Debate: Does God Exist? - Fr Gregory Pine Vs. Ben Watkins

g'day g'day g'day and welcome to pints with aquinas my name is matt fradd and i have been off the internet for a month and so it's good to be back i'm a little less hairy than i was in the beginning because i like making out with my wife but she doesn't like making out with a mustache so you be the judge tell me what you think was better and it's funny i just ran and got a beer for this debate i hope you've got a drink there that you'll be drinking even if it's tea or coffee or something and and the last time i drank out of this pints with aquinas beer stein was when i had trent horn and alex o'connor on the show and i was drinking iced coffee out of it but it's it's been a month so i can't i just i can't i can't drink out of this but all right so this is exciting uh really everyone you're super welcome to be here maybe in the live chat let us know where you are from we've got an exciting debate tonight between father pine and ben watkins and so in a moment i will have each of them uh tell to tell you a little bit about themselves but i want to kind of just kind of give you an overview of the debate to come there's going to be opening statements 15 minutes a piece then we'll move into first rebuttals which will be seven minutes apiece then second rebuttals at four minutes then we'll have a time of cross-examination after that we're going to have 30 minutes of audience questions which i will moderate and then finally we will have closing statements of five minutes each this way each person gets a fair amount of time to express their opinion to to reply to what needs to be replied to to make their case so i would just kind of invite i know it's kind of useless saying this on youtube but i just invite everyone to try to be as charitable as possible if you're an atheist try to be charitable to your christian uh interlocutors if you're a christian don't be nasty to our atheist friends who you know god bless ben for agreeing to come on this little catholic channel and do this i think this is super cool so all right so that with that out of the way i'm gonna throw up the screen here so everyone can see y'all we have here father pine and ben watkins why don't each of you take a minute uh to tell us a bit about yourself uh father pine and why don't you lead us off sure uh my name is father gregory pine and i am a phd candidate at the university of freiburg in switzerland i served previously as the the assistant director for campus outreach at the mystic institute um i went to school at franciscan university of steubenville and graduated in 2010 upon which i entered the order of preachers and then just kind of did some studies uh you know stumbled along as it were i was ordained a priest in 2016. and i got an stl in 2017. since then i served in a parish in louisville i taught at bellarmine university uh in the same city have you know done time with domestic institute and um yeah just delighted to contribute to some podcasts uh sometimes uh having conversations with matt and then uh dominican friars we have a podcast called godsplaining uh so those are just uh weekly 30-minute episodes of all things catholic kind of catholic miscellany things faith life culture philosophy theology literature whatever strikes the fancy as it were so delighted to be here thanks father ben so my name's ben watkins i'm originally from south carolina and i now live in portsmouth virginia my undergraduate degree was at the university of south carolina and it was in mechanical engineering and i now work at the norfolk naval shipyard here in virginia refueling submarines and so i am one of the hosts of real a theology a philosophy of religion podcast where we explore questions in the philosophy of religion from atheist agnostic and otherwise non-theist perspectives to see what we can salvage in the philosophy of religion once we have rejected something like theism and so you can check that out on youtube anywhere else you find podcasts awesome awesome so i want everybody to know this too that at the end of this debate i'm going to be announcing next month's debate it's tonight's debate is as you see in the title on god's existence next month it'll be on something different i'll be announcing that at the end of this debate it's very exciting i'm very much looking forward to it as i say this is on god's existence father gregory is in the affirmative obviously it would be awkward if he wasn't and so uh father pine uh whenever you want to start i mean are you ready and if you are whenever you start i'll just click the click the timer perfect i'm ready to start let's do it all right so just a word of introduction or prelude in my language i'm sometimes going to presume god's existence and i'm sometimes going to seek to prove it i don't mean to be imprecise or to go fast and loose but proving it obviously serves an apologetic purpose so giving reasons for one's belief as it were and showing it to be on good significant substantial rational ground or footing but sometimes i find that it's helpful pedagogically to presume god's existence because if one spends all of his time you know throat clearing and ground clearing or whatever clearing as it were then it can be difficult to actually get into the argument so i'm gonna you know presume at times on god's existence so that way we can get into the intelligibility of arguments that are a little bit further down the road so for times when that may prove a stumbling block i'll do my best to explain it subsequently so with regard to the existence of god first a word on access to the reality and then a word on proofs of the existence of god and then a brief word on the world view which informs the five ways so first access to the reality i think that at the outset we have to be honest uh or genuine sincere whatever in admitting that not all have equal access to the reality as it were so here uh it's not to say that there are some whom are favored by time fate and circumstance and others who have no recourse or who are simply without means whereby to discover it's just simply to say that it's easier for some and it's harder for others and it's not because those for whom it's easier are better and those for whom it's harder are worse it's just simply to say that the hands are dealt and they're not all of the same nature and then we go about playing those hands in our attempts at discovery or proof so this may be a matter of education for instance specifically religious education so you know i for instance was baptized three months after my birth it wasn't something that i chose and so it was something into which i was initiated progressively as normal for my family nor was it ever really something that was uh debated uh or called into question it was just you did it i remember one time asking my father if um i could have summers off from going to church you know i found that the arrangement with school was very you know pleasant i wondered if a similar thing could be done in the case of church i think it's like i was eight years old or something like that said uh yeah you're most welcome to you just can't live here um so you know all ingest as it were i think also uh the fact of personal temperament or disposition has something to do with it i remember having had a conversation with a friend and i i i recall having been stymied by the fact that women tend to be more religious or more broadly religious than men and i was trying to account for this is just because men stink and women are great you know i couldn't come up with it she explained to me uh take my life for example she said i live in a big city a big metropolitan area and i have to walk to a metro station whenever i do that i'm afraid and i said okay she said have you been afraid walking to a metro station i said no she said okay well fear uh even just in a kind of natural or negative sense has some kinship with awe as it were or fear of the lord wonder that's not to say that god is creepy or imposing but it is to say that when one lives constantly in a reality of dependence it can be easier to adopt that in other avenues of life there's also the fact of you know time place and circumstance the 21st century is rough i don't think by any stretch of the imagination that it's the worst but if you come into a world that is riven with strife or political polarization or a global pandemic it can be difficult to believe in a good god who has good and saving designs for those in his care whereas if you live in a time of relative prosperity or you live in a time where religious consensus is broad and deep then it can be easier to kind of enter into those commitments uh just to name a couple more think about like intermediate institutions you know if your family is religious or if your school is religious or if the places where you congregate socially or whatever are religious it's going to be easier if that's just part of the atmosphere that's in the water that you drink it's something normal and part of you know social living and then there's you know there may be the fact of direct intervention god may prove it as it were impress it upon your mind on your own uh road to damascus so i think when i when i make these arguments the ones that come i'm not saying that these should be patently obvious uh to all who uh who confront them or to all who have them proposed to them i just want to say that there can be a variety of ways by which one is prepared for these arguments or one is ill-prepared for these arguments and it's not a matter of one being bad or good it's just a matter of having been dealt a different hand and that being said i do think that this knowledge is accessible to all persons to all thinking persons so then next proofs of the existence of god the kind of classical teaching in the catholic church and the tradition that i occupy that proper to aristotle and saint thomas aquinas is that the existence of god is something available to natural reason so it's classed among what are sometimes called the pray ambula fidei which would be the preambles of the faith and those would be the types of things which are on the one hand discoverable by reason but on the other hand are also revealed so there's a kind of overlap and that is the case because one they are accessible but uh to get there can sometimes be difficult okay so to get there uh will sometimes be you know be time consuming it will be fraught with many errors it will be difficult all right but god in his generosity and in his condescension sees fit to reveal those things so that none would be left without access by virtue of his over abundant generosity and revelation so simply to say that these things are knowable but they are tough and that god reveals them so that all would have access but again that's not to say that they are necessarily obvious okay so i think sometimes we expect it or we expect the proofs as they are so stated to be immediately convincing we think about a geometry proof which kind of gives you this eureka insight it dawns upon your mind and it impresses its rationality whereas this is not commonly experienced with it's not commonly in the experience when one encounters the five ways of saint thomas typically one thinks them boring arcane overly complicated and silly okay so uh here you might think that this would militate against god's goodness if so much rides on god making himself known shouldn't he have it be more obvious that we come to him now what are some difficulties in attaining to such belief or in accessing this by reason well there's simply the limitations of human nature for one mind you the revelation is addressed to us as humans but we need to be cognizant at the outset that we can only know so many things in so many ways that we are limited by virtue of the fact that we are embodied souls born at a particular time and place and subject to all of the constraints in which we find ourselves within the christian tradition we also talk then about the difficulties introduced by sin both original and personal so our minds are darkened by ignorance our wills are twisted by malice and our passions are inflamed with concubines and undermined by weakness right you add to this the fact of one's own personal formation one of may one may have taken steps down particular roads which preclude the knowledge of god because god might be seen in those settings as a forbidder of you know chosen liberties or something like that and beyond you know personal formation there's also the fact of societal or cultural formation so i would say that now is not an especially conducive time to belief because it's often construed as something backward obscurantistic naive and dumb so then how is one to counter said obstacles how is one to attain to the faith which christians seem too laud is so very excellent i think here for our own purposes within the context of a debate founded on reason we're trying to assume a particular point of view at the very least this would be my stated goal namely the view which st thomas adopts in his description of creation what might call it the metaphysics of creation and here we can think about saint thomas's revelation as it were of of essay of the act of being the fact that everything that is is in a particular way it's in this way or in that way but we need to account for the fact that it is as it is or more basically or fundamentally that it is at all and this isn't to tell a genealogical story this isn't to say that we have to come up with some scientific master theory whereby to account for the progressive evolution of things so that they arrive at the present point because we are not so much concerned with development and dialectic as we are with a kind of vertical vision and vertical here does not need necessarily to import religious you know thought or thinking but to say that when we encounter things in the world we see them as somehow dependent we see them as somehow given and that language of dependence or givenness should cause us to wonder and wonder is the beginning of philosophy so in this third and final piece then let's turn to the five ways the type of reasoning that saint thomas espouses at the beginning of the summa theologiae so his first question there is about methodology his second question is proving that god exists because he's a good aristotelian scientist and you can't talk about what a thing is until such time as you have grounded that it is and so he gives these five ways of these five proofs and i think that uh you know in the 21st century some work better than others as it were that's not to say that they don't work or their bad arguments or need be refuted i can't necessarily adjudicate that in the time given but it is to say that some are more appealing to a modern mind and some seem less so so the fifth way for instance i don't think is especially helpful for our conversation today the fifth way which concerns teleology or things having inclinations towards their ends the fourth way which ed phaser refers to as the henological argument is very platonic okay and it's something that those not of a platonic persuasion will find strange you mean to tell me there's gradation in being and so i'm supposed to say that there's a most utmost highest of each thing crazy okay so i think just maybe to focus then briefly on the first three ways but to take them as a set of arguments so not necessarily to take them uh each individually and go through the steps but rather to think about what they're generally trying to show these taken together are typically called cosmological arguments because they observe something about reality whether motion or efficient causality or the fact of their being contingent things and each observes a similar approach namely that there's some feature of reality and when we begin to