Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Why the Knechtles LOST This Debate With Alex O'Connor and Phil Halper (And Why NOBODY Won) || SLP557

Transcript

Why the Knechtles LOST This Debate With Alex O'Connor and Phil Halper (And Why NOBODY Won) || SLP557 · The Speak Life Podcast

0:00
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0:43
SPEAKER_07: Wh does the Biblical God exist?
0:45
SPEAKER_07: I don't even know what Biblical God we're talking about.
0:48
SPEAKER_07: Which one?
0:48
SPEAKER_04: Bro, are you kidding me?
0:50
SPEAKER_04: You keep misquoting me like throughout this debate.
0:53
SPEAKER_04: And I did not give that in my opening.
0:55
SPEAKER_04: That was a response.
0:56
SPEAKER_07: How lucky Cliff and Stewart must feel to reside in a stronghold of the one true religion, given just how much variance there is out in the world.
1:03
SPEAKER_05: Obviously, you have your hair on your face mannequed very nicely.
1:07
SPEAKER_05: That is so dishonest and scary.
1:09
SPEAKER_05: And you guys, if you're gonna be honest, you know you have no solution other than despair.
1:13
SPEAKER_06: So Alex finishes his opening statement.
1:16
SPEAKER_06: He's pretty pleased with his performance.
1:17
SPEAKER_06: He's grinning.
1:18
SPEAKER_06: Phil is grinning.
1:19
SPEAKER_06: Now look over the connect please.
1:21
SPEAKER_06: Look at Cliff.
1:22
SPEAKER_06: Look at Stuart.
1:24
SPEAKER_06: Oh my goodness.
1:25
SPEAKER_06: Stuart is a coiled spring.
1:27
SPEAKER_06: Now, cards on the table.
1:28
SPEAKER_06: I watched this debate and I thought the Kinectles lost.
1:31
SPEAKER_06: But I do not think Alex and Phil won.
1:33
SPEAKER_06: There's nothing unexpected about animal suffering and death and pain and human suffering and death and pain on the God of the Bible.
1:39
SPEAKER_06: Alex has read the Bible.
1:40
SPEAKER_06: Alex knows that there's all sorts of death and pain and struggle in the Bible.
1:44
SPEAKER_06: This veil of tears is well explained by the God of the Bible.
1:47
SPEAKER_06: It's not at all well explained by whatever metaphysical priors that Alex has.
1:51
SPEAKER_06: He's not going to declare them here, but if you are an atheist, what you would expect is nothing and not everything.
1:57
SPEAKER_06: What you would expect is chaos and not order.
1:59
SPEAKER_06: What you would expect is non-life and not life.
2:02
SPEAKER_06: What you would expect is mindless matter and not mind.
2:05
SPEAKER_06: What you would expect is meaninglessness, not meaning.
2:08
SPEAKER_06: What you would expect is survival strategies and not morality.
2:11
SPEAKER_06: What you would expect is that Jesus remained in the tomb and no one had ever heard of him, and not that we're talking about the God of the Bible in the year 2024.
2:21
SPEAKER_06: What you expect on Alex's worldview is nothing like what you see.
2:25
SPEAKER_06: It's nothing like what you see.
2:27
SPEAKER_06: Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life would like to see all things through the lens of Jesus, including the modern-day debates that was held between Alex O'Connor and Phil Halper, and they were debating Cliff and Stuart connectedly on the subject does the biblical god exist?
2:41
SPEAKER_06: And uh just look at the setup to begin with.
2:44
SPEAKER_06: Uh Cliff and Stuart are onto a loser before they have even begun.
2:48
SPEAKER_06: Look at Alex's setup, look at the lighting behind him, look at the high-quality camera, look at the microphone.
2:55
SPEAKER_06: Phil also has some practical lights uh in the background.
2:58
SPEAKER_06: He is very well lit.
2:59
SPEAKER_06: Uh, looks like he's probably got uh a ring light in front of him.
3:04
SPEAKER_06: Uh his voice sounds very crisp, so I imagine he's got a decent quality microphone in front of him.
3:09
SPEAKER_06: On the other hand, look at Cliff and Stuart.
3:12
SPEAKER_06: They've got some laptop that looks like it's perched on a couple of uh books on a coffee table.
3:17
SPEAKER_06: Um who knows what's behind them?
3:19
SPEAKER_06: They are going to have to lean over, crouch over their webcam, and yell their answers into the ether.
3:27
SPEAKER_06: And they have already lost at this point.
3:30
SPEAKER_06: Somebody pay for Cliff and Stewart to have a proper setup.
3:34
SPEAKER_06: Somebody pay for Cliff and Stewart to have a camera so that they can be eye-level, so that they can have a microphone in front of them.
3:41
SPEAKER_06: And you think, Glenn, you are just nitpicking.
3:43
SPEAKER_06: Um, I am not.
3:44
SPEAKER_06: I don't think Cliff and Stuart would have gotten into some of the troubles that they get into in this debate if they were sat at a desk like this with a microphone in front of them.
3:54
SPEAKER_06: They don't have to yell, they don't have to raise their voices, they don't have to crouch, they don't have to look down on the viewer.
3:59
SPEAKER_06: Uh, they can simply sit and make calm, compassionate points in the debate.
4:06
SPEAKER_06: They failed to do that.
4:07
SPEAKER_06: Um, there are many points where I think Cliff especially, and and Stuart to some degree uh as well, um, they get a bit cranky.
4:14
SPEAKER_06: Cliff has to apologize at one point and say that he and his son Stuart uh need to probably go on some kind of communications course in order to learn how to communicate better.
4:24
SPEAKER_06: Um, there are some technical issues that have made it more difficult for them to communicate.
4:29
SPEAKER_06: I don't think that absolves um either of them from the duty to not lose their cool, but uh I I think a setup would have really helped.
4:37
SPEAKER_06: Another thing to really pay attention to in this debate is the fact that we've got two Brits and two Americans.
4:42
SPEAKER_06: And what a provocative American sounds like and what a provocative Brit sounds like are incredibly different things.
4:50
SPEAKER_06: Stuart says things like this.
4:52
SPEAKER_04: Bro, are you kidding me?
4:53
SPEAKER_04: You keep misquoting me like throughout this debate.
4:56
SPEAKER_04: And I did not give that in my opening.
4:58
SPEAKER_05: That was a response.
4:59
SPEAKER_06: Cliff says things like this.
5:01
SPEAKER_05: Obviously, you have your hair on your face mannequin very nicely.
5:05
SPEAKER_05: That is so dishonest it's scary.
5:07
SPEAKER_05: And you guys, if you're gonna be honest, you know you have no solution other than despair.
5:12
SPEAKER_05: Because poor suckers get born at the wrong time in the wrong place.
5:15
SPEAKER_05: It's just fate, destiny, and chance.
5:17
SPEAKER_05: And why don't you try and be honest about how you have to work through the despair and the meaninglessness of life in light of the fact that there is no God.
5:27
SPEAKER_06: And that raises the hackles of everybody on this side of the Atlantic and probably on uh Cliff and Stewart's side of the Atlantic as well.
5:34
SPEAKER_06: But notice that Alex and Phil, even though they speak in much more measured tones, uh, can be incredibly provocative too, in their own way, like when Alex says this.
5:45
SPEAKER_07: How lucky Cliff and Stewart must feel to reside in a stronghold of the one true religion, given just how much variance there is out in the world.
5:52
SPEAKER_06: To many people outside of the Oxford bubble and outside of England and outside of the south of England, especially, um, that might not sound like an incredibly provocative thing to say.
6:02
SPEAKER_06: Um, but to those from the New World, I'm from the New World, I'm from Australia.
6:06
SPEAKER_06: I lived in the Oxford bubble.
6:07
SPEAKER_06: I was at the next door college to Alex for three years.
6:10
SPEAKER_06: I w I was 20 years earlier than him at Oxford.
6:13
SPEAKER_06: But it really raised my hackles.
6:16
SPEAKER_06: My shoulders are getting up around my ears even now, thinking about some of the ways that posh English people speak, and it raises hackles in those who are not used to such environments.
6:27
SPEAKER_06: And and I think there's a degree to which certain people within the south of England and within certain spheres of academia, let's say, um, they're used to speaking in such terms.
6:38
SPEAKER_06: Um, listening with American ears, listening with Stuart and Cliff's ears, maybe I'm hearing some hoity-toity limey who is getting ahead of himself.
6:46
SPEAKER_06: Um and and yet I think either side, they are deaf to their own provocations because that's kind of the mode in which they speak normally.
6:56
SPEAKER_06: And I think that's true on the Connectly side of things.
6:58
SPEAKER_06: I think that's true on the Alex O'Connor side of things.
7:01
SPEAKER_06: So again, I begin with two really finicety points.
7:04
SPEAKER_06: One is about cameras and uh one is about culture.
7:07
SPEAKER_06: But let's now get down to the substance of the debate.
7:10
SPEAKER_06: And Stuart started with his opening five minutes, and then we come to Cliff and his opening five minutes, of course, because they're on the affirmative, they are affirming that the God of the Bible exists.
7:21
SPEAKER_06: Um, they get to go first.
7:23
SPEAKER_06: And I want to show you, before we talk about the different ways in which things go wrong on the Connectly side of things, I want to show you that what Cliff begins with is golden.
7:34
SPEAKER_06: And if you just stick with Cliff's points to begin with, uh I I think they can answer pretty much everything that's thrown at them from the other side.
7:43
SPEAKER_06: So let's have a look at Cliff's opening.
7:44
SPEAKER_06: I I think it's fantastic.
7:46
SPEAKER_05: The reason that I believe in the biblical God is first of all, I believe that non-existence cannot produce existence.
7:52
SPEAKER_05: That's absurd.
7:54
SPEAKER_05: Secondly, I don't think it's possible for chaos to produce order.
7:59
SPEAKER_05: That's ridiculous.
8:00
SPEAKER_05: Thirdly, I don't believe that it's possible for the rational to be created by the non-rational.
8:07
SPEAKER_05: The rational points me to a rational creator.
8:15
SPEAKER_05: Or that love comes from matter, or that free will comes from matter.
8:20
SPEAKER_05: Matter is simply matter.
8:22
SPEAKER_05: And when I observe people, when I experience life, I'm convinced that there is more to reality, there's more to you, there's more to me than simply complex chemical reactions than simply matter.
8:34
SPEAKER_05: Then when I look at Jesus Christ, I begin to understand that indeed He is reliable.
8:40
SPEAKER_05: No, I cannot prove God, I cannot prove Christ.
8:43
SPEAKER_05: That's not the question.
8:45
SPEAKER_05: I can prove almost nothing in life.
8:47
SPEAKER_05: Rather, the question is in light of the evidence, what is most reasonable, what is most plausible to believe?
8:54
SPEAKER_05: And when you look at the historical evidence of the way Jesus lived, died, and rose from the dead, I think the evidence is rather clear.
9:01
SPEAKER_05: He is trustworthy in a way that none of the options are.
9:05
SPEAKER_05: Whenever I struggle with doubt, and I regularly struggle with doubt, I go over some of the points that I just made, but I also go over the alternatives to Christ, be it materialism, atheism, evolution, agnosticism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam.
9:23
SPEAKER_05: And although there are points that can be made on behalf of all of those options, those points are nothing when it comes to credibility, when it comes to reasonableness, when it comes to reliability that support Jesus Christ.
9:36
SPEAKER_05: He lived a sinless life.
9:37
SPEAKER_05: In my best moments, I wish that I could live like Jesus, but I fail miserably.
9:41
SPEAKER_05: He taught amazing teachings.
9:43
SPEAKER_05: Robert Coles, a professor of meritus at Harvard, pointed out that all the teachings on ethics over the past 2,000 years are simply footnotes to the Sermon on the Mount.
9:52
SPEAKER_05: He uh not only lived an amazing life, not only taught an amazing life, but he died an incredible death.
9:59
SPEAKER_05: At the moment of his most excruciating pain, instead of cursing his enemies the way I would have, he prayed, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
10:07
SPEAKER_05: But fourthly and most importantly, not only did he teach amazing teachings, not only did he live an amazing life, not only did he die an amazing death, forgiving his enemies who nailed him to the cross, but fourthly and most importantly, the historical evidence is three days after he died, he rose from the dead.
10:24
SPEAKER_05: So, due to that evidence, I am convinced that Jesus Christ is reliable in a way that none of the options are.
10:31
SPEAKER_06: That is a phenomenal opening to a debate.
10:33
SPEAKER_06: Let me tell you why.
10:34
SPEAKER_06: A number of times during the debate, Alex will say to the other side that what we see in the world is unexpected if Christianity is true.
10:44
SPEAKER_06: What Cliff has been able to say in laying out the groundwork here is that everything we observe in the world is not just unexpected, but profoundly improbable.
10:56
SPEAKER_06: Improbable to the point of impossibility.
10:59
SPEAKER_06: If atheism is true.
11:01
SPEAKER_06: Because if atheism is true, then what we would expect is nothing and not everything, and yet what we see is everything.
11:07
SPEAKER_06: If we've had the miracle of everything from nothing, then I guess the next thing that we would expect is that there is simply background radiation and cosmic rubble flying around as debris in the world.
11:19
SPEAKER_06: What we would not expect is order.
11:22
SPEAKER_06: What we would expect on atheism is chaos terrain.
11:25
SPEAKER_06: What we in fact observe is a phenomenal level of fine-tuning to the cosmos.
11:31
SPEAKER_06: And so, you know, strike two against atheism at that point.
11:35
SPEAKER_06: And then thirdly, what we would expect if atheism is true is not for life to emerge from non-life, especially not without a god to work this miracle of resurrection.
11:46
SPEAKER_06: No, what we would expect on atheism is chemistry, perhaps, perhaps, but not biology.
11:53
SPEAKER_06: Then fourthly, what we would expect if atheism is true is perhaps some biology, but why on earth would we have rational thought, as Cliff says?
12:00
SPEAKER_06: Why have we gone from biology to psychology?
12:04
SPEAKER_06: Amazingly.
12:05
SPEAKER_06: All of these leaps, from nothing to everything, from chaos to order, from non-life to life, and from biology to psychology, all of these leaps are incredible leaps of faith.
12:19
SPEAKER_06: We would not expect any of those leaps, none of them, under atheism.
12:24
SPEAKER_06: We would not expect any of this.
12:26
SPEAKER_06: And then he keeps going and he says you would not expect a world of meaning when it's just a world of matter on atheism.
12:33
SPEAKER_06: You would not expect that.
12:34
SPEAKER_06: You would not think of morals as the way certainly objectivists um think of morals, if the world is just matter in motion.
12:41
SPEAKER_06: So what have we got?
12:42
SPEAKER_06: We've got everything when you'd expect nothing, we've got order when you would expect chaos, we've got life when you would expect non-life, we've got consciousness when you would expect mindless matter, we've got meaning when you would expect meaninglessness, and we've got morality when you would expect simple survival strategies, right?
13:00
SPEAKER_06: And then seventhly, Cliff points to I love seventhly, seventhly, Cliff points to Christianity.
13:06
SPEAKER_06: Um, on atheism, you would not expect a movement to have been founded and pioneered by a guy who's crucified in his early 30s by the Romans.
13:16
SPEAKER_06: What you would expect if there is no God of the Bible is that you would expect the Jesus movement to have fizzled out on Good Friday.
13:23
SPEAKER_06: They've crushed the leader, he was surrounded by losers and no hopers anyway.
13:27
SPEAKER_06: They crushed the leader, they've nipped the movement in the bud.
13:30
SPEAKER_06: Why has anybody heard of Jesus of Nazareth?
13:32
SPEAKER_06: And yet you have not just heard of Jesus of Nazareth.
13:34
SPEAKER_06: He is the most famous man who ever lived, who has pioneered the most diverse, the most inclusive, the most disruptive, the most influential, the most enduring revolution in human history.
13:44
SPEAKER_06: More people follow Jesus than have followed anyone else in history.
13:48
SPEAKER_06: Not bad for a guy who choked to death in his early 30s, crushed by the Roman Empire.
13:54
SPEAKER_06: The God of the Bible gives you every reason to believe that there should be something called Christianity.
13:59
SPEAKER_06: On atheism, it is unexpected that this movement has taken over the world.
14:04
SPEAKER_06: Cliff has seven incredible realities that he's bringing to bear on this debate, and Alex and Phil must get over all seven hurdles before they can even have a problem with suffering, before they can even have a problem with judgment, before they can even have a problem with the Old Testament.
14:20
SPEAKER_06: They are living in a universe which assumes Christianity and meaning and morality and consciousness and life and order and reality and something rather than nothing.
14:32
SPEAKER_06: They assume all those things which are totally unexpected, if not absurdly improbable on atheism, and they rely on all seven of those things in order to have a problem with suffering, in order to have a problem with the God of the Bible.
