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In this episode Trent joins Matt at the Pints with Jack podcast to discuss the moral arguments of C.S. Lewis, William Lane Craig, and David Baggett.
Welcome to the Counsel Of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Matt:
“Unless the measuring rod is independent of the things measured, we can do no measuring.” C.S. Lewis: The Poison Of Subjectivism. This is Pints With Jack, season five, episode 45, The Moral Argument. So Trent Horn, welcome to Pints With Jack.
Trent Horn:
Thank you so much for having me.
Matt:
Well, I’m excited this episode because we plan out these seasons many, many, many months in advance. David is the organized one, and he put together everything. He asked if I would do this one because he knows mere Christianity, the beginning part, is a lot of this moral argument, and it’s one that, I don’t want to say I wasn’t convinced with, but it was one I struggled with a little bit more. And so, I think he thought it would be funny if I’m the one that has to lead the episode on the argument that I struggle with the most, which put an added pressure because as a person guiding this conversation, I felt like I had to make sure I understood all of the different avenues. So this weekend I was sitting here reading article after article after article, pro, against, and trying to just make sure I understood at least high level what’s going on.
Trent Horn:
But that’s also helpful for you to talk about this argument if you’re not entirely convinced by it because then you’re not a yes man. I think that’s important in the world of apologetics and the world of defending the faith. It reminds me of that episode of the Simpsons where Mr. Burns goes broke. He has all these advisors and stock advisors with him, and all they ever do is just say, “Oh, that’s a great decision. Great decision,” and he ends up in ruin. And he says, “You’re just a bunch of sycophantic yes men.” They’re like, “oh, yes, we are. Absolutely.”
Trent Horn:
But in the world of apologetics, you don’t want to do it. You want to test your arguments to make sure that they’re strong. And I think as we discussed the moral argument, similar to the cosmological argument, we’ll see it’s helpful to call it the moral arguments. And that even if one version of an argument is not persuasive to someone, another version of the argument may be persuasive. So criticisms don’t mean the argument is bad, it just means we might have to modify it a little bit.
Matt:
I like that. And, yeah, I’ll be playing the role here of just inquisitive, asking questions. I actually just prior to this, honestly maybe a couple of hours ago, listened to the… What’s his name? I don’t know his actual name. But the Cosmic Skeptic where you were with [inaudible 00:02:36]-
Trent Horn:
Alex O’Connor.
Matt:
Yes, Alex O’Connor, back in, I want to say it was 2020. You were the very first debate that he had on the YouTube channel Matt Fradd did, and I really enjoyed that conversation between both of you guys. Even though you were talking much more broadly about the existence of God, a good chunk of it ended up getting into morality, and that was actually quite helpful to listen to.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, I thought that was one of the most fascinating parts of our exchange, that I offered a series of arguments to the existence of God, one of which was a moral argument for the existence of God. We were discussing about the nature of morality, and I think one of the most memorable parts of the debate, we were talking about objective morality. Some things just are right or wrong, independent of human opinion. And moral dilemmas came up. And so, we brought up the case, if you were dying and the only way to save your life was to directly kill another person, would it be moral to do that? And then I said, “Well, no, it wouldn’t be moral to do that.”
Trent Horn:
Alex disagreed, and we brought up an issue of cannibalism in 19th century seafares, which that was not an uncommon fear for people who were traveling the oceans in the 19th and early 20th centuries that you would be marooned on a life raft because you have much more primitive technology back then to rescue people and locate people. And so, the Dudley case, it was the case where a group of sailors killed and ate the cabin boy who was with them. And they were found guilty of murder, saying that necessity is not a defense for murder, is what they said. So the point I was raising is that some things just are right and some things just are wrong, even if we would very much like them to be the other way and what explains that, and that is really one of the seeds for the moral argument for the existence of God.
Matt:
And that debate was one of those moments, and I have these a lot. I don’t know how intentional it is, if you curate the people you debate, but you debate very intelligent people, which I appreciate. So you get really good sides. He started going and saying, “Well, that’s kind of more of a fringe case, and I don’t really think that happens very much.” And when you started diving in and actually giving evidence of how it was actually a pretty frequent thing and started getting the specifics, I was like-
Trent Horn:
Oh yeah.
Matt:
… “Trent’s knowledge is deep.”
Trent Horn:
And that’s important for when you’re engaging. Especially when you do philosophy, you’ll put forward examples or counter examples or thought experiments, and if they’re hopelessly unrealistic, they’re not that helpful. But the point I raised with Alex is, yeah, it’s not implausible to find yourself in a situation where you’re tempted to do something that is just wrong in order to secure some kind of greater good.
Trent Horn:
Another example would be if you are a judge or you are the warden of a jail and a mob wants to lynch an innocent person. If you don’t allow them to do that, they’ll burn down the town and kill many more people. Should you let them kill the innocent person or not? Well, justice would demand that you ought not do that even if more harm would come from the alternative. And philosophers try to explain in all kinds of different ways, well, why is that the case? So there, we debate about moral theory.
Trent Horn:
Morality really has three levels. Before we get into the argument, it is important for us to understand three levels of morality. I’ll start with the most top level. Bottom is foundational. Top would be applied ethics like, is abortion right or wrong, euthanasia right or wrong? What is an equitable tax policy? What do we do in certain situations? Below applied ethics would be moral theory. Okay, well, what theory do we use to determine what’s right or wrong? Is it utilitarianism, whatever produces the most utility? Is it some kind of natural law theory? Do we do what God tells us to do, a combination? So that’s the moral theory, what framework do we use to determine right and wrong, good or bad?
Trent Horn:
And then the final basement level would be meta ethics, and that would be the question, well, what is good? What is evil? What is morality? Does it exist? And if it does exist, why does it exist? What is its nature? And so, the moral argument really deals with that most fundamental element, that meta ethical theory, what is morality, and given morality has a certain nature, does it require a theistic or divine explanation?
Matt:
And I actually noticed it was interesting how I’ve never heard it put into those three different categories, but when I’m thinking back to that Cosmic Skeptic conversation with Alex how much you did get to the different categories with those. And now that you’ve put that mental template, I’m starting to think through the times when you guys started talking about evil as a deprivation of good, and you guys went down that path and you started talking about that. And I think he had some pushback and you guys were discussing what that looks like. And then that middle one that you just described, I remember he started talking about… because he was probably somewhat of utilitarian perspective.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Matt:
I think he said he wouldn’t 100% fully embrace, but more or less, it seemed like he was doing that. And you mentioned, I thought this was great, from the pleasure of suffering, are we maximizing pleasure or are we minimizing suffering? And you started talking about, well, if our only goal is to minimize suffering, God could have just created a universe with an atom and just kept it really simple. And I was like, “That is a really good point.” You can’t really minimize one. Actually, it made me think of Brene Brown when she talks about you can’t get rid of vulnerability and have joy and how those need to go together, and suffering and pleasure can actually be two of the same things. And so, it’s helpful to start with that.