reason back from it as an effect to certain causes which account adequately or necessarily for it then we come to some bedrock and it isn't to say that we looked for a first point in an accidentally subordinated series of causes we're not looking for you know enoch was saying it was like you know as the is the son of david and david is the son of caleb and caleb is the son of benjamin and benjamin is the son of adam we're not looking to go back back back back back until we find a first we're looking to evaluate these things in reality and account for the fact that they obtain we're looking to account for the fact that they are intelligible that they are addressed to human minds and that human minds are capable of accessing and penetrating such realities and engaging with them in such a way as to make sense of life one of the most basic distinctions that's at work in all of these arguments is that of act and potency basically act is what a thing is and potency is what a thing potentially can be or what it could be provided that it gets sufficient impetus to realize itself in said way and basically what all of these different things observe is that we observe all of these kind of causal chains of act and potency and we find that certain things go from what could be to what is and we also recognize the fact that they can't pull themselves up by their own metaphysical bootstraps and so we need to appeal to something which can make sense of all of these relationships make sense of all of these mutual entailed networks of causes and provide for them a space in which it all obtains so this for us is something that we kind of do on an ordinary and everyday basis it's not just for professional philosophers when something happens you know on your way to work you look for an explanation as to why it's why we look at car accidents because we want to get some sense based on the damage dealt to both vehicles what transpired so that way we can have some adequate reason for our having been delayed um one of the delightful side benefits of coronavirus is that this has been a lot less frequent and trips that used to take three hours and 45 minutes now take two but we're getting back into normal and with that comes traffic so this is something that we just do we seek a sufficient we seek um a necessary explanation uh a sufficient explanatory principle so we need to account for the fact of things being or of things being this way and ultimately we get to the question or you know some 20th century philosophers get to the question of why there is something rather than nothing and a lot of thomas would kind of take umbrage at putting the third way in such crass terms but i think it has a kind of apologetic appeal because at the end of each of these arguments st thomas is modest in saying that this we call god he doesn't say that we've proved god or we've explained god away or we've cast sufficient light on the mystery which is at the heart of god he just says we have gestured towards something which begins to fit the description and provided you permit me to take you by the hand i will walk you pedagogically through a bunch of subsequent arguments about simplicity perfection goodness infinity eternity omnipresence etc so we can fill out the picture which comports with that that is revealed but ultimately the reason for which one believes is that it is revealed and yet our minds as given by god are capable of attaining to the truth as it is exposited and as it is explained so um you know having proved the existence of god may not be the reason for which many claim there to be a god one might hold to it for reasons of belief for reasons of suspicion for reasons of opinion just hedging his bets so that if there is a god things don't end poorly after this life but ultimately all we mean to say and it's a modest claim is that it is knowable as a necessary explanation for the very coherence and intelligibility of reality and apart from it things don't hang together as they ought and as they do thanks all right thank you so much father all right ben uh this is awesome uh thanks so much by the way ben what beer are you drinking before we we begin here i'm drinking a stout what are you drinking i am drinking a flower power cool any good ipa it's very good good good to hear well before before we get into your opening statement i want to let everybody know who's watching we have well over a thousand people who are watching this debate right now and one way you could help this debate and and get this kind of really intelligent discussion out there is by sharing it on facebook or twitter or with your friends so maybe text it to a friend even but help us out by doing that give us a thumbs up because that actually really helps the algorithm and leave us a comment in the comments section we really appreciate it okay just give me one second here all right so whenever you want to start i'll click the 15 minute timer all right so those of us at rio the real a theology team want to begin with a sincere thank you to matt fradd and pi with aquinas for hosting this debate and inviting us to participate um we would also like to extend our warmest gratitude to father gregory for being willing to dialogue with us about the philosophy of religion we consider it an honor and a privilege to be discussing such an important question with one of the most thoughtful informaltomists today last i'd like to give a special shout out to my team for helping me behind the scenes recommending literature and providing useful objections revisions and advice before i begin tonight i do want to take at least i want to make at least one preliminary remark while atheism has grown to become more popular in the western world thanks to writers like richard dawkins and christopher hitchens we at real ethiology insist on making a distinction between what is often called the new atheism and contemporary philosophical atheism we place ourselves firmly in the latter camp and the contemporary tradition of analytic philosophy as represented by atheist thinkers like jl mackey j.h sobel j.l shellenberg michael thule uh paul draper and graham opie among others in what follows i will be paying particularly close attention to the precision of language the clarity of concept and the rigor of argument my aim is to provide the listeners with at least three arguments or reasons to believe philosophical atheism is closer to the truth than friar gregory's tomism i'll now take a moment to lay out the theological concepts we will be making use of tonight the question we've been asked to discuss is that of god's existence but it's important before we do that that we make a distinction between two conceptions of god we can call classical theism and theistic personalism according to theistic personalism god is a metaphysically necessary omnipotent omniscient perfectly good and perfectly free being classical theism affirms four additional distinctive claims about god that god is simple immutable timeless and impassable according to divine simplicity god is utterly devoid of physical metaphysical and logical parts so whatever is intrinsic to god is identical to god according to divine immutability god cannot change and is devoid of any potential for being other than he is he is purely actual and can change neither intrinsically nor in his relation to other things finally according to god's timelessness and impassability god exists without beginning end succession and duration and he also can neither suffer nor be causally affected in any way this distinction between theistic personalism and classical theater theism matters here because there are a variety of competing models of god within what we can call traditional theism many new atheists often misinterpret the classical theist or tomis tradition they think that god is a being within the world however god is instead the ground of all being or being itself or as aquinas would put it god is ipsum essay substance or purist actus with these conceptual points made clear the first argument i want to lay out is a variation of the problem of evil we can call a bayesian argument from evolutionary evil admittedly the label problem of evil is at least one way misleading because there is not merely a single problem but rather a family of interrelated problems with several variations of different arguments to the conclusion that god does not exist a pioneer of this sort of argument is the anal in the analytic tradition was the australian philosopher jl mackey in the early 1950s but many atheist philosophers like william rowe paul draper and michael tully have developed sophisticated versions of the problem evil since mackey's work what i'll present tonight will be one such formulation and i will primarily work from uh primarily draw from the work of paul draper this argument uses a well-known theory of probability known as bayes theorem that allows us to compare competing hypotheses to explain certain sets of data or facts in 1859 charles darwin forever changed how we understand ourselves and our place in the universe when he released on the origin of species darwin laid out how humans and other biological organisms share a common ancestor and evolved over hundreds of millions of years for this enormous amount of time biological organisms have experienced mostly profound languishing predation starvation and disease and relatively little flourishing most animals never flourish in their lifetimes and even fewer flourish for most of their lifetimes in fact there have been more than five mass extinctions over 99 of all species that have ever existed are now extinct and the state of nature is locked in a savage struggle for survival over limited resources on classical theism these are neither accidental nor unfortunate byproducts of an intentionally designed process but rather they are the very clockwork of the process itself this is the divine means by which god chose to bring about the end of biological diversity through his creative act in other words the god of classical theism actively employed widespread languishing and limiting flourishing in his provincial production of human humanity for hundreds of millions of years in addition to widespread languishing biologically conscious beings have experiences of pain that are systematically connected to the goals of survival and reproduction but much of this pain and suffering does not contribute to the biological ends of survival and reproduction nor to its moral development consequently the process of biological evolution is an extremely inefficient and inevitably cruel means for producing complex life because it is permeated with gratuitous pain and suffering from a moral point of view the distribution of pain in the universe appears random and mostly without much in the way of morally fruitful function for example the pain of a young fond burning to death in a forest fire is plausibly gratuitous or otherwise unjustified because such suffering is neither biologically nor morally useful if philosophical atheism is true there is no plausible alternative to complex life evolving such that it only felt pain when it would aid survival reproduction or some morally fruitful function this is because philosophical atheism implies that neither the nature nor the condition of complex life is the result of a providential and loving act of creation since the universe is fundamentally indifferent to creaturely pain and suffering biologically gratuitous pain is not surprising on the assumption of philosophical atheism the biological gratuity of pain or the pain not geared towards promoting survival reproduction or moral fruit is neither surprising nor unexpected given philosophical atheism however similar claims do not apply to father gregory's tomism it is very surprising on classical theism that an all-powerful and perfectly good god with radical providence and sovereignty over the precise character and contents of creation had available to him other means to create than biological evolution such as special creation a perfectly good god would prob plausibly create by different means given the profusion duration and distribution of intense evils that biological evolution implies we're now in a position to argue that facts about evolutionary evil are very surprising and unexpected on classical theism and facts about evolutionary evil are neither surprising nor unexpected on philosophical atheism therefore facts about evolutionary evil are evidence for philosophical atheism over classical theism i now want to turn my attention to an argument we can call the argument from freedom before articulating this argument i want to clarify some important concepts a contingent thing is something that could have been otherwise for instance my cat exists she's right there but it could have been the case that she never existed at all my cat's properties are contingent too since she could have existed in some other way with different properties sometimes being contingent on the thomist view is a matter of potentially not existing or potentially being otherwise where otherwise where potentiality is an unrealized possibility or potency using these concepts and that of classical theism we can now argue by definition that god is purely actual and whatever is purely actual is devoid of any potentialities therefore god is devoid of any potentialities we can argue argue further by definition that a will devoid of any potentialities is also devoid of any contingencies a will devoid of any contingencies could not have done otherwise and it will that could not have done otherwise is not perfectly free therefore classical theism implies god is not perfectly free but traditional theism implies that god is perfectly free for example god could have chosen not to create a world at all therefore god is not perfectly free on classical theism we can consider tomism to be false it's important to notice this entire argument is analytic meaning that all of its premises are true by definition none of these premises can be denied without either deviating from traditional theism classical theism or their conjunction that we've called tomism the last argument i want to present we can call the argument from changing knowledge this argument begins with the observation that change through time is a real feature of the world and that this implies god's knowledge if he exists must also change but according to classical theism god has no potential to acquire anything new nor lose anything old because god is immutable as a consequence of being purely actual most of us take the reality of change for granted things transition or change from being one way to being another or even to nothing at all this interplay of the concepts of being and nothingness through time give rise to our concept of temporal becoming we experience things coming into and going out of existence with the passage of time for example it is natural to think the present is currently real after having changed from the past that is no longer real and is becoming the future that is not yet real turning now to the case of us humans it was once false that humans existed there was a potential for human existence but it was not actual in the past it is now true that humans exist though we are currently actual but our future existence is an open question it may one day be false again that humans exist what this shows is that truths concerning humans and anything else spatially extended also changes with the passage of time the claim that humans exist genuinely changed from being false to being true and may change back to being false in the future but this implies that god acquires new law knowledge and acquires old knowledge with the passage of time the god because god can only know something if it's true in other words knowledge implies truth because only what