AS161: Real Atheology with Justin Schieber

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:31 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Atheistically Speaking. This is episode 161, and I am your host, Thomas Smith. Alright, today I've got a great interview with Justin Schieber. He's got a new YouTube channel called Real Atheology and we talked about that in the first video is about the evidential problem of suffering. So we went into that argument as well. So here we go. Here's that interview.

0:01:01 Thomas: Joining me right now is Justin Schieber, and this, I believe, is the third time you've been on the show, I think?

0:01:09 Justin: Indeed it is.

0:01:10 Thomas: Alright, that's pretty good. That's a good run. So, congratulations for that totally meaningless distinction that you'll completely forget about in a minute. But, third time, it's a charm. Arm. Justin is here to talk about, well, Real Atheology, his new YouTube channel, and I'm very excited about it. I've consumed the first video. Well, the first, I guess, you've got some videos of debates and stuff on there, which are also very great, but the first I believe original Real Atheology content has gone up, right?

0:01:10 Justin: Mm-hmm. Correct.

0:01:48 Justin: Yeah, I started the channel a few months back and over time I've kind of built up debate videos that I've had on other channels and I kind of moved them over here and in preparation to launch this Really Theology channel and essentially what that is is well I guess to define my term here, atheology, what does that mean? Well, in broadly, well, real is just my attempt to add some legitimacy to the channel, but Atheology is essentially broadly construed as just an opposition to theology.

So, you know, where theology kind of starts off with the assumption that God exists and then tries to kind of make God fit the world, you know, uh, what I'm suggesting is that's the wrong approach to go about, um, you know, asking the the interesting questions in life, and that we need to step back further without making that assumption. And, uh, so I think that there should be a negative attitude towards theological illogical aspirations, but, um, at least, at least primary, at least taking primacy over more fundamental questions as to the question of whether or not God exists in the first place. Uh, so essentially the channel is going to be discussing, um, all

0:02:17 Thomas: Wait a minute, let me do the questioning here. Hey, Justin, Justin, what does real atheology mean? You

0:03:27 Justin: Things philosophy of religion, uh, primarily contemporary philosophy of region. And I think that, um, at leas where my thinking is right now, I have two kind of main goals for this channel. And the first one is to kind of make important ideas in contemporary philosophy of religion digestible to people who, you know, don't have the time to look into these issues, but who still have an interest.

0:03:54 Thomas: Can say it. Dimwits like me. No, I'm just kidding.

0:03:58 Justin: To make this, and I want make it slightly unique in that I want want to make it a resource, a valuable resource for both theists and atheists. And secondly, I want to encourage people on both sides to think more like philosophers rather than apologists on either side. So, you know, apologists are, you Know, be them atheist or theist, they're out there to try and win you to their side, right? I think that that's an interesting thing to do. And I don't think it's necessarily, you know, a morally bankrupt way to go about it. But what I think is perhaps a better way to Go About It is to just explore these issues and not necessarily try and convert another person, but, you know, treat the arguments on their own merits.

And so in the channel, I plan on, you know, primarily I'm going to be defending atheistic arguments. But there will be times in which I will defend theistic arguments against bad atheistic critiques or theistic arguments that I think are just compelling, interesting arguments. And so that sense, I think that it, or at least I hope that it will be a valuable resource for people on both sides to try and, of think of these things in a more interesting way, in a way that's tied more to the the literature going on rather than, you know, just continuously talking about anthropomorphic spaghetti dinners. Yes.

0:05:31 Thomas: As delicious as they might be.

0:05:34 Justin: Elijah.

0:05:34 Thomas: Yeah, well, you beat me to my question again. I was going to ask how your channel would be a resource to theists in addition, because while you do look at the arguments, it seems like you tend to come down on the atheist perspective, I would think. But that's interesting. You're going to look at times when atheist arguments maybe don't cut it, which is something that I like doing as well. So I'm really excited for that. I just had a guest on recently for that, Yeah, yeah, did I tell you about that?

0:06:04 Justin: I heard that. Yep. Yeah. He's a buddy of mine. I like him. Sure.

