In this episode Trent sits down with Jon Steingard, the former front man for the popular Christian pop/punk band Hawk Nelson, to discuss why he left the Faith. Together they discuss the problem of evil, divine hiddenness, and Bible difficulties.
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. Joining me today is Jon Steingard, he is the former front man for Hawk Nelson. You made a big splash if you will, back in 2020. I’m reading here, this is an article at Today Magazine, Today.com ‘How Christian singer’s life has changed since revealing he no longer believes in God.’ So we’ll talk about the evolution of your belief up to that point and even after that point. But I’m super excited you’re here because we’re actually recording in the studio we used to record for our School of Apologetics here in Oceanside, California. And so we were talking and I said, “Hey, we should have a dialogue. I’d love to hear your story and talk about the issues that are raised.” And then when I found out where you live, I realized you live five minutes from the studio.
Jon Steingard:
I probably could have walked here. So it’s quite convenient for me.
Trent Horn:
And so this is helpful because I live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area now, but I happen to be here filming a course. And so it just works out well. I’m super excited you’re here.
Jon Steingard:
Thanks for having me. I love these conversations. I always feel like I walk away learning something and I’ve seen your work on online, and so I know I’m going to walk away learning some stuff here today too.
Trent Horn:
No, I… So I’m excited about that. So let’s fill some of our listeners in who may not be as familiar with you. Can you share with them a little bit of your background and how that led up to your music career and then your faith journey?
Jon Steingard:
Sure. So I’m Canadian originally, I grew up in a couple of different small towns in Canada and my dad is a Pastor. I grew up in a very expressive, charismatic, evangelical Protestant [crosstalk 00:01:58] environment. Hands in the air, roaring like lions, barking like dogs, waving flags, people feeling like they were getting gold teeth. Like-
Trent Horn:
Wait what? No, no, no. You’ve got to explain that one.
Jon Steingard:
So in the mid ’90s there was this sort of movement that swept through Southern Ontario-
Trent Horn:
Were you guys at the Toronto airport Plus?
Jon Steingard:
Yes.
Trent Horn:
You were Toronto airport [inaudible 00:02:20].
Jon Steingard:
So my dad was… that church… For those that aren’t familiar, there was in the mid ’90s, there was this wave of… I don’t know what you would want to call it. Internally it was called a renewal. They were hesitant to use the word revival. And the pastor of that Toronto airport church, which is now called Catch the Fire, his name was John Arnott. And my dad was one of his associate pastors, not at that church, but in that network. And so my dad pastored a related church.
Trent Horn:
And so during this period in the mid ’90s there was this sense of an outpouring of the Holy Spirit moving a very charismatic movement of renewal and, it was really big deal.
Jon Steingard:
It was very focused on signs and wonders and stuff. So it was a lot of people falling over slain in the spirit,
Trent Horn:
Speaking in tongues.
Jon Steingard:
Speaking tongues, all that stuff. So I came up in that environment and I was a kid, so I thought that was normal. And it was only later that I discovered that this was not necessarily your typical expression of Christianity that someone would grow up in.
Trent Horn:
But most people’s churches don’t have a Wikipedia page.
Jon Steingard:
Right.
Trent Horn:
Toronto airport Blessing does.
Jon Steingard:
Sure, so that was my upbringing. Pretty early on into my adult years, I joined a band Hawk Nelson. I was the guitar player initially and we started touring in the US, so I came down to the US when I was 20, and the first few years we did 240/250 shows a year, so we just were living out of a van. I didn’t really have an address for a few years, I didn’t unpack my suitcase for 10 years. So once we got doing the band, our… Within Christian music there’s different ways to kind of approach being an artist in Christian music. And I always say that there’s a blend of ministry, business and art, and everyone blends those three things differently. We were probably putting business first. We probably were more of this is something we do as a career, but we can also express our faith and we can also make things that we [crosstalk 00:04:33].
Trent Horn:
So you want to go on a path kind of switch foot or?…
Jon Steingard:
I mean, we…
Trent Horn:
News boys or?…
Jon Steingard:
Yeah, probably where it’s not like ministry and art weren’t important to us, but the blend of those three was probably more on let’s make a career for ourselves and also do stuff that we [inaudible 00:04:52]
Trent Horn:
So was this in the early 2000s?
Jon Steingard:
Yep, mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn:
Okay.
Jon Steingard:
That’s right.
Trent Horn:
I was-
Jon Steingard:
There was a wave of that.
Trent Horn:
Oh totally. I remember because that was during my conversion experience. I was a non-religious high school student, I had met some Catholic youth, but they were also into Christian music. So this is in the early 2000s. I remember listening to Relient K. Really enjoyed Reliant K. I saw… I was driving the other day and I saw a bumper sticker and the bumper sticker said, “I remember Five Iron Frenzy.” And I was like, “I remember Five Iron Frenzy too.”
Jon Steingard:
That’s the perfect way to bring up Five Iron Frenzy because there’s a certain kind of person that just has this deep nostalgia for Five Iron Frenzy specifically.
Trent Horn:
Okay. So you were part of that and then you guys were growing in notoriety. Your genre was kind of like-
Jon Steingard:
A Pop-punk, and we became more Pop-oriented over time. I was never a big Pop-punk guy, but I was the guitar player and I could support that sort of… I could play that role. In 2012, our singer left the band and we were trying to decide, okay, are we done? Do we want to continue as a band? And the idea was floated for me to become the singer. And so we tried that out, and we knew that it would require like a pretty big shift in style because I was just not like a Pop-punk singer. So we allowed ourselves to sort of take the DNA of the band and make something a little more Pop-oriented, Pop-rock. And I became the main songwriter as well. So that for me, it started a journey of a couple of things, like learning how to be a front man and a showman, at learning how to be a better songwriter. And then it got me in this mindset of constantly looking for material to write about.
Trent Horn:
Because what you’re writing about is our themes. It’s not strict praise and worship, but it’s themes that are informed by Christian thinking.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah, that’s really well-said.
Trent Horn:
Even Five Iron Frenzy, or Reliant K, these other groups, they’ll sing about going to the Sadie Hawkins dance or whatnot but they’ll have… It’s informed by their Christian worldly. And I guess there’s this thought you grow up in church thinking, “I don’t have to do hymns and praise and worship all the time. I can be a Christian musician who doesn’t sing about Jesus 24/7.”
Jon Steingard:
Right, I actually felt like I was drawn to go in a direction where I wanted to be more expressive about our faith.
Trent Horn:
Interesting.
Jon Steingard:
Because, I saw this dynamic happening where more… When we started there was this real sense that there was this cultural dynamic in North American Christianity, where there was this sense of a stark contrast between what’s Christian and what’s secular. And you saw that in the music. So there was this movement where parents didn’t want their kids listening to any secular music. And so there was Christian versions of everything, right?
Trent Horn:
Right.
Jon Steingard:
So we were like a Christian Blink-182 or a Christian Good Charlotte. But that dynamic changed over time in a way that I think was healthy. Parents were less black and white about it and more like, “Hey, what are the lyrics of this artist?” Regardless of whether they’re in Christian music or not.
Trent Horn:
Right, what is-
Jon Steingard:
Is it whole, is it good for you?
Trent Horn:
Right. What’s the message, and I agree that creates a weird stunted kind of bubble for people. To think, “I only want you exposed to people who, espouse Christian values or that’s who these people are.” I would agree with you, I would judge it by the content. There are some Christians whose content I’m like, “Oh, this is just dreadful. I don’t want my children to [crosstalk 00:08:30].”
Jon Steingard:
And I… Some of the stuff we were making, I remember having this experience, we played at a church that insisted on putting the lyrics up on the screen for every song, even if you weren’t a praise band. They wanted the lyrics on the screen. And I remember… And so there was TVs facing the crowd, but then there was also a TV facing the stage and we played this song called Bring Them Out, which we wrote for a Rene Russo movie that we actually got to… that’s a whole other story. But that was a cool experience. But we wrote this song and it was just meaningless. It was meaningless lyrics. It was a party song in a movie, and so I remember playing the song and seeing the lyrics on the screen at the back of the room and being so ashamed,
Trent Horn:
Staring back at.
Jon Steingard:
I remember being like, this is brutal. So I was really motivated to write stuff that was more meaningful, because I really thought that people were becoming more and more specific about what they wanted from Christian music, that they wanted things that were expressing their faith and uplifting them up in the course of their normal life. I imagined people turning on Christian radio and what are the situations that they’re in, in life? How can we encourage them? And that’s probably going to require us being a little bit more explicit. And so I wanted to… explicit as far as our faith, but explicitly.
Trent Horn:
But actually though what’s interesting is that sometimes I’m going to step out of the safe zone and I’m going to sing or perform about a topic that can be difficult. What about when you struggle with faith? The things that you struggle with.
Jon Steingard:
That’s what I wanted to write about.
Trent Horn:
Okay. So you’re going in this process of you’re wanting to go deeper, but then eventually something happens. And usually it’s small things that start to add up. Where does the road start to diverge?
Jon Steingard:
I started to notice that my gut instincts were taking me in a different direction than the culture that I was a part of, just on certain issues. So one of the first ones I can put my finger on was when the Supreme Court passed same-sex marriage. When, they legalized same-sex marriage. I remember in my gut, my first instinct was that, that was a good thing. I didn’t have a ton of gay friends, but I knew a few. We had a few friends that were close to us that were in long-term relationships and wanted to get married. And this was a big deal for them that they could do that. And I remember in my gut feeling that’s a good thing, that we’re evolving to allow people to love who they want to love and marry who they want to marry.
Trent Horn:
So it wasn’t just a legal situation. You also thought the sexual behavior itself, you didn’t see anything wrong with it or probably [crosstalk 00:11:16]
Jon Steingard:
Well, I was wrestling with it if I’m honest, I-
Trent Horn:
You’re raised one way to believe… and I get how I think what happens for a lot of people is that you’re raised in one view that this behavior is wrong, this is bad, this is sinful. Okay. Then you meet people who engage in this behavior and they oftentimes seem to be quite congenial, amicable, amiable, I’m throwing out all my [inaudible 00:11:39] it seemed like nice, decent good people. And it creates like a kind of cognitive dissonance.
Jon Steingard:
And it becomes difficult, it became difficult for me to say that I am not for these people. And I know that people that disagree with my stance on LGBTQ plus issues, I know they wouldn’t want to say that they’re not for those people as people. But I started to feel like I was on the wrong side of that issue. So that’s just, that wasn’t the whole thing for me, that was just one thing that I can [crosstalk 00:12:15]
Trent Horn:
Because there’s people that still identify as Christian but-
Jon Steingard:
They are affirming.
Trent Horn:
Right. So there’s the language of affirming people like Matthew Vines for example. And I had a conversation with Brandon Robertson, I believe is his name. He’s a local [crosstalk 00:12:30]
Jon Steingard:
Oh, Brandon. I know Brandon.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, he’s a local pastor here. We had a conversation about whether homosexuality is a sin or not. And so there are Christians who believe that it is a more traditional view. Those are more newer views saying that it isn’t, and then they have different views about what the Bible means in relation to that. So that-
Jon Steingard:
It leads to the question of-
Trent Horn:
What do you think about the Bible? Because then for you… Because then you’d have two options. If you think that there’s nothing immoral about homosexuality and you’re raised in a Bible Christian home, you would have to look at the Bible. You really have two options. You could say maybe the Bible doesn’t really say it’s wrong, which is like Matthew Vines’ argument. Or the Bible does say it’s wrong, but the Bible is just wrong on this. So those are the two different ways you could go.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah, and there’s new answers even within those options too. I mean, you could say that those were cultural perspectives at the time. You could make that argument.
Trent Horn:
Or it’s not binding now.
Jon Steingard:
Right, the same way that, most Christians don’t honor Sabbath the way that it would stipulate for the [crosstalk 00:13:39].
