AS175: Justin Schieber vs Robert Johnson, Part 1

Transcript

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

0:00:30 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Atheistically Speaking. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and this is episode 175. Alright, well, this weekend happened, or rather, last weekend. I had the first ever live Atheistically Speaking debate, and I think it went great. I want to thank you guys so much for responding to my requests for questions. We got plenty of questions, too many to get to, actually, but it was kind of interesting. Well, you'll see. I don't want to spoil anything. I'll just let you guys know, I apologize to those who already saw the debate, because that's this week's episodes. However, maybe it'll give you some comfort to learn that the ratio of people who actually viewed the debate is a tiny percentage of people who listen to the podcast.

0:01:19 Thomas: So that's going to be the content for this week. So I guess a lot of people just couldn't or didn't want to watch it live, and that's okay, so we're gonna have the podcast version this week, and then next week I've got some really interesting episodes chambered I'm excited to get to, but I'd better just get to the debate because it's really long, these are actually gonna be pretty long episodes, so there you go, there you have it, all, I'll get you right over to that debate now.

0:01:54 Thomas: Welcome to the first ever live debate hosted by the Atheistically Speaking podcast. I'm your host, Thomas Smith. I'll be lightly moderating things, very gently, passively moderating thing, maybe passive aggressively. Maybe I can give things like, you sure you want to use all that time? Okay. All right, yeah. Have you ever had a passive aggressive moderator? I don't know. Anyway, the proposition up for debate today is the following. The intensity and widespread nature of suffering is significant evidence against God. Now, note that the debaters are not debating whether or not God exists per se, but whether or not suffering is specifically evidence against God. Now arguing for the motion is Justin Schieber. Hello, Justin. Justin is Justin is currently the host of Real Atheology. That's a philosophy of religion YouTube channel where they use big words that are so hard to say, where he discusses important authors and arguments in contemporary philosophy of religion.

0:02:15 Justin Or Rob: Doing

0:03:01 Thomas: Previously, Justin was co-host of the Reasonable Doubts radio show that just came to an end recently. I know a lot of people were really sad about that, but that was for four years. Justin enjoys promoting a friendly yet firm skepticism toward religious claims. He has lectured on the philosophical arguments for and against the existence of God and has participated in many public debates throughout the United States and Canada, so is pretty much famous.

0:03:31 Thomas: Arguing against the motion is Rob Johnson. How are you doing today, Rob?

0:03:35 Justin Or Rob: Pretty well?

0:03:36 Thomas: All right. Rob is a Christian apologist from Lansing, Michigan. He currently runs the website Apologetics105.com and hosts a weekly podcast by the same name where he engages with arguments for and against God, philosophy, and various theological matters. One of the central pillars of his ministry, both online and through the local church, is encouraging a fruitful and respectful dialogue between non-believers and Christians. He argues that faith is reasonable and should always be based on evidence. Well, we've certainly got some non- believers and believers here today, so we'll see if that fruitful, respectful dialogue works out. I'm rooting for it.

0:04:15 Justin Or Rob: Me too.

0:04:16 Thomas: So the format for this debate is as follows. Two 10-minute intros, starting with Justin, followed by a loosely timed sort of cross-examination and discussion period. Both debaters agreed that they wanted the chance to really engage with one another, so the format will be somewhat loose tonight because of that, or today, whatever your time zone is. I know that, by the way, in Australia it's like some god-awful time. It's like 5 a.m., but I know. Hello, if we got any of those Australian viewers who I saw some commenting that they were definitely going to try to make it. So that's dedication. Thank you, guys. And after that will be a Q&A period. Now, please submit some questions, guys, as the debate goes along. You can submit them on Twitter using the hashtag Suffering and God, or I think there's a QAnA app here on Google Hangouts, so you could also use So those will be the two places that I'll be looking.

0:05:09 Thomas: I probably won't see it if you send it anywhere else. So sorry. And after that question and answer period will be five minute closing remarks, starting with Rob and ending with Justin. So that's it. I'm very excited. And with that said, I would like to open up the floor to Justin to start his opening remarks.

0:05:30 Justin Or Rob: Excellent. First of all, I want to begin by thanking Thomas Smith and the Atheistically Speaking podcast, and my opponent in this debate, Robert Johnson. The issue of debate is one of suffering, and whether or not the arguments I'm about to attempt from observations about suffering in our world can provide us with significant evidence against God. The word "significant" there can be a bit distractingly vague, I'll admit. So what do I mean by that? Well, by significant evidence, I mean evidence which would be very foolish to leave out of our investigations, so sometimes, you know, through limits and time or resources, we have to kind of limit the scope of evidence we look at, and sometimes we might ignore really trivial, very weak evidence. So all I'm saying is that significant evidence is the kind of evidence which we would not ever want to do that to.

0:06:29 Justin Or Rob: It seems then that Robert, my opponent in this debate, has a few strategies that he could adopt in successfully countering my central claim, which is that suffering is significant evidence against God. And one strategy might be to say that the facts to which my arguments refer are not actually evidence at all, let alone significant evidence, that they cannot serve as evidence against theism because of certain relevant epistemic limitations, limitations that we as humans suffer from. It might be argued that these limitations cast doubt on some of the inferences essential to my arguments. Another strategy might be to deny the empirical facts central to my argument.