0:06:06 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. I like Elijah too. I just have him on for that very purpose. And I think I don't agree agree with him on all of them, but it was very interesting, and we had a good back and forth, and I liked it. I like the idea of looking at the arguments, and that's totally cool, but I wanted to see what you, you know, maybe prod you a little bit on the apologist part, because I think that it's easy for me to look at, like, a religious apologist or Christian apologist and be like, oh, come on, what are you doing? You know, you're just trying to convert people. But then I sort of think that all cancels out because I think we all think we have the truth of some kind. Like, I don't really think that it's any worse to think you are a Christian with the truth than it is to think you're an atheist with the truth.

0:06:56 Justin: Yeah.

0:06:56 Thomas: So I don't really mind people who are trying to convince other people of something they they believe to be correct, or to try to point out, you know, ideology that might be an error and might cause problems. So, but you're just taking a different tact. Right.

0:07:12 Justin: Yeah. I don't want to be right. I don't want to sound like I'm suggesting that I think there's something, uh, you know, fundamentally wrong with with advocating a position and trying to, you know, get people to agree with you in the sense that, you know, if you think something is true, then you should want other people to also believe things that are true because knowing the truth is a good thing. So I don't, I'm not against that per se, but what I am against is where that takes a more center stage than the merit of the arguments itself, which can encourage a kind of partisan citizenship that is just not conducive to, you know, any kind of conversation of value.

0:08:02 Thomas: I would definitely agree with that. When, when it comes, when your conclusion becomes more important than the arguments, then that's always fair

0:08:08 Justin: Yes. So it's less about the activity of trying to, I guess, convert or deconvert. It's less about the Activity and more about the attitude with which one might go about such an Activity.

0:08:19 Thomas: Enough. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's, do you mind talking about the the first video you got up. I mean, people definitely should check it out. Search Real Atheology and it'll pop right up. And this thing called Google, this new internet thing. I don't know why people even give out websites anymore. It's just like, yeah, If you don't know Google, go to Google and type in Google. But there's almost no point in giving out any sort of URLs anymore, it's just, just google it, but uh, Real Atheology.

0:08:25 Justin: Sure. I haven't heard of this thing. I need to Google it.

0:08:49 Justin: Right. Exactly.

0:08:50 Thomas: It's spelled how it sounds and

0:08:52 Justin: Yeah, you're just putting an a before the theology, so

0:08:56 Thomas: It's not like Real Big Fish, where it's R-E-E-L, and it's a pun, it's, it's actually just Real Atheology, um, though maybe you should change it to that now, now that I think about it. Okay, so we'll see.

0:09:05 Justin: Yeah. I'll also make it a fishing show. I

0:09:07 Thomas: Yeah. Um, there's some sort of, you know, Christian pun thing in there somewhere.

0:09:15 Justin: Was just thinking that, yeah, the Ichthys fish, there you go. Um, but yeah, so the first video I did, I released, uh, a week ago, roughly about a week ego, and, um, it is on, uh, a kind of row style of argument from evil. And I forget if I've discussed this argument on your show before, but just to kind of go over it real quick.

0:09:15 Thomas: Yeah.

0:09:39 Thomas: Let me, sorry to interrupt, and it's okay if I'm putting you on the spot and you don't know, but can you tell us anything about this person, Roe? I mean, I really like how much you've studied different thinkers, and oftentimes you're citing religious thinkers as often as you're citing atheist thinkers. And I'm just wondering who this Roe is, and if you know any biographical details or anything like that you could share.

0:09:44 Justin: Sure. Yeah. Yes. So, well, William Rowe is a professor of philosophy at Purdue University. And strangely enough, I was talking with someone who had said that they, that he recently died and I'm looking on Wikipedia, which is pretty good about that kind of stuff. And it does not appear that he has died, which is a great thing.

0:10:29 Justin: He's at Purdue University with such minds as Paul Draper.

0:10:24 Thomas: Yeah. Well, good. Oh, okay.

0:10:34 Justin: And so he primarily works in philosophy of religion, but he's also worked in other areas. And he's a professor emeritus at philosophy at Purdue University. So he's not working there currently, presumably.

0:10:49 Thomas: So, is he an atheist or a theist or unclear?

