Transcription
Ken Ham, CEO of Answers in Genesis and creator of the world's only life-sized biblical Ark (except for the real one, of course), apparently watched my recent YouTube video detailing some of the reasons why I don't believe in God. Let's take a look.
Now, we go into a different clip, and this one by a person called Alex O'Connor. "We're sometimes told that God has morally sufficient reason to allow suffering to exist. Indeed, if God is good, then he must have such sufficient reason. Perhaps suffering is necessitated by human Free Will. Perhaps suffering helps to develop a person's moral character, or maybe it's necessary to achieve some other end that God wishes to bring about. But intuitively, there appear to be instances of suffering that cannot serve any such end."
"Clip after clip after clip of people like this that I see talking about the deaf and suffering issue, just don't get it. That this is not the world as God made it. This world is suffering from our sin, and God judged this. He's a holy God, and he judges with death. In fact, we don't even deserve to exist. I mean, we deserve nothing because we, and Adam, sinned against a holy God."
"Is this not the world as God made it? Remember, Ken Ham believes that the story of Genesis is a literal account of actual historical events. Is God not responsible for creating the serpent that tempted Eve, causing sin to supposedly enter the world? That's not to absolve her of moral responsibility for violating God's commandment not to eat of the tree, but think about it. Ken is responding here to the problem of evil and suffering by saying that the world is not as God made it. So surely he means one of two things. He might mean that the world as God created it contained no evil, or he may mean that it contained no suffering. That these things only pervade the world because of Adam and Eve's sin."
"Well, if the world as God made it contained no evil, then how did it contain within it an evil, deceptive serpent? It seems to me like evil did exist in the Garden of Eden before any man ever sinned. Indeed, it must have, because otherwise there would have been no evil to tempt Eve, and thus no fall. Perhaps then Ken means that before the fall, there was no suffering. But this doesn't seem right either. We have an indication in Genesis that suffering did exist before the fall, since when Eve does sin, God punishes her saying, 'I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing.' The Hebrew word here is usually translated as 'multiply,' meaning to increase, implying that childbirth was already a somewhat painful experience even before Eve sinned. So we can't explain the existence of suffering on account of man's sin either."
"Thus, in responding to the problem of evil and suffering by saying, 'Remember, this is not the world as God made it,' what can Ken Ham mean? It appears that the world as God did make it contained both evil and suffering before the fall of Man. However, Ken has subtly changed the language here. I was talking in my speech about suffering. He's introduced the concept of death, and 'God judged this. He's a holy God, and he judges with death.' Now, he may wish to say that it was death which entered the world through Adam's sin, and that's fine. But if that's what he means, then he's simply not responding to my arguments, since I never mentioned death. At best, this would allow him to explain why humans are mortal, but not why they suffer during their lives. That's not to mention, of course, the suffering of non-human animals."
"Plus, God warns Adam in Genesis by saying, 'but off the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.' In the day that you eat of it? Interesting, given that Adam is said in Genesis 5 to have lived for 930 years. Surely then, death here can't mean literal death, or the same day can't mean literally the same day. Otherwise, Adam would have literally died the same day that he sinned."
"Well, that's easy. Maybe death here just means something like becoming mortal, or spiritual death, or something like that. Strange, though, for Ken Ham, if a talking snake just has to be literal, but death or the same day are not."
"We don't even deserve to exist. I mean, we deserve nothing because we, and Adam, sinned against a holy God. But he allows us to exist. And really, when you look at this world that we live in, this fallen world, it's a reminder of how bad our sin is, how much we have rejected our Creator. He brought us into existence, and we rebelled against him."
"So Ken Ham is implying here that the reason for death and suffering in the world (remember, he's responding to the problem of evil) is because of man's sin, principally through Adam and Eve. The doctrine of original sin usually contains some idea that human beings today inherit a sinful state, something like a propensity towards sinning, from Adam and Eve because they committed a first, original sin. But how can sin have entered the world through sin, if before the fall, humans didn't have a proneness to sin? Then how can Eve, before the fall, have been so prone to sinning that she did so after a single conversation with the serpent? It seems like it wasn't Adam and Eve who bestowed upon humans a tendency to sin, but God himself, since that tendency was already there before the fall, and indeed was responsible for the fall."