Trent Horn:
So then the discussion would be understanding what does the Bible teach and what authority, I guess, do we use to determine that because ultimately we’re going to interpret it. But it’s interesting, it’s like we almost take outside sources of authority to help us to interpret the Bible. It’s like for me, for example during my conversion experience, I was completely convinced that the theory of evolution is true, the earth is about 4.5, 4 billion years old. So any interpretation that the earth is only 10 000 years old, I just can’t buy into that. I feel like maybe some people do that with the issue of homosexuality. It’s like, there’s some other authority telling me that it’s not immoral. So then I kind of look at the Bible in that light.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah, and also it kind of brings up the question of what do you mean by immoral? Because then you get into questions of what do we believe morality is? So you get into meta-ethics but in most of these conversations, people aren’t thinking about it on that level. And so, sometimes we end up speaking past each other because I have an idea of what I think morality is and if I don’t think about it all that deeply, I might just assume that everyone has that same idea. And then we’re arguing past each other because our fundamental belief of brown morality might not be the same.
Trent Horn:
And I think what’s important when we talk about, especially if more oral issues start our catalyst for thinking about our faith, it’s very important to figure out what are my overarching principles? It’s like, all right, well I know this is right and this is wrong. We agree sexual relations between a married man and woman are good. We might disagree about two men or two women. But it seems… well I’ll give you an example, I was at a school in the Midwest. I was giving a talk on the issue of marriage. And this was before the Supreme court. So this is when things were being really debated. It’s back in 2014. And I had a group of students, it was at a public university, and so there were a group of atheists wearing matching shirts for their club sitting in the front row. And I gave my talk and during the Q&A none of them came up because… and I asked them later, “Why didn’t you ask any questions?” They said, “We thought you were just going to talk from the Bible. And you never cited the Bible in your arguments about this issue.”
Trent Horn:
And so they were kind of taken aback and I remember one of the guys he’s saying, “why do you think this is wrong?” And I took a flyer from the event and I turned it over and I said, “Look, I try to think of this as a philosopher right. Let’s write down what are sexual behaviors that are right and wrong. We all agree rape is wrong, married sex is right, homosexuality, incest, other kinds of sexual behavior.” We wrote them all down. And I said, “What we have to do, I’m trying to draw a fence around the ones that are good. And then the ones that are bad.” And I got to figure out what determines the fence. So I think that it’s good to prompt people. Let’s say their only thing for sexual ethics is just Bible verses that they might actually still have the same fence, just for different reasons if they take a step back. But let’s say, okay, so that starts the journey but then it continues more with doubts about God.
Jon Steingard:
I think if it had just been that I think, I don’t know where that would’ve gone. But things started to kind of grow for me. I did a… Well, right around when I became a father, I started to feel the pressure of some of the things that I wasn’t sure about, about Christianity, about God. There was, always things that I just was uncertain about. Like, why is it that God is so mysterious that we don’t seem to have more direct access to God, that I could plausibly doubt God’s very existence because I’ve never actually like seen, I’ve never heard God’s voice directly, specifically. It’s always through this… Growing up, I always heard the term ‘still small voice’ so it’s this internal knowing, that you sense God, I mean this very expressive terms.
Trent Horn:
Well, because you grew up in very charismatic community.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah, and so I had questions and doubts but they didn’t crystallize until I became a father. And I felt now I’m responsible for teaching this little human being about the world.
Trent Horn:
Isn’t it weird though that before that people might have said that you helped to form the faith of millions of people by giving them inspirational themes and music, but it becomes a lot different when there’s some single person in your custody charge.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah, the importance of it came home for me then. And right around that same time I had been getting into film work and I did a documentary in Uganda on this people group called the Batwa, they’re an endangered people group. They’re an indigenous people group to Southwestern Uganda and they have experienced just, I could talk for hours just about them, but incredible hardship, suffering, discrimination. Most of the Botwan children don’t make it to the age of five.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, that’s one of the few places historically throughout history child mortality has been about 50%. About half of children don’t make it to the age of five and in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and rural like Afghanistan or the few places where we still have,
Jon Steingard:
Yeah, it’s still a big problem. And I had just never… You see videos and photos of these kinds of things, but being there was totally different for me. And I had also, like I said, just become a dad myself. And so I’m seeing these kids suffering, and I remember vividly having this moment where it got cold in the evening one night and I saw a four year old putting a sweater on a two year old, and realizing that that four year old was basically parenting that two year old because they had no one else. And it broke me even right now, it’s hard for me to hold it together. Because I saw my own kids and my kids just happened to be born in San Diego to a middle class family that can take care of them. These kids-
Trent Horn:
So the lottery of birth.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah, these kids, they’re born here. They didn’t choose to be in this situation. They didn’t do anything to deserve a different situation than my kids did.
Trent Horn:
Why does God let bad things happen to good people?
Jon Steingard:
So this is where it led me. I remember sitting there and going, because I grew up believing in a God that intervenes on behalf of humanity. That God shows up. That God is active. That he’s not sitting back and just watching life play out. He’s involved. And so I see this, this situation in Uganda and I was just like my belief, the type of God I grew up believing in and what I’m seeing in front of me right now, they don’t fit together.
Trent Horn:
So it sounds like the things that really challenged you, you believe in God, it sounds like they challenged more God’s goodness.
Jon Steingard:
That was the beginning. At first,
Trent Horn:
Okay. So the question, because when I think about these two issues counting as evidence against God that he does not seem as obvious to some people. I think for some people, you would probably know people, God is very obvious. But for others, why isn’t he more obvious to more people. And then number two, why do these bad things happen? You know what’s interesting actually, it’s interesting we don’t say why do bad things happen to people? We say, why do bad things happen to good people? As if we deep down it would be okay if bad people suffered.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah, so I sort of reject that dichotomy too. Because I mean, good people versus bad people is a problematic… because then how do you determine good? What makes a person good? What makes a person bad? Those are not easy questions to be answered.
Trent Horn:
I don’t know. I think a lot of people, if you were to ask them, “Can you think of a bad person?” They could easily think of serial killers like John Wayne Gacy, Hitler, Starwind. Even people they know in their own lives. I think I do… This is curious to me. I think it seems pretty-
Jon Steingard:
I’m happy to push back on that. So do you think Hitler’s mom thinks that Hitler’s at been bad person? Or do you think that Hitler’s mom would think that he’s tragically shaped by events in his life? And it’s not as much his fault? [crosstalk 00:22:37]
Trent Horn:
I think if I were Hitler’s dad, I would be profoundly disappointed. I would be profoundly, I would say that… And this is interesting when we have kids, right? Like I have a six year old, four year old and one year old, you had kids around the same age. And that, it’s interesting especially when they get into their elementary years, it’s when they’re babies, they can do no wrong right?
Jon Steingard:
Oh my kids can do wrong.
Trent Horn:
Well, I mean when they’re an infant, they give you that grand even when they poop all over the place and they get away with everything when they’re six months old, 12 months old. But then when they hit six or seven, you get that first sense of why did you say that to that little child? And you can experience that profound disappointment. And you see they have developed their own agency that you give them all the foundation you can, but they still have the choice to run with it or not.
Jon Steingard:
My kids are three and four and already I see they have their own personalities, their own ways of thinking about things. I try to guide them as best I can, but they’re already their own people.
Trent Horn:
But then it seems to me that they’re going, that I can make a judgment whether they’ve done something good, done something not as good, or done something really wrong or bad. And my love for them might bias me a little bit. But at the end of the day, I hope I could step out of the bias and see, okay, you’ve either met the standard that God, that natural law itself is presented for you or you fall or you fallen far short of it.
Jon Steingard:
I just think it’s easier to categorize behavior as good and bad versus a person as good and bad. Because, how do you… We could have another discussion on how you categorize behavior, because that’s interesting too. But as far as like a person, do you just add up how many good acts someone does in their life versus how many bad and then tally it up and see which one there’s more of and where’s the cutoff is it 60, 40? Is it 50? This is what I’m getting out on. Determining what makes someone a good person or bad.
Trent Horn:
Well, I would say whether someone’s a good person or a bad person would relate to their present disposition towards good or evil. Because you could have someone who is a very awful person through most of their life who has an awakening, who has a conversion realize I’ve been horrible and awful. I have to repent this. I have to make up for the damage that I did. And so that person at that moment, I would say they are a good person now they’ve done horrible things they might have to live with.
Trent Horn:
But their… We would ask like when we look at someone’s virtues. To me a good person is someone who, when there’s a decision to do right or wrong, they naturally choose right. it’s like it’s a musician. What makes someone a good musician or a bad musician? You can know somebody could pick up a guitar and they could just riff. And it’s just under their fingers, how all the notes are supposed to go together. And so, you might think, you look at their whole life, they might have been just terrible. They practice over and over, they’ve been bad for a long time, but now they’ve got it. And a bad musician, they don’t know where all the notes are supposed to go. It might sound good to them, but their tone deaf.
Jon Steingard:
So just to rephrase the way you’re sort of thinking about it, it’s almost as if paterns of, of moral behavior become ingrained. And then you would call that person a good person.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, or we would call them a virtuous person. Someone who seeks virtue.
Jon Steingard:
I think I’d be more comfortable with the term virtuous person.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, and that’s what we would strive. And so that’s why I would say as a religious person, why I think God is so important is that because God is the good itself, he desires for us to grow in these virtues to mirror him. So some of them are going to be virtues that any person can be aware of. We would classically call in the Cardinal virtues. That would be prudence knowing what’s the best way to get to the good. Temperance, how to balance your life. Justice, giving people what they deserve and then fortitude or courage.
Trent Horn:
Because you could actually know all the right answers and the right moral answers, but still shrink way and not do the right thing when it’s the moment. And then the theological virtues would be faith, hope, and love that are distinctly informed by God. So because it seems here that you were shaken about God’s goodness and seeing evil afflicting innocent people, that God’s not as present. And then that kind of moved you at one point, I seen this article, you had said that you’d no longer believe in God. That might not be the case as strong today.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah, I think, so…
Trent Horn:
What, encouraged you to go public about this? Because it’d be really easy to just not say anything and just keep let the good times rolling.
Jon Steingard:
Well, it was weighing on me really heavily. I went through a period, before I said anything publicly, I spent probably a year and a half really reading, trying to expose myself to perspectives I hadn’t experienced before. I didn’t grow up in a particular, my dad has a PhD. He’s very educated. But his perspective is very specific. And so I don’t feel like I really… Coming up in the circles I came up with, I didn’t learn a lot about theology necessarily.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, so what were these other things you were exposing yourself to?
Jon Steingard:
Well, I was studying issues sort of one by one, so I was really obsessed with heaven and hell for a while. I was really interested in evolution, common dissent and those kinds of things for a period. What are some other things? Oh, the authorship and the composition of the new Testament and then later the old Testament I went backwards there.
Trent Horn:
So you probably grew up with more of a conservative or fundamentalist view on those questions.
Trent Horn:
Inerrancy for sure. And I don’t think I, at the time growing up, I didn’t understand the differences between inerrancy and infallibility and those things. But I just knew this is the word of God and that’s it. And it began to occur to me that there’s a lot of different interpretations out there. And the more I learned, the more I realized that almost no Christian doctrine is completely universally agreed upon. Even saying something like Jesus died for your sins. That’s a pretty widely accepted phrase, but it’s referencing substitutionary or atonement-
Trent Horn:
Well, I think I would say nearly all Christrians, it’s always hard because someone can call themselves a Christian and they could have a whackadoodle view. [crosstalk 00:29:37] they could believe Jesus is an alien or something like that. But I would say of the standard denominations, the larger denominations, I would say they would all agree with the basics of what the apostle’s creed, but you’re right what the terms mean. What is the meaning of the atonement? What is the meaning of [crosstalk 00:29:56]. And that’s where you grew up in a home that more, [crosstalk 00:30:00].
Jon Steingard:
This is concrete and simple. And then once I learned-
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:30:04]
Trent Horn:
Basically [crosstalk 00:30:01]
Jon Steingard:
This is concrete and simple. And then once I, [crosstalk 00:30:03] once I learned [crosstalk 00:30:04]
Trent Horn:
Not so simple.
Jon Steingard:
More, it’s not so simple. And one of the things I started encountering when I studied Apologetics, for instance, is that within the sphere of Apologetics, a lot of Apologetic speakers were willing to be nuanced, right. I have a friend, Sean McDowell, who’s a great author and speaker, and he’s become a friend over the last couple years through this process.