0:10:53 Justin: He is an atheist, from, from, from what I can tell, he's an atheist.

0:10:57 Thomas: Right. Because, and that's the interesting thing about, I don't know, rigorous philosophy is sometimes you can't be totally sure, you know, if someone is just discussing an argument in the best way. Theoretically, that's almost something to shoot for. If you can discuss an argument, in such a way that someone doesn't really even know which side of it you're on, that That's pretty cool.

0:11:12 Justin: Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely.

0:11:18 Thomas: And I find that to be true sometimes with this stuff. But okay, so he's an atheist, and he's got an argument about the evidential problem of suffering, right?

0:11:19 Justin: Yeah. Yeah, to your point about, you know, how that should be almost the kind of goal, uh, for philosophers, I think, I think that's absolutely right. I think that that's what a philosopher should do, um, and when you see a philosopher like, like one of my, my favorites is Paul Draper. He writes, he writes a lot defending naturalism, but he also writes a lot defending theism. And that to me, where you can kind of, you're not necessarily towing the party line, but you're just exploring the arguments, you're throwing them around in your head, and you're playing with these ideas. And that, that to me is what's, is what the goal should be. And my, my friend, Jeremy Behan, who teaches philosophy at a, at a local college here in Grand Rapids, always hides his, you know, his, his beliefs.

0:12:19 Justin: He's an atheist, but he hides his beliefs from his students. But at the end of the, at the end of the semester, at the end of the class, he will ask them what they, he has them all fill out a questionnaire about, you you know, uh, performance of, of the teacher and stuff. And, um, and they're almost always like 80, 20 something where they generally think he's a theist of some sort because he's so like in the way he presents the arguments and stuff, I guess he's particularly sympathetic and which is really, Uh, encouraging to hear. I like that. And then they're all very surprised when they find out he's an atheist.

0:12:50 Thomas: Yeah. Well, Another guess could be that 80% has probably got to be roughly the percentage of people who are pretty religious, maybe it's, they, they project on their own views

0:12:55 Justin: Yeah. That's that's almost certainly a factor in that. Yeah. But

0:13:07 Thomas: Yeah. Which would still mean he's being pretty neutral about it and they're just kind of projecting their views.

0:13:12 Justin: It's An art, it's art school, so they got to be, you know. I would assume that it would be significantly less than the general population of theists.

0:13:12 Thomas: Oh. Okay. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's cool, um, I've got your, your the premises of this argument up here. Um. How would you feel, free, I don't want to, I don't want to do something out of order, take it away, however you'd like to explain this.

0:13:25 Justin: Yes. Yes. Okay. Yeah, so, uh, Rose argument, essentially he's, what he's trying to do is, uh, and and I should kind of lay out a little bit of context here. And I go into this in the video, though only really mentioning it. For the longest time, the problem of evil was seen as a, and defended as a kind of deductive argument, what they call the logical problem of evil. And so the logical problem of evil is an argument which attempts to show that there's a kind of logical incompatibility between the existence of God and any instance of evil or suffering. And suffering is generally thought of as an instance of evil, and so that's where these terms kind of fall into.

0:14:21 Justin: And for a while there, that was thought as a very successful argument, because so long as the premises are true, the conclusion follows deductively, necessarily, and therefore God does not exist if the premises aren't true. True. But Roe's argument is a bit more of a humble version of that same argument. And so what he's trying to say is that, look, it's not as though, you know, Roe wants to say, look evil is compatible logically with the existence of God, but nevertheless he wants to say that evil or suffering does actually constitute some evidence against God.

0:15:07 Justin: And and so even if the premises are true, at least one form of the argument is that even if the premises are true, then the conclusion doesn't necessarily follow, it just makes the conclusion more probable. So that's what he's trying to do is trying to employ certain observations about the world, certain instances of suffering, certain facts about suffering into a plausible argument which shows that those observations should lower our probability that we might place on the existence of God. So his argument starts off with the first premise stating that many instances of intense suffering seem gratuitous. And the word gratuitous is a kind technical term.