Trent Horn:
Exactly. And so I may do a whole show just on utilitarianism because it is a very common philosophy but not one most people are willing to go 100% in on, even Alex sees this, because it can lead to a lot of repugnant conclusions. It can lead to defending morally depraved acts if it generates more utility. There’s a problem right there: what do you mean by utility? Because if you do it in very basic terms like, well, whatever makes the most pleasure… because if you say, “Well, God should maximize pleasure and minimize suffering,” you’re right, well, no, those can go in two different directions. So this leads some philosophy to something that is called the repugnant conclusion. I’m not going to go into the whole thing because that would take us too far afield. But if you wanted to maximize pleasure, then what would be wrong with, let’s say, doubling the world’s population but pleasure goes down by, let’s say, 1%?
Trent Horn:
You double the population, pleasure goes down by 1%. Most people would say that’s a good trade off. But then what if you just kept doing it so you had zillions of people whose lives were just barely worth living? If maximizing pleasure is what matters most, then zillions with a little bit of pleasure, as long as it’s more than what you had before, would be justified. But most of you’ll say, “Well, no, life’s, it’s got to be more than that.” And then people will try to take other responses to it.
Trent Horn:
Like you said, if it’s like, okay, well let’s just minimize suffering, we don’t want suffering. Well, just snap your fingers and get rid of everything. Think about it, if my goal in life is to minimize suffering in the world, and I had an anti-matter device that could destroy the universe, it would seem like morality would oblige me to destroy the universe if the goal is to minimize suffering.
Trent Horn:
And that came up in our debate about the suffering of animals and whether God could allow that. So that’s why it’s important there in moral theory to figure out, okay, well, which moral theory is correct? And I do think, though, that our meta ethical foundation is going to determine in some way our moral theory. Because if we believe that God is the ultimate foundation for morality, then that gives us an impetus to believe that there is a natural law, for example, that we can access, that we should follow.
Trent Horn:
St. Thomas Aquinas said, “The natural law is the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law of God.” So God has a plan for the universe, and I got a brain, I can figure that out, I can participate in it. That’s natural law. And so, it’s funny, an applied ethic like abortion can lead us to something like a natural law, and then the natural law will lead us to the law giver Himself, which, by the way, we’ll talk about a lot today.
Matt:
I like it. Before we jump into this family of arguments and starting to lay this out, I do want to ask just a couple of questions from being an apologist yourself-
Trent Horn:
Sure.
Matt:
… and to all of the work you’ve done and what that journey’s been like. And so, I’m curious how you got into doing apologetic work in the first place. What drew you into this?
Trent Horn:
It’s a hazard of being a convert. And many apologists are converts because we have to assess the objections for ourselves. And once we’ve done that, some people want to teach others how to do the same thing, and I think I fell into that category. So I think it came out of the necessity of confronting the objections and a desire and joy in teaching other people how to do the same.
Matt:
And how have you dealt with… I don’t know if the word would be convert. I was raised Catholic but not really steeped into it. Fell away, went to atheism when I was studying abroad, came back to Christianity, and eventually came back to Catholicism through the Early Church Fathers, through the Ecumenical Council. So did a decent amount of diving in, and I love trying to convince people of the beauty and the truth of Catholicism because, similarly, I came to it from disagreeing with a whole chunk of it. And then when you dive into the history, you realize how thoughtful and how deep the arguments go over the last 2000 years.
Matt:
One thing I run into the problem of is I’m super heavy, I’m super rational. And so for me, creating a rational argument for the existence of Catholicism or the truth of Catholicism, it’s like, “Well, once I laid it out, why don’t you convert?” And I realize maybe half the population is quite rational, half prefer more of an emotional beauty argument. Have you ever had that where you’ve had to adjust or do you just say, “I like to do more intellectual argument. I like to convince from a philosophical perspective, theological.” Some people that works with, some don’t, or how have you dealt with that?
Trent Horn:
Well, I think that I always try to reach my audience where they’re at. I mean, I speak to diverse groups of people. Sometimes I’ll address professional philosophers, other times I’m speaking to junior high students. So I always try to reach people where they’re at. For a general audience I’ll include arguments, but I might also include visual illustration or emotional appeal, not necessarily to be manipulative, but to help a person through every aspect of their being come to understand truth.
Trent Horn:
So I’m fine doing that in a variety of ways. I really enjoy engaging high-level philosophy, I think that’s great. But I also really enjoy helping people, including lay people who aren’t super steeped in philosophy. So I think that you can explain it to people in different ways and people should be understanding and charitable that sometimes if you hear an apologist, especially someone with philosophical training, addressing a lay audience, sometimes they will oversimplify something, or at least they won’t nuance a point. And people say, “Oh, what about this? What about that?” Well, I’m speaking to a general audience. When I’m engaging a philosopher or a more rigorous critic, then I’ll have all of the nuances there. So we have to be charitable to see what was the audience a person was engaging.
Matt:
And the last question before going into the more argument side of things.
Trent Horn:
Sure.
Matt:
You’ve been doing this for a long time. What to you is the most convincing argument for the existence of God? If you had to pick one of them, I know it’s a family of arguments overall and probabilistically they add up, but for you, what’s the one that you find the most convincing?
Trent Horn:
That is a very difficult question. I’m not sure I have it entirely answered. It’s like picking my favorite argument is like my favorite child. I love them-
Matt:
Oh, it’s fair.
Trent Horn:
I love them all in different ways. It is hard because I think I like different things about different ones. I mean, my favorite arguments are probably cosmological arguments and then the moral argument. In recent debates that I’ve had, I really tend to focus on those particular arguments. And really, Immanuel Kant said the same thing, the famous German philosopher. He said, “There are two things that continue to fill me with wonder: the star heavens above and the moral law within.” And I think I share that sentiment, I think the question of why is there something rather than nothing, where did everything come from?
Trent Horn:
But then also, I like the moral argument, and I’m glad we’re talking about it because it is a more down-to-earth argument, literally speaking. Instead of just talking about contingency and big bang cosmology, I find it really is an immediate argument for people to assess when it comes to God. Now, it doesn’t prove everything that cosmological arguments prove like that God is infinite, timeless necessarily, and being eternal. I mean, it could show those things, but not in as an explicit of a way.
