A Catholic, Protestant, Atheist and Agnostic Discuss the Problem of Evil

i think there are certain goods you can't have them without a concomitant evil like compassion or courage an example i've sometimes given is the example of of someone like martin luther king being a great man right because he overcomes this great evil surely we'd rather be living in a world where there were no racism and no need for martin luther king it sounds to me that in a lot of cases when somebody says i just disagree i mean you you so you think it's better to actualize a world in which that i think it's very valuable i think a world that has that and has the accompanying evils is more valuable i've seen videos of like animals being like ripped apart like on reddit and stuff sometimes you'll look at the animal and they look peaceful like they're being ripped apart and they're just like sitting there like this just like getting their leg like ripped off the theist may say well maybe goddess isn't all powerful that may be the case but such a ghost of a god uh is hardly different from atheism or worth believing in this episode of the cosmic skeptic podcast is brought to you by you to support the podcast please visit patreon.com forward slash cosmic skeptic [Music] a catholic a protestant an atheist and an agnostic will walk into a house in the bible belt this sounds like the beginning of a joke but it is in fact the beginning of today's episode of the cosmic skeptic podcast because in a rather ambitious attempt to expand the podcast and make it reach new heights i've invited three other guests onto podcast with me today i am joined by cameron bertucci our resident protestant i'm joined by joe schmidt our agnostic trent horn our catholic and i am as always alex o'connor your atheist and we decided it would be fun since we're all here together in houston in order to do an event the captain christianity exchange which at this point will be in the past so the videos of of the interactions that we're all going to be having in our public event i'll put the links down in the description we thought while we're here it'd be cool to sit down as a four and talk about something which is important to all of us from our different perspectives it comes up regardless of of of how you're talking about the subject of religion uh which is the problem of evil and what better company to talk about the problem of evil with than people who come at it from completely different approaches so i don't really know how we should best begin this but i guess for myself the problem of evil is is easily the greatest argument against the existence of a god would would we all agree that that is the case you mean for people in general or for us for in in your view i mean like like what in terms of arguments that would seek to establish kind of strong a atheism that god doesn't exist i would yeah i would say historically the problem of evil or unjustifiable suffering is a strong one i mean aquinas basically dealing with the arguments for god really dealt with two arguments against god one's problem of evil and one is the problem of essentially scientific explanation apart from god so i would say historically yes though i mean it's not i have other concerns more so than the the problem of evil for me personally it was never as big a hurdle to get over as maybe for other people what do you guys you think it's a i think it's the like the biggest challenge to perfect being theism is the way that i would put it so i joe and i were talking about this in our interview is that like how what is the real what is the real breadth of the problem of evil what do i like of all the different types of theisms that might be out there which one does it really target and i think that it targets primarily perfect being theism where you've got these triomies the the omni benevolent god the omni omnipotent god and does it really like so there's a there's a philosopher who i interviewed recently on my channel his name is uh philip gough is he a philosopher i think he's a philosopher yeah and uh he's got this concept of god that he's sort of toying around with at the at the moment where he says that god is all good but he's not all-powerful and what he argues is that the problem of evil doesn't really even like say anything about that type of god if that god exists yeah that's a view there was a rabbi who i forget his name right off top my head but his 14 year old son i think died of a degenerative disease and that was essentially the conclusion that that view's been around for a while that the conclusion he came to how do i understand this horrible death of my son and being a rabbi yeah he said well god loves us and he wants to help us but he just can't yeah i love there is a book uh by an old book by this guy bc johnson called the atheist debaters handbook it's like his little book i found the library once and it was funny he was dealing with a problem easily so the theist may say well maybe god this isn't all-powerful and he said in the book that may be the case but such a ghost of a god uh is hardly different from atheism or worth believing in so i thought that was an interesting reply from from him that like i think for a lot of atheists i don't know it's like perfect being theism or bust yeah i don't know because yeah the idea that maybe god is all loving but not all powerful it seems to me a difference without distinction to most theodicies uh that is in their practical effect if you have a theodicy which for anyone listening who doesn't know is is an attempt to um what's the word reconcile the existence of a loving god with the existence of evil in the world or at least suffering in the world um well not just a loving god well unless you're trying to make it yeah yeah a god a god and anything both all loving and all but it does depend traditionally speaking to reconcile god and evil would be a defense to give a reason to explain why god allows evil and the goods he's achieving would be theodosia yeah that's right that's that's a helpful distinction um i think in terms of trying to justify let's say the existence of a god in the face of evil and suffering people have given lots of famous examples they talk about the fact that god wants us to have free will he talks about the fact that god allows evil and suffering to bring about higher order goods but to me this translates to saying something like well god has this end which he desires to bring about and potentially needs to bring about if he's a maximally great being if he's if he's by nature good he might need to bring about the best outcomes or or at least have a duty to bring about particular outcomes i i'm skeptical that but you can keep going but i'm i frown my nose yeah a lot of people uh found that too and i'm not sure i can even agree with it myself just because i'm not sure what it would mean to bring about like the maximal amount of good or the idea that god has to do yes like like for example like imagine god made a world a universe like ours but it only possessed inorganic matter and it actually had a lot of beauty like it had waterfalls and rocky crags and meteors and volcanoes and all kinds of cool stuff would it be i mean would it be bad for god to make that kind of world i i don't it would have no suffering in it whatsoever so i don't i doubt you would think that god was bad for making a world this inorganic matter but i think a lot of us would think you could make that better with people and conscious beings but i don't know if god is like obliged to make it better so yeah sure um whether he needs to or not the the but you'd expect something to expect from him not to drop the ball the justifications are kind of a given that take take a form of saying that god has some other purpose which he seeks to fulfill such as free will and the idea is that there's some kind of metaphysical or logical impossibility with god bringing about say a world of free creatures and there being no suffering or something like this and so in a sense something like a free will defense that says well there's just no way to bring about free will without suffering is like a way of saying well god is all loving but because he's got this thing free will that he wants to bring about he's just incapable of preventing this kind of suffering because if he were we wouldn't have free will so a kind of response that makes sense of a god that allows suffering that says well maybe god's just not all powerful it seems to me the same kind of thought as many other kinds of theodicies because because they're essentially saying well kind of god it's not like god's happy about this suffering taking place but he he just doesn't have the power to take it away either because uh there's there's some kind of thing that he needs to bring about that requires suffering or just because there's something he wants to bring about that still makes it impossible for him to not have suffering it seems like a similar kind of approach i guess it depends on what you mean by all powerful i mean that's the that's the key yeah i mean if if it's metaphysically impossible like if there's no way that reality could be such that god could bring about these goods without allowing certain sorts of evils to transpire then it's no mark against god's omnipotence to be bound in this way after all it's impossible for god to have done otherwise then he couldn't have had the power to that because it's an impossible power essentially so i don't really see that as compromising god's omnipotence it just depends on how you cash it out yeah well neither do i but i mean in terms of how people might make sense of this when somebody says something like well i i've gone through a horrible experience and so i can the only way i can make sense of this is to think that maybe god just isn't all powerful they could be equally captivated by a view that says you're so nearly right you're