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In this episode Trent debunks the claim that common Christian reactions to things like death, hell and abortion show that Christians don’t really believe what the Faith teaches.
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone, welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers’ apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. In case you missed our big announcement on Monday, I am recording now in our new dedicated office space and studio. Now it’s a little bit barren, we don’t have all the fancy lights and new backdrops set up. We’re hoping to do that soon, so pray for us so that can be done expediently. If you want to help us to reach that goal in a timely fashion, be able to expand, be able to do a whole lot more, consider supporting us at trenthornpodcast.com. Those who are our patrons, support us big shout out and thanks to the patrons. Without you guys, we wouldn’t be able to acquire this new studio space. Hey, I am super grateful for that, you’re in my prayers. You’re all on my prayers and definitely keep praying for us as the podcast continues to grow. If you want to support us, definitely check us out at trenthornpodcast.com.
Trent Horn:
Now, onto the subject of today’s episode. There are a series of arguments or questions that are asked and there’s more probably. I could probably easily do a part two or part three to this episode. There are criticisms of Christians saying, “Look, you might say you believe this doctrine or believe that doctrine, but you don’t really act like it’s true. So how can you say that you really believe it?” Now on the one hand, these kinds of arguments, they’re ad hominem arguments. They’re just saying, “You say you believe one thing, but you do another, you do the opposite thing. You’re inconsistent, so you don’t really believe it.” That doesn’t prove though, that the doctrine is false. All that proves is that the person is being inconsistent, they’re not living up to their own standards.
Trent Horn:
On the face of it, these arguments are not particularly strong. They’re just ad hominem arguments. At worst, they only show a person who’s be inconsistent. But you can be correct about something and still being inconsistent about it. I think most of us would say that diet and exercise are extremely important for living a healthy life. I think most of us would say that. But if you looked at the way we lived our lives, many of us don’t live as if that’s true. Jesus put it best. He said, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” It could be the case that we sincerely believe something and it is true, but we fail to live it out. So before I go through these, I think I want to say an overarching criticism that I have of them is that they’re ad hominem arguments. They only at best show inconsistency, not that the Christian faith is false.
Trent Horn:
But I think in many cases, these claims of inconsistency, they overlook important details that show that the person is not actually being inconsistent. Let’s jump to a few of these. Should I start with number one? I always feel like when I do these lists, I should count up rather than count down. Today I’m going to count down, we’ll start with one, why don’t we do that? Number one: why aren’t you happy when believers die? I tried finding a clip of this, I know it’s out there. If someone can find it, maybe you can link to it below or I’ll add a link to it. But it was an interview with Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion. He might have been with Sam Harris, that could be a confabulation in my mind. I know it was Richard Dawkins and maybe one other atheist. He was talking about how Christians don’t really believe what they’re sharing with other people.
Trent Horn:
He said, “If you really believe that your loved ones die,” let’s say your believing friends and family, fellow Christians, “that when they die, they go to heaven. If you really believe that, then why are you so sad? Why are you sad when the person dies, when you should be happy, you should be rejoicing?” I think Dawkins tries to take from this, this idea that we don’t really, really in our deepest of our hearts believe people go to heaven or believe in God. This is just something that we’ve adopted to try to help us to make sense of the world and maybe we should just in embrace instead, a deeper view that this life is all there is. That maybe we subconsciously believe this life is all there is and we have a religious veneer over that, but we’re desperately trying to hide that subconscious belief that this life is all there is.
Trent Horn:
Like I said, I know the clip is out there, I know I’ve seen it. Otherwise, I would show it to you. But I think there’s other people who might say this. He uses the example that when people go on a cruise, when they go on a cruise, they wave bon voyage to people, and they’re really happy and they’re excited. “Oh, you get to go on this great cruise. Oh, I’m going to miss you. But you have a great time.” And of course, heaven is infinitely better than any cruise you might go on. So when someone dies, why don’t we say bon voyage to that person? Well, I don’t think that this is a fair comparison. When most people go on cruises, it’s a few days, maybe a few weeks and the person will return.
Trent Horn:
Even if that were the case, imagine… Well, I don’t have to imagine this. Sometimes for Catholic Answers we have cruises and these are places where we’re able to meet Catholic Answers supporters. We spend a week or two at them. The last cruise I went on, the only cruise I went on, was to Alaska several years ago. We do these Catholic Answers cruises, and I hate to admit it, I like being on the cruise. It’s super fun. I set my alarm to get up at 11:30 for the midnight cookie snacks on the Lido deck. It’s super fun, but I don’t take my family with me because that’d be awful to have all of us crammed in a cabin together. What’s hard is how do you call your wife and she’s like, “How’s the cruise going?” and I hear the kids yelling in the background. I’m sitting there with my chocolate cake I got from room service. I’m like, “Oh, it’s terrible.”
