In this episode Trent shares a conversation he took part in with atheist Alex O’Connor, agnostic Joe Schmid, and Protestant Cameron Bertuzzi on the problem of evil.
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist, and speaker Trent Horn. Today, I want to share with you a four-person dialogue on the problem of evil. It features myself, Alex O’Connor a.k.a. the Cosmic Skeptic. He is an atheist who I previously debated on Pints with Aquinas, so it was really great to finally sit down with him again to have this chat. And Joe Schmid who is an agnostic over at Majesty of Reason.
Trent Horn:
It was great being down in Houston speaking. The four of us actually went out after this to have a bite to eat at a local burger place. Alex got a vegan burger, of course. So, it was awesome just for the four of us to be able to talk about things and we actually have a lot in common. So, it was a real treat, and it was great for the four of us to be able to sit down and discuss this important issue in the philosophy of religion.
Trent Horn:
Definitely, go… you can also check out other material at Capturing Christianity and on Alex O’Connor’s channel the Cosmic Skeptic, as well as Joe Schmid’s channel Majesty of Reason. And I hope to do a lot more collaboration with these three channels in the future. Hope you guys enjoy and check it out.
Alex O’Connor:
I’ve invited three other guests onto the podcast with me today. I’m joined by Cameron Bertuzzi, our resident protestant. I’m joined by Joe Schmid, our agnostic, Trent Horn, our Catholic, and I am, as always, Alex O’Connor, your atheist.
Alex O’Connor:
We decided it would be fun since we’re all here together in Houston in order to do an event, the Capturing Christianity Exchange, which at this point, will be in the past. So, the videos of the interactions that we’re all going to be having in our public event, I’ll put the links down in the description.
Alex O’Connor:
We thought while we’re here, it would be cool to sit down as a four and talk about something which is important to all of us from our different perspectives. It comes up regardless of how you’re talking about the subject of religion, which is the problem of evil. What better company to talk about the problem of evil than people who come at it from completely different approaches?
Alex O’Connor:
So, I don’t really know how we should best begin this, but I guess, for myself, the problem of evil is easily the greatest argument against the existence of a God. Would we all agree that that is the case?
Trent Horn:
You mean for people in general or for us?
Alex O’Connor:
In your view I mean. In terms of arguments that would seek to establish strong A atheism that God doesn’t exist.
Trent Horn:
Well, yeah, I would say historically, the problem of evil or unjustifiable suffering is a strong one. I mean Aquinas basically dealing with the arguments for God, really dealt with two arguments against God. One is the problem of evil and one is the problem of essentially scientific explanation apart from God.
Trent Horn:
So, I would say, historically, yes. Though I mean it’s not… I have other concerns more so than the problem of evil. For me, personally, it was never as big a hurdle to get over as maybe for other people.
Alex O’Connor:
What do you guys… Do you think it’s-
Cameron Bertuzzi:
I think it’s the biggest challenge to perfect being theism is the way that I would put it. Joe and I were talking about this in our interview is that… What is the real breadth of the problem of evil? Of all the different types of theisms that might be out there, which one does it really target? And I think that it targets primarily perfect being theism where you’ve got these tri-omnis. The omnibenevolent God, the omnipotent God, and does it really?
Cameron Bertuzzi:
So, there’s a philosopher who I interviewed recently on my channel. His name is Philip Goff. Is he a philosopher? I think he’s a philosopher.
Alex O’Connor:
Yeah.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
Yeah, and he’s got this concept of God that he’s toying around with at the moment, where he says that God is all good, but He’s not all-powerful. What he argues is that the problem of evil doesn’t really even say anything about that type of God if that God exists.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, that’s a view. There is a rabbi who… I forget his name off the top of my head, but his 14-year-old son I think died of a degenerative disease, and that was essentially the conclusion. [inaudible 00:04:15] the conclusion he came to, “How do I understand this horrible death of my son and being a rabbi?” He said, “Well God loves us, and He wants to help us, but He just can’t.”
Trent Horn:
There is an old book by this guy B.C. Johnson called The Atheist Debater’s Handbook. It’s like the little book I found in a library once. And it was funny, he was dealing with the problem of evil. He said, “The theist may say, ‘Well, maybe God just isn’t all-powerful.'” And he said in the book, “That may be the case, but such a ghost of a God is hardly different from atheism or worth believing in.
Trent Horn:
So, I thought that was an interesting reply from him. I think for a lot of atheists, I don’t know, it’s like perfect being theism or bust.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
I don’t know.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
Yeah.
Alex O’Connor:
Because the idea that maybe God is all loving but not all-powerful, it seems to me a difference without distinction to most theodicies, that is in their practical effect. If you have a theodicy, which anyone listening who doesn’t know is an attempt to, what’s the word? Reconcile the existence of a loving God with the existence of evil in the world or at least suffering in the world.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
Well, not just a loving God. Well, unless you’re trying to make a distinction here-
Alex O’Connor:
Yeah, a God-
Cameron Bertuzzi:
That is both all-loving and all-powerful.
Trent Horn:
Well, it does depend. Traditionally speaking, to reconcile God and evil would be a defense. To give a reason, to explain why God allows evil and the goods He’s achieving would be theodicy.
Alex O’Connor:
Yeah, that’s right. That’s a helpful distinction. I think in terms of trying to justify, let’s say, the existence of a God in the face of evil and suffering, people have given lots of famous examples. They talk about the fact that God wants us to have free will. He talks about the fact that God allows evil and suffering to bring about higher-order goods.
Alex O’Connor:
But to me, this translates to saying something like, “Well, God has this end which He desires to bring about and potentially needs to bring about if He’s a maximally great being, if He’s by nature good. He might need to bring about the best outcomes or at least have a duty to bring about particular outcomes.”
Trent Horn:
I’m skeptical of that, but you can keep going. But I frown my nose [inaudible 00:06:25]-
Alex O’Connor:
Yeah, a lot of people frown on that too, and I’m not sure I can even agree with it myself just because I’m not sure what it would mean to bring about the maximal amount of good or the most good or something.
Trent Horn:
Or the idea that God has to do that.
Alex O’Connor:
Yes.
Trent Horn:
For example, imagine God made a world, a universe like ours, but it only possessed inorganic matter, and it actually had a lot of beauty. It had waterfalls and rocky crags and meteors and volcanoes and all kinds of cool stuff. Would it be bad for God to make that kind of world? It would have no suffering in it whatsoever.
Trent Horn:
So, I doubt you would think that God was bad for making a world of just inorganic matter. But I think a lot of us would think you could make that better with people and conscious beings, but I don’t know if God is obliged to make it better. I don’t know.
Alex O’Connor:
Yeah, sure. Whether He needs to or not, the-
Trent Horn:
It’s something you’d expect from Him, not to drop the ball.
Alex O’Connor:
The justifications are given that take a form of saying that God has some other purpose which He seeks to fulfill such as free will, and the idea is that there’s some kind of metaphysical or logical impossibility with God bringing about a world of free creatures and there being no suffering or something like this.
Alex O’Connor:
And so, in a sense, some like a free will defense that says, “Well, there’s just no way to bring about free will without suffering.” It’s like a way of saying, “Well, God is all-loving, but because He’s got this thing free will that He wants to bring about, He’s just incapable of preventing this kind of suffering. Because if He were, we wouldn’t have free will.”
Alex O’Connor:
So, a kind of response that makes sense of a God that allows suffering that says, “Well, maybe God’s just not all-powerful.” It seems to me the same kind of thought as many other kinds of theodicies because they’re essentially saying, “Well, it’s not like God’s happy about the suffering taking place, but He just doesn’t have the power to take it away either because there’s some kind of thing that He needs to bring about that requires suffering, or just because there’s something He wants to bring about that still makes it impossible for Him to not have suffering.” It seems like a similar kind of approach.
Joe Schmid:
I guess it depends on what you mean by all-powerful.
Trent Horn:
That’s the key.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, I mean if it’s metaphysically impossible, like if there’s no way that reality could be such that God could bring about these goods without allowing certain sorts of evils to transpire. And it’s no mark against God’s omnipotence to be bound in this way. After all, it’s impossible for God to have done otherwise. He couldn’t have had the power to do that because it’s an impossible power, essentially. I don’t really see that as compromising God’s omnipotence. It just depends on how you cache it out.
Alex O’Connor:
Yeah. Well, neither do I, but in terms of how people might make sense of this, when somebody says something like, “Well, I’ve gone through a horrible experience, and so, the only way I can make sense of this is to think that maybe God just isn’t all-powerful.”