right that the suffering exists because god somehow has to allow it but it's not because he's not omnipotent it's just because even there are things that an omnipotent being can't do i think he's not an omnipotent just kind of on the path it's like god is saying well god has allowed this suffering and it could be the case that there is a particular good that would not be accessible without it so i mean if you think about like omnipotence is like power is the ability to to do something um there are just some things no amount of power could do because they're impossible for whatever whatever reasons i think what you're getting on the free will issue there's kind of two different ways to go about uh well although i don't i don't want to derail from the the point that you were making i'll put it out there and you can tell me if i'm derailing one approach it's kind of like planting his view it could be the case god can't make a world where all free creatures choose good because we have these counter factuals of freedom like you make cameron you put camera in the world whatever he's doing don't use me in this example by the way cameron will always choose the wrong in some possible world i'm not sure i'm really inclined to that i think god could make a world where only free creatures choose things uh but it would also lack certain goods and so it may be the case god has reasons for allowing certain good like i i would agree i think there are certain goods you you can't have them without a concomitant evil like compassion or courage yeah you might have things that look like them but aren't they of course we we spoke before i mean we had a debate on uh matt frad's channel a while ago and we spoke a little bit about this i can't remember we spoke specifically about about this topic but the idea of there being these goods like bravery that can't come about unless they're parasitic on some suffering or evil right to me something like bravery is only good insofar as it overcomes some some form of suffering or evil like it seems to me if you could have a world without the suffering and without the bravery without the fear and without the bravery this would be more desirable because sure you wouldn't have bravery but if you don't need bravery it doesn't it doesn't just seem to me to be like a good thing intrinsically it seems only good relative to the existence of some form of fear and suffering without the fear and suffering it would it wouldn't be intrinsically good in fact if you removed the fear and suffering and somebody was still acting in the way that a brave person would act you you'd say they were just being like immodest you think it was a bad thing well right here let me jump in real quick i don't know that we can actually advance the conversation when you make that kind of move because to me i think the problem of evil i don't want to say that it collapses into axiology but that's very central to the problem of evil is this notion of like what is most valuable because god is going to instantiate the world that is most valuable and what you're saying is that a world that doesn't have these goods but also doesn't have the suffering is more valuable than a world that does have those goods with the with the evils that sort of come along with it so and like how do you go like how do you advance when you kind of put your foot on the what's the right term put your foot down and you're like i just don't think that that's as valuable like i think what's most valuable is a world that doesn't have that and then what can we say we can say well we think that a world that has those that has those higher order goods and the accompanying evils like we think that's more valuable it's like how do you actually progress there that's that's kind of i think we may actually run into like a stalemate because i think that there are different intuitions on different goods that are supposedly served by suffering for example the example of bravery i think is maybe a bit of a poor one because it seems intuitively to me that we'd rather have no need for bravery and no bravery in the same way but that's just you like i don't think i don't think that i think that courage is or like bravery and courage compare it for example though to something like the free will defense which i think is it's a bit easier to argue that something like free will is just of a of a different category of of you could think so you could pick something else you could pick compassion for example or forgiveness or yeah like let's say somebody is like let's say someone experiences compassion for the suffering of a fictional character and even that i don't think is like i agree with you like courage where there's no real danger it's very like don quixote very like okay but like you know but but like but to watch a film and to have to feel an emotional compassion towards the sufferings of a person that doesn't exist you know they're fictional i i don't think that that's a a i think that i think i think the existence of the compassion itself it is a good thing yeah it may be and maybe that for that reason it's a it's a better example i think that that's to answer your point cameron i think that this isn't kind of equally obviously true with all of these higher order goods i just think that was something like bravery it seems to me fairly intuitive i mean you said you prefer to live in a world where there is fear and suffering so that we can have the good of bravery an example i've sometimes given is the example of of someone like martin luther king being a great man right because he overcomes this great evil surely we'd rather be living in a world where there were no racism and no need for martin luther king it sounds to me that in a lot of cases when somebody says i just disagree i mean you you so you think it's better to actualize the world in which that i think it's very valuable i think a world that has that and has the accompanying evils is more valuable i mean that's that's why i say that i think we may be at a stalemate like if you when you make that move we're just disagreeing about like our baseline axiological assumptions that we bring to the table we're all bringing our own axiological assumptions and if that's the one that you bring and that's the one that i bring it's like how do we how do we advance from there i i haven't seen and like i don't i don't really see a way out i'm curious what your thoughts are on yeah i mean what i'm trying to convey that bottom i mean it might just be a clash of intuitions i mean i tend to think that lots of philosophy is based lots of actually reasoning in general including scientific reasoning bottoms out and kind of seemings things like that like things seem to be the case where things appear to you to be the case and sometimes those can come in conflict when you're in these sorts of dialectical contexts and it's really difficult to know how to progress from there when two people kind of disagree with respect to their basic teaming can we go back a little bit alex to your the formulation of the problem of evil you find most pressing is it to you that it is a logical contradiction between god's existence and the world or that it just makes god's existence highly improbable i think it's more the latter i'm a little suspicious of the distinction here when people try to distinguish between the logical and and evidential problem of evil they'll say if you have a logical problem of evil that says something like you know if there is a god there would be no suffering there is suffering therefore there is no god people say this argument is dead in the water because as long as it's logically possible that god has some reason like morally sufficient reason to bring about evil the argument fails in other words if if one of the premises is not is it's logically possible for one of the premises to be to be false then it's not really a logical argument you're putting forward an evidential one but imagine if someone put forward the calam cosmological argument and said this is a logical argument a valid syllogism everything that begins to exist has a cause the universe began to exist therefore the universe has a cause and i said but that's not really a logical argument because as long as it's logically possible that the universe uh didn't have a beginning as long as it's logically possible that something can begin without a cause then you know the argument's dead in the water so you shouldn't really be advocating a logical column but rather an evidential kalam but that just seems like a weird distinction to make and i feel like people do it unfairly with the problem of evil but not with any other deductive argument that exactly if it goes exactly like that because it seems to me like i've encountered when i've heard your discussions about the problem of evil it sounds like you've said things like i understand how people could see where free will would be a reason god would tolerate evil among humans or something like that but but then why do animals suffer in such and such way yes and and that seems to insinuate that you could have some evils that they're they're not a lot they're not there's not a logical contradiction there as opposed to you know god uh you know well there's a lot of different logical arguments uh trying to say that god does doesn't exist they'd be incompatible properties things like that but it seems like you're saying it's just like well yeah i could see a world where there's evil at this threshold but not at this threshold and that's more than evidential it seems like to me i'm not sure because you could just you could just pull out a logical version you could say for instance that the existence of suffering does not there's no kind of logical syllogism i would use just from the existence of suffering alone to rule out god's existence but maybe i could formulate if i said well god would tolerate