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In this episode, Trent rebuts a video from Rationality Rules that claims it is irrational to believe God exists.
Transcript:
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn, and today I’m going to engage a video from the Atheist YouTuber Stephen Woodford, also known as Rationality Rules, and his video is called Why Theism is Irrational. Before I do that though, don’t forget to hit subscribe to help our channel grow and consider becoming a member at trenthornpodcast.com. You get access to all kinds of bonus content, the newest being my weekly patron only live streams that’ll be every Wednesday night, so you’re not going to want to miss that. Check it out and support us at trenthornpodcast.com. All right, so saying something is irrational is a really strong claim. You’re not just saying that a belief is false. You’re saying that a human being with a functioning brain shouldn’t believe this. You’ve done something really stupid or you’ve gone really against reason to believe something that’s irrational.
For example, if I think that it’s 10:15 AM because the clock in my car says it is, but I forgot the clock is two minutes slow. I have a false belief, but I’m not being irrational. It’s an honest mistake, but if I think it’s 10:15 AM just because my car clock says so when it’s actually 10:15 PM because I messed up the AM.OM Settings, that’s not just an honest mistake. I’d be irrational to believe the clock in spite of the obvious fact that it’s the middle of the night all around me and not 10:15 in the morning. I’d have to willingly ignore massive amounts of evidence in order to reach that false conclusion. So does Woodford have similar kinds of massive evidence to show God does not exist that Christians have to willfully ignore? Well, let’s take a look at his case and see where he goes wrong.
Of the beliefs we hold that are not rational, we typically maintain them because we haven’t considered, much less even recognized the absence of their evidential and logical support. Instead, we’ve leaned on intuition, authoritative figures, and cognitive bias. That said, there is a pretty famous other way of maintaining irrational beliefs that some even venerate, namely faith. Per Hebrews 11, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for. The evidence of things not seen.” To have faith is to believe in a proposition despite there not being sufficient evidence for doing so.
Think about when George Michael sings the following in his 1987 classic song, Faith, “Because I got to have faith, faith, faith, I got to have faith, faith, faith.” He’s not talking about religion. He’s talking about trusting in the fact that there are better people for you to be in a relationship with than who you might be with right now. Michael, in fact even said of the song, it represents the way I feel at the moment. It’s kind of another word for my hope and optimism. In other words, faith is just trust. That’s all it is. When people say they have faith that God exists, what they mean is they have trust in certain kinds of evidence like the grandeur of the universe or they trust the experience of God that they might have in something like prayer. Faith is just a kind of trust and we all have faith.
That doesn’t mean every act of faith is rational. Sometimes we have rational trust in something and other times we have irrational trust in something, like when a friend has consistently betrayed us over and over again and we still trust him to be faithful. That’s not rational. So faith like trust in itself is not a bad or irrational thing. We all have faith. When you go skydiving, there’s a lot of evidence you will survive the jump based on statistics, but you still have to make a leap of faith and jump out of the plane. We always have to trust the evidence even when we have enough evidence to justify belief in something. Next, Woodford basically says that it’s irrational to believe in God because of the existence of certain kinds of evils or what he calls gratuitous evils. Evils for which there is no greater good that comes from them or justifies them.
We stroll through the remains of mass extinctions and witness natural disasters, predation, parasitic diseases, and other forms of suffering in the world, it appears obvious and I mean really, really obvious that we are beset by gratuitous evil. That is evil that does not serve any greater purpose or lead to any greater good.
This poses a significant problem for all followers of this classical God. By maintaining that an all powerful and all loving God exists, theists are committed to a worldview that cannot admit of any gratuitous evil whatsoever. None. To them, every single instance of gratuitous evil must necessarily be an illusion.
Notice that Woodford doesn’t define evil, which is really problematic from the perspective of an atheist. One way to define evil is a state of affairs that should not exist or the way things are not supposed to be, but this implies there is a way things are supposed to be, which seems really odd if the universe is just a cosmic accident and was not created with a certain purpose. So without defining evil, Woodford is using the argument from evil to show God does not exist. But notice he frames the argument in a particular way because he probably knows that the more general argument from evil does not work. Notice he says that God’s existence is incompatible with gratuitous evil and not just evil itself. The very fact that Woodford has to use the term gratuitous evil instead of just evil reveals a weakness in his position.
