Dinesh D'Souza - Liberty University Convocation

thank you very much i'm um really honored and thrilled to be back at liberty it's been a couple of years since i was here uh last it seems that every time i come here there are new buildings sprouting up on campus so it's wonderful to see your success someone mentioned in the introduction that i'm doing a film on obama and the film is actually a look at what is obama's underlying compass you know obama is probably the most unknown guy to come into the white house and yet three years later he's he's still something of a mystery so the film is an attempt to look at to sort of raise the curtain on obama and show what his agenda is for 2016. what would the what would the world look like in 2016 if obama got a second term well this is not my topic for today i'm actually going to be talking about suffering some of you may consider these two topics a little related uh but the the issue of evil and and of suffering is maybe the most difficult problem faced by a believer by by a christian and it is actually the great weapon of the atheists uh i've been um uh debating a number of the leading atheists uh probably the guy i've debated the most is christopher hitchens who died a few weeks ago uh and uh as i got to know him over the years with these debates i realized that there's something odd about hitchens he was a very unique kind of an atheist a lot of the time it seemed that he was not so much an unbeliever in god as somebody who who hated god he had a beef with god after he died i picked up his autobiography and in it he has a chapter about his mom when hitchens was growing up he was a young teenager at oxford his mother eloped with an anglican clergyman and the two of them began this torrid uh affair which culminated very tragically uh when they went into a hotel room they made a suicide pact uh and they killed each other uh and the mother had been frantically phoning hitchens when he was at college in the last minutes before she died she was unable to to reach him so my point is this kind of traumatic incident is bound to leave a an imprint on a young man and very often you sit there with somebody and you're debating issues of evolution and the big bang but you realize that the guy's reason for being an atheist is totally different it has to do with some experience that they had that turned them against god i was in a debate about a year ago with a guy named michael shermer he's the editor of a magazine called called skeptic and in this debate in the question answer session somebody put up their hand and they said hey hey shermer how did you stop being a christian you used to be an evangelical christian you went to pepperdine university and shermer made his usual joke he goes well yeah i used to go out and hand out all this christian literature and now i want to go and get it all back and so he started off like that but after a bit he said well you know when i was in when i was a young man i was dating this girl and i was thinking about proposing to her and then right before that she had a terrible accident and she was paralyzed from the neck down and sherman goes i went down on my knees and i prayed to god and i said god come on help us out here you have the power to help us out yeah you're omnipotent you obviously have the desire to help us out you're benevolent you're good we're christians we're on your side but he said nothing god evidently decided to stay on extended vacation the girl was not healed and he said that was it i decided to make my exit from christianity i couldn't worship that kind of a god if there even is any benevolent good god in charge of the world and as i was listening to him and he got kind of moved as he was talking about this i realized that michael shermer too in a way is not an atheist he's not an atheist in the sense that he's found some other explanation for the world he's actually more accurately described as a wounded theist in other words he's somebody who is not an unbeliever in god as much as he is disappointed in god and you find that that is actually a phenomenon that's very common among the leading atheists i want to read you a couple of lines this is from well i'm reading from my own book but i'm quoting richard dawkins the biologist and this is from his book it's the god delusion he's talking about the god of the old testament and he says quote the god of the old testament is jealous and proud of it a petty unjust unforgiving control freak a vindictive bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser a misogynistic homophobic racist infanticidal genocidal filicidal pestilential megalomaniacal sato masochistic capriciously malevolent bully wow all this invective directed at a guy that dawkins doesn't even believe exists so you know what's going on here i mean something odd is happening right when when you spend a lot of time attacking something that you don't believe in it's a little strange normally if you don't believe in something you just ignore it case in point i don't believe in unicorns but you'll notice i i haven't authored any books called the unicorn delusion the end of unicorns unicorns are not great i just kind of you know live my life as if there aren't any so this phenomenon of atheists being angry with god is something that's worth noting but when we noted we we actually noticed something very surprising and that is that christians also believers also can be wounded theists so we have this actually in common with the atheist in other words not in normal life in ordinary life were great champions of god but you just have to wait for something really bad to happen to you your brother or sister is killed in a terrible accident or you suddenly contract a lethal and crippling and painful disease and then suddenly your faith is challenged and you turn to god and you're like god what the heck why are you doing this to me so this is a common problem between atheists and believers and that's the problem i want to focus on today i want to focus on it in part because many times in christianity even if you go to a pastor and you're faced with terrible suffering and i don't just mean ordinary suffering like my roommate won't bathe or something like that that's suffering that's probably the kind of suffering most of you are used to but but i'm talking about serious suffering really bad stuff horrendous suffering somebody kidnaps your uh your parents and chops off their arms or somebody kidnaps your daughter and rapes her this is horrendous evil and when that kind of thing happens it's very hard to know how to think about it what to do with it and if you go sometimes to christians they give you answers but the answers don't really satisfy you they don't even console you sometimes you'll go to a christian and say why is there all this suffering and they'll say something like well you know god has a plan and you're like god has a plan god has a plan to kill my kid or we're really sorry that you lost your parent even though you're even though they were so young god needed another angel thinking god need another angel he already has a whole lot i only have one brother or one dad or my favorite why do bad things happen to good people christian answer there are no good people in short everybody deserves it now to me these answers don't really work they're not they're not full answers to a serious problem and it is a problem and it's a problem also because from the atheist point of view the issue of evil and suffering seems to be a refutation of christianity it's a refutation of christianity because the argument works like a syllogism it's like a a mathematical piece of logic that can't be challenged so let's look at that god is omnipotent which is to say all powerful he can do anything god is good he's benevolent so god has the power to remove evil and suffering he's good so he has the desire to remove evil and suffering yet there is evil and suffering