In this episode, Trent sits down with former Christian Sam Devis and explores his concerns about free will, objective morality, and evolution as a guest on his podcast When Belief Dies.
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent:
It can be discouraging to see how people who disagree with one another, nowadays, it seems like they just filter into two separate tribes that want to declare war on each other, instead of being able to come together to seek out the truth. We shouldn’t be at war with one another. I know it’s felt that way in the past few years, and especially in the past few weeks, but there is a better way. Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. I actually posted about this recently on social media, especially in the wake of the events of the US Capitol, saying, “No, we don’t have to resort to tribalism.” We shouldn’t view each other with deep suspicion and treat people as tentative enemies. Rather, we are all sons and daughters made in the image of likeness of God. And because of that, as the prophet, Isaiah says in Isaiah chapter one, “Come, let us reason together.”
Trent:
It is possible. We don’t have to have social media soundbites or the talking heads on cable news to yell at one another. Whenever I can find people, especially people who disagree with me on important issues that are willing to sit down and have a good, honest conversation, it makes my day. And I think it’s going to make your day. That’s why I’m really excited for today’s episode. So I received an invitation from Sam who is the founder and host of the podcast When Belief Dies. So Sam is a former Christian. He lives in Northern England. He’s married, has two little boys so he’s in his early thirties. So Sam and I already have a lot in common. He says he was born into a Christian family and he considered himself Christian. Most of his life, he went to Pentecostal Bible College, but in 2017 he started having doubts about his religious beliefs.
Trent:
And then he stepped down from church leadership in December of 2019. So he has a blog @whenbeliefdies.com, where he’s been tracking his deconversion. But what I really respect about Sam, he’s an honest charitable guy. He’s willing to ask questions and he’s wrestling with these issues. He’s not some kind of idea log like the “new atheists” and on his podcast he has people who are atheists as well as people who are Christians come on. And he’s had some pretty big names, he’s had Matt Dillahunty on there. Recently, he had Graham Oppy who I consider one of the smartest atheists out there today. He’s had other Christians on like Alister McGrath. So he’s putting in the legwork, and we really had a really enjoyable conversation. I really enjoyed the chat I had with him, and I think you’ll enjoy it as well. I definitely recommend that you check out his work and see how he’s wrestling through with these issues.
Trent:
I’ll leave a link in the show description to go and check that out, but you can just search for it. The podcast is called When Belief Dies. Sam is the host on it. But without further ado, here is conversation. I really hope this can be a model for future conversations with lots of people disagree. And I want to keep doing that more here on the podcast. Debates are fun. I love doing debates. So I said on social media, I love the Matt Fradd, the “Reason and Theology” I just interviewed Michael often from “Reason and Theology”. I love they have debates with people who disagree. Civil debates are a great thing, but civil dialogues are also really good, when you can have that decent chat with someone.
Trent:
I want to do more of those. If you have an idea for a guest, that would be great for a one-on-one chat on the podcast, who’s just a very likable person who disagrees with the Catholic faith, but we can have a good chat about it. Let me know. Go to trenthornpodcast.com. If you’re a premium subscriber, mention in the comments under the episode, or you can reach out to me @trenthorn.com, there’s a contact page there. All right, without further ado, here’s my conversation with Sam at When Belief Dies.
Sam:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of When Belief Dies. My name’s Sam, and today I’m joined by Trent Horn. Trent, it’s great to have you on the podcast.
Trent:
It’s good to be here, Sam. Thank you for having me.
Sam:
So I just thought I’d start off by kind of getting us on the same page, and that is to say essentially that we are definitely not on the same page. I think your intellect and your ability to kind of answer questions and to deal with things is something that I aspire to, but I’m definitely nowhere near there yet. So, to kind of get things very kind of down to earth, straight away, I’m really interested in having an honest conversation with you about faith, but I’m just aware that I might not necessarily, A, understand or B kind of be able to respond well to some of the sort of things that you throw towards me, a curve balls or anything that you say.
Sam:
So just to kind of frame it. The listeners to this podcast are going to be interested in that stuff, for sure. And I’ll try and kind of get myself into a position to ask the right sorts of questions. But if I take something in the wrong way or if I ask a question that isn’t quite right, or if there’s something that you think could be kind of honed more effectively, then please pick it up and kind of run with it, if that sounds all right with you, Trent.
Trent:
Sure. I think that sounds great. I just want you to know, Sam, that I’m not here to win. I think this is, I always look forward to opportunities for people. One, just people to talk to each other who don’t agree on things, but especially for Christians and atheists to talk to one another, because many times a lot of people will just talk to others that they agree with. That’s a human problem. We all have confirmation bias. We all prefer to believe things that reinforce, so we already believe. And new things are challenging, no matter who you are or what you believe or what you don’t believe. So the fact that you’re willing to engage in conversations with those who disagree, that speaks to a high level of intelligence, because many people don’t want to reach that level, they want to stay right in their bubble. So now I’m looking forward to this.
Sam:
Amazing. I kind of guess, just jumping straight in that, Trent, if that’s okay. I mean, could give us kind of like an overview of your story and kind of why you believe in Christianity, and specifically kind of Catholicism?
Trent:
Yeah, sure. So I grew up in San Diego, California, the most beautiful place on earth, at least in the contiguous 48 states of the US to grow up in till I was about 10-years-old. My dad is Jewish though he doesn’t really go to temple. My mom used to be Catholic, but then she stopped going to the church. When I was a little boy, she tried to enroll me in the Catholic elementary school, because she knew at the very least it would be the best school for me to go to, it’s the best school around. And the nuns there, way different than they would be nowadays. The nuns refused saying, “We can’t teach your son because he can’t grow to be a good Catholic with a mom like you who doesn’t even go to church anymore. Well, I showed those nuns.
Trent:
Although I would say that there’s a line in St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. He says, “When I was a child, I believed childish things. I acted like a child. I reasoned like a child. Well, when I became a man, I put away childish things.” And so as I got into more like junior high, I thought, what’s all this religion stuff? I asked my parents. I watched the Bible stories on the video cassettes. I actually still show these to my kids, the Hanna-Barbera, greatest adventure Bible stories. They’re done by the same people who do the Jetsons and the Flintstones. So the quality is actually really good.
Trent:
But by the time I got to be 12, 13-years-old, I’m thinking, hey, what if this is just all bunk? What if it’s not true? And I asked my parents for reasons to think it’s true and they couldn’t give me any. So when I get to high school, I wasn’t an atheist. I believed there was a God out there who kind of started everything, but I didn’t really know this God very well. I only knew this God when I needed help and calculus AB, and I just ended up dropping that class, because I guess those are prayers He didn’t feel like answering, but He knows what’s best. So I didn’t believe in religion. I thought that was just kind of a crutch for people. But then I was befriended by some Catholic high school students in a youth group. What I appreciated about them was that they’re willing to ask tough questions and take tough questions. So over the course of about a year, I was a sophomore in high school. That’s what grade 10 for you guys, right?
Sam:
Yeah. I think so.
Trent:
Yeah. I went online. This is about 2001, and I wanted to look at both sides. And so I went to the Internet, and this is the Nicene days of the Internet. I went to the secular web, Internet Infidels. There was no YouTube back then, so I couldn’t just go watch YouTube debates between Christians and atheists, but I did find MP3s of debates people had uploaded, and I would scour the Internet for these debates and listen to the audio, and listen to the atheist and the Christians.
Trent:
And I eventually came convinced that not only did God exist, but he had revealed himself through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And I came to believe that Jesus established a church, a way to gather people to God, a universal church. And what made the most sense was that the one church today that can have a historical pedigree trace back to that would be the Catholic church. In fact, the word Catholic comes from two Greek words, Kata-Holos universal, or according to the whole. So that was kind of the journey in a nutshell, but I’m happy to unpack any of it or talk about anything you like.
Sam:
That’s really helpful. I think I first found out about you from a debate that you had with Cosmic Skeptic on the Pints With Aquinas YouTube channel.
Trent:
Yes. Alex is a great debate partner. It was a lot of fun.
Sam:
Yeah. So I watched that back this morning and that’s probably why I started the podcast like I started it, because it was just the sort of level of detail that both of you went into. It’s definitely those things you can watch and then kind of rewatch multiple times. It’s kind of, let it sink in with what you were both saying.
Trent:
Sure.
Sam:
But I kind of guess, on the sorts of topics that you were chatting to, Alex, it’d be really interesting to kind of hear your take. A bit more context might be helpful. So after I saw that debate originally, when it was published back in July, I think it was last year, I went away and got your book, Answering Atheism, and I found it really interesting because there’s some things in there that I hadn’t really thought of before, or at least the sort of circles that I had moved in within the atheism sphere that I know the most these days.