is true can be known it follows that when humans did not exist god did not know that humans existed but now that humans currently exist it follows from god's omniscience that he must now know this truth but as we just said god has no potential to acquire anything new nor lose anything old because god is utterly unchangeable or immutable he is devoid of any potential for change or for being otherwise he is purely actual and can change neither intrinsically nor in his relation to other things if god could acquire something new then he would not be purely actual because he would have the potential for acquiring something new so god is constantly acquiring new knowledge implying change or a transition from potency to act but that's incompatible with what we just said about god's immutability according to classical theism as the thomas philosopher edward fisa writes god would constantly be acquiring new pieces of knowledge such as the knowledge that it is now time t1 and the knowledge that it is now time t2 and so forth but all this would involve change and god is immutable visa is explicit that god cannot acquire anything new such as new knowledge as this would involve some transition from potency to act with all this groundwork laid we can now argue that if classical theism is true then god cannot acquire anything new or lose anything old but god can acquire something new and lose something old namely knowledge therefore we can conclude classical theism is false so far we've considered three distinct arguments against father gregory's tomism here first we saw the argument from evolutionary evil and how facts about the hundreds of millions of years of non-human animal languishing and the biological gratuity of pain are two powerful lines of evidence for philosophical atheism over tomism next we saw the argument from freedom which showed us how god's perfect freedom is incompatible with classical theism so the conjunction of traditional theism and classical theism or what we've called tonism is impossible finally we saw the argument from changing knowledge and how the reality of change or temporal becoming in the world is incompatible with classical theism unless until each of these arguments is shown to be mistaken i think we have very good reason to prefer philosophical atheism to father gregory's tomism i'll now yield any remaining time i may have left thank you okay thank you very much ben okay we're going to now move into our first rebuttals where each debater will have seven minutes father uh are you ready i am i'll just start whenever okay uh so maybe we can just take those three arguments three two one and then uh whatever time remains well whatever remains to be argued i'll try to see if we can address it in the next rebuttal uh so first with respect to changing knowledge um i think here it's helpful to draw some distinctions at the outset in order to clarify what specifically is intended by classical theists concerning the knowledge of god so i think that god's knowledge is unlike other knowledges as it were so in the ordinary course the knowledge that we gain is by engagement with a thing pre-existing so i you know have a computer in front of me say i'd never encountered it because i hadn't been to a mall or an apple store and then i see a macbook for the first time and i'm bewildered and i you know have in my mind a form of the macbook but effectively a thing out there has come to be within my mind in the form of an intentional species so truth is the kind of relationship between my mind and the thing and my mind is causally dependent upon the thing which preexists my mind whereas in the case of god's knowing god's knowing is itself causal so i think here again to appeal to the opening statement with regard to adopting a metaphysical stance on reality um it's not helpful to kind of anthropologize god or to think of god's knowing as if it were like our knowing because it transcends our knowing or at least you know such as the claim of classical theists so whereas we learn from things and have an intentional form impressed by encounter with the reality uh extra menta um so in the case of god the thing reflects uh the knowledge that he has which pre-exists that thing in the kind of uh ordinary course so god knows himself and in knowing himself he knows all of the ways in which his nature which you said you know ipsum essay per se subsistence very being itself can be participated uh whether you know more or less adequately or more or less deficiently and uh those kind of which seem to us like complex and differentiated things subsist in god as his nature so there's no shadow of division in or among them and that when god you know wills that those things be those things proceed forth from him and we call them true to the extent that they actually reflect the idea which exists in god's mind but the existence that they have in god's mind is of an infinitely higher sort than that of the way in which they exist in reality so in the case of you know god we talked about one of the things that you said is timelessness or eternity which boethius defines not so much as like die eternity an infinite extension of reality but rather a whole and simultaneous possession of endless life so i think one of the best ways by which to describe it is that god exhausts all that there is of being so god is his very nature is to be and god um you know exists in a way that transcends the limits imposed upon creation by virtue of their form which is circumscribed you know by the matter and with which they engage or the particular act of existence uh you know to which it is wed so in the case of um you know god's knowledge changing if things were to happen in time god's eternity is such that it embraces all of being and god's knowledge is a creative and a causal knowledge so god's knowledge is not passive or receptive with those things as they exist in the world rather it imparts to them their very being and makes them to subsist in their proper natures so with respect to god you know we're not so much saying that god is learning from time one to time two based on whether or not humans exist or don't because our mode of existence is of an infinitely deficient sort okay so we are subject to change and time is the measure of motion so time is concreted with reality in such a way that all things that exist you know as aristotle says and outmoded terminology in the sublunary you know are subject to generation and corruption are subject to alteration or subject to you know augmentation or diminution or subject to locomotion but god's knowing of those things is not contingent upon their changing within time because he is creating them to be he is causing them not only to be but also to cause and they're transparent to his gaze in an infinitely higher and rarefied form as pre-existing in a divine idea to which he weds his will so i guess like a kind of simple version of the argument is to say that god's plan accounts for change while itself not changing so just like you know a parent might say you know when my child is seven i'm gonna you know let her drink water and cranberry juice but you know i really want to enculture a healthy you know sense of temperance in my family and i think that the excessive focus placed on the age of 21 is silly so we're going to start drinking beer at home at the age of 14. with respect to the child it seems like dad forbade me to drink beer you know when i was seven and then he changed his mind and it permitted me to drink beer when i was 14. but truth be told what actually happened was that god had a plan that subsisted in him as it were as an exemplar and was impressed upon the created things subject to time and change in such ways to register in that as a change so that's just a long way of saying that god does not change while himself accounting for change because his providence is pedagogical such that he can orchestrate individual and particular things by virtue of his universal cause it out causality so that they were downed ultimately to the end of creation uh the second argument the second argument is a kind of version of the modal collapse argument and you said it's you know it's analytic and in being analytic it has you know aspirations to be rigorous in its predication but it does make a kind of sleight of hand with existential qualifiers so in the case of you know divine freedom we're trying to establish whether or not god is free and specifically whether or not he is free and creating so there i think the focus is um on what is specifically meant by divine freedom again just to draw distinctions as a way by which to illumine the concepts at stake um so freedom doesn't necessarily mean in its first uh kind of instantiation the the availability of options so like saint thomas will teach for instance that those angels who look on the face of god are most free while being fixed in the end yet they have greatest liberty with respect to the means which is to say that they exist and subsist for the glory of god but they can choose to do so by praising god looking upon him face to face or by ministering among those to whom they are sent you know those charged to their care but it is simply to say that um that they are free while being fixed in the end so freedom is not so much a matter of you know having options and not being able to abide within or without the options uh rather freedom is a matter of moving from an interior principle okay so freedom would be something proper to an intellectual creature which can know the good in a variety of ways or see it under a variety of aspects and then wed one's will to the way which appears to him given the things to be best or to be suitable in the case of god saint thomas never makes the argument that this is the best possible world and we can bring that up in this the next rebuttal round with respect to the problem of evil but rather it is the world to which he weds his will and it is a world from which he can draw good namely the good of god's glory and the salvation of souls who need not exist because they serve no purpose for the building up of the divine nature but rather because they are issued this invitation to live at the heart of the deity and to have for their own knowing and loving god's knowing and loving of himself which proves infinitely dignifying and ennobling in turn and is the very source of our own freedom okay thank you we'll have to leave it there and um ben are you ready for your first rebuttal feel free to start whenever ben i we can't hear you i don't think maybe you've muted yourself sorry yep no worries about that yeah no worries at all start whenever that's embarrassing yeah i did a last debate don't worry it's easy okay uh let me start with my notes so um in friar father gregory's uh opening speech um he made an interesting claim about how not everyone has equal access to god and i found that claim surprising because i think that shades right into what is known as the problem of divine hiddenness where if we're talking about a perfectly good being perfect goodness implies perfect love and that we would we are supposed to have a loving relationship with god but a necessary condition of such a loving relationship would be a belief that the other party exists i can't have a meaningful relationship with someone i don't believe exists so that seems to imply that god would always leave every finite person in a position to enter into a loving relationship with god simply by trying at any time and so the fact that this that isn't the case i definitely think that there's a tension there um so i'd definitely be uh curious to see what father gregory has to say there but now i want to move towards the five ways so it correct me if i'm wrong but i it seems that we've taken the fourth and the fifth way off of the table at least for now um so that leaves us the other three ways and so the first thing that i want to say about those three arguments is that i think they commit what's called a quantifier shift fallacy so there's two types of causal series in these types of arguments um per se and a per accidents and so the um per se chains are the ones that are relevant here i'm sorry i know i'm throwing a lot of philosophical jargon out there i probably shouldn't be doing that but um per se chains in each of the ways commit um the quantifier shift fallacy because just as it doesn't follow that there's a single unique counselor for all students from the fact that for each such student he or she has a counselor it likewise doesn't follow that there's a first cause of all chains of changes from the fact that for each such chain it has a first cause even if such things have per se efficient causes um have a unique fur per se efficient causes there are no obvious reasons why all things must have the same first per se efficient cause i know you know what in the world does all of this mean it's it's philosophical jargon i know but so basically what i'm trying to outline is the possibility of a a beginningless causal series in which we imagine each um everything that requires a cause think of like a web where each point in which the web um is connected to something that being a first caught unique first cause but there is no unique one each one depends on the other and so a causal series whether it be per se or per accidents need not terminate in a first member here is an example of a conceivable beginningless per se causal series a gunky physical object we can call it a gunky physical object is one that is made up of physical parts each of which is made up of further parts in other words it is made up of a series of even smaller or even more fundamental parts for instance a human being exists in virtue of parts like hands feet and eyes these parts exist in virtue of even smaller parts like skin cells bone cells blood cells etc so it might well be that this regress never terminates since each member has a concurrent cause and none of these causes can ever be removed if the subsequent members are to keep existing in this uh per se series almost misspoke there um so what else do i want to so there's also i want to mention a very contested aristotelian metaphysics at the core of these arguments so i just want to put that concern to the side and i only mention it because um what was i going to say there's a gap problem that's where i was going with this so but there's two unique gap problems here so the conclusion of these arguments is that there is an unactualized actualizer or the conclude but that's what the conclusion of the argument is but the conclusion that we want to get is something that's purely actual so i think there's a gap from unactualized mover to something being purely actual now this is already with a contested metaphysics in place but even if we assume the aristotelian metaphysics in play i think there's still a gap there now friar gregory mentioned i think the second gap or at least alluded to it in that these arguments don't get us to a being that is perfectly good so these arguments are entirely compatible with a being that is not worthy of our worship and so if that's the case we're going to need further argumentation to fill this gap um let's see so with my last minute i want to say something about existential inertia what we can call existential inertia um it is insufficiently justified as to why something needs an actual actualization of its very existence such a concurrent sustaining actuation doesn't even seem to be a real feature of reality what is the justification for thinking that the substance itself is right here right now being moved from potential to actual with respect to its existence and not just with respect to his aesthetic properties you don't need any immediate i do not see any immediate difficulty with saying that an object is reduced from potential to