Jon Steingard:
An unlikely friend, but a good one. He uses the word confidence, rather than certainty very often. We had this conversation one time, where I think I thought that he was certain about something and he goes, “Well, I’m confident and the reason why I say confident is be”… He would say that I don’t have a hundred percent certainty on this issue, but from everything that I see, I have confidence that this is true about God.
Trent Horn:
Okay. Yeah. I would say that this is helpful for people to learn and grow, to understand what they’re going to do, because I would say certainty and confidence are essentially synonymous, but you’re trying to… Because we might say, well, is certainty like 100%, I can’t possibly doubt this. And I agree, there’s very few beliefs… [crosstalk 01:00:03] like that.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
For example, I can say, in philosophy, would say, I can’t even say I am 100% certain, I’m having a conversation with Jon Steingardt, because this could be a… I’m dreaming about this, I hope the conversation goes well and things like that. I could say a 100% confident, I am being appeared to John Steingardt way, would be [inaudible 00:31:43] I definitely cannot doubt I’m experiencing something or-
Jon Steingard:
You’re having an experience right now.
Trent Horn:
I cannot doubt I’m having an experience. That I am thinking about something. That I exist. And then I think that… There’s certain levels of certainty that are like, I couldn’t doubt it without being a crazy person or I am just basically certain. I could doubt the world is real, it might be the Matrix, but I’m certain, I’m certain the world’s real.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah. At some point you have to make a decision to go, okay, I have to live my life.
Trent Horn:
Right. And then I think down the line, there’s even somewhere more doubts could creep in and I would call it moral certainty.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
In that, I can act and I’m not doing anything wrong in acting even if there are some doubts along the way. So you’re going through… Then let’s talk about… Can we talk about your decision to go public about this and what kind of… Where it went from there?
Jon Steingard:
Yeah. I had wrestled with this stuff privately for a while. I had gotten to a point… I remember where I was when I first had the thought, “What if God’s not real?” Because it, like you said up until that point, I had been questioning certain things about God’s nature.
Trent Horn:
Right? [crosstalk 00:32:49]
Jon Steingard:
Like what is the deal? [crosstalk 00:32:50]
Trent Horn:
How could a good God allow this? Maybe it could be explained by just, there is no God?
Jon Steingard:
That’s where my brain went to and eventually I was like… Because I started to find problems with the version of, I should say it this way, the version of Christianity that I had held to. I started to see problems and I started going, well, okay, how far down do these problems go? What if they, what if they go all the way? Honestly I was terrified. It was not a welcome thought because I had always believed that- [crosstalk 00:33:23]
Trent Horn:
Sure. I bet.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah. I had always believed that God created me specifically, knows me specifically, has a plan for my life. And all of a sudden I felt so vulnerable and scared and like I’m… Is it… Are we just out here? Could anything happen to me at any time?
Trent Horn:
Well, with the philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche, we always say the quote from Nietzsche, “God is dead”. And people think of that as a triumphal quote.
Jon Steingard:
That is not how he meant it.
Trent Horn:
No, in Thus, in his work, Thus Spake Zarathustra, there’s the parable, The Madman, and he says, “God is dead”. He goes in a bar and then he’s like, “Do we not feel it getting colder, we are not unchained from the sun, drifting in the darkness”. It’s a grim thing. The thought of God being dead.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah. I think he did hope that we would overcome the obstacles that we’d face as a result of killing God. I think he hoped… He talked about “The Overman” or the “Ubermensch”. Right, in the hopes that we would be able to create our own meaning. You’re right, the whole, “God is dead” thing is super misunderstood a lot of times. And he was- [crosstalk 00:34:32]
Trent Horn:
So for you it’s like that, it’s like you’ve been “unchained from the sun, drifting into the dark”.
Jon Steingard:
It was not something I welcomed, but I felt I had a responsibility to chase this journey down and go, well, what do I really believe? I did that for a while and then more and more, I was just like, I don’t think I believe in God at all. Eventually it got to a point where I was like, I cannot pretend. At that point we were already sort of winding the band down. Which, most people don’t know, I think a lot of people think the band ended when I said, “Hey, I don’t believe in God”.
Jon Steingard:
But we were already sort of winding the band down because we had been a band for 15 years. A bunch of us were starting to have kids and we’re really questioning whether we wanted to tour that much when we had kids. So I was going into film work and doing more of that and that was already in play. But even the small number of things that we were still doing as a band, I felt really uncomfortable because I was just like, I do not want to be faking this. I do not want… I don’t want to be out here singing songs about God’s goodness if I don’t think he’s there, I just don’t want to fake it. So, because I had been so public about faith for so long, it felt really incongruent, to not say anything. I felt like I had a responsibility to be honest. It was during the thick of the pandemic where I think, probably, life felt so chaotic anyways-
Trent Horn:
We were buying a house. It was, well, I think you announced, I think it was May 2020. I remember it hit the news media more in the fall. I read articles about it, but yeah, that was right when after… It was in the midst of a year, guys aren’t really doing any shows anyways.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah, well, I think it was when my wife signed off on it being public, that’s when, that’s what sort of surprised me.
Trent Horn:
Does she share these views or her views different to yours?
Jon Steingard:
Yeah. Her journey has mirrored mine significantly. We’ve been really on the same page most of the time. She might be six or eight months behind me in sort of the way that she’s processing it. The specific issues that matter most to her are different than me. Our journeys have been very, very similar and luckily that didn’t put a wedge between us.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, sure. Okay. So this is where you come out. You say this, it’s announced kind of more, he no longer believes in God, makes a big impact out in social media and things like that. And yet you, when we were talking, you may not have as strong a view on that.
Trent Horn:
I want to hear your thoughts on that because I would think, for example, if I thought of an analogy, I imagine an orphan who might say, “I’m in this situation, I couldn’t possibly have parents if I’ve ended up in this terrible situation. There’s no way if I had parents who love me, clearly I do not have a mother and father of any kind at all”. I would step in and say… The other orphan might say to him, “Well, I mean, you might doubt whether your mother, father were good people or maybe something weird happened, but it would seem like you had parents otherwise, how could you exist?” [crosstalk 00:37:53] “If you didn’t have parents”. So for me, when I hear the concerns about God’s goodness, that’s one part of the puzzle, but then it’s like, how am I even here to be doubting it at all?
Jon Steingard:
Yeah. That’s a good question.
Trent Horn:
So now what are, I guess your thoughts on theism and then we could always talk about Christianity.
Jon Steingard:
At that point, I think I was still looking at things through the lens of, is what I believed true or is it false? And I definitely think that that image of God that I had grown up with, I definitely still don’t believe in that God.
Trent Horn:
Particular kind of God and charismatic, evangelical Christianity.
Jon Steingard:
And I think there’s things about that God, that you would actually, probably agree with me on.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Well, you know what’s interesting about that, especially when we were talking about hiddenness, like why isn’t God more obvious?
Jon Steingard:
Yeah. Yeah.
Trent Horn:
I mean, it’s kind of funny. I wonder if I took my feelings of God, how I felt God in my life and I gave them to you, would you think God was still hidden? Because for me- [crosstalk 00:39:01].
Jon Steingard:
Oh, that’s interesting.
Trent Horn:
It’s very… It’s not warm fuzzies really at all. I’ve been in public about this, that I’m actually, I’m jealous, I make fun, I get jealous when people are like this.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah. I don’t-..
Trent Horn:
I don’t… It’s way more cerebral. Although part of, I get jealous, oh, I wish I could just have that feeling, like God’s just right here and I know it, but at the same time I’m like-
Jon Steingard:
Then you wouldn’t be you.
Trent Horn:
I would be… There’s a… That sounds like a philosophical… Perfect essence of philosophy right there. Yeah, I wouldn’t be who I am and I feel like I would be stuck to the vicissitudes of going to and fro from emotions, because what if suddenly- [crosstalk 00:39:48]
Jon Steingard:
You probably wouldn’t use the word vicissitudes.
Trent Horn:
Right. Maybe I’m just nervous with you and I just throw out my thesaurus?
Jon Steingard:
No, no, you’re great.
Trent Horn:
My wife’s sometimes says to me, “Trent, don’t use a word like that, it’s pretentious”. I’m like, I’m not trying to. It’s just, it’s funny, when I was growing up, I was terrible at math. I just could not get math, but the verbal on the SAT’s saved me. To get into college and stuff like that.
Trent Horn:
What I mean, is that if it was more emotional, maybe I would not have as a firm foundation for believing that God exists, that Jesus rose from the dead, that he established a church. Because when I think about the feelings and the emotion that come in… Though, I do think that it is important. I’m always just careful, the prophet Jeremiah said “The heart is a wicked thing who can know it”. Sometimes our feelings, they can lead us astray on things.
Trent Horn:
But it sounds like you went out and you were looking at arguments, looking at evidence. Now you’re broadening your horizons and now, the point you brought up earlier about the God. It’s kind of funny. It’s like, that might be a God I wouldn’t agree with either on theology and so for me, if I meet someone who says “I’m not a Christian anymore”, or “I don’t believe in God”, I guess one thing I try to do is, all right-
Jon Steingard:
Those are two different questions.
Trent Horn:
Right? They’re two different questions. I remember I met someone once who said, “Well, I’m an atheist because I read the Bible and St. Paul is sexist.” and I’m, well, all right, we can talk about that, but you’ve made a huge leap here. You could just, you could still be a Christian and just say, “I disagree with how to interpret these passages”. That’s what I would caution people if they run into problems, don’t go further than the problems need you to go. Basically.
Jon Steingard:
I think initially early on, I was willing to make those kinds of leaps very quickly because I was, because I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa… Because again, this is one of the unintended effects of the sort of version of inerrancy that I came up with.
Trent Horn:
The black and white thinking back, growing up.
Jon Steingard:
If you find one problem, the whole thing’s a problem, right. And that was… I remember, I read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, and it’s basically the story of the evolution of humanity, and it was so compelling and it was so much more detailed and thoughtful than any sort of origin story I had ever grown up with in Christianity. I was so compelled by it that I was, oh my gosh, I grew up believing this earth was 6,000 years old and anyone that said [crosstalk 00:42:26] otherwise was lying to you.
Trent Horn:
And that’s why I was so attracted. When I came to believe in Jesus in high school, I looked at all the dominations and-
Jon Steingard:
I’m like that.
Trent Horn:
That’s why I was attracted to Catholicism and that tradition because it’s very, “Hey, you don’t have to, but you can believe in evolution”. That in fact the Catholic church says “We don’t have a teaching on the science of evolution because the church doesn’t teach about science”. It’s like people will say, “Well, why didn’t the church say that Galileo was right?” I’m like, well its issues in biblical interpretation, but Galileo wasn’t right about everything. If the church had said “Galileo was right about everything”, because he thought the planets were a perfect circle around the sun but Kepler showed it’s an ellipse, that’s why the church is like, “No, we talk about faith and morals, but the science-”
Jon Steingard:
But they did wait 300 and something years to admit that Galileo was right. That the center is the center of the solar system though.
Trent Horn:
Well it talked about.
Jon Steingard:
It was 1992 when they finally admitted it.
Trent Horn:
Well, no, that was when Pope St. John Paul II issued an apology for how Galileo was treated in his trial. But it’s interesting. I was reading some atheist historians who were commenting on the whole story of Galileo, saying to their fellow atheists “Guys we’re really oversimplifying this. One reason is that Galileo just decided to be a giant jerk to the Pope at the time. He wrote this dialogue, explaining his views… He wrote this dialogue, explaining his views and there’s a character who represents the Pope and his name is Simplicio. Which basically means idiot or simpleton and so he’s kind of like doing this to the Pope. It was like, what do you expect is going to happen? But that’s… I’ll send you some articles. Well, there’s actually a whole new book on the subject. I’ll send you a copy.
Jon Steingard:
Well, it doesn’t surprise me that that story is… There’s more to it.
Trent Horn:
But that’s interesting. Your journey is all about going from black and white to nuance.
Jon Steingard:
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Trent Horn:
And I think that’s important for anybody who is religious, that when your views about your worldview, even if, actually… I know atheists that have kind of black and white reasoning.
Jon Steingard:
Oh for sure!
Trent Horn:
Who say things like “There’s no evidence for God!”. I’m like, “What?”