Trent Horn:
When I go on one of those cruises, my wife is happy for me, but when she hugs me goodbye, she is sad. She does tear up because she’s going to miss me. I’m only going to be gone for a week, but she loves me, my children love me and she’s sad that I’m not going to be there. So imagine though I wasn’t going on just a cruise for a few weeks. Imagine I was selected to go on an interstellar trip and I’m going to go and I’m going to help create a new colony for humans to live on a new planet in another solar system. I’m going to pass through a worm hole or it’s going to be interstellar. I’m going to travel at very high speeds. Well, it doesn’t matter I guess if I travel at high speeds. In Interstellar, when he returns, time passes slower for Matthew McConaughey’s character. So his kids grow up, he stays the same age.
Trent Horn:
But let’s say I don’t come back. It’s a one way trip, I’m doing it for the good of humanity. That’s a very great and noble thing. And when my wife was to say goodbye to me on this interstellar journey, where I’m going to this amazing planet and I’m going to do all this stuff, would she be upset? You bet she would be upset because she would miss that relationship we have. I think for many believers, one reason that we are sad is that we miss the earthly relationship that we have with the other person who is now, we hope and pray, we don’t assume, but we hope and pray that they have been received into the beatific vision, that they are in heaven. Because obviously we don’t know the exact state of a person’s soul at death, but we have hope for them, we pray for them.
Trent Horn:
So there is a sadness there in that we have lost something special in the earthly relationship we have with that person. That would be true with any other kind of analogy that we could make about someone going away and never returning. Even if they’re going away to an amazing place, we would be sad at the loss of that relationship. Also, the Bible talks about how death is not natural for us, especially the state after we die, when we are a soul without a body. Saint Paul says in Second Corinthians, chapter five, verses one through three, “For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands eternal in the heavens.” This is going to be our resurrection body that we’ll get at the final judgment. “Here, indeed we groan and long to put on our heavenly dwelling so that by putting it on, we may not be found naked.”
Trent Horn:
Paul talks about how it’s unnatural to be in a state of being a soul without a body, that we are not just our souls. We are very incomplete without our bodies. That’s why we hope for the resurrection of the dead; to be given back our bodies in a glorified form at the final judgment, at the end of the world. Death is also not a part of God’s plan, the idea of existing during this interim without a body is not what God ultimately intended for us. So there’s a bit of sadness there with that as well. Since death was not part of God’s plan for human beings, and the fact that death shatters the earthly relationships we have with people, they’re not the same after death. We can still pray for that person. If we know that they’re in heaven, if they’re a saint, we can ask them to pray for us, we don’t have the exact same relationship that we did on earth. And that’s something that we can rightfully mourn. That doesn’t prove that we don’t believe in heaven in that regard.
Trent Horn:
All right, number two. Why don’t you tell people they’re going to hell? I mean, think about it, hell is an awful thing, right? It’s the worst thing that you can think of. Being separated from God for all eternity, being in agony forever, unending. Why don’t Christians tell more people to believe in Jesus? Do they really believe? Now, there are some Christians who don’t believe that hell is eternal conscious torment. There are some Christians who believe in universalism, who think everybody’s going to heaven. So that would make sense they don’t tell people about hell, because they don’t believe in hell.
Trent Horn:
There are other Christians who believe hell is not eternal conscious torment, but the damned are annihilated, that God will destroy them. I’ve done other episodes on annihilationism. I had a dialogue with my friend, Randall Rouser about it. Go back in the archives, you can go and check that out. Even this objection would also apply to the annihilationists too. Saying, “Look, you’re concerned that a person’s going to go out of existence at the final judgment, God will destroy them. And they have heaven, this infinitely good thing waiting for them. Why wouldn’t you tell them about it? Why wouldn’t you tell them that hell is a bad thing and it’s a danger?”
Trent Horn:
The idea here is that Christians don’t really believe that hell exists or maybe they pay lip service to the idea. Because if they really believed that, they would tell everybody. Just like if you saw a friend about to drink a glass of bleach, you would knock it out of their hand and you would tell them, “Don’t drink bleach. It’s going to kill you. You don’t do that.” So why don’t Christians do that when it comes to hell? Maybe it’s because they don’t really believe in hell at all or hell isn’t real.