0:07:16 Justin Or Rob: A valid argument is not a very useful argument if your opponent denies the empirical questions that are being assumed. Thirdly, a third strategy might be to agree that the facts to which I refer are evidence, but that they're not significant evidence. These facts are just very weak, he might claim. And so those are three general strategies my opponent might take. However, I hope to show that none of these strategies are without unwelcome implications. So in presenting these three arguments, I'll be defending a certain atheistic hypothesis, which philosopher Paul Draper calls the hypothesis of indifference, articulating HI. Draper writes, quote, "Neither the nature nor the condition of sentient beings on Earth is the result of benevolent or malevolent actions performed by non-human persons," unquote. So Draper notes that the hypothesis of indifference, while consistent with supernaturalism, is not consistent with theism, because if supernatural beings do exist, then no actions performed by them is motivated by a direct concern for our well-being. So, of course, I'm defining theism here as classical theism: omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.

0:08:31 Justin Or Rob: Philosopher of science at Johns Hopkins University, Victor de Fey, writes, The most widely accepted probabilistic account of evidence is the so-called increase in probability or positive relevance account. See, the idea here is simply that E is evidence for H if and only if E makes H more probable than it otherwise would have been. And so generally, evidence for indifference and against theism will be observations that are expected on the assumption that indifrence is true, but rather surprising on the assumption that theism is true. The further apart these two conditionals are, the stronger the evidence is. I want to bring our attention to two observations that fit this description and so constitute significant evidence for Indifference against Theism.

0:09:18 Justin Or Rob: In this, the first argument is apparently pointless suffering. In this argument, I am willing to grant that God, if such a thing exists, may have reasons for allowing certain instances of suffering to occur in the actual world, perhaps to ensure some greater good, or to avoid some equally bad or worse instance of suffering. However, God, If He existed, would never allow an instance of suffer unless it was logically for that greater good, or that equally bad or worse instance of suffering. But of course, now we get to the problem. Many instances of suffering that we see in our world, both by human and non-human animals, seem suspiciously like the exact kinds of suffering that a perfectly loving being would prevent if he did exist.

0:10:09 Justin Or Rob: They seem utterly pointless. Think of the Holocaust, think of slavery in the American South, think about ISIS. The usual response here is to argue that God gave us free will, and that our abuse of free will is just that, it's an abuse.

0:10:27 Justin Or Rob: Now I agree that free will is important. Generally speaking, people should be allowed to make mistakes, learn, and grow accordingly. But however important free will it is, we must recognize that it is not a trump card. Everybody in this room already knows this. Imagine you're walking down the street and you don't intervene. We would think that one would have a moral obligation to intervene.

0:11:00 Justin Or Rob: So if respecting the attacker's free will is not an adequate justification for us walking on by such a crime, why does this not also apply to God? Then, of course, you have natural suffering. Think of the central theory of biology, the theory of evolution by natural selection. It can only occur with massive amounts of suffering and death, most of which occurred long before humans entered the world stage. Notice that this is not just an accidental byproduct of evolution. This natural suffering and debt is intrinsic to the system. Also in this category of natural suffering are things like earthquakes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, disease, and famine. This is all very real and deeply felt suffering.

0:11:46 Justin Or Rob: And so it seems quite obvious that this kind of suffering, the seemingly pointless kind, and the massive number of them, that on the assumption of theism, this is very surprising. But of course, the atheist or the indifferentist has no problem fitting these facts into their view. On indifference, the universe is indifferent to our suffering. On indifference, the universe is blind to our well-being. Therefore, the massive amount of seemingly pointless suffering in the world strongly favors indifference over theism. Or in the words of philosopher Robert Bass of UNC, suffering counts against the existence of God in the same way that crabgrass on the Gulf Green counts against existence of an efficient greenskeeper. The next argument appeals to facts about flourishing and languishing of sentient beings.

0:12:37 Justin Or Rob: And if there's anything obvious about the flourishing and languish of sentience beings, it is the following three facts. First, that only a fraction of sentient beings have an adequate supply of food and water and are able to reproduce, avoid predators, and remain healthy at some point in their lives. Two, even fewer are able to do these things for most of their lives, and three, even fewer still are able to do these things for all of their lives. Now premise one is going to be arguing that these three facts, jointly considered, are highly unlikely on the assumption that theism is true. So on theism, it seems quite obvious that sentient beings are at least supposed to flourish, and this is true for three reasons.

0:13:22 Justin Or Rob: First, as Paul Draper writes, almost all sentient beings are capable of flourishing on biologically realistic circumstances. Secondly, and to quote Paul Draper again, sentient organisms, because they have conscious desires and can feel pain and pleasure, are also capable of having lives that are good or bad, and the failure to flourish is incompatible with their having good lives. And lastly, a perfectly loving God would care greatly about his sentient loved ones having good lives, and would be in the perfect position and would have the requisite abilities to make it so.

0:13:59 Justin Or Rob: Premise two is that these facts about flourishing and languishing, these three facts, are highly likely on the assumption that indifference is true. This is because if indifference is true, and given that we are biological organisms, and that biological evolution must be true if that is true then if biological evolution is true, all animals are in constant competition for resources and survival, so these three facts are entirely expected on indifference. Philosopher Paul Draper writes, The fact that flourishing is rare and languishing or early death common is not only unsurprising, it is expected. Therefore, these three facts about flourishing and languish strongly favor indifference over theism. Now, because my arguments are aimed at theism generally, it may be tempting to argue that when we add certain Christian-specific auxiliary hypotheses or doctrines to the core hypothesis of theism, that my evidential arguments will no longer work.

0:14:58 Justin Or Rob: However, this would be to misunderstand my evidential arguments, because one must do more than simply identify and add new claims to the core hypothesis, which could help explain these observations on the hypothesis of theism. One must also demonstrate for us tonight that there is an antecedent reason for thinking that these additional claims are actually more likely to be true given the core hypothesis, given theism, than their denial. So without such reasons, or reason, this is without those reasons, my arguments would remain unscathed. This is because the question is not whether my observations are like Okay, and so those Those two arguments are what I'm proposing our significant evidence against theism. Well.

