Bishop Robert Barron & Alex O'Connor (Cosmic Skeptic) • Christianity or Atheism?

hello and welcome to the first episode of the big conversation season three i'd love to know what you think of alex o'connor and bishop baron's dialogue by filling out a brief survey it's multi-choice and really quick plus we've an exclusive bonus video of alex and bishop baron debating the trinity you'll receive it by simply subscribing to our newsletter at thebigconversation.show for the survey and the bonus content go to the links in the info well hello and welcome to the big conversation from unbelievable brought to you in partnership with the john templeton foundation i'm justine briley and the big conversation is all about exploring the biggest questions of science faith and philosophy with leading thinkers across the religious and non-religious spectrum and today we're asking christianity or atheism which makes best sense of who we are and this season is being recorded remotely of course for obvious reasons but the silver lining is that it does allow us to bring some fascinating voices together from around the world and so my guests today are bishop robert baron and alex o'connor bishop robert baron is auxiliary bishop in the archdiocese of los angeles and the founder of word on fire catholic ministries he reaches millions via youtube and social media and is seeking to proclaim christ in the culture alex o'connor is a student at oxford university and his youtube channel cosmic skeptic has grown to be one of the most successful atheist channels in the world and on it alex also explores a variety of philosophical and ethical issues including his passion for veganism so uh bishop robert baron and alex o'connor welcome along to the program great to have you both with me today my pleasure thanks for having me um i've really been looking forward to this engagement because in some ways i see both of you as leaders in your field especially in the online world youtube social media and so on occupying of course a christian and atheist niche but there's so much overlap in a way in terms of the things you're exploring the philosophical ideas that you're opening up um let's start with you bishop baron um i've been so looking forward to having you on the show um not not had you on before but your ministry has really started to reach so many people online what's what's been the secret of that why so many people tuning in to hear you speak on subjects hear your conversations with other people and capturing you know a relatively young demographic as well in the process well i think people are naturally interested in god and the things of god and i mean both believers and non-believers when i started i think the youtube channel began in 2007 so right after youtube began and that was the high-water mark of a lot of the new atheists so that was hitchens and dawkins and sam harris were really in vogue so i was right away in dialogue with a lot of their uh disciples and i i refer to them kind of playfully as secret herods because you know as herod loved to listen to john the baptist preach even though he had him in prison there were a lot of people i think who enjoyed the discussions of religious themes even though they were non-believers and and i welcome it i love that uh when i first started i'm so naive i didn't know you could comment on youtube videos so i would do these movie reviews or i try to find something in the culture that had you know religious resonance and i discovered pretty quickly that people loved to comment and most of the comments were negative you know in the beginning people that hated religion or hated me or god or whatever but i learned to love those conversations and i learned too that a lot of people that you're not directly dialoguing with you're indirectly dialoguing with because they're reading these long dialogues and i don't do it as much anymore i don't have time but in the early years i did get on there a lot and engage people but i think i think everyone's sort of naturally interested in the things of god and when you provide a forum for that conversation they respond to it i mean this has led you into a a really unique ministry um where you are reaching so many people online um what fruits do you see from that i mean do you see people who have been antagonistic to religion even going so far as to become catholics themselves all the time and i don't mean you know everyone that listens becomes a catholic but across the years sure we've had lots of examples one thing that you never ever ever see is someone saying in a comment you know that was a really convincing argument thank you i agree with you when i'm becoming a catholic it's usually it's years later someone will say you know it's a video of yours i watched in school or i watched when i was struggling with something and years later it's led me by this path toward uh the church so i i'm always really gratified by that sort of thing and it's usually by way of indirection you rarely have a direct you know payoff you make an argument and someone goes by god you're right but it's a sowing of seeds and these seeds through the social media land you know god knoweth where but they they take root in very interesting ways so that's gratifying hmm alex you've been running uh your atheist youtube channel cosmic skeptic for several years now i mean you you started early in a way i mean you were still doing a levels maybe even gcses when you started the channel um what what what what made you start and and what caused this massive growth you've had over the last few years well uh well justin i could ask you the same thing i mean it's recently come to my attention that you've been making some moves on tick tock and and putting all of us to shame in terms of the amount of views that you seem to be getting um it's wonderful down to my 16 year old son i can tell you anyway it's definitely it's definitely the place to be although the the comments have been nicer to you than they've been to me on that on that app so far i think um but it's it's one of those things about the internet isn't it it's so unpredictable as i as i think i remember saying to you the first time i came on your show and you're asking you know how it was that this channel got off the ground like if i knew what it was if i knew what i did that caused this surge in attention then i'd be doing it every single day i can't put my finger on it i think i i began making videos about anything that took my interest i mean for goodness sake i used to make skateboarding videos if you go back far enough and i decided to respond to one video i saw which was somebody somebody discussing uh i believe it was the video of somebody discussing homosexuality i think it was the watchtower the the jehovah's witness organization and i responded to it in a fairly kind of snarky uh sarcastic manner and i think people just seem to like it it got shared on a few forums and then i kind of had this period of sort of what bishop baron describes of religion being whilst an atheist isn't someone who who thinks that any of it is true they can still recognize that if it were true it would be the most important thing right in fact i remember talking about this in my interview for university uh being asked why as an atheist i'd want to study theology and i remember saying that i remember thinking like i don't i don't believe any of this but i want to be sure you know because if it is true then it's the most important truth that there is uh but i became kind of invested in these debates that i was watching between the new atheists and popular christian apologists and i began to really enjoy them and that's what first sparked the interest but i think that after long enough listening to those debates you realize that they're philosophically quite shallow and tend to be more about impressive rhetoric and entertaining uh spectacles which you know have their place i really enjoy the entertainment uh but then i kind of moved on to trying to be a bit more philosophically engaged i i would say i've noticed a sort of a progression in in your content over the years and um potentially i think you've probably just grown a lot you know in terms of your own understanding um your philosophical awareness um and and to some degree i would say even in the way you um the graciousness you extend actually to other christians i've seen you even put videos up in the last year or so where you've said here's something i used to say and i wouldn't make this argument anymore or a new appreciation for you know a christian perspective and i've really valued that that you've you've been willing to hold your hands up and say i i haven't always got it right in the past well i mean to be sure that the the bar is quite low in my opinion on on the internet i mean i've made a few videos where i've said hey listen you know there's this video i put out a few years ago i mean bear in mind i started making these videos when i was what 17 16. so of course my mind will have changed on certain things and so i would make a video saying hey i no longer believe this and people in the comments would say wow i can't believe how how humble this is how wonderful it is to see someone challenging their own beliefs and i thought how low is the bar for online philosophical discussion if if just saying hey what i said before isn't right gives you that kind of reaction it it really astounded me yeah well i i think it says something about the nature of sadly the the online world where basically to to admit any kind of failure or even learning something new is is seen somehow as detrimental but um i'm i'm i'm really pleased to bring you both on for i'm what i'm sure will be a really good discussion today um i think the place to start in some ways with both of you will be your stories um perhaps bishop baron first of all um can you tell us a little bit about um your growing up um within the catholic faith but why for you you didn't abandon that faith but you felt that actually this was something that made sense um what was the process as you went on yeah a quick version i was born and raised a catholic so from a devout catholic family went to mass every sunday was sent to catholic schools from the time i was six years old and so i mean i took catholicism pretty much for granted as a young man i wasn't all that interested in religion as a kid i was interested in sports i liked to read but i read books about baseball players and basketball players and i wanted to be a baseball player so most of my life as a kid was about sports my catholicism was sort of taken for granted as a background of my life but a major i say it now as a grace in my life occurred when i was about 14. so i was my first year in high school do you say secondary school uh and i went to a catholic high school and this young dominican friar presented one of aquinas's arguments for god's existence well i didn't doubt god's existence i wasn't like a modern rationalist wondering whether god exists and and i'm sure that presentation bored every kid in the in the room but i don't know why to this day again i think it's kind of a grace it just fascinated me that you could think about god in a more serious way mind you too i'm coming of age in the years right after vatican 2 which was to say the least not a high water mark of catholic education so this the schooling i got in catholic school was what i call the banners and balloons catholicism it was a lot of making collages a lot of personal experience very low level doctrinal presentation so i never thought of religion as a serious topic there was english and history and math and science were the serious topics and then religion was like gym class or