Audio only:
In this episode, Trent debriefs his recent debate on the existence of God at the University of Toledo.
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 Answer’s apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. And today I want to do a debrief of a debate that unfortunately you probably won’t get to hear, but it was still a really enjoyable experience, so I just wanted to share that with you. And I think there’s still a lot of things that you could learn as I break down how the debate went. The reason you won’t be able to hear the debate, odds are, is because unfortunately, it wasn’t recorded. I’ll get into the backstory more on that. I have heard from one of my contacts at the university where the debate happened. Someone in the audience did record an audio version of the debate and the audio is actually pretty good. I haven’t heard back on whether they’ve obtained that yet. So maybe after this debrief I’ll actually post just the audio of it.
I don’t know, we’ll have to see on that. So let me get into the background and then I will just break down the debate and talk about some of the arguments because it was a lot of fun. I love doing debates. Debates are one of my favorite things to do. In a few weeks, I’ll be debating Gavin Ortlund on the issue of solo scriptura. We’ve also talked about doing other debates, maybe apostolic succession. I’d love to sit down and have a dialogue with him about icon veneration since we had that big back and forth recently on that topic. I like sitting across the table from people who disagree with me and I’m talking about, it doesn’t mean that I debate every subject under the sun. There’s topics that I have researched a lot that I enjoy debating, and there’s other topics I might recommend to other people.
But, in general, I really enjoy debates. They’re a lot of fun. And I like doing debates, especially when they’re in person. I remember during COVID, everything was Skype and Zoom, and that’s why I was so excited to debate Ben Watkins from Real Atheology in person at Capturing Christianity V2, the Capturing Christianity conference where he and I had that debate live and it’s just so much fun. So I was looking forward to this that I was scheduled at the beginning of February. It was like February 1st or 2nd, it was like right at the first week of February. I was invited to debate Dr. Christopher Martin at the University of Toledo in Ohio. On the question was just, does God exist? I was really interested in this debate. What’s funny is that when I do debates, I research my opponent to see, “Okay, what arguments have they put forward?”
And I sincerely hope my opponent will do the same for me. And then when I looked though, I didn’t see very much from Dr. Martin on the arguments for and against the existence of God. He’s primarily a scholar of Spinoza. So the early modern philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, a Spinozist, if you will. And so he’s done a lot of publication, I think even an entire book on Spinoza. I thought, “Okay.” It’s interesting because Spinoza was kind of a pantheist, it’s a little bit hard to tack down exactly Spinoza’s thought on the philosophy of religion that he talks about God, he may have believed in God, but not the God of classical theism. He seemed to lean more towards pantheism at the very least that the universe flows from God necessarily. Whereas classical theists believe that God freely creates the universe. He could have chosen to not make the world if he wanted to.
Otherwise, I didn’t really see anything else there. So when there’s nothing there, I kind of have to do just a general prep and hope for the best and see what’s going to happen. ‘Cause I don’t know what arguments are going to be. It’s kind of going in blind, I don’t know. And it’s kind of fun. It’s like, “All right, what’s going to happen? I don’t know.” I did try to speculate. I thought, “Okay, this guy’s really big into Spinoza. And Spinoza had a complaint against classical theism. Things like modal collapse and other objections to divine simplicity or classical theism. Maybe he’s going to go down that route.” So I was kind of studying that a little bit, thinking maybe he’s going to go down that route for the debate. And he didn’t, which is fine. So I’m, I’m going to break it down here. Oh, let me tell you though, I had so much bad luck with this debate because it was in the first week of February when we had that big ice storm here in Texas.
Everything’s frozen over and it’s kind of embarrassing being in Texas. We closed, the schools were closed for the entire week and people in the rest of the country who get snow and ice all the time would be like, “Why are you freaking out? It was just a little bit of ice. It’s not like you had a blizzard or something like that.” But we’re not used to it. Even though it happens once every winter here, there’s a snowstorm or an ice storm and things are paralyzed, they still haven’t figured out how to salt the roads properly here. So a big ice storm, my flight to Detroit, and I was going to drive down to Toledo, it was a morning flight, it was canceled the day before. And I thought, “Okay,” but then I was rescheduled to an afternoon flight. I could still make the debate maybe, I don’t know.