Trent Horn:
C.S. Lewis’s book, Mere Christianity, is based on a series of radio addresses that he gave. And he was also doing things like giving talks for members of the Royal Air Force, and so he had to present arguments the common man could wrap his head around. Now, at that time, philosophers of religion, their big argument was the contingency argument for the existence of God. You can listen to Bertrand Russell debate Frederick Copleston on it on BBC Radio. And it gets very highfalutin very quickly. I think Lewis didn’t want something like that for his audience. His audience was not going to be able to understand that very easily. But he did present an argument, and it’s an argument that predated him. It was something that Cardinal Newman had a version of it. I think there was a gentleman named [inaudible 00:17:11] who presented one or even William Paley. But he’s saying, “Okay, look, look at the moral world around us,” and we’ll get to this more what Lewis meant, and he could talk about things that his audience immediately recognized in their own lives, and he asked them to explain this moral understanding of the universe. And so I think that was a very shrewd thing for him to focus on.
Matt:
Well, that’s perfect segue into it. Let’s jump into the moral argument. You mentioned it’s a family of arguments.
Trent Horn:
Yes.
Matt:
How about we start with your understanding of Lewis’ version of this argument?
Trent Horn:
Yeah, so Lewis’ version of the argument seems to focus on… Well, essentially it is asking for an explanation for moral realism. Moral realism is the view that moral propositions exist, they have a binding force upon us, they are normative, if you will. And so, they exist apart from us. They’re not mere subjective preferences. They are not illusions. They’re not errors. Moral truths exist. I sometimes like to call them moral facts. You ought to do good and avoid evil. There’s these different moral facts that exist, and we seek an explanation for them.
Trent Horn:
And so, in things like Mere Christianity, Lewis talks about how in everyday life we appeal to these things, not just to our preferences. For example, he talks about a seat on the bus. He says, “I gave up my seat, so you ought to do similar. I gave you a bite of an orange, so you ought to give me another bite as well.” That when we are in argument with people about moral disputes, we don’t just fall back on saying, “Well, I’m right because I feel this way, and you’re wrong.” We don’t argue about morality like we argue about sports teams or fashion. Because with fashion or sports, a lot of times it’s just a preference. “Well, this is better because I say so, or I like it.”
Trent Horn:
Rather, when we argue about morality like whether it was fair what you did or not, we appeal to some kind of a rule. It’s like when we play a game. It’s like when we play basketball, we could say, “Hey, that’s not fair.” Or, “You can’t do that, double dribbling or shooting outside of the boundary line, or something like that.” “Well, why not?” “Well, because there’s this rule that you broke.” Well, then that invites the retort, “Says who?” And that’s what Lewis tries to propose is, well, there is this moral law that exists, what is its ultimate source?
Trent Horn:
And so, Lewis does survey a variety of different explanations for that. I’ll talk about two, basically. One would be instincts. It’s funny, Lewis addresses these objections and they have persisted on. They’re the same objections with you with today to the moral argument. He says the one objection is, look, our moral feelings, you ought to do this, you ought to do that, that’s just instincts we have that developed over time. We as communal animals developed an instinct to share and thrive together. And so, if you don’t do that, it just triggers something inside you as an animal. It’s an instinct.
Trent Horn:
And Lewis gives an example, he says, “No, morality can’t be one of the instincts.” He agrees instincts are related to morality. “However,” he says, “morality can’t be one of the instincts any more than a songbook can be a key on a piano.” So the idea here is that what is the difference between a good song and a bad song on a piano? Well, it’s you hit the keys in the right order at the right time. And in order to know which ones you’re supposed to hit, there has to be that songbook for you to do that. “Because some instincts,” Lewis says, “are good or bad depending on circumstance. Fighting is good when you can overcome the threat, but foolhardy when you can’t. And fleeing is good when you prudently need help, but it’s bad if you’re being a coward.” And so which instinct you choose is based on which key you play. You need something beyond the instincts themselves to tell you which one is right in a given circumstance.
Trent Horn:
The other option might be, well, it’s just society. We have this social norm we’ve developed. You gave me some of your food, I should give you some of mine. It’s a social contract. But one of the problems here is that how do we know society is good or bad? Because if we talk about social progress, we’re assuming things get better. Because when you go back to fashion, people might disagree about whether fashion has progressed or not. At least we can say it’s changed. Men don’t wear tails and top hats. Some people call that progress, others call it regress. But at the bottom level, it’s change. But the fact that we don’t enslave people anymore, the fact that more people are equal under the law, that’s progress.
Trent Horn:
But then that shows that society itself can’t be the standard for morality because there has to be something beyond society to judge whether society’s getting better or worse, whether it’s better or worse than another society that exists. And the problem here is the problem of the social reformer. If society determines right and wrong, then whoever is in the minority is always wrong. Even someone like Gandhi or Martin Luther king Jr. would be immoral. But they’re not because sometimes society needs to be reformed. And so, Lewis eventually posits that the ultimate source for these unchanging moral truths would have to be an unchanging, perfect, moral person or God.
Matt:
We’ll circle back to some of those from the objection side of things. Okay, so that’s Lewis’. When you mentioned it’s a family of arguments, how are some of the other ones maybe variations or related but a little bit different from that one?
Trent Horn:
Sure. Some of them might be a bit more formalized. For example, William Lane Craig’s argument, I would say, is very similar to Lewis’, it’s just put in more of a sound philosophical argument, or at least it’s set in a syllogistic structure. William Lane Craig’s argument goes like this: if God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist. Objective moral values and duties do exist, therefore, God exist. First, it’s a valid argument. So that would just be modus tollens; if A then B, not B, therefore, not A. So if I am not in California, then I am not in San… No, wait, no, that wouldn’t… I’m using too many negatives here. The way I would do it, okay, so if I am in San Diego, then I am in California. I’m in San Diego, therefore, I’m in California, that’s modus ponens. But you can also reverse it. If I’m in San Diego, then I’m in California. I’m not in California, so I’m not in San Diego. So Craig’s using a modus tollens here. If God does not exist, objective morals, values, and duties don’t exist. They do exist, therefore, the first part is false, God does exist.
Trent Horn:
And a lot of this reasoning would be similar to what Lewis has reasoned. And also, Craig makes a distinction between objective moral values, what is good or bad, versus objective moral duties, what is right or wrong. Because just because something is good, it doesn’t follow you have a duty to achieve it. For example, it would be good for you to become a firefighter, a doctor, a soldier, a police officer, those would all be good things, a teacher. But you couldn’t do all of them, and you’re not obliged to do all of them. So just because something’s good doesn’t mean you have to do it. So, Craig makes that distinction in saying that these categories we have, things that are objectively good and bad, and then other duties we have, things that we ought to do, things that we must never do. This falls under that framework. If God does not exist, these things don’t exist. So there’ll be two routes to going against the argument, and we might be able to talk about this more with objections.