something something we did in school but it wasn't really intellectually serious well that presentation in high school was the first time i came across something like an intellectually interesting presentation of the faith well it lit a fire in me and i went to the local library i'm 14. and i don't know if you know mortimer adler's series of the great books you know it's very popular in our country and it's all the great thinkers of western civilization and there were two volumes on aquinas and so i saw those i grabbed one and i brought it home and i didn't know what i was reading i had no preparation whatsoever to read that sort of text but it started a process in me that's never really stopped from that time and it convinced me that it was worthwhile thinking about religion as alex just said i quite agree with that that if this is right what this man is arguing there's nothing more important and that started me on a process so i never really left the church or had questions about it but this moment was a moment of deepening and heck it followed me my whole life i mean i got into eventually the priesthood but then more specifically into study doctoral work and then my own teaching and writing so it set me on a trajectory away from baseball and toward you know the intellectual exploration of the faith so that's kind of a quick version of my story yeah i mean you say that that doubt uh was never a major part of your story um obviously it has nevertheless been an intellectual journey that you've been on in the process i mean have you found that um that's been a problem when it comes to other catholics you know who do lose their faith um is that they haven't been given a kind of an intellectual grounding in their faith so when a richard dawkins or a new atheist comes along it can be all too easy for for them to be persuaded by yes yes and i'll say this with the exception of i think of william lane craig uh the performance of christian intellectuals when the new atheist emerged was pathetic and there were many times i was just wringing my hands because the new atheists weren't particularly new in my judgment they were rehearsing a lot of foyer block and marx and sard and a lot of the standard atheist perspectives and the rejoinders coming from the christian community were as i say pathetic for the most part and the the people in the in the pews had very little intellectual formation generation before mine would have had a little more uh substantive formation intellectually so that's one reason why the new atheists i think ran through especially young people like crazy and in my early days doing the internet work i mean i heard the phraseology from hitchens and dawkins and sam harris all the time from i don't know if a young girl but people on my sites who had really bought into the arguments of the new atheists so yeah that's a serious problem that we had abandoned a lot of our own i'll tell you a very quick story there i was on a radio program it was in canada and when hitchens was really all the rage and so we're i was debating with this radio host at the end he said well father at least could you admit that christopher hitchens got you catholics thinking about these things for the first time i just i just paused to let my annoyance sink in and then i said look i i i'm the very inadequate representative of the oldest intellectual tradition in the west i mean trust me we've thought about these things before but the fact that he could say that so blithely was a was a sign of the corruption of it um alex tell us a little bit of you your journey because you also did grow up in a sort of catholic setting didn't it but it it certainly didn't stick as it did obviously with bishop baron tell us your journey then well i mean it sucked for a while uh as much as it perhaps would of anybody of my age i mean i remember being sat on the back of a bus on a school trip praying my rosary and essentially being bullied for doing so you know i was i was fairly devout as a child a lot of people have a deconversion story like uh my own dad had a deconversion story from when he was much younger when his own dad died and when that happened he just essentially immediately concluded that there is no god interestingly some people do the exact opposite when a loved one dies they cling to religion because that's that's one way that they uh kind of cope with the thing that they're facing for me there was no kind of singular event that happened that made me say i no longer believe this it was more a realization of the baselessness of what it was that i did believe now that's not necessarily to say that the catholicism to which i ostensibly subscribed is baseless but that my reasons for subscribing it uh to it were baseless and i think that's a product uh of bad teaching or at least in the same way that bishop baron describes our religious education was similarly uh kind of like doing pe or something it was something it was just one of these classes you did nobody took it particularly seriously and so it was very easy to brush it off but the thought that i had was why is it that i believe this where does this come from and i suddenly realized that there was nothing there so it wasn't the process of me saying i'm now going to say this was false but a process of me saying okay let me find out what it is that underlies this worldview and let me see if i can work my way back to where i was and i'm still working to this day you know the the climb has never stopped i'm still happily weeding through the arguments in literature as best i can to potentially one day regain the the catholicism that i once had or another religion because of course while it is true that if catholicism is true it's the most important truth it's trivially also the case that any other religion this would reply to any other religion as well so there's a very live potentiality for me to regain that that religious uh religious persuasion but i just haven't had any success thus far would it be fair to say that any of those new atheists um christopher hitchens and co had an impact in your own journey as you started to investigate whether there was you know a foundation to to the police you held absolutely i mean reading the god delusion by richard dawkins probably single-handedly uh opened that conversation in my mind you know and i go back and read the god delusion now and i i find it embarrassingly poor in many respects um but at the time it was the first time that i'd seen someone say hey like have you have you thought about this like and the thing is because dawkins kind of has this old man in the sky type caricature of of god um that that's one of the things that would trouble the christians whom he was debating but that was also the view that i had as a catholic right i mean it's not like i'd been taught the the uh the the minutia of christian doctrine i kind of had this childish image of some guy in the sky who'd give me a big hug after i die and when dawkins kind of said look that doesn't make sense well he was right of course that doesn't make sense and so it kind of pulled me away i then migrated onto christopher hitchens who probably had singularly the most influence over the at least the way that i present arguments and the way that i would kind of shape my discourse in the earlier years of my channel at the very least um but i think the influence there was more stylistic than actually substantive or at least as far as my content stands today i think the stylistic influence is still very much apparent but the substantive influence has pretty much gone ever since i made that video accusing christopher hitchens of being a sophist which probably didn't go down all that well with with his his hardest fans um bishop baron you wanted to jump in because i resonate very much with something alex just said about dawkins um you know your countryman he died only about 20 years ago now herbert mccabe the great dominican theologian one of the great contemporary thomas i think and mccabe often debated atheists publicly in england but he always made one stipulation that the atheist would speak first and then he'd respond and invariably he would listen to the atheist make the presentation and he would say i completely agree with you and what he meant simply was this that atheists serve and i mean this very seriously a very important function and that's to debunk forms of idolatry so there's a very good example the crude presentation of god as a being as some some big being alongside of others where the mainstream of our tradition has consistently denied that of god and when you fall into that trap now there's a very crude version of it the big man with the white beard but there are less crude versions of it that are still just as problematic when god is construed as one competitive being among many a lot of the problems that the atheists put their finger on emerge and i mean now going back to foyer block and marx and jean-paul sarden company when god is construed competitively competing for us on the same ontological playing field a lot of the typical atheist reactions occur and they're right they're right to put their finger on that and say that god doesn't exist and so i'm with mccabe a lot of the time with atheists i'll say yeah good i agree foyerbach you know if god is simply a projection of my idealized self-understanding isaiah knew about that he called it idolatry ezekiel knew all about that if god is just opium for the masses to assuage our suffering well of course that's a that's an idol we we put a crucified criminal at the heart of our religious uh imagination you know sartre if god exists i i can't be free but i am free therefore god doesn't exist well he's right if god is a great competitor to my freedom so i say thank god for all those atheists who who rid us of certain idols yes and as as has been said before um many a christian even say well i don't believe in the god that you don't believe in either in the sense that often it's a god that neither side really wants to believe in but but why why do you believe in god and specifically the christian god bishop baron because um perhaps if you could make if you like the positive case and then we'll we'll hear alex respond to it and perhaps you can make the case for why he believes atheism makes more sense this is our central question on the show today christianity or atheism which makes best sense of who we are how would you respond to that overall question then well again we could look at some of the classic uh ways aquinas called them paths i i like that much better than you know arguments or you know absolutely convincing rational demonstrations i think waze hits it much more accurately i think you look at it both sort of protologically eschatologically where does a contingent world come from or more precisely how do you explain contingent states of affairs the endless appeal to other contingent states of affairs won't work you must come finally to some non-contingent ground now i'm summarizing that famous argument in just a couple of lines but something like the quest for a foundation for a world that is radically evanescent that's radically non-self-explanatory that exists but doesn't have to exist now that goes back to the beginnings of philosophy and the earliest philosophers were on that quest and i think god is a very uh compelling answer to the question of how to explain contingent states of affairs but i do it the other way i'm calling it eschatologically there's a drive within us both intellectually and at the level of will toward what i would call the the unconditioned so the mind is is looking for truth all the time and it finds them but it's never satisfied it's one of