I really didn’t want to drive on the ice to get to the airport. I’m like, this is going to get canceled. But they kept saying, it’s going to happen. It’s going to happen. And I get to the airport and I check in. I pay for the expedited boarding ’cause I want to make sure I get off the plane real fast and get to the university to do the debate. And then it’s take off… And I hate when airlines do this. It’s like, okay, departure at 1:45, 2:00, 2:15, I guess we were waiting on crew and they never came. So then they canceled my flight and it was hard ’cause I thought, “Okay, do I want to cancel the event myself and say, look, I don’t want to show up and start a debate at 9:00 at night or something like that.” But then my flight was canceled so that was the end it was out of my control.
But the university did have a backup plan. They had a Skype or a Zoom channel set up so that they could have Dr. Martin there in person, I would be on a screen, we’d go back and forth. It’s not ideal, but it ended up going okay. And I’m really glad that actually they put that together and had that backup because they told me that they had 750 chairs set out for this debate and at least 500 of them were filled. So it was a huge audience at the University of Toledo that took part in the debate. Maybe some of you’ll leave a comment underneath this video that this really did happen, “I was there.” Reminds me of what Paul says in First Corinthians, 1 Corinthians 15, when he shares the creed about the resurrection of Jesus, that people saw the risen Jesus, even 500 people saw him.
Some of them are have… Some are asleep and the Lord have died, others are still awake. That’s in 1 Corinthians 15, the 500 witnesses. I would say there were 500 people that saw me debate Dr. Martin, this really did happen. So maybe if you were there, leave a comment below, that’d be fun to get your thoughts on the debate. So it was set up. But then as the debate started, the moderator was introducing, my computer kept restarting without me touching it. And I was like, “What is going on here? Why do I have the worst luck with technology?” Just kept restarting for no reason. And I was recording it on my end, on my Zoom account. And so I just turned that off. And I tried not to touch anything on my laptop just to keep it from being finicky, which is unfortunate because I think on their end, because of the restarts, they didn’t hit the record either.
And so it didn’t get recorded, but it went really well. So what I want to do now is I’m just going to go through the arguments. Not a ton of mine, more on Dr. Martin’s because they’re interesting and give you my thoughts on it. Would love to chat with him again or do another debate. Maybe we could do more of an informal sit down and talk about the arguments that would be a lot of fun. So Dr. Martin, and he was defending atheism, the claim that God does not exist. And he gave three arguments, though I felt like two of them were totally irrelevant to the case that he was making. They were non sequiturs. You’d have in philosophy… Even if they were correct, the conclusion God does not exist, doesn’t follow from them. At least on the second one he might say it follows in more of an extended way.
So now the arguments I gave, by the way, if I could go back in time, I would’ve changed one thing. I gave kind of my standard set. I gave a contingency argument, the argument for motion, a morality argument based on human dignity. That’s a new argument I’m kind of working on right now. A causal Finitism argument, like a column based argument and a fine-tuning argument. So I gave like five and then I had a sixth, I should have kept it to five. I ran out of time and I just mentioned the resurrection of Jesus at the end ’cause I think it’s important to talk about that. But I barely had any time to talk about it, so I never brought it up again later in the debate. I was willing to sacrifice that argument to drop it because I didn’t develop it enough in my opening statement.
So I just let that one go. I didn’t stick strictly to my opening. And so I would summarize some points to make sure people understood and that ate up my time. So those are my arguments that I gave. Then Dr. Martin got up and he gave his arguments. Here are the three arguments he gave. So I’ll go through each, well, I’ll give you the overview then I’ll go through each one. Number one, God cannot be a moral judge. It’s a incompatible properties’ argument. The idea that if God has perfect foreknowledge, and he’s perfectly good, these are contradictory. God can’t be a moral judge of us because his foreknowledge would force us to act in certain ways and take away our free will. So it’s argument dealing with God taking away our free will so he can’t really be a perfectly moral judge. That’s his first argument.
And by the way, the notes I’m reading here are so funny. These are just my little scribbles that I took during the debate ’cause I didn’t want to touch my computer. Normally I take notes on a separate Word document to lay it out. But sometimes though I just give my scribbles. Every now and then for my patrons, I post my scribbles so people can see what I do. And sometimes I really are when I’m thinking I just doodle geometric shapes while I’m listening to the debate. Keeps my mind in the right place. So maybe I’ll post those on Patreon. If you want more bonus content by the way, go to trenthornpodcast.com. Great way to support us just throwing that out there for you. So number one, God can’t be a moral judge. Number two, the afterlife does not exist. So when our brains die, we die so there is no afterlife.
