying biggest answer and put it out there.
John DeRosa:
Yes. And I want to emphasize that, when I study the first way of St. Thomas Aquinas and I’m sure Karlo Broussard who studied as well, would concur. What I’m finding out is, yes, it’s almost not even the argument for motion among Thomas, there’s different renditions of how it’s presented. I think something like what Feser’s doing in the Aristotelian proof is definitely one way of going about it. I just wanted to give readers another article that came out recently actually, the most recent edition Nova et Vetera, Father Michael Dodds is arguing from the Action of Creatures to the Existence of God. He’s also unpacking the first way, but he doesn’t necessarily do it in the exact same way that Feser does, talking about the concurrent actualization of a series of members for the existence of a thing.
John DeRosa:
He spells it out in a few different terms. And then there’s other renditions that maybe don’t focus on existence right away, but that get there later down the line. There’s a lot of different ways of cashing it out.
Trent Horn:
This is important because when we are engaging others on these issues, especially, and we’ll get to this with his objections to classical theism itself, classical theism is not a monolith, there are many different ways. When you get to these very fine points, there are different camps you might fall into or proposals you find to be more persuasive to answer these objections. And to me that provides more evidence for classical theism, that we have a wealth of resources of different reasonable ways of addressing difficulties that might arise.
John DeRosa:
I want to move to the second argument that you made just briefly for the causal finitism argument. People can watch it and see that argument presented. It’s so interesting, because I’ve gone back and forth on this myself. What we’re basically asking is, can we justify the second premise of a column cosmological argument that the universe has a finite pass? Can we present a philosophical argument that the universe has a finite pass or that no effect can have an infinite [crosstalk 00:23:39], an infinite causal history? Exactly. Thank you. And the argument you present paper pass or paradox version of the Grim Reaper, I’ve gone back and forth on it. I really thought it worked and then I try to defend it. I’m just going to allude to listeners against Jimmy Akin on my show a couple months ago and he started poking holes in it.
John DeRosa:
I’m not 100% sure yet. I know the version that you presented was deductive, that philosophically the past can’t be finite. I know Alex Bruce actually doesn’t necessarily defend it in that deductive fashion, but more along the lines that it’s the best hypothesis or the best way to make sense of a whole bunch of paradoxes that he thinks it’s the best theory. And then there’s other folks who would say, well, even if it doesn’t work on philosophical grounds, we still have the scientific evidence that the universe began to exist. But what was interesting to me Trent, is that Ben did not attack the argument in any of those ways. He only presented one rebutting defeater as I recall, and it was the idea that your argument was incompatible. The idea of an immutable God was incompatible with creation and that’s how he handled the causal finitism argument. Given that that’s so relevant to classical theism, I’m curious how you responded to that.
Trent Horn:
Absolutely. I think that might have been a tactical move on Ben’s part, that if he were to try to dissect the arguments from infinity and attempt to go in these different directions, he would lose the audience. And so he figured I’ll just grant it and say fine, but if you make a universe from nothing, he put forward, what’s called the modal collapse objection. This is a very famous objection against classical theism. The idea is that if God is necessary, he’s also free, right? The Catholic faith teaches God did not have to make the universe, he freely chose to. But if God’s necessary, that would mean everything, the argument, the collapse objection goes, everything he does is necessary. It has to be. The universe has to be, so he is not free.
Trent Horn:
Ben presented two different modal collapse arguments essentially, one that God, he lacks, potentials, he lacks the potential, did not create the world. And then another one, that basically, if God is necessary, the universe is necessary. And yeah, your website and podcasts are very helpful actually to have very pithy responses to these things, to show one traded on an ambiguous definition of potential, God has no potential in his being, but there are potentials related to how creatures might be related to God. Plus also, and I think it’s helpful for people to see, look, some of them might think, well, when God creates, he changes, he becomes the creator. No nothing ever changed in God. Right? Did he ever get new power? No. Did he get new knowledge? No. Did he have to move his will? God doesn’t have to do anything.
Trent Horn:
It’s just there’s God, and then there is creation with no temporal interval, because remember this isn’t happening in time. You just have to imagine, it’s like with the Cambridge relation I gave in the debate, it’s like if my son gets taller, I get shorter. If you look around the video, right? It’s like nothing about me changes. You have to imagine it’s like, this is God and this is creation. When creation does this, let me get my fingers right, God becomes creator, like how I get shorter than my son, but nothing changes here.