the great marks of a real intellectual that you're never satisfied with every question you answer opens up a hundred more questions and the mind just goes out out and it's by an inner dynamism pressing toward what i call the unconditioned truth or truth itself the will seeks the good and finds it in great acts of justice and so on but it's never satisfied it it keeps opening to wider horizons god if you want is not any of the things in the world that i might find any of the truths my mind might discover it's not some good that i might achieve but a kind of her luring horizon for the inner dynamism of the spirit and i think god is a is a compelling answer to that if you want how to explain the the contingency of the world and then how to explain the the inner drive and dynamism of of the human spirit um those are you know two kind of classical paths i i want to give alex talk i actually like to say a few words about the ontological argument because it gets it something that the arguments classically aren't getting at but i'll leave it there for a second okay well maybe we'll come back for the ontological argument not one we do offered on this show but maybe we can open it up a little um alex before we sort of hear your your sort of case against god if you like what do you think of this particular case for god that bishop baron has spelled out well i agree with many of the implications of what bishop baron is saying i mean for instance i very much uh agree with the idea of an expansion knowledge essentially never being able to satisfy our curious minds and there's that image of an expanding circle as it gets bigger and bigger so do the edges you know the edges the frontiers of our knowledge get bigger and bigger such that there are more and more things we don't know now that's one of the things that i find so incredible and and beautiful about uh the scientific and philosophical endeavors that we that we partake in because there's just endless things to discover i find it quite strange how the christian might be able to say that yes our circle is getting bigger and bigger and the frontiers of our knowledge are getting bigger and bigger but once we get to that certain point there it is we've got it we have the full circle we know what it is we're now satisfied the thing about atheism is that for most atheists that i know it's more of a passive thing than an active thing it's more just saying listen i'm not the one who has to do the explaining here i'm perfectly content to say that our knowledge will continually expand and with it so will the frontiers if somebody else comes along and claims that they have the answer that they have the thing that kind of that cuts off that progress and says we've we've found the answer we know what's at the base of all reality then they better have some good evidence for it and there are plenty of plenty of evidences that are put forward in many arguments that are made such as the contingency argument which i've discussed on your show in in uh in more detail before justin with cameron patucci of course um the the thing about it is that my job as an atheist is essentially to pick holes rather than to necessarily present an argument to say why it's false it's more of an undercutting approach than a rebutting approach is what i like to use with contingency when i was on your show before there's an assumption for instance that contingent things exist which is an assumption that often goes unanalyzed you know the idea that actually i could have not been born or that you know this this glass that i've got on the table here could have been a mug instead or something like this is how contingency is often described but as i spoke about before on your show justin that's not entirely it's not clear that that's necessarily true uh if for instance we live in a deterministic universe where everything is following a causal chain whereby it actually couldn't have been different um so there are there are certain assumptions that i think often go unanalyzed in these arguments and you can have an entire discussion about the nature of contingent objects and whether they exist but you can also have an entire discussion if you just grant that they do and say is it not the case as david hume suggested that if you have each contingent object explained by another contingent object you've explained the whole and there's plenty of discussion to be had there the problem is that these discussions are so large and so wide-ranging that to say actually no we we we've solved the problem we've solved all of these all of these polls that you can pick we're going to plug them up with god and we and and not not just not just as a god of the gaps not just as a well we don't really know let's just say that god did it but as a kind of no this is the best explanation for all of these things i i just i i failed to see it hmm response bishop baron we'll go to a quick break firstly perhaps elaborate a little on that contingency argument but also this other issue alex raises where he says it feels to him like christians are saying we've got it covered we've got the ultimate answer and sort of put a cap really on on how far our our quest for for knowledge can go first about contingency i mean the word itself just from you know tendre i mean to touch with so this state of affair is obtaining right now that that i'm speaking to this machine which is conveying information to you across the ocean that light's shining on me right now this state of affairs is contingent in the measure that it depends upon a set of causes extrinsic to itself so i put the question of determinism to the side and we can discuss that separately but the contingency of this state of affairs is simply the fact that it's being caused by a another state of affairs now is that state of affairs itself contingent or non-contingent if it is contingent it's explained by some other set of causes so i don't think it you know look people in the religious fear who believed in determinism also accepted the argument from contingency so i don't think determinism really affects the meaning of contingency that just means it's being touched upon by some kind of causal agency now can that process proceed to infinity so i'd quarrel with hume there because aquinas distinguishes between a infinite causal set subordinating what he calls paraoxidanes and subordinated per se peroxidants would be you know you had a father who had a father who had a father back back back in that kind of causal series that could be infinite because the the present existence of of the first element is not dependent here and now upon the higher elements but one subordinated aquinas says per se is where there's a here and now causal dependency so the fact that it's not a thousand degrees in this room right now the fact that whatever's making those lights go is going the fact that i have oxygen to breathe all that's making this state of affairs real it's actualizing a potential well how do you explain that well that has to be explained through another set of causes etc that kind of causal series i'd say pache hume cannot proceed to infinity because then the suppression of a first element would indeed entail suppression of the subsequent causal elements so i think that's the kind of causal series that the argument from contingency is is quarreling with now let me say a quick thing too because i loved your comment actually about god and the setting of limits because what came to my mind was augustine's famous dictum where he said see comprehendus non-esteos right if you understand that's not god which is why we purposely use language like horizon the sort of like ever retreating uh think of ignatius viola god is semper mayor always greater always more so you're right if we were to say boom end of it got it understand it got it figured out that's not god we're talking about the arguments are kind of gesturing in the direction of this ultimate horizon but if we become very unifical in our language that c comprehension honestly or aquinas you know he says whatever can be known or understood is less than god so if you ever you're tempted to say you're quite right i i got it end of the argument that's not god you're talking about so i i would add that um observation uh which i think is a very valid one that you make we're going to go to a quick break and uh we'll come back fascinating discussion today on the big conversation it's alex o'connor and bishop robert baron we're asking uh christianity or atheism which mex makes best sense of who we are and we'll be back very shortly for more conversations between christians and skeptics subscribe to the unbelievable podcast and for more updates and bonus content sign up to the unbelievable newsletter welcome back to the big conversation with me justin briley we're asking christianity or atheism which makes best sense of who we are fabulous to have on the show today bishop robert baron and alex o'connor both incredibly popular youtubers in their own right you can find out more about them with the links from today's show uh just in that last section alex um bishop robert baron was responding to that question about whether god is a sort of arbitrary stopping point in you know as an explanation and he obviously believes that no god god is in that sense opens up you know the field rather than closes it down i mean i could imagine someone coming back to you um and saying well a naturalist um someone who is a materialist as an atheist they've kind of got their stopping point which is the laws of nature and material stuff of the world and that's sort of the boundary of their explanatory uh viewpoint um and they might equally ask well why that particular stopping point you know what how have you arrived at that particular belief that that's that's the case um so perhaps take a moment to explain where where you do sit on that um do you call yourself uh in that sense an atheist naturalist um or something else and and you know how do you what makes you confident that atheism or naturalism is indeed the best explanation for the world we live in well this all very much depends on how we interpret the terms uh for example we were talking about god as being a kind of explanatory stopping point and you could say the same thing about naturalism if you are a naturalist if you're someone who believes that the only thing that exists is is physical material essentially but something like naturalism can also be a methodological process in other words as we investigate the world we make the assumption that there's no supernatural agency at play so the scientific method for instance tends to assume naturalism it says that we're going to investigate the world only in in regards to physical material now that doesn't necessarily commit them to the conclusion that that's all there is it just means they're using that as a methodology i would say that uh in in the in the former sense in the explanatory sense i wouldn't call myself a naturalist i wouldn't make the claim that there's no supernatural dimension to the universe i couldn't possibly know this what i can say is that i've seen no evidence to suggest that there is uh such a thing and so i i kind of abstain from really holding a belief on that position i remain rather agnostic but for that reason i employ a methodological naturalism which says that i know that the physical world exists at least to some extent on most accounts of knowledge that can be made sense of and so for that reason when i'm investigating the world i'll make that assumption now i would have no problem incorporating a non-naturalistic framework into the way i investigate the world if it turns out that there is some reason to think that