Trent Horn:
One would be to say morality’s not objective, it is just a preference or it’s a loselry. The atheist J. L. Mackie once said that moral facts were so odd that they could only exist if an all-powerful God created them. So Mackie just denied objective morality, the atheist J. L Mackie. At least he denied a particular form of moral realism regarding moral facts.
Trent Horn:
So some people will take that approach and just say, “Well, there is no objective morality.” The other approach should be to say, “You can have objective morality without God,” and they’ll try to formulate different means of doing that. So that’s one approach, and then I’ll just briefly mention two other approaches and then you can hash it out as you like. Another approach would be instead of a formal argument, like Craig makes, deductive, you could have an inference to the best explanation. This would be like someone like David, I think it’s Baggot or Badget. It’s always hard with these people’s names. I read their books, but I don’t watch videos of the people, so I don’t know how their names are pronounced, but it’s B-A-G-G-E-T-T. He’s written a few books with Jerry Walls on the moral argument. I’m going to say Baggot, so whatever. I can’t call him David because I never met him.
Trent Horn:
He takes more of an abductive argument. He would say, “Look, Craig’s argument,” he says “it’s valid, it just might not be convincing to people.” They might say, “Yeah, I still think it can have morality without God.” So what Baggett and Walls say is, “Well, actually, maybe there’s these different aspects of morality that you could have some moral things but not other crucial parts of morality.” God explains very strange features of morality like that some things are intrinsically evil, that humans have intrinsic worth, that we have moral knowledge, that we have moral responsibility. And so, God explains all that very well. Atheism doesn’t come anywhere close. And so, we should go with God on those questions. This is helpful because there are some philosophers of religion like Richard Swinburn who would say that maybe morality does exist out there, it’s just a necessary brute fact of the universe, but-
Matt:
I think I came across that one.
Trent Horn:
Yes, this would be atheistic Platonism or moral Platonism. They’re just out there inexplicably. But what we would say is it’s very strange that there are moral agents like us to access them. Even if morality doesn’t require God to explain its existence, it’s just a necessary feature of a universe, the fact that we are moral, that we can access these moral laws and know them, that we’re not constrained just by evolutionary instincts is something that cries out for explanation.
Trent Horn:
So a family of arguments, people can take their pick. I have dabbled in lots of different ones. I’m actually working on a book on a case for Christian theism, and I think in my study of the arguments, I’ve started out more with the deductive route. Although in my book, Answering Atheism, I didn’t use Craig’s argument per se, it’s so funny now that I’ve been doing this for almost 10 years seeing how my thought has changed over time. And I noticed the seeds being planted in my earlier work. So in Answering Atheism, my argument was posed this way: moral facts exist. There is no natural explanation for them. Therefore, there must be a supernatural explanation. So that was the argument that I use, and Craig used a similar one in his debate with Sam Harris on morality. And so, I think that kind of argument lends itself well to an inferences to the best explanation type of approach, to say, “Look, naturalism really can’t explain all the rich features of morality. The theism does explain it quite well, so we should go with theism.”
Matt:
And maybe just a quick nuance clarification question.
Trent Horn:
Sure.
Matt:
We keep talking about these moral facts, these moral truths that we come across and we’ve understood as time gone on. Out of curiosity, how have we come to build this morality almost? Is it, really, a good bit of it is from reading scripture and understanding the Ten Commandments from a Christian God perspective? Is it that it’s been placed in our hearts? If there’s a creator, God, He’s placed it in our hearts and, therefore, reason has allowed us to come to it. But it’s only because we can look internally and we have some sort of code in us that we just sense, and our reason allows us to tease out what that sense is. Maybe we can talk a little bit about that.
Trent Horn:
Right. So what’s interesting is that the catechism talks about this with the Ten Commandments, or the Decalogue as it refers to it. So, here’s what it says in the catechism of the Catholic Church in paragraph 2071, it says, “The Commandments of the Decalogue,” the Ten Commandments, “although accessible to reason alone have been revealed. To attain a complete and certain understanding of the requirements of the natural law, sinful humanity needed this revelation.” So what’s interesting here is we would say, “No, people can know morality apart from God.” This is a common caricature of the moral argument where you put it this way, are you saying a person can’t be good without God? That would be a false argument. Some people think the moral argument is claiming it is impossible to be moral without God. And that’s not true. There are atheists who exhibit upstanding morality. There are Christians who are quite depraved actually. So it’s not the sense that you can’t be good without God, it is the argument that goodness, a kind of objective goodness, cannot exist without God.
Trent Horn:
There’s a difference between moral epistemology, how we come to know moral truths, and moral ontology, what makes moral truths true or what makes it the case that they exist. And then Lewis dealt with this as well. It’s so funny when you read Lewis’ writings, he broaches many of these same subjects, he just doesn’t use the philosophical jargon, either because it wasn’t popular in his day or he wants to be a good communicator. But I believe he gives the example of someone learning the multiplication table, that a school boy in England would learn the multiplication table formally through his instruction, but someone on a desert island or someone who grew up in a tribe somewhere would understand the basics of multiplication. If he has two groups of three coconuts, he has six coconuts, but he doesn’t know the times tables like the school boy in England. But they’ve arrived at the same truth in different ways.
Trent Horn:
But what’s important here is just because they arrive there in different ways, the multiplication table is not something the school boy and his class invented in England. They both discovered it in different ways. It exists independently of them, even though some people are more aware of it than others. And this is a good analog because some people might say, “Well, how could morality be objective if we see moral progress? It seems like humanity throughout the past thousands of years we make moral progress, we learn more about morality. It’s like we have a car and we keep fixing it and making it better and better as if we made it.”
Matt:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
And I would say that’s not the case. We discovered it, and we’re getting better at discovering it. And that’s why I think the comparison to mathematics is so helpful because most people will agree, now there are a few philosophers, constructivist and others, who would say that we created mathematical truths. But I think most philosophers and most laypeople, if you ask them, “Did we invent math or discover it?” They’ll say, “Well, we discovered it. We can’t change two plus two equals four, we discovered that. We discovered all these mathematical truths.” But if they’re out there independent of us, notice we did not discover them at the same time. The axioms of arithmetic and geometry, that was discovered through the work of people like Euclid in Ancient Greece. And then even going forward, it still took over a thousand years or 2000 years to get to someone like Georg Cantor. Geog? Georg? Georg Cantor. Cantorian set theory to deal with the infinite.