If he just said evil shows God doesn’t exist and he picked relatively minor evils like stubbing your toe or hurting someone’s feelings, most people would say to that that doesn’t show God non-existence. God could have good reasons for allowing those minor kinds of evils. If the price of heaven is a stubbed toe or a bruised ego, nearly everybody would be okay with that. That’s why Woodford would not endorse this version of the argument from evil. It would go like this. If evil exists, then God does not exist. Evil exists, therefore God does not exist. So most people, including Woodford I would imagine, would probably say that premise one is false. There are some evils God would allow in order to achieve greater goods or to prevent worse evils. Most people will even tolerate a wide array of human evils because they see this as better than a world where humans don’t have free will or humans don’t have any opportunities to practice virtues like compassion, courage, or forgiveness.
That’s why the agnostic philosopher Paul Draper says, “Theists face no serious logical problem of evil.” So to avoid this problem, Woodford modifies the argument from evil and presents it in this way, premise one. “If gratuitous evils exist, then God does not exist.” Premise two, gratuitous evils exist, therefore God does not exist. Now, most philosophers present this argument in a probabilistic form and they say it’s really likely gratuitous evils exist, so it’s really likely God doesn’t exist, but Woodford goes way beyond them. He says it’s obvious these evils exist and that they serve no good purpose.
It appears obvious, and I mean really, really obvious that we are beset by gratuitous evil.
So how should we answer this argument from gratuitous evil? Well, we could deny premise one just as we did for the general argument from evil and some theistic philosophers like Peter van Inwagen have done this. Van Inwagen says, “There will always be some evils that don’t serve a greater good or purpose because that’s the price of having an ecosystem that follows natural laws instead of a world where God manages every single thing and natural laws don’t function.” But you can refute Woodford’s argument without going after premise one. Instead, the crucial premise that Woodford must defend is premise two. He needs to show these gratuitous evils exist. You’ll notice that Woodford doesn’t propose any method to objectively analyze evils to see if they’re gratuitous or not. He just relies on our gut feelings about them being gratuitous.
So when, for instance, we discuss a mass extinction in which millions of sentient beings suffer horrendous and often prolonged deaths, rather than recognizing that yes, gratuitous evil exists, theists have to spin a story, a theodicy so that they can confidently declare this must be for the best somehow, and they must do this with every single instance of gratuitous evil. This can’t be stressed enough, be it natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes or human atrocities such as the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, theists must continue to insist that, well, I know that it doesn’t look like it, but this must be for the best somehow.
Woodford goes on to provide other examples like forest fires, animal predation, and cancer in children, but it’s all the same type of evidence. He never gives a framework, a method, or any other way to show that some evils can’t possibly contribute to the greater good. First, this is ironic because in another video with Joe Schmid from Majesty of Reason, Woodford critiques William Lane Craig’s use of intuition and how Craig says that it’s just obvious something can’t come from nothing.
Woodford notes that intuition can be unreliable in unknown cases like something coming from nothing, but isn’t an intuition that an all powerful, all-knowing God could not possibly have a good reason to allow certain evils also treading into similar unknown territory where our intuitions just might not be reliable? Second, Woodford seems to confuse a theodicy with a defense. You can see this when he says that Christians must explain why certain evils are always for the best.
Theists have to spin a story, a theodicy, so that they can confidently declare this must be for the best somehow.
The argument from evil is an atheistic argument that tries to change people’s minds about the rationality of theism. That means the atheist has the burden of proof, not the theist and the theist doesn’t have to explain everything that is unknown about God and evil. All he has to do is show that the atheist has failed to make his case that God and certain evils are incompatible. Think about when a Christian asks an atheist, “If God doesn’t exist, then what is the natural explanation of the universe’s existence in order?” The implication is that if a person can’t provide a natural explanation for the universe, then there must be a supernatural explanation. However, an atheist could just tell the Christian, I don’t know what naturally explains the universe, but my ignorance of those explanations does not prove God exists. It just shows the limits of my own knowledge.