that that does exist in the universe but if you see what i'm saying whilst i i wouldn't assert that i'm a naturalist in the sense that i believe that that's all that there is in the universe i may employ it methodologically speaking um i would also say just to respond to what bishop baron said a moment ago um because i i think it it's beautifully put and one of the things that a lot of people misunderstand about causation is that there are there are two two types of causation that can be at play here when we were talking about causation on your show justin we were talking about causation in the latter sense that bishop baron mentioned like i was caused by my parents my parents caused by their parents but uh you as as bishop baron implies there is another type of causation which is a more kind of simultaneous causation the thing about parentage is that if my parents cause me if my parents then then go away then die or whatever i'm still here right but there's another kind of causation this kind of uh hierarchical causation as ed fazer describes it which is the kind of causation that says that the laptop i'm speaking to you on is being held up by a table and the table is being held up by the ground now if you if you if you get rid of the table the computer doesn't say where it is right the computer being caused to be where it is as it is is being caused by the table but not in such a way like with my parents where if you took it away it then disappeared it would it would still be here but rather if you take that away it completely disappears the interesting implication of this is that when we talk about a cause and a cause and a cause and a cause and a chain of causation that's not what we should be describing because the intermediate steps actually have no causal power of their own right the table only has causal power to hold up the computer insofar as the ground gives it that causal power because if the ground takes that away the table doesn't have that causal power on its own and so the very language that we speak about these things in when we say well actually there's this kind of causation which works hierarchically speaking right i'm not sure that that's entirely accurate because of the fact that we're not really talking about causes here we're kind of talking about an intermediary stage of things which don't have any causal power of their own accord the crucial question there is then what gives this entire chain of contingent things its causal power as one block that's the question that needs to be discussed and the christian says that it's god uh the atheist might say that it's the necessity of the chain itself or perhaps the necessity of the universe or something like that but talking about causation in that manner i think is uh ill advise but i would recommend to people who are who are listening who want an accessible version to understand this kind of causation that isn't the kind apparent in the calam cosmological argument you know a cause before an effect kind of thing but this different slightly less intuitive form of causation i'd certainly recommend reading ed fazer's book uh five proofs for the existence of god on on that topic um but i just wanted to make that observation before moving on completely sure did you want to add anything to that bishop robert well simply this that i i wouldn't use the language of the intermediary elements not having causal efficacy it's a borrowed causal efficacy just as the state of affairs obtaining now exists but doesn't have to exist it doesn't contain within itself the reason for its own subsistence and so it's a borrowed subsistence if you want and the same is true of all the elements within the chain they they are truly causes but their causality is borrowed or they're actualized by a higher and higher chain but the important thing is whatever we want to call that it has to be grounded somewhere or else we can't explain the state of affairs in front of us that needs to be explained as you say the computer resting on the table we can't explain what obtains now if we simply infinitely postpone the explanation which is what's in implicit in a infinite causal series of that type now now aquinas will say and this all people call god i'm happy for the moment to say let's just stop there and there's got to be something like a non-contingent source of contingency and now by several other steps i think we can get to something that really resembles what's classically uh characterized characterizes god but that's the second or third move yeah now that's why in these discussions and in fact i would still quarrel slightly with what you're saying in the sense of the terminology of borrowed uh borrowed causal efficacy um in the idea that the table does have causal power that it's borrowing from the ground that kind of thing i'm imagining an analogy that's often used to describe this kind of causation is that of a paintbrush and the idea of a kind of infinite paintbrush somehow painting a picture that wouldn't make any sense i would say if you had a painter who is painting an image i don't think it would make sense to say that the the paintbrush itself has artistic efficacy that it's borrowing from the paper from the painter i'd say if the painter puts the paint brush to paper it's the painter that has that that efficacy that has that artistic efficacy and through the paintbrush which has none of that efficacy itself it's getting to the paper in the same way i would say that whatever kind of causes a naturally sustaining another thing's ability to to to create or to withhold or to uh to sustain something i think it does make sense to say that actually no it doesn't have causal power if it's entire ability to to do that causation comes completely from something else which is which is giving it that power in the same way that the painter gives the paintbrush artistic efficacy i don't think you would use that kind of language no you're equivocating there though because you don't give the paintbrush as such uh aesthetic efficacy it has the efficacy to put color on canvas it's got that kind of efficacy i just use platonic language there participation you've got to kind of participate in causality all of it quite right is grounded in the supreme causality of god it wouldn't like aquinas talks about the um being given the the privilege of participating in god's causality so the way that we share in god's providence god is providential over all things but i can participate in that causality material things do it unconsciously we can do it through conscious cooperation but i don't know to me though whatever we want to call that it wouldn't really affect the argument that we have to come to some first uh instance i i i i'd love to move on to at this point um and again there's a great um conversation on the contingency argument uh you can find on the unbelievable channel elsewhere but is in a sense um the question of well presumably bishop baron you you're not a christian you're not a catholic just because of some great arguments that um aquinas made uh right a century you know a millennial and a half ago or whatever right um so what's what's the um what for you is faith um presumably it's more than just those intellectual arguments that obviously have been part of your journey along the way you know let me start with a very quick little anecdote i don't know if over in in the uk you know bill maher bill maher's program he's a very well-known kind of left-wing political and cultural commentator fiercely atheist hates religion well one time he had a christian on his show who was a political lobbyist so they talked politics for a time but then he said to him now you're a man of faith and he said yes that means you accept all kinds of things on the basis of no evidence and the man said yes well i had the the channel switcher in my hand and i i threw it at the camera at the tv because i thought no man that's the whole problem paul tillich the great protestant theologian said faith is the most misunderstood word in the religious lexicon because it's construed just that way faith means some wild credulity some crazy superstition believing any old nonsense on the basis of nothing that's not what faith is in our great people that's not what faith is in thomas aquinas or anselm or augustine or any of the great figures to put it simply faith is never in for a rational so superstition gullibility accepting any old nonsense that's all infrarational i'm against that the church is against that it's superstitious nonsense faith authentically construed is always rational it's it's a surrender at the far side of reason um i think that the best the best analogy to it is in our coming to know a person right so i'm meeting both of you at least virtually now for the first time i i watched videos of you my mind was alive to see what you're like and listen to you talk and i drew conclusions and so on uh i hope someday i can meet you in person i'll have an even more thorough knowledge of you my mind will be fully engaged around that but i mean let's suppose we continued to get to know each other and we developed into real friends well my mind has never gone to sleep in this process my mind is still alive and awake and alert and studying and but at some point in that friendship you would reveal something to me that i could never have learned through my own reason by reading about you or even talking to you or talking to others about you you'd you'd speak some truth about your life that i could never have guessed unless you had told me and see at that point i have to make a decision whether i believe you or not you could be making some crazy stuff up i don't know or you could be telling me the deepest truth of your heart i have to decide at that point do i believe you now i haven't put reason to sleep at all at no point in this process have i set reason aside but at a key moment if i really want to get to know you i have to say yeah based on a lot of things and hunches and intuitions and experience and knowledge and what i've gathered about this person i'm willing to say yes i believe that truth about you that's an analogy it seems to me to religious faith authentically construed that we would hold and we could talk about what this means it doesn't mean voices coming out of clouds that god speaks if if i accept things on the basis of no reason or no argument just any old nonsense that's credulity and superstition but a surrender on the far side of reason to the self-revealing god that's faith authentically construed i think well i mean uh look i i i would i would put it rather plainly and say that with the proposition you put forward is quite a simple one you know someone you know puts forward a piece of information and you've got to decide whether to trust them or not there are two options here you're either basing this on some form of reason that is you say listen they've never lied to me before i understand that this is a rational person i know who they are i know what their motives are and therefore i conclude that what they're saying is true i wouldn't call that faith i'd call that perfectly in line with what the average person would call reason the other option is that you're doing it as you describe on a kind of hunch an intuition that is to say lack of evidence i would say that what you're describing there is either an instance of believing what they say because you have reason to do so or believing what you say or believing what they say despite having no reason to do so on a hunch or an intuition if it's the first then i'd just call it reason and if it's the second then i'm supposing you wouldn't call it faith no take the first part of our conversation so we've