Bethinking 3/6: Peter J Williams on New Atheists & Old Testament (incl. The Canaanites)

our next speaker is dr. Peter J Williams who is the warden of Tyndale house in Cambridge Tyndale house is the research arm of UTC F when it's a center of expertise for the study of the Bible dr. Williams was a lecturer in Old Testament in Cambridge before moving to become senior lecturer in New Testament at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland showing the breadth of his expertise in July 2007 he became warden of Tyndale house in Cambridge and he continues as honorary senior lecturer in biblical studies at the University of Aberdeen on dr. Williams appointment as warden of Tyndale house professor Don Carson noted that not many scholars can speak competently across as many technical fields as can Pete and having heard him speak fully endorsed that under his leadership Tyndale houses current Bible and church project has been presenting world class scholarship directly to the church providing Christians with evidence in support of the historical basis of our faith renewing confidence in the Bible some of you may have been at their conference here two years ago there were DVDs from that and this one the authentic Gospels new evidence there are very few copies of this left they're available in the UCCS stand over on your left so do get there quickly and pick those up they're well worth viewing number of you will be aware of the controversy over the Canaanites that Richard Dawkins has raised over this last week and so having had this planned for some time before that it's particularly relevant to have dr. Pete Williams speak to us now on the Old Testament and the New Atheists please welcome here well good afternoon everyone it's really great to be here as the junior member of the quartet today and to have a chance to share with you about this topic and everything's ready to go the New Atheists and the Old Testament is my topic I'm not as philosophically sophisticated as the other speakers today so I may make some blunders but they can correct that in a question session later I wanted to say a little bit about arguments basically at this point I'm responding to an objection to the Old Testament now if Christianity is true we should expect there to be positive arguments for Christianity we should also expect the arguments against Christianity not to be defeated so I'm not expecting you to go away with a great sense of wow haven't we got a great argument about the cane eyes here so much as well that objection that God commands the destruction of the Canaanites in the Old Testament isn't as bad an objection as I thought it was when people ask us questions I think sometimes we can ask them to rank their questions they seem to have an infinite list of questions and I'd like to say is that your most difficult question is that your most important question and if they say well yes that is my most difficult question you say well are you then prepared to admit that if your most difficult question could be answered or part answered then the other question is can also be dealt with that seems a reasonable inference so what we're going to do is we can look at the general narrative that we have of religion and violence in our culture morality in the nature of the universe and then finally look at the Old Testament story of the destruction of the Canaanites well just on Thursday Richard Dawkins put up on the Guardian online his newest reason for not debating William Lane Craig which is that he's an apologist for genocide because bill Craig has spoken about the Old Testament and argued that what God commanded was not necessarily unjustified it fits into a wider narrative that we have in our culture about religion and violence the secularists have been telling us a story that says well we can go back to the Crusades you can go to the European Wars of Religion you can go to the witch-hunt season go to all sorts of things religious people are violent and then we have 9/11 and that narrative only intensifies religion causes violence we might won't ask is that really reasonable well of course it is in part true there are religious systems which cause violence they have that built into themselves however in one sense it shows too much because we could also say that politics causes violence after all we can see all sorts of examples where politics has resulted in violence does that mean all politics is bad well maybe some people today would say yes but what about leadership causes violence can't we say that there all sorts of instances of violence have happened in history because there has been leadership so what we need to do is have no leadership well you know that if there's no leadership it's going to be even more violent so actually we can't just say that because one thing has caused some violence that that thing is necessarily bad because we know that one of these things like politics and leadership in itself can be neutral without thinking causes violence and where have we ever had violence where people have not been thinking cognition essential for violence and so does that mean cognition is a bad thing well I think that's what people like to do with this religion causes violence but it's a very important narrative in the culture because actually it means that when they see one more example it fits into a pre-existent story and that gives it plausibility because stories are what often convince people that things are true now of course you could look at people like Mao and Stalin and think well didn't they cause quite a bit of violence between them was it 80 million or something the numbers vary depending what you read and someone might say well haven't those two atheists people who thought religion was something they wanted