14:46
SPEAKER_06: Now, cards on the table, I watched this debate and I thought the connectal is lost.
14:50
SPEAKER_06: We'll get into why I thought that in a second.
14:52
SPEAKER_06: But I do not think Alex and Phil won the debate.
14:56
SPEAKER_06: In order to win, they've got to show how why it would be expected on their worldview that you would get these seven utterly improbable realities.
15:04
SPEAKER_06: We live in a world in which Christianity is a thing, in which morality and moral intuitions at least are things in which meaning is a thing, in which consciousness is a thing, in which life is a thing, in which the fine-tuning of the universe is a thing, in which we exist rather than not exist.
15:20
SPEAKER_06: All of those are absurdly improbable on Alex and Phil's view, and they didn't do anything in this debate, I don't think.
15:27
SPEAKER_06: To make me see that atheism accounts for any of those seven realities, they merely take the skeptical position.
15:33
SPEAKER_06: And okay, they are opposing the motion, they don't need to affirm their own motion, they just need to bring down uh the proposition, the proposition being that the biblical God exists.
15:43
SPEAKER_06: But as they do so, they are standing on those seven realities, and all seven realities are not expected on their worldview.
15:51
SPEAKER_06: Okay, so Cliff rounds out the opening statements from uh those proposing the motion that the God of the Bible exists.
15:58
SPEAKER_06: Uh now we go to Phil, uh, who is the first to oppose the motion, and here's the sorts of things he says.
16:04
SPEAKER_03: And I'll start with an argument I publish in the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion called the expanded problem of animal suffering.
16:10
SPEAKER_03: Now we all know the standard problem of suffering.
16:12
SPEAKER_03: If God is all powerful, he could prevent suffering.
16:15
SPEAKER_03: If he's all good, he should want to.
16:17
SPEAKER_03: So why is there suffering?
16:19
SPEAKER_03: Now, one traditional answer from Christians is that suffering came into the world because of human sin.
16:24
SPEAKER_03: And indeed, that's what Cliff frequently appeals to.
16:27
SPEAKER_03: However, science has discovered that animals have been suffering for hundreds of millions of years before humans ever existed, which strongly undermines this key to Christian argument.
16:38
SPEAKER_03: Science has also revealed that the very engine of our creation involves mass extinctions and the brutality of evolution.
16:45
SPEAKER_03: Why would God choose these violent processes to get to us?
16:49
SPEAKER_03: And why does he command and commit cruelty to animals?
16:53
SPEAKER_03: In Deuteronomy, God orders those of a town who advocate worshipping a different god to be put to the sword, but not just the people, but also their animals.
17:03
SPEAKER_03: Same for the Amalekites.
17:04
SPEAKER_03: God orders their destruction, including their animals.
17:08
SPEAKER_03: God drowned almost all the animals in the world, including puppies and kittens.
17:12
SPEAKER_06: Puppies and kittens, remember, puppies and kittens.
17:15
SPEAKER_03: Because of human sin.
17:17
SPEAKER_03: In the ten plagues, as well as killing all the firstborn Egyptian domestic animals, he turns the Nile into blood, and all the fish drown.
17:25
SPEAKER_03: Jesus exercises demons into a herd of two thousand pigs who then run off a cliff and drown.
17:31
SPEAKER_03: It seems the biblical god loves drowning innocent animals.
17:35
SPEAKER_03: Right now there is a mass extinction of it at the hands of humans, primarily because we eat meat.
17:41
SPEAKER_03: Now God could foresee this tragedy and tweak our diets to avoid it.
17:45
SPEAKER_03: But he didn't.
17:47
SPEAKER_03: Why not?
17:48
SPEAKER_03: These issues are easily resolved if the biblical God is false.
17:52
SPEAKER_03: Then it's no surprise that both the Bible and nature are so cruel to animals.
17:57
SPEAKER_03: Now fears sometimes apply to this by running the moral argument.
18:01
SPEAKER_03: But this depends on trusting our moral intuitions.
18:04
SPEAKER_03: And if we can do that, then we should reject the cruel biblical God.
18:08
SPEAKER_03: And if we can't, then the moral argument fails.
18:11
SPEAKER_03: Either way, God fails.
18:13
SPEAKER_06: Sidebar just on debate technique and the technicalities of this debate are Phil and Alex want to oppose the motion that the biblical God exists.
18:21
SPEAKER_06: Phil has pointed to a heck of a lot of suffering, including animal suffering.
18:25
SPEAKER_06: And he sees that in nature and he sees that in the Bible, but he seems to be forwarding this as a case that the biblical God doesn't exist.
18:31
SPEAKER_06: What he seems to want you to do is to not like the biblical God, and so he mentions puppies and kittens and that sort of thing.
18:37
SPEAKER_06: But if people were just interested in winning this debate and affirming the proposition, all you need to do is to say, oh look, the God of the Bible is okay with animal suffering, and it seems like the world is okay with animal suffering.
18:49
SPEAKER_06: This certainly doesn't disconfirm the Bible, maybe it even affirms the Bible, right?
18:53
SPEAKER_06: But Phil's not really wanting to stick to the topic of the debate.
18:57
SPEAKER_06: He really wants you not to like the God of the Bible.
19:00
SPEAKER_06: Anyway, that's a sidebar just about the technicalities of this particular debate.
19:04
SPEAKER_06: But what Phil raises here is the problem of animal suffering, and they will return to this again and again in the debate.
19:10
SPEAKER_06: It was fascinating to me that Phil would mention puppies and kittens on the ark.
19:17
SPEAKER_06: And what struck me so forcibly in this debate is that it's held among we very privileged modern Western 21st century people for whom animals mean pets.
19:29
SPEAKER_06: Like when we think of animals, we think of the cute kind of kittens that we put on calendars and give to one another at Christmas, right?
19:36
SPEAKER_06: That is not the way the vast majority of people have thought about animals around the world and down through history.
19:40
SPEAKER_06: None of this is to say that animals don't have tremendous value.
19:43
SPEAKER_06: They do have tremendous value within the Bible.
19:45
SPEAKER_06: It's Christians who have been at the forefront of animal welfare.
19:48
SPEAKER_06: And when you think of the RSPCA, for instance, you know, William Wilberforce was right there as a trustee to begin with, and there were debates to begin with about how explicit their Christian faith should be when they found that society.
20:00
SPEAKER_06: But it was all Christians wanting to do it for Christian reasons, and then that gave rise to the SPCA and other kinds of animal welfare charities.
20:08
SPEAKER_06: Within Christianity, animals are not as valuable as humans.
20:11
SPEAKER_06: They're not.
20:12
SPEAKER_06: Jesus says, you are worth more than many sparrows.
20:15
SPEAKER_06: He even says that in the Sermon on the Mount.
20:17
SPEAKER_06: So humans are of greater value than the animal kingdom, but animals are profoundly valuable.
20:23
SPEAKER_06: But around the world and down through history, and certainly in the Bible, you don't, when you look in the face of an animal, you don't first of all think, oh, that'll look great as a screensaver on my phone.
20:35
SPEAKER_06: When you think of an animal, if you are the majority of people around the world today, and the vast majority of people down through history, what you see is food, you see money, and you see military might.
20:47
SPEAKER_06: Okay?
20:48
SPEAKER_06: You you see a source of food, you see wealth, really, because those who have 300 head of cattle are profoundly wealthy people.
20:58
SPEAKER_06: Um, when the disciples left their fishing nets and went to follow Jesus, what they were leaving was a lot of money.
21:06
SPEAKER_06: What they were leaving was their livelihood.
21:08
SPEAKER_06: When you think of animals in the shoes of most people in the world who have ever lived, you don't think of pets, you think of food, you think of money, and you think of military might.
21:18
SPEAKER_06: Horses, in geopolitical terms, are challenger tanks.
21:22
SPEAKER_06: They are your arsenal, they are your weapons, okay?
21:25
SPEAKER_06: Later in the debate, Phil will talk about the hoffing of horses.
21:28
SPEAKER_06: I guess that means the hamstringing of horses.
21:30
SPEAKER_06: It's something that happens in the book of Joshua.
21:33
SPEAKER_06: And all he can think of when the scriptures talk about hoffing their own horses, hamstringing their own horses, is he thinks it is just people taking pleasure in animal torture.
21:45
SPEAKER_06: There's no pleasure being taken in animal cruelty.
21:47
SPEAKER_06: The trouble is he's thinking of animals as pets when actually horses are challenger tanks.
21:53
SPEAKER_06: And what the Lord is doing is telling the Israelites, you need to strip back all your armaments.
22:00
SPEAKER_06: You need to hamstring yourselves.
22:01
SPEAKER_06: Horses mean military might.
22:04
SPEAKER_06: And that occasion where those horses were to be hamstrung is so that the Israelites could not use them as the challenger tanks against the Canaanites.
22:13
SPEAKER_06: This is one of many, many measures where the Lord actually incapacitates Israel.
22:19
SPEAKER_06: Now, was it painful for those horses to be hamstrung?
22:22
SPEAKER_06: Uh yes.
22:23
SPEAKER_06: Yes, it would have been painful for those horses to be hamstrung.
22:26
SPEAKER_06: But this is not the intentional cruelty of God or the Israelites taking pleasure in torturing pets.
22:35
SPEAKER_06: They aren't pets.
22:36
SPEAKER_06: Okay.
22:37
SPEAKER_06: For the vast majority of humanity, animals represent food, they represent money, they represent military might.
22:43
SPEAKER_06: And it should be no surprise, really, that it's modern Western post-Christian sentiments that find animal suffering to be such a defeater of Christian faith.
22:53
SPEAKER_06: What we're going to get into in this debate is again and again the atheist side lifts up a notion of compassion, a notion of empathy, a notion of sentimentality, I would say, at points, that really bears no relationship to the kinds of moral intuitions that most people have had around the world and down through history, be they Christian or not.
23:14
SPEAKER_06: They are specifically post-Christian notions.
23:18
SPEAKER_06: To a degree they are Christian because absolutely Jesus of Nazareth has foregrounded compassion in terms of the moral sentiments that we value nowadays.
23:26
SPEAKER_06: But we have in the West, in turning our backs on Christianity, kept a notion of compassion, but we've divorced that notion of compassion from the Bible, from the gospel story, from Christianity, and from every other virtue, from every other value, so that now compassion reigns supreme, and we're in the situation that G.K.
23:45
SPEAKER_06: Chesterton spoke of, where the virtues have now run amok.
23:48
SPEAKER_06: Every so-called defeater that comes from the atheist side is one that is based on a notion of compassion.
23:56
SPEAKER_06: And so suffering in particular, animal suffering is brought up, judgment is brought up.
24:02
SPEAKER_06: It sounds not very much like benevolence personified for the God of the universe to judge, that is brought up.
24:09
SPEAKER_06: Old Testament wars do not seem very compassionate to the atheist side of things.
24:14
SPEAKER_06: And then Alex has got an interesting argument about the uneven spread of the gospel, which again relies on a profoundly Christian assumption about what religions are and how God might deal with humanity.
24:26
SPEAKER_06: Even the idea that we have, and I share this idea, that the connectlys kind of lost because they lost their temper, whereas the atheist side of things kept their cool, that really shows how a Christian and post-Christian notion of compassion is quite controlling for all of us, me included.
24:44
SPEAKER_06: So we're going to skip over a couple of things that Phil and Alex and Cliff and Stuart say.
24:48
SPEAKER_06: We're not going to hit uh every single point, but uh Phil then starts to talk about some of the issues that Cliff brought up, including about the beginning of the universe.
24:56
SPEAKER_06: Phil says this.
24:57
SPEAKER_03: But you know, even if the universe had a beginning, I don't see any reason to think it must have a cause, as Cliff has argued.
25:03
SPEAKER_03: After all, Christians say that God doesn't need a cause, often because they allege he existed timelessly and then entered into time.
25:11
SPEAKER_03: So he has no beginning and thus requires no cause.
25:15
SPEAKER_03: But why can't the universe do the same?
25:17
SPEAKER_03: For example, the Hart or Hawking Word or holographic cosmology imply an initial timeless state, and we have good reasons to take these ideas seriously, unlike Genesis, which we know is wrong.
25:28
SPEAKER_06: Well, you might want to say that the universe is an uncaused cause, that it is this necessary being that is the source of life itself.
25:35
SPEAKER_06: Um I don't think there's anything in the universe that we observe that that makes us think that the universe has those sorts of properties, like it is a causeless cause, like it is the source of all beings, like it is a necessary thing.
25:47
SPEAKER_06: Um it's the sort of thing you'd kind of have to say if your assumption is atheism, but looking out at the world, the universe does not seem to be a source of being, whereas God, by definition within the Bible, is the source of life and being.
26:00
SPEAKER_06: Therefore, to use the language that is being used throughout this debate, what should we expect when we look out at the world?
26:05
SPEAKER_06: Well, if atheism is true, then we shouldn't expect to see a universe.
26:10
SPEAKER_06: The fact that we do see a universe is pretty remarkable.
26:13
SPEAKER_06: Um, we have to maybe conclude that the universe is necessary on atheism, which is not exactly what we observe when we look at the universe.
26:20
SPEAKER_06: So, what do we expect when we look at the world?
26:22
SPEAKER_06: I think what we expect when we look at the world is the sort of thing that Genesis does, in fact, describe.
26:27
SPEAKER_06: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
26:30
SPEAKER_06: The heavens and the earth are this contingent thing, just as it looks like it is, and we happen to be in this universe, and of course we're in this universe on purpose, which makes a lot more sense if the God of the Bible is true rather than if atheism is true.
26:44
SPEAKER_06: Phil then goes on to talk about the fine-tuning of the universe.
26:47
SPEAKER_03: Now, another argument Stuart has used is the fine-tuning of the constant nature.
26:51
SPEAKER_03: He said that the chances of life-mitting values are incomprehensible.
26:55
SPEAKER_03: Well, that's right.
26:57
SPEAKER_03: And that's why fine-tuning fails.
26:59
SPEAKER_03: These are probabilities that we don't know.
27:01
SPEAKER_03: To run that argument, you need to assume the constants could be different from what they are.
27:05
SPEAKER_03: But there's no evidence for that.
27:07
SPEAKER_03: We have to assume that without God, the constants would be selected randomly and only once.
27:11
SPEAKER_03: We've got no evidence for that either.
27:13
SPEAKER_03: We have to assume God would select life emitting constants.
27:16
SPEAKER_03: But since he can make life in any conceivable universe, then our universe looks even less likely with God than without.
27:23
SPEAKER_06: This is a stunning thing to think.
27:24
SPEAKER_06: Um imagine you walk through a forest, and let's, in honor of William Paley, imagine that you stumble across a watch.
27:31
SPEAKER_06: So you discover this pocket watch on the forest floor, you pick it up, you look, and you see it's incredibly well designed for telling the time.
27:38
SPEAKER_06: What are you going to conclude from this well-tuned pocket watch?
27:42
SPEAKER_06: I mean, you might say that uh, well, it seems like there are a million different designs that would not lead to a pocket watch.
27:50
SPEAKER_06: This is the kind of pocket watch that could only be designed in a very certain way.
27:54
SPEAKER_06: Therefore, well, therefore what?
27:56
SPEAKER_06: Therefore, there is a clever pocket watch manufacturer.
27:59
SPEAKER_06: Now, without interrogating the pocket watch manufacturer, you don't know whether that pocket watch manufacturer is capable of designing other kinds of timepieces or other kinds of mechanisms.
28:09
SPEAKER_06: Um they might be incredibly good at designing all kinds of mechanisms.
28:13
SPEAKER_06: The one you happen to have come across is perfectly well adapted and well designed to be a pocket watch to be that kind of timepiece.
28:21
SPEAKER_06: The fact that the values that are required and the precision that is necessary to manufacture that particular timepiece is incredibly exact, that is no argument against a pocket watch maker.
28:34
SPEAKER_06: That is no argument against a designer to say that it's incredibly well designed.
28:38
SPEAKER_06: Now, when it comes to God creating the universe, we're not saying that he couldn't have made silicon-based life or that he couldn't have made non-physical conscious beings instead of physical conscious beings.
28:49
SPEAKER_06: We're not saying that there might not have been a great array of different creations that are possible.
28:55
SPEAKER_06: What we are saying is that with all the various configurations of physical constants that this universe might possess, there is so much more of a chance that it produces junk than that it produces something well designed for life.
29:10
SPEAKER_06: If God wanted to make a triangular universe, just go with me on this.
29:13
SPEAKER_06: Imagine he wanted to make a triangular universe, um, then he is constrained in the ways in which he can make a triangular universe.
29:21
SPEAKER_06: He cannot make a triangular universe with four sides or five sides or six sides or seven sides.