0:15:35 Thomas: Time is up. Please wrap. Finish that thought. Sorry. Thank you very much. So thank you, Justin. All right. And with that, I'd like to hand it over to Rob for his opening statements. So I believe I can present you here and you are good to go, Rob. Wow.

0:16:00 Justin Or Rob: Thanks, first off, I want to thank Thomas for organizing the debate and getting this set up, as well as Justin for inviting me to participate in today's debate. I think it's important at the forefront to express differing versions of the problem of evil. That way we don't get caught up and mixing these up. So the first one that we need to look at is the logical version, which expresses that God and evil are logically incoherent, that it's impossible for God and evil to coexist. So that's not one we're talking about today. The second one is the emotional version, which I think is what the majority of people express whenever they invoke a problem of evil. They look at cancer or the Holocaust or someone getting hit by a car and trying to understand why God would allow that to happen.

0:16:47 Justin Or Rob: And they're not submitting any type of conclusion that results and therefore God doesn't exist. They're playing off an emotional argument, and therefore it's not one we ought to take seriously in philosophical thought, but it's definitely one we need to look at from a psychological level and definitely a counseling level. The third one is what we're expressing today, is the probabilistic version, or also called the evidential version. And about this version, which basically states that a person would be claiming that God probably doesn't exist based on the amount of evil we see in the world. So based on that, there are three things I want to tackle in my opening. The first is that the Bible is consistent when answering the reason as to why we suffer.

0:17:34 Justin Or Rob: So if we were to adopt a worldview, and I'm not talking about presuppositionalism here, I'm just merely talking about if we were to adopt a Christian worldview. The first thing, we'd have an understanding between the difference of good and evil at an objective level. And to an onlooker, something like the crucifixion, for example, might seem pointless. It might be an event of seemingly pointless suffering. Someone would ask, well, why would someone who is innocent, by all accounts, and who has done nothing wrong, be tortured and beaten and have nails put through his wrists and hands and strung up on a cross? Why would that be the case? And this is an example of the immediate local details not explaining why suffering takes place.

0:18:20 Justin Or Rob: Again, this is in the context of Christianity. But what we see is that when Jesus died, it was to redeem the world. It was to offer salvation to all people. It was to show God's love through this sacrifice. So a greater good came out of something that was seemingly pointless at a local level.

0:18:38 Justin Or Rob: And lastly, on the Christian worldview, we would look at heaven. So heaven, if real, would outweigh and justify the suffering that we have on this earth, because the chief purpose in life on the Christian worldview is not happiness, and it's not for people to achieve the most amount of money and happiness they can have. It's to express the knowledge of God and extend that view to all people who are in the world. That is the chief mission of the Christian, so it's not happiness, it's suffering and sacrificing to extend the message of the gospel to other people. The second thing I'd like to look at here is theodicy and and skeptical theism. To pick up with a theodicy, we can identify a greater good that has taken place in various circumstances of suffering.

0:19:24 Justin Or Rob: For example, freedom, natural law, and moral responsibility all may supersede suffering, and therefore suffering would be a byproduct of those things which are necessary. And this is endorsed by natural theologians such as Hick, Richard Winburn, and Bob Adams, all of whom expressed this view, and it's just one that I think would answer this seemingly pointless suffering claim on the probabilistic version. The second area to look at under my second argument here is that if we were to pick up skeptical theism, we could look at this from that perspective and say that we should not be able to discern why an all-loving, knowing, and powerful God would permit suffering, and this would be based on a distinction between an infinite being, who would be God, and finite beings, which would be us in humanity.

0:20:18 Justin Or Rob: And this view is one that is held to by Vanden Wagen, Alston, and Weikstra, and what they say is that we shouldn't be able to know why that's the case. We shouldn't know why God would allow something to happen, because we are finite in our time, and he is timeless. He has an overseeing view that we just don't have. And let's say we were to pick up on a probabilistic version that's expressed by William Rowe and look at his version, which is widely used. Graham Oppy, who's not a Christian, states that Rowe's evidential arguments are unsuccessful, and that he, quote, "Sees no reason why we should not say that this is just another of the many claims about which reasonable people can reasonably disagree."

0:21:07 Justin Or Rob: So the bottom line to this is that we don't have enough evidence to say one way or another, and I think at best it's a push to place probability on events without taking into account all variables and offshoots that would result from an event as misguided. Actually, in a lecture on the problem of evil, Dr. Bill Craig notes that, quote, "Every event sends a ripple effect through history, so that the consequences of any event are incalculable and incomprehensible for a finite local person." So we see that if we were to just take a car accident, for instance, where a child died, we don't know the ripple effect of that since through time. Moreover, we don't know if that greater good would come about 400 years later, and quite possibly on an entirely different continent.

0:21:55 Justin Or Rob: The third part I want to express to wrap here is Molinism, which is this idea that God has middle knowledge. So that is to say that logically prior to the divine decree, God knew what we would do in various sets of circumstances. He knew, for instance, whether or not Justin would have denied Peter three times if he were in Peter's shoes. He knows what he would have done. And based on that, God can order the world as he'd like, keeping our free will intact, as well as still being sovereign, still being in control. And if God wanted creatures with significant moral responsibility, then it seems to me that if that's the case, if he wanted those things to take place, that suffering or evil would be a byproduct of that, not being able to establish a world with free will and without evil. And if anyone wants to make a claim that says he could have done that, I would need to see a working model, because to date, no one has ever been able to do that.