actual when it was caused to exist at the beginning of his existence and from then until something comes along and causes it to cease to exist there isn't any causal process which sustains in being but rather it persists in actual existence as existential inertia as it were and so i will yeah feel free to wrap up feel free to wrap up your thought there there i'm saying i don't have any time to yield i was going to yield the remainder of my time but it was no problem at all thank you so much ben okay father pine we're getting now into our second rebuttals uh so each of you will have four minutes i want to ask everybody watching to please consider sharing this right now and giving us a thumbs up we have over 1 200 of you watching right now and i don't know about you but it's a nice break to all of the politics and the craziness that's going on this country to contemplate the higher things the things that are more beautiful and more sure so maybe share this with your friends on facebook or twitter and give us a thumbs up father when you start i'll click the four minute timer perf okay uh so based on the one argument that i left unaddressed from the opening statement and then the two that you introduced there we have three on the table so i hope to address a little bit the problem of evil and then we can pick it up again and what follows um so as respect to oh with respect to the problem of evil maybe just um a couple of introductory words it's not gonna obs you know like resolve the situation because western civilization has been kind of caught in the grips of this question for its entirety so just a quick word from herbert mccabe a 20th century dominican of the english province he says when confronted by suffering we are liable to two apparently contrasting reactions we may reject god as infantile as unable to comprehend or have compassion on those who suffer and are made to suffer in this world or on the other hand we may find as job did that it was our own view that was infantile we may in fact come to a deeper understanding of the mystery of god so here again just to kind of direct our attention to the metaphysical view and to hold off at arm's length the tendency to anthropomorphize and to hold god to a criteria which is foreign to him to his nature which exceeds that of ours um in a way surpassing the way in which we exceed the nature of a fly uh i think also of the introduction that gk chesterton wrote to the book of job where he says when you know when god shows up in book 38 of the book of job after all of these different kind of dialectical engagements with these four men who have tried to reason with job god doesn't come with answers he comes with questions uh he comes with questions that are even more agnostic than the ones that we ourselves have posed so i think with the with the problem of evil we need to be content uh with this type of questioning um saint john paul ii says at the end of salvafici dolores which is addressed to this meeting of human suffering specifically and evil in particular uh that god does not answer directly and he does not answer in the abstract this human questioning about the meaning of suffering man hears christ's saving answer as he himself gradually becomes a share in the sufferings of christ so whenever we talk about the problem of evil you focus especially on on animal pain but whenever we talk about the problem of evil we do so uh treading kind of lightly cognizant of the fact that you know many people suffer it existentially in a way that's terrible so i don't mean for explanations to make light of that or in any way to explain them away because such will decidedly not uh not be possible but just some some opening things uh first we want to kind of keep off at arm's length this uh tendency addressed in the 20th century whether or not you know those who are accused of it are guilty of it is another matter but this idea of onto theology treating god as if you were one you know kind of cause in and amongst the midst of a kind of mess of causes and you acknowledge that so we just again point to the fact that god transcends the world um so if um god is whatever answers our question how come everything uh then evidently he is not to be included amongst everything god cannot be a thing an existent among others it is not possible that god and the universe should add up to make two again if we are to speak of god as causing the existence of everything it is clear that we must not mean that he makes the universe out of anything whatever creation means it is not a process of making so here when we talk about god's kind of like interaction with or relation to creation we have to be very cognizant of the fact of his transcendence um and that he is not just a particular cause but rather a universal cause who actually imparts two beings their very being and their capacity to cause as secondary subordinated instrumental agents in their proper right so god doesn't you know simply have causal competence over this or that form but over being itself like you said ipsum essay pair say subsistence and so uh with agency the standard of flourishing is set principally by the nature of the agent and with art the standard of flourishing is set exclusively by the nature of the thing made but with creation there is no antecedent potentiality in light of which the act is judge for whereas on the one hand to make is to actualize a potency on the other hand to create is to produce the potentiality as well as the actuality so when we evaluate whether or not god is defective or guilty of neglect we need to be cognizant that god creates the very conditions under which it is possible for there to be a defect and i hope that we can pick up the theme again and what follows okay thank you father gregory okay ben whenever you're ready i'll click the four minute mark okay i'm not muted this time right no you're great excellent excellent all right i'm good to go all right i want to first say something about uh father gregory's uh replies to my argument from changing knowledge so that was the third argument that i presented in my opening speech um and because i want to say that i don't think that the rebuttal does not clearly work on a metaphysics of time like presentism or growing block theory um it cannot be presently true that god's knowledge of the past existence of humans consists in his causing or orchestrating the past if the past does not exist the past is not still around for god to be causing it it also cannot be true that god's knowledge of the future existence of designer babies assuming designer babies will exist in the future consists in his causing or orchestrating the future if the future does not exist the future is not yet around for god to be causing it so how is it that even now god knows of past and future truths even if the past and the future do not exist um so that's that's what i would want to say about the argument from changing knowledge um now i want to spend more of the time on the problem of evil um because i think um this is by far the most important argument um and i think that it can't be that god only is required to do what he explicitly agrees to do in the bible firstly we do not need to read the bible to determine what covenants god presently has with us humans if we have the intuition that god would never allow pointless or otherwise gratuitous suffering then we are a primo fashion justified in believing that he never would in other words our intuition tells us what covenants god has made with humans our rational intuitions i should say secondly since god knows of all the objective reasons that pointless suffering is bad and he is able to prevent such suffering it does not matter what agreements nor promises he has made these reasons for preventing suffering are normatively binding for all intelligent beings including purists actus thirdly if god is to be conceived as loving in any sense is like we said with divine hiddenness it is simply absurd that he does not will our well-being so he must be motivated to prevent us from suffering needlessly um and another thing i'd like to say is that even if god is not an agent on classical theism like we would understand it with us humans he is still identical to his act of creating sustaining loving knowing etc actions can be morally evaluated hence there remains a question as to whether god um you know whether it's a good action a bad one or a neutral what um and the evolutionary argument from evil constitutes powerful evidence that god is a bad action um and so i'll go ahead and yield any remaining time i might have there okay because that's that's what i want to say about the problem of evil okay yeah thank you very much ben all right so that concludes uh let's see our second rebuttals uh so now we're going to be moving into a time of um cross-examination want the audience to remember that the cross examiner is allowed and even expected to interrupt and move the flow of the argument as he sees fit so for example if ben is asking father a question he doesn't feel like father's asking it he's very welcome to cut him off and that's not to be considered rude at all that's just part of it so um we'll begin father with your you have 12 minutes to cross examine ben and then ben will have 12 minutes to cross-examine you so as soon as you start i'll click the 12-minute timer okay um so just maybe we can work on the problem of evil for a bit when discussing animal flourishing or the experience of animal pain uh specifically with respect to extinction you know you said over 99 of species are presently extinct that once were um you uh sometimes will describe such a thing as malevolent you know or um pointless i think but some of that language is itself teleological insofar as it presumes that there is a good way by which uh things ought to be conducted or one who is you know a putative god ought to conduct them so what would you say is the purpose of life oh that's a big one okay so um i would first contest that this language implies anything teleological so i'm um skeptical of teleteleology in nature but i would say that it is certainly normative meaning that it is reasoned and playing so if i say something is good or good then i mean that we have sufficient reason to want it for its own sake and if something is bad then we have reason to want to avoid it and with respect to reason in that regard you mean human reason so i mean reason as in the capacity the universal capacity to come to knowledge so reason with a capital r now there are reasons which are considerations which count in favor of having certain beliefs or are performing certain actions so for example the fact that some argument is valid and has true premises gives everyone reason to accept this argument's conclusion um similarly i would say something uh so pain is something that everyone has reason to want to avoid so when you say what is the purpose of life so that that question is going to automatically presuppose that there is a natural teleology or there is some aim at which we should ought or must be aiming towards and so i just want to go back briefly to the considerations of reason so reason with a capital r um maybe this is crassly materialistic but where is that or and what does it subsist to how to to like to what extent it's abstract so it does so we would have access to it in the same way that we would have access to mathematical truths or to um modal truths so what is possible or necessary or contingent um or normal non-moral normative truths like the truth that i mentioned earlier about evidence about how we should ought or must accept the conclusions of valid arguments with true premises so these are necessary truths that are true in all possible worlds but they don't add anything ontologically weighty so to speak to our view so this is what's known in the literature as ethical non-naturalism and so i believe that moral facts and natural facts are two non-overlapping domains of facts with the tellian model moral facts are reduced to a type of natural fact so i think that reduction is impossible if two thinking persons disagree as to what uh pertains to reason with a capital r how does one adjudicate claims between or among them dialectical process so a process of trying to resolve disagreement and appeal to reasons and evidence using arguments okay and do you think that that can continue to remain contentious or will it be patently obvious to all parties at the end of said dialectic that what is true is true so based on human nature it will it will not so if we had ideally rational agents in which all a you know no agent was being distorted by any distorting influences then yes the the if if every agent was fully rational and was um examining the evidence in the same way as the universal ways prescribed by reason with a capital r then yes they would come to the same conclusion okay so in the case of specifically the argument uh against god's existence because of the problem of evil uh what do you think are the pertinent principles derived from reason with a capital r to which thinking men have access that can be dialectically adjudicated and you know like impinge upon the current conversation so i think there's three moral principles that are at least worth um appealing to here um the first will be a kantian moral principle so it's the idea that we should uh should ought or must act only on those principles that everyone could rationally will so these principles would look like do not steal do not lie do not cause unnecessary harm do not injure do not disable things of that nature now the second moral principle we can appeal to is a form of consequentialism and so it says that we should ought or must act only on those principles that would make things go impartially best and the third um moral principle we can appeal to is a contractualist one in which we should ought or must act only on those principles that no one could reasonably reject and so i believe that all of these moral principles are climbing the same mountain so to speak in the sense that they will all the principles that they um prescribe to us we'll all meet at the peak of the mountain they'll all give us the same answers to our moral questions and so that moral philosophy consists of trying to understand all of the non-moral facts of any situation and then how to apply these moral principles to those non-moral facts to then get the right or correct or valid um act that we should ought or must do let's say with respect to the second of those principles because i think kind of in the background right now i have it in my mind that some of those principles like those who occupy the traditions which enunciate those principles might deny you know one of the other of the principles that you listed kind of as part of that constellation i think specifically with respect to like kantian and then consequentialist being at loggerheads so with respect to like the consequentialist one uh with respect to um consequences of an action obviously within the utilitarian literature there's some debate as to whether one ought to maximize um you know for oneself personally or for a common good whether that ought to be short-term whether that ought to be long-term what criteria then do you use to establish what types of consequences you're looking for so i am what's known as a rule uh consequentialist in that sense in that form formulation of the consequentialist principle in that we are looking for um a set of describable rules that we can then act on so not only do i think reason is objective but i also think that it is self-conscious and so if reason is self-conscious when we make some judgment that judgment contains within it the very judgment that i think this judgment is valid and so that is very i think very very very important and so you can't leave that