Sam:
I hadn’t really ever kind of come across this kind of logical, kind of progression that you had when looking at the idea of kind of atheism and agnosticism, and how actually lots of atheists are really agnostics. I mean, that’s a massive subject that I’ve had Matt Dillahunty on the show, I’ve had David Smalley, a quite well-known atheist who I would now say that they are an atheist, even though they aren’t convinced God’s real, they still would call themselves an atheist. It’d be really interesting to kind of get your take on that if that’s possible.
Trent:
Yeah. I would say, and there are other atheistic philosophers that I would think would agree with the perspective that I offer. One of my favorite atheists on social media, there are people like you who are friendly to chat with and thoughtful. It’s unfortunate when either Christians or atheists lack charity and thoughtfulness, on either side it’s just so off-pudding. They’re the team @realatheology. So they have a blog the Real Atheology podcast, Real Atheology podcast on Twitter is their channel. I think they would agree with me that the definition of atheism, to say atheism is just a lack of belief in God. It’s just not terribly informative. It’s a description of a psychological state, but it doesn’t tell me anything about the world. It’s like, look, I want to figure out what is real in the world. What’s the world like?
Trent:
So when it comes to the question, does God exist? I think it’s clear there are three answers, maybe four. So does God exist? Yes. Which would be theism. No. Which would be atheism or maybe, or I don’t know, which would traditionally be agnosticism. I mean, I don’t like to get too hung up on, you’re not really an atheist, you’re an agnostic. People want to call themselves whatever, that’s fine. Let’s just have a chat, but I don’t want people to think that atheism is just the default position, that somebody will take with God. `The default should be, there is no God, or God’s a silly idea, like Fairies or Santa or Harry Potter, or what may be.
Trent:
I really hope for atheists, the default where we start with, whether God exists should be more like, do aliens exist? Is there intelligent life somewhere in the universe? I don’t think most atheists would be super arrogant and cocky and say, “There are no aliens.” I mean, it’s a pretty big universe. I think it’d be more humble to say, “I haven’t been convinced that they’re aliens, but they could very well be out there.” That’s what I would like if I’m talking with an atheist, I’d like that to be the starting attitude. Well, I haven’t been convinced that God exists, but God could exist. It’s quite possible. For me, you see how it makes sense? I want to make sure we’re always starting in the right place.
Sam:
Yeah. I think that’s really helpful. I know a lot of the time people just enjoy being part of a group and having something that they can attribute to themselves. So I used to have a co-host on this podcast, a guy called Dave, who would probably describe himself if he wanted to have a label as an agnostic. But his big thing was this idea of labels. Both Dave and I kind of left Christianity with just loads of questions that we’re really struggling to find answers to, which is, hence why I do things like this.
Trent:
Yeah. Sure.
Sam:
And as we left it, we kind of realized that all these sorts of camps, all these sorts of labels that we could attribute to ourselves, but the issue is, it just felt so much, almost like you are just trying to drop one label to pick up another label. It almost felt like you’re just joining another church, church of atheism or church of agnosticism or church of Athena ex Christianism or whatever is it. It felt strange for sure.
Trent:
Well, it does seem kind of interesting to me when you look at discourse among atheists online. People say, “Well, what is atheism?” Atheism is just a lack of belief in God. I don’t know if that’s true because I’ve seen atheists argue with one another about ethical issues, political issues, almost with kind of a tacit belief that, well, if you’re an atheist you must vote this way or believe this moral issue or this ethical issue. So do believe that part of it, it’s not so much just looking at the arguments, it’s what group or what tribe do I belong to?
Trent:
There’s been a few books published in the US in the past few years about tribalism. I mean, you’ve got that with the US, with our politics. I’m sure you guys talk about that a lot in England, with Brexit and … The idea of, sometimes we check our critical thinking at the door and we just look at the notes. Okay, what does the tribe think about this? And that’s why I think people should be free thinking, reach their own conclusions. Now, at the same time as a religious believer, I don’t think that I know everything. And I think there is a reality that contains vastly more knowledge than I do. It should be God. So some cases I have to humbly assent to what God has revealed or hasn’t revealed, and you and the church can guide me in that, but I’m always wanting to test things. In the Bible 1 Thessalonians 5:21, it says, “Test everything, retain what is good.” And I think that’s a good policy for anybody to live by.
Sam:
Yeah. That’s really interesting. I think that’s just what I want in life. I might kind of tackle it. I guess you could say is kind of what it is, honest reflections and faith, religion and life. I want the conversations I have, the blog posts I write, the podcasts I put out, even with my wife and my children and stuff, I want those conversations to be real and honest. And if someone presents something or talks about something in a way that gets me and makes me go, “Oh, I’ve never thought of it like that.” And if that thing ends up changing my worldview then so be it. I’d rather not be fearful that I’m going to become something and therefore, almost poke my head up above the parapet, if you want to use that sort of phrase, and actually be able to go and look and see what’s out there and why does someone like Trent believe things he believes in? Why does someone like Matt Dillahunty or Graham Oppy well-known naturalist philosopher, and why do they believe that the things they believe? I think it’s just so important.
Sam:
So I guess kind of, if it’s [inaudible 00:17:05] then jumping into some of those on the topics I thought it’d be good to kind of get your thoughts on. So I kind of sent you an email with a few in, and I’m just going to kind of just run through it slowly. So for the listener, it might be a little bit strange, but these are things I struggle with and I question a lot, and I just thought that would be a good place to start basically.
Sam:
So kind of free will, this idea that we have libertarian free will, that we’re able to make decisions, how do you kind of deal with that or look that? Do you believe we have free will? And if so, how much is free will? [inaudible 00:17:41] don’t have complete free will without … As far as my way, that’s impossible, but how do you kind of think of it and view it, Trent?
Trent:
Sure. I think it’s important to define our terms to make sure that we’re not talking past one another. And this happens all the time with the issue of free will, because you have, for example, the debate between compatibilists and determinists, all right, sorry, compatibilists and incompatiblist, like the debate between Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. So this’ll be good to catch up everyone who is listening, which is interesting is that in the debate between compatibilism and incompatibilism, sometimes Christians and atheists are on the same side. So the idea here is, the question is, is free will compatible with determinism? And of course that depends on what you mean by free will.
Trent:
The classical view seems to have two ideas involved in it. I would say there’s two notions bound up in it. I’m able to act without being determined by something outside of me. So it’s not something beyond me that is determined what I do. I determine what I do. I’m not determined by something beyond me. I think that’s a part of what free will is. And I also think there’s another part of it, which is the ability to have done otherwise. So you think, I could have said to you an hour ago, “Hey, I’m not feeling super well, I’m not going to do the podcast.” Or “Could we schedule a time?” This seems to be something we have a really hard time letting go of. And I think for a good reason that I could have done otherwise in the past.
Trent:
Now, there is a philosopher, Harry Frankfurt, who’s made a counterexample against this definition of free will. And he says, imagine someone goes to the voting booth and we’ll keep it for the English example, Brexit, you’re voting for Brexit. There’s a little bomb planted in their head. And if they choose to vote for Brexit, their head will explode to keep them from voting for it. So let’s say he chooses not to vote for Brexit and pulls the lever. Now the argument is, well, could he have done otherwise? And the Frankfurt example tries to say, “Well, no, you couldn’t because his head would have exploded instantly if you tried to do otherwise.” Though I’m sympathetic to other philosophers that there has to be a flicker of freedom that before the … This is kind of like, did you ever see that movie? I think it’s Scanners, where the guy’s head explodes.
Sam:
No.
Trent:
There’s a meme of it online that they reproduce in different places. So just the idea here, before the device triggers to blow up his head to keep them from voting, it has to recognize you have made some kind of conscious choice in your head to do something, even if you couldn’t pull the lever. So I think the Frankfurt example, while I acknowledged it, I don’t think it is a complete rebuttal to … The classic definition of free will is being able to do otherwise.
Trent:
So this is important because some compatiblist will say, “Well, free will just means doing what you want to do.” And so you’ll have a lot of people, Daniel Dennett is one. I believe Richard Carrier is another example of kind of the compatiblist who will say, “Well, I’m free because I want to eat pizza. I want to be on the podcast. I am eating pizza. I’m doing the podcast. No one’s dragging me or making me, so I’m free.”
Trent:
But I think, and I’d love to get your thoughts on what you think free will is. I think when people talk about free will, they really mean something quite different, that free will is about doing otherwise, not being determined. What Sam Harris says, and so Sam would be an incompatiblist though he thinks freewill and determinism, you can’t have both. And so he says, “You don’t have free will.” I’m an incompatible list. I would say you do have free will.