been going through some of these classical paths to god which i think very convincingly show that belief in god or acceptance of god's existence is a reasonable position to hold so when someone out of a religious tradition so let's say out of the biblical tradition says that god has spoken and again i'm not talking about voice from clouds that's a symbol of what i'm talking about that god has spoken well i have a very reasonable context for that claim that god exists and i can show i think by a number of steps too that god is intelligent that god has will that god is connected to his world that god has created the world out of love within that context it makes perfect sense to say that god would want to communicate precisely in human history to his uh intelligent creatures so that's not an unreasonable claim it's in a reasonable context and so i accept that when i said hunch intuition i really meant that sort of thing that that there's a context provided by reason for the claim that god has spoken now what does it mean to say god has spoken i i rather like paul tillich's description of the breakthrough of the unconditioned into our ordinary experience that's why a lot of contemporary theologians don't use classical arguments they'll talk often about limit experiences at the limit of our knowing at the limit of our capacities at the limit of our attainment we often look toward that which transcends those limits right hegel's line about to know a limit as a limit is already to be beyond the limit at the limit we we gaze into what transcends that limit are there some people who have experienced the breakthrough of the unconditioned that the unconditioned being itself if you want god speaks god breaks through our ordinary experience faith is the sort of epistemological move that corresponds to that event that event the bible witnesses to those moments it seems to me uh now poets point in that direction often too but the bible witnesses to people that have had the experience of the breakthrough of the unconditioned but i i feel like uh interesting as it may be this is this is off track from the original point which is to say look i mean you i think what you're making is a distinction without difference here you say that faith needs to be just distinct from reason otherwise there's no point in having the term right we're talking about something that's distinct from the average kind of here's a reason for believing something so i believe it and you've said well no it's not that i kind of use reason to come to this conclusion i just have a context of reason from which i arrive at this belief is i think the terminology you used i i'm failing to see the distinction here in other words the question is quite simple it's like when it comes to something some proposition which you would say you need faith to believe whether that be a religious claim or or a claim that a person you've met is is making you either have sufficient reason to believe what they're saying in which case you're relying on reason or you don't in which case sure you're relying on faith but then faith would entail a lack of sufficient reason i i feel like those are the only two options available to you no but i think we're probably just using terms in somewhat different senses because i think when that person speaks her heart to you your reason is not in control your reason has prepared the way your reason provides a certain condition for the possibility but accepting what she says that has to be an act of real belief that goes beyond your capacity to control see one of the marks seems to be differentiates a philosopher approaching god and one of the great biblical figures philosophers are always for the most part in control of the situation they're proposing the premises they're analyzing they're proposing arguments drawing conclusions they're in the driver's seat epistemologically the great biblical figures uh you don't find anything like an argument for god's existence in the bible which is very interesting because they're very much in the in the passive voice they've been addressed they've been uh spoken to you know uh isaiah's vision in the temple that's a symbol of what it's like to be addressed by god so it's not repugnant to reason in fact reason provides a a context for that but it it goes beyond it it's something that reason can't control on its own what might help here alex is just for you to kind of explain just just to help move this on here is what what would be for you a reasonable evidence for god if you like and if that were presented to you would you still say well i'm not believing by faith at this point i'm simply believing by reason in god what would that sort of a reason have to look like yeah we'll see i'm i'm not sure exactly well i know what the reason would kind of look like which is some form of sound valid argument in favor of god's existence if the ontological argument is sound then the conclusion of the ontological argument is true you know it's it's as simple as it gets now i find this interesting because i mean it's actually fairly recently that this analytic style of philosophical thinking has been applied to religion and traditional systematic theologians were at least originally quite hostile to the introduction of analytic philosophy to doing theology and they say that the reason that this is is because you know religion requires narrative it requires poetry it requires this kind of faith-based thinking that analytic philosophy you know reason alone can't really grasp that this i find to be telling right we have someone coming along and saying listen i i am going to accept what can be reasonably shown to be the case and systematic theology essentially rejecting it on the basis of it not being able to to to properly handle the content of their beliefs i find it incredibly telling that when we try to apply this kind of analytic style of thinking to theological thought the response is never to try and show why um actually you know we can we can provide an analysis which shows that this is in keeping with our reasonable logical thinking but rather to say that actually you know the methodology is is inappropriate to use in this case and we should be using this vague concept of faith instead which i still haven't heard precisely defined from from bishop baron which would would be quite helpful actually if uh rather than kind of uh talking around the subject as i think we've been doing here i think it would be helpful to the listener and to me if we could have a a sentence perhaps that sums up what what faith is as a as a dictionary theological definition i mean there's a response to the revealing god bishop faith is a response to the revealing god the response of the whole self in the presence of the god who reveals himself now that's not repugnant at all to what we were doing 20 minutes ago in talking rationally about god in terms of philosophical proofs i think those are very effective ways to approach the mystery of god but then there's the claim the strange claim from the heart of religious traditions that god has spoken which means god has revealed something of himself beyond what the mind on its own can grasp now the mind can understand it it can take it in think about it faith seeking understanding etc but make it more specific and in the christian context we're talking about the incarnation we're talking about the trinity uh two realities that reason can't on its own uh grasp but were given to us were revealed to us and faith is the response of the entire person to the revealing god we'll come back to this um this claim at the heart of christianity that god is love and what the claims are at the heart of an atheist uh perspective on the universe i want to move us on in the next section gentlemen to just at least briefly touching on issues around our actual experience of life obviously the pain and suffering that often accompany it we're in the midst of a global pandemic and and how both of your perspectives as a christian and atheist bear on that you're listening to the big conversation here from unbelievable i'm justin brown my guests on the show today are bishop robert baron and alex o'connor hi again i hope you're enjoying the show just a reminder that i'd love to hear what you think of it in our brief survey we've also held on to a fantastic bonus video conversation between alex and bishop baron debating the trinity i'll send it to you when you subscribe to our newsletter at thebigconversation.show doing that also means you'll be the first to hear about future conversations and access more exclusive resources from the show links for the survey and bonus video are below in the info welcome back to the final part of today's big conversation we're asking christianity or atheism which makes best sense of who we are bishop robert baron and alex o'connor have joined me uh bishop robert baron the founder of the word on fire catholic ministries uh reaching millions through youtube and social media i'll make sure there are links to that from today's program and equally to alex o'connor's cosmic skeptic channel as well which has uh recently passed over 400 000 people subscribing to that on youtube we've talked a lot about some of the intellectual arguments the nature of faith we've even delved into the trinity in the course of today's show we've covered an awful lot of ground folks but um i suppose at a practical level most people if they accept or indeed often reject faith it comes at a more experiential kind of level um they're not necessarily thinking about the argument for god or against god for of aquinas or richard dawkins um it's it's often you know most people's journey involves some experiential element to it um as i said we're living through a pandemic where people are asking big questions around the nature of life suffering uh and everything else and i suppose at some level i see um i see people both rejecting faith and being drawn to faith during this pandemic uh people who you know when they see suffering it actually they throw themselves upon god and others who say well i i want nothing to do with god if this is the kind of world he creates um i mean does atheism per se alex have anything to say to this issue or or is atheism more just as you've said a kind of a point of view on one issue and people will have to kind of deal with the issue of pain and suffering in whatever form they can if they do happen to be an atheist atheism doesn't claim to have any explanatory power okay uh what we can say is that we would we would expect if there is a if there is a world in which there are conscious creatures which you know i recognize some people think is unlikely given atheism generally um but if if that's our premise what would we expect to find well we'd have no reason not to expect there to be all kinds of unpredictable and seemingly arbitrary suffering it's not me who has to do the explaining here you know and and you're right justin that during a tragedy like this you find that people come to religion and people go away from religion but that's that fools within the realm i think of uh of a psychological discussion it's like people might come to god because they find it's a good way to to deal with the immense tragedy of the suffering that we're facing but that says nothing about whether or not religion provides a sufficient explanation for why it's happening or justification for why it's happening because here's the problem in order to assert that there is an all-loving god who is supervising this and because you know i'm not the one here who is claiming that this is being supervised that somebody is watching this somebody knows that this is occurring and somebody's