human evil for free will but not animal suffering then i could just formulate a logical problem of evil that specifically uh focuses on animal suffering it would still be a valid argument it'd still be a formal logical syllogism the fact that it's kind of more specified or allows for the existence of other forms of unrelated suffering it it seems irrelevant to me as well say this so trent's already he's got a his view is basically he doesn't like the distinction either and he's like one of the most premier philosophers that's working on the problem of evil he's a catholic so it's i'll let you explain but it is so he thinks go ahead so he thinks that so basically there's there's two premises to the argument he does have that he does have that view but that's not what i'm talking about now go ahead yeah what i'm talking about now is that the logical version and the evidential version he thinks both are basically very similar so the first one or the the first premise is basically a theological claim about what would exist if god exists and then the second one is the evidential claim about whether or not there's this type of suffering in the world so like evil exists or animal suffering exists and in the logical version the evidential version it involves both the theological claim and then the evidential claim so he thinks that the distinction collapses too it's just like whatever you whatever specific theological claim you happen to be focusing on at this time yes is the so i and i'm kind of like i kind of agree with that i kind of think that the distinction between the logical and the evidential version you know what it seems to me if i if i can be frank is it seems to me that somebody will kind of present a logical problem of evil and in in the context of a discussion or a debate where somebody is trying to argue against an atheist they try to kind of they say like well are you making a logical version or an evidential version and they kind of get them on the back foot thinking well i guess it's logically well yes logically possible that god could have morally sufficient reason and they're like well then you're not making as strong a claim as you thought you were it seems like kind of a useful rhetorical tool for the for the theist but if you actually like pay close attention to the the conversation that's taking place as you say karen i think the distinction is actually just just it collapses it's not really a it's not a helpful one it's only helpful instrumentally to winning uh conversation you know now i want to like play moderator and be like trent is that what you were trying to do no well i don't think that's what you were trying to do yeah i don't think that's what you're trying to do i feel like that's how i'm trying to wrap my i do believe there's there is this distinction between one claim that any amount of evil whatsoever would show god does not exist versus particular kinds of quantity or quality of evil would make it unlikely i do think there's a legitimate there's a difference between those but both of those could be called logical well then i mean there's semantics and that's fine it's not it's not semantics it's the difference between a logical argument and like to say something's not a logical argument it's kind of an evidential problem it's not it's not logical because it's logically possible that one of the premises is false seeks to undermine the logical validity of the argument where i would the reason i ask for the distinction is because i believe that if the problem is a certain quality or quantity of evil then that is subject to a criticism that can't be leveled against an argument that says any amount of evil would disprove god because the criticism would be this that if an atheist says yes i could see how this amount of evil could be justifiable but not this amount one wonders why can't the defenses for this amount be applied to the other amount whereas if you have someone who says hey it's all or none that reply won't really work well it might kind of be like if if the government came along and just just flooded everybody's houses by just like pouring water into their front gardens and just absolutely flooding and destroying their property and you said that like this is ridiculous obviously the government is is trying somehow to to cause riots or something and somebody said well now hold on like i mean if the government were to install the sprinkler system that like watered your garden you think this was fine right and it's like yes and you say well look so so now your argument isn't so much that it's like it's some some real like absolute incompatibility between a good government and flooding your house because you're saying you know you're allowing the government to to put a little bit of water onto your garden but if it's it's this much then that's that's too but like it just seems like a weird line to take do you see one see what i'm saying no i mean there's robust versions of the evidential problem that i agree with you that if somebody basically says the logical problem of evil doesn't work and then they kind of ignore the other arguments for an evidential problem then that's then that's problematic but um then it'll come back down to though in different intuitions when certain things are allowable what can we foresee and i think it's a bit more than that when we because yeah i would love to get to drill down a little bit especially your concerns seem to be because you and you seem to have reaffirmed this previously i don't want to talk too much i want to hear joe says too and cam that i would think that if the concern is primarily about non-human suffering i wonder if there is a way to apply the justifications for for human suffering in the in these different ways that's i guess that's what i would look at to be to be most promising but if you think human suffering is also pointless then we're kind of back at square one i think that would that would be that would be good to discuss i think one one thing to say is that i think we would all agree i'm not sure but that an argument a problem of evil argument that says something like any amount of evil and suffering whatsoever is logically incompatible with god is is just is a bad argument it's it's not going to work it's not super popular but there's i mean there's people who are people who say that but i think everybody here would probably think that that's that would that would be a bad argument i mean i for myself i think when i say like a logical problem of evil i think maybe that there's a confusion here because you seem to be defining the logical problem of evil as the view that any amount of evil and suffering is incompatible with god i think that's pretty traditional i i have maybe maybe i guess it's it's if if that's what people are calling it maybe i should i should change my terminology here because when i talk about the difference between a logical and an evidential problem i mean to say that there are kind of versions of an argument that don't say any amount of evil and suffering is incompatible but yeah what you're saying you're basically it's still like a logical idea some versions of the problem of evil just focus on a particular range of facts or a particular range of kinds of evil and then you can go on to say of those that that is incompatible with god's existence so not and that you could probably classify that as a logical argument from evil but instead of getting bogged down in the terminology we might just want to lay out a particular version of the argument from evil and then just discuss that so i figured i could probably start with that um i could offer maybe just a pretty intuitive kind of bayesian argument from evolution animal suffering so we're not going to get into the fancy base machine goes burr we're not going to do that but let's just think i mean under perfect being hypothesis at least by my lights uh it just seems really surprising that god would use in his very creative act this stuff this process which is just rife with suffering and languishing and death and predation and parasitism you know nature writing tooth and claw organisms are ripping each other to shreds and this is just like built into natural selection this is built into the very process just this death and destruction and suffering and so on is built into the very means the very fabric of creation it seems from the from the get-go it seems and that just seems like a really surprising way we wouldn't predict that just a priori from the armchair would we predict a perfect being to bring about let's say humans and other ascension creatures by means of the process which is fraught with this kind of suffering this almost horrendous evil and not just any horrendous evil but hundreds of millions of years of this kind of evil i mean i remember just to make this appointment last night it was 2020 there were these fighters in australia and tens of thousands of koalas were burned alive now that's just australia that's koalas these koalas are suffering being burned alive that's just australia just a few weeks of forest fires think about the whole world now not just australia don't now just think about a few weeks think about a few years nothing about tens of thousands of years now tens of millions of years now how about hundreds of millions of years it's just it's mind-boggling and so that would that just by my life it just seems surprising on theism whereas on a view where i guess we should just say natural reality is indifferent to the flourishing and languishing of sentient creatures that's not as surprising nature's run through the claw there's nothing down there that cares about our the flourishing of sentient creatures so given that it's surprising one hypothesis and nor neurosurprising on another we would have some reason we have some evidence for the hypothesis on which it isn't surprising so that's an argument