Trent:
So Harris uses the example saying, like with Daniel Dennett, Dennett will say, “It’s kind of like if Sam Harris is trying to prove Atlantis exists.” Or they’re debating whether Atlantis exists, the underwater city, and Daniel Dennett says, “Well, of course, Atlantis exists, but Atlantis is really just Venice. It’s a beautiful city. The water’s about two feet high in the piazza. That’s Atlantis. And Sam Harris would say, “You’re right. Venice does exist, but that’s not Atlantis. It’s not a city under the water.” And so you would say, “You’re right. We can do what we want, but that’s not free will.” So I would say that I’m an incompatiblist, but I would hold that freewill and determinism are incompatible. You can’t have both, but that we do have free will and so we’re not determined. I don’t know. How would you see yourself in those camps?
Sam:
Oh, that’s really interesting question. So my kind of knee-jerk reaction, which is just a knee-jerk reaction is probably that we, I guess I can’t help, but understand how it wouldn’t be determined. So I think I come from this idea where, when I look at the world around me and I look at kind of how I’ve got here and how my computer’s got here and how other things I’ve got here, I can’t help, but see kind of this like cause and effect. I don’t know. People use this for the column because most [inaudible 00:22:56] and stuff. This idea that everything’s come from something, and actually do I really have the ability to-
Sam:
Do I really have the ability to say … So I guess, probably incompatible determinism probably. Is that sort of where my knee-jerk reaction is, but if you asked me to defend it, it’d be-
Trent:
No, no, I just want to know what you think. Right. I would just say, it seems like you understand free will. I feel like it’s a cop-out to say, “Well, you have free will, if you can do what you want.” But if everything you want and act has been determined by physical causes, going back to The Big Bang, it’s not really free then. I think we might share that kind of an intuition.
Sam:
I think so. Yeah. I think it might feel free, but it in and of itself is not free. And I know quite a lot of people, they kind of had quite serious, I think, mental problems they’ve actually kind of gone, “Well, actually this has really affected my mental health because I’ve…” That’s an example. It hasn’t affected me, but some people have said, the idea that they are almost lying to themselves and have this pretend feeling of free choice and this free choice isn’t actually a thing. It can be very challenging to some people. And then other people like CosmicSkeptic. I know we’ve mentioned him already or Sam Harris would go, it’s weird that that is something that you’d struggle with, because that’s just the way it is. Yeah. It’s a strange one, but I can’t understand, just because it feels free doesn’t mean that it is free. It could just be you deluding yourself essentially.
Trent:
Right. And so it’s interesting here though what you talk about with mental issues. There’s an article in The Atlantic. I think it was a few years ago called “There is no such thing as free will”. And it quotes a philosophy professor in Israel at the University of Haifa. Saul Smolansky. And he talks about how, we’ve done studies that show when people think they don’t have free will, they’re more likely to cheat or do the wrong thing. So they’ll do a study where someone reads an article saying they don’t have free will, then you’ll play a game. And people are more likely to cheat in the group that read the article saying there’s no free will than the control group. So Smolansky doesn’t believe in free will, but he says we cannot afford for people to internalize the truth about free will.
Trent:
So it’s like, “Yeah, we don’t have free will”, but for the love of goodness, we can’t let everyone figure that out because then everything just falls apart. So for me, I think the reason that I believe we have free will is first, I think it’s fair to start from the assumption that we do until proven otherwise. Much the same way that we start with the assumption that the world around us is real. And it’s not The Matrix. That other people I talk to have minds like I do, even though I can’t see their thoughts. So I don’t believe that it’s an equal starting field. Like even with God. I wouldn’t say, well we have to just start with God existing, because I believe that the existence of free will is far more obvious than the existence of God.
Trent:
And so for me, that justifies making it a starting assumption, like many other kinds of assumptions. And I put the burden on someone who says, “Well, we don’t”. So that would be number one, that it just appears to be true. And I have no reason to doubt it. Number two would be, I also think we have a very, very firm belief that moral responsibility exists. So we understand that there are two kinds of responsibilities. There’s a physical responsibility and moral responsibility. So in some cases you could have just physical responsibility when a lightning bolt strikes a cabin and sets it on fire. It’s responsible for the fire, but not in a moral way. When an arsonist sets the cabin on fire to collect the insurance money, he’s physically and morally responsible. But then to me, there has to be some qualitative difference between beings that are morally responsible and beings or things that are just physically responsible.
Trent:
And to me, without the notion of free will, I don’t see how you can get more responsibility. And so what I think some people do who are incompatiblists like Sam Harris, is they say moral responsibility also does not exist. Which I also feel like is a bridge too far. For example, if it was true, that moral responsibility and you feel free to stop me if I’m stacking too much on, but we can unpack this. If it were true, because then I might say, “Look, I believe in free will, because I believe in moral responsibility”, then someone might say, “Trent, you’re just kicking the can down the road. Why do you believe moral responsibility exists?” Well, because I have these deep intuitions about how we should treat one another. So for example, there’s a great book. I’ll show it to you afterwards. It’s on my bookshelf over here. Called the problem of punishment by David Boonin. He’s a really smart philosopher. And he talks about, well, why is it okay for the state to treat people in a way that you and I can’t treat each other?
Trent:
And he looks at theories of punishment that are only about consequentialism. Because what Sam Harris will say is, “Yeah, we’re not moral responsible, but we have to punish people in order to make society safe”. So even though we’re not responsible. You commit a crime, we got to lock you up because that deters other people from committing crimes. But if there’s no such thing as responsibility, then why not do anything that could deter crime? For example, I could imagine you could deter some really bad people by saying, “Look, if you commit a crime, not only will you go to jail, we’re going to put your whole family in jail”. And that might deter crime. Like there’s some mob bosses, their families, their weak spot. And actually in North Korea, they do do this. It’s called the punishment of three generations. They do this. But we recognize that’s evil. You shouldn’t do that. And then we’re starting to tread into deep seated ideas about moral responsibility. So I think those are my primary reasons, for why I’m pretty hard on free will. And I don’t see that being disabused for me. So I don’t know what you think of that.
Sam:
Fascinating. I think, as you’re talking, I’m just thinking myself, could this just be this idea that we wants to, I guess, flourish and reject that which is harmful and for those reasons we say that this thing’s wrong or that thing’s right. And this idea as well you’ve just mentioned there, this North Korea three generational lockup sounds horrific. I mention it like, “Flip. That would be a really good way to stop a lot of people doing a lot of bad stuff”, but I guess, could people then look at it and then turn around and say something like, “well, if I then put that on these people, what’s the chance of it happening to me as well”? So because I want to protect myself and my wellbeing and my flourishing, I don’t want to then put these other arbitrary rules out. I’d rather it was an individualistic system rather than a kind of collective system. Could people argue against it that way, I guess?
Trent:
Yes. One could do that. But I would say this same argument could be used to do away with punishment entirely. So if your only objection to the punishment of three generations, if your only objection to punishing innocent people in order to deter crime is, “Well, what if my innocent relatives are punished”? I would say that that’s just a pragmatic objection, because if I lived in that society, I would say, “Well, I’m not going to commit a crime. So my relatives won’t be punished”. Imagine if somebody said, “Well we shouldn’t lock up this guy for murder, because what if somebody locked me up for murder” to which I would say, “Well, that’s not a good argument because you should lock up that guy for murder. And then if I commit murder, lock me up”. So you could run the same way. I don’t want to lock up that guy’s family. What if they lock up my family? Well if that’s what produces the best results, then it seems like it could still be fair all around.
Trent:
Certainly my one reply there. But there’s also other problems. So Boonin’s book’s a very fascinating, Problem of Punishment. And there’s other thesis like this. So Boonin’s answered a punishment. As he says punishment is just about restoring a debt you owe someone else. And I’m actually very in favor of this kind of view of what’s called restorative justice. So instead of just trying to punish people, you try to say, “Look, you have to do something to make up for the disorder you’ve caused in the community”. But if punishment isn’t about moral responsibility. If it’s just about making society better, there’s all kinds of other things you could put in.
Trent:
Another example Boonin raises in the book and I think actually Harris and his book on free will, he makes a reference to the same kind of thing, is what if you had someone who was really beneficial to society, but they were an evil person, and so they’ve committed crimes. Maybe you should just give them preferential treatment and make people think they’re being punished when they’re actually kept in a secure place and they get luxuries and they’re being treated really well because it’s nice that they’re the guy that invents everything or this or that. It would seem like to me, I think most people see that we ought to operate with a world where fairness and justice are our operating principles, rather than just how do we arrange things to get the desired end we want? To me it just seems better to go with the virtues and principles that are naturally ordered towards those good ends instead of taking any route we want to, even if it’s a morally dubious one. And so hat might be how I might reply to that. That thought on freewill.