0:22:55 Justin Or Rob: So I don't see any way where free will can exist, and evil is gone or neutralized or anything like that, in a way that's meaningful and coherent. And as I said, to date, no atheist has ever been able to show that to be the case. So to conclude here, the three points that I want to emphasize are, first, that the Bible is consistent when we are answering reasons as to why we suffer, adopting a Christian worldview. The second is that theodicy and skeptical theism can provide an answer to the problem of suffering, with a theodacy saying that things like freedom, natural law, and moral responsibility supersede suffering and potentially would cause a byproduct of suffering.

0:23:47 Justin Or Rob: And the second is skeptical theism, which says we wouldn't be able to discern why an all-loving, knowing a powerful God would permit suffering, based on him being infinite and us as humanity being finite. And finally, we will look at Molinism, which is the idea that we have libertarian free will, and God has middle knowledge, where he can order the world based on the free choices of his creations and do what he wants by our free will choices, not determining us and not overriding our free will. So based on those three things, I don't find the probabilistic version of evil any way meaningful and towards going to disprove God's existence. I think at best it's a push, and therefore we shouldn't use it, and we should look to other arguments that might support or deny the existence of God. Thank you.

0:24:42 Thomas: Thank you. A minute under time. So we've got a little time for me to say something quickly that I meant to say. Now, because Atheistically Speaking is, of course, mainly an atheist-centric podcast, I think a lot of our viewers are coming from that perspective. So I'd like to encourage you, thank you for all the questions that I already see flooding in. I really appreciate that. If there's anyone viewing who has a question that's maybe from the Christian perspective or from the theist perspective, I encourage you, please ask that question, because we're going to naturally have a bit of an imbalance given the audience. So, I just want to try to make sure we can try to keep things balanced. So please, if possible, if anyone has questions more geared toward Justin and toward his claims, that would be much appreciated. So with that said, I think we shall begin the informal kind of, what are we calling it, I suppose, just discussion period, bit of a cross-examination period. I'll go ahead and and hand that off to Justin to begin.

0:25:42 Justin Or Rob: Okay. Well, I have some questions, but Robert, do you have any that you'd like to start off with? Are you leading this time with your questions, or am I doing it with mine? We didn't decide, so you can go first if you would like. Sure, all right. So the first question I would have is, what is your process for assigning probabilities on events rather than just your opinion?

0:25:56 Thomas: Hey,

0:26:08 Justin Or Rob: Well, you would, as in with the sciences, if you have a particular hypothesis and then you say, well, notice that all the probabilities I've assigned here are conditional probabilities, which say, given some particular hypothesis, some event or some observation is either very likely, only slightly likely, or there's obviously a range of different likelihoods that you could assign. And so the rough number that you'll give is going to be sensitive to the hypothesis that you're playing on. And so on theism, I think there are some things that we should expect to see and some things that we should be rather surprised to see. And insofar as those can be maintained, they might constitute evidence.

0:26:58 Justin Or Rob: But I'm just not seeing how this argument can encompass every single detail that is set through time from one instance of a local problem of suffering and how that expands out to all the people that it touches. So I guess I don't see how the probabilistic version can take into account, all of these things that take place and weigh objectively whether or not the good truly does outweigh the bad. Sure.

Okay, so presumably you're, when you're speaking of this, you're talking about Roe's argument, which was more in line with my first argument that I presented, where I argued that there are seemingly, there are many instances of seemingly pointless instances of suffering. So what you're saying is that we don't have any good reason to think that we can know all the causal relations going on here and that for all we know there might be something 500 years in the future that happens which required some suffering now and because we don't see that event in the future that it looks as though it is, you know, pointless, right?

That's essentially the argument being made here. I'm saying it would at least get you to a push and on the first argument, the apparently pointless suffering. You said God may have reasons for suffering, but God would never allow pointless suffering, and I get the themes, but I just don't see how we can objectively weigh that in a meaningful way that results in anything other than what Oppie said, which is we can just reasonably disagree with one another because we don't have all the evidence to say one way or another, so that's why I call this argument a push.

0:28:36 Justin Or Rob: I'm curious what you mean by push. I'm not entirely clear on that. No, there's not enough evidence to say either way which one is right, whether or not God does allow pointless suffering just on this argument, or whether he does not. Sure, sure, but notice that my argument was in the form of likelihoods, right? So what I'm saying is that the observations that we see about the suffering in the world, that those are not at all surprising on an indifferent hypothesis, but I'm saying there is some question as to whether or not they are surprising or expected on the theistic hypothesis. So what I'm saying here is that on theism, if theism is true and we observe these things, then what has to be the case is that there has to be some kind of observation which justifies this.

0:29:27 Justin Or Rob: And what I am saying is that our not knowing that fact is a problem. Now if what you are saying here is that you are endorsing skeptical theism, that is another problem that we can talk about. But I guess I'm not entirely sure what exactly your objection is. Well, the objection is that when you're saying that God may have reasons for suffering, that in our local time, in the 80 years we're here, we need to have an answer as to why this event took place, why there's a greater good that outweighs this event of suffering. One, I don't see why you would arbitrarily place that parameter on the event to say we need to have an answer in time right now. And two, I'm wondering how you account for futuristic events which do seem possible to answer why this event did happen, even if we can't specifically point to the fact that that is it, that is exactly the one.

0:30:22 Justin Or Rob: You see what I mean? Sure, sure. So in response to the kind of causal butterfly effect, or ripple effect as you called it, about some future event, this I think undermines classical theism. I think that this response would only work on a significantly weaker God. So, for example, God is supposed to be all-powerful. He's not supposed to being limited by causal laws. Rather, he is their very author. And so I guess I was under the impression that God was able to actualize any coherent state of affairs, causal laws be damned. So again, if an instance of suffering is to be justified, we need to be identifying something such that that suffering was logically necessary for.