that we could consider and i think it's worth i mean it's worth talking about human suffering but this argument works if we're just talking about non-humans and you say kind of natural selection it involves so much suffering it relies upon it as you say it's the very machinery survival of the fittest entails death and destruction and suffering of the unfit this is this is how it works um to me i find this a compelling argument i think it works i think there are some complications when you talk about human beings because there seems to be something else that that could be said to be going on there certainly just from a kind of coherent christian picture that that humans are special they're insoles whatever it may be but even even on that account humans evolved like what a few million years ago i mean homo sapiens have been around for a few hundred thousand years so you've still got millions hundreds of millions of years as joe says of the suffering to me this this is probably the strongest version of the problem of evil i have so many thoughts i have so many thoughts i don't even i i it's so difficult to know even where to begin yeah and like so one one thought is that i like this formulation of the problem of evil has made me want to take trent dougherty's approach to the problem of evil so serious excuse me so seriously like i think that we do we may need like have to look at other resources in order to explain the data so it's not just perfect being theism it's also like these certain axiological assumptions like these love manifesting virtues being so strong or being so valuable but then also maybe combine that with the fact that animals would be resurrected in the afterlife or there's some sort of afterlife for animals i i don't know i i think that i want them to be able to talk yeah sing exactly their suffering needs to be redeemed i mean i'm really i mean if i were a theist i would definitely opt for uh probably trend dority's approach yeah i mean i'm not saying it's plausible but yeah i i will say that okay i should probably people are listening like what we're doing is called inside baseball uh when you sometimes drop a bunch of like names or things and people are like what wait what what are they referring to so the truth in at least in the catholic worldview there's actually a variety of answers to the problem of animal suffering the traditional to mystic answer there's two ways you can look at it one is that animals do not suffer intensely or their suffering allowing their suffering is not morally blameworthy that's one view of the mystic tradition or the cartesian tradition uh michael murray would advocate that view in his book so one view is that animal suffering we're not morally blameworthy for causing it or that it's not a significant moral is not a significant evil to be concerned with the other would be it is significant but just as human suffering is significant but animals could be compensated it's not the traditional catholic view but but it is allowed within catholic theology uh and so one version of that would be that animals who have a sense of consciousness over time will experience a happiness fulfillment uh endlessly in an afterlife if an animal has a capacity for conscious suffering over time it stands the reason they could have a capacity for conscious uh happiness over time and so god could still give them an endless um happiness and some catholics take that view uh and then others like trend already add more that god could even add goods to them so they could be transformed like by giving them what my friend jimmy aiken calls a cognitive boost yeah and so they they might talk and and i'm i did laugh i mean i found a little silly at first reserving it and i'm still i'm a bit warmer to the idea i could see that more with the fate of domestic animals versus necessarily wild animals um but so so those are um those are two different approaches oh and then one i i think is worth considering though i think when the and i think joe you laid it out really well in a you know robust way to get us with the the heart and the head on it i worry about some of the assumptions we have to be careful some of the assumptions built into the argument a bit uh first for the vast majority of evolutionary history i don't think animals were sentient we have like invertebrates and things like that but it's still millions of years yeah sure well definitely hundreds of millions so i was going to i nearly said billions then i i decided not to say that because it's the life well life has been on earth for the interviews but but the kind of cambrian explosion what kind of suffering yeah those billions of years [Music] it what if we the percentage in an animal's existence its life is either pleasurable neutral or painful because certain billions of years there's going to be billions of years of pain but there are also billions of years of pleasure and billions of years of neutral activity like sleeping so we one must be careful not to prejudice this description and it's just one horrific gore fest uh i think we also look at the realistic lives of animals and then ask well is their existence themselves good and i guess i thought i gave you a thought experiment in our debate and here's another one that might be more realistic actually than the one i gave you in our debate would it be wrong for us to send a probe with amino acids to a planet like earth to start an evolutionary process there that normally would not have begun and we start this evolutionary chain that will entail a lot of suffering uh now one quick rejoinder that is well trent like we can't make you know that's how we we don't know how to make life aside from that but god could certainly you know snap his fingers and not use evolution so that's the problem there but i don't know if that's a great objection because if something is just really bad even if there's no other way to do it you should still refrain it'd be like let's say i could raise an animal with an artificial womb but the only technology we have the animal will just suffer horribly every minute of its existence and i would say but this is the only way i can grow animals in artificial rooms i'd say well then you just shouldn't do it at all but if it wouldn't be bad for us to start an evolutionary history maybe it's not so bad if god does it even if he has other ways that he could do it i don't know before you all come back on that uh there's another analogy of like the amazonian uh what do you call the ecosystem i don't know the amazonian ecosystem if we had the technology of which we do we could just completely wipe out the amazon right now and all of the animals that are currently suffering and going through horrible predation and everything else that's that's going on in the amazon right now so but but like if you suppose that there was a button that you could just press and you could get rid of it all would you press the button well that's what trent asked oh yeah that was in uh in our debate because i was talking about uh why why god would allow so much suffering and we have to be careful here to notice that that joe made an argument from natural selection right not not so much just animal suffering but specifically that the process of natural selection the machinery by which god brings about creation involves and necessitates uh suffering so when you ask you know would i press a button and kill every animal or would i not like yeah i actually don't really know but this isn't the situation that god is in god has a button that he can press that takes all of the animals living in the amazon and makes their life have fifty percent less suffering eighty percent less suffering and doesn't press it without having to kill them that's the situation that god is in so it's not an analogous situation we're embedded in the rules of a chess game that's already been laid down as it were and we're kind of having to operate within those rules but we're not the very author of the chess game itself and the rules by which it operates if we were i mean i worry about the feasibility though because i see the objection but even when you articulate well why wouldn't god decrease suffering by 50 or 80 percent i'm not sure exactly what that means like you could get rid of half of all animals that would decrease the suffering by 50 you could dull their senses by 50 or 80 percent but then could they function because i see your concern joe like well god's making the rules of the game but it could be the case that creating animal life has these necessary elements in it provided god does not excessively interfere with um the system itself so for example i mean suppose it was an evolution suppose god created all animals in their final forms like they are today and they existed for billions of years and never underwent evolutionary change seems like the problem would still remain you'd have predation you'd have disease you would still have all those bad things there's just no evolutionary mechanism it's just kind of always been it seems like there's something more direct about animal life that is the problem here i guess it depends what specifically we're thinking about i mean there are different things to disentangle here are we focusing on is it the fact that god used this almost like as a means by which to bring about creatures and you know it seems as though he's maybe intending maybe uh forcing but not intending you know but is that what we're focusing on or are we focusing on just uh the suffering inherent in the process i is it god's directing of the process that's the problem the way that i see it it's just a matter of prediction so like yeah okay maybe there are these necessary connections maybe but i mean conceivably epistemically it definitely could have been another one i mean maybe they just have some sort of built-in anesthetic such that when they're when the zebra just gets