to get rid of killed more people than all the people killed during all the Wars of Religion in all of history ah says the Atheist know that the problem is that was just two people and I'm not that kind of atheist fine but then I want to say well I'm not that kind of Christian I mean if you want to say I'm a follower of Jesus and you want to you know load on me everything that has ever been done wrong in the name of Jesus is that really fair we could also think about what about great thinkers or thinkers of the past and can we blame them for everything that's done in the name let's take Karl Marx well of course you're Marx it Marxist want to say well you know he had some great thoughts and people took them in the wrong direction what about Charles Darwin you know can we blame him for the Holocaust well no Pig would say no he had some great thoughts and people took them in the wrong direction but the same would also apply to food it wouldn't it can you blame Buddha if he existed for all the you know anything done wrong in the name of Buddhism but of course the same has to apply to Jesus Christ can we object to Jesus Christ because of things done in the name of Jesus Christ and it seems pretty obvious to me that we can't so I think I would be very generous in proposing a Marxist Christian truth you know and we basically say okay I'm not gonna do down Karl Marx because of what was done in his name provided you don't do down Jesus Christ because of what is done in his name I want you to look at Jesus Christ and I want you to tell me about Karl Marx seems like a fair deal now getting on to the Old Testament we remember this quotation many of us from Richard Dawkins after he's been consulting a a thesaurus the God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction jealous and proud of it a petty unjust unforgiving control-freak a vindictive bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser a misogynistic homophobic racist and infanticidal genocidal fill Asylum pestilential megalomaniacal sadomasochistic capriciously malevolent bully notice the scansion at the end so there we have his view of the God of the Old Testament well I wonder how much he's actually been reading or here we have from Christopher Hitchens from God is not great how religion poisons everything the Bible may indeed does contain a warrant for trafficking in humans for ethnic cleansing for slavery for bribe price and for indiscriminate massacre so that's what they believe the Old Testament is teaching the objections can be of course about violence generally in the Old Testament reporting of war and conflict but we can always say well that's just reporting it's not commending people might also object to the Old Testament laws that have capital punishment and corporal punishment and so on and we can raise that in question time if you like some people make objections about slavery but I think the most important objection the one that comes up the most is that God in the Old Testament told his people Israel to destroy the Canaanites we can deal with the Amalekites separately if you like we just focus on the Canaanites this time and the objection might go like this how can a God of love command the destruction of seven nations what about the children isn't that genocide and if your God could command them back then to kill people couldn't he command you and isn't that just like the terrorists suicide bombers and so on that's the form of the objection now of course post 9/11 I think a lot of us would feel quite a bit of weight to that last a way of putting the objection so what we have is atheists often making alignment between the Old Testament and two very nasty things one is religious terrorism 9/11 etc and the other thing is genocide Rwanda and what went on there and in a sense all of the nasty things of those two separate nasty things bundled together in one is the Old Testament well before getting onto that I want us to consider something about moral judgments it's already been very well put earlier today how there can be no morality outside of God no objective moral values no moral imperatives but let's assume that we're not going to try to press the argument too far what can we say about morality well our moral intuitions are formed in part by the nature of the universe we're in take for instance the universe of Tom and Jerry now for those of you who are familiar with this different physical laws apply in this universe it's possible for Jerry to do something very nasty - Tom Tom will be elongated or compressed and very soon he won't be restored to his original setting and that means that when we have our children watching Tom and Jerry we might have some qualms of conscience about it but on the whole we realize that our children are going to be discerning and realize that different physical laws apply in the Tom and Jerry universe to their own and so therefore they will not take this as simply a license to do what they will and have no consequences or you could imagine this story of The Sorcerer's Apprentice here in a Disney version and and what happens is every time of course the apprentice chops up one of those brooms it becomes - now what does that teach us well when it when we think about why it's bad to hit someone the reason it's bad to hit someone actually is connected to something about the universe namely the pain that they will feel if you're in a universe in which there was no pain it would not be of the same order or what about killing someone if every time you kill someone two of them came back it would fundamentally change the nature of killing some would it would it not or you could think about a film like Prince of Persia where of course time can run backwards and that of course fundamentally changes the nature of