And right off the bat you’d say, “Well what does that have to do with the existence of God?” And Dr. Martin was saying, “Well, without an afterlife you don’t have an adequate solution to the problem of evil.” And so that was essentially that if there is no afterlife, then God can… If there is a God, there’s got to be an afterlife for us. You know what’s so funny, now I think about debates, I should have gone back in time. There are theists who don’t believe in an afterlife and still think the problem of evil is resolved. There are many Jews, for example, some Jews do believe in an afterlife, but there are many Jews who go back to the Sadducees, right, they didn’t believe in a bodily resurrection. Many Jews today believe in ethical monotheism, but they don’t believe in an afterlife. But they still think God exists and there is a satisfactory solution to the problem of evil.
But that was a second argument, no afterlife so no God. The third argument was essentially a problem of evil divine hiddenness. This is a classic argument against the existence of God from atheism. There was, it’s just a minor problem of evil that God could do better, so why doesn’t he do better? I’ll get to that in a sec. And then a divine hiddenness argument based on deaths of despair that there are people, he says something like, middle-aged men nowadays are more likely to commit suicide or die from drug overdoses and they’re in their despair and they cry out to God and they don’t hear an answer, therefore God does not exist. And he said, “Look, if a child was lost in a store, a parent would go and find them and comfort them. Why doesn’t God do that for us?” So that was the case Dr. Martin made.
Then I’ll go through what some of my replies were to his case. So the first one was, God can’t be a moral judge because of his perfect foreknowledge. And I said, “Look,” and this is important in debate, sometimes in a debate you can just grant the opponent’s argument and say, “Yeah, let’s just say your argument’s right.” That does not win you the debate because you can still be a theist. Because his argument was basically that if God can’t be a moral judge if his foreknowledge takes away our free will. That if he knows what we’re going to do and if that determines what we’re going to do, then he can’t be a perfect moral judge because he’s determining what we do.
And I would say, but you can still be a theist. You could be like in a Islamic tradition, some Islamic traditions or like a Calvinist. Calvinist’s deny that we have free will in the sense we could have done something different. This is important for Dr. Martin’s argument because when you say do you have free will, people say, well what do you mean by free will among philosophers? Because one view of free will is being able to do otherwise. And I lean towards this view of what meaningful free will is. To have free will means you could have done otherwise.
The reason we consider it wrong for you to murder that person is because it is possible you could have not murdered him or her. But in other cases, we don’t think that a boulder that falls on someone, we don’t consider it morally blameworthy because the bolder is just acting in accord with physical laws. If you were to rewind the tape and before the boulder crushed the guy and given that the universe has the same physical constants and the same matter and energy in that location, the boulder will still fall on the guy. It could not have done otherwise. And because it’s a large object, you also don’t have things like quantum uncertainty or things like that ’cause it’s larger than a molecule. But we could have done otherwise, you could have done differently. You could have not done that bad thing or you could have done that good thing you failed to do.
So we have free will. Other more compatibles views of free will would say, “No, you can be determined. Free will just means you do what you want to do. As long as you want to do it, you’re free.” That’s what all the Calvinists would say. “Yeah, you wanted to sin and you sinned so you’re still free.” But where the source of my wants, if God ultimately determined what I want by determining by decreeing that Adam would fall and human beings would enter into sin, I’m not getting into the whole Calvinism stuff. But my point here is that if this is an atheism debate and you say, “Well I can’t believe in God because if God exists, we don’t have free will.” But there are theists who don’t believe in free will. Calvinists to be an example of that.
So I said right off the bat it doesn’t work. But then number two, I said, “No, I do believe,” should I get into the weeds more? I don’t want to. I’ll save that for another episode. I think I did one on free will this, the atheistic objections to it about the could have done otherwise. There are people who believe in free will, not the compatibilist view, who don’t accept the could have done otherwise formulation. I’m not going to get into the Frankfurt counter examples on that. That would take us too far away from this.