"And so, if not sin, or a proneness towards sinning, what exactly was inaugurated by Adam and Eve's eating of the fruit? What is it that entered the world and was transmitted from them to us through this original sin? Suffering? But it's implied that that was already there. Evil? That was definitely already there in the serpent. Death? Perhaps. But then what has this got to do with the problem of suffering?"
"Augustine thought that before the fall, Adam and Eve had the choice to sin or not to sin, but that after the fall, humans no longer have the option not to sin. And that it's this that was transmitted to us. But this suggestion makes it seem even more grotesque to me to be punished on account of sin, since we now have no choice but to do so."
"And there are further problems. Let's look again at the full narrative. Genesis tells us that God commands Adam not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, for if he does so, then he will die. The serpent then comes to Eve and says, 'Look, he will not die. God just knows that if you eat it, you'll be like him, knowing good and evil.' Then Eve sees that the fruit of the tree looks nice and perfectly edible, and so she takes a bite, and then she gives some to Adam. Thus, sin enters the world, or something."
"Oftentimes, critics point out that it's unfair for us to be punished today for the sin of somebody else a long time ago. The response is usually something like, 'We're not guilty of Adam's specific sin, but guilty of our own sins only. We're judged for the sins that we commit. It's just that we inherited a sinful nature from Adam and Eve.' This seems perfectly plausible. Indeed, in Ezekiel 18, we find the words, 'The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child.'"
"But now consider what happens next in the Genesis narrative. After the fruit is eaten, what is God's response? Well, he punishes the snake by forcing him and his descendants to crawl upon their belly and eat dust for all of their lives. He punishes Eve by making childbirth an extremely painful ordeal for her and her descendants, and subjugates her to her husband. He punishes Adam by forcing him and his descendants to gloriously toil for the rest of their existence in order to eat and live."
"Okay, so the reason why childbirth is painful for women today is because Eve committed a sin thousands of years ago. What does this mean? It means that we are being punished now for a sin that we did not commit. In other words, even if we don't inherit the guilt of our parents, we do seem to inherit the punishment for their crime."
"A final problem is this: Adam and Eve were told not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. Presumably, this means that before doing so, they didn't have a knowledge of Good and Evil. They were in a state of innocence. Therefore, when the serpent came to tempt Eve, how could she have even possibly realized that any evil was at work? If she hadn't eaten of the tree yet, then her actions can't have been knowingly evil, since she didn't have a knowledge of Good and Evil yet. Thus, we're not only being punished for a sin that we didn't commit, we're being punished for one which the person who did commit it didn't do so knowing it was wrong and was deceived into committing."
"Imagine you were renting a flat from a landlord, and the landlord decides to shut off your water supply and your heating, and installs a thousand locks, making it a torturous task just to open the front door. You ask him, 'Why are you making me suffer like this?' And he responds, 'Well, don't you know that your great-grandfather used to rent this very flat, and he once committed an abominable evil against me? I'm just administering the punishment.'"
"But it's worse still. Imagine if this so-called abominable crime was something like this: the landlord had told your grandfather once upon a time, 'Don't flick that one switch over there on the wall. If you flick it, it's going to electrocute you and you'll die.' And then your grandfather's electrician friend comes over and says, 'Look, your landlord doesn't know what he's talking about. It's clearly not going to electrocute and kill you. I mean, the thing's made of plastic.' And so your grandfather looks at the switch and decides to flick it. And guess what? His electrician friend is right. He didn't die. Still, the landlord was so outraged that your grandfather flicked this switch that he's now punishing you, a descendant, for that crime and saying that it's your own fault. Because, hey, it's your family that broke the rules. And the worst part is that the electrician friend is right. The landlord was actually lying to you, and you're still being punished."
"I mean, think about it. God says to Adam that if he eats the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, he will die that same day. The serpent says to Eve, 'You're not gonna die. You're just going to become like God.' And they both eat of the fruit. Do they die? No. Do they become like God, as the serpent said that they will? Well, let's ask God. God himself says at the end of the Genesis narrative, 'After they've eaten the fruit, the man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil.' So, was God lying, and the serpent was telling the truth? And we're now being punished because Adam and Eve took the right advice? And that's to say nothing of the snake. Even the snakes of today, non-rational animals crawling around, are crawling as what? A punishment for the sin of some ancestral snake? Are we supposed to also think that the problem of animal suffering, something that I cover in the speech that Ken is responding to but gets no mention from him here, is somehow a result of even animals inheriting the punishments for the behaviors of their forebears?"