allowing it to occur if we're going to assert that there is a benevolent being who is allowing this to occur then it must follow that there is morally sufficient reason for this to occur in the united kingdom just today we passed a hundred thousand people who have been done who have been killed by the virus and the christian has to say that this is morally justified and they're welcome to do so with reference to theodicies with by saying that you know this is pain people like to speak kind of abstractly about how pain and suffering might be necessary to obtain certain goods or it will be compensated in the afterlife or something of this sort but we have to say specifically on an issue like this that yes this specifically hundred thousand people who have died of covid have done so because god allowed it that's the first thing that needs to be admitted by the christian and most christians have no problem accepting that the difficulty comes in in the second proposition which is that it's justified this needs to happen or this should have happened or at least there's no kind of uh moral qualm with this having been allowed to happen that's the problem that needs to be faced and and can i just from you alex just understand is this a major reason why you don't believe in god i.e the problem of evil is for you a major objection to god yeah call it not an active cause of my atheism but a sustaining cause it wasn't the reason why i left the faith originally but it's one of the reasons that uh prevents me from from re-entertaining the the idea i mean as as we've discussed there are plenty of seemingly plausible arguments to say that there's a necessary being at the bottom of contingent chains in the universe that there's a a being who sustains things that there's an arbitrary first cause or something like this but to say that this first cause is a loving god who will preside over the kind of suffering that we've seen not just in the human context of something like the coronavirus but also the hundreds of billions and trillions if you include sea life of animals who are going through suffering that we wouldn't even be capable of imagining there seems to be no explanation for this okay so this is a huge question that we're trying to you know we're taking down the small questions today yeah do it where where are you going to begin with this uh bishop baron well how about with aquinas you know in the in the summer when he poses the question utrim deus it is there a god and aquinas famously puts up objections first right well two of them we've talked about one is that nature is a self-contained system there's no need to go outside of nature to explain what's going on within nature that's objection one objection two and thomas um states it i think more elegantly than anyone in the in the tradition and i include the atheist tradition thomas said if one of two contraries be infinite the other would be altogether destroyed so if there were infinite heat there'd be no cold that's his little example but god is called the infinite good therefore there should be no evil if there's an infinite good but there is evil therefore there is no infinite good um that's a good argument that's an elegantly stated argument and it's what has been argued for millennia right it's the perennial objection now i'm sure everyone here knows the classical response rooted in people like augustine repeated by aquinas that god doesn't cause evil but god is so good that he draws good out of evil that might not have existed without evil he permits evil to bring about a greater good now can we see that sometime sure i mean there's obvious examples in our ordinary experience of of evils that actually produce a great good can we very often not see it well yeah of course i'd say even typically we don't see right away oh yeah that's the reason why that was permitted so do we hold as theist that god is providentially uh ordering the whole of the universe that as jean-pierre de cosad put it everything that is is in some sense the will of god either actively or permissively yeah i think we are obliged to hold that view therefore something like this formula has to obtain that god permits forms of suffering to bring about a greater good now can we see it as i say sometimes yes typically no but that shouldn't surprise us right if we're talking about not one contingent cause among many so someone who might be ordering things in one corner of his of the universe but of god ipsum essay the creator of all things who's whose um preserve is all of space and all of time is it at all likely that we're going to see the the full implications of whatever is happening the full implications across space and time of what's being permitted and the answer there's obviously no and i think now go back to the book of job as the is the classic biblical answer in in the presence of great evil great suffering is we we don't know what god is up to and we're in no position now i'd put that back on alex we're in no position to say definitively there is no morally justifiable reason for this particular evil because we need a god-like perspective on all of space and all of time in order to make that claim and that's the import of god's speech to job the longest speech of god anywhere in the bible where were you when i made the you know the heavens and the earth etc but it just means you're in no position to pronounce or to articulate that premise that you have clear knowledge there can't be a morally justifiable reason for a given suffering it seems to me that from a purely logical standpoint the argument's not that compelling it is filled with emotional power i completely get it like anybody who's lived more than you know two years on planet earth i've suffered in my life and wondered why and asked the question of course i do and then as alex and many others point out that the really horrific suffering that we can see at all levels of of a sentient being sure i get it i totally get the emotional power of that but it seems to me from a strictly logical standpoint it's not a compelling argument because it assumes you have a god-like perspective this of course is not uh it doesn't need to be framed in a logical uh in a logical way of course the logical problem of evil has been famously made by a number of atheists but this can also just be seen as an inductive point right because what's being said here in in many elegant words i believe uh is essentially in the context of the coronavirus which is how you originally brought this up justin is is the claim that it's worth it we don't know what for but it's worth it you know 100 000 people have been killed by this virus which you know if it is the case that some good was necessitated by the death of these people humanity seemed to have been getting on just fine for around 200 000 years before the coronavirus appeared on the scene i don't see why now all of a sudden it's now necessary to bring in this new virus to produce some good that everybody else seemed to do without and you have to turn around and say that the reason this is happening is because it's worth it and someone asks you well what on earth for what on earth is this worth it for a hundred thousand people why couldn't it be why couldn't it be 99999 why couldn't one person have been spared why couldn't one persons of suffering have been marginally less surely the same kind of goods of community spirit or whatever it is that you think the good is that's come out of this coronavirus could have been achieved with one less person dying and not only does god turn around and say well listen you know you don't know what i know just just wait and see he turns around and says who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge how dare you even suggest that you know better than me how dare you even ask the question how dare you question that me allowing this to happen is a good thing it's worth it and you have to look at your dying father in the eyes and say i'm sorry i i'm not allowed to say that this is a tragedy because i know that from a from a divine perspective the only way to reconcile my christianity is to say not just that this is some kind of tragedy with an explanation but no this is worth it this is good this brings about something better i i don't think that's a task that can be done yeah but who are you or i or anyone to say how do we know how would anyone you we'd have to have a god-like grasp of all of space and all time to make a judgment pro or con neither one of us no one can make that judgment and i mean you can characterize it the way you did in a sort of flip manner but that that god permits evil to bring about some greater good i don't know what that is how do i know specifically what that is though i can state the principle i think legitimately but i don't know how do i know how does anybody know i think it's arrogant on either side in a way to claim that knowledge well then i know that god exists on other terms so i mean i think through various paths and various rational meanings i know that god exists i also know that evil is present in the world so i've got to find a way to reconcile those it seems to me the principle achieves that the details of it i don't know how would i possibly know well perhaps i can i can elucidate the problem i have with this view by asking you a question um bishop baron would you say for instance that it is uh that it is bad when you know a a woman has a miscarriage or a baby is ripped from the arms of its mother in a tsunami would you say this is a bad thing sure well how could you possibly say that how how could you be so arrogant is to suggest that you know enough about the ultimate reasons for this happening that you can conclude that this is overall all things considered a bad thing the problem is that if we say that because we don't have this divine universal perspective that allows us to understand the exact complete kind of field of play that's going on here i'm not allowed to say that actually there's no justification for this because i i can't possibly know that then we then we forfeit our right to use any kind of moral language because we are never ever in a position to judge these things and so we can never say that something is bad or something is good because we don't have that perspective no i don't see why that would follow i mean i can say like a moral action is is bad i can say what hitler did is bad it's morally wrong now did god permit that well sure in the measure that god permitted hitler to come into being that god didn't interfere with hitler's activity so god allowed that god permitted it but i can still say it's bad but does it does god allow that evil to bring about some greater good that i can't see that's the principle but i have no hesitation calling things good or bad i mean earlier on you said as well alex that you can't call the death of someone's father a tragedy if you're a christian because it can't be a tragedy if god has some greater purpose in mind but presumably bishop baron you would say tragedy exists for christians even if we do believe there's a an ultimate yeah you know well again we're we're probably equivocating a bit i mean i would subscribe to dante's we're ultimately dealing with a divine comedy so in that grandest possible sense there's no tragedy i'm dealing with a comedy finally but sure within that sure from our perspective we can identify something as tragic or deeply sad or wicked but god's perspective god is not one fussy competitive object among many god's not one little fussy cause among many but god is ipsum essay more like the author of a novel than a character in it right and so dostoevsky allowing all sorts of darkness within his great novels