0:15:53 Justin: In the literature, it has a very specific meaning. And an instance of evil is gratuitous if and only if it could not have been avoided without thereby losing out on some great good or avoiding some equally bad or worse instance of suffering. So essentially, gratuitous is just another word for unjustified. And so what Roe wants to say with this first premise is there are many instances of intense suffering in our world that seem to us like they are the gratuitous kinds of suffering. They're unjustified, and so that God doesn't have good reasons to allow these things to happen.

0:16:36 Thomas: You started the video with, uh, was that a voiceover you got from somewhere or were you doing an impression of Somebody

0:16:42 Justin: That was actually Ed Braden. Yeah, I had, right,

0:16:45 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Talking About a deer who essentially dies in a forest fire caused by lightning with no, no benefit at all, it seems like, so that might Be

0:16:56 Justin: There doesn't seem to be any reason for that kind of suffering, exactly. And so Roe kind of brings that illustration just to kind of illustrate that, you know, none of the traditional theodicies seem to do any work with that story. So it's not as though there's someone nearby who can witness the suffering and somehow grows in compassion or empathy towards, uh, animal life. Um, it doesn't seem as though the forest fire was, uh. Can be blamed on human free will because it was a purely natural event. Um, and there, you know, there's a, you can go on, go on down the list and it doesn't seem like there are at least the, the usual traditional theodicies. It doesn't seemed like they carry any weight as to try and get God off the hook of this.

0:16:57 Thomas: Right. Right. And

0:17:43 Justin: Kind of

0:17:44 Thomas: That's Even That's very generous too, because that's assuming that those even make sense, but he's not Even trying To take those on, he's just saying

0:17:44 Justin: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And Certainly, certainly those theodicies, their strength can be questioned, absolutely. Um. And so what Rose trying to say is, you know, he's illustrating this, this, he gives this story about the deer in the forest fire, and he's like, look, these kinds of things happen all the time, these kindsof suffering, these sufferings that don't seem like they can be explained away by these, you know, these, uh, different theodices. And so what he's saying is that, look, because there's so many of them, the probability of at least one of them actually is gratuitous, right? So many seem gratuitous, that's premise one, is that many of these seem gratuitious. Premise two is that at least one of them probably is gratuitious, then we can go to premise three, which is a theological claim, which just kind of follows from, or at least I would argue, you follows from the nature of the God as classically defined, and, uh, which is that, you know, God would not allow any gratuitous suffering, and then we can get to our conclusion that, you know, God probably doesn't exist, all else being equal.

0:17:51 Thomas: Right. Yeah.

0:18:54 Justin: Probably a kind of difficult way to unpack that here, but, uh, yeah, that's the, that's general thrust of the argument, right?

0:19:01 Thomas: And it's striking, how I think we've talked a little bit about this before, but it is very, uh, I guess I don't know what the technical, technical term would be, weak, like it's very, um, just trying to bite off just a tiny little corner, you know, it's like not even, it's just saying like, well, there's, there might be one instance of gratuitous suffering. And if there is one instance, then probably there's no God, you know, like it's, it's interesting that it's that way. And you talked a bit about that in the video and earlier that there's another form that's deductive. And I don't know what that is, but I assume it's more like just, you know, an omnipotent, omniscient God, um, wouldn't allow any suffering. I'm sure it's more direct, right, is it more, it tries to claim More, right.

0:19:45 Justin: It's It's, it's more bold. Yeah, it's more.

0:19:48 Justin: Yeah. What essentially that argument is saying in a nutshell is that God and evil are just logically incompatible. But there is that if there's evil in the world, that that is enough to disprove God. And so if you can.

0:20:01 Thomas: So. I'm wondering Why The Change of tactic, um, you alluded, I think briefly to, you know, that argument was considered good and then maybe not so much anymore, do you know anything about that?

0:20:12 Justin: Yeah well Alvin Plantinga in the late 60s. He's a Christian philosopher, primarily worked out of Notre Dame and a local school here at Calvin College. He argued what you probably are aware of called the free will defense. And the freewill defense, at least in a nutshell, this is an extremely complicated defense. But in a nut shell, it's saying that free will is a good thing. And you cannot have, You cannot guarantee that evil will not enter the world if you have free will. And because free will is so good, its goodness offsets the possibility of evil entering the world, right? And, I mean, again, the defense is quite complicated, but that's the general

0:20:12 Thomas: Right.