out that's why i don't just you know throw out a consequentialist principle i think the con the kantian one is important too because i think there is a continuum between our intentions and the consequences if we're going to have good cons good consequences will come from good and good intentions now things might fall short you know and have bad consequences in that way so but this is just a way of cashing out moral terms in consequentialist terms so this in no way implies attention with the kantian principle that i mentioned earlier so the kantian principle says that all of the principles that would make things go impartially best the ones from the consequentialist one just are the principles that everyone could rationally will so my i will make a bold claim tonight and say that they're just the the tension that is often seen between deontological consequences and contractual theories is largely superficial i think they largely agree i think they will mostly give us the same answers to our moral questions and they will be the right answers to our moral questions okay i think um well we only have a few minutes left so i think i think um basically with respect to that we could do more in terms of like drilling down on foundations or foundationalism as it were um but there are certain things maybe just to kind of like grant for one little cash out point i suppose um it sounds like in your description that you have god construed as a moral agent who is subject to these rules which rules are available to reason uh and which should be agreed upon universally by virtue of you know like the kind of three sub-postulates that you describe um so i think within that you know you have god's construed as a moral agent who himself is liable to or you know kind of judged within the context of this arrangement i think um in this you know you you certainly have the advantage of being largely uh adopting a critical stance because you need only prove that the thing itself is morally appropriate or contradictory or etc um maybe just to kind of move the conversation briefly into a positive vision um what would it look like what would a world look like in which there was no animal suffering i don't know if you have some theory as to what that would look like heaven we'll just say heaven we'll throw that out as a logical possibility okay and what would heaven look like um no suffering okay and what would be the like the mechanism for which one or mechanism whereby one arrives at heaven the mechanism but i i have no idea so i don't know how non-physical and physical things causally interact so when our physical body dies and our non-physical soul so to speak goes to heaven i relation of goes to heaven i don't i don't know i don't understand it so on the kind of like the plausible alternative for something as you know we currently experience it would be that things would just be created in a state of bliss no not necessarily in a state of bliss so a world of no suffering could be morally indifferent there could be nothing good in it whatsoever so everything could be morally neutral um you could have a world of disembodied minds that don't interact with one another and so maybe that world is not in itself good or worth creating but it's you know a logically possible word so we can then start to think of good things that come from our interactions with other agents so if we now think of a possible world like heaven where we have disembodied minds that do interact with each other there's still possible um loving relationships there there's an in a possible infinite loving relationship there with god himself there in heaven so you we would have a direct access i think in heaven to god's unsurpassable goodness and love i mean he would be perfect goodness and so for an infinite amount of time we would be able to come into a loving relationship with such a being and do you think that vision of heaven necessarily entails that there be no matter so no i don't think it necessarily entails that there be no matter um i would actually have have to think about what you know whether there would be matter or not so i have it conceived in my head as a disembodied mind so that it's not somehow constrained by matter but maybe matter can be a part of it i don't know i'd have to think about it more all right so now we're going to have ben watkins cross-examine father gregory pine and again ben is more than welcome to interrupt father gregory to move the conversation along or to change topics altogether whenever you're ready ben start and i'll click the 12-minute timer so i just want to start off so when i approach philosophy of religion from an analytic philosophy perspective i start in the vein of paul moser in that i start with the concept of a being that is wholly worthy of our worship meaning that it's always worthy of our worship it's not contingently worthy of our worship it always is demanding of our attention and reverence and respect and so i think from that initial concept the divine attributes follow and so we end up with the attribute of perfect goodness so this is the divine attribute um that is driving the reasoning of the problem of evil so on your view since you deny that god is a moral agent in some in in some sense you deny it um but is there a sense on your view in which god is praiseworthy or blameworthy if god does have acts those acts have consequences for the world is he praiseworthy or brainworthy for those acts in such a way that he would always be worthy of our worship um so i guess short answer is no uh because to be morally brave worthy or blameworthy entails that one is subject to a norm which transcends his nature so st thomas has this argument when he talks about uh the possibility of will in the angelic intellect and he says picture a hand that it's etching and let's say that that hand um you know were the very standard of its etching then that hand could not but etch well so you know to the question whether i ought to have etched this way or that one would simply respond i etched and that's a sufficient justification whereas he says if it is subject to a higher standard namely like a notion in the mind of the artisan of what good etching looks like or a standard you know kind of piece that he wants to replicate then we can say that it more or less closely approximates the the standard itself but in the case of god there is no law as it were higher than his nature and here you kind of get into the euthyphro problem right um which is you know there's like a big scholarly literature on that and certainly like a lot of exciting arguments to rehearse but the basic idea is that god's nature is good but in a way that uh it's not that it's anti-moral it's more so like trans moral in the sense that uh goodness has a prior metaphysical definition before it comes into the adjudication of moral claims so it has a kind of optic character and the notion of classical theism and basically like aristotle and saint thomas begin with the observation that we call those things good which we desire so it's kind of phenomenological it's the thing towards which one has an inclination by virtue of the fact that his nature is suited to it um and then you know he introduces conversations surrounding like perfection you know we call that thing perfect which lacks nothing proper to its nature and then final causality it's the type of thing which accounts ultimately for the movement of a nature towards its full realization so in the context of a conversation about god's goodness what we're talking about is ultimate desirability and a lot of times saint thomas will kind of include in his arguments this idea that god is universally true and universally good in so far you know we go back to the notion of ipsum essay parasite subsistence he just is being right he be he is in all of its various modes and modalities uh he's wholly uncircumscribed his very nature is to be essay and so god is not circumscribed or limited by having his you know form contracted to a particular octus ascended or to a particular kind of bundle of matter but rather he subsists in the mode of perfect being and so in that sense we would say god to be good so when st thomas advances his argument for question from question two in the prima paris then he goes towards simplicity which you gestured towards you know that god is not complex that that dds there and then perfection and then he builds up two questions there five and six on god's goodness um and and the kind of ultimate fruit of which is simply to say that god is and that we are made for god and so with respect to like you know your your consideration as to whether or not one is always worthy of our worship for him like the virtue of religion which is a potential part of the virtue of justice which governs this idea of worship he thinks that it's available to us by reason mind you it's complicated by original sin but it's still something that we should realize is immediately attended upon our natures having been given so because god is creator and end we owe him worship by virtue of the fact that he is our causal and primal source but we need not fear that because there is no higher law by which to norm god that he can subsequently like go off you know willy-nilly because that's to import you know anthropomorphizing criteria into the adjudication of god's actions god need not explain why he did this or that he simply is and for us the kind of stance is not so one of putting him in the dock and accusing him of wrongs but rather you know like in a theistic tradition is of adopting a contemplative stance and saying like what is the meaning of this and by asking what is the meaning of this one you know lays the groundwork for having that unfold in his or her life as you know he suffers god's timing and permission and comes to discover that this was all for the good so like a kind of classic augustinian thing is that god only permits evil to befall to draw forth from it some kind of good like a textured good a rich good a beautiful good and i've been talking for too long so i'll stop it's all good we're having fun so um this view seems quite reductionistic then it when it comes to our moral concepts it seems that goodness and morality are being reduced to god and god's actions so what ought to be reduces in some sense to what is so this is the famous is ought gap from hume um how can you know it doesn't seem that we can fully cash out all of our normative concepts in non-normative terms so is the is ought gap something that worries um you your atomist view um how do you uh you know what i mean like how do you onto the is odd gap is what i'm not trying to set up a gotcha question no no i got i'm laughing because um i'm just like a swaggering punk kid thomas you know so i'm like let's go let's go um so so saint thomas uh you know he anticipated it and it doesn't scandalize him largely because you know he's indebted to aristotle for his basic groundwork but i think that i think that for us a lot of this kind of movement from is to ought it comes naturally i don't think we're too terribly scandalized by it when it does arise in our moral reasoning so like you take a simple example of the fact of you know i have teeth and my teeth are covered with enamel i have 28 of them i want to keep them free of cavities i don't want to grind too much because then i'm going to have to get you know work done later and so i take care of them in a particular way certainly uh inspired by the council of my dentist who i'm actually going to see next thursday so i'm looking forward to that um on wednesday um so i you know i floss i brush i mouthwash i you know gargle whatever that is salt water for you know oral hygiene's sake basically because i don't want to spend a lot of money down the line on you know oral work and i don't want to cost my province money because i'm already irresponsible when it comes to taking care of my body with like knee injuries and stuff like that so i don't want to give them further cause to think i'm reckless so i just went basically there from an is to an ought now mind you you know like different analytic philosophers have way by which to describe that as a kind of supplement suppositional or hypothetical or conjectural or conditioned mode of argumentation but i just basically said like i have teeth that i want to work and so i ought to treat him in a certain way and it kind of impinges upon me as a rule right as normative and so i think that our life is just surrounded by these types of things whether or not we acknowledge them and uh it shouldn't it shouldn't be for us too terribly trying when we get to kind of higher order moral arguments um mind you they are more contentious and and they're like more specific or particular determinations of the moral law and so they're going to be more contentious but contentious by virtue of the fact that you've introduced like matter and contingency and all kinds of wild excitement um but you know going from an is to an odd is something that we that we do daily uh and it doesn't cause us uh too terrible uh heartburn so i think that like what we do is is a kind of metaphysical morals with whether or not we acknowledge it so to go from metaphysics to morality is something that's just in our in our dna awesome so that's what i wanted to comment on the normative bit so moving to um views of free will for you so how do you avoid the implication or potential implication i should say of determinism on your view so um we're i'm still relating to this the problem of evil sorry i'm all over the place with god sustaining the world in being so god is sustaining the world in every moment through his act his activity but so isn't god sustaining the bad actions of individuals so that seems to be you know again i'm not trying to set up a gotcha question but yeah how do you reconcile that tension there sure so um this is a bit you know in the augustinian kind of domestic tradition on this that the teaching is that evil is a privation of the good a provazio bony so asking the question you know what is god doing with evil is a kind of category error right it's to point at something which is not so now mind you evil can be very forceful terrible uh in an existential way but we shouldn't uh we shouldn't accord to it the status of being so when st thomas does his metaphysics of evil he asks you know about the four causes so you've got the efficient cause which is like the agent that brings it about you've got the final cause which is the purpose for which you've got the formal cause which makes the thing to be what it is and you've got the material cause which is the stuff out of which or stuff in which the foreman hears and when he asks about evil he said you know the material cause is the act itself because it adheres in the act but that itself is good and god sustains the act in being insofar as that act is and that is a good thing then he asks with respect to the form it's here you have the it's a privation so it's uh what ought to be there and is not it's a kind of disorder so in the concrete instance of you know sin within the theistic tradition you have a variety of goods on offer and you're choosing in and amongst or between them and you affirm a lower good to the detriment of an affirmation of a higher good so i'm toddling down the street okay on the left side of the street there's let's say somebody trying to parallel park their car and it's clear to me that like one of their mirrors is broken and that they're partially blind and that there's a high risk that they're gonna run over a water main one uh and like you know things are gonna go terribly on the other side there's a chick-fil-a and they have a sign outside that says free spicy chicken sandwiches well done fries and chick-fil-a sauce and i'm like hemming and hong like what do