but still having a commanding uh viewpoint it's an analogy that limps like all analogies but god's more like that than one fussy character among many within the novel well yeah i mean when dostoevsky allows the character to be mistreated it's certainly good for the plot line but it's not good for the character and that's the point here the christian at least the theology that's been proposed here is one saying that you know evil is allowed because some greater good can be can be brought brought from it which which means the corollary of this is that any time an evil exists any time bad exists it exists precisely because some good is going to be brought out of it that is to say evil is actually an indication that something good is happening which means that all of these evil instances and i specifically uh avoided using instances that have the complication of free will so i wouldn't use something like the holocaust but i use something like the coronavirus or something like a miscarriage the implication of this the implication of saying that evil is always an indication that some good is being obtained is to say that these are things worth celebrating any time that one of these things happens anytime that a tragedy and of course you can see it as an emotional tragedy a christian is still perfectly entitled to say that they're upset by this that they're sad that they're angry that they don't understand the reasons but ultimately philosophically they have to say this is a cause for celebration thank goodness that this has been allowed to happen so that we can draw out some good thank goodness that this hundred thousand people in the no but that now you're killed by this violence so that some good can be achieved that's an emotional appeal though alex i don't think that's right i mean the christian would look gravely at the situation and acknowledge god's will is at work here though i can't see it and i think that's the right attitude to say i would celebrate it seems to me the wrong uh point of view you you'd look at it and acknowledge there's a dimension to this that i can't fully appreciate i i place it within the context of god's ultimate purposes but i do so i mean obviously in a very grave manner typically in the presence of great suffering so i wouldn't say that we can celebrate it but we can of course we can we can have grave celebrations right i mean would you not say that god's will being done to produce good ends is worth celebrating of course if if god's will is being done to produce a good end that's something worth celebrating now in the same way if we win a war if we if we win world war ii we celebrate that that happened but it's a kind of solemn celebration because we recognize the cost that was paid but it's still a celebration it's still a good thing that we won that war if if evil is actually an indication of god's will being done by the procurement of some good through some evil then as solemnly as that celebration may occur it should have to be something worth celebrating which which seems to me totally anathema to the way that any person could let alone should entertain these kinds of tragedies if i would i would say you put it within the context of god's will and god's purpose and you do so in the right spiritual frame of mind but i wouldn't speak of celebration it's an acknowledgment of god's sovereignty if you want god even over creation i i suppose i mean my thought on this alex is that even jesus in the gospel of john weeps at the grave of lazarus shortly before he brings him back from the dead so there's a sense in which i don't see the christian story as negating the fact of tragedy even in the context of believing that there will be some greater greater good that ultimately comes out of it i i suppose and i suppose this is the practical dimension for me and i do want to kind of move us here um which is if if you're saying alex bishop baron and christians in general have a a you know should frame suffering within the context of a greater meaning and a purpose that god may have even though as bishop baron says they may not always see that um i suppose i would want to to to kind of put the challenge to you as well where does the atheist go with that because at one level is it arguably the suffering and pain and evil in the world there cannot be any meaning to it it is in a sense meaningless because it is just the way the world is there isn't going to be any final consolation any justice any ultimate you know making sense of this it just is what it is and and and that is our lot whatever you know life is thrown at us well uh allow me to answer both of your points there the first point about jesus weeping don't don't misunderstand me it's certainly compatible with the kind of i suppose you would see it as a caricature of the christian position but if that were the position it's certainly compatible with it to be to cry to be sad to be upset the uh archetypal example here i think would be the crucifixion if you were present at the crucifixion it was a a horrific tragic event everybody's weeping everybody's crying apart from the people initiating the thing of course you know jesus is suffering it's a horrible horrible event and yet it's still celebrated in the modern day it's celebrated on good friday because we recognize that yeah it's a tragic event that's worth weeping over but ultimately speaking because this brought about the greatest good it's worth celebrating this solomon tragic event and that's what i'm talking about your father dying or someone of corona virus or something you can weep you can weep and weep and weep but as a christian you have to deep down accept that it's worth it that this is a good thing that i'm glad that god's will is being done here because otherwise you're saying that you're not glad when god's will is being done which seems to be uh out of character for for a christian i would just add that you're perfectly entitled to ask well what what kind of consolation does the atheists give i remember when christopher hitchens was asked this question on stage he was asked listen you know what would you say to a friend who was who was dying on their deathbed and his response was to say well funnily enough i'm not usually the one they asked to to come along and and offer that often the last right at the desk i think yeah i i think i would have to i think i'd have to to plead the same which is to say look i i don't know what i would say to a friend who's dying right i really don't know and i don't claim to have an explanation for why this is happening i don't claim to have an answer to how justice will be served but the one thing i won't do is offer false consolation to my dying friend that's the one thing i won't do unless i'm certain and i'm able to say listen i know why this is happening don't worry you can relax everything's going to be okay if i don't have philosophically sufficient grounds to say that then it would be not just foolish but malicious of me to lie to them and i'm not accusing christians of lying but i'm saying that if you're going to make that claim you better be sure that you're philosophically justified in doing so and as far as the responses to the problem of evil that i've generally seen entertained by christians it doesn't even come close can i can i respond just a little bit because actually i'm i'm changing my mind i suppose a little bit with the word celebration because when you said celebration i thought immediately of well put on a party head and you know let's throw confetti we'll have a celebration because your dad is dying but the very fact that we talk about the mass being celebrated and the mass is nothing but a representation of calvary so indeed it is the good friday represented and we're celebrating the mass or the celebration of the good friday service but we're a long way from party hats and confetti we're celebrating but but the kind of beautiful solemnity and and grandeur and deep sadness of that good friday celebration that would signal the right christian attitude so i i will i'm okay with that we're celebrating it it's not party hat celebration it's this think of the good friday liturgy as the way a christian would celebrate suffering you know i i'm glad we kind of uh bridge that gap there i would i would just add though that the implication of this is to say i mean you can imagine as you say celebration we shouldn't really be thinking about someone throwing a party yeah but imagine you know that in in 10 years time we all get together to to celebrate the the coronavirus you know and don't worry we're not throwing a party we're not making cakes and and wearing party hats but we all get together in a room and we and we and we say thanks be to god for blessing us with the coronavirus it would seem absurd it would seem absolutely insane if that's what we were doing but that's that's the view that's implied by this theodicy which is to say that maybe not the kind of celebration that involves a party hat but the kind of celebration that involves us being able to get together and say thank you god for allowing this to happen i don't know who on there who in their right mind could possibly thank god i think what's undergirding your analysis here is some assumption that that we know what it is we get it we see the reason and i think we hardly ever see the reason we might get glimpses i mean i know lots of examples and as a pastoral minister lots of examples of beautiful expressions of love that have occurred in the midst of this pandemic i know lots of people who have responded in these wonderful ways now is that that's the reason i got it i know what god's up to no i might get one little one little hint of one move of the chessboard of a good that has come from this but i mean i don't know i'm like job i don't know what god's purpose ultimately is so i guess i'm resisting the sort of at least the implication that oh yeah i got to figure out i get it i see exactly what god's up to i never see that but yet in faith i would say i can place suffering within the context of god's purpose the contours of which i can't typically grasp i don't think that's an intellectually incoherent position at all though it might be emotionally difficult to move into it i was going to say as well before we come back to alex and we will have to start winding up the conversation in a moment but presumably within that mystery bishop baron you still see christianity is offering a better explanation of that suffering than an atheistic perspective a naturalistic perspective well you know i'd say this for an atheist it's not a problem there is no problem of evil for an atheist there is no problem of suffering as you say it's just dumb suffering it just happens it's just the way natural forces bounce off of each other and i don't mean that in a dismissive way i'm just saying it dissolves the problem it's a problem for believers so theodicy is trying to justify the ways of god in the presence of suffering an atheist doesn't have that burden so an atheist just says dumb suffering it's the way it is so we do have we bear the burden there we believers to make sense of this i don't think an atheist has to make sense of it it's just it's just the way things bounce off of each other i think you're i think you're right in some respects but but wrong in another you're right in the respect that in terms of actually uh requiring some explanation i think you're right the atheist doesn't need to address this problem that's not to say that they can't right it's just to say they don't need to the christian is is committed to having to find some explanation for this suffering but the implication of saying that there cannot be such thing as a