29:25
SPEAKER_06: If he wanted to make an octagonal universe, that's great.
29:28
SPEAKER_06: He could make an octagonal universe, but he could not make an octagonal universe with three sides, right?
29:32
SPEAKER_06: As soon as you posit a creator God who has a certain intention, it is no limit on that God that he has a particular intention, and it is no limit on that God that that particular intention entails certain design constraints rather than other design constraints.
29:48
SPEAKER_06: If he wants triangles, there's gonna have to be three sides.
29:51
SPEAKER_06: If he wants an octagon, they're gonna have to be eight sides.
29:54
SPEAKER_06: If we happen to live in the triangular creation, then we can't complain that God is incredibly limited because he only made this triangular creation with three sides.
30:02
SPEAKER_06: And we don't know whether he chose a triangular creation rather than octagonal or a rectangular or rhomboid creation.
30:09
SPEAKER_06: We don't know whether he was choosing from all those unless we start asking him questions, okay?
30:14
SPEAKER_06: But we happen to exist in this particular universe, this particular universe is incredibly fine-tuned for life.
30:21
SPEAKER_06: And the odds of getting junk rather than life are incredibly high.
30:27
SPEAKER_06: The odds of getting life rather than junk are incredibly low.
30:31
SPEAKER_06: So, to use the phrase that we keep on using in this debate, what would we expect on atheism?
30:36
SPEAKER_06: What we would expect on atheism is non-existence or junk.
30:40
SPEAKER_06: What we in fact find is existence that is incredibly well tuned for life.
30:45
SPEAKER_06: What is more probable?
30:46
SPEAKER_06: What explains the universe we do in fact inhabit and it's not atheism?
30:51
SPEAKER_06: It is far better explained on The God of the Bible.
30:54
SPEAKER_06: Phil continues.
31:01
SPEAKER_03: I disagree.
31:02
SPEAKER_03: Inflationary cosmology seems to predict it.
31:04
SPEAKER_03: Weinberg predicted dark energy using it.
31:07
SPEAKER_03: Arguably a Darwinian model did the same.
31:10
SPEAKER_03: So in surveys, both philosophers and physicists overwhelmingly reject the fine-tuning argument.
31:15
SPEAKER_03: To sum up, arguments for God like fine-tuning, the moral argument, the cosmological argument, they don't work.
31:21
SPEAKER_03: But arguments against God, like the expanded problem of animal suffering, like the clear errors of the Bible, do work.
31:27
SPEAKER_03: So we should reject the biblical God.
31:29
SPEAKER_06: That is simply not true.
31:30
SPEAKER_06: I mean, fine-tuning arguments are persuading people left, right, and center, including Philip Goff, who we're gonna have on this channel in the new year.
31:37
SPEAKER_06: He is a philosophy professor at Durham University, and he says, look, on the theist side of things, the universe really is incredibly well fine-tuned for life, and there's no escaping that.
31:48
SPEAKER_06: You've got to believe in some kind of god.
31:50
SPEAKER_06: But then he looks over at the atheist side and he says they've got a point when it comes to suffering and evil.
31:55
SPEAKER_06: And his solution to that is to say we need to honor both sides of this equation, and so he posits a god of limited powers who is loving, but he's not quite able to create a universe without all the suffering that we see in it.
32:08
SPEAKER_06: And I'm gonna have a conversation with him in January about that particular position, but it's the fine-tuning of the universe that has made him say uh atheism is just not an option, at least not for him.
32:18
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33:01
SPEAKER_06: So that's Phil's opening.
33:02
SPEAKER_06: Let's listen to Alex O'Connor's opening.
33:05
SPEAKER_07: Does the Biblical God exist?
33:07
SPEAKER_07: My knee-jerk response is I hope so.
33:09
SPEAKER_07: Uh it does, of course, promise eternal life and concrete moral purpose.
33:13
SPEAKER_06: I hope so.
33:14
SPEAKER_06: That's interesting.
33:14
SPEAKER_06: Uh Blaise Pascal said, uh, when you are talking to people who despise religion, show them that it's not intellectually silly.
33:20
SPEAKER_06: And then he says, make people of good will wish it were true, then show them that it is.
33:24
SPEAKER_06: Um interesting that Alex hopes that something like biblical Christianity is true.
33:30
SPEAKER_06: Or does what he wants to be true more a post-Christian sense of omnibenevolence that is detached from anything biblical or anything to do with any of the other virtues?
33:42
SPEAKER_06: Let's see.
33:42
SPEAKER_07: Unfortunately, my investigations thus far have run decidedly cold.
33:46
SPEAKER_07: Why is that?
33:47
SPEAKER_07: Well, tonight we are discussing the existence of the biblical God.
33:50
SPEAKER_07: I'm tempted to dismiss the motion out of hand on the grounds of a principle from formal logic known as ex falso quadlibet, from the false anything, a principle which states that from a contradiction, anything follows.
34:03
SPEAKER_06: I don't think that's what ex falso quadibet means.
34:06
SPEAKER_06: Uh it's it's about technical syllogisms that where the premises are in contradiction with each other and then anything follows from that.
34:13
SPEAKER_06: It's not talking about a supposedly contradictory body of text, which is what Alex is saying the Bible is.
34:19
SPEAKER_06: I I I don't think that's what ex falso quadibet is about.
34:22
SPEAKER_06: But anyway.
34:23
SPEAKER_07: The Bible is contradictory on a number of grounds.
34:25
SPEAKER_07: Not only does it present two characters, Jesus and Yahweh, as far apart in temperament as possible to imagine, only for Christians to expect us to believe that they are in fact one character, God, perfectly united in essence and desire.
34:38
SPEAKER_06: You can only do that by completely mischaracterizing both the God of the Old Testament and Jesus in the New Testament.
34:42
SPEAKER_06: You can you can only do that by just cherry-picking a few verses from Deuteronomy, Leviticus, Joshua, and then contrasting that with uh uh a Jesus Meek and Miles, um, who floats around in a nighty and and uh kind of dispenses epithets.
34:56
SPEAKER_06: You can posit a contradiction between the Old Testament and the New Testament, but you can only really do so by caricaturing both.
35:02
SPEAKER_06: I I don't see the contradiction.
35:03
SPEAKER_07: But it also does so in a series of books which contain too many textual contradictions to even scratch the surface of in our allotted time.
35:10
SPEAKER_07: The Gospels are a mine of contradictions, recording decades after the events in Greek, the behaviors and sayings of the Aramaic-speaking Jesus, who is said to fulfill Hebrew prophecies.
35:22
SPEAKER_06: Not sure why this is a contradiction at all.
35:24
SPEAKER_07: Prophecies which sometimes, such as in the case of Matthew chapter 2, verse 23, he shall be called a Nazarene, do not even exist in the Old Testament.
35:32
SPEAKER_06: The fulfillment formulae that Matthew uses throughout Matthew chapters 1 and 2 uh are not about going to a single verse and saying it's fulfilled in this way.
35:40
SPEAKER_06: Um Jesus goes down to Egypt, and that is in fulfillment of the verse in Hosea chapter 11 that says, And I will bring him up from Egypt.
35:49
SPEAKER_06: What's going on is is not fulfillment of verses per se.
35:53
SPEAKER_06: What is going on is the fulfillment of the very shape of the Old Testament.
35:56
SPEAKER_06: And there seems to be a play on the word netseir, which means branch, and multiple prophets actually predict that the Messiah would be called the branch.
36:04
SPEAKER_06: You can see Zechariah 3 or Zechariah 6, or Jeremiah 25, or Isaiah 4, Isaiah 11.
36:10
SPEAKER_06: Um, he is the branch, the the netzer.
36:13
SPEAKER_06: Just to look at one of them, Isaiah 11, a shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse from his roots, a branch will bear fruit, and the word branch is literally the word from which Nazareth is taken.
36:23
SPEAKER_06: He will be a Nazarene.
36:24
SPEAKER_06: What Matthew seems to be saying is that this Jesus who was born, he is the Isaiah 11, chapter 1 kind of a guy.
36:31
SPEAKER_07: So I have some questions for Cliff and Stewart this evening.
36:34
SPEAKER_07: And it's good to see you both again.
36:35
SPEAKER_07: I so much enjoyed our conversation.
36:36
SPEAKER_07: I'm glad to do this in the context of now a debate.
36:39
SPEAKER_07: Here are my questions.
36:40
SPEAKER_06: Alex treats debates and conversations very, very differently.
36:43
SPEAKER_06: Uh, it was all very pally in the conversation, but he does treat debates like they are theatre.
36:48
SPEAKER_06: With Richard Dawkins, for instance, he says this about debates and what he gets out of debates.
36:53
SPEAKER_07: My understanding of debates is that a lot of the time they are just theatre.
36:55
SPEAKER_07: And I think that as long as you recognize that's what you're doing, there there's no strict problem with doing that.
37:01
SPEAKER_07: It's a good way to get people to get excited about a subject.
37:05
SPEAKER_07: It's a good way to introduce them to some of the arguments that they might want to go and study at home.
37:09
SPEAKER_07: But the idea that it's a a place for exhaustive presentation of a worldview while you're doing it in front of a person whose entire job is to make you essentially, or at least your arguments, look bad and look flawed.
37:23
SPEAKER_07: And an audience with a proneness to fidgeting and getting bored and preferring to be a bit entertained or to laugh, you know, that's the arena that you're walking into.
37:32
SPEAKER_07: That's something, in other words, that I've learned about doing debates.
37:34
SPEAKER_07: As as I've I've done them in the past, I've gone in thinking, you know, I'm not even going to really research the person that I'm about to debate because I want to sort of really engage on the spot.
37:44
SPEAKER_07: And I I had this idea that I'm going in with a with a with a real desire to get to the truth.
37:49
SPEAKER_07: Whereas as time goes on, you begin to realize that actually it's something of a performance in many ways.
37:55
SPEAKER_06: So debates are entertainment, they are theatre, and I think that's something to do with why Cliff and Stuart get a little bit cranky with Alex, because they had enjoyed uh a congenial conversation, and then they are thrust into a a debate where it's no holds barred.
38:13
SPEAKER_06: And Alex attempts to go beast mode on them.
38:16
SPEAKER_06: Beast mode as Alex would do it, not as other people would do it.
38:20
SPEAKER_06: And I I think they were kind of shocked by the way in which Alex was able to step into that role and do the theatrical debate thing.
38:28
SPEAKER_06: Um he he does it well.
38:30
SPEAKER_07: What day did Jesus die?
38:31
SPEAKER_07: The Synoptic Gospels say that he died on the Passover.
38:34
SPEAKER_07: John's Gospel said he died the day before.
38:36
SPEAKER_07: What time was Jesus crucified?
38:38
SPEAKER_07: Mark's Gospel has it at nine in the morning.
38:40
SPEAKER_07: In John, Jesus is still stood before Pilate at noon.
38:43
SPEAKER_06: On timings, later on, Cliff very rightly points out that uh what people thought in Judea and what people thought in Galilee about timing and about dates uh was very different.
38:53
SPEAKER_06: The Greek-speaking world and the Hebraic-speaking world thought very differently about these things.
38:58
SPEAKER_06: Many people have found harmonies on this.
39:00
SPEAKER_06: I'm not sure why these facts should rock anyone's faith.
39:03
SPEAKER_07: Did Jesus carry his cross the whole way, or did Simon and Cyrene help him out?
39:07
SPEAKER_07: Depends which gospel you read.
39:09
SPEAKER_06: So some mention Simon and some don't.
39:11
SPEAKER_06: I'm still not saying the contradiction.
39:12
SPEAKER_07: Cliff mentioned that when Jesus was crucified, there were two thieves either side of him, one of whom condemns Jesus, and the other of whom jumps to his defense.
39:21
SPEAKER_07: A very moving story.
39:22
SPEAKER_07: Of course, that's what happens in the Gospel of Luke.
39:24
SPEAKER_07: But in the Gospels of Mark and the Gospel of Matthew, both of the thieves next to Jesus mock him on the cross.
39:31
SPEAKER_07: So which is it?
39:32
SPEAKER_07: John doesn't mention it at all.
39:33
SPEAKER_06: Cliff quite rightly points out later on in the debate that one of them began the day hurling abuse at Jesus and converted and turned.
39:41
SPEAKER_06: And Jesus said to him, Today you will be with me in paradise.
39:44
SPEAKER_06: This is a bit of a head scratcher.
39:45
SPEAKER_06: Alex begins in the mode of formal logic and brings ex falso quad libett and thinks that he's he's dealing with syllogisms and then brings contradictions that are in no way, shape, or form not even they're not even textual contradictions.
39:59
SPEAKER_06: They're not even um unable to be harmonized textually.
40:03
SPEAKER_06: They're certainly not logical contradictions in any way, shape, or form.
40:07
SPEAKER_06: And yet he he uses so much of his opening statements um to bring these things.
40:12
SPEAKER_06: I I I think that's weak source.
40:14
SPEAKER_06: I think that's particularly weak source.
40:15
SPEAKER_07: But do both of the thieves mock him, or does one come to his defense?
40:18
SPEAKER_07: Again, it depends which gospel you read.
40:20
SPEAKER_07: Did the temple curtain rip before Jesus died, as in Luke, or after, as in Mark and Matthew?
40:26
SPEAKER_06: We really are reaching for things at this point.
40:27
SPEAKER_06: Look, if you make a film, it's really interesting.
40:29
SPEAKER_06: People say a film is is made three times.
40:31
SPEAKER_06: It's it's made once when the screenwriter writes it, it's made a second time when the director shoots it, it's made a third time when the editor makes those decisions and takes all the different cuts.
40:42
SPEAKER_06: And you can imagine the way that the editor might do the scene at the cross and the scene at the temple.
40:50
SPEAKER_06: And what you're really trying to communicate is because of the death of Jesus, the way into the Holy of Holies is open.
40:56
SPEAKER_06: That great keep out sign is torn into because of the death of Jesus.
41:00
SPEAKER_06: Now we have access to God.
41:02
SPEAKER_06: Now the editor of the movie, just as Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they have the ability to either show the temple tearing first or to show the death of Jesus first.
41:12
SPEAKER_06: In a sense, you can't do both unless you've got a split screen.
41:15
SPEAKER_06: I guess visually you could do a split screen in which Jesus dies and the temple curtain tears simultaneously.
41:21
SPEAKER_06: Actually, in text, you can't do it.
41:22
SPEAKER_06: So you've either gotta put it before you mention the last breath of Jesus or you do it after you mention the last breath of Jesus.
41:29
SPEAKER_06: Um I see no contradiction in Matthew saying that it's Jesus' death, and now let's switch the camera angle to the curtain in the temple.
41:39
SPEAKER_06: Um, whereas Luke mentions the tearing of the curtain and Jesus' death second.
41:44
SPEAKER_06: Um you've got to do it in some order.
41:46
SPEAKER_06: That doesn't mean they're contradicting one another.
41:48
SPEAKER_06: This is really quite weak source.
41:50
SPEAKER_07: What does Jesus say when he dies?
41:52
SPEAKER_07: In Mark and Matthew, he says, Eli, Eli, Lama Sabakhthani.
41:55
SPEAKER_07: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
41:58
SPEAKER_07: Again, by the way, distancing himself from God and appearing to present himself as a separate being.
42:03
SPEAKER_06: Not a separate being at all.
42:04
SPEAKER_06: This is covenant language, my God, my God.
42:06
SPEAKER_06: This is absolutely the language of the covenant.
42:08
SPEAKER_06: This is the true faithful son of David.
42:10
SPEAKER_06: And if you read the whole of the Psalm, you see how absolutely connected this figure on the cross is.
42:16
SPEAKER_06: Um, so my God, my God does not distance Jesus from the being of his father at all.
42:20
SPEAKER_06: But what are Jesus' last words?
42:22
SPEAKER_06: Are they my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
42:24
SPEAKER_06: Are they into your hands I commit my spirit, as uh Luke would have it?
42:28
SPEAKER_06: Are they uh it is finished, as as John would have it?
42:31
SPEAKER_06: It's all of the above.
42:33
SPEAKER_06: There is no difficulty in harmonizing these accounts.
42:36
SPEAKER_06: I'm not sure which of the seven are absolutely the last, and different people can differ on that, but nothing says that these are contradictory accounts unless Matthew, Mark, and Luke and John have to note down all seven of Jesus' sentences on the cross, and all of them have to do it in the same order.
42:52
SPEAKER_06: Like, why?
42:53
SPEAKER_06: Why why are we inventing these problems that really aren't problems for the God of the Bible?
42:58
SPEAKER_07: In Luke, he quotes a different psalm saying, Into your hands I commend my spirit.
43:02
SPEAKER_07: In John, he simply says, It is finished.