0:31:12 Justin Or Rob: And if God is the author of causal laws, then future and past are irrelevant. He can make states of affairs occur. He can make that good in the future happen, regardless of whether the suffering in the present occurs. Right, but if we have the presupposition that God would give us free will, then overcoming that free will into a deterministic process or something like that would make natural laws not behave like natural laws. So things need to unfold in time as God would see fit, based on how he has ordered the world on our free will. And he's not constrained by time to say, I have to give you an answer in 80 years. I very well can give it 500, and he's not obligated to do either one. And yes, God can do everything if we understand omnipotence, but it has to be logically coherent.

0:31:57 Justin Or Rob: You know, it's like the rock too big to lift. Like, that's nonsensical. It has to be logical. Sure. So for whatever hypothetical example you could talk about, whatever great good you could Talk about 500 years in the future, if you were to just pull one out of your hat and essentially say, what if this happened and our current suffering was necessary for it, then it would be easy for me to say, well, there's a logically coherent state of affairs that I could describe that as, and it does not require the current suffering. And to say that it would, I don't know how that could be justified, I guess, is what I'm saying. And I'm not entirely sure on your comments about free will. Could you bring those up again?

0:32:45 Justin Or Rob: Yeah, let me answer what you just said, and then I'll get to the free will aspect. So, so if you're saying that you can understand or you can create a new set of affairs that would make this potential instance of suffering not take place, if I'm understanding you correctly, is that right? That you can understand a set of affairs that would make it so the suffering never took place from the beginning? Is that what you're saying? All I'm saying is that whatever thing you could possibly identify in the future that is a good thing, I'm saying that our suffering currently is not at all logically necessary for that to come about, because God is capable of miracles and he could just make it occur, right? Okay, so this is where the free will dynamic would come into play. So, if I don't think God overrides our free will, do I think he can? I mean, that's, I guess that's for another time, and reformed folks may disagree with me on that, which is fine.

0:33:38 Justin Or Rob: But if God wants a world, if his main desire is a world with free creatures that lovingly enter into a relationship with him freely, and overriding that to a point to say, well, now it's no longer free, I'm going to force you into a relationship, I'm gonna force these things to happen rather than just order them based on our free will decisions, which is the Molinism aspect. Sure, okay. Well, I guess my problem there would be that there's absolutely no reason to think that miracles in the way that I've described them are impinging upon free will. I mean, you believe in the resurrection. You don't believe that this was an affront to people's free will, simply because God made a state of affairs of a person that was dead into a state of affairs where a person was now alive again.

0:34:25 Justin Or Rob: There's no reason to think that that's a problem for free will. And in the same way, I'm suggesting that whatever good you want to identify in the future, it's quite plausible that it would be very easy for God to just make it occur and not need the causal antecedents to bring it about. Out. Right. And let's not be misunderstood. I'm not saying that miracles don't happen based on free will. Of course, the resurrection is a miraculous event. What I was saying is that if we're to take free will as being something that is serious and something that is taking place every day in our day-to-day lives, then it would be in our best interest not to say, well, God can just zap everything so that way suffering is gone and we don't really have any moral responsibilities for the things that we do.

0:35:12 Justin Or Rob: So yes, miracles and free will do and can coexist, I think, but I don't see, I guess I'm having a hard time seeing why you're saying that futuristic proposition could be brought about by no suffering taking place.

0:35:27 Justin Or Rob: Well, okay, so maybe we could talk about a concrete example. Could you give me an example, I mean, I Think that would clarify what we're kind of talking abstractly here.

0:35:37 Justin Or Rob: Okay, so let's talk about, well, first of all, let's talked about just the kind of Roe's example. So Roe, in his 1979 paper, talks about a faun who gets trapped in a forest fire that was caused by natural causes, by lightning hitting a tree, right? And the faun gets trapped, and it suffers horribly and dies after several days, right. So that's an instance of pretty extreme suffering. So there doesn't seem to be any free will to blame here, right, there was no moral agent interacting to bring about that state of affairs, and there doesn't seem to be anything learned morally from this. So the question is maybe you could identify some causal scenario wherein several hundred years in the future that the carbon accumulated from the forest fire has some causal effects later.

0:36:35 Justin Or Rob: Like that's what I'm saying is that whatever state of affairs you can refer to where that suffering is somehow justified, it fails as a justification because whatever state of affairs that is, you could easily bring that about if you're omnipotent without infringing upon free will, without infringering upon free choice. Why do you think it could be brought about without infringing upon a person's free will? Well, I guess first identify, say, tell me some event in the future that could possibly be coherently justified by the forest fire and the fawn suffering.

0:37:20 Justin Or Rob: Well, again, I just wanted to know the free will part, and I'll be glad to answer that question. I'm just kind of curious, that way I can understand where you're coming from, about why a future event could be brought about without changing a person's free will or something that someone would do.

0:37:36 Justin Or Rob: Well, future events, you can rearrange molecules. If you're God, you could rearrange molecules and create any state of affairs. So for example, if the great good being acquired here is something like, I don't know, some some father and daughter are reunited or something after some tragic story, right?

0:37:58 Justin Or Rob: You could always have natural causal things that come into play and guide people together, even though they're reacting in their circumstances in a free way, right, just as you said. If you accept Molinism, you should have no problem with saying that God would know in certain circumstances what a person would freely choose to do, and I'm saying that God could set up the circumstances such that they freely follow the path that God wants them to take and bring about this great good. And it doesn't need to be justified by suffering happening a hundred years earlier. So what I'm telling you is that this theodicy is just remarkably implausible. I don't think that's the case, and I think one thing you're failing to take into account is that God ordering the world based on our free will decisions is based on our free will decisions.