Alex O’Connor:
They could be equally captivated by a view that says, “You’re so nearly right. You’re right that the suffering exists because God somehow has to allow it, but it’s not because He’s not omnipotent. It’s just because there are things that an omnipotent being can’t do. It doesn’t mean He’s not an omnipotent God.”
Trent Horn:
Well, I think Joe’s on the path. It’s like God is saying, well, God has allowed this suffering and it could be the case that there is a particular good that would not be accessible without it. So, if you think about omnipotence as power is the ability to do something, there are just some things no amount of power could do because they’re impossible for whatever reasons.
Trent Horn:
I think what you’re getting of the free will issue… There’s two different ways to go about… Well, although I don’t want to derail from the point that you were making. I’ll put it out there and you can tell me if I’m derailing. One approach is like planting His view. It could be the case God can’t make a world where all free creatures choose good because we have these counterfactuals of freedom like you make Cameron, you put Cameron in a world. Whatever, he’s going-
Cameron Bertuzzi:
Don’t use me in this example.
Trent Horn:
By the way, Cameron will always choose the wrong [inaudible 00:10:38]. I’m not sure I’m really inclined to that. I think God can make a world where only free creatures choose things, but it would also lack certain goods. And so, it may be the case God has reasons for allowing certain… I would agree. I think there are certain goods you can’t have them without a concomitant evil like compassion or courage. You might have things that look like them but aren’t them.
Alex O’Connor:
Of course, we spoke before. I mean we had a debate on Matt Fradd’s channel a while ago and we spoke a little bit about this. I can’t remember if we spoke specifically about this topic, but the idea of there being these goods like bravery that can’t come about unless they’re parasitic on some suffering or evil.
Alex O’Connor:
To me, something like bravery is only good in so far as it overcomes some form of suffering or evil. It seems to me if you could have a world without the suffering and without the fear and without the bravery, this would be more desirable. Because sure, you wouldn’t have bravery, but if you don’t need bravery, it doesn’t just seem to me to be a good thing intrinsically. It seems only good relative to the existence of some form of fear and suffering.
Alex O’Connor:
Without the fear and suffering, it wouldn’t be intrinsically good. In fact, if you removed the fear and suffering and somebody was still acting in the way that a brave person would act, you’d say they were just being immodest. You’d think it was a bad thing.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
Well, yeah. Let me jump in real quick.
Trent Horn:
Sure.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
I don’t know that we can actually advance the conversation when you make that kind of move because to me, I think the problem of evil… I don’t want to say that it collapses into axiology, but that’s very central to the problem of evil is this notion of what is most valuable. Because God is going to instantiate the world that is most valuable.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
What you’re saying is that a world that doesn’t have these goods, but also doesn’t have the suffering is more valuable than a world that doesn’t have those goods with the evils that come along with it. How do you advance when you put your foot on the… What’s the right term? Put your foot down and you’re like, “I just don’t think that that’s as valuable. I think what’s most valuable is a world that doesn’t have that?”
Cameron Bertuzzi:
And then what can we say? We can say, “Well, we think that a world that has those higher order goods and the accompanying evils, we think that’s more valuable.” How do you actually progress there? I think we may actually run into a stalemate.
Alex O’Connor:
Because I think there were different intuitions on different goods that are supposedly served by suffering. For example, the example of bravery is maybe a bit of a poor one because it seems intuitively to me that we’d rather have no need for bravery and no bravery in the same way that-
Cameron Bertuzzi:
See, but that’s just you… I don’t think that. I think that bravery or courage is very valuable.
Alex O’Connor:
Compare it, for example, to something like the free will defense, which I think it’s a bit argue that something like free will is just of a different category of thing.
Trent Horn:
You could pick something else. You could pick compassion, for example.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
Or forgiveness.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, let’s say someone experiences compassion for the suffering of a fictional character. Even that I don’t think is… I agree with you, courage, where there’s no real danger, is very Don Quixote. Very like, “Okay.” But to watch a film and to feel an emotional compassion towards the sufferings of a person that doesn’t exist, they’re fictional, I don’t think that that’s a bad thing.
Alex O’Connor:
It’s certainly not a bad thing.
Trent Horn:
I think the existence of the compassion itself, it is a good thing.
Alex O’Connor:
It may be, and maybe for that reason, it’s a better example. To answer your point, Cameron, I think that this isn’t equally obviously true with all of these higher-order goods. I just think that with something like bravery it seems to be fairly intuitive. I mean you said you prefer to live in a world where there is fear and suffering so that we can have the good of bravery.
Alex O’Connor:
An example I’ve sometimes given is the example of someone like Martin Luther King being a great man because he overcomes this great evil. Surely, we’d rather be living in a world where there were no racism and no need for Martin Luther King. It sounds to me that in a lot of cases-
Cameron Bertuzzi:
I just disagree. I just disagree, I mean-
Alex O’Connor:
So, you think it’s better to actualize a world in which there is racism-
Cameron Bertuzzi:
I think it’s more valuable. I think a world that has that and has the accompanying evils is more valuable. That’s why I say that I think we may be at a stalemate. When you make that move, we just disagree about our baseline axiological assumptions that we bring to the table. We’re all bringing our own axiological assumptions, and if that’s the one that you bring and that’s the one that I bring, how do we advance from it? I don’t really see a way… I’m curious what your thoughts are on what I’m trying to convey here.
Alex O’Connor:
Yeah, I mean [inaudible 00:15:34] I mean it might just be a clash of intuitions. I mean I tend to think that lots of actually reasoning in general, including scientific reasoning bottoms out in seemings. Like things seem to you to be the case or things appear to you to be the case.
Alex O’Connor:
Sometimes those can come in conflict when you’re in these dialectical contexts, and it’s really difficult to know how to progress from there when two people disagree with respect to their basic seeming.
Trent Horn:
Could we go back a little bit, Alex, to your… The formulation of the problem of evil you find most pressing, is it to you that it is a logical contradiction between God’s existence and the world or that it just makes God’s existence highly improbable?
Alex O’Connor:
I think it’s more the latter.
Trent Horn:
Improbable.
Alex O’Connor:
I’m a little suspicious of the distinction here. When people try to distinguish between the logical and evidential problem of evil, they’ll say… If you have a logical problem of evil that says something like, “If there is a God there would be no suffering. There is suffering therefore there is no God.”
Alex O’Connor:
People say this argument is dead in the water because as long as it’s logically possible that God has some reason, morally sufficient reason to bring about evil, the argument fails. In other words, if one of the premises is not… it’s logically possible for one of the premises to be false, then it’s not really a logical argument you’re putting forward, but an evidential one.
Alex O’Connor:
But imagine if someone put forward the Kalam cosmological argument and said, “This is a logical argument, a valid syllogism. Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist, therefore the universe has a cause.” And I said, “But that’s not really a logical argument because as long as it’s logically possible that the universe didn’t have a beginning. As long as it’s logically possible that something can begin without a cause, then the argument’s dead in the water.”
Alex O’Connor:
So, you shouldn’t really be advocating a logical Kalam but rather an evidential Kalam. But that just seems like a weird distinction to me. I feel like people do it unfairly with the problem of evil, but not with any other deductive argument that it gets.
Trent Horn:
I don’t know if it goes exactly like that because it seems to me… I’ve encountered… When I’ve heard your discussions about the problem of evil, it sounds like you’ve said things like, “I understand how people could see where free will would be a reason God would tolerate evil among humans or something like that. But then why do animals suffer in such and such way.”
Trent Horn:
And that seems to insinuate that you could have some evils. There’s not a logical contradiction there as opposed to God… Well, there’s a lot of different logical arguments trying to say that God doesn’t exist. They’d be incompatible properties, things like that.” But it seems like you’re saying it’s just like, “Well, yeah, I could see a world where there’s evil at this threshold, but not at this threshold.” And that’s more the evidential it seems like to me.
Alex O’Connor:
I’m not sure because you could just pull out the logical version. You could say for instance that the existence of suffering, there’s no logical syllogism I would use just from the existence of suffering alone to rule out God’s existence. But maybe I could formulate… if I said, “Well, God would tolerate human evil for free will, but not animal suffering,” then I could just formulate a logical problem of evil that specifically focuses on animal suffering.