43:05
SPEAKER_07: Reconcilable perhaps, but is it a coincidence that the earlier the gospel, the more Jesus separates himself from God?
43:11
SPEAKER_07: Those are actual questions, by the way.
43:13
SPEAKER_07: And every single one of the contradictions that I've just mentioned is just about the death of Jesus.
43:18
SPEAKER_07: We still have the resurrection accounts and the birth narratives, for example, not to mention the general increasing divinity of Jesus in later and later gospels, telling me that the historical Jesus didn't even claim to be God in the first place.
43:31
SPEAKER_06: Alex does this often.
43:32
SPEAKER_06: He argues in a circle.
43:33
SPEAKER_06: He basically says, I think Mark must go first, and he goes with a certain consensus of scholarship that now says Mark was first, even though the earliest traditions say Matthew was first.
43:43
SPEAKER_06: But the reason why the modern scholars say we think Mark might have gone first is because his is a shorter, more stripped back account.
43:51
SPEAKER_06: And so they put Mark first and then they put Matthew and Luke next, because it is a more developed account, and they've got a kind of an evolutionary model in mind.
44:00
SPEAKER_06: It must have evolved from Mark to Matthew and Luke and then John.
44:03
SPEAKER_06: But to then say, I know why Matthew and Luke came after Mark, it's because they're more developed.
44:08
SPEAKER_06: Like, no, you've just argued in a circle.
44:11
SPEAKER_06: You only put Mark first because he was more stripped back in the telling of the stories.
44:15
SPEAKER_06: And you only put Matthew and Luke second because you reckon that those two came after because they are more developed.
44:22
SPEAKER_06: But to say, oh look, isn't it suspicious that after Mark came Matthew and Luke and they're more developed?
44:27
SPEAKER_06: That's not suspicious.
44:29
SPEAKER_06: Those are the terms that you yourself have invented if you want to say that Mark comes first.
44:34
SPEAKER_06: Mark comes first on that model only because he is more stripped back.
44:37
SPEAKER_06: You're just arguing in a circle there.
44:38
SPEAKER_07: Not only this, but Phil's already mentioned the problem of animal suffering.
44:43
SPEAKER_07: It's worth reflecting that the problem of evil has a number of well-thought-out responses called theodices.
44:48
SPEAKER_07: Evil exists because of higher order goods that can only be obtainable if there's some kind of suffering in the world.
44:54
SPEAKER_07: Free will means that we need to be able to commit free evil acts.
44:57
SPEAKER_07: Evil helps our souls to develop and grow closer to God, this kind of stuff.
45:01
SPEAKER_07: Please keep in mind that none of these, none of them, are effective in explaining the existence of non-human animal suffering.
45:08
SPEAKER_07: Animals do not make free moral decisions.
45:10
SPEAKER_07: They do not have moral souls that can develop through strife.
45:13
SPEAKER_07: It's controversial even to suggest that they'll simply be compensated in some kind of fluffy afterlife.
45:18
SPEAKER_06: It's a fluffy afterlife.
45:19
SPEAKER_06: Isn't that interesting the way language is being used?
45:21
SPEAKER_06: So Phil wants us to think about puppies and kittens on Noah's Ark, because he wants us to really engage with the innocence of those animal sufferers.
45:32
SPEAKER_06: Alex here wants to characterize any notion of an afterlife for animals as as fluffy.
45:37
SPEAKER_06: That is to poo-poo it, that is to diminish it.
45:39
SPEAKER_06: Um it's just interesting how language is being used.
45:41
SPEAKER_07: I want to hear today a direct answer.
45:43
SPEAKER_07: How can the suffering of a deer on its own in a forest, with its leg broken and trapped under a tree, already starving in confused agony, before being predated upon by having a mountain lion clasp the deer's windpipe in its jaw for an excruciating minutes-long death be explained if supervised by an omnipotent invigilator who, if for some reason could not prevent this particular event, seemingly could have at least designed the machinery of the natural world to be less prone to this kind of thing.
46:12
SPEAKER_06: Alex is getting this from William Rowe, who is a philosopher.
46:15
SPEAKER_06: And I read William Rowe when I was studying philosophy at Oxford.
46:18
SPEAKER_06: I'm sure we studied the exact same text.
46:20
SPEAKER_06: We we would have sat the exact same papers, uh, Alex and I, about 20 years apart, but we would have studied the exact same stuff.
46:26
SPEAKER_06: And William Rowe was a fundamentalist Christian, kind of deconverted from that.
46:31
SPEAKER_06: He, at this point where he talks about the the fawn in the forest, and in William Rowe's telling, the fawn in the forest is trapped, and then a forest fire kills the faun.
46:43
SPEAKER_06: Um Alex has him being, I think he says predated upon, I think he'd be like preyed upon, eaten by another animal.
46:50
SPEAKER_06: But William Rowe at that point wanted to tell the story just to foreground that animal suffering as totally innocent, completely divorced from any concerns about um human free agency and free will, and just wants us to feel empathy with that particular struggling fawn.
47:08
SPEAKER_06: Interestingly, William Rowe later backed off from thinking that uh suffering is a logical defeater for the existence of God.
47:17
SPEAKER_06: He later brought a more evidentiary argument against God's existence and just said that that kind of evil that the deer is enduring counts against belief in God.
47:25
SPEAKER_06: William Rowe came to see that there are always reasons that God might have for allowing suffering that we limited humans do not know about.
47:33
SPEAKER_06: And so it cannot be a logical defeater for God's existence.
47:36
SPEAKER_06: It's just it just counts against God's existence.
47:39
SPEAKER_06: But nevertheless, no wonder Alex picks up on this very emotive story about Bambi, basically.
47:46
SPEAKER_06: Imagine Bambi trapped there, Bambi can do nothing.
47:49
SPEAKER_06: And of course, one of the things that we're not focusing on in that moment is all the other joys that Bambi might have had, or all the other joys that other animals are having in that entire ecosystem.
48:01
SPEAKER_06: We're meditating on the suffering here, which for Alex's purposes here has to be so egregious that nothing within biblical Christianity could ever compensate it, could ever uh justify it.
48:11
SPEAKER_06: That's a really high bar.
48:13
SPEAKER_06: Which is why I think both Alex and Phil they have to think about puppy, they have to make you think about the puppies, they have to make you think about the kittens, they have to make you think about Bambi.
48:21
SPEAKER_06: Now I happen to think that animal suffering is a problem.
48:24
SPEAKER_06: I think it's more of a problem than either Alex or Phil can allow for on their moral schemes.
48:29
SPEAKER_06: As I'm always saying, the trick with the problem of evil is to make sure it is a problem, and I think it is a problem that we live in a world that has been knocked off kilter, that is not the way that it ought to be.
48:40
SPEAKER_06: We need to look at the suffering of Bambi and say that is wrong.
48:44
SPEAKER_06: As C.S.
48:45
SPEAKER_06: Lewis came to see, his atheism could not account for evil because there was no ultimate good.
48:52
SPEAKER_06: And if you just looked at crooked lines and there was no such thing as a straight line, then crooked lines are not crooked.
48:58
SPEAKER_06: That's just the way lines are.
48:59
SPEAKER_06: Wavy lines are wavy, right?
49:01
SPEAKER_06: And the only reason you can call the death of Bambi bad is because there is something that is good, good with a capital G.
49:07
SPEAKER_06: What is the good thing that is good with a capital G that Alex can point to, that makes the suffering of Bambi wrong?
49:14
SPEAKER_06: Wrong with a capital W.
49:15
SPEAKER_06: But we won't get a statement of why the suffering of Bambi is wrong from Alex.
49:20
SPEAKER_06: We can't get that statement because he is an emotivist.
49:22
SPEAKER_06: Now, what's interesting about an emotivist, an emotivist just says their moral theory, their meta-ethical theory, is that when I say the suffering of Bambi is wrong, I'm just expressing boo suffering.
49:35
SPEAKER_06: Boo, the predation of Bambi, right?
49:38
SPEAKER_06: And when I say that human rights are good and and to champion the cause of human rights in the face of great injustice is right, um, then I'm just saying, yay, human rights.
49:50
SPEAKER_06: And I am I'm expressing approval or disapproval.
49:54
SPEAKER_06: And that really is the the content of any moral approbation or disapprobation.
49:59
SPEAKER_06: Alex is an emotivist.
50:00
SPEAKER_06: Emotivist's gonna emote, and they're going to make us focus on Bambi, but they're not gonna make us focus on the beauty of Bambi and the beauty that the deer had enjoyed all throughout their lives.
50:12
SPEAKER_06: And this brings in Alex's utilitarianism, because on utilitarianism, what you're really trying to do is maximize pleasure and minimize pain.
50:20
SPEAKER_06: Pain on that account doesn't really have any value in and of itself.
50:25
SPEAKER_06: You cannot have meaningful suffering.
50:27
SPEAKER_06: Suffering is just the obverse of good.
50:29
SPEAKER_06: It it cannot be good.
50:30
SPEAKER_06: There cannot be such a thing as good suffering.
50:33
SPEAKER_06: Um, on Alex's worldview.
50:35
SPEAKER_06: Well, in the Bible, there can be all sorts of things called good suffering.
50:40
SPEAKER_06: And in fact, the God of the Bible is the God who, well, Revelation chapter 13, verse 8, the Lamb, talking about Christ, the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world.
50:51
SPEAKER_06: Suffering is the centerpiece and the glory of the living God.
50:56
SPEAKER_06: And the universe is the theatre of the glory of the living God, whose lifting up is not on a throne, but whose lifting up is on a cross.
51:05
SPEAKER_06: You've never seen anything more divine than the suffering not of a faun, the suffering of a lamb.
51:11
SPEAKER_06: The lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
51:14
SPEAKER_06: Suffering apparently is not a dead loss.
51:17
SPEAKER_06: There is such a thing as meaningful suffering, and in fact, the most meaningful thing there has ever been has included a hell of a lot of suffering.
51:25
SPEAKER_06: Now, do you think that there could be meaningful suffering in this world?
51:28
SPEAKER_06: If you do, I think you are far more living in the world of the Bible than living in Alex O'Connor's world.
51:34
SPEAKER_06: In Alex O'Connor's world, well, I don't know why we exist.
51:37
SPEAKER_06: I don't know why that we are not just background radiation and debris floating through the ether.
51:43
SPEAKER_06: I don't know why there is such a thing as life.
51:45
SPEAKER_06: I don't know why there is such a thing as consciousness.
51:47
SPEAKER_06: I don't know why there are any moral intuitions at all about good and evil and what is the purpose of existence.
51:52
SPEAKER_06: I don't know why we're talking about Christianity because this dude just died on a cross 2,000 years ago.
51:58
SPEAKER_06: I don't know why we're still talking about him.
52:00
SPEAKER_06: I don't know any of those things, which are very live issues and realities, and they are shaping this whole discussion and they're shaping your life right now.
52:10
SPEAKER_06: Alex doesn't know why any of these things are.
52:14
SPEAKER_06: And he hasn't set out to defend his own position on any of these things.
52:18
SPEAKER_06: That's fine.
52:18
SPEAKER_06: He's he's on the opposition side of this uh particular motion in this debate, that's fine.
52:24
SPEAKER_06: But Alex has no explanation for any of that.
52:28
SPEAKER_06: He also doesn't really have a category for meaningful suffering.
52:32
SPEAKER_06: If you have a category for meaningful suffering, then I put it to you that you have more of a reason to believe in the God of the Bible than to believe in whatever Alex's metaphysic happens to be.
52:42
SPEAKER_06: Another question.
52:43
SPEAKER_07: Why is a person's geographical place of birth a statistically reliable indicator of how likely they are to be safe?
52:50
SPEAKER_07: This is Stephen Mateson's argument.
52:52
SPEAKER_07: The populace of Connecticut is around 70% Christian, let alone theistic, whereas the populace of Thailand is 95% Buddhist, and therefore at best 5% theistic.
53:02
SPEAKER_07: I'm told by St.
53:03
SPEAKER_07: Paul in Romans that, quote, what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.
53:07
SPEAKER_07: For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power, his divine nature, and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
53:19
SPEAKER_07: Why then should I expect this God to provide more compelling evidence to those in New England than to those in Southeast Asia?
53:25
SPEAKER_07: Or are they tie just orders of magnitude more naturally incredulous?
53:29
SPEAKER_07: And if so, why?
53:31
SPEAKER_07: How lucky Cliff and Stewart must feel to reside in a stronghold of the one true religion, given just how much variance there is out in the world.
53:38
SPEAKER_07: Again, why is a person's geographical place of birth a reliable statistical indicator of how likely they are to be saved?
53:45
SPEAKER_07: On our hypothesis of atheism, religion is a product not of divine revelation, but of evolved local mythologies and customs, married to political influence and military conquest.
53:54
SPEAKER_07: Religious beliefs varying by region and culture in a statistically and historically predictable manner, whilst a trouble for the propositions theology is not only consistent with our worldview, but expected on it.
54:06
SPEAKER_06: This is what I mean by the Oxford diction, the Oxford style.
54:09
SPEAKER_06: Um, you know, how fortunate that Cliff and Stewart live in Connecticut.
54:13
SPEAKER_06: Um, you know, that that that's gonna rile people from the the new world.
54:18
SPEAKER_06: It it riles Australians, that way of speaking, and it's and it probably contributed to the riling of Cliff and Stewart.
54:24
SPEAKER_06: They should have kept it together a lot more than they did.
54:27
SPEAKER_06: Um, but uh but I hope you can see that that that style of speaking.
54:32
SPEAKER_06: Um like I love him for it.
54:36
SPEAKER_06: I love Alex for it.
54:37
SPEAKER_06: Um it is it is theatre and it's great theater.
54:40
SPEAKER_06: Um but let's let's let's address ourselves to this issue of the the spread of Christianity.
54:45
SPEAKER_06: I mean, let's have a look at how different religions are spread throughout the world.
54:49
SPEAKER_06: Um here here is where Islam is spread.
54:51
SPEAKER_06: 95% of Muslims live in North Africa, the Middle East, and Indonesia.
54:56
SPEAKER_06: Okay, 95% of them.
54:58
SPEAKER_06: Um, which means only 5% of Muslims live outside those little green bits.
55:03
SPEAKER_06: Uh, when you think of Hinduism, 92% of Hindus live in the Indian subcontinent.
55:09
SPEAKER_06: 8% is spread around the rest of the world.
55:11
SPEAKER_06: Uh you go to Buddhism, and in that little corner of Southeast A, well, it's not such a little corner, but um, compared to the rest of the world, it's quite a little corner, but 88% of Buddhists live in that part of the world, which means 12% are spread throughout the rest of the world.
55:26
SPEAKER_06: Um, but what about Christianity?
55:28
SPEAKER_06: Um, well, you just cannot geographically predict.
55:32
SPEAKER_06: Um, if you're in certain places in the Middle East, there are certain geopolitical reasons why, especially in the last 20 years, the Christian community has been uh utterly decimated.
55:40
SPEAKER_06: Um, and that's that's pretty tragic.
55:43
SPEAKER_06: But Christianity really is a global faith.
55:46
SPEAKER_06: And what's so interesting is that Alex wants to use this as an argument against the God of the Bible, but he is using some very Christian presuppositions.
55:54
SPEAKER_06: He expects something incredibly Christian like, that religion should be not culturally bound.
56:00
SPEAKER_06: That's a foundationally Christian understanding of how religion works.
56:04
SPEAKER_06: It's not really the way that any of those religions work.
56:07
SPEAKER_06: I mean, there's a universalism in Islam in which there is an ummah, there's a brotherhood.
56:12
SPEAKER_06: Um, whether you're in Indonesia or whether you're in North Africa or whether you're in Saudi Arabia, there is an ummah, there's a brotherhood that is international in that sense.
56:20
SPEAKER_06: But it is a brotherhood that actually works because it brings you back to seventh century Arabia and you need to dress and talk like a seventh century Arabian in order to be in on this ummah.
56:31
SPEAKER_06: It is actually quite culture-bound, even though it is a message for all the nations.
56:36
SPEAKER_06: So even the most universal religion outside of Christianity is so much more culture-bound than Christianity is.
56:43
SPEAKER_06: But by and large, religion is a very culture-bound thing, and the gods of this nation are not necessarily the gods of that nation.
56:50
SPEAKER_06: It's Christianity that has really scaled this idea that there is a god of the whole world, and you can remain an Australian and you can worship the God of the Hebrews, and you do not have to become an Israelite in order to worship the God of Israel.
57:03
SPEAKER_06: Um, instead, I can be a Christian and a Nigerian can be a Christian, and a Mongolian can be a Christian, and we can look Australian and Nigerian and Mongolian and worship the God of Israel, and none of us are becoming Israelites, but we're all worshiping um this one God of the whole nations.