the claw from or whatever it's like the teeth from the lion some sort of built-in anesthetic like i don't know there's some sort of psychophysical law that just kicks in and they don't feel any suffering but you know that um the line can still have its meal but here here's where my problem comes i notice i had the qualifier that god does not excessively interfere in the system well these are psychophysical laws built in from the get-go no because then because normally when an animal experience any of us we're animals when we experience pain it motivates us to act in an extremely aggressive way to promote our own survival so what if in some circumstances when an animal is attacked that immense amount of pain is what allows it to escape the attack and then to go on living and so then you say well maybe there's a psychosocial law where the animal doesn't feel pain when there is no possibility for escape it's like but there's no real biological mechanism it would seem like god would end up happening as an omnipotent being but that's why yeah but then he'd be interfering that's my point is he could have set it up differently from the get-go with different rules what i'm saying is god creating a natural system will inevitably entail um things that are more or less perfect in in competition with each other i worry that the concept of animal um that that you know pain for example like god could create animals you know instead of having pain what if we just had a heads up display that told us hand is burning move hand a lot of us would ignore the head the heads up display and you know our hand will become useless you know so this seems to be i what i worry the parallel here would be like well why can't god make people that are free but don't do evil we qualify humans so much they're not really human or free anymore why god can't god make animals that don't suffer in a natural ecosystem it gets changed and qualified so much not really animals they're more like furry robots that god's like sending around that's my concern well i just to me it seems almost like a limitation of imagination i mean we just i mean this is an epistemic argument so i don't need to say that these are actually metaphysical possibilities but so long as i can there's as long as they're epistemically open so long as i can conceive of these various other ways that reality could have been it we can factor that into our bayesian analysis and it just it really seems as though god could have set up psychophysical laws that really are really finally highly finely tuned in this sort of way where they're uh i mean not as infallible for knowledge of the various ways that things are going to go on surely he could have this precisely fine-tuned psycho-physical laws that connect the suffering states that the organisms are in and their physical states where it is actually privy to whether or not they're going to survive and so on and okay even if that makes them different than the animals that we do in fact have my point then would just be why not create rather i won't put this as a question because questions aren't arguments my point is it's more surprising that god created animals as we see them rather than animal star like the ones that we are describing this other epistemically possible scenario that would be more expected under theism the animals star than we see animals would you be i'm curious if your eyes will roll or your response would be to a defense saying how do we know animal star doesn't exist right now because it's very difficult to determine the inner lives of anything much less animals that is true that's true and there is some and i i like risk being taken the wrong way here yeah when i explain this but there are like when you've seen i i've seen videos of like animals being like ripped apart like on reddit and stuff and just randomly yeah like a nature channel and it's something like it's actually very strange like sometimes you'll look at the animal and they look peaceful like they're being ripped apart and they're just like sitting there like this just like getting their leg like ripped off and it's weird like so we i i don't i don't know how other times though they definitely don't look peaceful i think yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you can find yeah videos on the dodgy parts of the internet of human beings doing exactly the same yeah i mean it is it is but it is that we have to consider now philosophy of mind and how do we have access to the mental states of others and so on i mean it's a potentially problematic aspect that god doesn't clue us into this fact that things suspiciously seem as though it's animals not animal star um that might present problems of its own so a different approach to this whole bayesian like argument from evil is what about uh skeptical theism i i feel like we should at least discuss like skeptical theism i mean i i'm not like the biggest fan of skeptical theism i mean i guess it depends on the day but it's like one of the most popular responses to the problem of evil is like we really don't know what that probability is of how likely you know the suffering in the world would be given theism yeah we just don't know what that probability is given the fact that god's knowledge is so much greater than our own and there's you know we we have these epistemic limitations on us and so forth so what are y'all's thoughts on skeptical theism and how it relates to like bayesian arguments from evil i think it's interesting it's it's you need to be careful because it can turn into universal acid potentially as you've pointed well not with respect in response to skeptical season but universal asset that you've talked about like if we're so episomically in the dark about god's reasons for action and so on like what's going to happen to the rest of natural theology you know in order to run certain fine-tuning arguments you need to be able to make predictions about what god would do or might might do and you need to make it i'm just gonna i'm gonna uh name drop again john depoe yeah his uh his positive skeptical theism is compatible with natural theology for the sake of for the sake of people listening can we just about what skeptical theism actually is yeah because we've said it a few times yeah there are different versions i'll let you do it yeah there are different versions of skeptical theism um the most basic version is the one that your grandma gave uh god's ways are mysterious basically um his ways are not our ways so we shouldn't expect to be able to see all the reasons for which god acts there are much more sophisticated ways like oh the range of possible goods evils connections between obtaining states of affairs and so on of which we are aware is not representative of the total range of goods evils connections between goods and evils and so on that there are such that we wouldn't be able to conclude from our inability but we don't know if our sample is represented whether our sample is represented such that we can't justifiably conclude from our let's say not being able to see a good coming about from an evil that there in fact is no such good or that probably there is no such good because the range of goods and evils and necessary connections among them and so on that we are aware of is that's not representative of the total range that there is so we wouldn't be justified in making that leap so that yeah there are different ways to put it and so more or less we have an idea that you know there there is some reason or justification for the existence of suffering but even if there is such a reason or explanation you shouldn't expect to be able to see it doesn't follow that we must be able to know what that reason is or to be able to comprehend that that reason um this this seems to to me a good understanding of what of what skeptical theism is and what's difficult is that once you make that epistemic distance between us and god so large um you start to be able to you tend to bleed into areas where you're not able to predict what god i mean will god suspend the laws of nature tomorrow i mean does he have a sufficiently maybe he has a morally sufficient reason to do that i mean he after all god's ways are infinitely greater than our ways i mean who are we the range of reasons of which we're aware is not representative of the range of reasons that there are and so on as you pointed out there are ways there's different versions of i think that might be a bit like potentially the biggest problem for skeptical theism is that of a kind of moral paralysis that it might bring about that is if the if there is this suffering that exists there are kind of deer getting caught under a fallen tree and starving to death and you know starvation and predation and this kind of stuff and we we don't know what this reason is but there is some reason that it's that it's that it's there there is there is some good that it's serving there is something about it that's that's justified we run into a problem when it comes to trying to uh confront it or trying to change it if we were given us if we were in a situation where we have the opportunity to prevent an animal from suffering if skeptical theism is telling us that or indeed even a person if skeptical theism tells us that well when you see some suffering you should essentially assume that there is some good justification you just don't know what it is and when i see uh it's more difficult with a person because i think scripture quite like for a christian they could say well we have revelation to tell us that you should be helping people from from suffering and have a morally sufficient reason of what you're unaware yeah allow divine destruction yeah for to allow for certain um yeah this is this is true but so of course the the problem that i'm that i'm getting at is that if when you are faced with evil the skeptical theist says when faced with