What I Will (and Won’t) Debate

In this episode Trent lays out three criteria to inform his future decisions about debates and dialogues.

Transcription:

I cover a wide variety of subjects here on the Counsel of Trent and I’ve engaged in debates and dialogues on different topics related to the Faith. But that doesn’t mean that every topic I discuss on this channel is something I’m interested in publicly debating. So, in today’s episode I’ll explain what I will and won’t debate.

Part of my decision to be limited in what I debate is rooted in the limited mission of the Counsel of Trent. My goal is to help people see the truth, goodness, and beauty of the Catholic faith so I focus on defending its foundational truths like God’s existence, Christ’s divinity, the authority of the Church, and the truth of Catholic doctrine, especially moral teaching.

Some people imagine that a Catholic apologist is just a Catholic with an answer for everything, and that’s not what I want to be. For example, I usually don’t engage in commentary on Church politics or the news in general, except when it relates to a major Church teaching, like how the Presidential debates relate to defending Church teaching on abortion. But in other cases, like the Olympics mocking Christianity, I might not say anything if other commenters have already said what I’d say anyway.

That doesn’t mean every topic I discuss is going to be strictly about apologetics. Sometimes I notice there is something bad within the Catholic community that harms our witness and even people’s souls and so I may address it, such as the episodes I’ve done on red-pill ideology. Or, there may be arguments Catholics are making which are really weak and could cause scandal, like my episode on bad young earth creationism arguments.

But in general, I want to focus on defending and sharing the Catholic faith. And this also applies to my decision to engage in public dialogues and debates. My goal in these exchanges is to help people see the goodness of Catholicism or the flaws in some other competing worldview.

Since dialogues and debates involve a substantial time commitment for research and preparation, I limit the topics I choose to address in this way. Here’s the three basic criteria I that now use to inform my future debate and dialogue decisions:

Number 1: The topic involves a widely accepted, grave error.

This is the most important criteria. Since my time and energy is finite, I want to focus on those errors that are the most prevalent and cause the most harm. So, for example, atheism or religious apathy is both very serious and very common in the western world. Rejecting Christ’s church and the means it gives for salvation is also serious and common, so I frequently engage in debates on Catholic doctrine. Finally, evils like abortion and pornography are widespread and cause immense amounts of spiritual damage, so I’m interested in engaging these evils by debating their defenders.

Although, in some cases I won’t debate a widespread evil because of lack of reach or lack of experience. Hinduism is a widespread error in many parts of the world but I don’t have a large reach in Hindu populations. Also, I don’t have an advanced knowledge of Hinduism so at this point I’m not prepared to engage in apologetics on the matter. Instead, I’m focusing on grave errors I am equipped to address.

Criteria number one also explains why my primary interest involves dialoguing and debating with non-Catholics rather than Catholics.

You’ve probably noticed on the Counsel of Trent I rarely dialogue with Catholics about the Church. Instead, the people I speak with are non-Catholics are either on a topic of agreement or charitably on a topic of disagreement. There are a lot of channels where Catholics sit down and talk to each other, and that’s great. But there are far fewer channels where Catholics and non-Catholics charitably engage each other and that’s a mission I want to undertake here at the Counsel of Trent.

In fact, we raised all the funds needed to remodel our studio to allow for these in-person dialogues. If you’d like to help us reach our next goal of creating a mobile set up so I can travel and do interviews, then please click the donation link in the description below.

So since I’m focusing on talking to non-Catholics about widespread, grave errors, I’m just not interested in publicly talking with Catholics about more minor disagreements. For example, when it comes to the identity of the brethren of the Lord, I’ve said I’m convinced of the Epiphanian view they are children from Joseph’s previous marriage and that St. Joseph was an elderly widower. This is actually the oldest view in Church history, but many Catholics defend St. Jerome’s view that Jesus’ brethren are his cousins and so Joseph was a young man and they’ve asked me to debate the subject.

I’ve declined because Jerome’s view it’s a perfectly acceptable one and I want to focus on debating the most unacceptable views instead. Although, I’ve got to say this: the worst argument against the “Old Joseph view” is the claim “old men don’t walk to Egypt.” Tell that to Abram who the book of Genesis says walked from Iraq to Egypt in his 70’s.

But at the end of the day, if you want to hold Jerome’s view, like my wife does, that’s okay so I have no reason to debate the subject. In other cases, the disagreement is about something that can cause harm. For example, Catholics who think the earth is flat make us look silly and it’s a scandal for evangelism. But I have no interest in debating flat-earthers. I’d prefer to just make an episode showing why they’re wrong because this is a harmful, fringe view.