Alex O’Connor:
It would still be a valid argument. It would still be a formal logical syllogism. The fact that it’s more specified or allows for the existence of other forms of unrelated suffering, it seems irrelevant to me as to whether it’s-
Cameron Bertuzzi:
We’ll say this, so Trent’s already… His view is basically he doesn’t like the distinction either, and he’s one of the most premier philosophers that’s working on the problem of evil. He’s a Catholic.
Trent Horn:
I’ll let you explain, but it’s-
Cameron Bertuzzi:
He thinks-
Trent Horn:
Go ahead.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
So, he thinks that basically there’s two premises to the argument-
Joe Schmid:
[inaudible 00:19:22].
Trent Horn:
Yes. Yes, it is.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
He does have that view, but that’s not what I’m talking about now.
Trent Horn:
[inaudible 00:19:26]. Go ahead. We’ll talk about it later.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
Yeah, what I’m talking about now is that the logical version and the evidential version, he thinks both are very similar. So, the first premise is basically a theological claim about what would exist if God exists. And then the second one is the evidential claim about whether or not there’s this type of suffering in the world. So, evil exists, or animal suffering exists.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
In the logical version, the evidential version, it involves both the theological claim and then the evidential claim. So, he thinks that the distinction collapses too. It’s just like whatever specific theological claim you happen to be focusing on at this time is the-
Alex O’Connor:
Yes.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
And I agree with that. I think that the distinction between the logical and the evidential version-
Alex O’Connor:
You know what it seems to me, if I can be frank, is it seems to me that somebody will present a logical problem of evil, and in the context of a discussion or a debate where somebody is trying to argue against an atheist, they say, “Well, are you making a logical version or an evidential version?” And they get them on the back foot thinking, “Well, yeah, it’s logically possible that good could have a morally sufficient reason.” And they’re like, “Well, then you’re not making as strong a claim as you thought you were.”
Alex O’Connor:
It seems like a useful rhetorical tool for the theist, but if you actually pay close attention to the conversation that’s taking place, as you say, Cameron, I think the distinction is actually-
Cameron Bertuzzi:
It might collapse.
Alex O’Connor:
It collapses. It’s not a helpful one. It’s only helpful instrumentally to winning a conversation.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
Well, now, I want to play moderator and be like, “Trent, is that what you were trying to do?”
Trent Horn:
No.
Alex O’Connor:
Well, I don’t think that’s what you were trying to do. I don’t think that’s what you were trying to do. I feel like that’s how the [inaudible 00:21:10]-
Trent Horn:
No, I’m trying to wrap my head around because I do believe there is this distinction between one claim that any amount of evil whatsoever would show God does not exist. Versus particular kinds of quantity or quality of evil would make it unlikely. I do think there is a legitimate difference-
Alex O’Connor:
Yeah, there’s a difference between those, but both of those could be called logical arguments, right?
Trent Horn:
Yeah, I mean that is semantics, and that’s fine.
Alex O’Connor:
It’s not semantics. It’s the difference between a logical argument and an… To say something is not a logical argument is an evidential problem, it’s not logical because it’s logically possible that one of the premises is false, seeks to undermine the logical validity of the argument.
Trent Horn:
The reason I asked for the distinction is because I believe that if the problem is a certain quality or quantity of evil, then that is subject to a criticism that can’t be leveled against an argument that says any amount of evil would disprove God. Because the criticism would be this, that if an atheist says, “Yes, I could see how this amount of evil could be justifiable but not this amount.”
Trent Horn:
One wonders why can’t the defenses for this amount be applied for to the other amount? Whereas if you have someone who says, “Hey, it’s all or none, that reply won’t really work.
Alex O’Connor:
Well, it might be like if the government came along and just flooded everybody’s houses by just pouring water into their front gardens and just absolutely flooding and destroying their property. And you said, “This is ridiculous. Obviously, the government is trying somehow to cause riots or something.”
Alex O’Connor:
And somebody said, “Well, now hold on. If the government were to install a sprinkler system that watered your garden, you’d think this was fine, right?” And it’s like, “Yes.” And you say, “Well, look…” Now, your argument isn’t so much that it’s some real absolute incompatibility between a good government and flooding your house because you’re allowing the government to put a little bit of water onto your garden. But if it’s this much, then that’s too… But it just seems like a weird line to take. Do you see what I’m saying?
Trent Horn:
No, I mean there’s robust versions of the evidential problem that I agree with you that if somebody basically says the logical problem of evil doesn’t work. And then they ignore the other arguments for an evidential problem, then that’s problematic.
Trent Horn:
But then it will come back down to though, in different intuitions, when certain things are allowable, what can we foresee? And I think it’s a bit more than that when we… Because, yeah, I would love to drill down a little bit, especially your concerns seem to be… and you seem to have reaffirmed this previously. I don’t want to talk too much. I want to hear what Joe says too and Cam.
Trent Horn:
That I would think that if the concern is primarily about non-human suffering, I wonder if there is a way to apply the justifications for human suffering in these different ways. I guess that’s what I would look at to be most promising. But if you think human suffering is also pointless, then we’re headed back to square one.
Alex O’Connor:
I think that would be good to discuss. I think one thing to say is that I think we would all agree, I’m not sure, but that a problem of evil argument that said something like, “Any amount of evil and suffering whatsoever is logically incompatible with God,” is a bad argument. It’s not going to work.
Trent Horn:
It’s not super popular, but there’s people who make those arguments.
Alex O’Connor:
There are people who say that, but I think everybody here-
Alex O’Connor:
… would probably think that that would be a bad argument. I mean, for myself, I think when I say a logical problem of evil, I think maybe there’s a confusion here because you seem to be defining the logical problem of evil as the view that any amount of evil and suffering is incompatible with God.
Trent Horn:
I think that’s pretty traditional.
Alex O’Connor:
Maybe I guess it’s… if that’s what people are calling it, maybe I should change my terminology here because when I talk about the difference between a logical and an evidential problem, I mean to say that there are versions of an argument that don’t say any amount of evil and suffering is incompatible, but that there’s-
Joe Schmid:
I mean I get what you’re saying. You’re basically saying-
Alex O’Connor:
It’s still like a logical argument.
Joe Schmid:
… some versions of the problem of evil just focus on a particular range of facts or a particular range of kinds of evil, and then you can go on to say, of those, that that is incompatible with God’s existence. You can probably classify that as a logical argument [inaudible 00:25:36].
Joe Schmid:
But instead of getting bogged down with the terminology, we might just want to lay out a particular version of the argument of evil and then just discuss that. So, I figured I could probably start with that. I could offer maybe just a pretty intuitive Bayesian argument from evolution and animal suffering.
Joe Schmid:
We’re not going to get into the fancy Bayes machine goes brr. We’re not going to do that, but let’s just think, under a perfect being hypothesis, at least by [inaudible 00:25:58] it just seems really surprising that God would use in His very creative act this… This process which is just rife with suffering and languishing in death and predation and parasitism.
Joe Schmid:
Nature red in tooth and claw. Organisms are ripping each other to shreds and this is just built into natural selection. This is built into the very process just this death and destruction and suffering and so on is built into the very means, the very fabric of creation it seems. From the get-go, it seems.
Joe Schmid:
And that just seems like a really surprising way. We wouldn’t predict that. Just a priori from the armchair, would we predict a perfect being to bring about, let’s say humans and other sentient creatures, by means of a process, which is fraught with this kind of suffering? This almost horrendous evil. And not just any horrendous evil, but hundreds of millions of years of this kind of evil.
Joe Schmid:
I mean I remember, just to make this poignant, last… No, it was 2020. There were these fires in Australia and tens of thousands of koalas were burned alive. Now, that’s just Australia, that’s koalas. These koalas are suffering, being burned alive. That’s just Australia, just a few weeks of forest fires.
Joe Schmid:
Think about the whole world now, not just Australia. Don’t now just think about a few weeks. Think about a few years. Now, think about tens of thousands of years. Now, tens of millions of years. Now, how about hundreds of millions of years? It’s mind-boggling.
Joe Schmid:
And so, that would it just seems surprising on theism. Whereas on a view where I guess we should just say natural reality is indifferent to the flourishing and languishing of sentient creatures, that’s not as surprising. Nature’s red in tooth and claw. There’s nothing down there that cares about the flourishing of sentient creatures.
Joe Schmid:
So, given that it’s surprising on one hypothesis and nowhere near as surprising on another, we have some evidence for a hypothesis on which it isn’t surprising. So, that’s an argument that we could consider.