evil and suffering assume that there is a justification for why it's happening you just don't know what it is then when i see some form of suffering and i have an opportunity to stop it step in and prevent it skeptical theism seems to say that i should actually refrain from helping the drowning child in the pool or something because well there's a justification as to why that's taking place it's a greater good that it's serving and by stepping in if god wanted to allow that that child to drown he's got better understanding than i do with the situation so why should i not allow the child because uh given my cognitive limitations and that i don't know god has a greater good for allowing certain evils given my limitations i cannot rule out the greater good is me being heroic and stopping the evils given my limitation and skeptical thing i could say you're right i don't know there could be a lot of greater goods there could be ones i do or don't know but one i seem to be aware of at this moment is the good of me ameliorating suffering and since i am aware of that good and operating on a previous moral command then it would follow so i'm not as concerned about skeptical theism being this kind of acid i do think that in addressing the problem of evil people who put forward easy solutions probably haven't thought very hard about the problem i think it's a multi-faceted approach um but i do think that alex that at most like if you're weighing like it makes god really implausible that's got to be weighed against the reasons for god yeah and then it gets really difficult like how we assign mathematical values and but this this is why i think for instance this is why i think it benefits you to to press like an evidential logical distinction because if you say something like well what you're presenting is really an evidential problem of evil not a logical one then if you present an argument for the existence of god that's logically valid then you can say as you said in our debate that well like any amount of evidential evidence is not enough to overcome a logical argument from the other side i'm sorry uh so so yeah so even if you have like a logically valid argument and you think it's like a demonstration you still have to ask well what's the possibility of each of the premises and that's going to come in a kind of scale right some of them are going to be more plausible than not maybe only 60 possible and so on i mean your justifications for that that's going to vary so almost everything is going to come down to an evidential which i'm very sympathetic to transgender's point but that's um that's right like i think there is i mean like i mean even when you have these sorts of demonstrations even in mathematics you have to assess how plausible is this premise and at some point you're just relying on like intuition and seemings and so on but setting that aside you did make a good point in response to the moral paralysis objection but that actually might turn against itself when you come back to the skeptical theist response to the problem of evil i just want to briefly mention that paul draber points this out um even in response to these sorts of bayesian arguments you could say yeah maybe god has a morally sufficient reason maybe there are goods of which we're unaware that are necessarily connected with these evil states of affairs but it's also equally true that there might be goods or there might be further evils of which are unaware that are connected with these sorts of things um uh maybe you know you can you can add that but it seems as though the epistemic reasons of which we're unaware that are like good making features that or that are goods that might come about from this evil it seems as though that's kind of cancelled out from further bad things that might even come about and just horrendous things of which we are unaware as well and so once those cancel out we're just left with the first order reasons and the first order reasons even granted seen by the skeptical theists favor like god not allowing these sorts of things you know because we know that this is such a bad state of affairs so it seems to cut both ways well let me get back a little because with your concern i do feel like though it's like if we weigh these different arguments evidentially they're trying to prove different things and so many of the arguments for god are just showing there's a kind of necessary sustaining external transcendent cause of the universe and some of them purport to show the moral qualities of god it would be like saying you know two orphans are arguing they live in a horrible situation in their orphanage and like if if we had loving parents we wouldn't have ended up here like well there's there's this possibility and this or that and then one of them just says no this clearly shows we don't have parents i'm sure the other boyfriend would say well we clearly have parents i mean where did we come from you know now it seems like we're disputing whether they're loving or not so it seems like the concern about suffering it's really focused in on one particular either power or love but not necessarily necessity infinite immutable uh so one could even have your position you know that there is uh uh like aristotle's got an unmoved mover essentially uh although then i guess the theist strategy to move forward would be do we have more compelling reasons to think god is good uh maybe by definition or necessity than what presence of evils might might sway some other way yeah i mean you can even go further as stephen law does um i made a video on his evil god challenge where he he's he imagines a god who is exactly opposite to the kind of god that we met with in traditional theism and we say we have a malicious god an evil god who basically seeks to bring about the worst possible outcome now if i said that such a god existed you would probably rightly laugh at me in part because we're clearly not in the worst possible outcome like if there was an evil god he'd make things far worse for us than the way that they are but of course this mirrors the way that somebody who says that there's a good god um surely like this isn't as good as things could be he could he could make things much better for us and so what people do is they say you have this problem of evil for a good god but the evil god hypothesis has a problem of good if there is an evil god then why are there good things why isn't everyone suffering all the time and you can actually construct equal and opposite theodicies so you could say that well the reason why people are able to experience joy and happiness is because it makes it worse for the people who are not experiencing joint happiness they they experience different a deeper level and different kind of suffering such as the suffering of loneliness that cannot exist unless there are other people who are existing happily and so if if somebody and and stephen law's point is to say that because when you're faced with the evil god hypothesis most people say that is just patently ridiculous because of the world we find ourselves in and how suffused with goods it is that we should be fair and granting the alternative hypothesis that when someone says there's a good god we should just be saying that's passionately absurd my quick rejoinder to the evil god objection is that it only succeeds this will get us down and unfortunately we'll have another few hours to talk i wish i'm sure joe has a lot of thoughts on this it will turn on one's metaphysical understanding of the concepts of good and evil that if good and evil are just competing substances that only differ trivially like good is the red stuff and evil is the blue stuff yeah whatever then the evil god objection might work but if one had more of a privation view of evil that good is more like metal and evil is more like rust then the concept of an evil god well god who's completely evil would not be this you know nefarious being would just be non-existent and of course i understand that there are controversial views about the privation theory of evil but i think in a classical theistic model that's a route that i would go into answering the objection of moving but then isn't there a problem here because you said a moment ago that well i present a problem of evil and you say well you know this this doesn't remove the the possibility of there being some kind of of of god who's just like amoral or something but it seems to me that that your own view about the nature of god and the nature of good yes commits you to saying that that actually isn't a viable option because you can't think of well yeah but i think my view of the nature of god is superior to those that are incorrect i don't know if that's arrogant to say or not but but doesn't this mean that for the for what you just said a moment ago that somebody could have a problem of evil and just say at best this just shows that there's you know uh and not maximally moral god that on your own or they're agnostic about the david's character but and and we were talking about this in in the context of having arguments for god's existence and then you've got the problem of suffering and you say well you've got the arguments of god's existence and the problem of suffering so the problem of suffering maybe makes you think that god isn't good but you've still got the argument to show that god is there but the kind of arguments that you give the kind of arguments that you support do seek to establish that god is good by nature and so you you wouldn't be able to to make that line as a as a theist you wouldn't be able to say well yeah you've got the problem of suffering but you know you're not you're not ruling out god you're just ruling out a good god you you surely can't do that of course of course not but i don't think the existence of my the route that i arrive i agree the ra that with law in that we cannot use