0:20:31 Thomas: Well

0:21:08 Justin: Thrust of it.

0:21:08 Thomas: It, it It Had better Be, because it, to me, it's so unconvincing, but I I guess, yeah.

0:21:12 Justin: There's Yeah, there's some significant problems with it, and it doesn't really seem to answer things like animal suffering, right, like that doesn't seem to play into it but um essentially the the logical argument um has fallen out of favor I guess you could say among among philosophers a lot of philosophers seem to think that planting it did solve the logical problem of evil um and so So kind of in response, I don't know if I want to say for sure that it was a response to that kind of of demise in at least among most or among many philosophers, philosophers of religion, the kind of evidential comes in kind of is the new talk of the town, I guess you could say. But uh so I so earlier you called it it weak and and uh so I guess what do you mean by that because

0:21:13 Thomas: Right. I probably

0:22:03 Justin: What you're

0:22:03 Thomas: Used the wrong term I just meant the, yeah, that's all I meant. Like, it's not trying to bite off too much, you know, more than it can chew. It's just, like you said, inductive versus deductive. And maybe that, I mean, maybe that's just a very smart tactic because I suppose you don't need much more than that. I mean it's very, it is like just the bare minimum. It is very minimalistic. You know, it's like this is just probably there's no God based on this. And is that a style

0:22:06 Justin: It's it's certainly more humble than a straight up deductive argument that is true okay yeah well

0:22:41 Thomas: That is more in vogue for most theological or atheist arguments these days? Or yeah,

0:22:48 Justin: It it would it would seem to me that at least within contemporary philosophy religion the kind of evidential approach to these questions uh like the inductive argument from evil or, you know, the inductive argument from, you know, fine tuning or whatever.

0:23:06 Justin: Especially, you know, kind of Richard Swinburne kind of led the way on this, thinking about these things in a more probabilistic inductive method. And so, I mean, there are, of course, different strengths to different inductive arguments. You can have a very weak inductive agreement. You have a very strong inductive document. And what William Rowe is trying to say, is that the huge number of instances of seemingly gratuitous suffering is very strong evidence, because it's very, very likely, he wants to argue, that if there are so many of them that seem that way, at least one of them actually is that way. And one of then being gratuitous is logically incompatible with God. So you see how that's working, where he's saying, like, so it has a little bit of resemblance to the logical problem, but what he's saying is that it's not evil flat out, it's gratuitous suffering that's incompatible with God. And so he's saying that probably gratuitous suffering exists. He wants to make that very probable.

0:23:54 Thomas: Yeah, no, I definitely see how it's working. It's very fascinating. It's just interesting that things took a step back from, you know, like you said, the stronger deductive kind to this sort of weaker inductive form. But it makes sense.

0:24:24 Justin: Yeah, philosopher, I interviewed philosopher Eric Wielenberg last year, and he called it the scaling back back of atheistic ambitions.

0:24:36 Thomas: Hmm, yeah. And I wonder too, and maybe this is just because of how I think, but for me, I don't know how any suffering isn't gratuitous in terms of God. And I know, I guess it is in response to that theodicy of free will or God has plans or whatever it might be. But to me, and maybe we can branch off a bit here, it seems like there would be no suffering that isn't gratuitous. Because I think that we have an intuition as humans that, well, in order to achieve stuff, in order for your life to be meaningful, etc., you know, you need to work hard, you need to suffer a little bit, you know. A little bit of suffering can be good.

Good, you brought up the analogy of the flu shot, you know, sometimes we need these things in order to have a greater good. But to my mind, I don't understand why God needed to set it up that way. I mean, that's all because of our instincts. That's all Because we're humans, but God's not a human, you Know, he doesn't, he wouldn't need to set It up so that suffering is necessary at all.

0:24:59 Justin: Well,

0:25:48 Thomas: I don't know. But maybe that's, maybe that argument just doesn't appeal to people as well as one where it's like, well, sure, there could be, you know, there could be non-gratuitous suffering, but there probably is some gratuitous suffering and therefore you know there probably isn't a God. So do you think that's, it's almost more could be almost like a little bit psychological in that religious people are likely not going to relate to the idea that there shouldn't be any suffering?