Jon Steingard:
Yeah. I don’t agree with that.
Trent Horn:
That it’s important to have our views reflect reality, follow the evidence where it leads. And so now we were talking a little bit earlier, you’re a bit warmer at least to the prospect of theism.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah. I think it’s tough because all of these subjects are so interconnected, right. When you… For most people, when they say I’m a Christian, they’re taking on a wide array of views or possible views and they’re all connected. So theism versus atheism, is there a God or isn’t there. Are there gods, plural, which is, I actually think, an under explored area of thinking, because how many times of any creature that there is out there, how many times do we encounter a single one?
Trent Horn:
Right. And that’s interesting because from the classical theist tradition that you-
Jon Steingard:
There’s tons of polytheism.
Trent Horn:
Well, when I say classical theism, that there’s a modern view about looking at God and the philosophy of religion, there’s two views, classical theism, and what’s called neo theism.
Jon Steingard:
Oh, okay. I’m familiar with that distinction.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, so the distinction would be that, and this is kind of a newer view of God, really in the modern world that, what is God? Well, God is a person. God is a special kind of person who is all powerful, all knowing, all good and he’s a person without a body and he’s like you or me, like a person, but he’s got all these powers, basically. He’s the most unique person there is. Classical theism holds that God does not belong to any kind. Everything that exists has… There are two qualities to it. It has essence and existence.
Trent Horn:
So existence is the fact that it is. Essence is what it is. A fish has a fish essence, it swims. You and I have a human essence, but the essence of something doesn’t tell us about its existence. So we could talk, what’s the essence of a unicorn? It’s got the big horn, in some traditions it has magical powers. Doesn’t tell us if there is a unicorn, or a black swan. When I was in Australia, I saw a black swan. For a long time, people thought there were no such things like that. But the classical theist view would hold that God’s essence and his existence, they’re not distinct. His essence is, [crosstalk 00:46:45] his essence, that everything that exists, there’s a gap between what it is and that it is. God is different from every single thing in the universe, in everything else, because there’s no gap. His essence, just his existence, like in Exodus 3, “I am that I am”.
Jon Steingard:
I’ve never heard it explain that way before. That’s interesting.
Trent Horn:
Yeah and so there you, when you draw from that it’s oh, well, there couldn’t be more than one God, because then they would all belong to, they belong to this preexisting… Nothing preexists God, not even ideas.
Trent Horn:
So there could only be one, he would have to be infinite and there’s different arguments that would lead you in that direction and so there, I think that it’s helpful to not think of God as a kind of a person because sometimes even though we say He’s outside the universe, then I think He was like a genie holding the universe. Why doesn’t He intervene more? With your concerns with hiddenness, it’s like, I want to meet Shakespeare and I’ve read all of his plays and I didn’t find him. He’s not there. And it’s, well, you did meet him. I mean, he’s not Falstaff, he’s not Macbeth, but the genius and wit of Shakespeare is, he’s not a character in the play. He is the reason the whole thing is there and you see him suffuse through the whole thing.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah, I think for a time I went all the way to atheism because I almost feel like I needed to complete that journey in some way, before I felt like I could explore the space in between. Definitely since then, I’ve kind of been, well, okay… The question of why is there something, instead of nothing is a really good one, and the problem is that no matter what your views are on that question, you have to get… Something arrives at some sort of brute fact at some point. That just makes it really hard to get to. Also, our study of the universe, you go back 13.4 billion years or so, we can study all the way back to fractions of a second before The Big Bang. Then the word ‘before’ ceases to make sense because time started then to-
Trent Horn:
Essentially if there is an absolute beginning of the universe, we are right, we wouldn’t say before in a temporal sense, like in time, but we could talk about before in a logical sense. It’s like, if I make an argument, all men are mortal. Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. If I have that argument, the major premise, all men are mortal, is before it’s prior to [crosstalk 00:49:31]
Jon Steingard:
Logically before, but not temporarily before. Okay. That’ a good distinction.
Trent Horn:
So when we think about God creating the universe, we don’t think of God… Like I would say, it’s interesting. So we go back to the neo… God as a person, neo theism, and classical theism. The God as a person view would think of, well, God is just kind of sitting around and He’s concerned about me and He’s thinking and acting and wants to intervene and do these things. I would hold the view, and not every theist holds this… You could talk to… I was at a conference, actually, with other Protestant apologists and speakers, and there might have been eight or 10 of us, and they asked us in a panel, “How many of you believe God is timeless?” and I think only I, and one other guy raised our hands.
Jon Steingard:
Really?
Trent Horn:
Yeah. A lot more of them had the view God is, he is temporal. He’s like-
Jon Steingard:
I would think that would be a minority view.
Trent Horn:
Not in, I think a lot of more mainstream Protestant philosophy and views.
Jon Steingard:
They believe that God has, inserted, is the wrong word, but has put himself into time?
Trent Horn:
Yeah, well, William Lane Craig says that God sans creation is [crosstalk 00:50:36] timeless, but when he creates the world, he enters into time. And I believe that God is infinite, perfect and timeless, and so for God, all His knowledge exists in one perfect moment and so, because of that, God doesn’t think about anything.
Jon Steingard:
Which would explain why God can’t change.
Trent Horn:
He doesn’t change either.
Jon Steingard:
Because change needs time.
Trent Horn:
Well, change needs time and change needs to be explained. One of the reasons I believe in God is not just the universe began, but, it changes. The universe could just be a static block. It’s like a painting, it could just be a static block, but there’s change. It’s like, well, what changes this? Then something changes that. That God is the unchanged source of all the change, because of that, here you get, you draw a lot of neat things from that. If that comes to pass he’s this unlimited source of change and all his knowledge, everything is just one timeless perfect moment. That’s for me, why Christianity is so appealing actually, for God becoming man, is that my philosophical view of God, God is just like so different from me. I don’t know how that thing could love me.
Jon Steingard:
And, but then God entered into-
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Now I do see how that being could be good because when I think of good and bad, I think something’s bad when it’s missing something, like goodness and evil, or we just say good and bad. Like what is a… I had a computer that just died the other day and I had to take it to the shop. It was… Its hard drive was missing something it needed. We think about a…you think like a bad mu… There’s two kinds of bad musicians. There’s the one that charges for gigs that he shouldn’t do, he’s ethically corrupt and someone who just can’t hit the notes. But in either case, he’s either missing virtue or he is missing the right placement of his fingers, things like that. But in God, if he’s the source of everything that’s infinite and perfect, he couldn’t be missing anything. And so he would be good, at least in the non-moral sense and for me the moral sense would [crosstalk 00:52:37].
Jon Steingard:
Would follow.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. So in thinking about who God is, I don’t hold the view that He’s just a person, like you or me, He’s just, He is goodness. He is being, but for me then, even though I can see that he’s all perfect and good. The incarnation of Jesus Christ draws it all around for me. So you’re more open to theism, [crosstalk 00:53:00] you might-
Jon Steingard:
Yeah, I feel like I’ve set us on a tangent every time you’ve asked, so I’ll try to actually answer the question. I’m sorry.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, that’s fine.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah. I mean, looking at the question specifically of why is there something instead of nothing. That question is difficult to answer, but I think that question on its own, outside of anything else, theism makes more sense than atheism. Because something, bringing creation, bringing the universe into existence makes more sense. [crosstalk 00:53:32]
Trent Horn:
And those are actually two separate questions. Because even if the universe was eternal, we would say, why is there eternal something rather than just straight nothing. And then even more interesting is, we have a beginning, we’ve got creation. So you’re saying, okay, because it goes back to the orphan example I gave, even if the orphan doubts his parents’ goodness, he has a hard time explaining how he got here without parents.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah. So that’s a really good example because it illustrates why things change once you don’t ask that question in isolation. In isolation, the orphan goes, “Do I have parents somewhere? By my… The fact of my existence, it’s more likely that I have parents. Somewhere”. Right. That’s a metaphor for asking the something from nothing question in isolation. [crosstalk 00:54:22]
Trent Horn:
And then he might ask, fine, maybe I do have parents- [crosstalk 00:54:23]
Jon Steingard:
Where are they?
Trent Horn:
Where are they? Are they a good? Could there be some kind of good reason and now with… Then the analogy starts to break down because-
Jon Steingard:
Well, actually, then I think, from my view, the analogy begins to make even more sense because then the orphan goes, okay, so I have people telling me that my parents are both all good and all powerful. The problem, is the orphan has to make sense of that. The orphan has to go, okay, so I’ve never met my parents. People are telling me I’ve got them, if they loved me you would think they would be around and if they were all powerful, you would think that they would be able to be around, then the orphan has a problem .
Trent Horn:
And this would be the problem of divine hiddenness. If God exists, he’s all good. It’s a variant to the problem of evil.
Jon Steingard:
I found that too, because I started with the problem of evil. And it led me to this divine hiddenness thing because I realized I had this moment. I took my kids to the beach, this one evening, we watched the sunset. My daughter, at the time she was maybe one and a half, and she likes playing in the waves, but they’re kind of big for her at the time, and so she like reached up and she was like: “Daddy!” and I was, I had this moment where I was, that’s me. My whole life I’ve wanted God to be real and I’ve wanted a tangible, real connection and I don’t feel like I’ve gotten it. It’s difficult from…
Jon Steingard:
There’s various ways that it gets answered when you ask that question and sometimes, in some of the circles I was in, the answer was that it’s my fault. Now, people don’t always come out and say it, but as a kid you just develop certain impressions. I came away with this impression that all the people around me seem to be experiencing God in a way that I’m not. Can’t be God’s fault, must be my fault.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, [crosstalk 00:56:23] when I meant by the analogy breaking down is that it becomes difficult when we compare ourselves as parents to our children versus God, because of our limitations. So when my one year old gets hurt by something, it’s interesting, I’ll try to comfort him as much as I can, but he sometimes seems almost oblivious to me trying to comfort him. So now that he’s just that…That my inability to reach in there.
Trent Horn:
I guess I have a question then, for you, you’re comparing… If God existed, I would have the experiences other people have. How would the world look where you wouldn’t question divine hiddenness?
Jon Steingard:
Well, I could imagine a possible world in which, if there’s an age at which you need to decide… because like the whole heaven or hell thing, accept God or reject God, right. If there’s an age at which that decision becomes consequential, say 18, imagine your 18th birthday, God appears to you and says, “Hey, I’m God. I created you. Here’s some things I’d like you to do. Here’s some things I’d like you not to do. Depending on how you do that, we’ll determine-”
Trent Horn:
Well, I guess what would God look like?
Jon Steingard:
I don’t know. God could apparently look like whatever God wants to look like. But what we’re presented with instead is that basically everything I know about God within Christianity has come to me in the form of people telling me things, right. It’s never been direct. It’s never been God revealing himself to me and people have a tendency of not always being right about things and of being… We’re learning more all the time about all these different things. I sort of… Here’s the main… Let’s get to the main crux [crosstalk 00:58:13]
Trent Horn:
But I guess people can sometimes also be wrong about what they immediately experience.
Jon Steingard:
Yes. Yes
Trent Horn:
They think that at 3:00 AM the person breaking, the shadow, is a person breaking into the house. So that’s why, I guess I feel like this concern- [crosstalk 00:58:28]
Jon Steingard:
We’re not always trustworthy.
Trent Horn:
Even ourselves, [crosstalk 00:58:31] so then we could even doubt, for me, if just some being appeared and said, “I’m God, here’s what I want you to do”. I might think-
Jon Steingard:
If we could doubt that too-
Trent Horn:
Is this an alien? Is it Elon Musk? Is it Elon Musk, he actually is an alien, is a theory that I’ve heard, there could be… There are a… Am I having an episode? [inaudible 00:58:52] It seems to be the problem of divine hiddenness it seems like for a lot of people, God is not hidden.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah. I would agree.
Trent Horn:
God could do more to make his existence known. But for me, similarly with evil… The reason… I guess there’s two things I have a problem with the argument. One would just be the basic, well, could God have good reasons for not making his existence obvious.
Jon Steingard:
Yes he could.
Trent Horn:
Right. So then if He has good reasons, then it’s, well, I’m not in a good place to be able to say He doesn’t exist or He is not good, if I can’t see the whole picture like He does. That’s that’s one thing. [crosstalk 00:59:31].