killing someone but we have to say that actually Christians and atheists disagree fundamentally about the nature of the universe and that sometimes has game-changing effects on morality for instance is the fact that Christians believe that there is something after death isn't that a pretty fundamental thing does that not change the nature of the universe you're in relative to an atheistic universe does that not have some effect on morality or the Christian belief that God himself became incarnate and suffered on earth does that not have a game-changing effect on morality I believe that it does so when we read a story like in Genesis 22 about Abraham offering up his son Isaac it is essential that we read this in the right moral universe that a tendency of course is for an atheist just simply to read God nasty him told Abraham to offer up his son Isaac well God tell someone to kill someone else that's bad and they draw a simple parallel with 911 but actually when we read the story of Abraham going from the beginning we read that God has been very faithful to Abraham over many years has shown himself capable of fulfilling impossible promises to Abraham and he has made a promise that Isaac is going to have children that absolutely has to be fulfilled because God had promised it but hang on Isaac hasn't yet had any children that means that Abraham knows because he knows that God is reliable that God is going to have to do something remarkable which is is to do with the nature of the universe in order to make sure that if he does kill Isaac Isaac can continue to exist to have children and so when we read in Genesis 22 that he goes along with his two servants to the mountain with Isaac he says to the two servants that he leaves at the bottom of mountain I and the lad are going to come back now that is a game-changing thing because it shows actually the nature of the universe that Abraham believes he's in as the New Testament comments he believed that God was able to raise him from the dead now does such a thing affect the universe affect morality I believe in fact it does and that's going to come to be important in what we look to now what is the right thing to do I believe the right thing to do is what God commands and you might think well doesn't that mean God can command you to do the most nasty thing and it's the right thing to do absolutely not because God cannot command you to do absolutely anything anymore than God can do absolutely anything the Bible says that God cannot lie God cannot create another God greater than himself apart on the fact that be logically impossible he can't make himself cease to exist there is an in fact an infinite number of things at least we could say that God cannot do God cannot make three gods for God's five gods you know greater than himself not that those are logically possible anyway but you know the point is all sorts of things that we could maybe talk about he can't do and God cannot lie God I don't think can command us to lie but there are some things which would be wrong for you to do on your own authority but would be right if he gave you the authority and that's where we realize that making that distinction again between objective and absolute morality that was made by Bill Craig earlier that of course there are things which you cannot do in any but the most exceptional circumstances and one of them is kill another human being but in certain circumstances you can be authorized to do that now of course unqualified that sounds like a really risky statement it sounds like it's just license for anything God can declare wrong right and right wrong no that's not what we're saying because for Christians when we believe this when we believe in what's called divine command theory namely that what God commands is right that is always in the context of the character of God proven and shown in Scripture God reveals himself to be merciful that's something we know he's trustworthy God give him a record of his gracious actions in the Old Testament he has proven character and that means we can trust him and you cannot divorce one bit of Christian teaching namely that we should do what God commands from this the fact that God is shown to be trustworthy as we look at the narrative the Old Testament it's not that God goes around regularly giving commands like he did to Abraham that command in its own way is unique someone might say well isn't it always wrong to kill an innocent person isn't it always morally wrong well of course it's not always that moral guilt is incurred for killing someone else I mean what if someone is killed by a machine or killed by an animal like a tiger well that Tiger doesn't incur moral guilt if someone is who kills by accident does not incur guilt in the same way or someone who's mentally ill we might debate the particular circumstances but they cannot be said to be guilty in the same way as someone who's not what about someone who sincerely believes that they're authorized to kill someone are they allowed to kill someone the answer is absolutely not is nothing at all to do with sincerity if you sincerely believe that you have voices in your head going to telling you to go and kill someone like the Yorkshire Ripper did that gives you no authorization whatsoever but that if you indeed have proper authorization things are different think about 9/11 there was of course that a jet which never made it to the target that the terrorists were aiming for and which came down over Pennsylvania when it was known about that jet of course there executive order to scramble Jack's and to ask them to intersect planes to talk to them if they didn't respond in the right way to shoot them down now is that morally right or wrong at least I would say it's not obviously morally wrong I