So I made the point, I do believe you could, being able to do otherwise is an important part of free will. But I hammered home the point, the problem with this argument is that just because God knows what we will do in the future, it does not follow he determines what we do. And I gave a variety of analogies going back to Aquinas. If I’m on top of a building and I see two cars are going to hit each other based on their speed, I know what’s going to happen, but my knowledge doesn’t determine what’s going to happen. It’s not perfectly analogous, but it’s still pretty close. I also said you can’t think of God as if he’s in time with us looking ahead into the future. I think God’s timeless. So if God looking at me right now doesn’t determine what I’m going to do in the present, just like you looking at me, wouldn’t determine what I’m going to do.
God looking at me in his eternal now at me, the future me and especially if you believe in the bee theory of time where past, present, and future are equally real. They’re just different moments of the time, but they’re all equally real. God is aware of all of them in one eternal moment. And so God is timeless. He sees it and he does not… His knowledge of what we will do does not determine what we will do. That’s a timelessness timistic answer. There’s also the Molinist account. I didn’t get into that in debate because in debates you can’t get through everything. But I also said that I gave two arguments also to kind of take this argument for Dr. Martin and turn it on its head for theism. In a debate, if you can take your opponent’s argument and show that it actually proves your position, that’s a really helpful thing to do.
It’s like striking gold if you come across that. So I pointed out to him, because I asked him, “Do you think that human beings have moral responsibility?” And he said, “Yes.” He said, “Yeah, I do think humans are morally responsible for their actions.” And I said, “Well, are you a determinist?” And he said, “Yes, I am a deter…” This is in cross-examination. He said, “I am a determinist. I do think that we could not have done otherwise, that our actions are determined by preexisting physical states and the universe before us.” And so I asked him and he just talked around the answer and did not give a satisfactory reply. I said, “Dr. Martin, if you believe that we are determined by the laws of physics and yet we can,” yeah, I said this. “Dr. Martin, you believe we can morally judge one another as human beings,” because he believes a moral responsibility.
And so I said, “You believe we can morally judge one another in spite of the fact we are determined by the laws of physics. If that’s true, why can’t God judge us even if he theologically determines what we do?” Now, once again, I don’t think God determines our behavior, but even if that were true, Dr. Martin believes that’s why when people tell me why I’m in, I don’t believe in God because if God knows the future, I’m not free. Well, becoming an atheist doesn’t make it any better. You’re still not going to be free. You’re probably going to be a determinist. If I had to pick between the uncaring laws of physics determining reality and a perfectly good God determining reality, I’m going to go with a perfectly good God. If I have to pick if I’m to… If I’m not going to be free either way, I’d rather not be free under that which is perfect goodness itself.
So I brought up that under his argument, he does believe you can be a moral judge in spite of not having free will. Well then that collapses. You could have… And he just said, “Well, there’s some way we’re morally responsible you don’t know under physical determinism.” Okay, well why can’t I say the same thing about God? We’re some way morally responsible even if God theologically determines us. But I said, “If you think about it, if you believe human beings are morally blameworthy and praiseworthy, we have moral responsibility and no other entity in the universe governed by physical laws has moral responsibility, then there must be some explanation for why human beings have moral responsibility that is beyond a physical explanation. There’s something beyond a physical explanation.” Well, it’s because you have certain desires and reasons you can reflect on them.
But what determines how, what desires I have, what determines the reflection that I do? If it’s all physically determined, you still kick the can down the road. There has to be some explanation for why we are morally responsible that is not a physical explanation, not a natural explanation. It must be a supernatural explanation. So his argument that human beings are morally responsible in spite of determinism, “Actually,” I said, “It supports the case that I’m making.” So that’s what I thought was wrong with the moral judge argument. And ultimately, like I said, it’s an irrelevant argument. Second argument is the case against the afterlife saying, “Well, you can’t solve the problem of evil unless you have an afterlife.” Now, I didn’t bring this up in the debate, but there are theists who believe you can do that. I then said, “All right, I can still undercut it, it’s still irrelevant. Let’s say I granted your case,” and his case… The argument he said, why we don’t have an afterlife is because the mind is dependent on the brain.
Everything we look at in neuroscience says that brain states are… The mental state is dependent in some way on the brain state. There’s a correlation between the two. Fine. Let me grant, I will grant Dr. I did this in the debate. I grant Dr. Martin’s premise that we cannot have mental states apart from brain states. So his claim is we can’t have an afterlife then if your brain you die, your brain dies, then you can’t have an afterlife if you don’t have a brain. And my reply is, and there are Christians who believe this, I think Keith Ward might be one, maybe Peter van Inwagen. Well, van Inwagen doesn’t believe in material resurrection. I’m trying to remember his view on that.