empirical observation to determine whether god is essentially good or evil i think that's a prior metaphysical question i was getting your understanding of god i was going to say that the response to the evil god hypothesis that i find plausible is that you just you don't rule out an evil god by looking at good in the world that's that's one of the premises of his argument and so i just don't think that that's like the way to do it you've got to do it other ways i would quite like to slightly change course and go back to something that we were talking about earlier which is this idea of if you have goods that are kind of parasitic on evils would we rather have no evil and no parasitic good or would we rather have them both i gave the example of martin luther king and you said that you'd rather have the world in which there's racism to require a martin luther king for the sake of having a martin luther king i quite almost truly think that it would be preferable to have no racism and no need uh for martin luther king because what it seems to me you're saying if you say something like that you'd rather the former world is saying something like we can be glad of the existence of cancer because without the existence of cancer we wouldn't have the good of people coming to develop chemotherapy and cancer research and cancer research is a good thing people giving to charity people doing fundraising this is a great thing so isn't it great that we have cancer because it allows this higher order good of cancer research but clearly we'd rather have no cancer and no need for the cancer research in the same way i'd rather have no racism and no need for martin luther king i'd rather have no fear and suffering and no need for bravery well i'll have a quick poetic rejoinder of course um i one of my favorite musicals is uh les mis based on the novel by victor hugo they miss rob and most many of the characters in there have quite miserable lies based on the revolution and poverty and death and very sad sad scenes in there but the play is it's quite beautiful at the end when the main character uh jean valjean dies and he is welcomed into heaven with those and everyone is is singing together that that this has been overcome it's it's a one probably one of the best descriptions of of the gospel i've ever seen in media and i feel like would we rather have evil be non-existent or evil be defeated and i i think that many people see the importance there if there if there is compensation if we're all brought through rather than just they're not being evil because this gets back to the the question that if the only if the only good we're trying to pursue is just the reduction of suffering then you know thanos was 50 right you know uh you'd be amazed how often that specific example is given to me and in these kinds of conversations yeah so i mean um yeah i i i see what you're saying and maybe maybe joe's right this comes down to intuitions a little bit that we have but i guess another example might be like let's say i told you that it turns out this world is a simulation and you're a program at a computer and there's all the universe is one guy with a super computer it's like would you rather have found out that this is a simulation or that this is real then you might be grateful that the suffering is gone but it might also be kind of horrifying to realize all that seemed to be good was not not real either so i don't know if it is cut and dry c.s lewis had an example of getting me into sorry the matrix i would say no reality is just different than what we thought it was yeah but this is definitely reality no no i i agree but um is it a preferable kind of reality that would go back to robert the philosopher robert nozick put forward something called an experience machine yeah i just i think it's a i think there are a few things that are a little bit unfair about how nozick treats the case for example he doesn't take into account something like status quo bias he says yeah would you would you jump into an experience machine that brings you nothing but pleasure but it's actually just fake and there are so many problems the first is to say this is different from if you were to wake up and it turns out you have been plugged into the experience machine and the doctor say to you listen like your life sucks like it's it's really bad it's even worse than was in the machine i mean the same outside yeah like it's so much worse out here but you know welcome back but but if you like we'll plug you back in and you'll forget this ever happened it's at least a lot more plausible that people in that situation would be like yeah put me back right so it might have a lot to do with kind of the situation already obtaining jumping into the experience machine feels different also of course we have necessarily a kind of omniscience when thinking about the situation we can talk about being outside of the experience machine inside the experience machine what obtains what the what the differences are but to jump into the experience machine requires that you forget that you had the possibility to not do so or to do so and so when somebody says that in the experience machine this would be a worse existence somehow that intuition just doesn't land with me because once you're in the machine it's the same thing you're just living a life and you're just experiencing reality as we experience this reality here even if it's a different even if it's like a much worse life out there i mean i think empirical philosophers you know people who go out and actually do these surveys of like folk intuitions and so on um yeah you do get a resounding um you get a resounding no to get a big experience machine if you're like hopping into it for the first time but you can actually turn the tables like you're describing and the situation is your whole life so far has been in an experience machine now you're faced with a choice to get out and you know you're just i think you're like i forget what it is but you're just like it's either it's not worse than your current position but it's not better you know maybe you're just like an artist in kansas or something you know whatever yeah even if yeah a lot of people they actually felt like a lot of people wouldn't get out of it um and it's like it's like really i forget the specific results but i think it's like i i actually forget but it's much more saying you'd stay because it's like the people that i know like you guys feel like i'd be in a different but that had but then have they really reflected on it like using phrases like the people i know yeah but this is this is the problem but this is exactly what people do when they refuse to jump into the experience machine i feel like what they're thinking is at least partly influenced by kind of i'd be giving up my life i'd be giving up my friends and my family i'd be adopting a whole a whole new new system a whole world but of course once you're in there it just feels you know i was sometimes asked um my my university was split up into like a bunch of different colleges there's no like singular campus and people are always talking about how they or everybody seems to feel like they made the right choice of college everyone thinks that their college is the best college in the world i i wasn't such a fan of of mine i thought it was like okay i thought there were better ones and my friends once said to me but like they said but if you went to a different college you never would have met us and we'd never be friends and i said well yeah but i'd have met other friends and i'd value them just as equally as i value you right now they thought that was a bit cold but you get the point like it seems it seems like you wouldn't want to say that right in that situation i might think but if i went to a different college i wouldn't have met the friends that i that i had right now and sure that that's kind of bad but if i were in that college i'd be saying the same thing about those friends and it's the same thing with the experience one other attack here like let's say what would we want god how would we want god to treat us as creatures because one way we might say well i would like god to give me infinite happiness that would seem fair if god gave me infinite happiness if you could somehow numerically quantify happiness and it turned out to be infinite um well then by that logic even if you had an absolutely horrific finite life if you have infinite happiness in the afterlife it would still turn out to be infinite happiness based on transfining arithmetic then suppose you might say well no god should just spare me from just like the absolute worst evils because i think many people would say they're willing to tolerate some evil but not others but then i worry maybe their intuitions are off even in that given how the entire system is is set up in that regard there's nothing worth considering which is that i think a lot of the discussion around theodicy and around the problem of evil kind of assumes a consequentialism this is something that a friend of mine um his name's dan walner he um brought this to my attention he said that like when you say something like well god has this good that he wishes to bring about and so he'll allow all of this evil as if to say like this this good is somehow better than this evil like there's more good brought about by allowing some evil and that's why god allows it but it may be that god for instance has a duty to bring about certain things right if god has some kind of moral duty to bring about free will let's say then it's not just that well free will is is much better than the suffering that it entails like even if the suffering is far worse if you've got a duty to bring about free will it would still function as a theodicy if there's some kind of duty to bring about compassion or to bring about bravery even then even if like a world in which there's