Transcription
Atheism doesn't claim to have any explanatory power. Okay. Uh, what we can say is that we would we would expect if there is a if there is a world in which there are conscious creatures, which you know I recognize some people think is unlikely given atheism generally. Um, but if if that's our premise, what would we expect to find? Well, we'd have no reason not to expect there to be all kinds of unpredictable and seemingly arbitrary suffering. It's not me who has to do the explaining here, you know.
And and you're right, Justin, that during a tragedy like this, you find that people come to religion and people go away from religion, but that's that falls within the realm, I think, of uh of a psychological discussion. It's like people might come to God because they find it's a good way to to deal with the immense tragedy of the suffering that we're facing. But that says nothing about whether or not religion provides a sufficient explanation for why it's happening or justification for for why it's happening.
Because here's the problem. In order to assert that there is an all-loving God who is supervising this, and because you know I'm not the one here who is claiming that this is being supervised, that somebody is watching this, somebody knows that this is occurring, and somebody's allowing it to occur, if we're going to assert that there is a benevolent being who is allowing this to occur, then it must follow that there is morally sufficient reason for this to occur. In the United Kingdom just today, we passed a 100,000 people who've been d who've been killed by the virus. And the Christian has to say that this is morally justified. And they're welcome to do so with reference to theodicies by saying that, you know, this is pain. People like to speak kind of abstractly about how pain and suffering might be necessary to obtain certain goods or it'll be compensated in the afterlife or something of this sort. But we have to say specifically on an issue like this that, yes, this specifically 100,000 people who have died of COVID have done so because God allowed it. That's the first thing that needs to be admitted by the Christian. And most Christians have no problem accepting that. The difficulty comes in in the second proposition, which is that it's justified. This needs to happen or this should have happened or at least there's no kind of uh moral qualm with this having been allowed to happen. That's the problem that needs to be fixed.
>> And and and can I just from you Alex just understand, is this a major reason why you don't believe in God? I.e. the problem of evil is for you a major objection to God?
>> Yeah, call it not an active cause of my atheism, but a sustaining cause. It wasn't the reason why I left the faith originally, but it's one of the reasons that uh prevents me from from re-entertaining the the the idea. I mean, as as we've discussed, there are plenty of seemingly plausible arguments to say that there's a necessary being at the bottom of contingent chains in the universe, that there's a a being who sustains things, that there's an arbitrary first cause or something like this. But to say that this first cause is a loving God who will preside over the kind of suffering that we've seen, not just in the human context of something like the coronavirus, but also the hundreds of billions and trillions, if you include sea life, of animals who are going through suffering that we wouldn't even be capable of imagining. There seems to be no explanation for this.
>> Okay. So this is a huge question that we're trying to you know
>> small questions today.
>> Yeah. Do where where are you going to begin with this? Bishop Baron.
>> Well, how about with Aquinas, you know, in the in the Summa when he poses the question *Utrum deum sit*. Is there a God? And Aquinas famously puts up objections first, right? Well, two of them we've talked about. One is that nature is a self-contained system. There's no need to go outside of nature to explain what's going on within nature. That's objection one. Objection two, and Thomas um states it, I think, more elegantly than anyone in the in the tradition, and I include the atheist tradition. Thomas said, "If one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed." So if there were an infinite heat, there'd be no cold. That's his little example. But God has called the infinite good. Therefore, there there should be no evil if there's an infinite good. But there is evil. Therefore, there is no infinite good. Um, that's a good argument. That's an elegantly stated argument, and it's what has been argued for millennia, right? It's the perennial uh objection.
Now, I'm sure everyone here knows the classical response rooted in people like Augustine, repeated by Aquinas, that God doesn't cause evil, but God is so good that he draws good out of evil that might not have existed without evil. He permits evil to bring about a greater good. Now, can we see that sometimes? Sure. I mean, there's obvious examples in our ordinary experience of of evils that actually produce a great good. Can we very often not see it? Well, yeah, of course. I'd say even typically we don't see right away, "Oh yeah, that's the reason why that was permitted." So, do we hold as theists that God is providentially uh ordering the whole of the universe? That as Jean-Pierre de Caussade put it, everything that is is in some sense the will of God, either actively or permissively. Yeah, I think we are obliged to hold that view. Therefore, something like this formula has to obtain that God permits forms of suffering to bring about a greater good. Now, can we see it? As I say, sometimes yes. Typically, no. But that shouldn't surprise us, right? If we're talking about not one contingent cause among many, some who might be ordering things in one corner of his of the universe, but of God, *Ipsum esse*, the creator of all things, whose whose um preserve is all of space and all of time, is it at all likely that we're going to see the the full implications of whatever is happening, the full implications across space and time of what's being permitted? And the answer there is obviously no. And I think now go back to the book of Job is the is the classic biblical answer in in the presence of great evil, great suffering is we we don't know what God is up to. And we're in no position. Now, I'd put that back on Alex. We're in no position to say definitively there is no morally justifiable reason for this particular evil because we need a godlike perspective on all of space and all of time in order to make that claim. And that's the import of of God's speech to Job, the longest speech of God anywhere in the Bible. "Where were you when I made the, you know, the heavens and the earth, etc." But it just means you're in no position to pronounce or to articulate that premise that you have clear knowledge there can't be a morally justifiable reason for a given suffering. It seems to me that from a purely logical standpoint, the argument is not that compelling. It is filled with emotional power. I completely get it. Like anybody who's lived more than, you know, two years on planet Earth, I've suffered in my life and wondered why and and asked the question. "Of course I do." And then as as Alex and many others point out, that the really horrific suffering that we can see at all levels of of a sentient being. Sure, I get it. I totally get the the emotional power of that. But it seems to me from a strictly logical standpoint, it's not a compelling argument because it assumes you have a godlike perspective.