Trent Horn:
Well, the truths about the infinite were always there, we just hadn’t discovered them yet. And so, we get better and better at it and we have more of a system, but the mathematical truths preexisted our discovery of them. I would say the same thing is true of morality. And so, the catechism here is interesting. It says, “Through reason we can figure them out.” But it’s very dim, we’re grasping at it sometimes. Or we try to explain it away. A man says, “Well, adultery’s not wrong in this case because I’m not treated well, and this woman’s not treated well in her marriage, so it’s fine, whatever.” So then if his reason is being numbed, you’ve got this commandment, thou shall not commit adultery, and it’s just black and white. Here you go. The Ten Commandments are kick in the pants, don’t try to weasel your way out of this.
Trent Horn:
So that’s what it means here when it says, “By reason we can attest morality.” But in other cases, even though we can know it by reason, there’s something different when God just outright commands and tells you do or don’t do this. That has kind of a more binding force to it.
Matt:
So if I’m understanding this correctly, going back to before the revelation of scripture and God came in that, the time before that, and I know we have a very diverse listener base and some people might not think there was a time before in the Bible, but let’s assume there is, and it goes back and-
Trent Horn:
Well, there was certainly a time before written revelation. Think about Cain and Abel for example. It was certainly wrong when Cain murdered Abel, but there had been no written revelation. There’s no record in scripture of God saying, “Don’t murder each other either,” before this time. So there would’ve been an acquaintance with the moral law through conscience at this point. There hadn’t been a complete formal giving of the law.
Matt:
So it’d be that word you used earlier, dim. It’s on our conscience. We don’t fully understand it yet. We can somewhat reason it, but then through revelation it became much clearer.
Trent Horn:
Mm-hmm. Right. And also, through revelation it can encourage the will to comply with the moral law. In many cases, we do understand the law, but as Jesus said, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” We do understand it, but we don’t feel an impetus to want to carry out the law’s commands. Whereas having that command articulated bluntly to us as an order, “Get up and go,” that can be different.
Trent Horn:
To give you an example, I have been getting healthier recently because I attend boxing classes. My kids do wrestling-
Matt:
Sounds fun.
Trent Horn:
… at the same time, and I do boxing. My wife and I agreed that I am in way more shape when I attend a class than when I just go to the gym by myself. Because when you go to the gym and it’s just reason tells if you want to be healthy, you ought to vigorously exercise. But sometimes we just walk on the treadmill and we watch The Food Network. But when you’re in a class, you have someone saying, “All right, do this, do that, 10 and 10, shadow boxing.” They’ll give these commands like, “Okay, okay. I got to do this. I got to do this. I got the command here.” And it gives you more of that oomph to do it. Whereas, if you were just relying on just your reasoning of what is good or bad for you, you might not take it as seriously. So that’s another reason to explain atheists saying, “Well, I don’t need Ten Commandments, I know stealing is wrong.” Yeah, until you try to rationalize it.
Trent Horn:
I had a friend once who went to a party, and it was for a very wealthy girl, friend of ours. And she got a gift card for $50. And later on, a few weeks later, we were out to eat and he used that gift card to pay for his dinner. And I said, “Why’d you do that?” He said, “Because she’s full of herself. She’s been really mean to us lately, and she’s not going to miss it. So who cares?” So he would normally say stealing is wrong, but he found a case where you could justify it. So that’s why I think the commands can be so helpful in that regard when we try to weasel out of them.
Matt:
So let me put on an atheist hat right now a little bit.
Trent Horn:
Sure.
Matt:
Let’s dive into this very first objective: does morality have to be objective? This is going to be a simplified way of explaining this, but if you’re an atheist, and we just talked about from a Christian perspective we have this conscious on us and then we had revelation come from the creator, from God, and that gave us much a clear light. Could you say what would be the flaws of saying, “Okay, evolution created these instincts,” which to some degree feels a little bit like a conscious in the sense that there’s some internal thing pushing us one way or the other. I mean, I know it’s not the same thing as a conscious, but we’re learning how to act in certain circumstances for the benefit of society as we developed these instincts that have allowed us to evolve and get to this point. Without them, we wouldn’t have been able to evolve over the hundreds of thousands of years to get where we are today. And then as times could come on, as we developed the ability to reason, we were able to rationally start explaining what these instincts are, and we can have debates. And as we’ve done that, we’ve been able to not necessarily get to objective morality but a sort of thing that feels like objective morality. I know that’s super vague to some degree-
Trent Horn:
No, I think understand this is a common retort to the moral argument in trying to deny these moral truths exist. The late atheistic philosopher, he later became a deist actually, Antony Flew, I think one of his responses to Lewis’ argument was that, “Well, we just have a moral marketplace, that over time people have proposed different moral beliefs and the better ones have won out. And that explains the moral conditions and truths that we have.” I would say, once again, I mean, there’s a variety of ways that one could go about targeting this belief. And I guess this goes back to some of the other non-standard moral arguments, different from Lewis or Craig. This gets into the moral knowledge arguments, because even some philosophers will say, “Yeah, you could have morality without God,” but it’s very, very strange that we have this moral knowledge.
Trent Horn:
Because normally when we know things, we use one of our five senses to figure it out, or we contemplate apriori truths, like mathematical truths. Morality doesn’t seem to be like either one of those. And so, one of the arguments against moral realism… Because there are atheistic moral realists, there are people who will say, “Yeah, morality is out there, but it’s not dependent on God.” One of the arguments against moral realism is the evolutionary debunking argument. They would say this: that our moral beliefs are conditioned by evolution. But our evolutionary beliefs are not targeted for morality, they’re targeted for survival. Because I would ask people, “All right, what is morality? What is it?” And I guess a basic definition you could give is this: morality involves actions that are good… let’s leave good or bad out… praiseworthy and blameworthy. Because you can have good, bad in the non-moral sense. Like there’s a good skateboard has to have four wheels and spin, but just if a wheel falls off, it’s not an evil skateboard, it’s just a deficient one, it’s bad. But a good or bad person, that’s a little different.
Trent Horn:
Actions that are blameworthy and praiseworthy that we engage in, that seems very restricted to human beings. So the evolutionary debunking argument would say, “Well, morality is just… sorry, evolution is just giving us instincts to help us survive. It’s targeted towards survival. And it would be a gigantic coincidence if it turned out that all of our instincts for survival, that all of our survival… I guess I’d ask an atheist this: what are survival truths? Let’s write them all out. Don’t drink what’s under the sink. Don’t play with snakes. There’s all these. And then don’t defraud someone because they might try to steal from you. Don’t sleep with somebody’s wife because the husband will try to kill you. So you’ll notice there’s overlap here, because I could ask you, “Let’s write out survival truths and let’s write out moral truths. Okay, let’s write them out in two lists.”