no bravery and no fear is much better consequentially from a kind of crude utilitarian perspective that's a better world than one in which there is bravery but there's also the fear and suffering if there's something a bit more like deontological about this that bravery is just something that must be brought about then we don't need to debate whether that's a better world or a worse world than where there's no braver and suffering suffering because the theodicy doesn't work and saying that the evil is kind of worth the uh or the good is worth the suffering on a kind of balance but that the good requires that any amount of evil would still be allowed to obtain because there's a duty to bring something about so it's it's weird how how otherwise generally deontological uh religious thinkers when having this discussion are perfectly happy to just kind of adopt a concept i would say it's teleological not necessarily consequential it aims for a particular kind of end informed by goodness uh but it's not strict kind of consequentialism god treats creatures as having a particular kind of dignity and good to to share in him that who is the ultimate goodness itself i guess yeah it will come down maybe to intuitions about when we say like goodness you know there it seems like there are these different kinds of good if we imagine them and i think you're right some of them are conjoined to evils is it really better to never have them at all uh that maybe joe's right maybe that's just a very basic that's just when it comes to the existence of god some people find a principle sufficient reason plausible others don't and i think this might be one of those very like to me it does seem and i try to make an analogy i know they're not perfect but like to creating life through evolution or even begetting having your own children it's like well i know i i mean i could you could take actually this is something i saw should look this up so matt dillahunty did a reply to as people asked him about anti-natalism why are you bringing up matt dillon wait that's it have you why are you have you seen you know when you debated him on the resurrection yes and you mentioned my name as an example why are you bringing about us at least from what i saw with your engagement with alex o'connor you do not believe a person what's wrong what the hell does alex o'connor have to do with this you've mentioned him twice all i asked him was matt are there are there beliefs that you disagree with but find to be reasonable and you were like no he said no he said no he said there were no beliefs that it that if he he says well i'm a reasonable person that it that if someone disagrees there must be i was like he said just as an example he was like so for example alex or connor's veganism you think he's wrong but maybe reasonable he wouldn't do it wouldn't do it but sorry people ask him about anti-natalism yeah the idea like well is it moral to have children knowing that they could they could suffer and you bring someone into existence and they're harmed and you didn't get their consent and all the while watch the video all the while i was watching the video he was saying well there are harms but there's also these goods that come into play when you bring a child into existence and we balance that and i was like this sounds like a theist responding to the problem of evil yeah so i just found that so sometimes i like to bring up these other examples say oh well if it can make sense in one context albeit it's analogical and there's limits perhaps it can make sense in another that there are some incredible uh similarities between the discussion about bringing children into existence and god bringing us human beings into existence and it's even kind of a useful analogy in the way it's you're talking about like a father and his children right and so that's why there's so many similarities right so i think that if you're partially saying oh i could see that there's a benefit here even though there's costs that are involved i would push that towards oh maybe it could at least be more sensible god would create and that he has more resources than human parents this is sometimes informed by the fact that people who kind of on balance there are a lot of people who've lived a life that on balance has had more suffering than pleasure maybe it's like 60 40 or something and yet at the end of their life we'll think it was worth having and there are also ways that pleasures and pains kind of balance out in in uh in asymmetrical ways for instance i mean david bennett talks a lot about this and in in of course in bed enough to have been for instance a life that begins with a lot of suffering but then gets better over time versus a life that begins with a lot of pleasure and gets worse over time these don't seem to be equal it can't just be like a crude balancing of pleasures and pains there seems to be something about the the worth of living through this experience that needs to be i'd let's say christian theism were true let's just hedge our bets with christian universalism everybody goes to heaven i wonder if that would change his thesis it surely has to you would think yeah no must do must do yeah well why don't we send them an email and see if we can go right anything so well maybe i'll do then and uh i'll if he responds i'll i'll yeah they might qualify universalism every everyone goes to heaven i don't know this would be an interesting route to explore also for more more discussions on on problem people i don't know well this has been quite a quite the round table i think we've covered a lot of ground uh and had some interesting discussions and i hope that people find this this useful of course it's it's great to have four people in a room but it also makes it harder to you know hear everybody out on everything but i think we've we've struck up a good balance um i want is there anything like pressing that anybody else is like just dying to get out there before we wrap up no not pressing i ha i have other things that i want to talk about but i think i may save it for dinner yeah yeah yeah yeah um yeah sorry he's building up his courage this is this is a problem i i think that um we can at least all agree that the problem of evil is a very important topic and yeah it makes it makes a lot of intuitive sense and it's something that's that's really worth considering i mean my my kind of final analysis of the situation is that it's often framed the problem of evil is often seen as like the best response to theism it's like you have this religion and in response you get the problem of evil why are people suffering why are people nihilist why is life so apparently meaningless but to me i feel like this is actually the wrong way around i feel like the best treatment of the nihilistic condition is not found in david benatar it's not found in like modern atheistic writers it's found in ecclesiastes right it's found in it's found in job it's found in the psalms and it says to me that maybe it's not that the problem of suffering is like a response to religion but rather religion itself was a response to the problem maybe that's the thing i would close with like for me more of an intuitive end to this is there's also one practical reply to this it's that if you get rid of god you still have evil you still have just pure awfulness like i do wonder if what i would do if i were put to the test like if my family died in an accident i i went through job's trial you know i had cancer i was just brought to my lowest how you know how would i how would i respond to that and so well my friend jimmy aiken for example i love what he says on problem people because he he's dealt with personal tragedy his wife died of an illness shortly after they were married he never remarried and the way he looked at it is well you know chris christianity is my my one hope to be reunited with my wife and for evil to be conquered it's the one hope for evil to be answered for there to be a solution why would i give that up without there being a good argument again so i guess for me like with evil i am just so thrilled at the prospect of christianity answering it i refuse to give up christianity unless there is another independent reason to show that it's false i guess yeah i mean of course i can sympathize with that i guess i would just say i mean i i equally would love it to be true and if i believed it would never want to to give it up but as i say i think that that may indeed be why these religious ideas exist in the first place rather than being the other way around but that maybe that's something we can discuss tomorrow because of course we're here in houston to do the event that i mentioned earlier which as i say will be in the past so i'm sure that a lot of these threads will probably be continued at some point tomorrow so i'll make sure that everything's linked down in the description um but yeah this has been this has been edifying so thank you all for thank you yeah thanks for having us on your channel this has been great um for everybody watching uh a quick reminder that everything i do is supported by you on patreon.com forward slash cosmic skeptic a special thanks as always to my top tier patrons for keeping the channel afloat um we've i really do appreciate the the the help that you've been given not just to be able to produce content but also to be able to justify traveling around the world and speaking to interesting people so thanks to you in particular uh i've been alex o'connor as always i've been joined by cameron batucci joe schmidt and trent horn and you've been watching the cosmic skeptic podcast yes [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Alex O'Connor

Views: 241,147

Keywords: Alex O'Connor, cosmic, skeptic, cosmicskeptic, atheism, vegan, veganism

Id: hxUgziZ4vro

Length: 74min 53sec (4493 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 02 2022