i do and i dart in the chick-fil-a that's sinful because i affirmed a good right so i had as the object of my act something good but in so doing i subverted an inclination to what is in you know like a higher more substantial good so there it's it's about affirming a good that privation is about affirming a good but one that's deficient by comparison to what ought to be there the efficient cause is just the human being and the final cause is a kind of madness right so the final cause is it's it's trained on this good like chick-fil-a but it's to the detriment of the other thing so with respect to god supporting evil and being god is supporting agents and their acts and he's giving them at always you know like at all times at least the grace sufficient to turn to him to make of it something beautiful and good as to whether or not they choose to exceed to that offer to consent to and cooperate with it is another thing uh but god you know is is positively uh you know like a gently uh initiating something that is good okay all right excellent well that does it for the cross-examination period guys we've both been uh drinking a bit father's and water me and ben some beard do the two of you need to have a two-minute break before we get into our 30-minute uh quick q and a session from youtubers are you feeling good i'm good i feel great all right okay excellent i feel like i got too much beer left well this is this has been really cool and it's been really great to see in the comments people commenting how great it is to see two you know intelligent people having a discussion that's that's charitable as well as sort of philosophically rigorous so so good for you guys all right so uh before we get into this 30 minute audience questions a couple of things i want to say if you haven't yet liked this video and shared it please do that please subscribe it really helps the channel out we want to do these debates once a month so we can have these intellectually stimulating conversations for you and your loved ones and you can help us just by giving us a thumbs up sharing the video with your friends on youtube or facebook rather that would really help us out a great deal also on a remind you at the end of this debate i'm going to be announcing next month's debate very excited about who we have in store for you so please stick around for that and so now what we're going to be doing is taking 30 minutes in which we'll take q a now here's here's how it works each person gets two minutes to answer a question addressed to him and his opponent gets one minute to respond so i'll begin for example by taking a question for father gregory pine he'll have two minutes ben will then have one minute to respond the next question will be two minutes to ben father gregory will respond so as you're writing in these questions uh please keep in mind we want to get equal amount of questions for for both so here we go this is like the most work i have to do all night i just get to sit drink listen to you amazing people and here we go now we've got to actually do some work so let's do this all right so this first question actually comes from uh trent horn so it's nice to have trent listening trent did the debate last month he says my question does ben's so this first question for ben does ben's argument from changing knowledge require the a theory of time or presentism to be true go for it oh you might be muted dang twice start whenever so it does not pre-suppose so certainly the example in which i use the language from the present or the past not being real the present currently being real in the future not yet real that language certainly sounds like presidentis language but that was an example to clarify the concept of temporal becoming so even if we had an eternalist view or a view in which all points of time are concurrently real it would still be the case that the proposition humans exist changed throughout time and so it would still be the case so the intuition that the argument is appealing to is not one that has to do with time but one that has to do with knowledge and it's that you can't know something that's false and so if it's false that humans existed god didn't know that and so that would be true of a certain time slice in the past whereas in the present time slice it would now be true that humans existed so at some point you god's knowledge changes so you can use an eternalist model a president's model or a growing block model and this correct this question now draws to my attention how misleading my past present future example could have been in this so i appreciate that question no problem okay father you have a minute to respond yeah i guess uh just again to gesture at this metaphysical stance uh so according to god the primacy which he has in the metaphysical order and to look at it not so much from the vantage of time though of course we are accustomed to rise from what is better alone to what is lesser well-known so we're going to analogize we're going to draw examples from our experience reason back from effect to cause whenever we talk about god and we limit ourselves you know to the ambit of reason but in this particular case it's the k you know it's just decidedly the fact that that time is contingent the time is uh causally subject to the reign of eternity and that when we talk about eternity it's not so much helpful for think to think about it as extended time in two directions that has neither beginning nor end that's just some paternity or die eternity it's not eternity in the strict sense what we're talking about is god's possessing being in one whole and simultaneous embrace and imparting to all things at all times which are equally present to him and what you know boethius calls a new stance and now standing an eternal now uh the being with which in which they subsist excellent okay thank you very much all right this next question is for father pine classical theist says father pine could you comment on the existential inertia objection to the five ways sure so the existential inertial ejection objection says basically like that um we can rely upon if there were a creator at the outset we can rely upon that thing to subsist uh provided that it gets this initial boost um so i think a good argument that is leveled against this is one taken from frank sheed in his book theology for beginners he says picture an artist and picture a carpenter who makes a chair you know he takes wood uh in this particular instance and from it he fashions his end product and then let's say that he leaves his workshop or he sends his chair to a consumer uh absent him right when that thing has departed from his immediate presence and causal action it subsists by virtue of the thing from which it is made namely wood okay so it's obsessed by virtue of the material which undergirds it but he says when we're talking about creation we're not talking about a particular type of change or artifice we're talking about making something out of nothing ex nihilo not de nihilo but x nihilo so there's nothing presumed to the creative act so then let's say that god the artisan you know fashions for himself a human being or god to leave the metaphysical room that thing would have to subsist by virtue of the substance from which it was made to speak improperly which is nothing so we would talk about that creature as for nothing so there's a sense in which what we're talking about with respect to god again infinitely transcends our notions of making or fabricating rather we're talking about him imparting the very act of to be which does not inhere in the matter by virtue of any intrinsic principle which need be wed to the thing in order that it subsists in its nature okay ben you have a minute to respond um so i'll use my time to try to help clarify existential inertia because i know that we're using philosophical jargon here so my objection is to the idea that god sustains everything in being at any time such that if you were to take god out of the picture everything would cease to exist and i i'm saying that no after the big bang an event such such as that everything stays in existence just on its own existential inertia it doesn't need some sustaining cause at every moment to actualize a potential and so what i asked in my objection is what is the justification for thinking that the substance itself is right here right now being moved from potential to actual with his respect to his existence and not just with respect to its aesthetic properties okay that yep there we go that does it for that i tried to get it out as quick as i could yeah it's tough for tough work you did great okay this this next question comes from chris donohue and is for ben he says if there is no god or intelligence to create good or bad how can there be debate on what is morally good or bad to do so i do not believe that good or bad are created in the sense that these are contingent things that a world can just have or not have so in this respect i believe that moral properties like goodness of badness or rightness and wrongness and principles that make use of those concepts are more like mathematics or modal truths or logical truths they are necessary truth they are true in all possible worlds so when the question is asked if these aren't created that's already a loaded question in this because it's assuming that these are things that are created out of some material well i don't even think they're material i think they're abstract so they're you know they're they they're the exact opposite of something material if we're using you know a restitution concepts here like they could not be more different types of things and so much like the property of being evidence like the fossil record is evidence for biological evolution but i don't have to go into the fossil record and dig around for this property being evidence similar when there's some act that's good i don't have to go around and look in some ontologically weighty sense for this property of goodness that's i think so the the concept of creating good or evil already makes the mistake of giving good and evil this kind of concrete reality that with ontologically weighty concrete reality that i would just deny as an ethical non-naturalist all right thanks very much father uh to respond yeah maybe um just simply to say that uh i don't wanna import too much uh reliance upon the existence of god to ground moral claims as to whether or not you know you you eventually end up at that bedrock that's a longer discussion but i think maybe just the most basic claim at issues from what we had described earlier on the subject of going from is to ought that good is a relative claim not a relativistic claim but that good is a relative claim to a nature and that what we're asking about effectively is flourishing and that flourishing needs the the full realization of a nature or the kind of progressive accumulation or assimilation of accidental properties which give that nature its fullest expression you know we talk about it in human terms as happiness and so we call those things good which promote it in a you know like in a real sense and you have to accord you know afford some space here for self-deception and yada yada but we call those things good which promote the flourishing of a nature and we call those things bad which derigate from it so it i don't know that it need rely too terribly much on god at least for its kind of initial explanation it's simply to say whether or not something accords with nature okay excellent next question is for father pine who has two minutes to respond tom lachlan says father gregory what is the purpose or what is sorry let me see if i can read this probably what is the purpose of suffering in relation to love right so um i referenced earlier a work by saint john paul ii called salvafici dolores and in there he gives a variety of things and you can think about this especially at the foot of the cross how suffering reveals the depths of love and obedience you can think about how christ drew near to those who suffered and suffered in our nature you can also think about how like in the case again of christ how the suffering of christ makes possible truly meaningful suffering so the suffering of christ is especially revelatory of the love with which he merits our salvation the lengths to which he is willing to go and saving sacrifice but it also affords us an entry into a meaning that would not ordinarily open up before our own suffering which to us can strike us as uh insane madness of this you know like the craziest stripe uh saint john paul ii writes in the cross of christ not only is the redemption accomplished through suffering but also human suffering itself has been redeemed um so you can think about maybe in a more kind of basic or natural way how suffering calls upon our deepest stores to manifest moral integrity you can think about your experience of hiking and you want to be tested to the limit you know it's just i find it sometimes unsatisfactory just to take a kind of rambling walk in the woods unless you have really good company what i'm more interested is you know suffering for a view uh striving for something that is more delightful by virtue of its difficulty you know like there's no food that's as delicious as camp food even though it's super simple and oftentimes gross but when you're that hungry and you strive that hard it's excellent and so i think that suffering kind of like can manifest more clearly the work of grace and an afflicted nature it can kind of call forth from us this response it can conform us to christ to conform all of these different connections in the heart of the human person okay ben so i want to use my minute to just refocus the question to the arguments that i gave tonight so i focused on evolutionary evil for a reason so the evil that i'm appealing to is non-moral agents or are they they aren't moral agents so these responses might work for soul building of persons but when we're thinking about the hundreds of millions of years of gratuitous suffering and mostly languishing and relatively little flourishing and the fact that god is sustaining these at every moment all of this gratuitous pain and suffering i think there's a very very serious tension there with god's love how can a loving being choose to create in this way for hundreds of millions just gratuitous suffering and languishing and so i think that those other responses while they might be plausible when applied to human persons when we apply them to non-human animal persons they don't help us at all understand god's love in relation to pain and suffering and languishing all right this next question is for ben and it comes from brianna she says how do you objectively judge pointless suffering versus non-pointless suffering is all suffering bad so this question is a little bit hazy so if she asked is all suffering bad i'll take that question first so i believe that suffering is in itself bad so i think that we all have reason to want to avoid suffering but i also believe that suffering can be instrumentally good so friar pine was giving us some some excellent examples of that so this is the difference between an intrinsic good and an extrinsic good so the first question asked about a moral epistemology it's so how do i objectively judge um something gratuitous or non-gratuitous so i did mention earlier how i think that reason is both one of the one of the unique features of reason is that it's both objective and that it is self-conscious and so when we make a judgment that and if that judgment is true it does not depend on any character of the person making the judgment so that's how judgment is objective and also judgment is self-conscious in the sense that it contains within it the very judgment that what i am judging is valid so if something if i