Alex O’Connor:
And I think it’s worth talking about human suffering, but this argument works if we’re just talking about non-humans. You say natural selection, it involves so much suffering, it relies upon it. As you say, it’s the very machinery, survival of the fittest-
Joe Schmid:
The engine.
Alex O’Connor:
… entails death and destruction and suffering of the unfit. This is how it works. To me, I find this a compelling argument. I think it works. I think there are some complications when you talk about human beings because there seems to be something else that could be said to be going on there.
Alex O’Connor:
Certainly, just from a coherent Christian picture that humans are special, they’re ensouled, whatever it may be. But even on that account, humans evolved, what? A few million years ago. Homo sapiens have been around for a few hundred thousand years, so you’ve still got hundreds of millions of years as Joe says of the suffering. To me, this is probably the strongest version of the problem of evil.
Joe Schmid:
I don’t have the answer.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
I have so many thoughts. I have so many thoughts. It’s so difficult to know even where to begin. One thought is that this formulation of the problem of evil has made me want to take Trent Dougherty’s approach to the problem of evil so seriously. I think that we may need or have to look at other resources in order to explain the data.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
So, it’s not just perfect being theism. It’s also certain axiological assumptions like these love manifesting virtues being so strong or being so valuable. But then also maybe combine that with the fact that animals would be resurrected in the afterlife or there’s some sort of afterlife for animals. I don’t know, I think that-
Trent Horn:
I’d like them to be able to talk and sing.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
Exactly.
Joe Schmid:
Their suffering needs to be redeemed, I mean I’m really… if I were a theist, I would definitely opt for probably Trent Dougherty’s approach, yeah. I mean I’m not saying it’s plausible, but-
Cameron Bertuzzi:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Trent Horn:
I will say that I should probably, if people are listening, what we’re doing is called inside baseball. When you sometimes drop a bunch of names or things and people are like, “Wait, what are they referring to?” At least in the Catholic worldview, there’s actually a variety of answers to the problem of animal suffering.
Trent Horn:
The traditional Thomistic answer… There’s two ways you can look at it. One is that animals do not suffer intensely or allowing their suffering is not morally blameworthy. That’s one view in Thomistic tradition or the Cartesian tradition. Michael Murray would advocate that view in his book.
Trent Horn:
One view is that animal suffering, we’re not morally blameworthy for causing it or that it’s not a significant evil to be concerned with. The other would be it is significant, just as human suffering is significant, but animals can be compensated. It’s not the traditional Catholic view, but it is allowed within Catholic theology.
Trent Horn:
And so, one version of that would be that animals who have a sense of consciousness over time will experience happiness, fulfillment endlessly in an afterlife. If an animal has a capacity for conscious suffering over time, it stands to reason they can have a capacity for conscious happiness over time. And so, God could still give them endless happiness and some Catholics take that view.
Trent Horn:
And then others like Trent Dougherty add more that God could even add goods to them, such as-
Cameron Bertuzzi:
Where they could be transformed.
Trent Horn:
Like by giving them what my friend Jimmy Akin calls a cognitive boost. And so, they might talk… And I did laugh. I mean I found it a little silly at first, reserving it, and I’m a bit warmer to the idea. I could see that more with the fate of domestic animals versus necessarily wild animals.
Trent Horn:
So, those are two different approaches, and then one I think is worth considering though, and I think Joe, you laid it out really well in a robust way to get us the heart and the head on it. We have to be careful with some of the assumptions built into the argument a bit.
Trent Horn:
First, for the vast majority of evolutionary history, I don’t think animals were sentient. We have invertebrates and things like that, and it’s still millions of years, sure.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah. Well, definitely it’s hundreds.
Alex O’Connor:
Hundreds of millions.
Trent Horn:
It’s hundreds of-
Alex O’Connor:
So, I was going to… I nearly said billions-
Joe Schmid:
It’s definitely not billions.
Alex O’Connor:
… and then I decided not to say that because the life-
Joe Schmid:
Yes, it’s not. But the other one is-
Alex O’Connor:
Well, life has been on earth for billions of years, but the kind of-
Joe Schmid:
Yes, life is billions, but [inaudible 00:32:30].
Alex O’Connor:
The kind of suffering, yeah, it would have to be hundreds of millions.
Trent Horn:
Well, let me ask you this. Suppose in those billions of years what if the percentage in an animal’s existence its life is either pleasurable, neutral, or painful? Because sure, in billions of years, there’s going to be billions of years of pain, but there’ll also be billions of years of pleasure, and billions of years of neutral activity like sleeping.
Trent Horn:
So, one must be careful not to prejudice this description and it’s just one horrific gorefest. I think we also have to look at the realistic lives of animals and then ask, well, is their existence themselves good? I gave you a thought experiment in our debate, and here’s another one that might be more realistic actually than the one I gave in our debate.
Trent Horn:
Would it be wrong for us to send a probe with amino acids to a planet like earth to start an evolutionary process there that normally would not have begun? And we start this evolutionary chain that would entail a lot of suffering. Now, one quick rejoinder to that is, “Well, Trent, we can’t make… We don’t know how to make life aside from that, but God could certainly snap His fingers and not use evolution, so that’s the problem there.”
Trent Horn:
But I don’t know if that’s a great objection because if something is just really bad, even if there’s no other way to do it, you should still refrain. It’d be like let’s say I can raise an animal with an artificial womb, but the only technology we have, the animal will just suffer horribly every minute of its existence.
Trent Horn:
And I would say, “But this is the only way I can grow animals in artificial wombs.” I would say, “Well, then you just shouldn’t do it at all.” But if it wouldn’t be bad for us to start an evolutionary history, maybe it’s not so bad if God does it. Even if He has other ways that He could do it, I don’t know.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
Before you all come back on that, there’s another analogy of the Amazonian… What do you call it? The ecosystem?
Joe Schmid:
I don’t know-
Cameron Bertuzzi:
The Amazonian ecosystem. If we had the technology, which we do, we could just completely wipe out the Amazon right now, and all of the animals that are currently suffering and going through horrible predation and everything else that’s going on in the Amazon right now. But suppose that there was a button that you could just press, and you could get rid of it all, would you press the button?
Alex O’Connor:
Well, that’s what Trent asks-
Trent Horn:
Oh yeah, that was in our debate.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
Oh, okay.
Alex O’Connor:
… in our debate because I was talking about why God would allow so much suffering. We have to be careful here to notice that Joe made an argument from natural selection. Not so much just animal suffering, but specifically that the process of natural selection, the machinery by which God brings about creation involves and necessitates suffering.
Alex O’Connor:
So, when you ask, would I press a button and kill every animal or would I not? I actually don’t really know, but this isn’t the situation that God is in. God has a button that He can press that takes all of the animals living in the animal and makes their life have 50% less suffering, 80% less suffering, and doesn’t press it without having to kill them. That’s the situation that God is in, so it’s not an analogous situation.
Joe Schmid:
And we’re embedded in the rules of a chess game that’s already been laid down, as it were, and we’re having to operate within those rules. But we’re not the very author of the chess game itself and the rules by which it operates. If we were, I mean-
Trent Horn:
I worry about the feasibility though because I see the objection, but even when you articulate why wouldn’t God decrease suffering by 50 or 80%, I’m not sure exactly what that means. You could get rid of half of all animals. That would decrease the suffering by 50%. You could dull their senses by 50 or 80%, but then could they function?
Trent Horn:
Because I see your concern Joe like, “Well, God’s making the rules of the game.” But it could be the case that creating animal life has these necessary elements in it provided God does not excessively interfere with the system itself.
Trent Horn:
For example, suppose it wasn’t evolution. Suppose God created all animals in their final forms like they are today, and they existed for billions of years and never underwent evolutionary change. It seems like the problem would still remain. You’d have predation, you’d have disease. You would still have all those bad things, there’s just no evolutionary mechanism. It’s just always been. It seems like there’s something more direct about animal life that is the problem here.
Joe Schmid:
I guess it depends what specifically we’re thinking about. I mean there are different things to disentangle here. Are we focusing on is it the fact that God used this almost as a means behind which to bring about creatures? And it seems as though He’s maybe intending, maybe foreseeing, but not intending. But is that what we’re focusing on or are we focusing on just the suffering inherent to the process? Is it God’s directing of the process that’s the problem?
Joe Schmid:
The way I see it, it’s just a matter of prediction. So, yeah, okay, maybe there are these necessary connections. Maybe, but I mean conceivably, epistemically it definitely could have been otherwise. I mean maybe they just have some sort of built-in anesthetic such that when the zebra gets the claw or whatever, gets the teeth from the lion. Some sort of built-in anesthetic like there’s some sort of psychophysical law that just kicks in and they don’t feel any suffering, but the lion can still have its meal and so on.