0:26:18 Justin: Actually, you bring up an excellent point. So the argument, so for something to justify, for God to be justified in an instance of suffering, it can't just be that, you know, that God allowed this instance of suffering because he wanted some greater good, right? It can't be just that. It also needs to be shown that instance of suffering was logically necessary for that greater good, okay? So, for example, for us humans, it's permissible for us to, you know, as you said, it is permissible to put needles into our children's arm to inject some medicine of some sort for some greater good, right?

0:27:09 Justin: But if that, that would not be, that's an excuse for us, but that's only because of our severely limited abilities and resources and knowledge, right? If for Example, if, for example, I was, uh, I, you know, could move things with my mind or something and just make things make states of affairs occur just by thinking about them, then I would just, um, dispense with the relevant, um, injections with no needles whatsoever. I would just make, uh, those person's bodies have that, those new contents, right?

0:27:21 Thomas: Yeah.

0:27:50 Thomas: Right. And furthermore, if someone else was like, nah, I still want to to give my kid the needle, you'd be like, you're a monster. I can do it. I could do it without the needle. Yeah.

0:27:55 Justin: Exactly. You Yeah. Because those, that person's ambitions would be completely unjustified, right? If There's a way to do some good thing without suffering, then of course you pick that way. And so for us, that's a, that's a legitimate excuse, that we, you know, there's no other way to get this injection into the child, right? But for God, now, now here's, here's where the strength of the argument comes from, or at least one of the parts of the strength the argument, it comes from, is that God doesn't have that kind of excuse. So if you go down the line and you think about all these instances of suffering, the question that the theist is being pressed with is that how is that instance of suffering logically necessary for some greater good? First, the theists need to identify some great good, And then they also need to show why that instance of suffering was, like, the only way it could have possibly occurred, even though God is omnipotent and he can just make states of affairs occur, right?

0:28:03 Thomas: Right. Yeah,

0:29:00 Justin: So That's The strength of it, because it's really hard to think about what possibly could justify things to an omnipresent God. Well,

0:29:00 Thomas: I know. But that's, well, but to me, that's the strength of the deductive argument too. Like the, the inductive one, I think gives a lot of that ground by saying, like you said, it sort of admits that, okay, maybe there's some reason for some suffering sometimes. But I think we're talking a little bit more about the deductive kind right now, or am I wrong? Or is it both, maybe?

0:29:28 Justin: We're There's Definitely, uh, I mean, there's going to be a deductive inference there for sure, in the sense that, um, you know, if they're, I mean, the claim of course is that God cannot allow gratuitous suffering, and so if gratuitous suffering exists, God does not exist. And then our claim is that probably gratuitous offering exists.

0:29:49 Thomas: Right, but the claim I was trying to make was that any instance of suffering is gratuitous, because of the fact that he can bring up any state of affairs he wants, he could bring up Any State of Reality he wants—one in which you don't need any suffering to have a greater good.

0:29:57 Justin: Right.

0:30:07 Justin: Right. So then there is, so, you know, I mean, just to kind of briefly tell you what a theist would say in this, in Response.

0:30:16 Thomas: Sure, yeah, well, that's what I was going to bring up next, But yeah, go ahead.

0:30:19 Justin: Yeah. Is that so, for for some, you know, that God creating, for example, you know, just robots going around and doing, you know, automatic things, right? That this would not be a good thing. This is not a valuable state of affairs, a world filled with robots that don't have any autonomous choice making or moral decision making, right. That moral decision-making, moral deliberation, these are good things, and a world that's

0:30:46 Thomas: Right. Because God needs that for some reason. And God needs his fix. He needs his moral fix. Right?

0:30:57 Justin: Right, right, right. So that's the thing. There are, of course, questions as to whether or not God would want to create anything, or why God would wants morally interesting creatures in the first place. But this argument kind of steps past those points.