Sam:
Yeah, it’s fascinating. I mean, this feeds into the whole subjective objective morality as well, which freewill and morality go together in quite a few ways. Obviously they’re separate but they’re very compatible, you could say. So in your book you have this chapter and forgive me, I can’t remember the title. The chapter’s towards the end of the book where you basically start off talking about the sort of a hammer attacks that happened. I think it might be in Ukraine somewhere like that.
Trent:
Yeah. I can’t pronounce it. It’s a long Russian word, The Dnepropetrovsk maniacs, I think.
Sam:
Yeah. So I remember accidentally stumbling across the video, gosh, many, many, many years ago. Yeah, it’s stayed with me. That’s never going to go. It was absolutely horrific. So when you mentioned it and you mentioned this sort of thing within you that says this is wrong, like what these people are doing is completely wrong. And obviously very much felt that and also felt the effects of having seen it stay with me, hopefully forever. Because I don’t want to ever think something like that’s okay, obviously. So I kind of wondered if you can kind of break that down for us. I assumed the sort of objective moral sorts of understanding. But yeah, how would you, how would you talk about that?
Trent:
Sure. And I think here the debate about morality, people use different kinds of terms, some more helpful than others. What I tried to use in the book and I’ve done since then is I talk about moral facts. So the idea here, objective and subjective. It really gets down of the question, what are moral statements? So when we say things like, “It is wrong for these three young men to bash a guy’s head in with a hammer for fun” which is what happened in that video that they recorded, it is wrong to do that. What does that statement mean? When we say it is wrong? Some people will say all that statement means is, “I am repulsed and have a sense of disgust and sadness and anger when I see something like that”. So all that statement is saying, that doesn’t say anything about what they did, it just says something about how I feel about what they did. But if that’s the case, why care? Okay, people have feelings, what does it matter what feelings you have? Your feelings don’t dictate how I live my life. But if the statement “It is wrong to do this” refers to a truth or a fact I would say. That there are facts about not just the way we do behave, but the way we ought to behave. That there are what you could call commands even. That we are obliged or commanded. We have a duty to act in a certain way, and especially to not act in horrifying or savage ways to other people. And then comes the challenge of explaining if these moral facts do exist, how do we explain them.
Trent:
In his book The Miracle of Theism, the atheist J. L. Mackey, one of the smartest atheist of the 20th century. He was a moral skeptic. He didn’t think these moral statements had any real reference, or at least if they did they were always false statements. He said, “Look, if these moral facts do exist, then they’re really strange”. I think he said that they’re queer even. They’re just so bizarre, there could be these commands just out there dictating what we do. He said the odds of them arising without an all-powerful God are very, very low. He couldn’t see them existing without God. So, because Mackey was an atheist, he just gets rid of the moral facts. But for me, if the moral facts are like, “Yeah, I think it’s a fact” or what philosophers call moral realism, that these moral facts about how we ought to live exist, they’re part of the fabric of the universe, how do we explain them?
Trent:
I would say, if they’re there and God is tied into that in an essential way, then I would just take God along with it. So if you’re an atheist, there’s kind of two ways you could attack this argument. One, you could attack the idea that morality is objective or that moral facts exist. You could say there are no moral facts. It just appears that way. Or two, you could say they do exist, but they’re not really dependent on God. So I think that’s the two ways an atheist might be able to go about against this argument.
Sam:
That’s really helpful. And then, so jumping into kind of what I would say is the case, and this is just what I’ve thought in the past. And I really want to be pushed back on. Someone’s pushed back against me on this. Is this idea that moral facts don’t exist, but what does exist is my subjective feelings, but it’s not just what I personally feel. It’s due to my genetics and evolution and the memes that have been brought with me and the culture around me and all of these things make it seem as if a fact exists. When actually all that does exist, I could say, I would say, “Rape is wrong”, but that doesn’t mean that there’s some sort of fact out there that says, “Rape is wrong”. What there is instead is an evolutionary and genetic DNA meme, encrypted understanding of the world and what flourishing looks like and what society looks like and how things work together. That has brought me to that point. I mean, how would you talk about that?
Trent:
Yeah. And what I would say is, I would say that evolution certainly explains our moral feelings. Though not entirely. I was recently reading Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature. I don’t know if you’ve ever read it or not,
Sam:
Yeah. Yeah I have. Good book.
Trent:
But what’s interesting, the conclusion that Pinker reaches, it seems like most of our moral feelings don’t actually come from evolution because it actually comes from the civilizing effect of society. Because one example Pinker makes in the book is that if we’re related to chimpanzees, our evolution has predisposed chimpanzees to be very aggressive in order to secure their territory and survive. Chimpanzees will travel as roving gangs and they will eliminate strange chimps who don’t belong to their tribe. They’ll attack weak chimps that are on their own. If they meet an equal force, they’ll holler and yell, they won’t want to get into a fight. They only get into a fight when it’s like the maniacs, the three guys and a hammer. When they know they can just tear this chimp apart, they will go ahead and they will do that. Or if they come across a female chimp with a baby, they’ll eat the baby and then impregnate the female. And so when you look at anthropological evidence, it seems that the rate of homicide among ancient peoples. Let’s say hominids or even stone stone-age people a hundred thousand years ago, I think it was something like 15% of all people died at the hands of other people. Whereas today in the modern world, depending on where you live, it’s 0.1% or something. And that’s really only happened really in the past few thousand years.
Trent:
So what’s interesting there is, you’re right that evolution disposes us to have certain moral feelings. Society disposes us to have a certain moral feelings, but I think ultimately it’s up to us as individuals. How do I determine if my moral feelings are right or wrong? How do I determine if it’s okay to act on the feeling or not okay to act on the feeling? When a man catches his wife in bed with another man, evolution has predisposed him to have the feeling like killing both of them, but in a civilized society he knows not to do that. He goes down to the marriage counselor, you know? So it just seems to be that. And that’s because he has recognized there is a moral fact, you ought not kill an innocent person. You just don’t do that. And that would be the rule you’re breaking here. So this objection, “Well evolution explains things”, I would say, yeah, it explains the feelings, but not the facts because we use the facts to sort out which feelings we should indulge and which feelings we should rebuke.
Sam:
It does. Yeah. I guess my response would be, and this is just pushing it because this is probably going to be as far as I can go with it. But this idea of obviously prescriptive and descriptive, ought and is, and that sort of stuff. So I guess this idea that I have no problem saying that in the last 2000 years or so, this murder rate has massively dropped. In fact I completely accept and agree with that. But what I can’t help but also think is, we act in a way which is going to essentially propagate our genes into the future. And if we can live in a way, which means that the society around us and our loved ones and the families and our kin are able to live with the most flourishing, the most resistance to harm, let’s say. Where they can actually be alive and be as happy as they can be in a situation where there is as much flourishing as possible. And actually living in that society means that I’m able to do the very thing that evolution has programmed me to do more effectively than chimpanzees for instance, or I know there are other sorts of groups that live In different ways, but could it not just be the case that’s just prescribed to us, again, because of evolution.
Trent:
No. Because my distinction here would be, I would say it’s a very grand coincidence that moral truths, specific kinds of moral truths also happened to be survival truths. I mean, you think about how evolution disposes people to act and how slight changes in the environment can cause radical changes in the animal or organisms structure. You know, you think about like when you have a peninsula right, of animals and then there’s a flood and it cuts off the island from the mainland. That can cause the animals on the island to go all totally bonkers evolution wise. You can have giant creatures because they don’t have competitors, this and that. But it would just seem strange to me that we have these particular moral truths, especially, don’t punish innocent people, don’t commit fraud. But it also gets in even more specific territory. Respect people’s wishes after they have died. We all seem to really have that one. We ought to respect someone’s wishes after they die. Even though after death, there’s no one there to offend. If they’ve asked us to do something. that’s an interesting one. If you don’t respect someone’s wishes, who do you harm at that very moment because they’re not around anymore, right?
Trent:
We have all these moral truths and it just seems to me very coincidental as an explanation. Well, the reason we believe these moral truths is that they’re just the same thing as the survival truths or flourishing truths evolution disposes us towards, even though evolution has a wide variety of things it could predispose us towards. And I still think though, that it gets the order of things a little backwards.