mean we can have a discussion about it but it's not obvious that that's morally wrong so in fact in extreme circumstances with due authorization I think one could say that perhaps a pilot in a jet would be authorized to do something which would take innocent life now that is absolutely exceptional and I want to make the same case about the old testament that what we see when we come to this destruction of the Canaanites in the Old Testament is something as exceptional as that other thing that happened on 9/11 which the New Atheists don't often talk about well let's think about the way the New Atheists tend to attack the Old Testament I would maintain that they do something very unfair which is they launch two simultaneous attacks on the Old Testament the first attack is it didn't happen Dawkins is fiction word and the second thing is it's unfair now if we're going to look at the fairness of something it doesn't matter whether it happened or not we look at the fairness of the story we could look at that in Tom and Jerry's world we could look at it in any story whether something is fair or not but if I'm going to judge the fairness of the story I think it's only fair to look at the story world that I'm looking at I cannot judge the morality of Jerry's actions against Tom thinking of our physical laws that's not actually entering properly into understand the story so I believe that in order for an atheist to critique the morality of the story in the Old Testament they have to enter in to that story now this is what Dawkins says in The God Delusion the ethnic cleansing begun in the time of Moses it brought to bloody fruition in the book of Joshua a remark the text remarkable for the bloodthirsty massacres it records and the xenophobia relish with which it does so yet again theologians will protest it didn't happen indeed it didn't happen but that's not the point the point is that whether true or not the Bible is held up to us as the source of our morality well I at one level I might say yes it doesn't matter whether it happened or not but I would say if we're going to consider the story we have to consider all of the details in the story including all of the characters in the story and one of them by the way is called God he's a character in the story and I can't just say well I don't believe in God so as I'm judging the story I'd sort of omit him from the story that's not fair again we have the way Dawkins talks about Joshua the Bible story of Joshua's destruction of Jericho and the invasion of the promised land in general is morally indistinguishable from Hitler's invasion of Poland or Saddam Hussein's massacres of the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs or as he said just on Thursday most churchmen these days widely disowned in the horrific genocide ordered by the God of the Old Testament anyone who criticizes this the divine blood lust is loudly accused of unfairly ignoring the historical context or as naive literalism towards what was never more than metaphor or myth I would say he's got it exactly wrong there he says that that the tendency is for people to say aha it's not really meant to be taken so seriously my problem is that he doesn't take the text seriously enough including all of the details in it as I won't seek to show because when Dawkins tells the story it goes like this God doesn't speak to anyone no miracle to perform there's no massive Exodus but then I can judge all of the characters as if God hadn't actually told them to do anything so in other words he's got his own naturalistic watered-down version of Exodus and that's the thing that he attacks what's the reality when we look at the story in the Old Testament firstly we have to go back to the beginning and to understand God we have to understand what he set up in the beginning in the beginning God gave everyone life that's part of the story I can't just miss that out it's actually there I could also say that God clearly doesn't think violence is good because in the beginning there was none when I look at the end of his story in the Old Testament as outlined in the prophet I can see again his vision of peace that the wolf shall dwell with the lamb and so on so that gives me some guidance as to how to understand the story trying to understand a bit of a story without reading the beginning and the end usually isn't the best way before you write your literary criticism then we need to get into the story about the Canaanites what's in the story well one of the things is that in the story they're punished for their wickedness not for their race this isn't a racist question how can we show that because Rahab the prostitute and her extended family were spared and why was she spared because she wanted to believe in God why did she want to believe in God because she had heard about him and in fact she said that all of the people around her had heard about the amazing things he had done and yet she was the only one who seemed to respond and yet in the story when Israel commits the same sins as the Canaanites they to a judge like the Canaanite so it's not a question of favoring one race over another according to the story according to what Rahab and others indicate the people in the land knew what God could do and chose to resist also in the story they sacrificed their children this is something that also we can say it seems very likely archaeologically people believe that they did have child sacrifice at the time this is from Phoenician culture where you've got their baby being offered in sacrifice to a two-headed God but Phoenicians and Canaanite culture are deeply linked and it says in Deuteronomy for every abominable thing that Lord hates they've done for their gods they even burn their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods then we need to think about Israel within the story within the story Israel has a unique relationship to God Israel is his judicial representative that means of course that no one can correctly apply anything that Israel is told to do by God directly to themselves we can also say that an important part of the story is the miracles the command to destroy the Canaanites was accompanied by the greatest display of miracles that really is recorded in the Old Testament you have the Exodus and the ten plagues the crossing of the Red Sea and then God going with a pillar of cloud and fire for forty years in the desert well you may believe that's just myth and didn't happen but the point is in the story that's an intriguing part and that means I can't just count that out and that means of course when I look at it from the point of view of the characters in the story the Israelites then they would have had no reason to doubt God command if he's really given the command the Ten Commandments booming voice from the top of a mountain to a whole crowd below and clearly authenticated Moses they would have no reason to doubt it so if I'm looking at the morality of let's say Odysseus in the Odyssey I need to consider him in the light of the oddities claim that Athena appeared to him whether it's fiction or history doesn't make any difference the point is I can't just discount that that's all part of the story so if I'm going to judge the morality of the people in the story have to say well would they really have had any choice about what they could do if God really had done all those miracles we can also consider some of the principles of the story God's saying that punishment should be limited by proportionality the unusual thing that the warfare and the conquest of Canaan is shows a restraint that is not found elsewhere if you were being besieged by the Assyrians you weren't just worried that they would kill you you were worried about what they might do with you before they killed you and yet one of the things that doesn't happen if you like the dog that doesn't bark and it didn't bark in the story of the invasion of Canaan is then going in and torturing all other people and then killing them it's just not there we can also say and this is an argument that the Bible used but I throw out in case it's useful to you that it would have put an end to Canaanite child sacrifice could an omniscient God know that over the centuries this command might result in the killing of fewer children whereas not giving the command would have led to a site violence as one generation Avenger next and so on we can't say for definite but I suppose we can always ask say that the it's the burden of proof on someone to prove that an omniscient God could not have known that then we need to think about the character of God when God reveals himself in this context he reveals something about his personality he says I am the God whose merciful gracious slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness in other words if you like there is an asymmetry in which God's tendency towards mercy is different from the way he has a tendency towards anger because the anger is if you like a strange work to God not something inherent to him whereas his love is something and we see that in the story where of course God delayed the punishment of the amorite one of those groups of the Canaanites for 400 years well think how many conflicts nowadays will be avoided if people just waited 400 years before pulling the trigger would make quite a difference wouldn't them so those are all part of the story we can also say that in the story God actually did most of the fighting I mean God made the walls of Jericho fall down and when the Israelites went into the land and they fought with the northern coalition of Kings it actually says in the text that God through the hail killed more people than the Israelites did now I can't just strip that out because God is actually the biggest character in the narrative and I'd want to suggest you that that's a game-changing thing imagine that Neptune appears out of the sea oh really to someone and tells them to go and do something are you going to hold that person responsible for what they do in the same way as if he hadn't no no that that really does make a difference and then the question is how are you going to complain to Neptune about what he's doing but then let's blow this up to something bigger what if we're talking about Almighty God what if he made everything and commanded this doesn't that make a difference whether in reality or in fiction I'd say it does make a difference now someone might say well that's just the way the Bible justifies it they might say well don't a lot of nations claim to be better than other nations in fact Israel in the Bible is not said to be better I know of no ancient literature which so much does down the nation from which the literature came as the Old Testament you know usually ancient literature doesn't just say the glories of the people group it actually tends to give you the glories of their kings which also that you don't get much of the Old Testament do you that the Old Testament tells you in fact that Israel became as bad as the other nations you can compare the most proverbially evil city Sodom in Genesis chapter 19 and what goes on there with in fact what happens in the City of Israel in judges chapter 19 you can read about Manasseh and how he burnt his sons and as it says has done more evil than all the amorite state who were before him so does the Bible encourage people to kill others today absolutely not because as we read it we know we don't have the same judicial position as Israel had then the command was not private but with the greatest display of signs of all history