Trent Horn:
But here’s where my problem comes. Notice I had the qualifier that God does not excessively in the system.
Joe Schmid:
Well, these are psychophysical laws built in from the get-go.
Trent Horn:
No, because normally when an animal… Any of us, we are animals. When we experience pain, it motivates us to act in an extremely aggressive way to promote our own survival. So, what if in some circumstances when an animal is attacked, that immense amount of pain is what allows it to escape the attack and then to go on living?
Trent Horn:
And so, then you’d say, “Well, maybe there’s a psychosocial law where the animal doesn’t feel pain when there is no possibility for escape.” It’s like but there’s no real biological mechanism… it would seem like God would end up having to-
Joe Schmid:
God is an omnipotent being-
Trent Horn:
[inaudible 00:38:36]-
Alex O’Connor:
Yeah, but then he’d be interfering.
Trent Horn:
That’s my point is-
Joe Schmid:
He could have set it up differently from the get-go with different rules.
Trent Horn:
What I’m saying is God creating a natural system will inevitably entail things that are more or less perfect in competition with each other. I worry that the concept of animal… That pain, for example, God could create animals… instead of having pain, what if we just had a heads-up display that told us, “Hand is burning. Move hand.” Well, a lot of us would ignore the heads-up display and our hand would become useless.
Trent Horn:
So, this seems to be… What I worry, the parallel here would be like, well, why can’t God make people that are free but don’t do evil? We qualify humans so much they’re not really human or free anymore. Why can’t God make animals that don’t suffer in a natural ecosystem? It gets changed and qualified so much, they’re not really animals. They’re more like furry robots that God’s sending around. That’s my concern.
Joe Schmid:
Well, to me, it seems almost like a limitation of imagination. This is an epistemic argument, so I don’t need to say that these are actually metaphysical possibilities. But so long as I’m epistemically open, so long as I can conceive of these various other ways that reality could have been, we can factor that into our Bayesian analysis.
Joe Schmid:
It really seems though God could have set up psychophysical laws that really are and really highly finely tuned in this sort of way where they’re… I mean not as infallible for knowledge of the various ways that things are going to go on. Surely, He could have this precisely fine-tuned psychophysical laws that connect the suffering states that the organisms are in and their physical states where it is actually privy to whether or not they’re going to survive and so on.
Joe Schmid:
Okay, even if that makes them different to the animals that we do in fact have, my point then would just be, why not create… Rather I won’t put this as a question because questions aren’t arguments. My point is it’s more surprising that God created animals as we see them rather than animal star like the ones that we are describing in this other epistemically possible scenario. That would be more expected under theism. The animals star, then we see animals.
Trent Horn:
I’m curious if your eyes will roll or your response would be to a defense saying how do we know animal star doesn’t exist right now?
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, yeah.
Trent Horn:
Because it’s very difficult to determine the inner lives of anything, much less animals.
Joe Schmid:
Yes, that is true. That’s true.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
And there is some, and I risk being taken the wrong way here when I explain this, but there are… I’ve seen videos of animals being ripped apart on Reddit and stuff and just randomly-
Joe Schmid:
Nature.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
Yeah, like a nature channel. It’s actually very strange. Sometimes you’ll look at the animal and they look peaceful. They’re being ripped apart and they’re just sitting there like this. Just getting their leg ripped off, and it’s weird. I don’t know how-
Joe Schmid:
Other times though they definitely don’t look peaceful.
Alex O’Connor:
I think-
Cameron Bertuzzi:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Joe Schmid:
[inaudible 00:41:38] shock.
Alex O’Connor:
You can find videos on the dodgier parts of the internet of human beings doing exactly the same thing.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, but it is a good point that we have to consider now philosophy of mind and how do we have access to the mental states of others and so on. I mean it’s a potentially problematic aspect that God doesn’t clue us into this fact, that things suspiciously seem as though it’s animals, not animal star. That might present problems of its own.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
So, a different approach to this whole Bayesian argument from evil is what about skeptical theism. I feel like we should at least discuss skeptical theism. I mean I’m not the biggest fan of skeptical theism. I guess it depends on the day, but it’s one of the most popular responses to the problem of evil is we really don’t know what the probability is of how likely the suffering in the world would be given theism.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
We just don’t know what that probability is given the fact that God’s knowledge is so much greater than our own and we have these epistemic limitations on us and so forth. What are y’all’s thoughts on skeptical theism and how it relates to Bayesian arguments from evil?
Joe Schmid:
I think it’s interesting. We need to be careful because it can turn into universal acid potentially as you’ve… Well, not in response to skeptical theism, but universal acid that you’ve talked about. If we’re so epistemically in the dark about God’s reasons for action and so on, what’s going to happen to the rest of natural theology?
Joe Schmid:
In order to run certain fine-tuning arguments, you need to be able to make predictions about what God would do or might do, and you need to make these [inaudible 00:43:08]-
Cameron Bertuzzi:
And I’m just going to name-drop again, John DePoe. His positive skeptical theism is compatible with natural theology.
Trent Horn:
We’re using a lot of big terms.
Alex O’Connor:
Can I suggest for the sake of people listening, can we just spell out what skeptical theism actually is because we’ve said it a few times?
Cameron Bertuzzi:
Yes.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, there are different versions-
Cameron Bertuzzi:
I’ll let you do it.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, there are different versions of skeptical theism. The most basic version is the one that your grandma gave. God’s ways are mysterious, basically. His ways are not our ways, and so, we shouldn’t expect to be able to see all the reasons for which God acts.
Joe Schmid:
There are much more sophisticated ways like the range of possible goods, evils, connections between obtaining states of affairs, and so on, of which we are aware is not representative of the total range of goods, evils, connections between goods and evils, and so on, that there are. Such that we wouldn’t be able to conclude it from our inability to-
Cameron Bertuzzi:
We don’t know if our sample is representative.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, whether our sample is representative such that we can’t justifiably conclude from our let’s say not be able to see a good coming about from an evil that there in fact is no such good, when probably there is no such good. Because the range of goods and evils, necessary connections among them, and so on, that we are aware of, that’s not representative of the total range that there is. So, we wouldn’t be justified in making that leap. Yeah, there are different ways to put it, and-
Alex O’Connor:
So, more or less we have an idea that there is some reason or justification for the existence of suffering. But even if there is such a reason or explanation-
Joe Schmid:
We shouldn’t expect to be able to see it.
Alex O’Connor:
… it doesn’t follow that we must be able to know what the reason is or to be able to comprehend that reason. This seems, to me, a good understanding of what skeptical theism is.
Joe Schmid:
And what’s difficult is that once you make that epistemic distance between us and God so large, you start to be able to… You tend to bleed into areas where you’re not able to predict what God [inaudible 00:44:55] will God suspend the laws of nature tomorrow? I mean maybe He has a morally sufficient reason to do that. I mean, after all, God’s ways are infinitely greater than our ways. I mean who are we? The range of reasons of which we’re aware is not representative of the range of reasons that there are, and so on. As you pointed out, there are ways to-
Cameron Bertuzzi:
There’s different versions of skeptical theism.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, there are different versions.
Alex O’Connor:
I think that might be… Potentially the biggest problem for skeptical theism is that of a moral paralysis that it might bring about, that is if there is this suffering that exists. There are deer getting caught under a fallen tree and starving to death, and starvation and predation, and this kind of stuff.
Alex O’Connor:
We don’t know what this reason is. But there is some reason that it’s there. There is some good that it’s serving. There is something about it that’s justified. We run into a problem when it comes to trying to confront it or trying to change it. If we were in a situation where we have the opportunity to prevent an animal from suffering, if skeptical theism is telling us that-
Joe Schmid:
Or even a person.
Alex O’Connor:
Or indeed, even a person. If skeptical theism tells us that, “Well, when you see some suffering, you should essentially assume that there is some good justification. You just don’t know what it is.” It’s more difficult with a person because I think scripture quite… For a Christian, they could say, “Well, we have Revelations tell us that you should be helping people from suffering,” and that-
Joe Schmid:
God could have a morally sufficient reason of which you’re unaware to allow certain-
Cameron Bertuzzi:
Yeah, divine deception.
Joe Schmid:
Yeah, to allow for certain [inaudible 00:46:23].