"Now, of course, a great deal, almost all perhaps, of the problems that I'm raising here can be solved by, oh, I don't know, perhaps reading Genesis as an allegorical story rather than a literal account of world history, in which toil and childbirth are literal punishments administered due to a literal person eating a literal fruit after a literal talking snake literally convinced her to. But that's not a live option for Answers in Genesis."
"God holds everything together, and he placed upon us the curse of death. And actually, it was a loving act. It was an act of judgment, but also a loving act, because it's through death that he's able to bring us back to him by paying the penalty for our sins."
"Oh, now we're really talking. God cursing us with death was actually a loving act because it allowed him to save us from that death via the sacrifice of Jesus. I think even most Christians would cringe at this interpretation. 'For God so loved the world that he created a problem in order that he might solve it.' This would be like me tying up a damsel to a train track just so that I can then come and save her from the approaching train. Oh, and I'm also the one driving the train."
"Well, maybe the punishment was needed because without it, there would be nothing that Jesus could do to pay for our sins. Without some punishment for him to take on, we'd be trapped in our sin, unable to inherit eternal life."
"Well, maybe. But then, at the end of Genesis 3, God says, 'The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the Tree of Life and eat and live forever.' So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden. So it seems like eternal life could have been achieved by simply eating from another tree. But God didn't want this. So he employs cherubim and a flaming sword to guard its fruits. Again, as a metaphor, this is a fascinating and thought-provoking narrative. As a literal account, why on Earth would it be a better option to produce a human son to brutally sacrifice when eternal life could have been gained by simply eating another piece of fruit?"
"So they don't understand the gospel. They don't understand our sin, what it's done to this world. And so they really don't understand what's going on here. And they again look at God and blame God for everything."
"The biggest problem for theism here is not, famously, the great sufferings of the world like holocausts or earthquakes, but rather meaning menial, less significant suffering like being caught out in the rain, or stubbing your toe, or tripping over a curb on the street."
"So Alex O'Connor kind of goes on and says, you know, that there's something that's even more, in his opinion, more difficult to explain, and that is why we would stub our toe and hurt our toe. And so, in other words, all the little things that happen day to day. But again, he doesn't understand. We're living in a fallen world. This is not the world as God made it. You know, God holds everything together, but he's not holding everything together perfectly. And so now everything is falling apart. And where to blame? Where to blame for the fact that God isn't holding everything together perfectly? How do you figure that? It's our sin."
"See, people don't want to take responsibility for their sin. They don't want to acknowledge they're a sinner. They don't want to acknowledge they need a savior. And again, the interesting thing is, they look at this world and they see all the death and suffering and disease and so on. And yet they attribute this world to evolutionary processes. And so what they're really saying is, 'It's great that Evolution did this.' And then they turn around and say, 'But if God's responsible for this, how horrible God is.' Think of the inconsistency even there."
"Um, Ken, the difference is that naturalists don't believe that the evolutionary process is a conscious agent that cares about the creatures it produces. You believe that God created the world, inserted within it an evil snake, knowing that he would be able to seduce Adam and Eve, and now punishes their descendants on account of their original sin. This must be reconciled with his supposed loving nature. Naturalists do not believe that evolution is inflicting a punishment upon animals. They don't believe that the suffering of the world must be reconciled with some kind of loving essence at the basis of the evolutionary process. And also, nobody says it's great that Evolution did this. In fact, one of the strongest arguments for atheism is the fact that the very mechanism by which species evolved on planet Earth is one brimming with torturous suffering, the violent and brutal survival of the fittest. We're not the ones claiming that this world is being supervised by a benevolent and all-powerful invigilator. You are. We all agree that suffering exists in the world, but an evolutionary worldview does not require that there's some kind of moral justification for it. Theism, conversely, does."
"Now, an important clarification is that I, of course, don't think that Ken Ham's views here are representative of Christianity as a whole. I guess what I'm mainly trying to do here is demonstrate some of the reasons why it seems ludicrous to me to take Genesis to be a literal historical account. Ken Ham, I would love to see you respond to some of the questions that I've raised in this video, if you find the time. To the rest of you, thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one."