Trent:
So there’s a debate in mathematics between Platonists and anti-Platonists about numbers. Not numerals like the numeral one or the Roman numeral one. Like the number one, two plus two equals four, sets. It seems like math is really universal, right? I’ll give you this. If every culture had a story about Batman, I would be a lot more open to the idea Batman really exists, right? Instead of it just being something that Bob Kane came up with back in the thirties and forties. But every culture understands mathematics. Some more primitively than others. But every culture has two plus two equals four. Now you might say, well that’s just because math describes the world around us. And when you have two rocks and two rocks, that’s four rocks. It’s not a big deal. But I don’t think that’s true because we even have math, like using infinite sets, that’s universal. But there are no infinite sets in the real world, like there are rocks to check two plus two equals four. So you might say, “Well, what explains these kinds of universal mathematical truths”? I mean if somebody said, “Well, we just evolved because as human beings, the more we learned about shapes and numbers, the better we were at surviving”. I have a deep sense about counting and shapes and distance because that helped us to hunt game and survive in the woods. Yada, yada. I would say.
Trent:
Game and survive in the woods, yada, yada. I would say, sure, that explains how we got good at geometry or how we got good at math, but it doesn’t explain the Pythagorean theorem being universal or it doesn’t explain the truths we got good at. I would say evolution explains and cultural conditioning explains how we got good at moral facts, adhering to them, but not the existence of the facts themselves. With math, a lot of non-religious people are okay saying, okay, maybe there is an abstract world of numbers and shapes and the universe is a weird [inaudible 00:46:37] thing, but an abstract world of commands to do good, to me that starts to tread into theistic territory.
Sam:
Really interesting, and I really like the idea that you’ve mentioned a few times now, which is this one of things have gone in a way where there seems to be improvements rather than evolution has many things at her disposal and that she could utilize them in a different way. We could think that murdering children’s absolutely fine and people have thought that in the past and lived in that way. But actually the way we find ourselves today, it doesn’t seem to be like that. And yeah, I find that a really interesting and challenging one.
Trent:
Well, let me add onto that.
Sam:
Sure.
Trent:
This idea, evolution isn’t ordered towards progress if you think about it. It’s ordered towards adaptation. Some people might think like, Oh, it’s progress. We went from the water, to amphibian, to being on land. And yeah, that’s adaptation, but it’s not moral progress to get out of the water and onto the land because if there was a change in the world, people might have to adapt and go back in the water through some evolutionary process. But you’re right. When we look at moral progress and we see that we can judge certain societies, we can see we’re on the arc of justice. And also just for ourselves to ask, if I lived in 1860, would I have been against slavery? If I lived in other times and places, if I lived in first century Rome, would I have been against infanticide? And I think deep down, a lot of us want to say, “Yeah, I wouldn’t have gone with the crowd. I would have done what was right.” That’s another one that to me is a clue to this transcendent morality.
Sam:
Yeah, that’s interesting. I guess the hard reality could be that although we want to think that now, we wouldn’t have done that then. I know it’s-
Trent:
That’s true. That’s true.
Sam:
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, forgive me if that’s the wrong name for the man who wrote The Gulag Archipelago, talks about-
Trent:
Gulag Archipelago.
Sam:
Yeah, the line of good and evil running through every human heart. People mentioned it many times before, this idea that anybody could have been a guard at Auschwitz. As hard as that is to allow to come, I feel like you could have been born into the situation, into the family, into the settings that culminated in you ending up being in that position. And I find that really challenging as well, that actually there is this idea that the world we’re in and the circumstances get handed to us does have a big impact on what we end up believing and doing. Just look at the different religions and the different geographical locations of the world. What would you say to that?
Trent:
The accident of birth. Yeah. The lottery of birth. It seems like the most important fact about us is something we can’t choose and that’s who our parents are, and it does seem almost unfair. Well, if you have an atheistic worldview, you say it’s unfair, there’s nobody to complain to. There’s no complaint department under atheism.
Sam:
I like that.
Trent:
Though one could complain to God and say, “Well, Hey God, why did you let me be born in this family or that family?” And people ask that question a lot. But I would say at least under a Christian worldview, that God loves us and the only reason we exist is because he wants us to exist. And even if we endure hardship and suffering in this life, even purely because of situations beyond our control like where we are born, God’s plan for us and his judgment of us takes into account what we’ve been given.
Trent:
For me, being Catholic, I teach people about Catholicism. I feel like God holds me to a very high standard, a scarily high standard. I know the rule book inside and out. If I break it, there’s no excuses. But someone who was given a deformed education and morality, someone who was raised in a dysfunctional home or society or raised without even knowing who Jesus is, they were dealt a very different hand. And I believe and the church teaches that God will judge that person differently based on what they’ve received. But I believe for me, it’s important to share with people the life of grace and understanding who God is.
Trent:
You’re right. You go back in time, most of us, most people follow the crowd. I love studying disasters, what happens when a ship sinks or a plane crashes, and on my podcast I always talk about them. And I’ve read studies saying that among people, you can divide them up into three groups. 10% of people are leaders, 80% of people are followers, and 10% of people can neither lead nor follow. And so, it seems like to exhibit real heroism, to go against the grain, it is something that can be more in the minority. That’s why I feel this moral duty to share the truth about the dignity of the human being, to oppose injustice, so that people don’t have to rely on grace to be heroes, that society is just a better place and people are treated with equality and with fairness and with justice and to reach that real moral progress.
Sam:
Yeah. I think that’s really interesting idea that you mentioned about being held to this higher standard. There’s that famous Annie Dillard quote, which is something along the lines of this Eskimo says, “If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?” And the priest says, “No, not if you didn’t know.” And the Eskimo says, “Then why did you tell me?”
Trent:
Right. Now, what the church teaches, though, is that… And it’s important to understand what hell is. I think that when people think of hell as just you stand in front of the pearly gates and if God is in a good mood, he opens the gates. If he’s in a bad mood with you, he pulls the lever and the trap door opens and you fall into the fire. If that’s your view of hell, that’s a view of hell that I also would reject, as hell as like an extrinsic, arbitrary punishment, that you didn’t love God so now God’s going to hit you with eternal fire for that.
Trent:
But when it comes to hell, I have a easier time wrapping my head around it. Not that it is a punishment for a decision to not follow God, but that it is the decision. That if God just is goodness itself and everything we see in this world that is good, it’s a faint shadow of God, then the desire to pursue the good will naturally lead you to God. And ultimately, if you know about the church and about Jesus, you should find the good in God he’s given to us and through Jesus and through the church. But if you were born, let’s say in America, in the United States, well, the new world, North America in the year 1000, there’s no church, but you could understand that goodness in the human conscience. And so do you follow it? Do you recognize in creation there’s a greater power beyond you and you follow that? And it’s still a hard path because our human hearts, we have a natural predisposition to selfishness and to taking our own interests above all others.
Trent:
And so, I think that God, if some people have gone through life and their trajectory has always gone towards, I love myself more than anything, and in fact, one definition of sin is loving creature more than creator, loving the creature more than the creator, then that is what you’ll have for all eternity and God won’t won’t force you to be with him for all eternity. In fact, that might even be hellish. Because I think in this life, we see gradations of good and evil among people, but also their natural disposition to goodness. But I believe in the next life, it will be a lot more stark. You’ll see how people are.
Trent:
And some people, if by that point they’re fully in love with themselves, they’re a narcissist, if you’ve ever seen a narcissist around a legitimately amazing person, it drives them bonkers. You ever go to a party and there’s someone who’s a total narcissist, but an actual famous person or someone people really like is there in competition? They cannot stand that person. For a narcissist to be in heaven with God, infinite goodness and perfection itself, that would be a hellish thing. Now, of course, there’s a lot more I could get into with hell and with all that, but I just hope it’s important to see that if human beings have free will to choose the good or not choose the good, I do think there has to be an ultimate ability to either choose God as the good or to choose something else like oneself instead and that God won’t coerce someone in that regard.
Sam:
Yeah. And it obviously reminds me very much of The Great Divorce by Lewis, massively. This idea of this day trip to heaven almost. You have this Napoleonic figure, I think it’s Napoleon himself actually almost moving into or different people moving into houses further and further and further and further away from each other. Yeah, it’s really interesting. I would advise anyone to read that book if you want to probably think more on mystics.
Trent:
I was about to say that. I’m like, I should really plug The Great Divorce, but you’ve done it for me. Very good.
Sam:
Yeah, I love Lewis. [crosstalk 00:10:31].
Trent:
You have to, you’re English.
Sam:
Yeah, that’s it. Yeah. Got to represent. One of the reasons that I stepped away from a belief in God is this idea that evolution is a painful, long, horrific, death-orientated process. And God’s being all loving and being for this world and us humans being his-
Trent:
Sure.
Sam:
Yeah, his light here, almost his garden is here on earth, can a Christian God really be behind something like evolution which has brought us about? It just seems so alien to this Christian message.