Alex O’Connor:
Yeah, this is true. Of course, the problem that I’m getting at is that when you are faced with evil, the skeptical theist says, “When faced with evil and suffering, assume that there is a justification for why it’s happening. You just don’t know what it is.”
Alex O’Connor:
Then when I see some form of suffering and I have an opportunity to stop it and step in and prevent it, skeptical theism seems to say that I should actually refrain from helping the drowning child in the pool or something because, well, there’s a justification as to why that’s taking place. There’s a greater good that it’s serving and by stepping in…
Alex O’Connor:
If God wanted to allow that child to drown, He’s got better understanding than I do of the situation, so why should I not allow the child-
Trent Horn:
Because given my cognitive limitations and that I don’t know God has a greater good for allowing certain evils, given my limitations, I cannot rule out the greater good is me being heroic and stopping the evils. Given my limitation and skeptical thing, I could say, “You’re right. I don’t know. There could be a lot of greater goods. There could be ones I do or don’t know, but one I seem to be aware of at this moment is the good of me ameliorating suffering. And since I am aware of that good and operating on a previous moral command, then it would follow.”
Trent Horn:
So, I’m not as concerned about skeptical theism being this kind of acid. I do think that in addressing the problem of evil, people who put forward easy solutions probably haven’t thought very hard about the problem. I think it’s a multifaceted approach, but I do think though, Alex, that at most, if you’re weighing it makes God really implausible, that’s got to be weighed against the reasons for God. And then it gets really difficult how we assign mathematical values and-
Alex O’Connor:
But this is why I think, for instance, this is why I think it benefits you to press an evidential-logical distinction because if you say something like, “Well, what you’re presenting is really an evidential problem of evil, not a logical one.” Then if you present an argument for the existence of God that’s logically valid, then you can say as you said in our debate that, “Well, any amount of evidential evidence is not enough to overcome a logical argument on the other side.”
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Schmid:
I have to say something about that, I’m sorry. So, even if you have a logically valid argument and you think it’s a demonstration, you still have to ask, “Well, what’s the plausibility due to the premises?” And that’s going to come on a scale, and some of them are going to be more plausible than not, and maybe only 60% plausible, and so on. I mean your justifications for that, that’s going to vary.
Joe Schmid:
So, almost everything is going to come down to an evidential, which I’m very sympathetic to Trent Dougherty’s point, but I don’t even think there is-
Alex O’Connor:
That’s right [inaudible 00:48:55].
Joe Schmid:
I mean even when you have these sorts of demonstrations even in mathematics, you have to assess how plausible is this premise? And at some point, you’re just going with intuitions and seemings and so on. But setting that aside, you did make a good point in response to the moral paralysis objection. But that actually might turn against itself when you come back to the skeptical theist’s response to the problem of evil.
Joe Schmid:
I just want to briefly mention that Paul Draper points this out. Even in response to these sorts of Bayesian arguments, you could say, “Yeah, maybe God has a morally sufficient reason. Maybe there are goods of which we’re unaware that are necessarily connected with these evil states of affairs.”
Joe Schmid:
But it’s also equally true that there might be further evils of which you’re unaware that are connected to these sorts of things. Maybe you can add that, but it seems as though the epistemic reasons of which we’re unaware that are good making features or that are goods that might come about from this evil, it seems as though that’s canceled out from further bad things that might even come about and just horrendous things of which we’re unaware as well.
Joe Schmid:
And so, once those cancel out, we’re just left with the first-order reasons. And the first-order reasons, even granted seeming by skeptical theists favor God not allowing these sorts of things because we know that this is such a bad state of affairs. So, it seems to cut both ways.
Trent Horn:
Well, let me get back a little because, with your concern, I do feel like though it’s like if we weigh these different arguments evidentially, they’re trying to prove different things. And so, many of the arguments for God are just showing there’s a necessary sustaining external transcendent cause of the universe, and some of them purport to show the moral qualities of God.
Trent Horn:
It would be like saying two orphans are arguing they live in a horrible situation in their orphanage and like, “If we had loving parents, we wouldn’t have ended up here.” “Well, there’s this possibility and this or that.” And then one of them just says, “No, this clearly shows we don’t have parents.” I’m sure the other orphan would say, “Well, we clearly have parents. I mean where did we come from?” Now, it seems like we’re disputing whether they’re loving or not.
Trent Horn:
So, it seems like the concern about suffering, it’s really focused in on one particular… either power or love, but not necessarily necessity, infinite, immutable. So, one could even have your… that there is like Aristotle’s God, an unmoved mover, essentially. Although then I guess the theist’s strategy to move forward would be, do we have more compelling reasons to think God is good maybe by definition or necessity than what presence of evils might sway us another way?
Alex O’Connor:
Yeah, I mean you can even go further as Stephen Law does. I made a video on his evil God challenge where he imagines a God who is exactly opposite to the kind of God that we’re met with in traditional theism. And we say we have a malicious God, an evil God who basically seeks to bring about the worst possible outcome.
Alex O’Connor:
If I said that such a God existed, you would probably rightly laugh at me. In part because we’re clearly not in the worst possible outcome. If there was an evil God, he’d make things far worse for us than the way that they are. But of course, this mirrors the way that somebody who says that there’s a good God surely, this isn’t as good as things could be. He could make things much better for us.
Alex O’Connor:
And so, what people do is they say, “You have this problem of evil for a good God.” But the evil God hypothesis has a problem of good. If there is an evil God, then why are there good things? Why is everyone suffering all the time? And you can actually construct equal and opposite theodicies.
Alex O’Connor:
So, you could say that, “Well, the reason why people are able to experience joy and happiness is because it makes it worse for the people who are not experiencing joy and happiness. They experience a deeper level and different kind of suffering such as the suffering of loneliness that cannot exist unless there are other people who are existing happily.”
Alex O’Connor:
And so, if somebody… and Stephen Law’s point is to say that because when you’re faced with the evil God hypothesis, most people say, “That is just patently ridiculous because of the world we find ourselves in and how suffused with goods it is.” That we should be fair in granting the alternative hypothesis that when someone says there’s a good God, we should just be saying that’s patently absurd because of the amount of suffering.
Trent Horn:
And my quick rejoinder to the evil God objection is that it only succeeds… This will get us down, and unfortunately, we don’t have another few hours to talk. I wish. I’m sure Joe has a lot of thoughts on this. It will turn on one’s metaphysical understanding of the concepts of good and evil. That if good and evil are just competing substances that only differ trivially like good is the red stuff and evil is the blue stuff, then the evil God objection might work.
Trent Horn:
But if one had more of a privation view of evil that good is more like metal and evil is more like rust, then the concept of an evil God, God who’s completely evil would not be this nefarious being. He would just be non-existent. Of course, I understand that there are controversial views about the privation theory of evil, but I think in a classical theistic model, that’s a route that I would go in answering the objection and moving forward.
Alex O’Connor:
Then isn’t there a problem here because you said a moment ago that… Well, I presented a problem of evil and you say, “Well, this doesn’t remove the possibility of there being some kind of God who’s just amoral or something.” But it seems to me that your own view about the nature of God and the nature of good commits you to saying that that actually isn’t a viable option because you can’t think of a-
Trent Horn:
Well, I think my view of the nature of God is superior to those that are incorrect. I don’t know if that’s arrogant to say or not, but-
Alex O’Connor:
But doesn’t this mean that for what you just said a moment ago that somebody could have a problem of evil and just say, at best it just shows that there’s a not maximally moral God? That [inaudible 00:54:55]-
Trent Horn:
Or they’re agnostic about the deity’s character.
Alex O’Connor:
And we were talking about this in the context of having arguments for God’s existence and then you’ve got the problem of suffering. And you say, well, you’ve got the arguments for God’s existence and the problem of suffering. So, the problem of suffering maybe makes you think that God isn’t good, but you’ve still got the arguments which show you that God is there.
Alex O’Connor:
But the kind of arguments that you give, the kind of arguments that you support do seek to establish that God is good by nature. And so, you wouldn’t be able to make that line as a theist. You wouldn’t be able to say, “Well, yeah, you’ve got the problem of suffering, but you’re not ruling out God. You’re just ruling out a good God.” You surely can’t do that.
Trent Horn:
Of course not, but I don’t think the existence of… I agree with Law in that we cannot use empirical observation to determine whether God is essentially good or evil. I think that’s a prior metaphysical question based on your understanding of God.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
I was going to say the response to the evil God hypothesis that I find plausible is that you don’t rule out an evil God by looking at good in the world. That’s one of the premises of his argument and so I just don’t think that that’s the way to do it. You got to do it other ways.