This also helps answer a common complaint I hear online: Why am I willing to dialogue with abortionists, pornographers, and sodomites but not faithful Catholics? Some people make it seem like my willingness to dialogue with a person means I think he has more respectable views than a Catholic I’m not willing to dialogue with. But that’s false.

Consider holocaust denial, which I addressed earlier this month. I think denying the Nazi holocaust of the Jews causes scandalous harm to the Church and so it should be avoided. However, denial of the American holocaust against the unborn, i.e. supporting legal abortion, is far worse than nazi holocaust denial. That’s because denying the American holocaust contributes to the ongoing systematic killing of nearly a million human beings every year.

Since the latter is much worse than the former, my response to each denial will be unequal. This is evident in the fact I’ve done one episode on Holocaust denial but I’ve produced nearly a dozen episodes, engaged in multiple debates, and wrote an entire book on the issue of abortion.

The fact that I’m willing to sit down with someone for a dialogue isn’t a seal of approval for this person’s views being respectable. Instead, it’s a sign that we disagree about a serious, widespread error and so I want to follow the exhortation in Isaiah 1:18 “Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.”

However, as I’ll note in criteria number 3, my willingness to sit down with the person is usually a seal of approval of the person’s demeanor, but I’ll discuss that later.

My willingness to dialogue with people about abortion or sodomy doesn’t mean I think they are worthy of my time and other people I disagree with aren’t worthy of my time. It means the people I talk to represent some of the gravest challenges facing the Church and so I want to engage those challenges in a gracious way. That’s also why one of the few Catholics I would dialogue with would be someone like the leader of Catholics for Choice because, in spite of claiming to be Catholic, they have endorsed an obviously anti-Catholic, pro-abortion view.

One issue I am torn about discussing is young earth creationism because I’ve seen it cause people to lose their faith and about 40% of people hold this view. But I’m now mostly inclined to let this be an area of mutually understood disagreement.

What that means is that if you are a Catholic who likes to publicly critique the idea of the universe being billions of years old, don’t clutch your pearls if I decide to publicly critique the idea it is no more than 10,000 years old. Or, since I affirm Catholics can believe in a young earth, I would ask you to do the same and not condemn people who believe the earth is not thousands of years old, which has included people like Pope Pius XII and St. Maximilian Kolbe.

So I lean against debating that issue but I definitely wouldn’t debate whether the theory of evolution is true because that relates to the next criteria I use.

Number 2: The topic is conducive to public dialogue/debate

Some topics are so broad they wouldn’t be appropriate for a public debate or dialogue, even if they are important.

Consider the question, “Is the Bible true?” That’s a huge topic spanning thousands of years of salvation history across a wide variety of literary genres. There’s way too many issues that come up and the topic would become unwieldy. That’s why I criticized Dinesh D Souza in a recent episode for debating that topic with Alex O’Connor.

Even the topic “Is Christianity true?” or “Is Catholicism true?” can just be too broad to discuss, especially in a formal debate. I may be willing to engage the topics in an informal dialogue with someone who wants to dialogue and isn’t just trying to “own” the other person. But broad topics leave you at risk of being Gish Galluped.

The term comes from Duane Gish, a young earth creationist who was very good at winning debates against those who defended evolution. He would throw out a bunch of things evolution allegedly couldn’t explain and his opponent simply wouldn’t be able to answer all of his objections in the allotted time. Gish would then say he won because his opponent didn’t refute his whole case.

This strategy is now called the Gish Gallup. I had it used on me on my second debate with Dan Barker on the existence of the Christian God. To try and show the Christian God didn’t exist, Barker threw out dozens of Bible difficulties but I had studied his past debates and packed my rebuttal to be able to answer his Gish Gallup.

But it’s not always easy to do that and so I’m not interested in debating topics where this often comes up, including the theory of evolution where an opponent can just raise a bunch of “how does evolution explain X” and you don’t have time to answer every argument.

For example, in my commentary on Peter Dimond and Jeff Cassman’s debate on sedevacantism, I noted that Dimond used a Gish Gallup. He just unloaded as many post 1958 papal difficulties as possible and Cassman had no way to respond to all of them in the allotted time.

Another reason a topic may not be conducive to a public debate is because both parties involved will end up speaking past each other due to preexisting, widespread disagreement. For example, Jimmy Akin has said he won’t debate whether Christ had a human and a divine will with a Jehovah’s Witness because they don’t even believe Jesus is the True God.