57:20
SPEAKER_06: And so Alex seems to think that if there were a God, he would be a Christian kind of a god, which is interesting.
57:26
SPEAKER_06: Like his intuition is that there should be a really well-distributed spread of believers around the world.
57:33
SPEAKER_06: That's a that's an incredibly Christian thing to think.
57:35
SPEAKER_06: He cites Romans 1, which says that, you know, what may be known about God is made plain to all people.
57:40
SPEAKER_06: I think that is true.
57:41
SPEAKER_06: Um, but Romans 1 is a missionary letter by a missionary called Paul, trying to prepare the Romans to help Paul on his way to Spain so that he can continue to spread this universal message of God to people who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.
57:57
SPEAKER_06: You gotta read the whole verse in Romans chapter 1, and you've got to read the whole letter because the Bible is very clear that yes, there is one God of all the nations, but what God is growing on planet Earth is not simply an awareness of a God of heaven.
58:14
SPEAKER_06: What God is spreading is a family.
58:17
SPEAKER_06: A family that is spread face to face with life-on-life discipleship.
58:23
SPEAKER_06: And the family is grown as people one by one come in on this family.
58:28
SPEAKER_06: And over the last 2,000 years, there's been an extraordinary growth of Christianity.
58:33
SPEAKER_06: Followers of Jesus of Nazareth in 33 AD were one in a million.
58:37
SPEAKER_06: Um, now it's like one in three in the world, and it's been expanding all through the the last 2,000 years.
58:43
SPEAKER_06: Um, that is an extraordinary thing on atheism.
58:47
SPEAKER_06: It is to be expected if the God of the Bible is indeed true.
58:51
SPEAKER_06: So I I don't think the spread of faith uh makes the point that Alex thinks it makes.
58:56
SPEAKER_06: I think it actually opposes his point.
58:57
SPEAKER_06: But anyway.
58:58
SPEAKER_07: The same is true of animal suffering.
58:59
SPEAKER_07: What would we expect to see if the world was being supervised by benevolence itself?
59:04
SPEAKER_06: Benevolence himself.
59:05
SPEAKER_06: I absolutely believe that God is love.
59:08
SPEAKER_06: I absolutely believe that Jesus Christ is compassion on legs.
59:12
SPEAKER_06: I absolutely believe that, but I refuse to divorce benevolence himself from the gospel story in which he manifests that benevolence, and it involves a heck of a lot of suffering.
59:23
SPEAKER_06: It involves the hell of the cross as well as a very embodied resurrection at the end of all things.
59:30
SPEAKER_06: I don't really know what Alex means by benevolence, but if what he means by benevolence is divorced from suffering, pain, death, the valley of deep shadow, then not only is his definition of benevolence completely divorced from the Bible, I think it's also divorced from the realities of modern life.
59:48
SPEAKER_06: And especially the realities of modern life around the world now through history.
59:51
SPEAKER_06: Most most people have had a place for kindness and compassion, but most people also recognize that life is incredibly hard.
59:59
SPEAKER_06: Benevolence himself still judges the world according to the Bible.
1:00:03
SPEAKER_06: Benevolence himself still goes through suffering and still expects us to go through suffering.
1:00:08
SPEAKER_06: None of that betrays the fact that he is benevolence himself.
1:00:13
SPEAKER_06: I don't know what concept of benevolence Alex is talking about, but I I don't think it's a particularly biblical concept of benevolence, and I'm not sure that it actually tracks with how most people experience the world either.
1:00:24
SPEAKER_07: And what do we find?
1:00:25
SPEAKER_07: Natural selection is the mechanism of animal development, which does not just involve but relies upon death and destruction to the extent that 99.9% of the species, let alone the individual creatures, that have ever existed on this planet have been brutally wiped from existence in some of the most painful ways imaginable.
1:00:44
SPEAKER_06: There's been a heck of a lot of life and there's been death.
1:00:46
SPEAKER_06: A heck of a lot of life and there's been death.
1:00:48
SPEAKER_06: Why does he focus only on the death?
1:00:50
SPEAKER_06: I don't understand.
1:00:51
SPEAKER_07: Survival of the fittest is the same thing as death and anguish and suffering of the unfit.
1:00:56
SPEAKER_07: I think this is at is at least unexpected.
1:00:58
SPEAKER_06: There's nothing unexpected about animal suffering and death and pain and human suffering and death and pain on the God of the Bible.
1:01:04
SPEAKER_06: Alex has read the Bible.
1:01:05
SPEAKER_06: Alex knows that there's all sorts of death and pain and struggle in the Bible.
1:01:09
SPEAKER_06: Um I would I would say that this veil of tears is well explained by the God of the Bible.
1:01:14
SPEAKER_06: It's not at all well explained by whatever metaphysical priors that Alex has.
1:01:19
SPEAKER_06: He's not going to declare them here, but if you are an atheist, let me just remind you that what you would expect is nothing and not everything.
1:01:26
SPEAKER_06: What you would expect is chaos and not order.
1:01:29
SPEAKER_06: What you would expect is non-life and not life.
1:01:31
SPEAKER_06: What you would expect is mindless matter and not minds.
1:01:34
SPEAKER_06: What you would expect is meaninglessness, not meaning.
1:01:37
SPEAKER_06: What you would expect is survival strategies and not morality.
1:01:41
SPEAKER_06: What you would expect is that Jesus remained in the tomb and no one had ever heard of him, and not that we're talking about the God of the Bible in the year 2024.
1:01:50
SPEAKER_06: In fact, you would not expect that it is the year 2024 because you don't believe in the year of our Lord, 2024.
1:01:58
SPEAKER_06: What you expect on Alex's worldview is nothing like what you see.
1:02:03
SPEAKER_06: It's nothing like what you see.
1:02:05
SPEAKER_06: It's very, very well explained by the God of the Bible, who makes clear we must walk through the valley of the shadow of death.
1:02:14
SPEAKER_06: We must.
1:02:14
SPEAKER_06: The Son of God at our head goes through the valley of the shadow of death.
1:02:18
SPEAKER_06: He doesn't get beamed up out of the valley.
1:02:20
SPEAKER_06: He pioneers the way through.
1:02:21
SPEAKER_06: The lamb was slain from the foundation of the world.
1:02:24
SPEAKER_06: Now, does that twist your melon when it comes to the lamb slain from the foundation of the world, who is himself benevolence?
1:02:32
SPEAKER_06: Well, yes, but maybe we need to figure out what benevolence really means.
1:02:36
SPEAKER_06: Because I think when we understand benevolence as cross and resurrection, we won't just understand the Bible better, I think we will understand the world better and we'll be able to suffer better in this life.
1:02:47
SPEAKER_07: If we assume naturalism, however, the world is just an amoral arena of accidentally existing organisms, fighting in a blind struggle for survival in a world of limited resources.
1:02:56
SPEAKER_07: Again, we do not just explain the reality of the world, we also come to expect it.
1:03:02
SPEAKER_07: So, an unreliable source pointing to a fragmented God who, despite being the essence of benevolence, designs and consistently oversees systems of untold suffering and sometimes commands its infliction directly himself.
1:03:14
SPEAKER_07: The very moral intuition that Cliff and Stewart are relying upon to make a case for God's existence.
1:03:20
SPEAKER_07: Well, you know that certain things are right or wrong.
1:03:22
SPEAKER_07: You know that's not just a matter of opinion, are the very moral intuitions that we're invited to discard with when faced with basically anything that the God of the Old Testament does.
1:03:31
SPEAKER_07: Does the biblical God exist?
1:03:33
SPEAKER_07: I don't even know what biblical God we're talking about.
1:03:36
SPEAKER_07: Which one?
1:03:38
SPEAKER_06: So Alex finishes his opening statement with some rhetorical flourish.
1:03:42
SPEAKER_06: He's pretty pleased with his performance.
1:03:43
SPEAKER_06: He's grinning.
1:03:44
SPEAKER_06: Phil is grinning.
1:03:45
SPEAKER_06: Now look over at the Connect Lease.
1:03:47
SPEAKER_06: Look at Cliff and look at Stuart.
1:03:50
SPEAKER_06: Oh my goodness.
1:03:51
SPEAKER_06: Stuart is a coiled spring.
1:03:53
SPEAKER_06: And uh when it now comes to uh the the open time of discussion, Stuart is going to launch himself at this camera.
1:04:00
SPEAKER_06: And again, the setup is so bad.
1:04:02
SPEAKER_06: The connect lease, like you guys, you need to get the camera at eye level.
1:04:06
SPEAKER_06: You need to have a good microphone so that you're not crouching over the over the camera and unleashing um because the the this is what this is what happens.
1:04:16
SPEAKER_06: Let's have a look.
1:04:17
SPEAKER_04: All right, I'll start.
1:04:19
SPEAKER_04: First of all, Phil, I don't know where he's getting his philosophy of religion and his statistics, but just to keep him honest for a second, check out Nature Magazine, a highly secular atheistic journal magazine, I would call it, over here.
1:04:35
SPEAKER_04: And over 40% of Harvard mid school professors and Harvard philosophers at large teachers say that there is a personal biblical God.
1:04:48
SPEAKER_04: Over forty percent are then agnostic and say that they are not true.
1:04:54
SPEAKER_06: Look at that, look at that, look at the the look from a father to a son.
1:04:57
SPEAKER_06: I just I do like that.
1:04:58
SPEAKER_04: That's a that's a nice phrase from so the highest level of thinking, at least here in the US, you know, Oxford and Cambridge could be higher.
1:05:04
SPEAKER_04: But I'm dubious.
1:05:06
SPEAKER_04: And they outright say the majority say that there is a biblical god that exists.
1:05:12
SPEAKER_04: Very small percentage are atheists.
1:05:14
SPEAKER_04: They're atheists.
1:05:15
SPEAKER_04: Maybe maybe that's largely because they're scared, because so many people think that they're snobbish and they're arrogant, atheists that is.
1:05:22
SPEAKER_04: But I believe it's based off of evidence that all these Harvard professors and Harbor men in undergrad have come to.
1:05:28
SPEAKER_04: So that's Nature Magazine.
1:05:29
SPEAKER_04: That's not Christianity today.
1:05:30
SPEAKER_04: That's no Christian magazine or type of literature.
1:05:33
SPEAKER_04: That's your literature, my friend.
1:05:35
SPEAKER_06: Your literature, my friend.
1:05:37
SPEAKER_06: Okay.
1:05:37
SPEAKER_06: Okay, so Stuart's pumped and he leaps at the camera and he says, you know, my friend, and he points the finger.
1:05:43
SPEAKER_06: He calls Hume an idiot here.
1:05:45
SPEAKER_04: You know, David Hume had an incredible influence here when it came to the miraculous and denying the miraculous.
1:05:50
SPEAKER_04: I think he's an idiot.
1:05:52
SPEAKER_06: That causes Phil's eyebrows to nearly leap off his forehead, quite understandably.
1:05:56
SPEAKER_06: Um, if you're going to call uh one of the greats of the Enlightenment an idiot.
1:06:00
SPEAKER_06: Idiot, you should at least have some reasoning behind why you're dismissing him.
1:06:03
SPEAKER_06: Stuart then returns to the issue of the teleological argument, and then he really quite significantly misrepresents what Richard Dawkins said on an interview.
1:06:12
SPEAKER_06: Let's see.
1:06:12
SPEAKER_04: Secondly, the teleological argument.
1:06:14
SPEAKER_04: Phil is way off as well.
1:06:15
SPEAKER_04: I didn't even bring up the teleological argument.
1:06:16
SPEAKER_04: Maybe you did, but he's wrong on that as well.
1:06:19
SPEAKER_04: I think you got to get to know your partner a little bit better there, Alex.
1:06:23
SPEAKER_04: I saw him talking to Richard Dawkins not too long ago briefly.
1:06:26
SPEAKER_04: I caught a couple snippets, and oddly enough, it was on the teleological argument and free will.
1:06:31
SPEAKER_04: And Dawkins now calls himself a cultural Christian.
1:06:34
SPEAKER_04: And he says, I have no idea what to do with the teleological argument, because it is so convincing that potentially there is a God.
1:06:40
SPEAKER_04: And he said that about free will as well, by the way.
1:06:42
SPEAKER_06: That is not a fair description of what Dawkins says.
1:06:45
SPEAKER_06: As Phil is about to say, in order to correct him, um, just to say that the teleological argument is the best among arguments for God's existence does not say that it is a good argument.
1:06:54
SPEAKER_06: It might just say that it's the least bad argument.
1:06:57
SPEAKER_06: Stuart continues.
1:06:58
SPEAKER_04: So to say that outright the teleological argument has is laughable now, to say outright that somehow the universe having a beginning is laughable now, I just don't know who you're talking to.
1:07:10
SPEAKER_04: I'm talking to different people, I guess.
1:07:12
SPEAKER_04: So we'll have to have another sit-down on that one and bring our stats and research.
1:07:16
SPEAKER_04: So those are big, big pieces of evidence.
1:07:18
SPEAKER_04: Alex has also said to me before, I just need a revelation and then I'll believe in God.
1:07:21
SPEAKER_04: That's all I need.
1:07:22
SPEAKER_04: Just a revelation.
1:07:24
SPEAKER_04: That sounds exactly like Richard Dawkins.
1:07:26
SPEAKER_06: Stuart at this point is bringing up lots of things that have happened outside the debate.
1:07:30
SPEAKER_06: And there's so much on the table right now.
1:07:33
SPEAKER_06: I'm not really sure why we're bringing more things in from stuff that Alex has said in other interviews, stuff that Richard Dawkins has said on another interview.
1:07:40
SPEAKER_06: I'm not sure why we're piling the table high with unanswered questions when there are a heck of a lot of other unanswered questions that just need dealing with.
1:07:47
SPEAKER_06: Cliff's opening is where you should be camping out, not bringing in other unanswered questions.
1:07:52
SPEAKER_04: And what does Richard Dawkins say?
1:07:54
SPEAKER_04: Well, my revelation changes about every year.
1:07:58
SPEAKER_04: So one, it was, his first one was well, if the stars align and say, Richard, believe in me, I am God.
1:08:03
SPEAKER_04: Then I will believe in God.
1:08:04
SPEAKER_01: Pardon my interruptions.
1:08:06
SPEAKER_01: I just want to be sure.
1:08:06
SPEAKER_01: Maybe this is the last point, and then we'll we'll kick it.
1:08:09
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, this is last point.
1:08:11
SPEAKER_04: So I want to know what kind of revelation Alex wants, and what kind of revelations does he want the boy in Myanmar or wherever else to have in order to believe in God for this God to be fair and morally good.
1:08:24
SPEAKER_04: Because Richard Dawkins switched and he said, you know what?
1:08:27
SPEAKER_04: Actually, I need more than that because I could be hallucinating in terms of those stars aligning.
1:08:32
SPEAKER_04: And I hear that from all the top atheists.
1:08:34
SPEAKER_04: Now, maybe, maybe Alex is talking about a different form of revelation.
1:08:37
SPEAKER_04: I want to be fair to him.
1:08:39
SPEAKER_04: But I see the consistency, the moving of the goalposts all the time.
1:08:42
SPEAKER_06: So instead of dealing with the many open questions that uh are on the table, uh, Stuart's sort of added an extra open question.
1:08:49
SPEAKER_06: Uh there's a little bit of back and forth between Alex and Phil and Stuart.
1:08:53
SPEAKER_06: Uh, and then at this point, Stuart then brings in his father, Cliff.
1:08:57
SPEAKER_04: All right, Cliff's about to jump out of his skin here over here, so I better uh I better let him roll.
1:09:02
SPEAKER_05: It's an honor talking with you two gentlemen.
1:09:04
SPEAKER_05: I'm a little shocked that I heard that Genesis teaches that there's a steel dome over the universe, over the earth.
1:09:11
SPEAKER_06: Phil mentioned the firmaments uh from Genesis 1 in his opening discussion.
1:09:16
SPEAKER_06: That's what Cliff is referring to.
1:09:17
SPEAKER_05: That is embarrassing.
1:09:19
SPEAKER_05: I have read the Bible many, many times over the past 60 years.
1:09:22
SPEAKER_05: I can promise you there is no science anywhere in the Bible.
1:09:25
SPEAKER_05: Science is the discussion of process, how an organism works.
1:09:30
SPEAKER_05: There is absolutely no biology, no chemistry, no physics, no geology, no astronomy anywhere in the Bible.
1:09:38
SPEAKER_05: And if someone insists that there is, I think that they have an incredibly wooden interpretation of a book, and that's scary.
1:09:47
SPEAKER_05: Secondly, there are problems in the New Testament, there are problems in the Old Testament, Old Testament textually, but I can promise you it is totally plausible for two thieves nailed to crosses on either side of Christ to heap insults on him, on him, and then for one of them to have a change of heart, a change of mind.