John DeRosa:
I think that’s the key point. You labeled it a fallacy of accident. Following, Feser says the same language in Five Proofs and Father Brian Davis also says the same thing. I just want to nuance one thing. It’s not that God doesn’t do anything. I think it’s that God does create the world. He does act of creation, but he doesn’t have to act in the same way that creatures do. When we act, we’re familiar with ourselves, I have to move my arms around. I have to go teach my students by writing on the board. We think that, just because we have to act in that way, it would be a false inference to think that therefore anyone who ever acts must act in that way. If God is so powerful that if he can create the world extrinsic to himself, as you mentioned in the debate, in extrinsic change, without himself having to internally change, if he’s so powerful that he could do that. Well, then that’s what we say as classical theists.
John DeRosa:
It’s not just something we made up recently, the Council of Nicaea, all the way back at 325, they actually affirm the immutability of God. Catholics will know, we say in the creed, that we believe in one God, the creator of heaven and earth. The idea of him being a creator and also being immutable, that was something held very early on in Christianity. It’s not just something we came up with later.
Trent Horn:
Absolutely.
John DeRosa:
I thought that was a good point. But here-
Trent Horn:
Before you go to the next one though, I will say, I’m still very convinced of the arguments for the finitude of the past. I’m going to be doing some more research work on this. I think eventually I’m just going to have to, it’d be fun to sit down and have a chat with Jimmy on this. Maybe a public one.
John DeRosa:
Yes. I might have to get in on hosting that, that could be a fun discussion and dialogue, we’ll see.
Trent Horn:
I think that would be incredibly fun to do. Because he had a good discussion with William Lane Craig, it’s just hard they come from different theological traditions. Because for example, there are Catholic philosophers like Rob Koons, which is where I got the paper pastor example. He is a Catholic philosopher who holds that you can defend the finitude of the past. I think it would be very fruitful, but I also believe that other people, that’s why it’s interesting, John, with the three arguments I gave, I gave them to satisfy different people. For example, at the conference, it was interesting in the final panel, the next day, we had all the speakers in the conference. These are mostly Protestant pastors who were present. I was the only speaker who affirmed classical theism. Because we had a little panel asking, what do you guys think about God?
Trent Horn:
Now, to credit, there was a modified classical theist. There were two other, one pastor and someone else who affirmed divine timelessness, but they all rejected divine simplicity. They all rejected, I think immutability. It was fun, Catholic conferences I never get to see any variety, but like, yeah-
John DeRosa:
I just remembered a point I wanted to make. We’re going to move on to Ben’s arguments, but you just said it with the idea they rejected immutability. In Ben’s opening statement, I found this interesting. So I just wanted to get this on the table.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, go ahead.
John DeRosa:
He really wanted to get perfect being theism on the table. And so he talked about the idea of God as a perfect being, perfect being theism. And then he also said, classical theism has these additional attributions. And to an extent, I think that’s okay because as classical theist, we of course believe that God is perfect in himself. But I also want to push back a little bit on the methodology of perfect being theism. This will come up when we bring up his next argument or a couple of his arguments. Because a lot of times it rests on people’s intuitions about what perfection would be like. It’s so interesting, Trent, when and Anselm developed this, did he think that God was immutable or that he was mutable, because he held that God was that which nothing greater can be conceived. Anselm held, no, it’s more perfect to be unchanging than it is to be changing. But nowadays it’s almost turned around, and the intuition is a lot of these pastors-
Trent Horn:
It is so strange to me, because normally in our world when we change something, it’s order to perfect it. Maybe you could say, well, you’re changing from one perfect good to another perfect good. But I find that very counterintuitive. Normally change is a means to perfect something in our reality. But yeah, let’s talk about Ben’s other arguments-
John DeRosa:
Yeah, let’s go two, this will be good for the last chunk of the episode. I would say his two main argument. He did do the argument from divine freedom, but that already goes with modal collapse, which we talked about. Let’s look at his other two main ones. One was that naturalism was simpler than theism and he gave a few considerations in that regard. And then the next one was based on the idea that a perfect creator wouldn’t make an imperfect world and he gave a lot of evidence that he thought supported that. Why don’t we look at those two. What does this mean and how does it work as an argument against God to say that naturalism is simpler?
Trent Horn:
Well, this would be from a probabilistic argument. He’s not saying he’s proving atheism. He’s saying, okay, what’s more likely? When you deal with probability, there are things like intrinsic probability and then background knowledge. Intrinsic probability is just, well, how probable is the thing in question? And then what’s all the other relevant background knowledge that’s going to be involved? I gave a quick retort in my example. Because when you do these arguments, you’ve got to have all the knowledge on the table. For example, the intrinsic probability of a 600 pound athlete is very, very low. I hardly know any. But if I add, by the way, this athlete has won three Sumo wrestling championships, it’s like, oh, it’s Emmanuel Yarbrough, the heaviest athlete in the world.