Jon Steingard:
Right, right.
Trent Horn:
The second. Yeah. That’s one, the second is, this idea of relationship, I feel like God could… His goal is to order me towards my goodness and I feel like that could take, that could look in a lot of different ways. That I might encounter God in even acts of virtue and goodness itself. I don’t know when, I think, this will, this might air… Last week in my podcast, I spoke with Joe Schmidt at-
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [01:00:04]
Trent Horn:
Last week in my podcast, I spoke with Joe Schmidt in Majesty of Reason and we talked about… Joe is an agnostic.
Jon Steingard:
Okay.
Trent Horn:
And We talked about divine hiddenness. I’ll send you the interview of that section.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah. I’m interested.
Trent Horn:
What he said, was interesting, was that he doesn’t consider this a good argument for atheism, because he could see ways where we could be in relationship with God, but we’re not consciously aware of the relationship.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Like how an unborn child and a pregnant woman are in a relationship.
Jon Steingard:
They are.
Trent Horn:
And The mother is caring for this child, but the child’s just not aware of it.
Jon Steingard:
Right.
Trent Horn:
I would say similar to an infant, honestly.
Jon Steingard:
Yep.
Trent Horn:
So, I guess those are…
Jon Steingard:
Here’s why it’s important to me, I think that the divine hiddenness thing again, on its own, it’s like, God might have reasons to not reveal himself. But when it is coupled with this decision that Christianity teaches that we’re supposed to make, where we believe in Jesus, when we put our faith in him, and that is our ticket to Heaven. If we fail to do that, we have rejected God, and we would go to hell. Now there is a different philosophies on hell. We could go down that tangent, but we will, [crosstalk 01:01:08]
Trent Horn:
Listen we have to make a choice for God.
Jon Steingard:
There’s some sort of choice involved. To me it’s the coupling of the hiddenness and the choice. This is where I have a problem. Because it’s like God is very mysterious, seems to be more hidden than he could be. And that would be fine if there wasn’t this really consequential choice to make. The fact that according to Christian doctrine, that there is this really consequential choice to make. That puts me in a position where like, do I need to believe in a God that leaves things so mysterious and yet will judge people, if they get it wrong? That feels not loving to me.
Trent Horn:
And what I would say is that I…
Jon Steingard:
There’s two ways out of that, as far as I’m concerned, you could prioritize one over the other. You could be a Universalist. You could say, “God is real”. In the end, God will reconcile all things and all people into himself. That’s one way you could reconcile the problem. The other is that you could deny that God’s hidden. You could say that he is certain [crosstalk 01:02:27].
Trent Horn:
There is a third way that God… his judgment will be based on what people have been given. If people have what is called invincible ignorance. They have an ignorance of God because of something that they don’t have control over. Maybe they were raised in the Soviet Union where their state mandated atheism, It becomes difficult to know God, but even still people might encounter God in conscience, in the moral law, in nature itself. I think somebody like me is going to be judged more than someone who has been given a lot than someone who might be going off less.
Jon Steingard:
Can I ask you a question about that?
Trent Horn:
Yes, then I want to bracket one thing that going about the problem Of his manifestation. But yes, go ahead.
Jon Steingard:
I actually relate peace in nature in that list. I relate to that, I have always felt more connected, more of a sense of awe in nature than any church service or concert or anything I’ve ever been a part of. If there is a place I ever feel like I used to characterize it as experiencing God and now I’m not so sure.
Trent Horn:
I consider this almost an argument against atheism that I would call the problem of gratitude. It’s like when you go to nature, you want to be thankful for it.
Jon Steingard:
Grateful.
Trent Horn:
But to who?
Jon Steingard:
That’s a really good question. I’m sympathetic to people who feel like they are most connected with God in nature, but my response there is that whatever you’re connected to there, it’s not necessarily indicative of the truth of specifically Christian claim.
Trent Horn:
I think one of the things that helps is Emmanuel Kant once said, “Two things fill me with wonder, the starry heavens above and the moral law within.”
Jon Steingard:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn:
I do think, I really do believe that this existence of a universal may not always get all the facts, right. But people seem to be attuned to the moral law. I think that provides a way for them to come to know God. And that’s what Romans chapter two says. Paul says that the Gentiles in Romans 2:14-16, “Those who are not given the law on the stone tablets, had it written on their hearts”, as one of those means. But when I talked about the manifestation, like for sovereign divine hiddenness, I agree. It’s like, “Okay, we’ve got this choice we got to make”, it seems like God can make himself more well-known and makes it easier to make the choice. My concern would be there’s going to be trade-offs here that as God makes himself more known, the ability to make the free choice might be hampered a little bit.
Jon Steingard:
I would disagree with that, but I’ll let you [crosstalk 01:04:54].
Trent Horn:
For example, like when I drive down the freeway and I see a cop car, I don’t slow down because I want to be a good driver to other people and I have this overwhelming moral duty I’m carrying out. I’m just, I don’t want to get caught. C.S. Lewis wrote about this. He wrote a whole article, send it to you. I should just leave these actually what I’m going to send you. I’ll leave them as descriptions in the show description for people to read about C.S. Lewis’s response to divine hiddenness. And one of them saying, “You could doubt things.” We do doubt, whether our personal experience has come from God or us. So it seems like, unless God makes it ridiculously overwhelming. It’s just the glorious golden beatified vision, “Here I am everybody.”
Trent Horn:
But then the problem is it seems like where God has created us to make that choice, it would almost be gone. Here’s what Lewis says, “We can guess why he…” why is God delayed in making it just obvious to everyone. “We can guess why he is delaying. He to give us the chance of joining his side freely. I do not suppose you and I would have thought much of a Frenchman who waited till the allies were marching into Germany and then announced he was on our side. God will invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realize what it will be like when he does.” And so I think that there, if God, other people have called this an epistemic distance that God wants to give us freedom. These include freedoms to come to know him and also just cognitive freedoms to think. With evil, I think the ability to freely choose good and evil is a really good thing. I’m glad God gave us freewill. He could get rid of freewill to get rid of a lot of evil, but that’s kind of a high price to pay for me. I see something similar with divine hiddenness, God could rework our cognitive faculties. So we’re, “Oh, I get it. He’s right there.” But I think it’s also good. He gives us freedom to think for ourselves. So that’s two ways I kind of look at it.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah. I think the Bible has examples of people to whom God revealed himself very specifically. And yet they still retain their freewill, Adam and Eve being an obvious example right now. I believe Adam and Eve is a metaphor and a good one, but you may not feel sure that view.
Trent Horn:
Or you take Moses, take Abraham? You know what’s interesting there? God revealed himself and …
Jon Steingard:
I don’t think it removes our ability to choose.
Trent Horn:
I think it might remove some ability to choose, like to believe whether someone does exist or not.
Jon Steingard:
But why make that a possibility?
Trent Horn:
I think that it might be helpful to have a situation where people freely choose to enter into relationship or not, versus… Because even in those examples, the angels, Moses, people can know full well, God exists and still not obey him.
Jon Steingard:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn:
I think this is not controversial at all. For example, I know that eating right and exercising is good for me. I know that, I have no doubt. I have no doubt that if I cut out flour and sugar and I ran 30 minutes a day, I would be better. And I just haven’t done it yet.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah, that’s a good point.
Trent Horn:
That’s interesting. I have no doubt about that, but I haven’t moved to the will for that. So I do think that you’re right. For me, even if God made his existence obvious, and not even that though, just like his power and threat of punishment, a lot of people might just be going along with the program.
Trent Horn:
It might not be something that God wants, that he wants more… That it’s not just about choosing to obey or disobey as I’m thundering over you, but choosing to enter into and to seek out relationship. And the other thing might be, why would God allow this ambiguity? I think there’s a kind of a beauty in sharing faith with other people. Like when I guide my children into coming to know God and to know who he is and what God wants from them, and then God made them and he loves them, sharing it with them has been a real treat, which is something I would not have if God just got to do the for me. I think I see the problems we wrestle with. And I think there’s a difference between wrestling with a problem that bothers you and something that defeats belief.
Trent Horn:
Like for me, when you tell me about the Batwa people?
Jon Steingard:
Oh. Batwa.
Trent Horn:
Batwa people?
Jon Steingard:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn:
Yeah. When you tell them about the Batwa people, I wrestle, why am I feeling comfortable and well, and they’re not. I wrestle and struggle and it makes me upset, but not to the point of defeating one of my key beliefs.
Jon Steingard:
Right.
Trent Horn:
I think sometimes we can have the wrestling. The question is, does it defeat a key belief or not? Maybe we have to wrestle with it. There’s other ways of dealing with.
Jon Steingard:
And that didn’t stand alone for me, it was just one piece of a journey. And a lot of the things that you’re talking about. I believe in goodness, and I’ve been chasing it my whole life.
Trent Horn:
What would you say goodness is?
Jon Steingard:
I think getting back to the basics of existence, right? I’m pretty sure I’m here. I have experiences. There’s certainly experiences that feel a lot better than others for me, pleasure and pain, but then there’s also really rewarding experiences that might not be so as…
Trent Horn:
I think what’s interesting, there is, you would see, there are pains. I should prefer over certain pleasures.
Jon Steingard:
Okay. So that gets layered because, on a basic level, there’s hedonistic pleasure and pain, but then, you talked about health is a good example. Why do people go to the gym? The gym can be painful. It’s not always fun, but you know there’s a greater good that comes from it. So our sense of reason enters into this.
Trent Horn:
Yeah.
Jon Steingard:
But I can see that I’m not the only human being, around here. I know there’s the problem of other minds, but that aside. It’s reasonable to assume other people, there’s a bunch of people in this room right now that we’re all living, having experiences. It’s intuitive to me to believe that the things that make my life seem better to me probably there’s some similarities with other people. The more we live in community, the more that things that help you also help me. And there’s this general sense of not just surviving, but thriving.
Trent Horn:
It was kind of a pragmatic approach to morality.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah. I suspect this is how morality came about, because if you look at the animal kingdom, non-human animals, animals… There’s lots of examples of apparently moral behavior. We don’t believe that wolves that have an alpha male disagreement, they’re having a scuff, a scuff up. One of them wins over the other and has every opportunity to rip the other males, throw it out. But the other one submits the alpha male. They have these moral seeming behaviors that are just based on instinct.
Trent Horn:
And I agree with you. What’s interesting is this kind of goes, Lewis also brings up something like this, about morality being an instinct. And he says, morality could not be an instinct any more than a song sheet could be the keys on a piano. Morality tells us which, just as a song, she tells us which notes at which time the morality tells us which instinct at which time. Cause we have instincts like fight or flight. Sometimes fight is a good instinct. Not that it’s a bad instinct. Flight can be good if you got to get help and it could be cowardly if you need to stay and get the job done. So I would say that I agree with you that human beings, as they evolved over time, discovered certain behaviors that were useful and not
Jon Steingard:
I think that hose behaviors existed before our articulations of reasoning about them.
Trent Horn:
But I also think that it doesn’t follow from that that morality is simply a product of evolution, that it could be that these are trues that exist prior…
Jon Steingard:
That’s true.
Trent Horn:
For example, I think the human beings evolved to get good at math. Like we didn’t have all the mathematical truths at the beginning. The very beginning with shepherds, they’re counting, when sheep would enter a pen, they would stack rocks. And then when the sheep left, they would take the rocks back to let them know. That was very basic primitive, counting. Then we develop more complex. The middle ages, we discovered algebra from the middle east, aljabr, and then calculus and then finally contour and set theory. We discovered more of these things, but they all…all the mathematical truths pre-existed everything. So it’s not like we make, we found them. And so for me then…
Jon Steingard:
That’s clearly true in a sense.
Trent Horn:
But for morality, if the truths like you ought to do good, especially they feel like a blaring command, you ought to do good and avoid evil. Even things that might benefit our survival, like euthanizing disabled children, which would benefit the herd. But I would say we have a moral command. No, you must care and provide for the weakest among you. I would say evolution, we stumbled across these moral truths, but they were articulated long before, when the universe was created. And so for me they’re imperative quality of saying, “You got to do this.” Nobody can make me do something unless they are a source of authority, like in in an inorganic, inanimate object can’t make me do anything, but people can do that. That’s why I see it, how I see it kind of pointing to God a little bit more.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah. And I could see that. And again, I would almost even agree depending on how we define God, there’s the definition of God as ground of being, which I think is really interesting. Like maybe not a person.