That’s why it’s better for a Christian to show God exists not from gaps in our knowledge about the natural world, but from positive facts about how only a divine cause explains a changing contingent finite, fine-tuned, and moral universe. Now, consider that Woodford is basically asking a similar question, but from an atheistic perspective. He’s asking if God does exist, then what is the moral explanation for the universe’s seemingly unexplainable evils? The implication is that if a Christian can’t provide a moral explanation for evil in the universe or the greater purpose it serves or greater good, then there must be a natural explanation or it’s just what we would expect in a godless universe. But this runs up to the same problem. A Christian can simply say, “I don’t know what morally explains certain kinds of evils in the universe or the greater goods they serve, but my ignorance of that doesn’t show God does not exist. It just shows the limits of my own knowledge.”
A Christian can also point out that he and an atheist agree that God has good reasons to allow certain evils like the good of free will or virtues. They explain many human evils. A Christian can then ask an atheist, what would prevent God from bringing about greater goods from more serious evils like mass extinctions? God isn’t ignorant of a way to do that like we might be, and because he’s all powerful, he has enough power to be able to accomplish that end. So it’s justified to believe that even if we do not know how God could bring about a greater good from certain evils, we also don’t know what could stop an all knowing and all powerful God from being able to do just that. So we’re justified in believing that God is able to do that.
He’s able to bring greater goods from any evil, even if we don’t know specifically how he would do that, that just represents the limits of our knowledge as finite fallible human beings. This becomes obvious if we restate the argument this way. Premise one, if evil that an infinitely powerful knowing and loving being cannot remedy exists, then an infinitely powerful, knowing, and loving being does not exist. Premise two, there is evil that not even an infinitely powerful knowing and loving being can remedy, therefore an infinitely powerful knowing and loving being does not exist. Once again, how does Woodford so confidently know what an all-knowing, all-powerful being can and can’t do? Since this is not an intuition about the world per se, but about what God can and can’t do and it doesn’t involve something God plainly cannot do, like a logical contradiction, it follows that Woodford has no grounds to say premise two is true, so the argument doesn’t succeed.
So let’s return to Woodford’s argument. Premise one. If gratuitous evils exist, then God does not exist. Premise two, gratuitous evils exist, therefore God does not exist. The response I’ve just given undercuts the evidence for premise two. Evil exists, but we’re not in a position to know that it’s gratuitous. We’re not in a position to know that an all-knowing and all-powerful God is incapable of bringing greater good from it. Therefore, there is no reason to think premise two is true, but there’s also reason to believe that premise two is false. We can do that by simply reversing Woodford’s argument. His argument is a classic modus ponens. If A, then B. A therefore B, but you can reverse the argument with a modus tollens. If A, then B, not B, therefore not a. It would go like this. Premise one, if gratuitous evils exist, then God does not exist.
Premise two, God does exist, therefore gratuitous evils do not exist. Woodford has a lot of impressive animation showing different evils in the world, but a theist could counter him with animated arguments from people like William Lane Craig or Ben Shapiro that show the existence of change proves there must be a purely actual actualizer or God or that the existence of temporal series of events shows there must have been a first divine cause or that contingent affairs that can fail to exist are only explained by a necessary being, God, that cannot fail to exist or that moral properties in the universe only make sense if a perfectly divine standard of morality exists. Since all of this evidence show God does exist, that means every evil we see in the world simply cannot be gratuitous because we already know a perfectly good, purely actual necessary being who can bring a greater good from it or God exists.
Saying God does not exist because there are unexplainable evils in the world is like a pair of orphans saying they don’t have biological parents because of their parents’ unexplained absence. They must have parents because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to complain about being orphans in the first place since they would not exist. Likewise, God must exist because if he didn’t, we wouldn’t be here to wonder about the mystery of evil in the first place, and this relates to another problem with Woodford’s approach.