1:10:07
SPEAKER_05: There is absolutely no contradiction.
1:10:11
SPEAKER_06: That is a good and fair response to Alex uh throwing out contradictions that weren't really contradictions, but there is an intensity at at the very minimum.
1:10:20
SPEAKER_06: Can we say that there's an intensity to Cliff here?
1:10:24
SPEAKER_06: Um, that's I don't know, it makes me uncomfortable in this debate format.
1:10:28
SPEAKER_06: And it makes me think they are not in the strong position that I believe that Cliff and Stuart are.
1:10:34
SPEAKER_06: I I don't believe they should feel threatened by anything that Alex or or Phil have said, but the intensity that's coming across from Cliff conveys to me that that Cliff and Stuart feel threatened.
1:10:45
SPEAKER_06: I don't think they should feel threatened, and I don't think they should communicate this level of frustration here.
1:10:50
SPEAKER_05: There are different perspectives, yes.
1:10:53
SPEAKER_05: There's a difference, especially when it comes to the dating of exactly when the Passover occurred, and that's because there's a difference between the interpretation of dating in Galilee versus that in Judea.
1:11:05
SPEAKER_05: And it's a well-known fact that they disagree, they had different interpretations.
1:11:09
SPEAKER_05: So to be all psyched out about different interpretations of exactly when the Passover occurred, I'm afraid it's a type of hyper skepticism that if you applied that to all of reality would lead you a very to be a very lonely, very isolated person.
1:11:27
SPEAKER_05: So I I'm very unimpressed.
1:11:30
SPEAKER_05: I'm also very unimpressed because all the it's it's very easy to sit back and take pot shots at different people, a different philosophy, a different religion.
1:11:40
SPEAKER_05: But tonight, you put your head on your pillow, and I put my head on my pillow.
1:11:44
SPEAKER_05: And like it or not, you're gonna have a worldview, I'm gonna have a worldview.
1:11:48
SPEAKER_05: And Jesus Christ, I have said, is by far the most reasonable, credible, plausible explanation of who God is, of how we are to live our life, the whole dilemma of evil in this world combined with tremendous goodness.
1:12:02
SPEAKER_06: I really appreciate that Cliff brings things back to the person of Jesus.
1:12:06
SPEAKER_06: I really appreciate that.
1:12:07
SPEAKER_06: I I think more debaters need to do that.
1:12:10
SPEAKER_06: I mean, he and Stuart, they are evangelists and they are preachers, and that's what they excel at, and they excel at preaching the gospel, they excel at lifting up Jesus, they excel at preaching to the conscience and saying your head's going to hit the pillow and you need to deal with yourself.
1:12:24
SPEAKER_06: They excel at bringing to bear these truths on human hearts and not simply winning points of intellectual debate.
1:12:31
SPEAKER_06: I I really admire that about Cliff, and that's important to say.
1:12:35
SPEAKER_05: And to listen to some people, I won't name names, but to listen to some people use the moral argument to object to animals being hurt in this life and to prey upon people's emotional appreciation of animal life, and then to try and use a moral argument that therefore there is no God, that is absolutely ludicrous.
1:12:58
SPEAKER_05: Because if there is no God, morality is relative.
1:13:01
SPEAKER_05: So, what's wrong with animals dying?
1:13:03
SPEAKER_05: And obviously, the Bible never says that animals suffer because of human sin.
1:13:07
SPEAKER_05: Never once does the Bible say that.
1:13:09
SPEAKER_05: Instead, we read that there was a rebellion against God that the angel Lucifer led.
1:13:15
SPEAKER_05: There was also a rebellion against God in Adam and Eve.
1:13:18
SPEAKER_05: So to come down once again so precisely on these points and act like the Bible says this and the Bible teaches that, I begin to think, good gracious, what Bible have you been reading?
1:13:29
SPEAKER_05: What are your means of interpreting a text?
1:13:32
SPEAKER_05: And if you're going to be overly wooden, it's just as ridiculous to say, well, when Jesus says I am the vine, he's claiming to be a plant.
1:13:40
SPEAKER_05: You've got to allow an author and a speaker to use metaphors, simile, allegory.
1:13:44
SPEAKER_05: And these arguments are really hyper-skepticism that's straining at a gnat and missing the whole point.
1:13:52
SPEAKER_06: I agree with the points that Cliff is making, actually.
1:13:55
SPEAKER_06: Um I just disagree with feeling agitated towards the person of Alex in the midst of the theater of the debate.
1:14:02
SPEAKER_06: And I don't think that communicates the strength of Cliff and Stuart's position.
1:14:05
SPEAKER_06: I think they have a very strong position, but I think it's being betrayed by the tone.
1:14:09
SPEAKER_06: Now, Phil goes on to bring up this issue of the firmament again and how the Jewish rabbis uh spoke about a solid firmament over the earth, and how Augustine discussed uh a solid firmament over the earth.
1:14:20
SPEAKER_03: The idea of the firmament as a solid dome is well established.
1:14:24
SPEAKER_03: I mean, even Saint Augustine, let me quote you from a minute.
1:14:28
SPEAKER_03: So what?
1:14:28
SPEAKER_03: He said, hang on, let me finish, Cliff.
1:14:30
SPEAKER_03: Let me just read.
1:14:31
SPEAKER_05: He's not the Bible.
1:14:32
SPEAKER_05: St.
1:14:32
SPEAKER_05: Augustine is not the same.
1:14:34
SPEAKER_05: Luther's Martin Luther.
1:14:35
SPEAKER_05: Well, I'm using arguments.
1:14:37
SPEAKER_05: Can I hotshot and make sure I'm listening to arguments and then responding?
1:14:43
SPEAKER_05: Please do the same.
1:14:44
SPEAKER_02: Just we'll uh listen the same.
1:14:46
SPEAKER_02: We'll give about maybe two minutes to fill, and I promise we'll come right back.
1:14:50
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
1:14:51
SPEAKER_03: So there's good reasons to think that the ancient people believed that the sky was solid.
1:14:56
SPEAKER_03: All right.
1:14:57
SPEAKER_03: The quote from Augustine, I'll read it anyway.
1:15:00
SPEAKER_03: I know you don't care, but he said, bear in mind the term that the firmament does not compel us to imagine a stationary heaven.
1:15:05
SPEAKER_03: We may understand this name as given to indicate not that it is motionless, but that it is solid and it constitutes an imparsible boundary between the waters above and the waters below.
1:15:15
SPEAKER_06: Now it's very interesting that he references Augustine because Augustine, while he did speculate on such things, uh, was also very clear that science understood properly, or natural philosophy as he would have called it, understood properly, cannot contradict the word of God.
1:15:30
SPEAKER_06: Simply cannot.
1:15:31
SPEAKER_06: Um, God is not going to lie to us in natural philosophy and he's not going to lie to us in his word.
1:15:36
SPEAKER_06: We must have misunderstood one or the other.
1:15:38
SPEAKER_06: But he was quoted by Galileo over a thousand years later because Galileo wanted to say, I'm in the tradition of Augustine, who says, look, if it's true, it's not contradicting the Bible.
1:15:48
SPEAKER_06: We've either misunderstood the science or we've misunderstood the Bible, but there is no contradiction here.
1:15:53
SPEAKER_06: Interestingly, Augustine was adamant that Christians not speak outside of their area of expertise, especially when it comes to natural philosophy.
1:16:01
SPEAKER_06: He said, We must be on our guard against giving interpretations which are hazardous or opposed to science, and so exposing the word of God to the ridicule of unbelievers.
1:16:10
SPEAKER_06: Augustine, talking about the firmament, was actually trying to say things that were credible in his day in scientific terms.
1:16:18
SPEAKER_06: Now, Phil finds Genesis 1 incredible.
1:16:20
SPEAKER_06: He also finds the Ptolemaic system incredible.
1:16:24
SPEAKER_06: Um, and of course, everybody who's a modern astronomer thinks that the Ptolemaic system that that Augustine was kind of working with was uh wrong, um, foundationally wrong, really, really wrong, ridiculously wrong.
1:16:38
SPEAKER_06: But the Ptolemaic system is wrong because we know better scientifically, and what Augustine was doing was actually trying to be credible within his own scientific system.
1:16:46
SPEAKER_06: Uh, and the judgment of 1600 years later is that, well, that was a foolish system.
1:16:51
SPEAKER_06: But what's to say that the system that we now think is so credible is not going to look foolish in just a couple of hundred years' time.
1:16:58
SPEAKER_06: Of course it will look foolish, in just the same way that we look back at older theories of the world with a risable smile, and we think, how ridiculous, who believed this stuff?
1:17:06
SPEAKER_06: Well, everybody believed that stuff back then.
1:17:09
SPEAKER_06: The firmament is just one more example of the kind of science that was the cutting edge of natural philosophy back in its day.
1:17:17
SPEAKER_06: Um, and of course it doesn't seem so now, but neither will the scientific theories of 2024 seem cutting edge, they will seem laughable by the likes of our children and grandchildren.
1:17:26
SPEAKER_06: So that's just on the firmament point and the Augustine point.
1:17:29
SPEAKER_06: But the conversation develops, and uh, here's where we get to.
1:17:32
SPEAKER_05: I think that is scarily intellectually dishonest.
1:17:36
SPEAKER_05: There's absolutely no description of the process that God used to create.
1:17:41
SPEAKER_05: And just because Galileo contradicted the accepted Roman Catholic understanding that the earth was the center of the solar system tells you nothing about what the Bible says.
1:17:57
SPEAKER_05: It was a contradiction of how the Catholic Church interpreted the Bible and how Galileo did good science.
1:18:04
SPEAKER_05: And Galileo did a tremendous job in science and in interpreting the Bible.
1:18:10
SPEAKER_05: Galileo said the Bible does not tell us how the heavens go, the Bible does tell us how to go to heaven.
1:18:17
SPEAKER_05: And you are mixing areas of knowledge.
1:18:20
SPEAKER_05: Science is not in the Bible.
1:18:22
SPEAKER_05: And just because Sumerian and Babylonian cultures believed in a steel dome, and just because a lot of the Jewish rabbis believed in a steel dome, does not mean that the Bible is teaching that there is a steel dome over the word earth.
1:18:35
SPEAKER_05: That is so dishonest it's scary.
1:18:37
SPEAKER_06: I wouldn't say it's dishonest, I wouldn't say it's scary.
1:18:40
SPEAKER_03: That is it's not it's not steel, it's not bad.
1:18:42
SPEAKER_03: The point is that it says so.
1:18:45
SPEAKER_03: I agree.
1:18:45
SPEAKER_03: The fact that's no, it doesn't say that.
1:18:47
SPEAKER_03: It does.
1:18:47
SPEAKER_03: It absolutely is.
1:18:48
SPEAKER_05: Then show me where it says that.
1:18:50
SPEAKER_05: It is not saying that.
1:18:51
SPEAKER_05: That is your interpretation, and it's a false interpretation.
1:18:54
SPEAKER_05: It's adding where the text is silent, and that's intellectually dishonest.
1:18:58
SPEAKER_06: What we do with the understanding of a firmament um is up for grabs.
1:19:03
SPEAKER_06: But I I don't think getting angry at Phil for citing the history of tradition about the firmament uh is particularly fruitful.
1:19:10
SPEAKER_06: But anyway, we continue.
1:19:11
SPEAKER_06: Let's continue with Alex asking Cliff and Stuart about Matthew chapter 27 and about how people rose from the dead and were seen in Jerusalem after the crucifixion of Jesus.
1:19:24
SPEAKER_06: Does Cliff believe that that actually happened?
1:19:26
SPEAKER_06: Do you think that happened?
1:19:28
SPEAKER_05: Yes, I do think that happened.
1:19:29
SPEAKER_05: Now, Alex, it's time for you to answer my question.
1:19:32
SPEAKER_05: What is the alternative to the biblical God, Jesus Christ, that you accept as more reliable?
1:19:38
SPEAKER_05: And secondly, what's the evidence that that alternative to Christ is really reliable?
1:19:43
SPEAKER_07: I'm an agnostic.
1:19:44
SPEAKER_07: I I don't I don't submit to know what the ultimate answers to human existence are, but I don't think that the evidence for Christianity being the correct one is is plausible.
1:19:54
SPEAKER_05: So give me the more plausible one.
1:19:56
SPEAKER_05: That was my question, Alex.
1:19:57
SPEAKER_05: What's the more plausible one that you have chosen to follow?
1:19:59
SPEAKER_05: Because obviously you're dressed a certain way.
1:20:01
SPEAKER_05: Obviously, you have your hair on your face manicured very nicely.
1:20:05
SPEAKER_06: I don't think hair is manicured.
1:20:07
SPEAKER_06: I think nails are manicured, aren't they?
1:20:09
SPEAKER_06: And and toenails are pedicured.
1:20:10
SPEAKER_06: Uh, I guess hair is coiffered.
1:20:12
SPEAKER_06: I don't know.
1:20:13
SPEAKER_06: Any French speakers, you can let me know.
1:20:15
SPEAKER_06: Um, Phil Phil finds that very funny, and I find it funny.
1:20:19
SPEAKER_06: Like um, it does come across as passive-aggressive.
1:20:22
SPEAKER_06: You know, you've you've done your hair very nicely.
1:20:23
SPEAKER_06: When you start to uh draw attention to the uh appearance of your opponent in the debate, it's it's not a good look, ironically enough.
1:20:31
SPEAKER_06: Um Phil's amused by it.
1:20:33
SPEAKER_06: I I think a lot of Christians are kind of cringing at that point because that's the sort of line that seems to be born of anger.
1:20:39
SPEAKER_06: It might not be born of anger, it might just be born of complete, compassionate concern for the soul of Alex O'Connor.
1:20:46
SPEAKER_06: Um, but it comes across as a little bit snide, as a little bit angry.
1:20:50
SPEAKER_06: Um the point, though, that Cliff is trying to make is that Alex went to the trouble of looking nice for this video because he thought it was a meaningful thing to do.
1:20:59
SPEAKER_06: There was purpose in carrying himself throughout life.
1:21:02
SPEAKER_06: And what Cliff is trying to do is to say, look, existentially, you can't be agnostic.
1:21:07
SPEAKER_06: Nobody is agnostic actually at that fundamental existential level because you have to live for something.
1:21:13
SPEAKER_06: And to be agnostic at that level is a kind of a it's a performative contradiction because he's shown up to say things meaningfully, but all the while he's saying that nothing is meaningful.
1:21:24
SPEAKER_06: That is a performative contradiction.
1:21:26
SPEAKER_06: Later on, Cliff will say he doesn't know certain answers to some limited apologetic questions.
1:21:32
SPEAKER_06: That's actually a different kind of agnosticism to the performative agnosticism of Alex O'Connor.
1:21:37
SPEAKER_06: Alex O'Connor is agnostic about the meaning of all things, and yet seems to treat life in some regards as meaningful.
1:21:47
SPEAKER_06: That is a different kind of agnosticism, and it's a different kind of contradiction to Cliff saying that he's sure about Jesus, but he's unsure about certain aspects of the Bible and how you harmonize bits of the Bible.
1:21:59
SPEAKER_06: Um this will become important later in the debate because Alex will have a little gotcha moment with Cliff, where Cliff says, I don't know to a question, and Alex says, Oh, I thought I don't know was off the table, because I th I thought we couldn't be agnostic.
1:22:13
SPEAKER_06: Um that is to misunderstand Cliff's point.
1:22:15
SPEAKER_06: Cliff's point is actually a more profound point than you might imagine, but he doesn't do himself any favors by drawing attention to Alex's appearance.
1:22:25
SPEAKER_06: And it makes it sound like Cliff is being a little bit snide here, which will backfire on Cliff when Alex says to Cliff, you can't be an agnostic either, can you?
1:22:34
SPEAKER_07: That deer, leg trapped under a branch on its own.
1:22:38
SPEAKER_07: No moral free choice, no moral soul development, no people looking at this with a chance to save them, giving them an ability to achieve some higher order good.
1:22:47
SPEAKER_07: The question is, why?
1:22:48
SPEAKER_07: Why is this allowed?
1:22:49
SPEAKER_07: And bear in mind that I don't know is not an answer.
1:22:53
SPEAKER_05: Oh, yes, it is an answer.
1:22:54
SPEAKER_05: I don't know is called honesty, Alex.
1:22:56
SPEAKER_07: And if I don't Well, there we have it then.
1:22:58
SPEAKER_07: I agree with you.
1:22:59
SPEAKER_07: I don't know is called honesty.
1:23:00
SPEAKER_07: I'll give you my best.
1:23:01
SPEAKER_07: Agnosticism on this question is called honesty.