But what I said was, “Let’s assume you were right that we can’t have a mind without a brain. We could still have an afterlife if an all powerful God could just resurrect my physical body.” I don’t believe this view. But, once again, in a debate, you don’t have to defend your ideal view, you just have to defend the minimal debate resolution. So you could be a theist if you say, “Well yeah, I’m a theist. I don’t believe the mind is separate from the brain at all.” Fine, just believe that God resurrects our physical bodies, including our physical brains. He’ll put all the atoms back together again. And then there you go. You can still have an afterlife. It’ll just be a material afterlife. We’ll have a material resurrection and you can have a glorified material body and live forever. So the problem is completely avoided.
And Dr. Martin said, “Well, that has problems. What about parts of my body that become parts of other people’s bodies? I die, go to the ground, become the grass, the cow eats the grass, and then I’m a part of somebody’s cheeseburger, at least a few of my atoms are.” And I said, “Well actually Aquinas dealt with this 700 years ago. He even went so far to say, what about a cannibal who only lives off other humans?” Which I don’t think there’s any person like that that exists actually. But Aquinas said, “God can just create new matter for our body’s ex nihilo to fill in the gaps.” And that makes sense to me. I could still exist, even if I don’t have my pinky finger or God can create a new one for me, ex nihilo. So I don’t think that that objection about body parts belonging to other people is as serious that our substantial bodily parts never become the substantial parts for other people really.
I guess you can get into brain transplants, stuff like that. But those are the marginal cases. I think in general, the argument was irrelevant. And then I gave some more arguments saying, “Okay, yeah, but now your argument, you gave one piece of case against the afterlife mind brain dependence. I could totally grant that. Yeah, the mind is dependent on the physical brain, but it doesn’t follow that the mind and the brain are identical.” Because I brought up qualia, the hard problem of consciousness, qualia is the mental images that we have saying, “Hey look, if we’re completely physical, how do you explain this non-physical sensations that we have?” I talked about near death experiences, out of body experiences. So we have to look at all of the evidence that really said, and I could say, so he said, “Well, I’m not saying I’m a materialist, I’m just saying the mind is dependent on the brain.”
And I said, “Look, I agree that they’re correlated.” And I could agree that without the brain we can’t engage in certain rational processes. It may be the case that after we die, I think it is the case, that God infuses knowledge into our souls that we are severely hindered in our abilities without our brains unless God compensates for them. And he can do that because he’s perfectly omnipotent. So I brought that up and I thought that that argument didn’t work as well. Oh, I forgot to include this by the way, if you want some resources on how to defend the Catholic view of the mind body relationship, the existence of an immaterial soul, and just this idea that the mind’s dependence on the brain, the idea there’s a correlation between the mind and the brain does not refute a classical Catholic view of the afterlife, the soul, immateriality, human existence, things like that.
Two resources I want to recommend, one would be by Edward Feser, a book called Philosophy of Mind. So it’s more of a presentation of the philosophy of mind in general. But Feser does a really good job. He’s a Catholic philosopher of defending the Catholic points of view that show up in this book and also critiquing some of the more dominant views among secular philosophers when it comes to philosophy of mind. So I recommend that. And if you want more of a specific treatment on a Catholic perspective, on philosophy of mind, I really like this book by James Madden. It’s called Mind Matter and Nature, A Thomistic Proposal for the Philosophy of Mind. So just wanted to add those right in there for you. I think I’m throwing this in here at the last minute. Back to what I was saying, let’s talk about the last two problem of evil and depths of despair.
So the first one that he brings up is problem of evil. He quoted Levinas, I guess that’s that Levinas Spinoza, that’s his area he really enjoys studying a lot. And he asked me, “Trent, if you… Levinas says that this is the best of all possible worlds and it clearly isn’t, wouldn’t God make the best of all possible worlds, why do we live in a world like this? Shouldn’t it be the best?” And I said, “Well, no, because I think that that notion the best of all possible worlds is incoherent. The best of all possible worlds is as incoherent as the highest of all possible numbers. There is no highest number. You can always keep adding.” And I said, “There are some things that can be perfect, perfected, certain great making properties. So God can have perfect knowledge. He can know everything that can be known. He can have perfect power. He can do everything that can be done. He can have perfect existence. His existence never fails. So there can be perfect, a perfect being, God, a maximum great being, a perfect being. But other things can’t necessarily be perfect. I don’t know what a perfect world is.