Trent:
Sure. And so this would be a subset of the problem of evil. For many, many people throughout history, C. S. Lewis himself grappled with this problem after the death of his wife. It’s interesting. Lewis actually wrote two books on the problem of evil, The Problem of Pain, which was his academic response to the question, and then A Grief Observed, which was what he wrote after his wife died, which is a lot more raw. You can always tell when someone writes about evil how much evil they’ve endured in their own life if they can really come to come to grips with it.
Trent:
I was reading a Christian theologian the other day writing about the problem of evil, and he was very raw about the suffering involved with caring for his mother, or sorry, for his wife who has Alzheimer’s and seeing her waste away in this regard. And so, he still believed that suffering did not refute the existence of God. In fact, it gave him hope in the midst of this suffering, but he saw how it could certainly darken one’s one’s view of God. That’s the question. To answer the question about evolution and animal suffering, we have to recognize it’s a subset of the problem of evil, which is God’s all good, all knowing, all powerful. Evil exists and all good being like this shouldn’t allow evil, would prevent it, but it’s here, so God either doesn’t exist or he’s not all powerful or he’s not all good. He can’t be all those things.
Trent:
And so, I think what’s interesting here is that the problem of evil, many people are willing to admit that there are some evils that could be justified. We talked about free will earlier. The evils of murder and rape and adultery and genocide, why would God make human beings? Well, God could make human beings without free will, and then you wouldn’t have those evils, but you’d lose goods like love, courage, compassion. And I’ve found from any atheist I’ve spoken to the existence of these other great goods helps to explain why God might tolerate evils existing. But then the rejoinder I hear is, yeah, but what about animals that don’t have those great goods like forgiveness, compassion, courage, free will? What about animals? They seem to get the short end of the stick here.
Trent:
And so, I think that that’s your concern with evolution. Though what’s interesting to me is that I don’t think your objection is really with the process of evolution itself because I think you would feel this way if God… What if God 10,000 years ago had made the world as it is, but with animals that ate each other and things like that? Because what’s interesting is the view that death only occurred at the fall of man for all beings, that’s actually more of a newer Protestant view. Traditionally, like St. Thomas Aquinas said, prior to the fall of man, there was death. There had to be because in the Garden of Eden, it says, Adam and Eve, I give you the green plants eat. Well, Adam and Eve killed those plants and they made a salad. There was death there. The plants died, and then Aquinas said, it makes sense that the animals would not have suddenly changed from being benign to ferocious just in one fell swoop.
Trent:
What’s interesting is evolution does add the compound factor of something happening for millions of years, but I think your concern is more, why would God make higher order animal life? Because if you think about it, let’s say the earth is 4.5 billion years old. The first what? Two billion years? It’s proteins and bacteria. There’s no suffering there. You go forward. Maybe you get plants and lichens, and then you start getting reptiles and amphibians. And it’s about the past and I’m not an evolutionary biologist. I took geology 101 in community college, so it’s a long time ago. I remember the geological ages, but let’s say there’s been, I don’t know, 300 million years of higher order animal life existing.
Trent:
I guess the question your concern is, if higher order animal life exists, like a bear, a deer, a Komodo dragon, it seems like they can feel pain and a lot of times their lives do end in pain. Is it okay for God to do something like that? Well, that gets us back to a bigger question. Is it good for God to make these kinds of animals in the first place? Before I continue, is this making sense where I’m running with this?
Sam:
Yeah, no, it really is. It’s really helpful. Carry on.
Trent:
Okay. Then we make the point, all right… And for me, I have a soft heart for animals. I remember once I was riding my bike around a lake and a duck came out from nowhere in front of me, darted out in front of me. And I tried to hit the brake and I ran over the duck and his head smacked into the concrete and I just felt awful. I was like, Oh no. And I saw him waddling away to the water to get away and he was all woozy.
Sam:
Oh gosh.
Trent:
And I was like, Oh gosh, I hope I didn’t kill him. Maybe he just is banged up and he’ll be okay, but I had that sense, a sense of empathy. I don’t want to cause an innocent being… So, I get it with animals suffering. You don’t want to see animals suffer. But at the same time, I also think it’s good that animals exist because you think with human beings, like the free will example, why can’t God just make human beings that don’t have free will? Well, they wouldn’t really be human beings. They’d be Stepford wives. They’d be robots. They’d be Westworld. It’s the idea here, God makes bears or take, let’s say, a lion. Bears are kind of vegetarians. They’re pescatarians. They eat salmon, they eat berries and grubs. Let me take a lion. I like lions. Now I sound like my five-year-old.
Trent:
I like lions, but lions eat zebras. Lions are a carnivorous animal and zebras are an animal that relies on being aware of the world around them. When they get thirsty, they seek out water. When they see a lion dart and they feel fear, they run away. When they sense an injury, they get within their herd. You might say, well, why can’t God just make animals then that don’t feel pain? That’s like the humans that don’t have free will. It’s like, well, it’s not really an animal then. God just made a fleshy robot. Then the question becomes, all right, God has a good reason for allowing humans to suffer. Could God have good reasons for allowing animals to suffer?
Trent:
And there’s lots of different ways theologians have approached the issue. One that I find interesting is it just might be good that the animals exist. And that was the thought experiment I brought up with Alex in my debate with him. I said, “Well, hey, you know what, Alex? What if we found a planet with sentient animals and they’re suffering like they do on earth? What if we could just destroy that planet, just wipe it out in an instant? Then there’d be no more suffering in that part of the universe.” But I think a lot of us would be really hesitant to do that. We have a sense like, yeah, it’s bad that they suffer, but it’d be worse without them. I think if I have that mindset, then animal suffering, it’s not as problematic. Does that make sense?
Sam:
Yeah. Yeah, it does. I think that’s very helpful. I guess my question then would be, why did God bring about humans through such a long process, right? Why is there so much suffering, so much pain, which I think is Alex alludes to as well in the debate?
Trent:
Right. Well, you could also argue the same thing about humanity. Why did God bring you and I about through 20,000 years of human reproduction?
Sam:
Right, yeah.
Trent:
God could have made each of us instantaneously and given us knowledge and here we are. Why didn’t God do that? And the answer is, well, there are other goods that come about through human beings existing in a chain of reproduction. Now, I’m not saying that the same goods justify evolution, but sometimes I find when there’s one puzzle, why did God do this or why that, sometimes the way to approach the puzzle, I like to go to another puzzle that’s similar and if I can get an answer there, okay, then that gives me hope to find an answer to the previous puzzle.
Trent:
With human beings, yeah, God could have made all of us, snapped his fingers, and we all exist simultaneously, but there’s a good in human beings having a grand story of us all being one, we’re all interconnected. When you think about it, you and I are probably, what is it? At the most, we’d be like 51st cousins. All of us on earth, I think they’ve said something like, at the most, you’re a 52nd cousin from somebody else. We are all literally part of one family, which it would be hard to say we’re part of a family if we were all created ex nihilo from nothing. There’s a good in the human family existing together, in human beings coming together in marriage. I have three children. My third one was born at home unexpectedly. We waited a bit too long and I caught him when he was born.
Sam:
Wow.
Trent:
Yeah, no, he came out in a minute and I just caught him and he looked up at me and he starts crying.
Sam:
Gosh.
Trent:
I will never forget that moment for the rest of my life. Most people don’t do that, but if we were all created simultaneously, I would not have had that good. Now of course there are bads. There are children who die in childbirth. There are women who die in childbirth, but I also believe that if God is sovereign and all powerful, then he is able to compensate how humans suffer in this life. And it’s also possible, some theologians have speculated God could compensate animals. The Bible talks about the wolf lying down with the lamb in the new heaven. If animals have a continuous consciousness, then it’s possible God could put their parts back together. Maybe they’ll have a consciousness free of pain in the next life. But if animals don’t perceive of themselves over time, it’s also possible animals might feel pain, but they’re not aware they’re in pain like you and I are. It’s a different kind of higher order awareness. Then there’s not as much as a problem.
Trent:
But ultimately for me, I would say that arguments against God saying, I can’t believe in God because of some evil, whether it’s evils of evolution or a wicked serial killer, for me, my ultimate backstop on this, I can’t let that get me to atheism because if I give up God, I still have all the evil. For me, it’s like, all right, I can’t believe in God with this. Well, that’s just not much of a solution. I’m still stuck with a bunch of problems. There’s still suffering, there’s still awfulness, and I gave up my one possible hope to redeem it all and to make it right in the end. For me, if there’s good reasons to think God exists, then I’m not going to give up that hope unless somebody disabuses me of all those reasons, like the ones I put forward in the debate. You know?