1:23:04
SPEAKER_07: We don't know.
1:23:05
SPEAKER_07: You don't know, I don't know.
1:23:08
SPEAKER_05: That deer is not born into the Garden of Eden.
1:23:11
SPEAKER_05: And because we are born into an unfair, messed up world, I've got a bigger concern than the deer.
1:23:16
SPEAKER_06: A few minutes on is the the most that Alex will expand positively on his ethical moral vision for life.
1:23:22
SPEAKER_06: He says this.
1:23:23
SPEAKER_07: When it comes to ethical decision, for example, it's well known that uh amongst my followers that I'm an ethical emotivist.
1:23:28
SPEAKER_07: I'm not um attached to that position particularly strongly, but it seems to make sense of the way that I interact with the world and the way that I see people doing ethics.
1:23:36
SPEAKER_07: I think that ethical propositions are expressions of emotion.
1:23:39
SPEAKER_07: Um, and that's kind of the end of it.
1:23:42
SPEAKER_07: Now, I could be wrong about that, and you might think that that has disastrous societal consequences, but to imply that it's impossible to adopt that position, to imply that it's impossible to say I don't know if there is a God or not, I I I just think is unintelligible because I do it, lots of people do it.
1:23:57
SPEAKER_07: It's not just that you're claiming that it's irrational, but that it's impossible.
1:24:00
SPEAKER_07: You you say I'm forced to make uh I'm I'm forced to of course I have motivations for my actions.
1:24:04
SPEAKER_07: You know, when I do X or Y, especially when it's a so-called moral decision.
1:24:08
SPEAKER_07: Of course I have a motivation, but as an ethical motivist, I believe that I'm just expressing an emotional state.
1:24:13
SPEAKER_07: And and that is um perhaps a pessimistic conclusion, but that's not to say a false one.
1:24:18
SPEAKER_06: This is good.
1:24:19
SPEAKER_06: We've got clarity on this issue to some degree.
1:24:21
SPEAKER_06: Cliff is pressing Alex on.
1:24:23
SPEAKER_06: Is it a contradiction to say that uh you don't believe in meaning ultimately and yet you live meaningfully um in the midst of a meaningless universe?
1:24:31
SPEAKER_06: Um, Alex has answered the way that Alex has answered.
1:24:34
SPEAKER_06: I still think there is a tension between a meaningless universe and nevertheless living that meaningful life in the midst of it.
1:24:40
SPEAKER_06: I think Cliff has exposed that gap, but here's where the conversation gets to.
1:24:44
SPEAKER_03: The topic for our debate is does the biblical God exist?
1:24:47
SPEAKER_03: And I think we provided very good reasons to say that he does not.
1:24:51
SPEAKER_03: And I don't think you've addressed, for example, the the the cruelty to animals in the Bible, in nature.
1:24:58
SPEAKER_03: You haven't really given a good let's just take a specific example, right?
1:25:02
SPEAKER_03: In Deuteronomy, we are told that if a town goes around and says, Worship another god, you are to kill all of them, including their animals.
1:25:14
SPEAKER_03: Now, what justifies that?
1:25:16
SPEAKER_03: That's question number one.
1:25:17
SPEAKER_06: Again, we look at animals, we think of pets.
1:25:20
SPEAKER_06: Most of the world and most of history has thought of food, they have thought of wealth, and they've thought of military might.
1:25:26
SPEAKER_06: Now, Deuteronomy 31 is the Lord saying, as you bring the judicial and divine judgment of the Lord against that culture, I don't want you to profit from that culture.
1:25:36
SPEAKER_06: Uh, you are not to go to war against that culture so that you can get rich.
1:25:39
SPEAKER_06: That's what the animals mean.
1:25:41
SPEAKER_06: The animals are not fluffy kittens and puppies, and God is not really pleased with torturing animals, and God is not asking people to torture animals.
1:25:51
SPEAKER_06: What he's saying is, don't get rich off this divine judgment, this fearful judgment that I'm bringing on the other nations.
1:25:59
SPEAKER_06: I refuse to make you rich out of my judgment.
1:26:03
SPEAKER_06: Here's how Stuart answers some of that Deuteronomy 31 issue.
1:26:07
SPEAKER_04: Alex said the Bible doesn't talk about animals in heaven.
1:26:09
SPEAKER_04: Well, clearly it states that the lion will lay down with the lamb in heaven.
1:26:14
SPEAKER_04: So who's to say when ultimately animals are swept up, for example, in a bomb in Iraq?
1:26:21
SPEAKER_04: I'm sure some squirrels have been swept up in a bomb.
1:26:23
SPEAKER_04: Who's to say that that's not justifiable in any sort of way?
1:26:26
SPEAKER_04: When we live in a tremendously broken world, you talked about it yourself earlier.
1:26:30
SPEAKER_04: Over 90% of the suffering we go through is done by humans.
1:26:35
SPEAKER_04: So, no, I'm not gonna give you a I don't I don't want to say that I don't have a problem with it.
1:26:40
SPEAKER_04: Sure.
1:26:40
SPEAKER_04: There's some there's some moral feelings that I have where it's, man God, why do you why do you allow this to happen?
1:26:47
SPEAKER_04: But you need to come to the conclusion that the most reluctant atheist across the pond where you guys live, named C.S.
1:26:53
SPEAKER_04: Lewis, he had the opposite response as you do right now.
1:26:58
SPEAKER_04: He talks about animal as well as human suffering, and his moral outrage towards it shows that there is a moral law, that there is justice ultimately, that's objective, and that would be from God.
1:27:09
SPEAKER_06: That really is a good point.
1:27:11
SPEAKER_06: I mean, if you are outraged by the innocent suffering of animals, that is not predicted on atheism.
1:27:16
SPEAKER_06: That is not predicted on the survival of the fittest.
1:27:19
SPEAKER_06: It is far better predicted on theism, Christian theism, and the God of the Bible, and the Christian revolution that has upturned our presuppositions.
1:27:28
SPEAKER_06: I think our intuitions are much better predicted by the God of the Bible.
1:27:33
SPEAKER_06: Um, but Stuart goes on.
1:27:35
SPEAKER_04: Then, secondly, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the great Pulitzer Prize winning author over here, Annie Diller.
1:27:40
SPEAKER_04: Read it yourself.
1:27:42
SPEAKER_04: She came to believe in God and then a Christian as well as this huge atheist because of her moral outrage over what she saw mainly with insects in the swamp behind her house that she studied for over a year, when she saw different forms of insects landing on the She didn't have this response that you and Alex did, which is oh, there could be no God who would allow something like that to happen.
1:28:08
SPEAKER_04: No, she had the opposite response.
1:28:09
SPEAKER_04: And she said, My moral outrage leads me to believing that there is moral objectivity out there.
1:28:15
SPEAKER_04: I have a real issue with it.
1:28:16
SPEAKER_04: If there wasn't, I wouldn't have a big issue with it.
1:28:19
SPEAKER_04: It's just this is how nature operates, and I gotta be okay with that.
1:28:23
SPEAKER_04: So some of the biggest have come, and I follow what they're saying.
1:28:27
SPEAKER_04: That makes sense to me.
1:28:28
SPEAKER_04: Checks out.
1:28:30
SPEAKER_06: He's actually making some decent points, but just look at the top chat.
1:28:33
SPEAKER_06: Lol, this guy's son is so emotional, sarcastic, and indignant.
1:28:36
SPEAKER_06: Very un unlike Christian behavior from the representation.
1:28:40
SPEAKER_06: Get your emotions in control.
1:28:42
SPEAKER_06: These connect leaves are emotional wrecks.
1:28:44
SPEAKER_06: Somebody better call in a wellness check on them after this stream ends.
1:28:47
SPEAKER_06: Being angry does not equal being right.
1:28:50
SPEAKER_06: These guys are easily hopped up on cocaine, right?
1:28:52
SPEAKER_06: That is the way that people are responding to the connect lease, and it's a real shame because they've got good points and they don't need to feel threatened.
1:29:00
SPEAKER_06: Look at more of the top chat.
1:29:01
SPEAKER_06: Are they on drugs?
1:29:02
SPEAKER_06: They seem like they might be on drugs, or maybe they should be on drugs.
1:29:05
SPEAKER_06: Okay.
1:29:05
SPEAKER_06: Um, it's not going well from that point of view.
1:29:09
SPEAKER_06: Uh, but let's keep going in in the debate.
1:29:11
SPEAKER_07: These animals are not swept up like you describe as those squirrels.
1:29:16
SPEAKER_07: These animals are killed on the command of God.
1:29:19
SPEAKER_07: And as you know, we we discussed this at some length in our last conversation.
1:29:23
SPEAKER_07: Uh, in 1 Samuel 15, the best of the livestock are kept alive by Saul.
1:29:30
SPEAKER_07: And when he uh approaches Samuel, Samuel informs him that God has said he regretted he made Saul king.
1:29:36
SPEAKER_07: Why did God regret that he made Saul king?
1:29:39
SPEAKER_07: Because he kept alive the animals that he was supposed to kill.
1:29:42
SPEAKER_07: This is not like there is some kind of natural order which requires a balanced ecosystem which will involve predation and this kind of thing.
1:29:48
SPEAKER_07: This is God saying, go into this town, kill the men, kill the women, kill the children and the infants, and kill the animals.
1:29:55
SPEAKER_07: And when Saul does not kill the animals and leaves some of them alive, God regrets that he made Saul king.
1:30:01
SPEAKER_07: Phil's question, I think, is to explain how this kind of command can be justified.
1:30:08
SPEAKER_07: Not not animals getting swept up as a as a as a foreseen but unintended consequence of the natural order or war, but no, go and kill them.
1:30:17
SPEAKER_07: And if you don't kill them all, you're going to be punished for it.
1:30:19
SPEAKER_07: Why?
1:30:20
SPEAKER_06: These are fearful verses, and I'm not saying there are easy answers here, but at the heart of the answer to this question is animals are not pets for the vast majority of human beings.
1:30:31
SPEAKER_06: They are not kittens and puppies.
1:30:33
SPEAKER_06: Animals in this setting are wealth, and the Lord, in bringing about his fearful judgment, refuses to enrich Saul when he brings about the justice of the Lord on those other nations.
1:30:46
SPEAKER_06: He insists that the Israelites not enrich themselves when they are bringing the justice of the Lord because they are no better than those who they are actually judging.
1:30:55
SPEAKER_06: And this is a judgment situation, not a plundering situation.
1:30:58
SPEAKER_06: Like I say, this does not answer every question that people have about Joshua or about one Samuel.
1:31:03
SPEAKER_06: But none of this has anything to do with God likes torturing animals or the Israelites like torturing animals.
1:31:09
SPEAKER_06: It also goes to show how our moral sensibilities are so different from those of 3,000 years ago and 3,000 miles away.
1:31:17
SPEAKER_06: And if you're going to be an emotivist and you're trying to get your moral intuitions from 2024 to be calibrated to the moral intuitions of a traditional society in the Middle East 3,000 years ago, I mean that is a translation issue that is almost insuperable.
1:31:34
SPEAKER_06: But I don't think at the end of the day that uh Alex and Phil's biggest problems about Deuteronomy 31 or about 1 Samuel 15 or about the book of Joshua, I don't think their biggest problems are about the animals.
1:31:45
SPEAKER_06: I think probably their biggest problems are about the judgment of God on the seven nations of Canaan in the book of Joshua, or on the Amalekites in 1 Samuel 15.
1:31:55
SPEAKER_06: And I completely understand that.
1:31:58
SPEAKER_06: It is a it is a fearful judgment that God brings as a portent of the justice that will happen when Christ returns to judge the living and the dead.
1:32:10
SPEAKER_06: And everything in us reacts against that reality, and we want to shut our ears to it, we want to close our eyes to it, we want to carry on as though there is no God of justice, and yet God has woven death into our lives as his just means of bringing us from this life and before the judgment seat of Christ.
1:32:31
SPEAKER_06: And God has done that, and God is doing that, and God will do that, and there will come a day when he will judge the living and the dead, and no one can run and no one can hide, and this is the God of the Bible.
1:32:44
SPEAKER_06: The God of the Bible is not an omnibenevolent construct that we've kind of pieced together from some post-Christian sensibilities.
1:32:53
SPEAKER_06: The God of the Bible, which is the topic of this debate, is the God who will judge every single person on planet earth.
1:33:01
SPEAKER_06: And not only is that the right thing for God to do, that is the very standard of righteousness.
1:33:06
SPEAKER_06: The just thing in the world is that God will judge the living and the dead.
1:33:10
SPEAKER_06: Now there were some limited expressions of that global judgment.
1:33:14
SPEAKER_06: Israel bringing about the fearful judgment of the Canaanites through the sword in the book of Joshua.
1:33:21
SPEAKER_06: That is a portent of the true Joshua, Jesus Christ, cleansing the land and bringing in his reign of righteousness.
1:33:28
SPEAKER_06: We resist and diminish and deny and distract ourselves from that fearful reality.
1:33:33
SPEAKER_06: But the book of Joshua and 1 Samuel 15 are in the Bible to say that there is a God of justice, and every single one of us will face that God of justice.
1:33:43
SPEAKER_06: What's interesting is that those texts go out of their way to describe how the Israelites themselves are unworthy judges, even though they're being used by the Lord for this divine justice and for this portent of the final day.
1:33:56
SPEAKER_06: They themselves are weak, they themselves are compromised, they themselves are not the righteous judge, and the whole book of Joshua is this subversion of what warfare actually looks like.
1:34:09
SPEAKER_06: Here is this army, that this bedraggled mob of refugees coming up out of Egypt, this slave nation.
1:34:16
SPEAKER_06: Um the first thing they're told to do in Joshua is to circumcise themselves.
1:34:20
SPEAKER_06: All the all these adult men are to circumcise themselves.
1:34:23
SPEAKER_06: They are hamstringing themselves just as they will hamstring their horses as well.
1:34:28
SPEAKER_06: They will go into battle armed with pieces of temple furniture and and horns and uh musical instruments like that.
1:34:37
SPEAKER_06: They are a ridiculous and sinful David going up against Goliath, but the Lord will use them to bring about his own justice in that limited, unrepeatable expression of what is coming to the whole world.
1:34:55
SPEAKER_06: What is coming to the whole world is a fearful day of anger.
1:35:00
SPEAKER_06: God is angry at the world.
1:35:02
SPEAKER_06: And we know that God is angry at the world because we are dying.
1:35:06
SPEAKER_06: Um 170,000 people per day are dying.
1:35:12
SPEAKER_06: Now, that does not make God a murderer any more than Shakespeare murdered Hamlet.
1:35:17
SPEAKER_06: Shakespeare didn't murder Hamlet, Laertes murdered Hamlet, right?
1:35:21
SPEAKER_06: Um Shakespeare gave Hamlet life.
1:35:24
SPEAKER_06: Shakespeare giveth and Shakespeare taketh away, blessed be the name of Shakespeare, to reappropriate uh the words from Job.
1:35:32
SPEAKER_06: Um Shakespeare is in a different moral category to Laertes.
1:35:35
SPEAKER_06: Laertes is putting Hamlet to death.
1:35:38
SPEAKER_06: Um Shakespeare has actually given him life and breath and all things.
1:35:43
SPEAKER_06: Shakespeare is not a murderer of Hamlet, and God is not a murderer of people.
1:35:48
SPEAKER_06: By nature, God is not in the same moral category as you or I.
1:35:52
SPEAKER_06: He is the source of life and well-being.
1:35:55
SPEAKER_06: When he brings somebody from this life before the judgment seat of Christ, he has wronged nobody.
1:35:59
SPEAKER_06: We all have a certain number of heartbeats, and when that number is up, our number is up, and God has wronged none of us in doing any of that.
1:36:07
SPEAKER_06: The God of the Bible, though, is a God of justice and a God who says, I kill and I make a life.
1:36:13
SPEAKER_06: Says that in 1 Samuel as well.
1:36:15
SPEAKER_06: In fact, what he is doing is bringing justice to a world that is unjust, a world that is constantly wronging other people.
1:36:22
SPEAKER_06: On the topic of a world that is constantly wronging other people, we as a human race are killing babies 200,000 times a day.
1:36:30
SPEAKER_06: Are you angered by that?
1:36:31
SPEAKER_06: If you're not, there's something wrong with your moral compass.
1:36:34
SPEAKER_06: God is angered by that.
1:36:35
SPEAKER_06: This is emblematic of the kind of sin that humanity is not only capable of, but humanity carries out multiple times each second.
1:36:47
SPEAKER_06: 200,000 abortions a day on planet Earth, 73 million per year, which means every month is the equivalent of the Holocaust, every month.
1:36:59
SPEAKER_06: Um, should God be angry at this world?
1:37:01
SPEAKER_06: Is God angry at this world?