>> This of course is not uh it doesn't need to be framed in a logical uh in a logical way. Of course, the logical problem of evil has been famously made by a number of atheists. But this can also just be seen as an inductive point, right? Because what's being said here in in many elegant words I believe uh is essentially in the context of the coronavirus, which is how you originally brought this up, Justin, is is the claim that it's worth it. We don't know what for, but it's worth it. You know, 100,000 people have been killed by this virus, which, you know, if it is the case that some good was necessitated by the death of these people, humanity seemed to have been getting on just fine for around 200,000 years before the coronavirus appeared on the scene. I don't see why now all of a sudden it's now necessary to bring in this new virus to produce some good that everybody else seemed to do without. And you have to turn around and say that the reason this is happening is because it's worth it. And someone asks you, well, what on earth for? What on earth is this worth it for? A 100,000 people. Why couldn't it be why couldn't it be 9,999? Why couldn't one person have been spared? Why couldn't one person's of suffering have been marginally less? Surely the same kind of goods of community spirit or whatever it is that you think the good is that's come out of this coronavirus could have been achieved with one less person dying. And not only does God turn around and say, "Well, listen, you know, you don't know what I know. Yeah, just just wait and see." He turns around and says, "Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? How dare you even suggest that you know better than me? How dare you even ask the question? How dare you question that me allowing this to happen is a good thing, is worth it?" And you have to look at your dying father in the eyes and say, "I'm sorry. I I I'm I'm not allowed to say that this is a tragedy because I know that from a from a divine perspective, the only way to reconcile my Christianity is to say not just that this is some kind of tragedy with an explanation." But no, this is worth it. This is good. This brings about something better. I I don't think that's a task that can be done.
>> Yeah. But who are you or I or anyone to say? How do we know? How would anyone you we'd have to have a godlike grasp of all of space and all of time to make a judgment pro or con? Neither one of us, no one can make that judgment. And I mean, you can characterize it the way you did in a sort of flip manner, but that that God permits evil to bring about some greater good. I don't know what that is. How do I know specifically what that is? Though I can state the principle, I think legitimately, but I don't know. How do I know? How does anybody know? I think it's arrogant on either side in a way to claim that knowledge.
>> Well, then
>> I know that God exists on other terms. So I mean I I think through various paths and various rational means I know that God exists. I also know that evil is present in the world. So I got to find a way to reconcile those. It seems to me the principle u achieves that. The details of it I don't know. How would I possibly know? Well, perhaps I can I can elucidate the problem I have with this view by asking you a question. Um, Bishop Baron, would you say, for instance, that it is uh that it is bad when you know uh a a woman has a miscarriage or a baby is ripped from the arms of its mother in a tsunami? Would you say this is a bad thing?
>> Sure.
>> Well, how could you possibly say that? How how could you be so arrogant as to suggest that you know enough about the ultimate reasons for this happening that you can conclude that this is overall all things considered a bad thing? The problem is that if we say that because we don't have this divine universal perspective that allows us to understand the exact complete kind of field of play that's going on here, I'm not allowed to say that actually there's no justification for this because I I I can't possibly know that. Then we then we forfeit our right to use any kind of moral language because we are never ever in a position to judge these things. And so we can never say that something is bad or something is good because we don't have that perspective.
>> No, I don't see why that would follow. I mean I can say like a moral action is is bad. I can say what Hitler did is bad. It's morally wrong. Now, did God permit that? Well, sure, in the measure that God permitted Hitler to come into being, that God didn't interfere with Hitler's activity. So God allowed that. God permitted it. But I can still say it's bad. Uh, but does it does God allow that evil to bring about some greater good that I can't see? That's the principle. But I I have no hesitation calling things good or