Trent Horn:
These things, they raise the probability. What he was trying to say is, look, when we start off and you have to just pick without any other knowledge, it’s probably more likely going to be naturalism than theism, because naturalism, hey, we got nature. We all agree there’s nature. The theists are saying there’s nature and God. And so it’s going to be less probable in that respect. And so my retort to that, is that the definition of naturalism here is circular. I-
John DeRosa:
Before you do that, can I just give a quick example?
Trent Horn:
Yeah, sure, sure.
John DeRosa:
Because I thought people give these examples that just help to get the simple point, because I didn’t originally understand this, but now I get it. It’s like saying, I could give two hypotheses right now. I’m in my apartment, there’s a cat outside on the sidewalk right now or a second hypothesis, there’s a black cat outside on the sidewalk right now. And so the idea is that the simpler hypothesis that, it’s more likely that there’s a cat outside of my sidewalk up right now. Because if I say there’s a black cat outside-
Trent Horn:
You’ve specified it.
John DeRosa:
You specify it, and there’s more ways that that could go wrong. Ben is saying, whereas naturalism we just have the world, with classical theism you have God and the world and therefore it’s not a symbol. Okay, go ahead.
Trent Horn:
However, now this was something I wanted to turn on its head in my rebuttal. Because my contention though, is that why is it a cat is more probable than a black cat? Well, I used possible world language, of all the ways we could describe the world. There’s lots of worlds where there’s a cat of many different colors on your balcony, but there’s fewer possible worlds where it’s a black cat. It would follow from there that when something is in more possible worlds, that increases its probability. Now classical theism holds that God is just not a being like a cat. God is a necessary being. That’s why I think that, I’m not going to go into all my rebuttals, I think this is an important point to draw out. That these probabilistic evidential arguments they’re problematic for me because we’re not dealing with the odds of something in the universe.
Trent Horn:
God is necessary. Either God, it is either impossible for God not to exist or it’s impossible for him to exist. The odds of God existing are either zero or one. That’s the nature of God who’s the necessary being. All these probabilistic arguments, I think they’re looking at the question wrong, because either it’s either one or it’s zero. So God is in all of these possible worlds. I would say it makes the intrinsic probability more likely. And then I showed in the rebuttal just that it’s not a fair comparison because, Draper, Paul Draper, where Ben got this argument from, he says naturalism and supernaturalism are equally likely. He just sees theism as a specified form of supernaturalism, to which I would say, okay, well you’re not going to sit on naturalism. In fact, this was a rebuttal I did not give in the debate because I felt Ben didn’t put enough out there for me to warrant it.
Trent Horn:
But I would say to Ben, okay, is this person a naturalist? They believe there’s just the physical world. By the way, there’s been an infinite series of physical Gods that have causal power over the universe. Like take Mormonism. Mormonism would postulate an infinite series of physical Gods going backwards in time. Now under Draper’s view, because I asked Ben, what his naturalism? I said, would you agree with Draper that it’s the physical precedes the mental, even if we have minds, they’re always anchored to physical things like brains. He said, sure, well then under that view, you could be a naturalist that believes in God, as long as God is just totally physical. I think though most atheists would say, no, I don’t believe leave in any Gods, physical or immaterial. If that’s the case, atheism is a specified form of naturalism and then atheism and theism are both still equally intrinsically probable.
Trent Horn:
I didn’t get into that because he didn’t present it in that way, but I just wanted to show, no, naturalism and supernaturalism for Draper are equally probable. I would say that theism it’s more probable than other forms of supernaturalism, because it’s more coherent and it has better ultimate explanations, even if it’s more specified. Another example that I would give is, look, don’t get hung up on intrinsic probability. The odds that Joe killed Bob, intrinsically is like what? One in six billion? But that means, are we going to doubt anybody killed Bob, because it’s one in six billion for anybody? Well, no, we got other evidence. Look at the other evidence to do probability calculus.
John DeRosa:
I do want to spend some time on the argument that Ben developed at length. That he think was his most important one, which is the argument from imperfection. But I will say that is some interesting stuff about simplicity and I think it’s worth diving into deeper in the future. Ben’s argument from imperfection, he even said in his opening statement, he leaned in and said, this is the one, my most important argument, I think he said something to that effect. That’s what I wanted to go back to. Because just as the argument for simplicity, you really were pressing him on to define his term, what is naturalism? In this argument from imperfection, I think you did a nice job of pressing on him, but I was still left a little bit unclear on defining his term of, what is a perfect world? Let me just sketch what the argument was-
Trent Horn:
Right. Go ahead.