Trent Horn:
Once again, I think that this is an unwarranted conclusion. Number one: I think in many cases the dilemma they have, we’ll go back to the example of the diet and exercise. Do you believe that diet and exercise are a good thing for you, or do you believe that eating horribly unhealthy foods and never exercising is bad for you? I’m sure you probably believe that, and it could lead to really, really bad things: diabetes, arthritis. You can be in a lot of difficult situations. You probably believe smoking causes lung cancer. But do you find yourself in situations where you don’t tell people who smoke, or you don’t tell people who live really unhealthy lives, “Don’t do that?”
Trent Horn:
I remember in my college years, dating years, there’s some friends in our group or acquaintances, they would date people that were really bad for them. That’s an unhealthy relationship, they’re bad for them. But the other people in the group would just say, “Good for you. I’m so glad you’re happy.” They didn’t have the guts to tell the person, “This is a bad idea.” I mean, a lot of times, don’t you find yourself in a situation where somebody does something really dumb, but you don’t want to tell them? Why is that? Is it because you don’t really believe it’s dumb? No, you do believe it’s a dumb decision. But I think the reason is that you have forecasted in your mind what’s going to happen. That you have the relationship with the person and they’re doing a dumb thing. And you worry that if you tell them in strong language, “It’s a dumb thing, stop doing it,” they’re going to keep doing the dumb thing anyways, but you’re not going to have the relationship with them. They’re going to get mad at you.
Trent Horn:
If you tell someone, “Hey, that business venture is a really bad idea. Don’t do that,” “You don’t believe in me, you’re not supporting me. You’re a bad friend.” Or think of a lot of these cases, “You need to exercise, you need to get your life together,” “You’re nagging me. How dare you? You know who I am, you know what I can do, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” You’ve been in this situation. Someone is doing a dumb thing and you worry if you try to correct them, they’re going to keep doing the dumb thing anyways and you’re just going to harm or mess up the relationship you have with them.
Trent Horn:
I’m not saying that’s what we ought to do with people when it comes to salvation. I’m saying that is the rationale that I think is going on in people’s minds when they don’t say this. Because in many, many cases, it’s not that the person has never heard of hell, they’re like, “What’s hell? I never heard of that.” It’s that, “Yeah, I know. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I know, but I don’t really care,” or, “Oh, I don’t believe that.” And you end up in a debate or an argument that you feel like you’re not going to make headway in. As I said, I don’t think that’s the right attitude we should have. We should still talk with people. We should still dialogue with them, but I’m just explaining why some Christians don’t do this. It’s because they feel like they’ll end up in a debate or discussion that’ll be fruitless anyways and they’re not going to change the person’s mind.
Trent Horn:
Now I think that you can, by asking good questions, presenting solid arguments and evidence. You might not always, but you can. And I think it takes a lot for us. We have, as Christians, to build up a tolerance to people not wanting to be in relationship with us because of our beliefs. We shouldn’t make it the case that people don’t want to have relationships with us because we’re obnoxious. That’s when it’s our fault. But if it’s just the content of our beliefs, that we’re trying to help them and they don’t like that, then that’s not always going to be our fault.
Trent Horn:
Number two: I think that also what happens is that many Christians believe that they have an overconfidence in who will go to heaven because they’re invincibly ignorant. The church teaches it’s possible for someone who has never heard of Jesus to go to heaven. God will judge them based on the revelation they were given. God’s not going to damn someone just because they were born in a time and place where they never heard the gospel. But just because it’s possible someone who does not believe will be saved, it does not mean that it’s probable. I think Christians sometimes overestimate from the possibility someone who doesn’t believe can be saved, to the probability they’ll be saved and they just don’t worry about it anymore.
Trent Horn:
I think they really do still believe in hell, they just overestimate the probability of a non-saved person, they underestimate the power of sin in this life to lead people away from God. I think that many people, really Christians do believe in hell. They should tell other people about salvation from that fate. But if they don’t do that, it doesn’t mean they secretly don’t believe or something like that. It just means like in many other contexts in life, sometimes we feel like it’s fruitless to try to talk with someone about a dumb decision they’re making, because they may still head towards that dumb decision, and we’re worried about our relationship with that person. I think psychologically, that is what is going on in many of these cases. That’s a challenge to me too. I worry about that in my relationships with people, with friends, with family who are not Christian.