Trent Horn:
I would say that God, and this goes back to the classical atheism. I would say, God is not a person, but he has personal qualities. So God is not a mind. He is not an intellect, but he is…
Jon Steingard:
It’s interesting, because I think a lot of people would say that God’s a disembodied mind.
Trent Horn:
Yes I would be someone like Richard Swinburne. [crosstalk 01:15:31] But I would say that God has intellect, will. He is the ground of being. And so God has moral concerns for us, for our good, he’s not as an inanimate object, but he is just so different from us. He’s not like a person, but he does have these personal qualities, like intellect, grasping truths, desiring certain goods for us. Before we wrap to a close, let’s go to Christianity itself now. Because it’s helpful to see the openness to theme and where atheism, where the journey has taken you. And it seems like when you look at Christianity for you, it’s like Christianitise.
Jon Steingard:
Oh, for sure.
Trent Horn:
So it’s more like you see a lot of these versions. Are there any that are more, what’s the word I’m looking for here?
Jon Steingard:
Enticing?
Trent Horn:
Yeah, enticing or intelligible than others that you’ve been interested by?
Jon Steingard:
This is going to sound like I’m pandering. But I think Catholicism is a really interesting.
Trent Horn:
Did you hear that, folks? No, but that’s what was interesting that Graham Oppy, who is a well-known [crosstalk 01:16:42] atheist, when [Lang Craig 01:16:42] calls him scary, smart. I was reading an article of his saying, “If we’re going to examine the theologies, perhaps we ought to look at the theology of the Catholic church, one of the most robust theologies in Christian history”, that he actually had, it was in a review to an article by J.P. Moreland. But even he… And of my friends that really theology have said similar things about orthodoxy and Catholicism about that. Why do you say that?
Jon Steingard:
There’s a couple of things. I think it feels a little bit less brittle than some of the perspectives that I grew up with and this sort of charismatic, evangelical, protestant space. I say brittle, because I think there’s some protestant, circles that cling to this kind of biblical inerrancy that feels really desperate to me, but it’s just like it’s anxious and terrified that there’s going to be a problem. So we have to blanket it with this false certainty. Whereas like the Catholic church has a long history of leading, not just on scripture, but also on tradition. The tradition of having a Pope goes all the way back to Peter.
Trent Horn:
Essentially the Bible comes from the church, not the church from the Bible.
Jon Steingard:
Right. And I think the protestant church has it the other way.
Trent Horn:
When the church comes from the Bible, you get really defensive like, “Hey, don’t mess with my Bible. You’re going to mess with my church.” Whereas for us, you would say, “Well, God’s word comes to us in a written and unwritten form.” And that you’re right. That I would say that the Catholic Church does believe in an errancy. We believe that…
Jon Steingard:
It just doesn’t feel the same.
Trent Horn:
Yes, we would say that the Bible is fully divine and it’s inspiration, but fully human in its composition. And so God allow the human authors to use their insights, to write a scripture. And part of that is God allowed them to retain, for example, incorrect, scientific views about the world, because that was not pressing for him as a part of his communicate. I think it was a medieval Cardinal, he was Caesar Baronius once said, “God wants to teach people how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.”
Jon Steingard:
Oh, wow. That’s a cool way of saying it.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. So that was I think Caesar Baronius, might’ve been during the Galileo controversy actually. And so when I read scripture, it’s helpful that I see that I do, and that I firmly reject, and I think it’s unfortunate to see some protestants, not all, but some fundamentalists take like a dictation view. Like the Bible is just… God just told you write this down. Which to me is clearly false. For example, in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, he says, “I baptized the households of Crispus and Gaius and Stephanas. But after that, I don’t know if I baptized anyone else.” God certainly knew. He’s letting Paul use his own thoughts. And there’s other examples in scripture, like when you read Luke’s gospel, I love Luke’s Gospel, has a lot of little nods to medicine. He has a lot of healing stories. He has a lot of interests. He uses the correct Greek terms. Whereas other evangelists will use just more generic terms for fever or things like that. Luke uses the very specific terms.
Jon Steingard:
He was very likely the only New Testament author that wasn’t Jewish, right?
Trent Horn:
Yes. He he would have been the Gentile. But it’s interesting to what he says, uses these terms. And then about the woman who had a hemorrhage for 12 years. Mark says she spent all her money on physicians and they made her worse. And then Luke just says, no physicians could help her. He leaves out the little part about them making her worse. So they tell the same story.
Jon Steingard:
I never noticed that.
Trent Horn:
And you think, “Oh, because he’s a doctor and he’s like, ‘give us a break’.” But I love seeing scripture in that way and not being confined in that sense. And so that can be helpful, but I don’t believe… I do believe that scripture is preserved for what God had put into it for the sake of our salvation. It is free from error, but that doesn’t mean that the evangelists… They could write stories and vary the details. The old Testament has a mixture of a symbolic imagery, like Genesis one through 11, for example, it’s like either it’s a total myth metaphor. I reject that dichotomy it’s metaphor, or it’s a newspaper account of what happened. I like the genre, epic poetry.
Jon Steingard:
Okay. It’s definitely poetic.
Trent Horn:
Yes. And some people say myth in the truest sense, but we think a myth is false. I like epic poetry because it’s true, but you can have fun with the details. For example, the poem, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. It’s like, “The British are coming, the British are coming.” That’s not what happened because first the colonists would be like, “Oh, we were British.” Because they thought of themselves as British, you wouldn’t be shouting that. And if it’s a secret message, he’s not going to be shouting it to everybody with people who would be sympathizes, but he did go on this ride to Concord. It did happen. But the poem that Midnight Ride of Paul Revere is an epic way of telling the story with details that are not literal. And so the Catholic Church teaches that the account of the fall in Genesis for example, describes a real event, but it uses non-literal language. And so I believe that we had first parents, we have fallen, we’re supposed to be better, of all the animals species, we’re the only ones that are cruel. I know some animals are just wickedly predatorial.
Trent Horn:
Only humans get the cake for just being just cruel sometimes. And that we have fallen from a place we ought to be. And Christianity gives me my hope of getting them back to that. But any who, go ahead.
Jon Steingard:
Just to put a bow on kind of that, I think where I’ve evolved is, I’m less concerned with what is metaphysically true these days. And I’m more concerned with, how do I live a good life and how do I live… What do I spend my time doing? And so, more recently, that’s been spending less time on social media and more time with my family. I’ve been texting with close friends more instead of going on Twitter. And I’ve been trying to dig into, like I said earlier, I’ve been chasing goodness my whole life. And I really do believe that there are better ways of living than… There are ways that are better than other ways. Right?
Trent Horn:
Sure. It’s always interesting. Better is a relative term. Better at what?
Jon Steingard:
I think better at promoting the flourishing of human and animals.
Trent Horn:
That one gets us to an interesting thing in your ethical journey. Should we privilege human flourishing over non-human flourishing?
Jon Steingard:
That’s one of the things I’ve evolved on too, is in studying evolution. I realized that we’re a part of the animal kingdom, not nearly as separate as I had imagined growing up. And so I became vegetarian a year ago and I don’t eat meat anymore. But that’s sort of an aside. I look at it and I go, “Okay, in my life, I have experienced things that feel good. And that seemed good to me. And that are worth chasing and participating in goodness for myself, for my family, for others, for my community, for my country, for humanity, for species that are not human.” And if there is a source of that goodness, then I want to get closer to it.
Trent Horn:
Would you say that you have a duty to be good?
Jon Steingard:
Not that I’m aware of, but I think that if I behave in ways that we would call not good, that there are consequences for both myself and people that I care about.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. And so for me, the way I…
Jon Steingard:
Consequences that I would call natural causes.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. I guess the way I look at like moral consequences versus non-moral consequences. I agree, there’s consequences that I have, ever since the pandemic, let myself go a little bit. But they’re not… They hang around me, but they’re not… But it’s not like guilt. [crosstalk 01:25:16]
Trent Horn:
Oh, man. But it’s not like guilt. When I have a moral consequence, it’s like I have failed. Not just myself. I failed being someone I ought to be. I have a failure to an accountability to somebody else, because it’s like, if you do something and it feels bad, there’s different things you could do about it. Like if I have a pair of shoes that feels bad, I just buy new shoes. If there are moral rules and I break them and it makes me feel bad, I’ll just get new moral rules. It’s like I can get new shoes, but I can’t get new moral rules. And some people do do it. And there’s bad people who just totally rationalize and they’ll come up with things like, “Well, look, if they’re going to be an idiot, then I don’t feel bad taking advantage of them.”
Trent Horn:
People came up with these kinds of… But I think you and I would agree. No, no, no, no, no, no. With morality, we ought to be good. And I think it’s commendable. You want to pursue goodness, even at great cost, like becoming a vegetarian for example, and that everyone should do that. And I think, for me, my encouragement for you and for others would be is that I believe God just is the good, I don’t know how much of Plato you might’ve read.
Jon Steingard:
A little.
Trent Horn:
Here’s interesting. A lot of people in my tradition are more Aristotle. He was the foundation for Aquinas. Everybody. I love Plato because he’s easier to read. And he’s fun. And Plato talked about the form of the good. It’s just everything we see that is good in this world is a shadow or a reflection of it. So you’re right. We want to go towards that goodness. To me, it’s going to have some kind of perfect ultimate quality to it. You call a god or a not or wherever you want. Maybe part of the journey, you just might be, “God, if you’re goodness itself helped me to be good.” Because for me, I make the phone…
Jon Steingard:
I’m on board with that.
Trent Horn:
….I make the call and I don’t hear an audible answer back, but I feel it in just being moved.
Jon Steingard:
I’ve studied part of my journey is that I’ve looked at a lot of the different world religions and I wouldn’t consider myself someone who says the… Like the truth claims of all religions are all true. Like I’m not a relativist in that sense.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Because you can’t go to heaven hell purgatory and be reincarnated and go to nothing at the same time.
Jon Steingard:
Right. Right. But I see in each of these traditions, areas in which they’ve richly reflected the questions that people were asking, what does it mean to be a good person, as we talked about, what does it mean to live a good life? What should we aim for? What should we strive for? And this ideal that we hold up for ourselves, of the person we know we could be? That’s something that you see all across all cultures.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. And so for me, and that’s interesting that the Catholic Church teaches, we don’t deny what is holy and true in other religions. And so what I would say is…
Jon Steingard:
Another reason I like about [crosstalk 01:28:28].
Trent Horn:
Yeah. What I would say is there are going to be belief systems that are closer and further to the truth. I think Hindus and Buddhists are right. There’s a transcendent reality. I think Muslims and Jews are right, that that reality is one infinite God. And then it starts narrowing to Christianity, God revealed himself and gathers and guides us into that. So hopefully, maybe we could sit down again and talk about Bible, Jesus, Christianity as a… I don’t know.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah. I definitely spent a lot of time on new Testament specifically, but sometimes that can kind of get into the weeds and that’s interesting for…
Trent Horn:
But for me, it ultimately comes down to, if we do believe in theism in God, God is goodness itself. And it pulls us towards him. We’ve got all these different religions. It’s like, how do you pick between them? What’s helpful for me is, they all have a answer to who Jesus is. So Hindus would say he might be a guru. Muslim say he’s a prophet. Jews say he’s a rabbi. Every religion does have an answer. Every non-Christian religion denies Jesus’s resurrection and his divinity. So for me, it’s like, if I can figure out that question…
Jon Steingard:
Sometimes politely.
Trent Horn:
Yes. If I can figure out that question, either Christianity is off the table, if he’s not.
Jon Steingard:
And Paul said as much.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Or the rest are off the table, at least they’re not the fullness of the truth.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah. And I agree with you. And I spent a lot of time thinking about the resurrection, because I agree with Paul on that one. That’s a necessary component.
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:30:04]
Jon Steingard:
I agree with Paul on that one. That’s a necessary component, that has to be true for Christianity to be true. And I don’t find myself convinced on that. So.