John DeRosa:
… I don’t what you talk about. He said, a perfect creator could not create anything less than a perfect universe, and that to deny this would contradict God’s omnipotence or moral perfection, which entail the actions of a perfect being cannot decrease the degree of perfection in the universe as a whole, in any possible world. And then he made a cumulative case and said, here’s how I show that this is an imperfect creation. One, there’s this problem of divine hiddenness, that there’s non-resistant, non-theists. Two, there’s this evidential problem of evil that there probably are some unjustified evils given all the different apparently gratuitous evils we see. And then three given millions of years of evolutionary animal suffering and languishing, naturalism would be more likely.
John DeRosa:
He also threw something in there with the second law of [inaudible 00:38:50] to double check. But he gave those three lines of support to say that, therefore this is an imperfect world, and since we know a perfect being wouldn’t make one of those, therefore there is no perfect being. How did you think through that?
Trent Horn:
Well, what I wanted to show people, I wanted to give multiple lines of understanding. My big reply to these kinds of arguments, is like what Brian Davies does in his book, On Evil, is to say, okay, you’re saying if there’s unjustified evils, God does not exist. So there’s these horrible evils, therefore there’s no, God. You can run that argument backwards to say, but if God exists, there’s just no horrible evils then. If my other arguments work in the debate, then we’re saying, well, it seems there’s these unjustifiable evils. I would say, well, I think I brought up Mona Lisa in the debate saying we’re not in a good position to see if they are. Now with the perfect creator, perfect world, that’s where I was concerned. The word perfect there is being equivocated on, it’s ambiguous. What does that mean?
Trent Horn:
That’s why I said I can think of a perfect being, but I don’t think any of us can agree on what a perfect world is. And now Ben understands that in philosophy some earlier philosophers tried to say that God made the best of all possible worlds, he had to. But that’s like saying if God made a basketball player, he would be the tallest basketball player. Okay? How tall would he be? Well, he could be infinitely taller, right? There is no maximum. Ben was very clear, I’m not saying the best of all possible worlds. I’m not saying the best world. I’m saying a best world. If you zoom in on the video, you can see I have a quizzical look on my face, because I didn’t understand the distinction between the two. But I was thinking about this today, more John, about the ambiguity there. For example-
John DeRosa:
I’m still unclear on what he meant by perfect world. I really am.
Trent Horn:
Right. I think he was saying, it’s not quantitative like infinite happy things. It’s qualitative. It wouldn’t have any suffering I guess. But that’s why I brought up the one point about, well, why not? It just goes from imperfect to perfect, because then you get all the goods of perfection and you get goods that only exist in the imperfect, moral virtues like forgiveness. But I was thinking about this today that, let’s say I’m a perfect musician, does that mean I’m going to play the perfect song? I guess if I’m a perfect musician I’m going to play a perfect song. What does that mean? Well, if I’m a perfect pianist, I would play the Beethoven’s fifth symphony. I’m going to hit every note exactly where it’s supposed to be on the sheet music. But let’s say I’m a perfect piano player and I’m going to create the perfect original song. Well, what does that look like?
Trent Horn:
I get perfectly performing a rendition of a done piece. Right? But I have no idea, would a perfect piano piece have any sharps, any discordant tones? Well, yeah, there’s a lot of songs that are beautiful, precisely because they have discordant tones that are contrasted with harmony. I think many people wrapping their head around this would say, no, it’s way too vague to say that God is obligated to make a perfect world. I don’t know what is, Catechism, I think it’s in paragraph 306 or 309, around there. It says that God could always make a better world. With infinite power, he could always make a better world. God is not obligated to make a perfect world. He’s just obligated to make a good world. I agree God would not make a world that is nothing but infinite suffering. But as long as he brings greater goods, that’s the whole point of the Odyssey. Then we can justify evils that he might allow.
Trent Horn:
But that’s why I wanted to press though about the terms, John, when I was debating him, good and bad, and perfect and things like that. I wanted him to define those terms as well, because naturalism’s got to carry a burden of proof of also.
John DeRosa:
I will say one of the most incredible moments of the debate was at the end of Ben’s second rebuttal. I’m not even going to spoil it for the audience. If you haven’t seen it, you have to watch it.
Trent Horn:
You could do it. That’s fine.