In order to determine if theism is rational, you have to look at all of the evidence available. For example, if I asked you what are the odds a man who weighs 600 pounds and has a BMI of 40 is a professional athlete? You’d probably say the odds are really low or almost impossible, but if I added other background knowledge like that, he has won several championship martial arts tournaments, the odds go way up and you would figure out the best way to understand all of the evidence is that the man is a professional sumo wrestler.
Likewise asking if God exists, but you’re only looking at the evil in the world is like asking if an athlete exists and you only look at how much he weighs. You need to look at all of the evidence in order to assess the rationality of belief in something. Finally, we don’t have to rely solely on a defense that says, well, we’re not in a good position to say that we know God has no good reasons to allow certain evils. We can offer minimal theodicies that at least make the possibility of explanations for evil more plausible. Now, when Woodford piles evil after evil in his video on top of one another, it can kind of overwhelm our critical thinking. It’s easier, therefore, to notice that his gratuitous evils basically boil down to two types, harms to innocent humans like cancer in children or harms to non-human animals like animal suffering and death.
What good reasons could God have for allowing innocent children or non-human animals to suffer? When it comes to humans who haven’t committed evil like children, some of the reasons include the fact that human beings inherited a human nature that’s prone to biological decay because of original sin. Part of free will means that our descendants can both benefit and suffer from our decisions. The suffering also includes some of the most powerful examples of human courage, compassion, forgiveness, and love. The fact that we go to incredible lengths to care for sick infants, including ones whose parents have abandoned them, shows that human beings have intrinsic dignity, which is incompatible with a naturalism that has a species neutral form of value associated with it. Finally, God can compensate children and other profoundly wronged human beings with eternal life or infinite happiness. Now, I’m not saying I’ve solved the problem of evil with that brief explanation, but hopefully it shows that trusting in an all-powerful God to right every wrong is not irrational.
It really is our only source of hope in a world constantly swallowed up by the darkness of death. As Genesis 18:25 says, “Will not the judge of the whole world do what is right?” When it comes to the suffering of non-human animals, I bring up the thought experiment I posed to Alex O’Connor in our debate on God on Pints of Aquinas.
Imagine humans left the earth to colonize another planet. Should they instantly vaporize the earth with an anti-matter device to end the suffering of the non-human animals they leave behind? If people say, no, you should let the animals continue to exist in spite of their suffering, there’s nothing wrong with that, then there’s nothing wrong with God creating a world even though animals will suffer or imagine that human beings terraform a planet and created new evolutionary life on it, most people would say that would be good in spite of the foreseen suffering.
So then why can’t God create a universe that has foresee suffering in it? Now, one objection would be that we don’t know how to create life that does not suffer, but God knows how to do that, so the cases are very different. First, even if you don’t know how to create life that doesn’t suffer, in some cases, you shouldn’t create the life. Imagine you can make a creature in a laboratory and all it ever experiences is agonizing pain for its whole life and you don’t know any other way to make the creature except for those conditions. In that case, you probably shouldn’t make the creature in the first place, but we don’t know how to create an ecosystem without there being suffering involved in it. Yet most people don’t view us creating an ecosystem or allowing an ecosystem to exist after we’ve left the planet to be the same as creating a creature that only writhes in agony for its whole life in a laboratory.
So once again, in that case, it’s morally justified for human beings to create life or to allow it to continue to exist even though there will be suffering and there’s a parallel there in God being able to do that and our inability to do otherwise doesn’t really factor into the argument in that case.
Second, just as we wouldn’t really be free humans if God directed all of our actions, animals wouldn’t really be animals if they didn’t experience pain or sensory inputs or respond to stimuli if God just handled all of that for them. They would just be fleshy robots. I would say it follows that if humans can have good reasons to create or sustain ecosystems, then God has similar good reasons. Plus, unlike humans, God can grant conscious animals eternal life or eternal happiness. I’ll link to some resources that defend that view in the description below. The fact that God can give conscious creatures, be they human or non-human animals, infinite happiness would outweigh any kind of evil they might experience in this life.