Trent Horn:
And the objection seems to have force because you do see overlap with some of these. Okay, yeah, some of the survival truths are moral truth, but that doesn’t get you all the way. The question is, what are the odds that all of the survival truths are identical to the moral truths? And that seems incredibly unlikely given that we could have evolved in all kinds of different ways to have different things that would’ve been good for our wellbeing or not for our wellbeing. Because different animals, for example, engage in acts that contribute to their flourishing, forced copulation, sacrifice to save the queen. Different animals engage in acts that are good for their flourishing as animals that would not be good for us. It might be different if we had evolved in different ways, but it seems like the moral truths are unchanging. They’re like the mathematical truths, but they’re not identical to the survival truths. They don’t map over one to one. There’s some overlap, but other things like, for example this, do not directly kill babies just because they have a mild disability.
Trent Horn:
Now, a survival truth would say, “Ensure your offspring have maximal genetic fitness.” That seems like a clear survival truth that evolution would instill in us. In the animal kingdom, it’s very common for animals to leave more disabled or injured young to care for the stronger ones that have more chance of survival. So if survival truths were all that mattered, you could justify all kinds of evils. So they’re really not identical between the two. And so that’s why moral truths cry out for an explanation beyond mere survival. Because I could say, “Look, you’re right, we did evolve morality to get along, sure. But we also evolved mathematical knowledge to get along, right?” If you couldn’t count that there were three tigers running after you and you see two runaway and you’re like, “Whoa, three tigers after me, two run away, that mean no more tigers.” Well, guess what? You forgot the one other tiger, and then he ate you.
Trent Horn:
I don’t know why every cave man, “Me, know two things, yellow sun and sky and yum yum donut,” to borrow from Jim Gaffigan. But there, that would be an example that the cave man with bad math dies and the cave man with good math survives. But that doesn’t mean mathematical truths are identical to our survival truths because there are mathematical truths about infinity that have absolutely nothing to do with our survival. You can easily survive and thrive without knowledge of infinity. You may even do better, who knows? But they’re still true.
Trent Horn:
But you might say then, “Well, why can’t moral truths be like these brute mathematical truths?” That’d be the other atheistic platonist route. And I would say, “Because they are imperative, they’re categorical. They command me and bind me to do things, and that really only makes sense in light of some authority.” So I might read a mathematical equation and I find it interesting, or if the Scrabble box tips over and it says, “Go to store,” that’s a weird coincidence, but I’m not going, it’s a Scrabble box, it can’t tell me what to do. But if my wife leaves a note that says, “Go to store,” I have an imperative there based on her particular level of authority and so on and so on. Is that helpful? Does that make sense?
Matt:
No, it really is, and the end part partly answered what I’m about to ask right now, but I’m just curious.
Trent Horn:
Sure.
Matt:
What if someone came to you and said, “Okay, in the beginning of this process, the evolutionary, the instincts were 100% survival. Then we reach a point where survival is no longer quite as prominent on our minds because we have evolved enough or we’ve developed enough systems and processes where survival isn’t necessarily the main focus, like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we’ve got the basic ones covered and now we’re working our way higher.” We get to that point and it’s like, “Right, now we want to go do this marketplace that you brought up, and let’s just have conversations.” And maybe it isn’t objective, maybe we don’t have objective morality, but we’re constantly debating, it’s not perfect, we’re not fully there, but at this time in society, even if some people use the language we’re progressing, let’s even take that off the table and say they’re using that language, but it’s not really a progression, it’s just as society, we think we’re in a better spot right now. We might be calling on something, but in reality, it’s just a debate going on of ideas. A thousand years it might be super different and we might even regress in some ways, although regress already betrays the point I’m making.
Matt:
I’m just curious, if someone said that and said, “But we don’t need objective, it’s just a marketplace. Subjective, it’s working. It’s good.” What would you say is the danger of that? Does that devolve into something? Is it just not even possible to do that, like you can’t even have that argument?
Trent Horn:
Now, it’s making progress here on the explanation to say, “Well, okay, morality is not identical to survival instincts, but it is just something that we create, that we want to move beyond survival to flourishing.” And this is similar to Sam Harris’s approach in his book The Moral Landscape. And that would be the idea that, well, morality is objective. Harris wants to say it’s objective, but it doesn’t have a divine foundation. And more than that, Harris wants to say that science can prove moral truths. And that’s very controversial. Even many philosophers will say, “Well, no.” This goes back to David Hume, the is-ought gap. Science might tell us the way things are, but it can’t tell us the way things ought to be. It describes a system. It’s descriptive, not prescriptive.
Trent Horn:
And so, Harris puts this forward in his book The Moral Landscape, and he talks about this. But others are critical of him. For example, Alex Rosenberg in his book… He’s an atheist. He wrote the book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality. He says, “Harris correctly explains how science can resolve moral disputes. He mistakenly thinks that science can show the resulting moral agreement to be true, correct, or right. It can’t. Science has no way to bridge the gap between is and ought.” So science can tell us, for example, if we Institute some kind of moral policy, a policy of imprisonment or taxation, or what are the out consequences of forbidding or permitting something. Science can tell us what will be the result of that. It can tell us if you do a lockdown of businesses because of a pandemic, we now have a study to show that really didn’t decrease mortality at all, for example.
Trent Horn:
But then science can only take us that far. It can’t tell us, well, it was morally right to do the lockdowns or is morally wrong. It can’t bridge that gap. Harris thinks it can because Harris tries to define morality… He basically says it’s the same thing as medicine, that morality is the science of human flourishing. And he uses medicine as an example that you can have objective medicine without God, well, you cure what ails you. But here I would say that Harris has collapsed the distinction that there is a difference between morality and medicine. Otherwise, morality just becomes… It’s just medicine, what helps humans flourish. So you’re saying, “Okay, it’s not just survival, we also want to flourish as human beings. What contributes to human flourishing?” And if something contributes to human flourishing, that is moral, and we have an obligation to contribute to that.
Trent Horn:
A whole host of problems here because some people will say, “Well, it’s not just humans, it’s conscious creatures.” And this came up in my debate with Nathan Nobis. He had to bite the bullet saying that the flourishing of a rat might be morally on par with a human in some circumstances. But then in other cases, he said, “Well, you can override the rats right to life, yada, yada.” But here it seems that no, no, no, the flourishing of the human species is more important than the flourishing of other species. Well, why is that? Well, that’s a moral fact that stands in need of explanation. Also, at the end of his book, The Moral Landscape, Harris admits that even if you had a science to figure out how human beings would flourish, that’s not the same as morality.