Alex O’Connor:
I would quite like to slightly change course and go back to something that we were talking about earlier, which is this idea of if you have goods that are parasitic on evils, would we rather have no evil and no parasitic good, or would we rather have them both. I gave the example of Martin Luther King, and you said that you’d rather have the world in which there’s racism to require a Martin Luther King for the sake of having a Martin Luther King.
Alex O’Connor:
I quite almost trivially think that it would be preferable to have no racism and no need for a Martin Luther King. Because what it seems to me, you’re saying, if you say something like you’d rather the former world, is saying something like we can be glad of the existence of cancer because, without the existence of cancer, we wouldn’t have the good of people coming to develop chemotherapy and cancer research. And cancer research is a good thing. People giving to charity, people doing fundraising, this is a great thing. So, isn’t it great that we have cancer because it allows this higher-order good of cancer research?
Alex O’Connor:
But clearly, we’d rather have no cancer and no need for the cancer research. In the same way, I’d rather have no racism and no need for Martin Luther King. I’d rather have no fear and suffering and no need for bravery.
Trent Horn:
Well, I’ll have a quick poetic rejoinder. I’m going to [inaudible 00:57:19]-
Alex O’Connor:
That’s my favorite kind.
Trent Horn:
Of course. One of my favorite musicals is Les Mis based on the novel by Victor Hugo, Les Misérables. Many of the characters in it have quite miserable lives based on the revolution and poverty and death and very sad, sad scenes in there. But the play, it’s quite beautiful at the end when the main character Jean Valjean dies, and he’s welcomed into heaven with those… and everyone is singing together that this has been overcome. It’s probably one of the best descriptions of the gospel I’ve ever seen in media.
Trent Horn:
And I feel like would we rather have evil be nonexistent or evil be defeated? I think that many people see the importance there if there is compensation, if we’re all brought through rather than just there not being evil. Because this gets back to the question that if the only good we’re trying to pursue is just the reduction of suffering, then Thanos was 50% right.
Alex O’Connor:
You’d be amazed how often that specific example is given to me in these kinds of conversations.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, I see what you’re saying, and maybe Joe’s right. This comes down to intuitions a little bit that we have, but I guess another example might be let’s say I told you it turns out this world is a simulation and you’re a program in a computer and there’s… or the universe is one guy with a supercomputer.
Trent Horn:
It’s like would you rather have found out that this is a simulation or that this is real? You might be grateful if the suffering is gone, but it might also be horrifying to realize all that seemed to be good was not real either. So, I don’t know if it’s as cut and dry.
Alex O’Connor:
C.S. Lewis had an example of-
Joe Schmid:
[inaudible 00:59:16] the Matrix. I would say no, reality is just different than what we thought it was. [inaudible 00:59:21].
Trent Horn:
No, no, no, I agree. But is it a preferable kind of reality? That would go back to the philosopher Robert Nozick put forward something called an experience machine.
Alex O’Connor:
Yeah, I think there are a few things that are a little bit unfair about how Nozick treats the case. For example, he doesn’t take into account something like status quo bias. He says, “Would you jump into an experience machine that brings you nothing but pleasure, but is actually just fake.” And there are so many problems.
Alex O’Connor:
The first is to say this is different from if you were to wake up and it turns out you have been plugged into the experience machine. And the doctors say to you, “Listen, your life sucks. It’s even worse than was in the machine. I mean the simulation-”
Trent Horn:
You mean outside the machine.
Alex O’Connor:
Yeah, like, “It’s so much worse out here, but welcome back. But if you like, we’ll plug you back in, and you’ll forget this ever happened.” It’s at least a lot more plausible that people in that situation would be like, “Yeah, put me back.” So, it might have a lot to do with the situation already obtaining. Jumping into the experience machine feels different.
Alex O’Connor:
Also, of course, we have necessarily a kind of omniscience when thinking about the situation. We can talk about being outside of the experience machine, inside the experience machine, what obtains, what the differences are. But to jump into the experience machine requires that you forget that you had the possibility to not do so or to do so.
Alex O’Connor:
And so, when somebody says that in the experience machine this would be a worse existence somehow, that intuition just doesn’t land with me because once you’re in the machine, it’s the same thing. You are just living a life and you are just experiencing reality as we experience this reality here.
Joe Schmid:
Even if it’s a much worse life out there, I think empirical philosophers, people who go out and actually do these surveys of [inaudible 01:01:05] intuitions and so on, yeah, you do get a resounding… You would get a resounding no to get into the experience machine if you’re hopping into it for the first time.
Joe Schmid:
But you can actually turn the tables like you were describing, and the situation is your whole life so far has been in an experience machine. Now, you’re faced with a choice to get out, and I think you’re like… I forget what it is, but you’re just like it’s either… It’s not worse than your current position, but it’s not better. Maybe you’re just an artist in Kansas or something, whatever.
Alex O’Connor:
Yeah, even if it’s not worse.
Joe Schmid:
Even if it’s the same, they actually found a lot of people wouldn’t get out of it. I forgot the specific results, but I think it’s like… I actually forget, but it’s much more saying you’d stay because it’s like, “The people that I know like you guys. I’d be in a different-”
Trent Horn:
But then have they really reflected on it using phrases like “the people I know”.
Joe Schmid:
[inaudible 01:01:56].
Alex O’Connor:
Yeah, but this is the problem. This is exactly what people do when they refuse to jump into the experience machine. I feel like what they’re thinking is at least partly influenced by I’d be giving up my life. I’d be giving up my friends and my family. I’d be adopting a whole new system-
Joe Schmid:
A whole new world.
Alex O’Connor:
But of course, once you’re in there, it just feels… I was sometimes asked; my university was split up into a bunch of different colleges. There’s no singular campus, and people are always talking about how they… everybody seems to feel like they made the right choice of college. Everyone thinks that their college is the best college in the world.
Alex O’Connor:
I wasn’t such a fan of mine. I thought it was okay. I thought there were better ones, and my friends once said to me, they said, “But if you went to a different college, you never would have met us, and we’d never be friends.” And I said, “Well, yeah, but I’d have met other friends and I’d value them just as equally as I value you right now.”
Alex O’Connor:
They thought that was a bit cold, but you get the point. It seems like you wouldn’t want to say that. In that situation, I might think, “But if I went to a different college, I wouldn’t have met the friends that I had right now.” Sure, that’s bad, but if I were in that college, I’d be saying the same thing about those friends, and it’s the same thing with the experience machine.
Trent Horn:
One other tack here. Let’s say, how would we want God to treat us as creatures? Because one way we might say, “Well, I would like God to give me infinite happiness.” That would seem fair if God gave me infinite happiness. Or if you could somehow numerically quantify happiness and it turned out to be infinite.
Trent Horn:
Then by that logic, even if you had an absolutely horrific finite life, if you have infinite happiness in the afterlife, it would still turn out to be infinite happiness based on transfinite arithmetic. Then suppose you might say, “Well, no. God should just spare me from the absolute worst evils,” because I think many people would say they’re willing to tolerate some evil but not others. But then I worry maybe their intuitions are off even in that given how the entire system is set up in that regard.
Alex O’Connor:
There’s another thing worth considering which is that I think a lot of the discussion around theodicy and around the problem of evil assumes a consequentialism. This is something that a friend of mine, his name’s Dan Wallner, he brought this to my attention. He said that when you say something like, “Well, God has this good that He wishes to bring about, and so, he’ll allow all of this evil.” As if to say this good is somehow better than this evil. There’s more good brought about by allowing some evil, and that’s why God allows it.
Alex O’Connor:
But it may be that God, for instance, has a duty to bring about certain things. If God has some kind of moral duty to bring about free will, let’s say, then it’s not just that free will is much better than the suffering that it entails. Even if the suffering is far worse, if you’ve got a duty to bring about free will, it would still function as a theodicy.
Alex O’Connor:
If there’s some kind of duty to bring about compassion or to bring about bravery even, then even if a world in which there’s no bravery and no fear is much better consequentially from a crude utilitarian perspective. That’s a better world than one in which there is bravery, but there’s also the fear and suffering.
Alex O’Connor:
If there’s something a bit more deontological about this that bravery is just something that must be brought about, then we don’t need to debate whether that’s a better world or a worse than where there’s no bravery and suffering because the theodicy doesn’t work in saying that the evil is worth the… Or the good is worth the suffering on a balance, but that the good requires that any amount of evil would still be allowed to obtain because there’s a duty to bring something about.