Woodford then offers an argument from the philosopher Stephen Law that tries to show these sorts of explanations that I’ve given you are apparently futile because they could be used to defend an absurd belief like that a totally evil God exists.
To believe this, I argue, is to be profoundly irrational. Having a faith this strong only serves to protect you from reason. Now in my experience, theists tend to fail when grasping the irrationality at play here, and so let me flip the script through the work of Stephen Law. Suppose that I believed in an all powerful and all evil God, which entails that he has unlimited power and will always act as to create the greater evil, and when I’m presented with something that’s seemingly obviously good, such as children playing as they cultivate lifelong friendships and love, I argue that this is an illusion of good. Can’t you see that God has intentionally allowed for moments of good as a way to intensify the suffering that follows? After all, if you didn’t love that person before God gave them cancer, then you wouldn’t have experienced the pain that you still do even to this day.
God is wise in his cruelty, don’t you know? Then suppose you gave me countless other examples of seemingly obvious good, and yet I didn’t budge at all. No, I confidently declare. This all might appear rather lovely, but I assure you this must be for the worst somehow. Technically, I would indeed be telling a consistent story here, my theodicy provides a possible account, but mere possibility doesn’t imply high probability, does it? The fact that it’s possible that an evil God exists doesn’t mean that it’s rational to believe as much. You may find the evil God concept facetious, but make no mistake about it. This is a parity of precisely the irrationality of Abrahamic theism.
So Woodford’s argument is that if we say an all evil God cannot exist because the amount of good in the world is not what we’d expect an all evil God to create, then we also have to say an all good God cannot exist because the amount of evil in the world is not what we’d expect an all good God to create. But all this argument shows is that we can’t determine God’s character solely from the amount of good and evil in the world. I mean, if everything was maximally evil at every second of existence, then you could probably conclude an evil creator made the world, but that would not prove God was evil. At best, there would just be an evil being that made an evil universe within the much larger reality God created because God by definition is all good and evil isn’t a thing anyways.
The problem with Law’s evil God challenge is that good and evil are not too kinds of things. Evil is not a thing. Goodness and being are interchangeable. Something is good if it has being or if its existence is in accord with its nature and something is evil if it lacks something or it’s not in accord with its nature. So a bad tree might have rotting leaves and not bear fruit when it should, but it’s not morally bad. A bad football player might always drop the ball, but he’s not morally bad. He just lacks coordination. A morally bad football player might cheat, which means he’s a rational human who lacks the virtue of justice for example. The evil God challenge doesn’t work because evil is the absence of good. That means there can’t be anything that’s all evil. If something were all evil, it would just completely lack being.
The opposite of God is not an evil being like Satan. It’s simply non-existence because God is perfect existence itself. So Woodford is right that if our arguments for God existing in spite of evil were the same as the arguments for an evil God existing in spite of goodness, then they wouldn’t work. But we know God is all good because of the philosophical arguments I discussed earlier which show a purely actual, necessary, perfect standard of moral goodness must exist. Since goodness and being are interchangeable, that means if God is infinite being itself, God must be all good because evil only exists as a deficiency or absence, and God has no deficiencies because he’s pure act or pure being itself.
At the end of the video, Woodford doesn’t offer a specific argument. He just says it’s irrational to believe God created the world and gave us a way to avoid hell when religions disagree with each other about how to do that, but this doesn’t disprove the existence of God because an all good God can make it so that no one spends eternity apart from him for an unjust reason.
For example, Catholics believe that God has made it possible for anyone to accept his offer of salvation even if they never heard of Jesus, because God desires all people to be saved. God will judge people based on whatever truths of revelation they were given and how they respond to those truths given their individual circumstances. Once again, will not the judge of the whole world do what is right. All right, well, thank you guys for watching, and I would definitely be happy to engage Woodford in a longer dialogue or debate about whether theism is rational if you’d like to follow up to this video. Maybe we could even set up an in-person event over in the UK, bring in Alex O’Connor and a few other people. Have a jolly good time. All right. In any case, cheers and I hope you all have a blessed day.
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