0:38:47 Justin Or Rob: It's not like he can bring about a set of circumstances that someone would not have done. I mean, that's incoherent. Excuse me. So I guess that's what I'm failing to see. And getting back to the fawn in the forest, I mean I can't tell you an event right now that would justify the faun dying in the tree. I don't really have a tremendous example. But the point is that it is possible that that could take place, that there could be an event as such. It's now logically impossible. Possible. So if that's the case and we don't know what the future events are holding, why are we placing so much value on this argument that we can't be sure of? And I'm not saying that this is an argument that fails miserably or goes down in flames. I do agree with Oppy when he says that reasonable people can disagree on this because there's so much evidence that we don't know about a particular event in time.

0:39:37 Justin Or Rob: So that's why I call it a push at best, in that we need to examine other arguments rather than one like this. So that's all I was getting at. Okay, sure. And I mean, so you're, I totally agree with you that it's possible, right? There's a logically possible scenario where these things could be justified by things I can't even conceive of. That's perfectly fine. But to think that this does anything to the strength of the evidential argument would just be to misunderstand the evidentia argument. But I would like to get back to this concept of free will and how this could plausibly serve as a theodicy in response to certain instances of suffering.

0:40:18 Justin Or Rob: What I guess I'm curious about is, what's so valuable about free will? What gives free will its goodness? Why is free will a valuable thing? Well, the ability to choose A or not A, and have your every, let's say, pick up a deterministic point of view, then there's literally no meaning in anything that you do because it's already predetermined. So I think on its face, if you compare free will to determinism, I mean, it seems properly basic that one is far superior to the other. Wouldn't you agree? Well, I'll step aside for that question for now. But I guess what I'm asking now is, that if it's the case that God does not have the kind of robust free will that you're talking about, then does that suggest that God lacks a particular good-making property?

0:41:09 Justin Or Rob: And if so, how on earth can you say that free will is a good thing, because then that's a moral value that you don't have grounded in God, and I'm wondering where you're getting this idea that freewill is good on theism. Alright, so go back to what you said about God not having free will. Repeat that one more time. Well, at least in terms of the kind of free will that you're referring to, which is a It's a kind of libertarian free will, which I'm not entirely sure is, I mean, I'll step aside that question. But if we're talking about libertarian Free Will, which is a genuine choice between, you know, right or wrong action, right? So it entails some kind of moral free will.

0:41:53 Justin Or Rob: God has no such thing as moral free Will. It is impossible. It is a logical contradiction to say that God, if we're defining God as classical theism here, that God is capable of performing a wrong action, correct?

0:42:11 Justin Or Rob: If you're saying God is incapable of sinning, I would say yes, if that's what you mean by wrong action. Yeah, so God does not have moral free will, is what I'm saying.

0:42:22 Justin Or Rob: No, but as a maximally great being, what I am saying is that God's nature is goodness, and that doesn't play into sin. So can God do whatever he'd like to do? Well, as long as it's logically coherent with his nature, then yes. So in getting back to God's free will and our free will, what I'm saying here is that God makes the decision as to what type of world he wants to have. And if he wants a world of free creatures, from that decree, all of those things going forward are based off of his decision to say, "I want a world with free creatures." And of course, he could say, "I want to world that's based off determinism, where I control people to do what I want them to do." And that's his will. That's whatever he'd like to do, but I think biblically and philosophically we can make arguments for free will from the nature of God that give us these various set of circumstances where people do commit evil acts and suffering does happen in the world.

0:43:18 Justin Or Rob: So I don't think you can have a world where everyone has libertarian free will and it's free of evil and suffering. And I think if that was logically possible, possible. That's the world we would be in right now. But we're not in that world. So I don't think it's logically possible. Okay, but you do think that it's, I mean, so you believe in God. So you believe in a being that does not have moral free will, but nevertheless, because of his nature, his morally perfect nature, always does the morally perfect thing, correct?

0:43:48 Justin Or Rob: See, you're misdefining free will based on the nature of God. I'm not even talking about free will here. I'm just, I just said what you believe. You believe that God always does the free will thing necessarily because he's a morally perfect being, right? Yeah. And you don't think there's anything trivial about that, right, you think it's perfectly significant and it's a great good that he always does, the perfect thing, right.

0:44:13 Justin Or Rob: I guess I'm not understanding your line of questioning, so you're saying that my belief is that—let me just give you my belief about the moral values and duties of God. Sure. So what I'm saying is that God has a maximally great nature of morality, of goodness, or however you want to word it. And from that stems our values and duties as human beings. So yes, God is morally perfect in that way where he doesn't sin, but his free will is juxtaposed to his nature.

So he can't do anything out of his nature because that would be logically contradictory. Contradictory. So saying, can God sin? That's like saying, can you be a married bachelor? Like, no, he can't. Say It's logically contradictory. So, so that's my position. Does that clear things up? Yeah. And I guess, I mean, whether or not we call that free will, we can, we can set that aside, we can, I'm fine with just calling free will essentially libertarian free will. Right.

So God wouldn't have libertarian three will, you would agree? No, he would, because it's, because because it's based on his nature. Whatever he wants to do, he can. But you've got to look at things logically. Sure. You know, can. All right. Go ahead. So, yeah, let's move on forward with that premise. So God has libertarian free will, which means that, I mean, I don't know, maybe we're just defining this differently, but I take it as an axiom of classical theism that, as a matter of principle, it is impossible or logically impossible for God to do something that is wrong, right? I would assume that that's something you would agree to. Okay, so under at least the typical view of libertarian free will, there's a possibility, there's an actual possibility that a person will do wrong.