Trent Horn:
Well, let’s take a tiny little bit just why aren’t you convinced and then we’ll wrap up.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah. I mean, I think Jesus didn’t obviously leave us any of his own writing, so we have other people’s writings to go on. And those writings, there’s not enough there for me to have certainty that this thing that never happens as far as I can see- a person coming back to life, this thing that is outside our normal understanding of how things work. I would need, like Hume, his whole thing of extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Jon Steingard:
Like I, that’s how I feel toward the resurrection and every argument I’ve heard for it just falls short for me. I know there’s the minimal facts, arguments and the various ways to approach it. But I just think there’s enough. I have enough question marks about what I see in the Bible on the resurrection. When you get into the resurrection appearances between the Gospels, those are some of the things that, where you see the most divergence, in between the Gospels.
Trent Horn:
Do you mean at the end about Jesus? Oh, like the appearances to the women or the [01:31:37].
Jon Steingard:
Right. And like, did they go to Galilee or did they stay in Jerusalem depending on,
Trent Horn:
Yeah and that’s where like, my view of scripture, looking in, for that, I would say, well, Luke is probably like, when he’s describing, he telescopes a narrative. To me, I would just look at it as well.
Trent Horn:
Did Jesus exist and was he crucified?
Jon Steingard:
I think that’s true. Yeah.
Trent Horn:
And, but, the reason we know that is from writings. Like it’s interesting, a claim of resurrection essentially is a conjunction of two claims. Well, three claims. Somebody was alive.
Jon Steingard:
Somebody died.
Trent Horn:
Somebody died and then somebody was alive again. So it’s interesting if we-
Jon Steingard:
I’m fine with the first two.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. But I guess then it’s like, how do we, then the third claim is alive again. But it’s like, how do we, what evidence do we get to believe that somebody is alive? It’s usually I saw so-and-so. I agree, it’s more extraordinary this time around, the live and it died previously. But also, I think the evidence rises up more in the sincerity, the willingness to evangelize in the face of persecution, conversions towards this.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah, I think that the martyrdom of the Apostles’ argument is really over-emphasized.
Trent Horn:
I think it’s misused.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah. Like we only really have concrete. We only really know for sure about Peter and Paul and there’s conjecture about more Apostles. And then.
Trent Horn:
Well, Sean wrote that whole book.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah. Sean’s a good friend. So, all I say. You’re right. I agree, it does not prove Christianity. I would say.
Trent Horn:
Not even the martyrdom. You can say, if you read an ax or in Paul’s letters. Paul’s letters seem to make it very clear. People who promoted Christianity, experienced persecution from their fellow Jews. And it’s interesting that the intra-Jewish debate could be very heated. When you read in the dead sea scrolls, they call down curses on other Jews. And it’s just like infighting among Christians. We could, some, they say really mean things to each other. It seems clear to me that they did, whether it was martyrdom or at least persecution in life, it shows their sincerity.
Trent Horn:
That’s it.
Jon Steingard:
So for me, I’ve been caught up in movements of the spirit. That, where I’ve witnessed groups of people be very certain about things, that I don’t think are true. If you look at the 2020 election, right after the 2020 election, you had literally half the country, not, we’ve all just witnessed something. Right. Witnessed, remotely. But like half of the country didn’t even agree on what just happened. And so, and they’re ardent about it. And so, I just see tons of examples in life, of people who believe they’ve experienced something, or word gets passed around. Like, one of the things with the appearances is that you really only need to have two, like Peter and Paul, if they’re ex, if they both had like bereavement, you know, post bereavement experiences, it’s very easy for me to imagine a scenario where they told the other Apostles and the story evolved over time.
Jon Steingard:
Where, now lots of, now that 500.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Let me, let me back the pedals a little bit today. So with your analogy, I think that you and I would agree, everybody agrees, an election happened. People disagree about it’s, some people questioned integrity, and things like that. They question elements of an event we all agree happened. So to make the analogy with the resurrection, it would be like, well, I think we can agree that the Apostles, Paul and the other Apostles, had some kind of an experience. So then it becomes, then it comes down to. You’re right, with the resurrection what best explains this experience that they had, that either it is veridical, it’s something that really did happen or there’s some other natural explanation. Like you say, bereavement, and this has happened to me, actually. I had a friend who died when she was 19.
Trent Horn:
I gave the eulogy at her funeral. And I had like this dream that we sat in the foot of the. Yeah. I had this dream. We sat at the foot of my bed and we were talking and it felt like totally real.
Jon Steingard:
That’s wild.
Trent Horn:
You know? Yeah. That was the hardest, I’m a public speaker. That was the hardest speech I ever gave, was doing a eulogy at her. It was just very sudden. And then, I had a, it wasn’t a daytime experience, but this felt like a very vivid dream. And I woke up sitting in my bed. I’m like, did that happen? But it’s interesting that most people, like when you do studies on bereavement, like something like one fifth or once like a decent number of people have what they think are encounters with the deceased.
Trent Horn:
Now I think actually, number one, that could be strong evidence of an afterlife. And number two, though, most of those people, when you ask them, do you think that person rose from the dead? They said, oh, no, I don’t. I don’t think that. So I, so for me, it’s hard to say it’s just, well, I think bereavement might explain like Peter and maybe some of the other Apostles.
Jon Steingard:
Doesn’t explain Paul.
Trent Horn:
Doesn’t explain Paul. And I’m not even sure. Go ahead though.
Jon Steingard:
But. And this is the point that I sort of came on later in my journey. It’s like, Paul’s experience is different than the disciples experiences. It’s after the Ascension. So, which is something that I, no one ever talked about growing up. So it’s like, okay, Jesus ascended to heaven. But then he appeared to Paul later than that. And the writings, the descriptions of that appearance, they seem very much like a vision.
Jon Steingard:
Now I know they have, there’s mention of other people, like sometimes hearing there’s two different ways to [crosstalk 01:37:27] look at it.
Trent Horn:
There’s two, there’s Paul’s own description of his conversion in Galatians, which isn’t as explicit as Luke’s description in Acts- chapter 9, 22.
Jon Steingard:
Well, there’s three descriptions in the Acts.
Trent Horn:
There are three descriptions in acts. And I, I’m not the [crosstalk 01:37:40] same. Well, I would say once again, I would say that they’re, they differ, they differ in the details. When you hear like that, there is, what they agree on is that Paul had some kind of an encounter with Jesus and those who were with him recognize something was happening, but did not have the same encounter. And so I take, I think there’s good historical evidence for Luke’s account in there that Luke was a traveling companion of Paul and he’s, he’s faithfully. Like we see in parts of acts, it switches to the first person plural.
Jon Steingard:
Right, and that’s when they separated.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. When Luke was traveling with Paul and, and things like that. So when they’re traveling together saying we did this, and it’s very, very vivid, he vividly describes a shipwreck in Acts 27. So combining Galatians and Acts 9 and Acts 22, it seems clear that something happens to Paul. And he has this encounter that is not strictly an internal experience. Because when you talk about visions, like in Acts and other places like Paul says, for example, later in Acts, I had, I had, I saw a man from Macedonia when I had a vision in the night. And so there, it seems like they did understand visions. And when those visions happen, they use that language. Like a vision in the night is what we would call a dream, but that same kind of language isn’t used for the other encounters.
Trent Horn:
But I’m helpful. I think we’re, we are getting to the focal, which is they had some experience. It’s either the real deal or it isn’t, what best explains what’s going on.
Jon Steingard:
Sure. Yeah, and what I come back to there is that, what have I seen more? Have I seen stories evolve from a seed to something much bigger or have I seen people rise from the dead? And I’ve seen the first a lot more often. And so, and then I look at the New Testament and I see lots of places where it does seem to me, and you might disagree, it seems to me like the story has evolved over time. Like, so you can look at the four gospels and the earliest one written is the most humble, the simplest. And doesn’t have the Mark, doesn’t have the Virgin Birth.
Jon Steingard:
Doesn’t originally have any resurrection appearances until you get the long ending, which was added later. And I learned that.
Trent Horn:
Well, let me. Let me jump in on that. First, I would say Mark does have, he has a resurrection. It’s very.
Jon Steingard:
It tells about the resurrection, it doesn’t have appearance.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. And so the question of what happened in Mark’s Gospel, we actually don’t know if a part [crosstalk 01:40:23] was lost, right? Because if these are scrolls and they’re rolled up and the ends, the beginning and ends, will meet each other right here. If that part, or if Mark is purposely doing something with a literary device, where he’s purposely saying, ‘Go’, he’s telling, I think it’s to Mary Magdalene, ‘Go and tell Peter and the others, as I told you where I would be’. And it says, and then they ran and said nothing. Now.
Jon Steingard:
And then cliff hanger.
Trent Horn:
Right. But it doesn’t mean they literally said nothing. Because where did the story come from? It’s like in Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory, when Charlie finds the golden ticket, ‘Run home son, don’t tell anyone you found the ticket’. Well, clearly he did. He goes back to the thing later. It means they were scared. So they didn’t tell any passerbys on the way.
Jon Steingard:
But my overarching point there is that you have Mark and then you have Matthew and Luke, which add the Virgin Birth story. And then you have some time in between, 10 years, whatever, however you want to date them, 10 years or so. And then you have another 10 or 15 years and you have the Gospel of John, which is the most developed, theologically. It’s a completely different type of document.
Jon Steingard:
And I mean to my eye, I see evolution. I see an evolution.
Trent Horn:
I’ll tell you what. I see something different. So number one, I would say actually our earliest account is actually horrendous. Because Paul talks about Jesus appearing to 500 people, to the 12. So I would say Paul’s account, which is the earliest we have, is a very grand account, if you look at it in that way. Number two, with John, I see a complimentary account. It’d be like, you might have people talking about your life as a musician and your faith, what you’re doing. And if they’re using similar sources, they might talk about, kind of like, your public appearances and songs you would share and like stories, same stories you would kind of tell in group settings. And then if though, if that’s been out there for a while, so I might, I’m going to write about John’s conversion, but there’s another side of him, you’re not, you don’t know as well.
Trent Horn:
Like having these deep; feel like some people might just see you on social media and the music you do and not realize, wow, this guy has got some real deep insights on theology here. And you would think, you’re like, well, I’m a multifaceted person here, people. You can’t just look at me as just on, some of this, because I agree with you. It can be jarring to read Mark and then read John. And you’re like, who is, is this the same? Jesus.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah. But I think the tone is so different.
Trent Horn:
But I think though, that it’s like, if someone were to, with any of us, you might see different facets of a person in different environments, that are drawn out. And so.
Jon Steingard:
But I think for each person and who looks at this stuff, they have to sort of ask themselves the question.
Jon Steingard:
Do I think that this is someone showing another side of Jesus? Or do I think this is evidence that the story evolved over time and I find the second one more.
Trent Horn:
And there’s another hybrid to it. So, when you read the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, for example.
Jon Steingard:
I’m not familiar.
Trent Horn:
He’s. There’s two big ancient Greek historians, Herodotus, and Thucydides. Herodotus is fun to read and he’s not as reliable. Thucydides is more accurate.
Jon Steingard:
It’s probably what makes him fun.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, exactly. So, he talked about how you preserve speeches in the ancient world and discourses and teachings. And he said, ‘Some of them, I was there, but I didn’t remember the whole thing. So I wrote what I thought the person would say, what was most true to their words’. And so I think when we read the Gospels and you see Jesus giving these long discourses, it may not be word for word what he said, but what is preserved, is the essence of it.
Trent Horn:
And John is giving it to us in this kind of robust language. Now I think it’s very true to a Jesus. Its almost like ‘Trent’s a heretic’. I’m not. I know I’m not. Because when you look at. Let’s take the baptism of Jesus, what does the father say at the baptism?
Jon Steingard:
Well, it depends on where you go.
Trent Horn:
Right, but Mark and Luke say, this is my beloved son with whom I am. You are my beloved son with whom I am well-pleased. Matthew says, this is my beloved son. So.
Jon Steingard:
I think there’s some texts somewhere that says today, I have begottten you.
Trent Horn:
Oh, mine might be a very variant manuscript.
Jon Steingard:
I think it is.
Trent Horn:
The Gospel of the Ebionites.