Likewise, I won’t engage in a formal debate on the topic of Mary’s bodily assumption. That’s because the primary evidence for Mary’s assumption is the divine authority of the Church that infallibly defined this doctrine. There is biblical and historical evidence for this dogma, but at the end of the day the case for Mary’s assumption will rest on the authority of the Church.

When Robert Sungenis debated the Assumption with James White many years ago, Sungenis basically made an argument from Acts 15 for the Church’s authority to declare dogma. So in a debate on the assumption we’d just be talking around the central issue we really should be debating: the Church’s authority. I’m willing to debate a narrower topic as I did with Steve Christie on whether Marian dogmas contradict scripture, but not one where end up avoiding the main issue.

Likewise, many Protestants wouldn’t debate an atheist on the purely historical evidence for Jesus’ ascension into heaven or the Exodus from Egypt because the primary evidence for those events is the authority of scripture itself and in a formal debate you’d lose the focus on that central issue. That’s why I thought it was genius when Jimmy Akin debated the Virgin Birth by simply making an argument for the authority of the Bible based in God’s revelation rather than by using an historical proof like one would do for Christ’s resurrection.

This is also why I wouldn’t debate a Protestant on the papacy but I will debate them on sola scriptura or apostolic succession. I might debate an Orthodox apologist on the early papacy, because we agree sola scriptura is false and that the authority of the apostles was given to their successors the bishops. We just disagree on how much authority the bishop of Rome has and how that was viewed in the early church. But most Protestants don’t believe this so we’d need to address those issues first before we can even begin to talk about the papacy.

And aside from being too disagreed to debate an issue, there are topics that are not conducive to debate precisely because people are in such agreement about it, like when 97% of people, Christian and non-Christian, hold that view. That’s another reason I’m not interested in debating whether the earth is flat or whether the holocaust happened because reliable polling indicates only about 3 to 4% of people hold these views.

I’ll address fringe views, but I won’t debate them if there is no debate on the question. For example, I’ve done an episode on bestiality before and engaged academic arguments on the subject. But I am not going to take part in a debate on whether bestiality is moral because it just isn’t, period. It’s scandalous to even have to debate such a thing. When the subject of bestiality came up in my debate with Jazmine Jafar and Destiny, it was to show how their defense of pornography leads to absurd perversions. Or when I debated destiny, we didn’t have a debate on the question of whether it was okay to create brainless toddler sex dolls. We debated abortion and I showed how Destiny’s view led to that absurd consequence.

Similarly, 96% of biologists agree life begins at conception, so I’m not going to debate some kook who thinks unborn children are not biological human beings. There is no debate on that question. Even if it was a slam dunk of a debate, it would just be a waste of time and mislead some people to think the issue is contested when it isn’t. But there is a debate on the moral question of whether these human beings have a right to live in the sense that lots of people don’t hold that view. That’s I will debate that issue in hopes of changing the widespread status quo currently against the unborn.

The only exception I can think of is Jesus mythicism. This is a very serious error, but there is no academic debate on the matter. The agnostic scholar Bart Ehrman says, “The view that Jesus existed is held by virtually every expert on the planet”

Ehrman wrote that sentence 12 years ago and mythicists have failed to seriously change the academic consensus on the matter. So, on the one hand I don’t want to debate this issue because there is no debate. Jesus existed. On the other hand, this error is common on the Internet and it causes grave spiritual harm. How can someone believe in the good news of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, i.e. the Gospel, if he thinks Jesus never existed? I’ve debated the issue once before in 2014 and I’m open to the idea of debating it again or I may decide to pursue another avenue to combat this serious, niche error.

Now, this doesn’t mean I’ll never talk about the assumption with a Protestant or other hard topics. I’m inclined to do it if I have the right interlocutor. For example, I’m hoping to have Gavin Ortlund in the studio after it’s remodeled, don’t forget about the donate link below to make that happen, because I can trust he and I can discuss where we agree and disagree and not use it as an opportunity to just try and own the other person.

Likewise, I’ve said before that I wasn’t willing to debate an atheist on slavery in the Bible. It’s too broad a topic and we are too far apart in our worldviews. But I made an exception and took part in a 4-way dialogue on the subject where I teamed up with Gavin Ortlund to engage two atheists and our conversation was very productive.

Which brings me to

Criteria Number 3: The Person is conducive to public dialogue and debate

Some people are just too belligerent to have a good-natured dialogue. If a person loves to interrupt, or troll, or focus on owning the other person, I don’t want to have a chat with him or her. I might engage in a debate that has a structure to avoid this, but I also might just avoid the person. Life is too short to waste your time with jerks.