0:46:04 Justin Or Rob: So under that definition, I don't think God would have free will. And that's my point here. He doesn't have libertarian freedom. I disagree with the definitions, but I see what you're saying, and I would again just point back to the nature of God based on free will. Like our natures, we have a restricted nature, but we still have libertarian free will Yeah, okay, so the question is, when we go back in time, or prior to time, and we're thinking about God when he has this choice of world to actualize and the choice of the kinds of persons to actualize, is there any moral justification whatsoever for him to create persons that are anything less than also having morally perfect natures? Because if they had morally perfect nature, then would they not necessarily, as God does, do the correct thing all the time? And would that be any less trivial than God's own decisions?

0:47:02 Justin Or Rob: So it sounds like what you're saying is, if God were to create people, they would essentially be many gods, where they would have the same exact identical nature as he does? Is that what you're getting at? I'm saying, if it's a good thing that God has a morally perfect nature such that every action he does leads to the perfect act and he always makes the right choices, if that's a good thing and it's not trivial and it is a good thing, then what justification does God have to creating a population of people who have anything less than that?

0:47:38 Justin Or Rob: I guess, again, I'm missing the distinction being made here, because if God wants to make people with free will, He's not making people with morally perfect natures like Himself. He's making many gods, and I would argue that that would be logically contradictory. But again, okay, so if, again, we're talking about free will, but I think we're using it differently. All I'm saying is that if God, as something flowing from his nature, always does the correct thing, and you think that that's a good thing, right, then the question is, why did he not also make it the case that human persons are morally perfect creatures who are free in your sense, but because of their nature, always do the good thing.

0:48:27 Justin Or Rob: So there's nothing, you know, if it's a problem for those humans that they're morally perfect and that they always do The Good Thing, then the same problem applies to God. I'm asking why it is that God chose to create persons that have a lesser moral quality than God did in the first place. Is there any justification for that? Well, I would say he's not creating creatures who are deterministic in that way of – That's not deterministic though, not any more than God, right? Right. Well, if you can let me finish. What's the problem? Let me finish, I'll get to that. So if he's creating people who are, in what you're saying, have a morally perfect nature, so they have a morality perfect nature endowed with libertarian free will, I would count that as a divine attribute, not a human attribute.

0:49:17 Justin Or Rob: So I think it's a category error. So I think when he creates people to have a legitimate decision to interact with one another, who would be unlike God, that they do have that choice to do good and bad. And I would argue that people were originally created with a good nature, and then they fell in the fall by sinning. So again, I think it's a category error because you're saying, why didn't God create more people just like himself? Why didn't he create other gods? No, it just doesn't seem like a meaningful question to me. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding. Okay, well, I mean, there's a couple things you said there that I'm a little bit confused about. On the one hand, you said that it's a category error and that it is impossible for humans to have a divine attribute, correct?

0:50:06 Justin Or Rob: Okay, then we have a problem with Jesus. Secondly, you also said that, despite having just said that it's impossible, you also said, that in the beginning, we did have morally perfect natures. The problem there, of course, is that, no, we didn't, because if we did, then as God, we would necessarily do the good, and we would never fail. Right? Right. Alright, so let me pick up with the Jesus thing first, and then I'll address that in the beginning we had morally perfect nature. That was a misspeak on my part, But why do we have a problem with Jesus if we understand the classical doctrine of the hypostatic union? Okay, so if we have some doctrine of some – what was the hypostat union? I forget how to say that.

0:50:51 Justin Or Rob: So if it's coherent to speak about persons having attributes such as moral perfection as you believe Jesus did, right? Right? You believe as a result of Jesus' perfect moral nature that it was impossible for Jesus to sin, correct?

0:51:09 Justin Or Rob: All right. It was impossible for Jesus and his humanity to sin. No, I think it was logically possible for Jesus and his humility to sin but he did not. So that's why I said that's when we're talking about this doctrine which is quite deep. So we would say that Jesus as the second person of the Trinity has always existed, the eternal sunshine. And that when When God came down, and then we would talk about the Incarnation, added human nature to the second person, that is far different than God creating one single person who doesn't have a separate attribute of deity, because Jesus and his deity wasn't ever created, and he was always there. Sure. So you've given me your theology, but you haven't given me a reason to suggest that it's logically impossible possible that persons be created with morally perfect natures.

0:52:00 Justin Or Rob: You've said that this is a category error, but all that means is that this is a, I mean, you're just grouping things differently. I'm suggesting there's nothing at all logically impossible about God creating persons that all have morally perfect nature, and as a result never do anything wrong. And that to me, if it's trivial, then so too is God in his own decisions because they would be motivated in the exact same axiomatic way.

0:52:30 Justin Or Rob: No, again, I don't see the two-ness, if you will, of saying that if God wants to create a creature who has a morally perfect being, then they can't therefore sin, so they can't do things that are wrong, but they still have libertarian free will. And that's a difference between a divine and a human attribute, again. And that's why I said I misspoke when I said morally perfect. I meant morally good before the fall. Okay.

0:52:59 Thomas: Rob, sorry, I want to just cut in because I think that Justin has had far more of an opportunity to grill Rob than Rob has. So I just want to try to make it a little bit fair because we're actually almost to the end of this. Well, to the end of the time we allotted kind of unofficially. So Rob, I want to give you the opportunity to ask Justin any questions you might have. Have.

0:53:06 Justin Or Rob: Oh, that's true. Sorry.

0:53:18 Justin Or Rob: Okay. All right. So the first question I would have is, on naturalism, is suffering objectively bad?

0:53:30 Justin Or Rob: Well, first of all, I've not defended naturalism this evening. But is it objectively bad, that'll depend on exactly what you mean by those words, and it'll depend on the naturalist you subscribe to, because naturalism, obviously as you probably know, is defined in many different ways. At least as I define it, not necessarily.