am making a judgment that i believe to be valid and the truth of that judgment does not depend on any character about me then i have made an objective judgment that i am aware of its own validity okay thanks so much father pine uh yeah i think uh certainly the argument uh concerning animal suffering is a good one and i think every theist has to contend with it i recently read an article or a yeah an essay by david foster wallace called consider the lobster where he goes to the main lobster festival and he's talking about like the world's largest lobster cooker and all the ways in which you know um it seems unnecessary suffering goes into the preparation of this particular meal and how people delight in it uh he thinks uh in a way that he finds at the very least distressing or troubling and he has to you know reconcile this with his own consumption of meat so i mean like i'm alive to the conversation but i think that the question of whether suffering is pointless or whether it has a point is a good one and i think that that kind of falls to the non-theist to give criteria for explaining such a thing and um you know i think that we can see clear examples as to why there would be a point for it or how animals being subjected to human ends can bring about great goods in the human community and while certain other instances of suffering to us do not make sense you know like why do lions need to eat antelopes we can appreciate a kind of wisdom at work when you begin to get at it all right this next question is for you father from gary burke he says father gregory please explain free will versus god's omniscience am i right in saying that just because god knows how we will exercise our free will in our lives does not make our outcomes predestined yeah so that's a good question the same time us ask this with respect to so it's in the prema pars when you ask questions about god's power and specifically about god's providence and he's asking how is it that god causes free agents to act and we're worried about violence or coercion but saint saint thomas delays some of those fears because god is able to be more interior to us than we are to our very selves and you know to operate within us in a way that is in you know more natural to us than in than is our own movement because he's the very giver of our liberty so i think he'll go on to say that god causes necessary things to happen necessarily and contingent things or free things to happen freely so such is the nature of god's causal power that not only does he cause a thing to be but he causes the very manner in which that thing unfolds so in the case of necessary thing god causes them to be and causes them to be or to cause necessarily but in the case of free things god causes them to be and causes them to cause freely so god gives us our agency and he gives us our agency as something that is super determined that is to say has for its end god who is universal truth and as a result underdetermined in so far as particular goods no one particular good will entirely command our attention because by comparison to the universal true uh or the universal good it does not wholly sate our desire so we're always making these comparisons and able to adjudicate in and among or between different goods in a way that leaves us under determined with respect to them so god is causing us to be causing us to cause but causing us to cause freely or contingently such as the nature of his causal power okay ben i just want to point out how much all i'm in that he was able to answer that question in two minutes that was incredible so um i'm i'm not going to respond too much to to what uh um father gregory said there because that's kind of an in-house debate among theists so i'll put on my theist hat and uh um when i imagine myself being a theist and trying to answer this question i am more sympathetic to what is known as open theism which just bites the bullet saying that look god can't know the future actions of perfectly free creatures but that doesn't count against god's omnipotence because it's logically impossible to know the future actions of some perfectly free creature and so i would just invite other atheists or atheists other theists interested in that question to check out that position it is controversial but it's the one i prefer all right thanks so much this next question is for ben and it comes from sorter he says what is the warrant or justification for inferring that an instance of evil is gratuitous metaphysical from its seeming epistemic to be gratuitous if god is good shall i read that again i think i got the just of it so there is a well-known principle in epistemology called the principle of phenomenal conservatism and so this principle says that if something seems like it is the case then we at least have primo fascia justification that it is the case obviously in the absence of defeaters and so this is one way of answering that question it's just appealing to a principle of phenomenal conservatism but there's i think a much bigger more important moral question here that requires us to go even further than the the phenomenal the principal phenomenal conservatives and those are those three moral principles that i appealed to earlier the kantian contractualist and consequentialist one because again what we're doing so moral philosophy is all about taking these moral principles and systematizing our moral intuitions to apply them to actual acts and traits of character or states of affairs and so i think that is really what's driving the um moral reasoning within at least my version of the problem of evil of the movement from uh seeming like an unjustified evil to something actually being an unjustified evil father uh yes so within the domestic tradition something would be judged as gratuitous or non-gratuitous vis-a-vis end so to adjudicate said claim one has to have some knowledge as to what the thing is and what the thing is for so you're making substantive claims as to what constitutes animal flourishing but also substantive claims as to where animal flourishing fits within the ecosystematic harmony of the world and i think there you know a good thing to introduce into the conversation is the purpose for which god creates which is not out of need but rather as a kind of manifestation of his glory so you know at its kind of outset that might seem to complicate the the argument more but god is not about a work of you know serving the particular needs of one or other thing in the universe rather he's making manifest um his uh his attributes so that in the contemplation of that ecosystematic harmony of created things we could have some insight as to his nature and so like with respect to evolution for instance god can fill creation with abundant testimony of his goodness not only synchronically but diachronically all right excellent man it's hard to spit out a good answer like that in a minute isn't it okay let's see what he is next question is for ben uh this comes from dan lindstrom one of our patrons he says awesome debate my question is for ben given that father gregory replied to your problem of evil objections by suggesting that you might be treating god as one moral agent among many would you agree with the with that assessment or do you believe there's a difference in moral standards for god versus humans so i do not consider um god to be above morality or something just like i do not consider god to be above mathematics so god couldn't make two plus two equal five and he couldn't make torturing children good i think these are things that would transcend the nature of a god now for this debate i realize that classical theists want to resist those claims because they want to deny that god is a moral agent and i think that waters down the concept of god which is one reason why i pressed the object the point about being wholly worthy of worship so i think that once you take away these ideas of god being praiseworthy for his actions because he acts in ways that are worth acting for you lose this idea of a being that's wholly worthy of our worship and so you get this kind of abstract ground of bee that doesn't really respond to the religious concerns that people might have when they're you know approaching these questions you know does god exist well yeah but he's this abstract ground of being that just you know his actions are not really morally evaluable a lot of you know his nature is a mystery um i think i think it waters it down so in this sense i lean more towards the theistic personalist camp than i do the classical fies camp but for this argument i tried to focus on perfect goodness and use the toe mystic model and not deviate as much as possible from that okay father would you like me to reiterate that question um i'll just launch go for it um so saint thomas talks about a three-fold way by which we reason back from effects to the cause in our kind of inquiry into god's nature and he says we observe first the via khazalitatis you know the way of causality so when we observe like a good thing as it were or something that comports itself good we would reason back to a god who is good but then he says we next observe the vienna gaziones or emotionas the way of negation or emotion and we say that god is not good in the way that we are good you know we're good in a composite way to even say like you know ben is good is to attribute goodness to ben by way of a copula which seems to suggest sometimes with you know composition so we want to deny that of god and then third and finally he says we have to observe the via eminencia the way of eminence to say that god is good but in a way that transcends our goodness so i don't mean to say that god you know is uh amoral uh but that the nature of goodness at work in god is of a sort higher you know like higher than we experience and beyond our comprehension and that that is the prime analogout and that our notion of morality should be subject to it okay all right a question here from uh catholicism he says question for father pine what would you say to an atheist that brings up old sun worship and parallels of it in christ's sacrifice old sun worship and parallels of it that's great i think that's a great question too i mean i'm excited for that one perhaps more broadly having to do with parallels that we find in pagan religions that seem to be mirrored in christianity oh yeah sure so i think that um christianity is aware of parallels and pagan religions and not scandalized by it and sometimes very consciously adopts the content of those pagan religions within um itself for evangelical ends whether or not that's colonialistic or imperialistic is for another day but um it's there's a kind of recognition that like thomas would say that the natural law is at work in our members so we're inclined to the preservation of our existence by virtue of the fact that we're substances we're inclined to the procreation and education of children by virtue of the fact that we're animals we're inclined to know the truth about god and to live in society by virtue of the fact that we're rational and so knowledge of god and ordering our lives in accord with that knowledge which god can share you know kind of in a natural ambit is part of what we all share as human beings and that may have various expressions but it should come as no surprise that it crops up here and there and so like for instance in creation accounts the genesis accounts are very conscious of other ancient near eastern myths but they consciously transpose the content of those myths as a way by which to be more revelatory so they take something close to the people's experience but then they transpose it into a higher register by virtue of the revelation which god is sharing so god is the author of scripture and fight inspires the sacred author um and illumines you know his mind such that he is able to relate something of the very mysteries of the godhead so from the you know creation accounts we know that god is one that god is good that evil is introduced by human choice and that it's outside of god's perfect will but that god can use it as a way by which to bring about something beautiful um so i think that with respect to like sun worship in particular i don't know much of you know other religions on the particular theme um but i know that uh this idea of you know interpersonality being at the heart of the triune god that love is the deepest thing in reality and transcending reality and that it's a relationship into which we are welcomed and that it expresses itself in you know kind of familial terms should come as no surprise to us not because we invent a god of our own cultural imagining but because god addresses himself to us in revelation such that we would be accommodated to the divine mystery excellent okay ben um so i want to say that i think that this objection being put forward is often put forward in bad faith and is often um not a valid argument um so with that said i think the relevant argument is one about a question of religious disagreement in that not that these other religious traditions resemble other traditions but that the very fact that these religious traditions disagree is surprising if there's a perfectly loving god so i think that's the much more pressing objection than the fact that these other you know sun gods type exist with parallels to the resurrection story um i think that's trying to answer a different question that's not answering the question does god exist that's answering a historical question of you know how did certain religions come about and in what areas and what what affected them i'd like to kind of conclude by asking you i'll give you each two minutes uh to give us the in your opinion the best argument for the other side and why you think it fails so father pine i'll ask you first what do you think the best argument is for atheism why do you think it fails and then i'll ask ben what the best argument is for theism and why he thinks that fails so father feel free to go whenever yeah i think the thing that ben mentioned last this idea of pluralism i think the variety of seemingly incommensurable traditions is uh is tough it's tough to overcome because not only does one feel like there are a panoply of options or a cornucopia of options but that those people are made by virtue of their traditions incapable of hosting arguments or debate with those of another persuasion and so it seems like human discourse has become like naturally balkanizing it's it's headed off in a variety of directions and no one is actually having real or substantive exchanges um i mean like just the conversation tonight is encouraging by way of counter example um but i think that it's possible you know to host real engagement in and among traditions but it means becoming a native speaker of another tradition if you're going to do the work of translation rather than just taking your language and importing it into another setting um so like you know ben did his homework and you know he knows aristotelian tone isn't well which is awesome um i don't know that i know the tradition that you occupy as well but you know it's an aspiration to actually host substantive uh debate and i think that that gives me encouragement that pluralism is not uh beyond the pale that it's something you know there is good and legitimate diversity within the world but i think that it's ordered dynamically towards unity and i think that a lot of people in 21st century despair of that but i do think that it is ultimately possible okay thanks ben so i think that the best argument for theism is a form of teleological argument so a lot of apologists are familiar with what is known as the fine-tuning argument and so this argument claims that there are um constants that are within a very very narrow range to permit life and that this