Trent Horn:
I remember with one family member I said, “Hey, if you ever wanted me to, I can have a priest come see you, go to confession. I think that’d be really important, given what God wants from us.” It’s hard and Jesus had it hard too. In Mark, it says that people in Nazareth didn’t believe in him. And Jesus said, “Look, a prophet is not accepted in his own homeland.” Sometimes the hardest people that we can share the faith with are our own friends and family. But we need to do that and baby steps along the way to do that. Understand that if they get mad at us and overreact and we have been kind and have just shared what we believe, that is not on us. God wants us to do that. That is a psychological barrier that we do have to get over when it comes to evangelizing people.
Trent Horn:
But just because we might be hesitant to do that doesn’t mean we don’t really believe it. Just like we might be hesitant to tell people, “Stop smoking, exercise, break up with so and so,” we might be hesitant there because we’re worried about a fruitless discussion. Doesn’t mean we aren’t right about those things. I hope that’s helpful there on number two.
Trent Horn:
Number three: why do experiences make it real? I saw this little clip, once again. I mean, I could find it. This was on Doug from Pine Creek, his channel. Doug, I just had the debate with him on the resurrection of Jesus. I thought that was a very good debate, very illuminating for people. He said this and I don’t know where it is because Doug puts out a lot of content, it’d be hard to find. Maybe he’ll watch this and he’ll put it up there and he’ll have a thought about this, I don’t know. He was commenting on Mike Licona, the Christian apologist, saying that there are people who have had supernatural, paranormal experiences. They have a Ouija board, the Ouija board flies against the wall, trash can lids are floating. I think Mike a comment like, “For those people, they know the supernatural is real.”
Trent Horn:
I think Doug made some comment to the effect of, “Oh, you don’t really believe this with these arguments, like the [inaudible 00:18:15] cosmological argument, the historicity, the resurrection of Jesus, these kinds of arguments. You don’t really believe that. You really believe when actually you empirically see the trash can lid flying across the room, the Ouija board going up, having a paranormal experience.” You don’t really believe in it before that point, maybe you’re just paying lip service to it. The arguments are apparently not good enough, right? You need to see a Ouija board fly around or something like that.
Trent Horn:
Here, I would say that also this parallels in many cases where we believe something. We believe something is true, but we have a firm, unshakable confidence in it after we directly experience it. If you go on a map, you could look at a random village or tiny town somewhere across the world. Well actually, I really shouldn’t do this. I’m going to get on my computer right now. There is a conspiracy in Germany about a town that doesn’t exist. It’s from an old Usenet group a while back. It’s [foreign language 00:19:29], it’s German, [foreign language 00:19:31]. There’s an old conspiracy that the town of [foreign language 00:19:35] Germany does not exist. An old running joke on German Usenet groups that, “Well, [foreign language 00:19:41], do you know anybody from [foreign language 00:19:42]? Have you ever been there?” “No, no.” “How do you know it’s real?”
Trent Horn:
If you went and looked on a map of Germany and you saw a random town and I would ask you, “Is that town real?” I’m sure you’d say, “Well, yeah. Because maps are generally reliable and if it’s on all these different maps and I look it up online, sure I believe that. It’s real. I’ve got reliable sources here to believe that.” But I’m sure if I took you on a plane and you went to Berlin and you drove and you walked into [foreign language 00:20:07] and you saw the welcome to [foreign language 00:20:09] and you saw the town and you examined it, it would feel a lot more real to you.
Trent Horn:
You talk about celebrities, I know Conan O’Brien is real, obviously. You’ve seen it, you’ve watched his show, things like that. Or Tom Cruise is real, Arnold Schwarzenegger. But I’ll tell you, it felt a lot different when I was at Comic-Con before the pandemic, it was in 2019, I think. Yeah, I think it was 2019, three years ago. I was at Comic-Con in the big Hall H and I saw Conan O’Brien and Tom Cruise and Arnold Schwarzenegger right up on stage, right in front of me. I’m like, “There they are. They’re real.” You can believe something is real, a historical fact, other things like this, and you say, “Yeah, I believe it. I have reliable sources,” but then it becomes unshakeable when you’ve had a direct encounter with it.
Trent Horn:
I’ve never had an experience like this, a paranormal experience. I mean, I’ve had spooky things, but nothing I would call genuinely paranormal. So I could see someone believes in God and then something just happens to you. Similar to a miracle, that you can believe in God, but a miracle is a sign. It is a sign of God’s presence. And if God performed a miracle for you, even if you already believed in God, your epistemic confidence in God’s existence would radically shoot through the roof when you have miraculous evidence that you have directly observed. But it doesn’t follow that in the absence of that evidence, you did not already have good or sufficient evidence to believe in God. Just like I have sufficient evidence to believe in [foreign language 00:21:46] Germany, I would feel dramatically more confident it exists if I actually went to the town and walked around and did things like that.