I mean, I can think of some things like a perfect sphere. A perfect sphere would be all of the, or let’s say a circle, a perfect circle. A perfect circle would be every point along the circumference is equidistant from the center of the circle. So everything on the circumference is perfectly… And a perfect circle, we don’t have them in the real world, even atomically, you could never get them exactly right. But you have them as abstractions in Euclidean geometry. So I can understand perfect being, a perfect mathematical object, but a perfect world. I don’t know what that looks like.” Let’s say a… What’s a perfect basketball player? How tall is he? Is he infinitely tall? There’s no such thing. Does he run infinitely fast? Does he score infinitely many baskets?
Is a perfect, well perfect island. You could always keep adding things to objects to make them perfect. There is no upper limit like there is to perfect properties like omniscience or omnipotence. There is perfect knowledge, there is perfect power. There’s things like that. So I said, “I don’t believe there is such a thing like that. I do believe that God is perfect himself.” And now he said, “Well, you know, what about God can create a world without suffering where he determines what people do and they don’t even know it? What good is that world lacking?” And I said, “It’s still lacking goods. It lacks courage because there’s no danger. It lacks compassion because there’s no suffering. It lacks forgiveness because there’s no wrongdoing.”
And I said to him, this is one of the memorable lines of the debate. I said, “It would be better to, just as it’s better to marry a real person and grow together in marriage, it’s better to marry a real person and grow together in marriage than it is to create a perfect creepy Stepford wife who does everything you want to do in marriage. And that’s the same with God making a world of journeys to perfection rather than one that’s already perfect.” And he said, “Well, I disagree, but that’s a very good analogy.” And so he liked that. The other analogy that stood out was he said, “Well, how can you say God is morally good when God can’t fail? If he’s goodness itself, he can’t fail, he can never do wrong. We praise people because they overcome adversity and they could do evil, but they choose good.”
And I said, “Well, it depends what you mean by being praiseworthy. I think praise worthiness is not just overcoming an obstacle, but it’s being good in and of itself. Like goodness is the possession of being. A good tree does not have decay on it and it does not have rotting leaves. A good squirrel has all of his legs and can find a nut. God just is goodness itself, so we praise that which is good cause it possesses being. And God possesses infinite being. And so that makes him praiseworthy, not because he overcomes a weakness, but because he just has all goodness and beauty and truth and all other things that are goodness itself.” And so I gave the analogy and I said, “I think it’s a ship that won’t sink as long as you steer it right, is not as awe-inspiring as a ship that can’t possibly sink under any circumstances.”
And he said, “Well actually I’m more impressed by the ship that can’t sink as long as you steer it right versus the one that can’t sink no matter how you drive it, pilot it, steer it.” And I said to him, “I tell you what, Dr. Martin, if you have a ticket for a ship that can sink in…” I told Dr. Martin, “If you have a ticket to go on a ship that cannot sink in principle, and I have a ticket on a ship that can sink in practice, that you have a ship that is intrinsically unsinkable, I have a ticket for a ship that is unsinkable as long as everything goes right, like the Titanic,” I told him, “I’ll gladly swap tickets with you. I’m more impressed by the ship that intrinsically cannot sink has no flaws whatsoever in that regard.” And I think the same is true of God.
And then the last one was your standard divine hiddenness argument. And I said, I got into that and said, “Look, this is a probabilistic argument you’re saying,” and I finally whittled down the argument in cross-examination and said to him, “All right. Your argument, to make sure I understand it, is if unjustifiable divine silence exists, God probably does not exist, unjustifiable, divine silence exists, therefore God probably does not exist.” That’s your standard motus opponent, if A then B, A therefore B. And I said, “It’s unjustifiable divine silence. Like you’re suffering and God isn’t there to comfort you to let you know everything will be fine.” So I said, “Look, I can run that argument in reverse. Okay? If…” And you can do this with a motus opponent’s argument, okay? So if I am in Dallas, I am in Texas, I’m in Dallas, I’m in Texas, I can do it in reverse.