is surprising and i actually think that that argument doesn't go far enough i think that the um universe could be seen as being fine-tuned for moral agents not just life so the argument for moral agency it seems like the world is designed for moral agents to make morally significant decisions and that this is not that this is very surprising on naturalism this is not something that naturalism would predict antecedently but it is something that theism would predict predict antecedentally because theism entails the existence of at least one perfectly good being god and so i think that gives um at least primo fashion evidence that there are moral agents um to theism over naturalism or something like naturalism or philosophical atheism and so the objections that i think apply to that most are that that argument assumes a libertarian conception of free will and so i'm a compatibilist about free will now that's a rabbit hole so i won't i won't go down that that road yet um then the other thing is the problem of evil so obviously um there's evidence on the other side and so i think that the evidence from the problem of evil outweighs the evidence for moral agency and i'm also so skeptical of non-physical minds so i believe that all mental activity is based in brain activity so this is another way in which i am skeptical of the argument but i think i think it's the best one for theism okay excellent all right well thanks so much for that all right uh well we're about to wrap up here with five minute closing uh speeches presentations from each of our debaters but lads take a breather for a moment because i want to say thank you to one of our sponsors and that is hello so we are going to go into our five minute uh closing statements and we'll start with you father gregory and then ben so whenever you want to start okay i think maybe for the last thing just to talk a little bit about the argument of divine hiddenness so my familiarity with the argument comes from travis dumsday who i think teaches in edmonton but he wrote an article in the american catholic philosophical quarterly on the theme which i found very helpful uh so the basic you know statement as ben said of the argument for divine hiddenness is you know if so basically if so much rides on our believing in god uh why doesn't god make himself better known uh and you might permit yourself the imaginative exercises of thinking through what that would look like you know god could take it upon himself to interrupt the halftime show of the super bowl or god could end the coronavirus now or now or now and leave some permanent sign in the clouds as to why he permitted it and why he healed it and what ultimately we're all supposed to think about him uh but god doesn't uh or it seems that to the to the present moment he has not yet um and when he did take human flesh he did so in a kind of roman backwater among a people who were relatively insignificant in the tendency of world history and who it can be argued may not have left the mark that other contemporaneous civilizations did so so what is god's what is god's aim or what is god's end in being so sneaky so maybe to kind of spell it out more rigorously and philosophically we can think about the objection in these terms god loves us and he promotes our good our well-being involves having a positive relationship with god so it's necessary that we believe that god exists god as the one in the driver's seat must need secure this belief and yet many do not so therefore god does not exist so i think here we can just gesture briefly to a correspondence between uh human nature and god's mode of revelation we said that god could chose could have chosen to reveal himself in any number of ways but he chose the way that he did and for us it's not to say whether or not we think that he could have done better but to consider precisely why he did what he did so think about our own human nature namely as embodied souls or insult bodies who come to our end by many movements so our lives whether you think them good or bad have the shape of a kind of narrative they have a kind of dramatic flavor or color to them and we are able to kind of wend our way here and there through a variety of choices and experiences and you know life events to a good or bad end as it were and as we know like solon is quoted as having said call no man happy until he dies so our lives have a real import to them and they are uh only said to be tragic if they fail in the ultimate sense um the only ultimate loss or failure the only real tragedy is not to become a saint as leon bloy is quoted as heaven saying so god addresses himself to our human natures which are decidedly on the way and he does so in a way that is dramatic that is compelling that has a narrative shape to it because christ himself took human flesh and told a story in his flesh a story in which evil asserts itself in terrible fashion think of the import of our having killed god but yet triumphs by virtue of love and obedience love and obedience to the father and love for us who are destined to share with him a life forever in eternity so god rather than kind of running roughshod over our human nature he does not see fit to dehumanize us but rather addresses himself to us in subtle and in varied forms by sending prophets by sending the law by gradually educating us in morality such that when he came on the scene we would be well suited to recognize and to worship him and so god gives us hints so that we might inquire further he gives us indications so that we might read the signs god gives us little by little step by step himself ultimately under sacramental signs and in varied ways so that we could ask questions you can think about the gospel of john how often times a revelation is usually preceded by a question or by a misunderstanding on the part of the apostles god wants us to ask god wants us to inquire god wants us to draw more and more further up and further in into the heart of his love for us so that once we have become more and more established on that solid ground we need never fear departing but even if we should god has accounted even for that because one may depart from him in the order of transgression only to return to him in the order of mercy and as one 20th century dominican said uh at every moment of every day god is offering to even the most hardened of sinners at least the grace sufficient to pray so god wants your friendship as it were and he gives himself to you but not in a way that is discourteous or again overwhelms our humanity but one that is addressed to us as reasonable beings as ones destined by virtue of the image of god at work within our members to life with him and so in that god may permit us ultimately to wander to the very edge of the world but with the intent of pulling us back by a twitch upon the thread for he has made us for himself and he will not be satisfied until such time to speak him properly until he draws us back okay thank you very much father pine ben you have five minutes whenever you'd like to begin let me begin my closing statement by first thanking father gregory for having such a great discussion with me tonight these discussions are always super fun for me and most of all they help me grow in my philosophical work um so much i also cannot thank matt fried enough for agreeing to host us tonight so cheers to him as well um i don't want to introduce any new material so i will merely content myself with reviewing the arguments that i've already given tonight so recall that i began tonight by clearly outlining the theological concepts that i was going to make use of and then i gave three arguments that attacked the concept of classical thesis that is at the core of father gregory's tomism so my first argument was an argument from evil we saw that complex life has biologically evolved over hundreds of millions of years this history of sentience contains facts about the flourishing and languishing of complex life as well as the biological gratuity of pain in the course of that history these evolutionary evils constitute some of the most powerful evidence against theism because most of these evil seem unjustified or otherwise gratuitous and theism implies there are no unjustified nor gratuitous evils therefore we reasoned that facts about evolutionary evils constitute strong evidence against theism my second argument was the argument from freedom we saw that traditional theism implies that god is perfectly free this means god's act of creation was contingent because god could have refrained from creating anything at all however this idea of could have done otherwise is incompatible with classical theism because that view implies god is purely actual if god is purely actual and contingency is a necessary condition for the ability to do otherwise then it follows that god contrary to traditional theism is not perfectly free because his will does not contain the potentiality required to actualize something other than what he does will and that's a contradiction my third argument was the argument from changing knowledge here we saw that change through time is a real feature of the world and it implies god's knowledge also changes with time but according to classical theism god has no potential to acquire anything new nor lose anything old including knowledge because god is immutable as a consequence of being pure act or purely actual so now these arguments may not be convincing to you and i'd be surprised if they convinced anyone who is already deeply committed to a catholic or otherwise potomac tradition but i do believe that is not a fault of any party here tonight i believe this is the nature of reasonable disagreement in philosophy these arguments are first and foremost tools for us to think about the question of god's existence for the rest of our lives the question of god's existence is a perennial question of philosophy it's not going away and neither myself nor father gregory have had the last word here however our engagement might just help give many of you a deeper insight into an imposing view or possibly to your own view perhaps it will start pulling the threads within your web of beliefs that eventually leads to an unraveling of some aspect of your world view these are the deeper thrills of philosophy after all it's what keeps us engaged it's what keeps us coming back and yearning for more and more discussion i'm fond of saying that we have nothing to lose and everything to gain from an honest pursuit of truth for its own sake i'll leave everyone here tonight with uh some of my favorite words from thomas jefferson which are question boldly even the existence of god i'll go ahead and rest my case here thank you for giving me a fair hearing tonight and cheers to everyone yeah okay that was awesome well thank you father pine and thank you so much ben um what i want to do now um is is tell people about some of the things that we have coming up here on pints with requirements but before we do that i'd like to kind of again let both of you tell our audience where they can learn more about you listen to your podcasts if you have books or whatever so father pine uh sure so um things you can check out from the dominicans in my province are the mystic institute which is a research institute of our faculty you can check it out it's mysticinstitute.org for uh live events and then there's a podcast called the mystic institute and then some video courses online you can check out the quarantine lectures from the past six months and then aquinas 101 which is a kind of step-by-step walkthrough of domestic philosophy and theology that's ongoing unto ages of ages until jesus comes back um and then god's planning is a podcast of some friars of our province and that the register on that's a little bit more conversational so 30 minute episodes once a week a catholic miscellany where it's um yeah catholic faith life philosophy theology we just did an episode on ernest hemingway in literature we just did an episode on judgment and judgmentalism we just did an episode on conversation regarding race in america things like that um so a variety of things that you may find pertinent helpful so yeah check those things out all right ben you can find us at real a theology a philosophy of religion podcast um so we have a facebook a twitter an instagram we have a blog um our podcast is available on apple podcasts um and youtube wherever where your favorite place to get podcasts were there and um we really are committed to trying to um kind of undo the damage of the new atheism in trying to facilitate healthy dialogue between theists and atheists so we welcome everyone of all stripes especially people who are honestly seeking for truth and we hope we hope that we can provide you with some tools to help you on your journey well that was definitely demonstrated tonight ben uh you were very charitable as well as intelligent so thank you so much for that i want to let everybody know that we are hosting the largest catholic apologetics conference in the world this uh this october we have an online way of going about it and then we're doing an offline one so october 23rd through 25th uh go go check this out put a link in the show notes we're gonna have over a hundred presenters we're expecting over 60 000 people to be present virtually we also have an offline uh conference that's only available to our patrons so if you wish you had a become a patron that would have been a good reason this is gonna be fantastic father pine am i right in thinking that you'll be at our offline north georgia mountain retreat thing i'll be there yeah so exciting ben check it out we're doing a whiskey tasting night we're doing a cigar night we're actually having a cigar aficionado coming up and then my wife will be there to talk to women if they don't want to smoke cigars and drink whiskey i don't know you had me at whiskey and cigars man so that'll be fun and then i want to let everybody know about our debate next month it's going to be between stephanie formerly stephanie gray now stephanie connors she will be debating dr malcolm potts who is a human reproductive scientist from berkeley on the topic of abortion and whether abortion can ever be justified so this is going to be a fantastic discussion obviously to be a little different to the previous two debates we've done on god's existence but we'll hope you'll join us for it i'll put that up over the next couple of days so you can learn more about it but that's going to be a very exciting debate as well all right you guys are awesome thank you so much for all the work that you put into this for being so respectful and and so intelligent and very articulate it was terrific it was an honor i had so much fun thank you father gregory for agreeing to do this with me thank you very much it was a trick all right bye you

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

Views: 53,755

Rating: 4.9535065 out of 5

Keywords: debate, fr. gregory pine, ben watkins, existence of god, jesus, atheist, priest, dominican, friar, philosophy, pints with aquinas, matt fradd

Id: 0QMwHUijmqo

Length: 131min 54sec (7914 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/YoungMaestroX]

What are people's responses to the free will objection for God who has no potency to be different and so could not have willed anything different, the evolutionary animal suffering objection, the idea that the first 3 ways have a quantifier shift fallacy whereby we don't need to posit one ultimate ground, the idea that there is a gap problem between unactualised actualiser and actus purus, the idea of Gods knowledge changing because of truth propositions changing with time, the idea of divine hiddeness etc.

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These are probably all the main objections brought up today.