so you can't say that someone like the Yorkshire Ripper or some 9/11 terrorists who made some deductions because of things going on in their head that they should kill someone is anything in any way parallel with someone who has actually heard God's voice speak from heaven when there are six hundred and three thousand five hundred and fifty men listening it's quite a different thing so it's completely different for more modern wars and I think intelligent readers know that children know that they feel that in their intuition test which by the way explains Richard Dawkins experiment with children and why they don't seem to object to the Joshua narrative so a common atheist perspective is that religious terrorism and genocide go together Dawkins in particular says that Joshua the narrative there is morally indistinguishable from the story about Hitler or Saddam Hussein well I'd want to say there are a number of differences the specific guilt the narrative in Joshua really does have sin on the part of the canaanites it's not indiscriminate and it in fact there's even a concern for children there as a 400 year delay there's a warning which is ignored there's warrant on the behalf of the people who are actually executing the command and God does most of the fighting does that really make no difference morally between two things I'd want to say actually those sort of things can make a world of difference you might think that two things look the same when they're quite different take an amputation an amputation you know cutting off a limb by a surgeon to help someone is absolutely morally wounds apart from an amputation in a bloodbath in Sierra Leone you can't say that they're the same thing of course you can go very superficially and say well you know in each case an arm was cut off by a person using something with a sharp edge and you say well therefore they're morally the same but actually the conditions make them morally worlds apart then we need to ask which objection are people making there are two very different objections one is the objection it was immoral for God to command the destruction of the Canaanites the other one is immoral for the Israelites to evade such a command if it really was given in the way the Bible describes now I would have thought that it's very hard actually to make that second objection because the second objection would mean if I were on a jury judging those people and God really had appeared to them and given them a command in that way I would judge them to be guilty would you would there be no special plea circumstances related to that if that really did happen and then the first objection is even more difficult because if God really did make the world and really gave everyone life who are you to say that he can't do something but when we come to this what we find is in fact there is an emotional reaction for us and that's a good emotional reaction the emotional reaction is this all free was wrong and it does because we're in a broken universe I'm not wanting to say that the problem is taken away I'm not wanting to say that all the questions are answered but this is clearly the most difficult moral objection to the Bible at least at an emotional level but if we consider the fullness of the story we have to consider who God is and the reality of the command you can't strip that out then of course we realize that it's not a conclusive defeater when we look at it in an analytical way it's not a defeater that doesn't necessarily give us more rest in our souls what would I think give us more rest in our songs is contemplation of the cross and arguably we could say that if the destruction of the Canaanites is the punishment for their sins then that's what sin deserved and if Christ on the cross took our sins on himself then what happened to the Canaanites becomes for some way a picture for us of how awful sin is and how much Jesus Christ did on the cross for us taking on himself that one person the punishment for so many and when we look at that it like that I think it's much more emotionally and spiritually satisfying if we can say this about the most difficult moral objection to the Old Testament I think that should make us want to consider the positive arguments for Christianity at least with an open mind thank you very much well thank you Peter very much for that gave us a very different way of looking at to what is for many of us I think a really difficult issue to think about so I'm sure there are questions so if you want to make your way up to each of the microphones and then we'll take about ten minutes of questions from you okay on the right person thank you hello thank you for your talk around it really helpful I've been asked about came riding aside from quite off my non-christian friends and I I've spoken about it quite a few times but they usually don't give me 45 minutes to explain and so I was wondering if you could help me what points would you raise if you have five minutes where you will write on a blog or something like that yeah great question I mean part of the issue is is you know the soundbite culture that we're in so I think what you need to do is try and reply with something that might stop someone in their tracks and so could you reply you know are you could you imagine another universe in which the morality would be different because I mean they're thinking within a you know what one conception if they're an atheist we might want to ask why they have this moral intuition that this is wrong so I mean that that to me would might be a classic way to go you feel this is so wrong where do you get that sense of it being wrong you know because what if you were to sort of swap roles and start saying well I don't think it's wrong at all we want to affirm their sense