If I’m in Dallas, I’m in Texas, I’m not in Texas, therefore I’m not in Dallas. If I’m not in Texas, I couldn’t possibly be in Dallas. It’s a valid move. So I said, “Look, if unjustifiable divine silence exists, God probably does not exist. Well God probably does exist, therefore there are no unjustifiable divine silences. God has a good reason for not making his existence obvious to people who are suffering.” And I gave specific reasons for what I gave some possible reasons for that. God might want to give us our free will to moral decisions and our rational decisions that he’s not going to guide us all the way. He might want to give other people an opportunity to share God with us or to help us. He might be helping, I don’t think I brought this up in the debate, but he might be helping us in ways that we don’t understand and we’re not fully aware of.
And so I brought up the analogy. So what about the mom who will comfort her son when he calls out for her? I said, “I have three sons, they call out for me all the time. I don’t always go to them when they do that. Sometimes I want them to handle things and I know that they’re going to be all right even if I’m not there. And if God is all powerful, that if he can compensate someone who suffers in this life, whether it’s evil or divine hiddenness with the perfect life in Heaven, which is why he went after the afterlife earlier in the debate, then God is still justified in what he does.” And then I said, I also said in the debate, “But what about all the people who have claimed,” like, yeah, yeah, Johnny said, “I didn’t hear mom when I was suffering so there is no mom. What about Billy and Susie? They heard mom when they were suffering, does their testimony not count anymore?”
We didn’t get into a lot, but divine hiddenness is one that’s coming up a lot more. And so I think Christians need to be prepared to offer an answer. But I also brought up in the debate, look, if you’re going to say God probably doesn’t exist, you’re making a probabilistic argument. I said, you have to include all the data points. And I brought up an example from William Lane Craig. If I say that Bob weighs 500 pounds, what is the probability Bob is a professional athlete? Probably very, very, very low. But if I say, Bob weighs 500 pounds and he has won two Sumo wrestling championships, what are the odds he is a professional athlete? Now it’s much higher now. I mean, he could still not be one. He could have been just some random yokel that won a Sumo championship.
But the odds are now when you put all the evidence together, “Oh yeah, it all makes sense that he’s a professional athlete. He’s really big, but he’s a sumo wrestler. So that makes sense.” So with God, if you have the improbability from evil or divine hiddenness, you also have to weigh that against the other background knowledge, like the evidence from the arguments, from change, from contingency, from causal Finitism, from morality, that I would say do tip the scale. I don’t make big probabilistic cases though, but you have to weigh all of it when you’re doing that. Well, I think I covered everything. That was my one set of notes here and a few things he did misunder… And then from my arguments, he kind of misunderstood them. So with fine tuning, he said, “Well the universe isn’t fine tuned. Look at how empty it is.”
And I said, “No, fine-tuning doesn’t mean the maximum amount of life exists. It’s a neutral term. It just means that the value of the constance and the laws of physics to have a life permit permitting universe is incredibly narrow. So narrow, it can’t be explained by chance. Just like other narrow odds, like winning 10 poker games with 10 royal flushes can’t be explained by chance alone.” So misunderstood the fine-tuning argument. Like he said, my argument from change, he said, “Why can’t there be two purely potential beings?” I’m like, “No, no, it’s purely actual beings.” So I think he kind of misunderstood those arguments. So I don’t think he offered that many arguments to really oppose the case I was making. But thank you guys. I hope that was helpful for you all. If you were there, leave a comment that would be fun to hear your perspective.
I apologize if I was biased in my debrief. I mean, I’m, everyone’s going to be biased. I gave my stuff and there was one part I thought I would’ve changed on the resurrection stuff, but overall I thought it went well. But if you were there, leave a comment. Otherwise, I’m looking forward to my debate with Gavin Ortlund soon. And then hopefully I’d like to maybe do our… Am I allowed to say this? Maybe I will say this. We’ll just, or I might get in… Who cares if I get in trouble? Whatever. So our conference next September at Catholic Answers is going to be on atheism, and I am proposing to Catholic Answers Leadership. I would love to do a debate at the conference. That’d be super fun. I’d love to bring in maybe a professor or someone who’s well known on the issue of atheism to debate live at the conference. That’d be a lot of fun. So maybe we’ll do that. Who knows, right? But thank you guys, and I hope you have a very blessed day.
Narrator:
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