Trent Horn:
So just because Christians might have dramatically more confidence in the claims of Christianity because they personally experience something paranormal or supernatural, it does not follow that they don’t have good or sufficient evidence from philosophical arguments for God’s existence or historical evidence for the resurrection. Just like you could have good philosophical or historical evidence for other nonreligious things and you would believe, but then if you directly experience it, you would have just much more confidence. That doesn’t show they don’t really believe in that regard.
Trent Horn:
Here’s the last one. This is for pro-life advocates in particular. I’ve had people ask me, “Look, if you think that abortion kills,” and this was way back in the day, “3,000 unborn children every day in the United States…” Now it’s a lot lower, maybe 2000, I’m not sure, but thousands. “If you really believe that, then why every day aren’t you totally depressed?” Think about it, when 3,000 people died on September 11th, it was shocking, it was tragic. When you hear about a school shooting, when you hear about a few kids who have died in a school shooting, there is a sense of sadness and tragedy there. But if that’s the case then, why don’t pro-lifers feel this tragedy and sadness every day, knowing that thousands of children are aborted? Maybe it’s because they don’t really believe the unborn are human beings.
Trent Horn:
Once again, I would say that this is a ad hominem. At most, it would show inconsistency not that we’re wrong, because there are thousands of people who die every day that we don’t mourn. Think about it. Fact: thousands of people die from preventable illnesses; malaria, diptheria, childhood diarrhea even, in places where children don’t have enough resources and it’s awful. Do you believe that thousands of people die from things where many times we could help prevent it by donating $3 to buy a malaria net? By the way, go to againstmalaria.com, I love them, to buy cheap malaria nets to save lives.
Trent Horn:
But do you really believe that? That these people that they exist and they’re dying? Yeah. Well, why aren’t you sad about it? Well, because I couldn’t live my life if I was just in constant mourning for the evil that is in the world. But I think what happens is whether it’s abortion, or malaria, or terrorism, or war, the first time we hear about it… You’re pro-life, think about the first time you learned about abortion. It probably felt like a punch in the stomach, punch in the gut, right? The first time we hear about an evil, we do feel a numbing sadness. Remember the first time you learned about the Holocaust when you’re what, 10 years old? You’re sad, but you don’t have that exact same sadness now that you did when you first heard about it.
Trent Horn:
That’s the same thing with abortion, that with any kind of evil, we as human beings, we psychically numb ourselves. We have to become accustomed to it so that we can function in the world. You see this with EMTs, with police officers, with people who handle death on a regular basis. They grow a tolerance to it so that they are able to function and accommodate it. So the fact that pro-lifers do not mourn the thousands of children who die in the womb every day, it doesn’t prove those children are not human. Just as you and I don’t mourn thousands of born people who die every day from preventable illnesses. It doesn’t prove those people are not human. It only proves we have accommodated ourselves to the evil that exists in the world, emotionally accommodated, so that we can function in our daily lives and that we have enough energy and willpower to do something about those evils. To work, make money, donate to get malaria nets, donate for de-worming, donate to your local pregnancy resource center to go and pray in front of an abortion facility.
Trent Horn:
I think that can be helpful there in making the distinction. I also think that sometimes the comparisons aren’t entirely fair. One reason we have a heightened sense of emotional awareness with terrorism or school shootings is with that act of violence, sometimes we have a secondary fear like, “What if that happens to us? What if I die in a terrorist bombing? What if my children get shot at a school?” So we think about it more, whereas with abortion, we’re not really as concerned. We’re not worried that we are going to get aborted. And we usually don’t think that our own children, unless they’re unborn and in a difficult relationship, we don’t think anything bad’s going to happen to them. That might be a secondary thing also to show a difference in our emotions there.
Trent Horn:
Well, I hope that was helpful for you all, but just to underscore once again, even if people don’t act in the way they should act based on what they believe, that only at best proves inconsistency, not that they’re wrong. But I’ve shown why a lot of these questions and problems overlook important details. But then also, maybe we ourselves need to grow in some areas to be more consistent. That if we really believe hell is real, telling people about the gospel. We should do that, not do it in a weird way, but find more opportunities to share it. That’s what we always try to do to help people here at the Council Trent podcast, to be able to do that. Thank you guys so much, and I hope you all have a very blessed [inaudible 00:27:26].
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