problem of evil for an atheist is to assume that there's there can be no such thing as ethics without god and you know i'm aware that that's a common philosophical position that's held but it's not one that's held universally i i know plenty of atheists who would certainly consider themselves to be even moral realists uh despite not believing in god but you're right that it's a it's it's a problem for the christian but that's in so many words that the point that i'm trying to make which is that when we discuss the existence of suffering and i frame it in suffering instead of evil for precisely this reason this is a problem for christianity it's not a problem for me right people like to turn around and say well what's your account it's like i don't need to have one because i agree i think that's right there is an explanation here i agree it's a problem for those who who hold belief in god yeah um i would say though uh just to respond to what you said before a moment ago i mean like i i think i'm i'm much like job as well except i don't like to stop asking the questions when god kind of turns around and says because i said so it's that kind of parental tactic of like well look i i've got my reasons that you'll never understand something what you appear to be doing is but by saying you know look there are there are many good things that have come out of something like covert and many good things that maybe have come out that we don't know of it it's like man it's like somebody it's like somebody getting cancer and then somebody being so grateful that you know the the existence of cancer has allowed great medical advancements to be made it's like celebrating the fact but you know we've seen some good come out of this in in the sense that we've developed kind of medicines and treatments and things like this i'd rather no cancer and no treatments right yeah there may be some good things that have come out of this coronavirus such as people getting together to you know give up their town hall to become an emergency hospital but i'd rather not have that good and not have that evil yeah it's so unclear option it's you from your necessarily very limited perspective or me from mine i can say sure i'd like the world this way i wish that never happened i wish it was but i'm seeing this little tiny tiny swath of space and time god who who masters all of space and time so don't read the answer to job as like oh you know shut up it's it's more the acknowledgement of a creaturely mind could never even in principle understand what god's about he's not like disciplining a a recalcitrant child it's simply acknowledging it's it's like you know it's like trying to explain to a dog why you're bringing the dog to the vet that's a better comparison because even in principle i couldn't explain to the dog because of the the capacities of my mind compared to his now a forza to the highest possible degree the difference between god's grasp of space and time and mine even in principle god can't explain it i i'd read job that way rather than god sort of just you know brushing aside the question well yeah i mean there's something i think we could potentially agree on here but first something that we don't which is to say i i like this analogy it's it's it's an analogy i've sometimes heard framed as you know a child being taken to the dentist the same kind of thing you take your dog to the vet you cannot in principle explain why it's being done but you recognize it's a good thing that it's being done but if you as that pet owner were in a position to make it such that the vet wasn't needed you'd be out of your mind to say that you'd rather have you'd rather have the dog going through whatever it's going through so that you can take it to the vet to bring that good sure if that if that badness is there if that suffering is there then you can say yeah i have i have a reason to take my dog to the vet but if you're in a position where you are capable of allowing that evil to not exist in the first place i think you'd rather know dog injury and no vet but well the the point that they're the point in the very particular instance but now i got all the space all the time every possible implication and consequence of that how do i possibly grasp that how do i know what what the the ultimate purpose and the ultimate good is i can't control that well that's the atheist position is that you don't know i don't know nobody knows here's what i think we can agree on if you're a christian if you're a christian it can it can be logically compatible for you to say i have this worldview that says god is all loving there's these seeming you know depths and depths of misery and suffering but we're not in a position to know that this is incompatible with god so i'm a christian and evil doesn't mean that i have to give that up i think you're welcome to do that but what doesn't make sense is going in the other direction is to start with the evil and suffering and to say the best explanation for this is christianity if you're already a christian you're welcome to say that any evil that you that you witness is by definition just compatible with your view which makes it unfalsifiable by the way but you're welcome to do it you're welcome to say we just we will just never know uh the the whole moral scheme and so it's going to be compatible but you can't start from a neutral non-christian perspective with the suffering with the evil yeah with the disgusting levels of suffering that we're seeing and from that say well this seems to point to the existence of a nominally benevolent god but final thought we'll start to wrap it up because i wouldn't start there i would start with my knowledge of god's existence derived by various you know rational paths i have good reason to believe that god exists now i also know that there's suffering and evil so i've got to find a way to reconcile them but i'd begin with the existence and goodness of god that's my primary point of reference now i've got to figure out how to but i wouldn't start with with off with the evil so then the the the question there well it's a sentence the question for the for the listener i think then to decide kind of which approach is better here is to say what do we start with do we what do you think is more obviously present in your life the existence of a god or the existence of suffering if you start with god you can you can make it compatible with evil but if you start with suffering as bishop baron would not i don't think you can get to christianity it's up to you to decide whether you think one is more present than the other to me i think that suffering is more obviously present than the existence of a god but that's just my opinion but there's a there's a more fundamental metaphysical point that evil is a pervazio bony right evil is the privation of the good therefore starting with evil is always a problematic thing it's metaphysically incoherent because it's always a privation of a of a greater good like a cavity in a tooth i mean so metaphysically speaking you can't really start with evil that's never the primordial reality wherever sin abounds grace abounds the more as paul put it but good is always greater than evil so i would begin there metaphysically as well as ethically we're gonna have to well as a currency to you justin i won't i won't try and unpack that i understand we could keep going and i'd love to if time allowed but um but maybe maybe we can do a round two at some point maybe just to sum this all up um and i'll just ask you to keep this to it to a minute or so at most but why don't we return to that original question which we started with christianity or atheism which makes best sense of who we are let you go first alex and then um bishop baron why for you ultimately does atheism make better sense of who we are than christianity does well i think i think this is a good opportunity to kind of restate the the point i ended on there which is to say that you know that there are if you think that there are philosophical reasons that are kind of really compellingly leading you to believe that there's some form of god and from that you have to make sense of the world then i think sure it can make sense to be a christian right but if you accept the premise that i put forward which is that if you start with the suffering it doesn't seem to lead to god then the question becomes what is more obviously present and to me when i when i wake up when i reflect on the state of the world when i reflect on the nature of contingency and the nature of causation but i also reflect on the nature of death and suffering and misery the thing that's more obviously real and more undeniably real and therefore i think a better philosophical starting point you know more more justified starting ground is the existence of the suffering if i cannot get from that existence of suffering which is undeniable nobody can deny that that exists if i can't find a root from that suffering to the existence of a loving god then i can't use christianity to make sense of the world that i find myself in you're welcome to go in the other direction if you like but if if you share in my view that suffering is so obviously present that it should be the starting point of philosophy then i don't think that you can make sense of it with christianity alone and for you bishop baron why does christianity in your view make best sense of who we are i i would maybe stay with that point because it's very very interesting to me uh because i think it's never right metaphysically to begin with pain or with suffering i don't think that's coherent because that's that's always a subset of something much more fundamental so i i think that's a really problematic starting point and if you do that i think you're going to be metaphysically on very shaky ground and will be led to strange conclusions so that's interesting that you name that as a starting point i i would say very quickly it christianity makes much better sense of how to explain a radically contingent world and it makes much better sense of the of the dynamism of the human spirit which pushes out toward the unconditioned truth and the unconditioned good it makes sense of both the beginning and the end if you want the alpha and the omega um to me the atheist perspective doesn't make sense of either of those um and that ends up becoming from a rational standpoint to my mind quite incoherent we're going to leave it there but can i just say thank you both for such a an engaging and uh you know the good spirit in which the conversation was had as well um and and both being willing to listen and and hear each other and respond and perhaps we can do it again at some point in the future but now thank you very much bishop baron and alex great to have you with me been a pleasure thanks to both of you well i hope you enjoyed today's big conversation from unbelievable who were you most persuaded by i'd love you to tell me by filling out a brief survey it's multi-choice and really quick also don't forget to get hold of the exclusive bonus conversation between alex and bishop baron by subscribing to our newsletter at thebigconversation.show you'll get access to that video and much more as 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Channel: Premier Unbelievable?

Views: 439,629

Keywords: unbelievable, justin brierley, premier christian radio, christianity, atheism, philosophy, faith, theology, God, apologetics, Jesus, debate, alex o'connor, cosmic skeptic, bishop barron, bishop robert barron, the big conversation, richard dawkins, william lane craig, word on fire

Id: aC9tKeJCJtM

Length: 92min 5sec (5525 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 02 2021