that there is something that's objectively wrong in you know in all but special circumstances of killing someone we might want to ask them to think whether there can be special circumstances because we're very much wanting to say look this thing that happened with the Canaanites is not normal this is exceptional it's not normal way of carrying out wars in the Old Testament it's a special circumstance so I think I'd want to do something like that just just a little teaser that gets the door slightly open maybe and question from the other side yeah so when we take into account the fact that in the Old Testament people were stoned and people were like if you went to war you could take a wife home or something stuff like that yeah all that sir and then we like you said we look at the cross stone we say you know that shows that shows how serious sin was and you know like Jesus had to die for us but that doesn't take away the fact that like was it fair for the other people back in the day to have to endure that suffering when we get what makes it so special for us now yeah well of course thank you there's a couple of sorts of unfairness one is negative unfairness and one is a positive unfairness and positive unfairness is of course you know the people who work in the field all day and you know the people who've been working there all day get the pay they agree to and the ones who just work for a short time get something extra so in a sense I'd want to know what we're looking at there when I understand the Old Testament I want to do what Jesus does when he's asked about divorce Matthew 19 he says when you look at the law of Moses you've got to remember that's not the way it was in the beginning in the beginning there was no divorce I can do the same with slavery I can look at something as they look in the beginning there was no one person ruling over another in that sort of way I can see the same with polygamy multiple wives that that's not there in the beginning and whenever people have multiple wives there are always family problems you know so I could go back to the beginning and I think I'd want to do the same in relation to anything to do with violence I want to say look God's pattern at the beginning is that there should be no violence then I come to commands like about stoning and so on well I think we do have capital punishment in our society if you carry a large rucksack jump over security barriers at an airport and run towards a plane you know and you get shot well you know think well all you've done is jump though some barriers carrying rucksack running to to play I mean what's wrong with that I mean running carrying a rucksack what's wrong with those you know but we know there's a certain context for that and that might help us understand some of these things with the other thing is prison that we have you can only have when you have an economic surplus so you know to say that a society long ago should have been using prisons prisons have problems you know doesn't really work that would at least explain some of the corporal punishments you never have corporal punishments for non corporal offenses that's the other thing when you hit someone's eye that's what you get back to yourself so I would want to bring in a number of things but what I think is going on in the old testement legislation is regulation some of the time if the government regulates the gambling industry and decides not to shut everything down does that mean they think gambling is a good thing no it means that it's being tolerated at a certain level and I think what we have sometimes in the Old Testament is that sort of regulation and toleration the case of people take being allowed for instance to take wives from a defeated army in war is actually very unusual because of course didn't all ancient society and involving battlefield rape we actually have a command against battlefield rape you have to wait one month before you take it now you might think that's not very long but in the society it's actually a huge step from what normally went on so I think I'd want to say we got movement towards the right in the right direction why wasn't it stricter well because I guess humans are so sinful god knows what reactions there would be if his law had been you know stricter I'm not always as strict with my children as I think I might need to be because I am also trying to move them on so thank you from right yes you can't have touched on this that if you can expand a little bit um regarding the slavery question and exodus later on to NGO thing that talks about the meeting yeah and about the property yeah and I don't really understand why God who knew right from wrong wasn't able to do more to ensure that that kind of thing didn't happen of what point suddenly it was bad okay I'm on the subject of slavery I think I'd want to distinguish a number of different sorts of slavery depending actually on the origins of the slavery so we think about someone being owned by someone else is it that they've sold themselves into this position that they've been conquered that they have been born into this position that they have been kidnapped into this position or that they got into debt and are therefore in that position then we need to think when we have those are all very different circumstances I have far less sympathy for someone who gets themselves into that situation through open-eyed choice you know then we need to think when we read the Old Testament Roman slavery and the North Atlantic slave trade have not happened so we mustn't read the word slave back in there actually the King James Version only has the word slave once in the Old Testament and that's in italics because it's not there in the original and there's been a rise in the occurrence of the word