Alex O’Connor:
So, it’s weird how otherwise generally deontological religious thinkers when having this discussion are perfectly happy to just adopt a consequential [inaudible 01:05:49]-
Trent Horn:
I would say it’s teleological, not necessarily consequential. It aims for a particular kind of end informed by goodness, but it’s not strict consequentialism. God treats creatures as having a particular kind of dignity and good to share in Him who is the ultimate goodness itself.
Trent Horn:
I guess, yeah, it will come down maybe to intuitions about… When we say goodness, it seems like there are these different kinds of good if we imagine them. And I think you’re right. Some of them are conjoined to evils. Is it really better to never have them at all?
Trent Horn:
I think Joe’s right, maybe that’s just a very basic… When it comes to existence of good, some people find a principle of sufficient reason plausible, others don’t, and I think this might be one of those very… To me, it does seem, and I try to make an analogy. I know they’re not perfect but like creating life through evolution or even begetting, having your own children.
Trent Horn:
I mean you could take… Actually, this is something I saw… You should look this up. So, Matt Dillahunty did a reply to… People asked him about antinatalism.
Alex O’Connor:
Why are you bringing up Matt Dillahunty?
Trent Horn:
Why are you [inaudible 01:07:06]?
Alex O’Connor:
You know when you debated him on the resurrection-
Trent Horn:
Yes.
Alex O’Connor:
… and you mentioned my name as a [inaudible 01:07:10]-
Trent Horn:
Why are you bringing up Alex O’Connor?
Alex O’Connor:
Why are you bringing up Alex O’Connor?
Trent Horn:
At least from what I saw with your engagement with Alex O’Connor, you do not believe a person-
Matt Dillahunty:
Oh my God.
Trent Horn:
What’s wrong?
Matt Dillahunty:
What the hell does Alex O’Connor have to do with this? You’ve mentioned him twice.
Alex O’Connor:
Why are you bringing up Alex O’Connor?
Trent Horn:
He was so mad and all I asked him was, “Matt, are there beliefs that you disagree with, but find to be reasonable?”
Alex O’Connor:
And you were like-
Joe Schmid:
Did he say no?
Trent Horn:
He said no. He said no. He said there were no beliefs that if he… He says, “Well, I’m a reasonable person.” That if someone disagrees, there must be-
Alex O’Connor:
Just as an example, he was like, “So, for example, Alex O’Connor’s veganism. You think he’s wrong, but maybe reasonable.” And he was like, “Why are you bringing up [inaudible 01:07:50]?”
Trent Horn:
He wouldn’t do it. Wouldn’t do it.
Alex O’Connor:
Sorry, Matt Dillahunty, you were saying.
Trent Horn:
So, Matt did a reply. People asked him about antinatalism. The idea, well, is it moral to have children knowing that they could suffer, and you bring someone to existence, and they’re harmed, and you didn’t get their consent. Watch the video. All the while I was watching the video he was saying, “Well, there are harms, but there’s also these goods that come into play when you bring a child into existence, and we balance that…”
Trent Horn:
And I was like, “This sounds like a theist responding to the problem of evil.” And so, sometimes I like to bring up these other examples to say, “Oh, well, if it can make sense in one context, albeit it’s analogical and there’s limits, perhaps it can make sense in another.”
Alex O’Connor:
Yeah, there are some incredible similarities between the discussion about bringing children into existence and God bringing human beings into existence. It’s even a useful analogy in the way you’re talking about a father and his children.
Trent Horn:
Right, and so that’s why I-
Alex O’Connor:
There are so many similarities in the ethical.
Trent Horn:
Right, and so I think that if you’re partial say, “Oh, I could see that there’s a benefit here even though there’s costs that are involved.” I would push that towards, “Oh, maybe it can at least be more sensible God would create…” and that He has more resources than human parents [inaudible 01:09:03]-
Alex O’Connor:
And this is sometimes informed by the fact that people who, on balance… There are a lot of people who’ve lived a life that on balance has had more suffering than pleasure, maybe it’s like 60/40 or something, and yet at the end of their life will think it was worth having.
Alex O’Connor:
And there are also ways that pleasures and pains balance out in asymmetrical ways. For instance, David Benatar talks a lot about this of course in Better Never to Have Been. For instance, a life that begins with a lot of suffering, but then gets better over time versus a life that begins with a lot of pleasure and gets worse over time.
Alex O’Connor:
These don’t seem to be equal. It can’t just be a crude balancing of pleasures and pains. There seems to be something about the worth of living through this experience [inaudible 01:09:43]-
Trent Horn:
I would love to ask Benatar if let’s say Christian theism were true. Let’s just hedge our bets with Christian universalism, everybody goes to heaven. I wonder if that would change his thesis.
Joe Schmid:
It surely has to.
Trent Horn:
You would think.
Alex O’Connor:
Yeah. No, must do, must do.
Joe Schmid:
It has to.
Alex O’Connor:
Well, why don’t we send him an email and see what he thinks?
Trent Horn:
Go right ahead.
Alex O’Connor:
Well, maybe I’ll do that, and if he responds I’ll put the link [inaudible 01:10:07].
Trent Horn:
Yeah, so you can say theism, but you might qualify universalism. Everyone goes to heaven.
Alex O’Connor:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, let’s ask him. Let’s [inaudible 01:10:14]-
Trent Horn:
And then, I don’t know, this would be an interesting route to explore also for more discussions on the problem of evil, I don’t know.
Alex O’Connor:
Well, this has been quite the round table. I think we’ve covered a lot of ground and had some interesting discussions. And I hope the people find this useful, of course. It’s great to have four people in a room, but it also makes it harder to hear everybody out on everything. But I think we struck up a good balance.
Trent Horn:
We did really well.
Alex O’Connor:
Is there anything pressing that anybody else is just dying to get out there before we wrap up?
Cameron Bertuzzi:
No, not pressing. I have other things that I want to talk about, but I think I may save it for dinner.
Alex O’Connor:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
Yeah. Yeah.
Joe Schmid:
He’s building up his courage. This is the problem of evil [inaudible 01:10:55].
Alex O’Connor:
I think that we can at least all agree that the problem of evil is a very important topic, and it makes a lot of intuitive sense and is something that’s really worth considering. My final analysis of the situation is the problem of evil is often seen as the best response to theism. It’s like you have this religion and in response, you get the problem of evil.
Alex O’Connor:
Why are people suffering? Why are people nihilist? Why is life so apparently meaningless? But to me, I feel like this is actually the wrong way around. I feel like the best treatment of the nihilistic condition is not found in David Benatar. It’s not found in modern atheistic writers. It’s found in Ecclesiastes, it’s found in Job, it’s found in the Psalms. And it says to me that maybe it’s not that the problem of suffering as a response to religion, but rather religion itself was a response to the problem of suffering.
Trent Horn:
Maybe that’s the thing I would close with. For me, more of an intuitive end to this is there’s also one practical reply to this is, is that if you get rid of God, you still have evil. You still have just pure awfulness. I do wonder what I would do if I were put to the test. If my family died in an accident, I went through Job’s trial. I had cancer, I was just brought to my lowest, how would I respond to that?
Trent Horn:
My friend Jimmy Akin, for example, I love what he says on the problem of evil because he’s dealt with personal tragedy. His wife died of an illness shortly after they were married. He never remarried. The way he looked at it is, “Well, Christianity is my one hope to be reunited with my wife and for evil to be conquered. It’s the one hope for evil to be answered, for there to be a solution. Why would I give that up without there being a good argument against?”
Trent Horn:
So, I guess for me with evil, I am just so thrilled at the prospect of Christianity answering it. I refuse to give up Christianity unless there is another independent reason to show that it’s false, I guess.
Alex O’Connor:
Yeah, I mean, of course, I can sympathize with that. I guess I would just say I equally would love it to be true and if I believed it, would never want to give it up. But as I say, I think that may at least be why these religious ideas exist in the first place rather than being the other way around. Maybe that’s something we can discuss tomorrow because, of course, we’re here in Houston to do the event that I mentioned earlier, which as I said will be in the past.
Alex O’Connor:
I’m sure that a lot of these threads will probably be continued at some point tomorrow, so I’ll make sure that everything’s linked down in the description. But yeah, this has been edifying, so thank you all for…
Trent Horn:
Thank you.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
Yeah, thanks for having us on your show.
Alex O’Connor:
This has been great.
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