Trent Horn:
Let me read to you what he said here, he said, “It is also conceivable that a science of human flourishing could be possible, and yet people could be made equally happy by very different moral impulses. Perhaps there is no connection between being good and feeling good, and therefore, no connection between moral behavior as generally conceived and subjective wellbeing. In this case, rapists, liars, and thieves would experience the same depth of happiness as saints. It would no longer be an especially moral landscape. Rather, it would be a continuum of wellbeing upon which saints and sinner would occupy equivalent peaks.” The problem here is that Harris has completely undermined his argument. If he says that goodness, the good, is identical to increasing human flourishing, then there can’t be a case where those two are not the same thing.
Trent Horn:
It’s like when I say that Clark Kent is identical to Superman. There is no case where Superman is not Clark Kent. They’re the same, they’re identical. They refer to the same thing, they just have different reference. Or another example would be that two plus two equals four means that two plus two is always four, they’re never not the same thing. But he admits here, “Well, goodness might not be that which increases human flourishing.” And if that’s the case, they’re not identical. And so, while human flourishing may be good in many cases, that’s not what goodness is. And so, that will take us back to the ethical theory, what is goodness? And I would propose, I think Lewis and others would ultimately get to this point, that the good entails the way things reaching their proper end and ultimately the highest good for all things is that which is goodness itself, or God, what the medieval philosophers would call the summum bonum, the highest good. And that helps to order us in understanding all these subordinate goods and provides an order and framework to make the universe morally intelligible.
Matt:
Going back to your ought versus is, could you argue that we can just let go of the ought? I know some people use this language and I know, obviously, Lewis uses the ought language all the time, but what if you’re an atheist and you’re just like, “You know what? Honestly, right now as a society, we’re selfishly making these decisions. We’re debating them in a marketplace. We don’t even need the ought, and things are adapting and adjusting, honestly, based a little bit on power, persuasion, influence, that shifting things. I guess in theory you’re seeing this a lot today with the sexual revolution and you’re seeing the institution of marriage really get under threat and imagine if to the rise of social media and medic desires slowly shift over a hundred years where there’s only five people left that really think about that and 99.9% of the world thinks like this is all good and we all accept it and all before you know it… I don’t think that’s necessarily possible, but do we have to have that ought? We could just let it go and just make a debate of ideas and whatever wins out based on power or influence is what… And we’re adding other language to it.
Trent Horn:
I think people can claim to want to do that. For example, David Humes said that when it comes to morality, what we mean, we are essentially expressing our preferences. So when I say murder is wrong, what I’m really saying is murder makes me feel bad inside. And so, if enough of us get together and say, “Hey, murder makes you feel bad inside too.” “Yeah, me too,” well, if we would all like to not feel bad inside, let’s make that illegal and stop each other from doing that. The problem here is that you could try to make morality like that, but I don’t think anyone really lives that way. You have Richard Dawkins as a prime example of this. In his books, on the one hand he’ll say, “In the universe, there is no good or bad.” In fact, the quote is very famous. I bet I could find it right now through Saint Google.
Matt:
While, you look that up, I appreciate every time I ask these sort of vague questions, you know exactly what I’m asking and then you articulate it the proper way.
Trent Horn:
Yes.
Matt:
Because that preference idea is exactly what I was somewhat getting at.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, and here’s what Dawkin says: “In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces, and genetic replications, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference. Everything is; there is no ought.”
Trent Horn:
But then in The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins does a lot of moral whining. He says that Christians ought to give up their belief in God, that it is wrong. And I agree with him for some religions to practice female genital mutilation. That he offers these blistering commands, “You ought not do that. You shouldn’t do this.” And so, you try to say it, but you really can’t live it, I think.
Trent Horn:
This also brings up the difference between what would be called a hypothetical imperative and a categorical imperative. So, many people who will take this route to the moral argument will say that morality is just a series of hypothetical imperatives, and you can have those without God, right? I don’t have a divine command, why do I change the oil in my car? It’s not because there’s an 11th commandment, thou shall change your oil every six months or 10,000 miles, whichever comes sooner, or whatever. It’s because if I want my car to run well, then I must change the oil. It’s hypothetical. If I want X, I need to do Y. And so, some people, well, morality is just, “Well, if I want to live in a peaceful society, then I’ll need to behave a certain way.” And they try to make morality just a bunch of hypothetical imperatives.
Trent Horn:
But I would say, no, there are hypothetical imperatives, many of them, including immorality. But there are also categorical imperatives. It’s not, if you want X, do Y. It’s just do Y. It doesn’t matter if you want X. Do good and avoid evil. Don’t torture children for fun. Love your neighbor as yourself. And it’s just a universal and binding command that is given without that hypothetical element to it. And that, to me, becomes very difficult to explain in a universe like Dawkins would describe, that is at bottom, no design, no purpose, and has just pitiless indifference.
Matt:
I like that. I know we’re pushing up on an hour here. Got one final question here.
Trent Horn:
Sure.
Matt:
I came across this… More just your thoughts on it, not some deep discussion. But it’s something moral because God says it is?
Trent Horn:
I was hoping you would bring up Euthyphro. Go right ahead.
Matt:
That’s funny, I had no idea the Euthyphro because that one I didn’t get a chance to look up. You put it in the notes ahead of time, so I just threw it in there. I didn’t realize that was the same as objective Euthyphro.
Trent Horn:
Good. Yes.
Matt:
But I had read that, and then Lewis literally writes in a letter to Mr. Beversluis-
Trent Horn:
Beversluis.
Matt:
Beversluis.
Trent Horn:
I think Beversluis is his name. Actually, we should do a mega episode for Pints of Jack, let’s do this soon, it’ll be so fun, on debunking C. S. Lewis’ greatest critic. And he really is, Beversluis. He wrote in, I think it was 1985 C. S. Lewis in the Search for Rational Religion. He’s probably one of the few philosophers that’s really taken Lewis seriously.
Matt:
Wow. So I was wondering, the moral from God, apart from God, or is it because he says that? And Lewis takes a stance, “Things are not good because God commands them. God commands certain things because He sees them to be good.” In other words, divine will is the obedient servant to divine reason. The opposite view, [inaudible 00:59:12], Paley’s… I think you actually mentioned Paley beginning of this, leads to an absurdity. So I’m just curious, is Lewis correct on that? I know nothing about that. My first instinct was, if it’s separate from God… I mean, I guess it just seems tough for it to be separate from God, but I also see the difficulty the other way. I don’t see them both ways.