And sometimes the person is just so morally repugnant that I don’t want to talk with him. For example, I’m not interested in debating Steven Anderson, a radical Protestant preacher because he seems unhinged and is accused of being abusive.

Indeed, repugnancy is exactly what I found in many of the responses to my episode on the Holocaust.

I’m not going to debate people with this attitude for the same reason I’m not going to debate pro-abortionists who say things like “no fetus can defeat us” and mock unborn children. These people don’t need a debate, they need Jesus.

Of course, defending abortion is always wrong but there is a difference between someone who misuse moral argumentation to achieve what they think is good, like comparing banning abortion to forcing someone to donate an organ, and someone who just callously denies the evidence and revels in evil. I’m reminded of what Michael Caine said in The Dark Knight: some men can’t be reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

Another reason I’m not interested in debating people who deny the moon landing, or the earth’s rotation, or the holocaust is that they don’t really debate the subject. They just deny the existence of any evidence that contradicts their view like by saying NASA photographs and astronaut testimonies are all fake. Holocaust deniers do the same thing and they just ignored much of the evidence I cited or made the bald assertion it was fake.

In one case they made a big deal about how my video editor didn’t completely transcribe the original German of Himmler’s Posen Speech where he talks about exterminating the Jews because the original file was low resolution. He left some Latin filler words in the graphic and my critics. A charitable critic would notice this and engage the main point about the actual speech, but deniers simply leap to the illogical conclusion that the speech itself was a fake, even though historians agree it’s authentic.

Personally, I’m not surprised at the pushback my holocaust episode received. In 1963 Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone anthology aired the episode He’s Alive that showed Hitler’s ghost inspiring a young neo-Nazi. The final monologue says “He’s alive because WE keep him alive” in hateful rhetoric. The producers received 4,000 pieces of hate mail in response. One critic even took the time to email me the following piece of hate mail about my holocaust episode: Hey Trent, I would like you to know that I do not blame Hitler for killing those effing Jews that he killed.

And what I’ve noticed from some deniers is that they don’t care about evidence because they relish in embracing kooky views. One eastern orthodox Christian said: Trent Horn spent 13 minutes giving evidence for the Holocaust and then said it’s “obvious” the earth is a globe and we landed on the moon… Way to make me skeptical of all your Holocaust evidence.

Sorry my globeism offends you. And other critics dismiss the evidence by any means necessary. One popular denialist account claimed the image above my catholic.com transcript for this episode was a fake. But it’s not. It’s a famous image of inmates at Buchenwald but there are two versions of this image. One, which they claim is the real image, is actually an edited version that removed one of the inmates, possibly for reasons of modesty. This image was published in the New York Times. However, the original image I used was published before the Times version in the papers like the St Louis Dispatch and the high-resolution version of the photograph can be found at the National Archives. Only deniers say it’s a fake.

Debating deniers of all types, be it the holocaust or the moon landing or any other consensus position, is like playing chess with a pigeon. They just flap their wings, knock over the pieces and squawk until you give up playing and then they say they’ve won because you don’t want to humor them anymore. Or, they engage in tactics like Gish Galluping and try to bring up as many difficulties as possible so that you can’t respond to in a single setting.

I’ll debate people about where the evidence leads, such as whether first century documents demonstrate Christ rose from the dead, but I won’t debate people on whether incontrovertible evidence itself exists, such as if Paul actually wrote first Corinthians, which is something even Jesus mythicsts accept but deniers like Joseph Atwill reject in his book Caesars messiah (which I’ll address in a future episode but not a debate).

Finally, the people I was told I should dialogue with on holocaust revisionism have called me an effing Jew, a Jew boy, a liar, and demanded I be fired from Catholic Answers. Why would I want to sit down with people like that? And, in spite of claiming to be Catholic, some of them have said horribly blasphemous things that I’ve yet to see them apologize for, such as joking about the Holy Spirit picking Mary for the Incarnation because the Spirit “likes em young”. People who troll and make horrible kinds of jokes like this remind me of Proverbs 26:18-19, “Like a madman who throws firebrands, arrows, and death, is the man who deceives his neighbor and says, “I am only joking!”

These aren’t serious people and so I have no interest in wasting my time talking to them when there are charitable people defending widespread, grave errors I should be talking to instead in order to build up God’s kingdom.

So hopefully that explains how I want to move forward and if you have suggestions for future debates and dialogues please leave them in the comment section below. Thank you guys so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.