Sam:
Yeah. No, that’s really helpful. And at the end of the podcast, I definitely want to come back to these good reasons and ask where people can go to learn more-
Sam:
These good reasons and kind of ask where people can go to learn more about these good reasons. So please remind me of that. But before we get there probably quite left field, but it’s the final kind of thing that I wanted to kind of talk to you about. Though I would love to do this again, for sure.
Trent:
Yeah, sure.
Sam:
This idea of the Bible then so, I love the Bible. I think we’re recording this on the 8th of January 2021 and I’ve just started doing the Bible in a year which might sound a bit of a shock to a lot of my listeners, but actually, I want to engage with the Bible because I think as a minimum, me engaged with the Bible will enable me to understand where the people I’m talking to are coming from. I can at least know the scriptures more. I can understand how they’re interpreting it and how people are reading it. So I’m doing that again I’ve read it many times, but I might just thought, yes, it has been a few years since I stepped away from Christianity and actually I want to begin to look at it again.
Trent:
Good.
Sam:
I mean, I watched people like.. And I’ve spoken to [inaudible 01:09:58] on this channel. Have you ever heard of [inaudible 01:10:00] the YouTube atheist?
Trent:
Yes. He specializes in critiques of things like the resurrection.
Sam:
Yeah. This is such a massive subject area and I’m not an expert, but there seems to be a lot of very knowledgeable people like [inaudible 01:10:16] or others who have come to a very clear way of explaining how we cannot know things for certain. We can’t know that Jesus rose from the dead. We can kind of go from this point onwards from the gospel is being written, people believed it to be the case, but actually it’s impossible to get all the way back to the resurrection. That’s just one example of many kinds of questions that people have about the Bible. And I kind of wanted to ask you very generally, how do we know that the Bible we have and the verse of the Bible that we have is actually the word of God and is true and happened. How do we begin to even unravel that sort of massive deep question?
Trent:
Yeah, that’s a good question. So for me, when I was in high school, I thought the Bible was just a collection of human writings. And so you’ve got some things that are true in them and some things that are false and some things that are nonfiction and some things that are fiction. And so for me, if I look at the new Testament as a set of historical documents and it shows Jesus vindicated as claims to divinity by rising from the dead, then that gives me confidence, both in the church he established and the scriptures that the church has declared to be the word of God with having the authority of being successors of the apostles.
Trent:
So that’s sort of the anchor for me for the whole thing. But when people say like, “How do you know the Bible is true?” It’s sort of like the question, how can you trust everything written in that bookstore? Well, a bookstore… Well, I believe the books in the bookstore that are trying to… That are accurately written and trying to talk about non-fiction for example, but a bookstore also has fiction in it. And the Bible is more like a bookstore than a book. I mean, it’s a collection of books written over a span of 1500 years or so.
Trent:
And so some of the genres are all very different. Some of them may very well be fiction. There may not have been a prodigal son, but that’s okay. Jesus is trying to make a point with a story. It’s also the case… I mean, that could also be true for stories like Jonah or job. These could be educational fiction, the Psalms are more literary elements, but then there may also be other elements where you have history told in different genres.
Trent:
So the catechism of the Catholic church actually says that the fall of man in Genesis three is true, but it’s described in symbolic language. So it may not have been a literal serpent and fruit. There was a fruit, it wasn’t an Apple like every North American Bible says. I’d pin my money on a date for Mesopotamia. But it may not have been.. That that may not have been the exact sin that Genesis three may not be written in the genre of a newspaper account or a transcript. I would say a lot of the Bible is not written in that way, but you also have ways of telling history through things like epic poetry, through recollections. Though, I would say, as you get closer to the gospels, I would say that they’re of the genre of ancient biography. So they’re committed to telling history, not necessarily in a chronological way, not necessarily in a transcript, but in a way that is factual and truthful to historical events. And then you have like things like the letters of St. Paul that fall into the ancient genre of the epistle of, the letter communicatinG trues to others.
Trent:
So then I will go through each of them to look at their genres, but, but ultimately my faith in the Bible as a whole being the word of God will be rooted in a historical examination of who Jesus of Nazareth is and whether he Rose from the dead, from these historical sources, just as human writings. Though, I would say with [inaudible 01:13:57] I mean, yeah, you can’t get absolute certainty of almost any historical event. I mean, you’ve got conflicting and converging evidence. I mean, there’s evidence that John Wilkes Booth, the guy who shot Abraham Lincoln, didn’t actually die when he was pursued by law enforcement. But he went on to change his identity with another name. Most mainstream would say that he died, but there’s evidence contrary to that. And some people accept the alternative view. With history, you’re not going to get absolute certainty like you do with philosophy. I mean, even with science, it’s like, you think like you get absolute with science. Yeah. You do until science has a revolution a hundred years later. Newton thought like, “Yeah, we’ve got it all figured out.” Then Einstein comes along and says, “Actually you didn’t.” So absolute certainty is something really, it’s more in logic, you get these kinds of things. But I would say with history, I am convinced by the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, that would definitely be a show for another time to go into deeper.
Trent:
I have thought though, of actually writing… There’s lots of books on the resurrection. I’ve thought about writing a book. At the very least, I do think that the resurrection of Jesus is the best attested miracle in antiquity. And when you compare it to things like the miracles of Buddha. The first documented stuff we have on that as 400 years later. There are other miracle figures. It’s very removed secondhand, but I think the resurrection, the testimony of Paul, the accounts, especially in early gospels, like Mark, the early apostolic preaching, it all comes together to me that the resurrection of Jesus makes the most sense of all the data related to the origin of Christianity. But I would recommend for your listeners, if they would like a more comprehensive treatment of that. A good introduction is The Case for the Resurrection by Gary Habermas and Mike Lacona. Mike wrote a big thick book on that called The Resurrection: A New Historiographical Approach, which is good. And Andrew Loke, L-O-K-E. Smart guy. Some people call him the William Lane Craig of Asia. He wrote a book on the resurrection as well, that I hear is very good called Investigating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. So those might be three resources I put your listeners to from that.
Sam:
That’s really helpful. I think, yeah, the Bible is such a challenging and as you mentioned, varied book. You’ve got 66 different books, I believe [inaudible 01:16:32] if you take the kind of version I read, but I don’t know, you probably read a different version, right?
Trent:
73 in Catholic Bibles. Catholics and Protestants differ about the number of books in the Old Testament. So Catholics and Protestants agree there are 27 books of the new Testament, but they disagree about how many were in the Old Testament. Catholics would hold to the tradition of the number of books in the Old Testament that was found in the Septuagint, which was the Greek Old Testament that Jesus and the apostles used. I actually did a debate on that on [inaudible 01:17:05] channel if you want to see that with me in a protestant.
Sam:
Yeah. I saw that starting. I was like, I don’t have time for this, you to pause it. Yeah. That was-
Trent:
Sure.
Sam:
That looks really interesting. Okay. That’s helpful. And I guess just kind of go into the Old Testament just for the last kind of question really is there are lots of things in the Old Testament that people read and they just go with that’s [inaudible 00:01:17:27], that’s evil as wrong and that’s challenging. I know that you’ve written on this before and I just kind of wanted to kind of get your quick take on it. I’m aware people should go meet the book or they want to know more, but how do people in their hearts kind of deal with these, I guess atrocities? You pick your atrocity that happened in the Old Testament, people would say [inaudible 01:17:45] this sacking of this village is awful. The ripping out of babies, outranking women’s awful, devastating, whatever is awful. How do we actually begin to reconcile those as we come to the Old Testament scriptures?
Trent:
Well, there’s a number of rules. One should follow. I described them at length in my book, Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties. So a lot that I would do when when you read through that. One rule would be just because something is recorded in the Bible, doesn’t mean it’s recommended. Some people think the Bible is God’s instruction book to human beings. And it most certainly is not. Some parts of it are, but the Bible is the record of God’s revealing of himself in salvation history. So when you read something like you referenced babies being ripped from mother’s arms or cut from mother’s wombs, for example, what you’re reading there is things like how the Assyrians or Babylonians captured is real and atrocities that were committed, Or take the book of Judges as a good example of this.
Trent:
So the book of judges, the theme of the book of judges is don’t do this. It’s just a big book of don’t… Horrible things happen Judges. And at the end of the book of judges, there is a Levi with his concubine staying in the village of Gibeah. And the men there is kind of like Sodom and Gomorrah. They seek to rape him and he offers the concubine instead. And so they rape the concubine as a show of power and dominance. And she is left for dead on his doorstep. And then he cuts her up into 12 pieces, sends her to the rest of the tribes and says, “Look at these horrible things that happened in Gibeah.” So then they go to war against the tribe of Benjamin, which was in charge there. They nearly wipe out Benjamin. And in order to keep Benjamin from going out of existence, they kidnapped 600 dancing girls from Shiloh and force them into marriage.