0:30:58 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:31:16 Thomas: Right, well, and that's why I was saying earlier, like, it's almost maybe more of a kind of getting into the psychology of who's going to be hearing the argument more. That's why I said that, because to me, I really, I've never been able to be convinced of why God would need to create anything. I don't understand that at all. But like you say, I mean, for whatever reason, I was going to ask you too, maybe I can tie this in. I was gonna ask you, why do you think theists are so unconvinced by this? Because I know, I'm sure it's happened in debates you have, but I've seen it in countless debates where you try to talk about the needless suffering in the world, or rather the atheist does, whoever it might be. And maybe if it's Hitchens or somebody, maybe they're getting a bit gratuitous in the way they're talking about it, but it's never convincing.

0:31:16 Justin: Right.

0:32:05 Thomas: I mean, obviously never in the history of debates has one side said, oh yeah, you're right. Okay, cancel this. But still, it is really remarkable to me that somehow theists are never convinced by this. They're not moved at all. And I was going to ask you why you think that is.

0:32:23 Justin: Well, actually, that's a really good point. And I'll be addressing one of the main criticisms in a future video.

0:32:30 Thomas: Ooh, awesome.

0:32:31 Justin: So one of these, I mean, theists have responded to this argument in a number of different ways. But by far the most popular response is something called skeptical theism. And essentially what skeptical theisim is trying to do is kind of throw away the inference between premise one and premise two. So if you recall, premise one is asserting that there are many instances of intense suffering that seem gratuitous, right? Right. That just, that seems like a pretty obvious premise, right? There seems to be a lot of things that doesn't look like they get, there's no real reason they could be justified, right. So they seem gratuitous. Premise two, though, is that probably some are gratuitous. Now implicit in that is that somehow that just because something seems to the case that therefore at least one of those probably is the case, actually is what it seems to be. Now, generally speaking, that's a perfectly fine inference, right?

So, you know, in the video, I use the illustration of kind of opening up your fridge and looking for a carton of milk, right, and if you're looking for it, you're going to a couple seconds, and you scan quickly, and you don't see one, we're all generally agreed that that's a perfectly valid inference to make, that there is no carton of milk in your fridge, right. And

0:33:09 Thomas: Sure. Yeah. Yeah,

0:33:58 Justin: The reason is, is because cartons of milk are the kinds of things that you'd be able to identify and see fairly easily. Now, what the theist wants to say is that this argument assumes that God's justifications for instances of evil are like cartons of milk, that they're the kinds of things we could see if we thought about them, or that we could conceive of if we thought deeply enough about them. But the theist wants to challenge that assumption. They want to say that God's justifications are more like walking into a house and are more like fleas or something inside of a house, where there's just a handful of fleas inside of this giant house.

0:33:58 Thomas: Yeah.

0:34:45 Justin: And you walk in and you kind of, you know, you scan each room, you don't really see them, so you walk out and you say, probably there are no fleas, right? That inference would be be unjustified because fleas are so small that they're not the kinds of things you'd expect to see.

0:34:58 Thomas: Boy, this is all too real for me because the kitten, the kitten we just got had fleas and there were no cartons of milk anywhere near her. So no, wait, I might be mixing up. Yeah no, I see your point. It's a good illustration because yes, you can never be sure that there are no fleas. You know what's funny? Completely completely unrelated to this. When I was trying to check the kitten for fleas, this is very recently, like maybe a couple of weeks ago, after we gave her some medication and I couldn't see any fleas. I actually, I swear to you guys, everyone listening, I thought of the classic argument of like, well, have you looked all over the universe for God?

Have you checked every part of the universe? And I was like, it's like that with the fleas! I could just apply flea medication to this kitten for my entire life because there's no way I can ever like fully know because they, you know, she's a dark-haired cat, fleas are dark, like they could be somewhere. So I guess I'd better keep applying this medication every day because I can never be sure.

0:35:05 Justin: So the

0:36:13 Thomas: All right, well, there you go. There's part one with Justin Schieber. I really like talking philosophy of religion. It's so fascinating. And there's going to be more of that on Thursday. We branch off, talk about some more things as usual, and it's really fun. So you'll have to look forward to that. And I will see you then. Thank you all my patrons. As usual, check out patreon.com/atheist if you'd like to support the show. And of course, check Check out Justin Schieber, Real Atheology, and we will see you on Thursday for the dramatic conclusion of the interview. Bye.