0:53:55 Justin Or Rob: Okay, so let's leave aside the naturalistic part for a moment. So is suffering objectively bad? Let me define what I mean. By objective, I mean valid and binding outside of our thoughts and emotions or our feelings. Are you asking if I personally think that this is true? Right. Okay. I think yes. I can't tell you why it hinges on your argument. Oh, here's the thing. Well, I'll say two things. I'll first say yes. Secondly, I think it's irrelevant to my argument because my arguments are about our explanatory comparisons. Persons. And quite obviously on theism, it must be true that those are mind-independent properties, right?

0:54:40 Justin Or Rob: So if that's the case, then that's why it's kind of irrelevant, because the explanatory power is there in the first place. Right. So I agree. So if you were to come at it from a Christian world perspective and critique mainly the Christian view and say, you know, we do have these things that are objective in this context. But the line of questioning is simply to say, what makes you assume that to be the case outside of Christianity. Does that make sense?

0:55:08 Justin Or Rob: Sorry, what am I assuming outside of Christianity again? Where's that grounding for suffering coming from, to answer that question? Sure, but notice that nowhere in any of my arguments is the premise that suffering is bad on indifference or on naturalism. I've never stated that, and my arguments do not require it. All right, we'll move on. So let me go back to the second argument here. You said sentient beings are supposed to flourish and that God can make people flourish.

0:55:45 Justin Or Rob: So if God – and that was one of your premises is that God can make people flourish. So in what way is that coherent with what we say about free will? So I just wanted you to define that a little bit better. Are you asking specifically about the three reasons I gave for why, on theism, sentient beings are at least supposed to flourish? Is that what you're asking me? Yeah, I had a note, and maybe I wrote it down incorrectly, but you said God can make people flourish. I wanted you to expand on that a little bit more. Oh, I just mean that God is in a position and has the requisite abilities in order to make it the case that, for example, resources aren't so scarce.

0:56:31 Justin Or Rob: On naturalism or on indifference, there's a finite number, and as we all know, the scarcity is increasing, and it's a problem. But on theism, there would of course be no affront to free will to say that God could, you know, magically multiply loaves and fishes, right?

0:56:53 Justin Or Rob: Okay. All right. So, okay, that helps me a little bit more. So I wanted to pull back to skeptical theism because you said you wanted to go more into that for one of the reasons I pointed out. So let's say we import Vanden Wagen and what he has to say about skeptical theism, and that we should not be able to discern why an all-loving, knowing, and powerful God would permit suffering.

0:57:17 Justin Or Rob: Yeah. Well, if you adopt skeptical theism, then that would do away with my first argument. I'll fully admit to that.

0:57:25 Justin Or Rob: And maybe that's where you were reading that Graham Oppie quote. Maybe that was what the context was. But yeah, if you adopt skeptical theism, Roe's argument falls away. But it does not touch my second argument, which is a comparative likelihood argument, which essentially, the way I would respond to that argument, if skeptical theism were put forward as a rebuttal, would be to say, okay, well, it's certainly possible that there are reasons that we don't know of that might justify God's permitting this suffering. But again, if we can appeal to unknowns, it is also possible that there are extra reasons why God would want to prevent that suffering. And without antecedent reasons for preferring one of those collections of reasons be either greater in number or intensity than the other, then they cancel each other out.

0:58:11 Justin Or Rob: And at the end of the day, indifference is a better explanation than theism.

0:58:18 Justin Or Rob: All right, but if it's merely indifferent, if what you're saying is that skeptical theism can't, and you were talking about flourishing, right, your second argument? Correct, correct. Okay, so if skeptical theism can't touch flourishing, it sounds like to me you're you're saying, well, we don't know one way, and if we're not sure the other way, then what we're left with is indifference. And I would argue that we just don't know in general why those particular claims about flourishing would have any relevance to the topic here as far as suffering. So I guess I just don't see why the flourishing thing, I guess, even matters, which is why I was trying to have you clarify, because maybe I missed something in the original piece. Yeah, so if you recall, the second argument, what I was doing is I was identifying three facts about the tendency for, you know, with which creatures either flourish or languish, right?

0:59:15 Justin Or Rob: And what I'm saying is that those three facts are very likely on indifference, right, so you would agree with that, that those observations are not at all surprising on indifference. But now we get to, well, that was the second premise. So the first premise would be that they are unlikely on theism. So if you want to say that, well, theism doesn't predict that, then all you're doing is you're undermining further the explanatory power to explain those observations. And so regardless, at the end of the day, indifference is a better explanation than those facts because indifference says something about whether or not we'd be able to predict them or not predict them. And theism, if you adopt skeptical theism, suggests we can't even know. So it's barely an explanatory hypothesis in the first place. So the evidence should be forthcoming. Okay, alright, that was it for my questions.

1:00:07 Thomas: Okay, good. We went a little over time on that, but I wanted to make sure that Rob had a chance to grill Justin a little bit. So thanks, guys. That was excellent. Well, we have a large stream of questions. Can I ask you guys real quick, can you see the questions or is that just me right now?

1:00:07 Justin Or Rob: Okay I might be able to if I go online

1:00:25 Thomas: Don't worry about it. I just wanted to check because I think I can highlight them here and it should work. So as I had referenced, we do have an imbalance, a lot of questions for Rob. So Rob, you may be in for something here, but I'm going to do my best to, well,

1:00:30 Justin Or Rob: Okay Yeah, try and split them if you can I

1:00:44 Thomas: I will try, but unfortunately we are not getting very many for Justin. But I have one myself that I really want to ask Justin, but I think I'm going start with some we've had here waiting for a while. Thanks everyone for the questions you've asked.

1:01:14 Thomas: Alright, well that does it for part one. Again, it was really long and part two is really long as well, but really rewarding, I think. So, thanks for listening. I don't want to take up any more time. I'll see you on Thursday for part two.