1:37:03
SPEAKER_06: Yes, he is.
1:37:04
SPEAKER_06: Is there a judgment on this world?
1:37:06
SPEAKER_06: There already is a judgment on this world, right?
1:37:10
SPEAKER_06: 170,000 people die each day, which means they are moved from this world to the judgment seat of Christ.
1:37:17
SPEAKER_06: Now that's not the end of the story, certainly not for those who trust in Jesus.
1:37:21
SPEAKER_06: There is a future I kill and I make alive, says the God of 1 Samuel.
1:37:27
SPEAKER_06: There is resurrection, there is glory, I believe there is also resurrection and glory for animals.
1:37:32
SPEAKER_06: Okay, there's plenty in the scriptures about that too.
1:37:36
SPEAKER_06: But the pathway is down and up, facing that judgment.
1:37:40
SPEAKER_06: But then clinging to Christ, well, he is the one who goes through the valley of the shadow of death.
1:37:46
SPEAKER_06: And through his death and resurrection, he pioneers a path, and we can walk with him through suffering and into that glory.
1:37:53
SPEAKER_06: Does God have reasons for bringing about suffering in this world?
1:37:56
SPEAKER_06: Um, yes.
1:37:58
SPEAKER_06: First of all, there is judgment for sin.
1:38:02
SPEAKER_06: Second of all, there is the fact that his glory is expressed in the Lamb who was slain.
1:38:08
SPEAKER_06: The Lamb was slain before the foundation of the world.
1:38:10
SPEAKER_06: In this debate, they get they get into different discussions of when did the fall happen, and is the fallenness of this world simply tied to Adam and Eve's sin?
1:38:19
SPEAKER_06: Stuart and Cliff want to say, oh, but there perhaps was an angelic fall before Adam and Eve's sin, and therefore that fall explains animal suffering that might have happened before humanity fell.
1:38:32
SPEAKER_06: And and they get into that conversation.
1:38:34
SPEAKER_06: I mean, I don't think that actually the when of the fall matters very much to Alex and Phil.
1:38:40
SPEAKER_06: Um, even if you say that there was a fall right from the beginning, and that whatever animal suffering there might have been pre-Adam was because of an angelic fall, I don't think that cuts the mustard with them anyway, because they don't see a connection between humanity and the rest of uh the world or between spiritual reality and the rest of the world.
1:39:00
SPEAKER_06: I I would go right back to Revelation 13, verse 8.
1:39:04
SPEAKER_06: The lamb is slain from the foundation of the world.
1:39:07
SPEAKER_06: The compassion that defines who God is, God is love, but that compassion runs crimson with the blood of Jesus.
1:39:15
SPEAKER_06: It is a blood-earnest compassion, it is a death and resurrection kind of a compassion, and it entails suffering, whether we like it or not, and we don't like it.
1:39:24
SPEAKER_06: But then we look out at a world and we see suffering, and we see people trying to live meaningfully with suffering and navigate the valley of the shadow with some kind of hope, and that is precisely what we would expect if the God of the Bible is true, and I think the God of the Bible is true.
1:39:42
SPEAKER_06: So, where have we gotten to?
1:39:44
SPEAKER_06: We've talked about heavy things, we've talked about death and sorrow and suffering and judgment.
1:39:50
SPEAKER_06: Um, how should we round things out?
1:39:53
SPEAKER_06: Well, you can go and watch uh the modern day debate video for yourself and uh check it all out.
1:40:00
SPEAKER_06: But where I come to as a Christian is this the biblical God is a very serious God.
1:40:07
SPEAKER_06: He is a God of omnibenevolence, but that benevolence is not to be judged by the sensibilities of modern 21st century Westerners.
1:40:16
SPEAKER_06: We all, Christian or non-Christian, have the sensibilities that have been attuned by our modern prosperity, by our modern Christian and post-Christian sensibilities, by a thousand factors that really were not at play when the scriptures were written.
1:40:33
SPEAKER_06: Whether we're Christians or not, all our sensibilities, our all our intuitions, all our sentiments have been formed by a culture that is incredibly romanticized and individualized, that is incredibly prosperous, that is incredibly entitled.
1:40:51
SPEAKER_06: We are living at peace, largely.
1:40:54
SPEAKER_06: If you're in the Anglophone world right now, humanity has never had it better.
1:40:59
SPEAKER_06: But it also means we have intuitions that are soft and that are ready to be hacked by anyone who will claim compassion as the foundation for their cause.
1:41:08
SPEAKER_06: But there are a thousand ways to claim compassion and actually be cruel.
1:41:13
SPEAKER_06: And for our modern sensibilities, there are many ways that look cruel but are in fact compassionate.
1:41:19
SPEAKER_06: And if you are an emotivist, I'm not sure that you can come back at that.
1:41:23
SPEAKER_06: You might have a strong intuition that Bambi trapped in a forest, about to be preyed upon or die in a fire, that that is such a catastrophe that it does not justify existence itself.
1:41:36
SPEAKER_06: You might have that moral intuition, but I put it to you that if you're having that moral intuition, that says more about you than it does about reality.
1:41:44
SPEAKER_06: That says more about the cultural moment that you live in and the prosperity that you've enjoyed.
1:41:48
SPEAKER_06: It says more about your psychological state than it does about theodicy.
1:41:54
SPEAKER_06: I also put it to you that if you constantly look only at the suffering of this world, you will inevitably become nihilistic and misanthropic.
1:42:03
SPEAKER_06: Inevitably.
1:42:04
SPEAKER_06: I was a little bit disturbed at a very recent video in which Alex was on a panel, there was Rowan Williams there, Elizabeth Oldfield, Philip Gough, and they were talking about this issue of theodicy.
1:42:19
SPEAKER_06: And actually, Alex seems to have a lot of time for the teachings of David Beneter, an anti-natalist.
1:42:26
SPEAKER_06: Here's what Alex said.
1:42:28
SPEAKER_07: I think people are are generally very um sort of overestimate the extent to which their life are going well.
1:42:34
SPEAKER_06: Um there's actually a plays it for luffs, but I I I think this goes in some disturbing ways, actually.
1:42:42
SPEAKER_07: I think it's called the polyam principle or something or something like that.
1:42:46
SPEAKER_07: Um David Beneter, the anti-natalist, talks about this a lot, and because he tries to convince people that it's immoral to have children.
1:42:52
SPEAKER_07: Not just this reason, but he does also convince you that your life is He he makes an argument that even if your life goes really well, it's still immoral to have children, and then the next chapter is even still your life is going much worse than you think it is, and here's why.
1:43:04
SPEAKER_07: Um so people are often sort of looking back much, they struggle to identify the bad parts and they sort of have like an optimistic bias.
1:43:14
SPEAKER_07: I do think suffering abounds.
1:43:16
SPEAKER_07: Menial suffering, if suffering can be just defined as an experience which is not wanted when experienced, broadly speaking, you know, being a bit uncomfortable in your chair, having to walk upstairs, having to stand up and sit down, all of these acts that you don't even think about, when you actually add them up, it's quite a lot of menial suffering that goes on that that goes on.
1:43:31
SPEAKER_07: There are menial joys too, but I think that if you were to do a calculus and add up all of those menial sufferings and all of those menial joys, I suspect the suffering would come out on top, but I don't know.
1:43:40
SPEAKER_06: I think that's absurd, and I think that's dangerous, and I think that comes from an incredibly privileged modern Western position that we are all in.
1:43:49
SPEAKER_06: And I don't fault Alex for having that view.
1:43:51
SPEAKER_06: I pretty much have that view.
1:43:53
SPEAKER_06: I am an entitled ingrate, and I tend to focus on all that's going wrong in my life when everything seems to be going right.
1:44:00
SPEAKER_06: And that that is diabolical though.
1:44:02
SPEAKER_06: That view that David Benitar view is literally diabolical.
1:44:06
SPEAKER_06: Um, there is the serpent slithering into the garden.
1:44:09
SPEAKER_06: It's paradise, and yet the serpent wants Adam and Eve to fix on the one boundary.
1:44:15
SPEAKER_06: Forget that every tree in the garden is good for food and pleasing to the eye.
1:44:19
SPEAKER_06: He wants them to focus on the boundary, not on the bounty, but on the boundary.
1:44:23
SPEAKER_06: It is a diabolical ploy to think about all the ways in which reality is constrained, and I need this other thing, this forbidden thing, and I'm not getting what I'm entitled to, and how dare reality hold back from me, my dearest wishes.
1:44:39
SPEAKER_06: That honestly, that that is at the heart of the David Banatar philosophy.
1:44:44
SPEAKER_06: It's at the heart of anti-nathalism.
1:44:46
SPEAKER_06: It is a hop, skip, and a jump away from suicidality.
1:44:49
SPEAKER_06: It genuinely is.
1:44:51
SPEAKER_06: It is a misanthropic position, it is a nihilistic position.
1:44:54
SPEAKER_06: And it's an incredibly located cultural phenomenon.
1:44:58
SPEAKER_06: And in the form that we think about it, the problem of evil is only about 300 years old.
1:45:04
SPEAKER_06: I mean, the the earthquake in Lisbon was 1755, and Voltaire sort of rails against it with enlightenment rage.
1:45:12
SPEAKER_06: But this is also the time when we're becoming post-Christian and we're becoming a heck of a lot richer, and we start to expect better standards of life than our ancestors had experienced.
1:45:25
SPEAKER_06: And even though standards of living are going up and up and up and up, our experience of life is that we are more and more and more disappointed, which should make us at least slightly suspicious of our modern sensibilities and our ability to adjudicate between suffering and not.
1:45:40
SPEAKER_06: And the majority of the world thinks that there is something valuable about life in and of itself, and that there can be meaningful suffering, purposeful suffering, that is not to be focused on, but that is to be endured and to let that suffering form us and shape us morally and in terms of our virtue.
1:46:00
SPEAKER_06: This is the way that people down through the ages have thought about suffering.
1:46:04
SPEAKER_06: They have not focused on Bambi in the fire, or puppies and kittens who didn't make it onto the ark.
1:46:11
SPEAKER_06: The great majority of people have taken in their stride the fact that there is catastrophe and suffering.
1:46:16
SPEAKER_06: And if you thought that the God of the Bible meant omnibenevolence that beams you up from that suffering, I'm afraid you have not read the Bible.
1:46:24
SPEAKER_06: The lamb was slain from the foundation of the world.
1:46:27
SPEAKER_06: I keep returning to that verse, Revelation 13.8, because it kind of sidesteps the whole issue of when was the fall?
1:46:33
SPEAKER_06: And when did animal suffering happen before the human fall, after the human fall?
1:46:37
SPEAKER_06: I think it's very important theologically that man's fall is at the heart of the suffering of this world.
1:46:43
SPEAKER_06: It is very important that man's fall determines this suffering world because Christmas comes and Christ becomes man to raise us up.
1:46:53
SPEAKER_06: And unless man is at the heart of the problem, I think the man Christ Jesus is not going to be at the heart of the solution.
1:47:00
SPEAKER_06: So theologically, it's important that man's fall is at the heart of the fall of all things.
1:47:05
SPEAKER_06: I think that's very true.
1:47:07
SPEAKER_06: But even if you put animal suffering after man's fall, that's not going to really connect with Alex and Phil because they're going to simply say, well, why does man's fall have any connection to animals and earthquakes and the created order?
1:47:22
SPEAKER_06: In the Bible, they're connected because man is the great high priest, and what happens to man is what happens to the world.
1:47:28
SPEAKER_06: Adam is Earthman, made from the dust to be the great high priest with the animals under him and the created order under him.
1:47:35
SPEAKER_06: And there is a very anthropocentric theology in the Bible.
1:47:39
SPEAKER_06: With Phil and Alex, that's a longer conversation.
1:47:42
SPEAKER_06: Um but I've wanted to sidestep the issue of does does animal suffering happen before or after man's fall?
1:47:47
SPEAKER_06: Because I don't think it would convince Phil or Alex either way.
1:47:51
SPEAKER_06: But I also think there is a deeper truth that the lamb was slain from the foundation of the world.
1:47:56
SPEAKER_06: David Ferguson, the Edinburgh theologian, said the reason the world was made was so that the Son of God might be born.
1:48:02
SPEAKER_06: Let's finish on this Christmas note.
1:48:04
SPEAKER_06: The reason the world was made was so that the Son of God might be born.
1:48:08
SPEAKER_06: Whatever it is that is conditioning God's choices for the fine-tuning of the cosmos, it is for Christmas morning.
1:48:16
SPEAKER_06: And then Christmas morning leads to Good Friday, leads to Easter Sunday.
1:48:21
SPEAKER_06: God wants a world that he can enter and suffer with and suffer for and come out the other side and lead all creation in a parade of joy.
1:48:32
SPEAKER_06: This is God's intention through the valley of the shadow of death and up out the other side.
1:48:38
SPEAKER_06: And you might think it can't be worth it.
1:48:40
SPEAKER_06: How can it be worth Bambi and the Fire?
1:48:42
SPEAKER_06: How can it be worth the kittens and the puppies who don't make it onto Noah's Ark?
1:48:45
SPEAKER_06: How can it be worth that?
1:48:47
SPEAKER_06: And again, the answer to that question is Jesus Himself.
1:48:51
SPEAKER_06: I don't know.
1:48:51
SPEAKER_06: I can't do the calculus of whether pleasure outweighs suffering or suffering outweighs pleasure.
1:48:56
SPEAKER_06: I can't do it, Alex O'Connor can't do it, you can't do it.
1:48:59
SPEAKER_06: There's one person who is actually qualified to make that analysis and to figure out whether life is worth it given all the suffering.
1:49:08
SPEAKER_06: That one person is Jesus Christ.
1:49:10
SPEAKER_06: And in Hebrews chapter 12, it says, For the joy set before him, Jesus endured the cross, scorning its shame.
1:49:17
SPEAKER_06: For the joy set before him.
1:49:19
SPEAKER_06: Jesus, you could put it this way, it's a very limited way of putting it, but Jesus was facing this dilemma.
1:49:23
SPEAKER_06: He doesn't face dilemmas in that way, but but you can imagine the dilemma, can't you?
1:49:27
SPEAKER_06: The dilemma of is the cross worth it?
1:49:30
SPEAKER_06: The cross where all the suffering of the world and of hell itself, the wrath of God, burns down on Jesus at a single point.
1:49:40
SPEAKER_06: Hell itself.
1:49:40
SPEAKER_06: Is it worth it?
1:49:42
SPEAKER_06: Is it worth all that hell for the joy set before Christ?
1:49:46
SPEAKER_06: And Jesus thought so.
1:49:48
SPEAKER_06: And Jesus endured the cross, scorning its shame.
1:49:51
SPEAKER_06: And if he can endure that suffering and thinks that the beauty of life and the glory of the future is worth it, it's worth even that level of suffering.
1:50:03
SPEAKER_06: If he can make make that calculation, then surely you and I can make that calculation.
1:50:06
SPEAKER_06: And Alex and Phil can make that calculation as well.
1:50:09
SPEAKER_06: It's worth it.
1:50:10
SPEAKER_06: This suffering is worth it.
1:50:12
SPEAKER_06: The God of the Bible explains a suffering world.
1:50:15
SPEAKER_06: It explains why we feel all this suffering as a fall from something that ought to have been so much better and that could be so much better.
1:50:23
SPEAKER_06: It explains why we are outraged at the suffering that we are outraged at, but it also explains why you can cling on to hope in the midst of the valley of the shadow of death.
1:50:33
SPEAKER_06: Because Jesus Christ pioneers that path.
1:50:36
SPEAKER_06: He thought it was worth it.
1:50:38
SPEAKER_06: I can't do the calculations.
1:50:40
SPEAKER_06: You can't do the calculations.
1:50:41
SPEAKER_06: But I trust Jesus to have made those calculations.
1:50:44
SPEAKER_06: I put my hand into his hand and he helps me through the valley and out the other side into resurrection glory.
1:50:51
SPEAKER_06: That'll do us for now.
1:50:52
SPEAKER_06: If you want to find out more about the Jesus story, you can go to 321course.com.
1:50:56
SPEAKER_06: We've got some new features on 321course.com.
1:50:59
SPEAKER_06: We've got a chat bot that will lead you through.
1:51:00
SPEAKER_06: His name is Pathfinder.
1:51:02
SPEAKER_06: There's also a church finder so that you can find out a church that is running 321 nearby to you, and you can discover Jesus' vision for God, the world, and you.
1:51:09
SPEAKER_06: Why don't you go to 321course.com?
1:51:11
SPEAKER_06: Merry Christmas to everybody.
1:51:12
SPEAKER_06: Subscribe to the channel, and we'll see you on the next one.
1:51:15
SPEAKER_06: God bless.