Trent:
And then the book ends, Judges 21-25 ends, “And this is how it was in Israel when there was no King. Every man did what was right in his own eyes.” And that was the end of the book. Is just saying this is what you do. When you think you’re right, you do what you think you’re going to do. So record versus recommend is number one, just because of the record, so doesn’t mean recommends it. Number two, just because it regulates something doesn’t mean it recommends it.
Trent:
So you have things like divorce, which the church teaches is evil, but was tolerated in that time. Sometimes less optimal things are tolerated in the Old Testament because that’s the best we can expect people to do. So things like slavery. Read about slavery. How could there be slavery? Well, you also have to remember that in this culture… We live in a culture where you can get credit easy. You can go get a credit card with an APR, whatever. In the ancient world, there was no credit. Usually you had a choice. If you were destitute, you could either starve to death or you could sell yourself to someone else. And in the Genesis, it actually talks about when there was a famine in the land, people went to Egypt saying we will sell ourselves as slaves to you so the people wouldn’t starve to death basically. Does that make slavery right? No, but there’s regulations in the Bible to prevent the universal institution of slavery from being the worst that it can be. And in my book, I talk about how Israelite slavery was actually quite different from other ancient nations.
Trent:
Now it’s easy for us to say, “How could those primitive people have done that?” But we have to remember 500 years into the future, people might look at you and me and say, “I can’t believe those people ate meat.” “I can’t believe.” Of course, 500 years from now it might be easy for everyone to be a vegan. It’s a bit harder now. But the Bible does record how God progressively leads people with hard hearts. Because you might say, “Well, why doesn’t God just give them all the right rules at the beginning?” Well, it’s like I have a five-year-old and a three-year-old. I could give them adult standards of behavior and they would just fail spectacularly. I have to progressively lead them in moral maturity. And the Bible records that with the people of God as well.
Trent:
And then finally. Well, two more things, when it talks about God killing people or God’s people killing people, one, there is a dispute about whether the commands to slaughter men, women, and children are literal or non-literal. It could be like how, when I say we destroyed them at last night’s basketball game, we didn’t commit a felony or anything. Could just be exaggerated warfare language. But it goes back to if God is the author of life, is he isn’t he allowed to give us as much or as little life as he sees fit? We don’t have a right to it. He gives it to us. If I gave you $20 every day for the next 20 days and I stopped on day 21, I haven’t harmed you because you have no right to it in the first place. It was a gift. And it’s kind of saying, “If God gives me life, he’s given me life every day, but he doesn’t see stops tomorrow.” I mean, all the days were a gift from him.
Trent:
And then finally, I would say, if you are absolutely convinced that what happened in the Old Testament was evil and wrong. It sounds you are comparing that to those moral facts we talked about earlier. [inaudible 01:23:01] somebody said, “Well, that’s just their culture. They were programmed…” I mean, if you think about it, they live in a society where it’s dog eat dog. I don’t want to go on and on here. I watched the movie Greenland recently, I don’t know if you’d got a chance to see. It was released on Amazon Prime.
Sam:
No. Not yet.
Trent:
Are you familiar with it?
Sam:
Basically, yeah.
Trent:
So it was a new movie that came… Yeah. It’s with Gerard Butler and its asteroid movie. The asteroid is going to hit the earth. And Gerard Butler… And I love it because they let him be… He’s plays in American, but it’s clear he was… He says later in the movie he was born in Scotland because they let him just have his accent. It’s great. It’s, “Go right ahead. Have your full Scottish accent.” He wants to get his family to safety from the asteroid at a secret bunker. And humanity figures out that in two days, the world’s coming to an end. And so everybody freaks out and just, they become Savage. They’re beating each other with hammers, stealing from each other. They revert to a primal sense.
Trent:
We have to remember that in the Old Testament, that’s what the world was like when you’re a roaming tribe. The closest to imagine is, imagine what the world would be like if electricity was gone. There was no running water, no lights, no heat, no air conditioning, no telephone, no internet, no one to call for help. What would your neighborhood turn into? I bet it would get very Old Testament very quickly. And so you might need very, very, very strict rules, much stricter than you’re used to to keep your little community from being invaded by the barbarians. And so that’s another thing to examine in the Old Testament.
Trent:
And I go to all of them at length in my book. It’s a big topic. But I do think, look at the end of the day, if you’re an atheist and the reason you’re not a Christian is because there’s things in the Old Testament that bother you.Well, that doesn’t prove God doesn’t exist. So it doesn’t even disprove Jesus’s resurrection. I mean, you could just be a liberal Christian who says, “Well, those parts of the Bible are in error. They’re ignorant people we’ve progressed.” So I do think it’s also important for atheists who have certain objections to parts of Christianity, that only would say you should be a certain kind of Christian. Not that you should leave Christianity entirely, which I think is a point that gets neglected often.
Sam:
Yeah. I think that’s really interesting. I think I asked this stuff myself quite a lot because you hear this idea that if we turned around and said that God doesn’t exist, the whole world, everyone would just be fornicating in the streets and it would all go up the wall. It’s just very challenging. Would I act differently? Would the world be different if everyone believed there was no God? Is kind of back to that freewill thing. People begin to realize how free-willed they begin… Sorry. People begin to believe they don’t have free will, they begin to act differently? And if everyone believes there, isn’t some sort of divine higher power, will they act differently? I know that’s been something that’s been debated quite a lot. But it is challenging because I think… I don’t know. Obviously I’m in a position right now where I don’t believe in God but I’m willing to ask these questions, to have these conversations and begin to work out why I don’t believe there’s a God. And if there’s a good reason why I should.
Sam:
In my heart, I still don’t think that I would act differently if there was this change in society because God wasn’t believed to be real. So this kind of… Go back to this Gerard Butler film. This idea that everyone’s [inaudible 01:26:50] Old Testament very quickly. I could also see myself doing that. I want to think that I wouldn’t. That I wouldn’t be able to go out on the street and get something. I need to get this food for my children. I’m going to go and kill someone for it or whatever. I want to think that wouldn’t happen, but actually do I know that for sure. I don’t know that for sure. And I think there’s things in me that probably would make to do that.
Trent:
And to be honest with you, if I was in those positions, part of me would think I’m going to act like a father, not like a Christian. Part of me would want to feel that way. The thing is like doing good or doing evil. It’s not going… We think picking between good and evil is going left or right in the road. It’s really not. It’s more walking downhill or climbing steeply uphill, the choice between good and evil. Evil is easy. It’s easy to start walking downhill and you don’t realize how far you’ve gone downhill. And then when you try to get back up, you see this. Then when you want to stop doing evil, you want to go back, it’s that steep climbing back uphill.
Trent:
And so that’s why for me as a Christian, I pray and trust, not in my own abilities, because the prophet Jeremiah said, “The heart is a wicked thing who can know it.” And I just desperately pray for the grace of God to conform my heart so in those situations, I will be able to act in a cord with God who is perfect goodness itself to act in a way that he made me. Sometimes you and I when we do something bad, if we really hurt a friend, sometimes we have this instinct, “I’m so sorry. That’s not who I am.” And we do something awful to somebody and say, “I’m so sorry. That’s not me.” But as atheism is true, that is you buddy. Sorry.
Trent:
But I do think we have this deep underlying sense of yeah, there isn’t a biological aspect of me, a purely animal aspect of me, but I was made or meant or created for something more. That’s the true me. The new man that I’ve put on CS Louis might say. So I just say this, especially to your atheist listeners. You know what I understand if you’ve been hurt by Christians. I am sorry. A lot of people know the best way to not represent God as some Christians, no doubt. But what I would say, one experiment, you could try that Louis offered was just putting on Christianity. If I were a Christian, how would I act in a way to show up these hypocritical Christians and give it a try? And then the more you do it, the more the role kind of comes naturally as you read the Bible and explain these kinds of truths.
Trent:
And I’ll also answer your question earlier about the resources on arguments for God. There is my book answering atheism. If you want to [inaudible 01:29:27] my debate with Alex O’Connor is a lot of fun. A good book on the arguments I’d recommend is, Five Proofs for the Existence of God by Ed Feser. I think is one of the best books on arguments for God out there today. So lots of good resources there.
Sam:
Fantastic. Trent. I could probably pick your brains and [inaudible 01:29:47] all day, but it’s been so good having you on the show. And yeah, for you honestly reflecting sharing. So thank you. Thank you so much.
Trent:
Absolutely. I’d be happy to come back anytime.
Sam:
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