John DeRosa:
Okay. Okay.
Trent Horn:
No, it’s not a vengeance end game people.
John DeRosa:
That was hysterical. But basically Ben was almost at a time, he finished his rebuttal timed, absolutely to a T. He had two seconds left over and then I think he might have just realized that he was going to go on to the perfect world point and he just goes, that’s what a perfect world looks like. The whole audience laughed. And then you came up to the mic and you said, well, how can it be a perfect world if more goods are about to be added to it? And then people were really enjoying themselves. The crowd really got going.
Trent Horn:
Yes. There a GIF online of some teenagers. They say something that burns somebody and a guy runs past going, oh, I wish I had had someone there to run by, oh.
John DeRosa:
Those are both great. Let me just bring up one more point.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, sure.
John DeRosa:
The attempts to define the perfect world. I don’t think they fully got there, but at one point he did bring up the idea that, well, maybe I can’t give a definition, but heaven would be an example of a perfect world. And so God could just create heaven and that’s what a perfect world looks like.
Trent Horn:
What I would say is, it is a world that lacks evils, but I wouldn’t necessarily call that perfect. Because once again, I don’t know what that means. To say something is perfect, means it conforms to a type that it ought to be. Like I’m sure a perfect basketball has certain dimensions it needs to be, to be in the NBA. There is no code a world has to subscribe to, to reach certain perfections. Any world God makes, is going to be limited and there’s going to be competing goods in it. Even if he makes only immaterial beings, it’s going to lack material goods, for example. God, well he could make just the angels. Right? And that would be a very good world, but it would not have other goods. What about the goods of finite creatures bringing new immortal beings into existence, through their own actions? That’s an amazing good.
Trent Horn:
You can’t have that with angels, but if you do that with finite creatures, you also get problems too. There’s always going to be trade offs. All in all, I guess just to pull everything together, I was very happy with the debate. I think it’s probably the best debate I’ve ever had, frankly.
John DeRosa:
I was going to ask you, just for closing comments. I know we’re short on time here, but what if anything did you learn from the debate? What lines of argument or evidence do you want to pursue further in the future?
Trent Horn:
Well, I think what I’m just going to do is continue to research and put into different forums, whether it’s books or videos, this growing movement among atheists that want to present high level critiques of classical theism and high level critiques of apologetic arguments. I want to be able to offer it in print or video, or even in live debates like this. I’m so grateful, originally I was supposed to debate Alex O’Connor and he couldn’t make it. I’m grateful Ben was there. We both said afterwards, we put together a good product. That’s how Ben and I viewed it. We didn’t view it as trying to even beat each other, we wanted to put out good arguments. Ben and I viewed it as we wanted to create something together that would teach people about the high level debate between classical theism and philosophical atheism.
Trent Horn:
Our goal was to teach people about this and I believe that was accomplished. I’m looking forward to more engagements like that, but I’m very grateful. I also give Ben a lot of credit and that he really showed some good debate skills in the debate that I had with. I’ve seen other people, they don’t even bother to do the prep. They don’t do the prep, John. I’m always amazed. They won’t even read my books. I debated someone once and I gave him a free copy of my book, I’m like, I’m sure you already have this. He’s like, I never heard you wrote this book. I’m like, really? Would have helped you in the debate if you had read it. Ben’s a nice guy and hopefully we’ll have a lot of future engagements. [crosstalk 00:47:01]. Because he does the opposite, he’s prepared and he showed it.
John DeRosa:
I was going to say, well, you both prepped. You both prepped a lot.
Trent Horn:
Yes. I made sure [crosstalk 00:47:08] prepped for it.
John DeRosa:
It was clear in your rebuttals that you were prepped for each other’s arguments. I hope here in this debrief, we just wanted to lay out some material to help people better understand the content of the debate, but I want people to check out the debate for themselves. In the comment section, there’s already hundreds of comments. There’s some interesting people in there. I saw Dr. Richard DeClue from Word on Fire. He was giving some of his comments down there. So you can check that out. [crosstalk 00:47:32]. Watch the debate for yourself. He had an interesting comment actually on the heaven objection. We don’t have quite time for it now, people can check that out. Trent, great job as always. Thanks for bringing me on to debrief with you.
Trent Horn:
Thank you very much, John, and be sure everyone to check out Classical Theism podcast for other great deep dives into defending the existence of God, the Christian faith. I hope you guys will also definitely support us at trenthornpodcast.com, and be sure to check out Ben Watkins and all the guys at Real Atheology as well. Thank you all and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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