Trent Horn:
Right. Well, I would say that God and His omnision certainly knows what is good for us and bad for different creatures and beings. So He does not command things that are at variance with what is good for us as rational creatures. So He perfectly identifies the good. But this reply is not satisfactory to me because it doesn’t show that the Euthyphro dilemma is a false dilemma. So what is the Euthyphro dilemma? That goes all the way back to Plato’s dialogue, Euthyphro, and in it, Socrates basically says this… The original is, is something Pius because the god say so, or do the god say so because it’s Pius. I will retranslate it for a modern audience, and it’ll go like this: is an action good because God says it’s good, or does God say it’s good because it’s good?
Trent Horn:
Then that leaves a problem. If it’s good because God says, what if God said, “Actually, child torture is okay on Wednesdays. Go right ahead.”? That would make God a arbitrary cosmic dictator. If He needs to consult a moral rule book to get morality, right, then it seems like whatever that thing God consults, that’s really God, not God. So either morality comes from God’s will, which would make it arbitrary, and it’s not, or morality is completely beyond God and He is subservient to it, which means He’s not really God, it’s beyond Him. And-
Matt:
It’s good formulation.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. And so, the reply that I would prefer to the dilemma is to say, a thing is not good because God says so, and God doesn’t say so because it is good. Rather, God says so because He is good or He is the good. So God’s commands flow from His nature. So morality does not come from God’s will, it comes from His nature. And from a Catholic perspective, I think this is helpful because we have a robust theology. We talk about divine simplicity, God’s infinite nature. God is just perfect being itself. If evil is an absence of good, and since God is infinite undivided being itself, God by necessity must be good. He can’t be bad, He doesn’t lack anything. He’s infinite undivided being itself. So if God is the good, then we’ve been able to split the horns of the dilemma. What He commands will be necessarily good, it flows from His character.
Trent Horn:
The catechism puts it this way in paragraph 271, “God’s almighty power is in no way arbitrary.” And then it quotes Aquinas, “In God, power, essence, will, intellect, wisdom, and justice are all identical. Nothing, therefore, can be in God’s power which could not be in His just will or His wise intellect.” So that’s where I believe is the key to splitting the horns of the Euthyphro dilemma. It’s not good because God says so, and it’s also, God doesn’t say so because it’s good. God says so because He is good, the goodness itself. And He’s the natural stopping point. It would make sense here.
Trent Horn:
To give you an example, before they changed it using the speed of light and I think cesium atoms, what makes something a meter long, right? How do we know something is one meter in length? Well, we know something’s a meter in length because traditionally there was a bar of iridium and platinum in France called the meter bar, and that bar was the standard for how long a meter was. Now, it wasn’t exactly-
Matt:
I’ve never heard that.
Trent Horn:
… a meter, so they’ve changed it with, I think, radioactive decay and speed of light, things like that are more precise. But it wouldn’t make sense to ask, “Well, how do you know the meter bar is a meter long? How do you know? Is something a meter because the bar says so, or does the bar say so because it’s a meter? You would say, “No, both of those are wrong. It’s a meter long-
Matt:
It is a meter.
Trent Horn:
… because it matches the bar and the bar just is what a meter is. And so, that can help us to see how God’s relationship to morality is not arbitrary or subservient. It flows from the fact that God just is goodness itself. And so, morality naturally flows from His perfect divine nature.
Matt:
I like that meter analogy. That’s beautiful. Clear, simple.
Trent Horn:
Actually, that goes back to the quote, I believe. Maybe you could read it from the very beginning of when we were speaking about the rod. Could you read that again because that ties up everything that we began with?
Matt:
Unless the measuring rod is independent of the things measured, we can do no measuring.
Trent Horn:
That’s right. It makes sense. If the meter was a part of the thing that you measured, you couldn’t know what was a meter long or a foot long, rhetoric maybe. It has to be a standard that’s outside of these things that we can consult. And so, that would be similar to God. And so, once again, yeah, it’s important to use analogies and that’s where Lewis really excels as an apologist in creating these memorable analogies to help people understand. Hey, that worked out well, we brought it full circle. I like that. That’s good.
Matt:
I’m glad I stuck with that quote now because I almost did this one from David, Proverbs 18:17 because I had just listened to the debate you just did with…
Trent Horn:
Oh, Steve Christie.
Matt:
Yeah. He went first, if I’m correct. I remember hearing, I’m like, “These are some pretty good arguments.” I literally texted David this, and then I go, “Oh, good, Trent really addressed those well.” And he goes, “The one who states his case first seems right until the other comes-
Trent Horn:
Forward and challenges him. Yes.
Matt:
Yes. And I always feel that whenever I’m listening to your debates, because I listen to the first person, I’m like, “This is going to be a tough one.” And then you’re unfazed and you come with all the responses. I’m like, “I love it.”
Trent Horn:
Absolutely.
Matt:
So beautiful. Well, this was awesome. Super helpful. I’m glad we’re able to dive in, especially to that part at the end with the subjective part and the evolutionary side. Those were a lot of thoughts that I had and even wrestled with. And so, I appreciate that. Actually, it was quite convincing as well. And so thank you Trent, for coming on the show.
Trent Horn:
Happy to be here anytime.
Matt:
Yes. And before we sign off, since the last time you’ve been on here, any ways that people can find out more about you, some of your conversations, your debates, your books for new people who haven’t heard some of your previous ones with us?
Trent Horn:
Well, I’d recommend that they check out my podcast, the Counsel of Trent, C-O-U-N-S-E-L, on iTunes and Google Play and YouTube. And they can also visit our website at Catholic Answers at catholic.com, and I have my own website, trenthorn.com.
Matt:
Beautiful. And guys, I can’t recommend enough the book Why We’re Catholic. It’s such a good tool for wherever you are on the spectrum, in the beginning part, whether you believe in existence of God or not, Christianity, Catholicism. I think, Trent, you do a fantastic job really just being able to hand that to anyone where they are on their journey, and I think that’s fantastic. Everyone, please join us next time in Apologetics Month when we’ll be going further up…
Trent Horn:
And further out.
Matt:
Oh, I should have told you.
Trent Horn:
Oh no-
Matt:
I should have told you further in.
Trent Horn:
To infinity and beyond.
Matt:
I was going to say we’ll cut it and redo it, but I really like that to infinity-
Trent Horn:
That’s fine. That’s fine. Let’s try it again. What would you like me to say?
Matt:
Please join us next time when we’ll be going further up…
Trent Horn:
And further in.
Matt:
Cheers.
Trent Horn:
Cheers.
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