slave in Old Testament translations which I'm having a little fight against but that's another story so I want to say let's at least Park the term look at the reality the reality is when we read about these servants whether it's of Abraham or whatever these are people who are trusted with wealth and so on in the Old Testament if you knock the tooth out of your servant then you have to let me go free but what was allowed in the Old Testament was what we might now call debt slavery and this is where again you in a subsistence society you've run out of everything that you have are you allowed to sell yourself or what that means is effectively hold yourself as you know a capital against an advance and that I think is allowed and in a sense in a subsistence society is that if you have no salt social welfare or yes and that is a different thing and I think we read the word slave and we think slave catchers there are no traders in slaves that we read about in the Old Testament Joseph's brothers and that was very bad idea it's people selling themselves or their daughters but then all marriages of financial transactions I can explain that if you like it's a different thing that's going on so the verse that I think you referred to was Exodus chapter 20 was it or 21 yeah sorry 21 verse 20 where he said okay if a man strikes his servant or slave or his maidservant with a rod and they die under his hand he shall be avenged now what does that mean it means that there is capital punishment I would assume if you kill your own servant or slave now I think that is quite a striking thing because I don't know that existing anywhere in the ancient world then but if it the person lives for a day or two he shall not be avenged because and a lot of translations say at this point this is 20 X is 21 21 here's his property now literally it says he's his silver now I think what this means is that this person has made a financial investment in purchasing that man's labor and therefore there's a presumption that if this person just happened to die a few days later this was not deliberate because this person would be doing himself out of work and and you know that sort of thing so I would not understand this as saying it's his property he has no chattel property I don't I don't think the old the Old Testament very clear in the book of Job for instance that God owns everyone and you know that that has to underlie any of this okay I think we need to be just have one question if it can be fairly brief and the answer very brief is right I know it's a really complex issue and it brief answers then can be done just one more I'm afraid thank you thank you we were talking about defending the character of God and you were drawing on the illustration and Deuteronomy with the rim sacrificing his son child sacrifice seemed to be framed as immoral and then Abraham is asked by God sacrifice to sign you so is it fair to say that God sometimes asks us to do something evil even though like you mentioned this some that Aryan knew full well that he anticipated got stopping him but is it fair to say that God would ask us to do something evil no I don't think God would ever ask you to do something evil I would say that there are some things that would be evil to do if you are not properly authorized by God so the taking of life in special circumstances is not an evil I mean in special circumstances like if you're a an authorized judge you haven't or in a war he's a special circumstance this is not an evil so taking life without due authoritative --all god isn't interested in having children sacrifice to him and it quite clear you know he calls it off that could attest is he it says he's tested Abraham he wants to see his full of billions but he only does that against the backdrop of having promised him that Isaac will have continued existence and offspring so in other words that is he doesn't just go around giving people arbitrary commands part of his character is he shows his faithfulness and gives the test in that context so I think there are some times someone might ask you to do something an unreasonable what but your judgment of whether it's reasonable depends on your knowledge of them if they're a random person in the street you say no if it's someone you really know and love who asks you something to hold a baby for five minutes then you do it you know so I think I'd want to put that context on it okay thank you very much indeed show appreciation once again let's go to the source that critics accept most of all a New Testament I'm going to start chopping off a time line up here so this is proximately 3080 in the mid 70s if you found someone in a well-placed book if that person said Jesus was raised from the dead you almost could not find one that was not an emma Jellicle today the majority of scholars writing in the field no matter how far left or right they are the majority of them think something happened to Jesus after his death something happened to him not just to the disciples I'm going to argue that you can use a critical approach to the New Testament and still come away believing the resurrection you

Channel: ReasonableFaithTour

Views: 47,565

Rating: 4.8322148 out of 5

Keywords: Peter J Williams, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Canaanites, Old Testament, genocide, Tyndale House, violence, terrorism, context, Reasonable Faith, Tour, apologetics, bethinking, conference, Bethinking Conference, Christianity, God, theism, atheism, arguments, The God Delusion, New Atheist, Morality, UCCF, Damaris, Premier Christian Radio, Westminster Chapel, youtube, video, Jesus, William Lane Craig, Abraham, Isaac, sacrifice, 9/11, slavery

Id: ulCbh_1SlwE

Length: 51min 32sec (3092 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 16 2013