Jon Steingard:
Some people have made a big deal about that point.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Well, the Gospel of the Ebionites, an ancient text, has Gods saying both things.
Trent Horn:
It tries to fix the contradiction.
Jon Steingard:
The question was, when did Jesus become the son of God?
Trent Horn:
Right. And so my point though, there is, that in that historical episode, the evangelist Matthew, Mark and Luke. They changed the words, but they preserve the essence of the meaning, which is just, Jesus is the Father’s beloved son. So when I look at that, I don’t. I see a common thread running through, but I agree when we go back to the resurrection appearances. To me, this would be a larger conversation for another time, perhaps. I do think, oh, I knew another point I wanted to raise, the other concern, about frequency. I am concerned about making judgments about things based on the frequency of them happening. So for example, if British. Let’s say it, like it’s the 17th century and captain James Cook goes to Tahiti and meets the Polynesians.
Trent Horn:
And they’re like, so what is life like in Britain? He says, oh, well, this time of year, you can walk across the lake. The Polynesians would say, they would, it’s like how many times did the Polynesian see someone walk across the lake? Zero. And in the entire history of their people. But, if you had enough evidence, it’s like, oh, you can overcome that. Or to believe that there was a big bang.
Jon Steingard:
Sure. So I mean, what you’re talking about is like the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic probability. Right? And so.
Trent Horn:
Right. So something. And also to determine intrinsic probability, if it’s just frequency, I would be concerned because there could be infrequent things that are not that improbable.
Jon Steingard:
Well, there are things that happen every day that are improbable. So you’re entirely right. I agree with you on that.
Jon Steingard:
The only thing is that when you’re assessing, when you have incomplete information. If you’re going to believe that something that almost never happens or you’ve never seen happen, happened, you’ve got a lot more to overcome, than when you’re going like, Hey, this thing that, that happens a lot more often may have happened. There’s less of that thing to overcome.
Trent Horn:
Then for me, it becomes, when I put forward the hypothesis. The proposal. Here’s what happens. Here’s the effects we observe. It’s like, we have the writings of Paul, Ryan’s, the other Apostles, the growth of the church. We all agree on the effects, there was a Christianity. So, then it becomes. All right, I’m going to put in my proposal of the cause of these effects. I think the resurrection explanation is, what has a lot going for it is, I think it has good scope.
Trent Horn:
It explains them all. It has power like, ‘Oh yeah, I can imagine these effects coming from this cause’. The only thing where people have problems with it is that it would be ad hoc. It’s like, ‘Oh, we don’t see resurrections a lot’, but I don’t think it’s something invented just to explain away what’s going on here. I agree with you. We should take the simpler explanations when we can. For example, when I was in college, my bike got stolen. Cause I had a crummy little lock and it could have been bike thieves or Martians. And both just zapped at my bike. Both do explain the effects, but one is preferable because I’m familiar with bike thieves. That’s a part of my framework. Though I guess so, for the resurrection I am; If God does exist and he; I’m familiar with God and you know, the idea that God exists and care about us, that kind of factors into it a little bit too. But I think, I do agree with the harder to believe, in the resurrection.
Trent Horn:
If you, I don’t know how you believe in the resurrection, if you didn’t believe in God.
Jon Steingard:
I mean, I know people that do actually. Paul, a polytheist friend of mine. He doesn’t believe in a singular God. He believes in Gods. So he actually grants the resurrection and still doesn’t believe in the truth of Christianity, which is a really interesting position. And he’s actually really sharp about the way he argues it. I don’t agree with him, but.
Trent Horn:
If Jesus rose from the dead, if you were convinced to that, you’d probably be like, okay, I think I’m back on board. I don’t know.
Jon Steingard:
I mean, probably? I don’t know. The way that I approach Christianity now, one of the things that I’ve softened on a lot is that like I see that religions and religious communities are, they do a lot. And so, especially now being someone who’s sort of separated myself from any particular religion, particularly Christianity, I don’t go to church.
Jon Steingard:
I don’t have a church that I’m a part of. There is a bit of a sense of isolation there, and my wife and I have grieved a little bit. Most of our, I mean, all of our family is Christian, a lot of our friends are Christian. With some friends, it doesn’t feel like it’s put a barrier between us. With other friends, it kind of has. But there isn’t that regular meeting that a church body gives you, that regular coming together, and that holds a lot of value. And then also, when you’re living your life, we’ve talked about this a bunch, like how do we make decisions on how we should live? What makes a good life? Religion can help religions. Christianity, in this case.
Jon Steingard:
It can help give you some direction, a way of orienting your life. And that’s something that you lose when you walk away from it. And so I’ve wrestled with that. So there are ways, there are things that faith, Christianity, religion does for individuals and communities that are meaningful. And so that’s been the entry point for me of going like, okay, there’s a reason why basically every society that’s ever come about in humanity’s history has had an associated religion. It’s doing something. And that something.
Trent Horn:
Well, people are naturally social creatures. They’ll bond together. And I think even people that are not religious will find things to try to organize themselves.
Jon Steingard:
Yeah, there can be rituals that are non-religious, that, I have developed, I’m not going to say friends, but I’ve had conversations with Sasha Sagan, who’s the daughter of Carl Sagan.
Jon Steingard:
She has a book called ‘For Small Creatures Such As We’, which is about the value of rituals from a completely secular perspective and how they can bring meaning to our lives and stuff like that. So I look at those things and I go, like, I find myself a little bit humbled by my approach over the last couple of years going like, okay, like how many times have I been willing to throw out the baby with the bath water? Not sure how much baby is in that bath water, you know? And so I.
Trent Horn:
There might be more you could salvage from Christianity than you realized.
Jon Steingard:
I mean, I think there are expressions. There are Christians that I’m friends with whose faith motivates them to live a life that I admire and who wouldn’t maybe be living exactly that way, if it wasn’t for their faith.
Jon Steingard:
So for instance, in like the [Boardwalk 01:52:02] Community that I mentioned. The organization I went with is a Christian organization. And every time they do good stuff there, they’re saying, you know, this is God, God is doing this. And I look at it and I go like, well, I see you doing it and I’m glad you’re doing it, but they’re very clearly motive, their motivations are intertwined with their faith. And I really admire that.
Trent Horn:
And I guess what I would see is, I see both. It’s like, if I listen to a symphony, I’m not like, oh, man, that trombone was great. Well, that trombone, of course it sounds great. It’s been maintained. It’s also, [crosstalk 01:52:35] but there’s the player. The player is what sustains it through. And I don’t think we’re mere instruments that we can; we can cooperate. That’s the thing, we cooperate with God.
Trent Horn:
We’re not able to do that. So yeah, I guess that, I really enjoyed this conversation and I’m very heartened to see your openness, how it will take you away, and then maybe back a little bit, and there’s that openness, I think is commendable and is what I would hope anybody who is asking questions like these will say, okay, I’m just not going to be locked in a certain box. I’m going to follow the evidence, whether it presents as rational argument and it might even present itself in a non-rational way to say, oh, I see the faith in a different light now.
Jon Steingard:
I’m actually not against that either. I mean, I think a lot of my atheist friends are, they tend to stick to reason and there’s a general distaste for anything sort of mystical sometimes in that community.
Jon Steingard:
And so I get a little bit teased, cause they’re like, oh, you like John, you like the woo woo stuff. And I’m like, I like a little woo woo.
Trent Horn:
Like life is just.
Jon Steingard:
Well, life is mysterious. And you have these moments that are beautiful.
Trent Horn:
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your worldly philosophies” says Hamlet.
Jon Steingard:
Is that Hamlet?
Trent Horn:
Yes. That’s where Hamlet and his friend Horatio are debating whether or not they really saw his dead father who has come back to tell him to avenge him as his brother killed him. I only know that because my, my son loves reciting Hamlet to me. He’s got this, well, not, please, not a savant, but like he has this kid’s Shakespeare.
Jon Steingard:
That’s really cool. When I have experiences with my kids, when I’m spending time with my kids, I have this sense all the time where I’ll be with my son or my daughter.
Jon Steingard:
Usually this happens when it’s more one-on-one, when you have those one-on-one times with one of your kids, and it’s just like, you’re just, like the moment everything slows down, you know that this moment matters. And so I’m just having a moment like this and like the word sacred feels right.
Trent Horn:
And I would say, that when I’m in that moment with my kids, I feel a deep, that’s probably some of my deepest religious sense, is the sense that you were entrusted to me. You were entrusted.
Jon Steingard:
Scares the crap out of me.
Trent Horn:
But because of that, I know God has given me, he will give me the abilities. God does not call the equipped, he equips the call. And so when I see that, I think that can be a huge point that, to see God and I’m being the father to my children, helps me to understand who my father is in heaven, who longs for that relationship with me.
Trent Horn:
And maybe I am entering into that relationship with them unknowingly when I’m being the father of the children that He; they’re with me for that, they exist. They have immortal souls they’ve been entrusted. And he gave them to me because, and he gave them to you, because he knows you’re the right person for it.
Jon Steingard:
Well, I keep coming back to this. I feel like in my time as a Christian, I was always separating the sacred and the secular, right? And then as a non-believer, I was still doing the same thing. I was separating these things. And eventually I got to a place where I was like sometimes the atheistic perspective they’ll be like, oh no, no, no, no, there’s no such thing as sacred. Everything is just, there’s no sacred, everything is secular.
Jon Steingard:
And my perspective now is more like, whoa, [crosstalk 01:56:20] maybe everything is sacred.
Trent Horn:
Maybe we can bring it together. Man, I wish we had hours and hours, hours, and hours [crosstalk 01:56:29], but.
Jon Steingard:
I have no concept of how much time this has been.
Trent Horn:
We’re just paying by the hour here in the studio, I’m just kidding. We already had the studio, so we’re all golden. Everyone, I hope you really enjoyed this. Where can people go to follow you more on your journey or learn more about you or.
Jon Steingard:
Well, you know, I actually sort of came off social media, so I have a YouTube channel that’s still up. I’m not doing any stuff on it right now. It’s just under Jon Steingard. I have an Instagram and a Twitter account, but I’m also not on either of those, so.
Trent Horn:
You know what, just pray for Jon. [crosstalk 01:57:02]
Jon Steingard:
I’m spending time.
Trent Horn:
Good for you.
Jon Steingard:
I’m spending time right now, learning about presence and being present and studying presence and reading and being with my kids and my family and the people I care about.
Trent Horn:
And I tell you what, next time I’m back, we’ll do a longer conversation. We’ll do another conversation. And then we could stop by. I’d love to take you, I attended Eastern Catholic churches, an Eastern church here. It’s kind of like, it’s Catholic, but it feels like Eastern orthodoxy.
Jon Steingard:
Okay, that’s interesting.
Trent Horn:
Oh yeah. It’s got incense smells and bells. The [comma sauce 01:57:37] Icons. It’s, if you like mystical, you should come by with me. It’d be fun.
Jon Steingard:
I would definitely do that. The way that I approach life is.
Trent Horn:
It’s very, it’s very kid friendly, by the way. And you know what’s fun about it.
Trent Horn:
We don’t have, at least at the Eastern church that I go to now, we don’t have pews, because for 1500 years, Christians stood.
Jon Steingard:
It’s all standing.
Trent Horn:
Standing is the proper attention and reverence. Though every year, during Lent, during the great fast, you lie prostrate in sorrow for sins, and it’s very engaging. I think you’ll like it.
Jon Steingard:
But I like sampling experiences.
Trent Horn:
It’s a good place to be at. So yeah, lets. Well definitely checkout; share, well, I guess share this dialogue. So normally I ask people to go check out your stuff.
Jon Steingard:
But I have nothing to plug right now.
Trent Horn:
How about this? Share this dialogue with others. And this is important, I want more people who have different religious beliefs to be able to have these kinds of sit-downs. Jon, it was a lot of fun.
Jon Steingard:
Thank you for inviting me.
Trent Horn:
Absolutely. So thank you guys for listening. And if you want more bonus content, check out Trent Horn podcast, trenthornpodcast.com. Otherwise, Jon, thanks for being on the podcast.
Jon Steingard:
Thanks for having me.
Trent Horn:
All right. I hope you all have a very blessed day.
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