and not just some of it a lot of it so therefore a god who is omniscient omnipotent and benevolent does not exist that's kind of the syllogism and actually it seems like a pretty strong syllogism because if you agree with the premises which i think as christians we would agree with by the way in other religions you could dispute the premises for example the ancient greeks believed that there were many gods and they were really powerful but they were not omnipotent and a lot of a lot of times they did do good things but they were not all benevolent so there's no problem of evil for example an ancient greek mythology the answer is well god may want to help but he can't or god's not really that good but in christianity and judaism we accept the premises and so the conclusion seems inevitably to follow and yet i want to suggest that there is a way to actually take this syllogism apart there is a hidden premise in it that that is needed for the syllogism to really work and that is god is omnipotent god is benevolent but there needs to be a third premise god has no good reason to allow evil and suffering or to allow the amount of evil and suffering that is actually in the world because if god had a good reason to allow it then the logic break falls apart so that's what i want to focus on what could be god's possible good reason to permit so much evil and suffering now first of all in considering any question like this you have to consider the limits of human knowledge of human reason because if you think about it what are we trying to do we're trying to think of why god might do something or not do something we're trying to figure out why god designed the world in the way that he did it's kind of like saying if i were god i would have which is a little bit of a weird way to think about things if i were god it's kind of like an ant who cry walks into the cathedral of notre dame looks around and says if i were the architect but the point is you're not the architect you're an ant and so if the ant says i find this architecture very defective it's too drafty in here and so on the point is that as an ant you have the ant's eye perspective you're seeing things from a limited point of view and in our case from a human point of view we don't have the god's eye view we can't see the whole thing in the book of job as you know job protests bitterly against god and he says god why are you tormenting me a righteous by the way job's friends show up and they offer what i said earlier was one of the christian answers they say that they say to job you're not a righteous man you may think you are you have the reputation of being righteous but you probably did some bad stuff and god is punishing you for it now interestingly as christians we think that that must be right obviously human nature is flawed job is a sinner but but that point of view on why job is suffering is actually not god's point of view in in the story of job you can see god's point of view and god's point of view is no job you're not suffering because of what you did you're suffering for a completely different reason and god appears to job at the end of the story and you might think that god would say to job hey job listen calm down the reason you're having these problems is not because of what you did it's just that i've got this annoying fellow the satan who keeps bothering me so i decided to have a bet with him and by the way good news we won the bet so this is the reason for your suffering but god doesn't say that god actually gives job a very odd kind of answer he says job where were you when the foundations of the world were laid job are you responsible for the flight of the eagle or for the leviathan coursing through the waters and you might think what kind of an answer is that in one of my debates with bart orman bart is kind of a former christian uh bible scholar teaches at unc chapel hill now an atheist bart says god is just showing up to kind of smash job god is saying to job job don't ask questions but i think in reality if you look at what god is saying to job god is actually making a point to job hey job you have the limited human perspective you don't have if you will the cosmic perspective you can't see the architecture of the universe as a whole therefore be a little humble if you're in questioning if you will the work of the divine architect so keeping that in mind that human reason is a little bit limited i still want to forge ahead and ask the question why would god allow evil and suffering now by the way for many centuries when people consider evil and suffering they basically say listen we know why there's evil and suffering evil and suffering is due to the evil actions done by human beings in other words when we think about suffering we can divide suffering into two camps suffering that's the result of moral evil and then natural suffering those are two different things what's moral evil moral evil is the stuff that human beings do bad things and human beings can do bad things to each other you can do bad things to yourself to animals maybe even to nature but moral evil is the evil done by men natural suffering is different natural suffering is things like earthquakes tsunamis hurricanes parkinson's disease cancer now when insurance companies talk about earthquakes they sometimes call them acts of god why because human beings didn't do them so god must have and right away you begin to see a problem which is that even if we could account for moral evil let's say we say moral evil is due to free will human beings have free will therefore they do more legal well yeah but that doesn't explain earthquakes that doesn't explain natural calamities that are outside of the control of any living person so why did god allow those i'm going to get to that in a second but i want to say a word first about the issue of moral evil traditionally christians have explained moral evil by an appeal to free will don't blame god for the holocaust he didn't do it that was hitler those were the nazis they're responsible and why did they do it they did it because they chose to they wanted to they had free will now true god could stop them but remember it wouldn't be enough to stop one guy because if you stopped hitler you'd still have the stormtroopers you'd still have the ss you'd still have himmler and goebbels and the nazis so you'd actually have to block everybody you'd have to block all those guys and then you'd have to probably block all the people who voted for them well how would you go about doing that the only way to do it is in some ways to arrest or to take away their free will but the problem with taking away human free will is that it's the same free will that enables us to do bad things that enables us to do all good things if you think about it without free will there is no vice but there is also no virtue virtue requires freedom if somebody came to me and put a gun to my head and said listen there's a starving guy give him a sandwich and i do it i get no moral credit for it because i had to do it i'd be shot if i didn't it's only if i give it freely that there's some moral credit for it so the point being here that all the goodness in the world including our ability to respond freely to god depends on free will without free will we cease to even be recognizably human we become more like animals move by instinct or even like a stone which has no choice but to roll down the hill it's it's moved not by freedom but by law and yet this free will defense that is often given to account for more legal is in my opinion inadequate it's a little inadequate why because it doesn't explain why god made us flawed creatures in the first place think of it kind of this way if i'm a a a a an engineer and i can make a special kind of a robot let's say a semi-human robot and i decide to make an alcoholic robot a robot that really likes whiskey and i take this robot and then i i put him into an alley that is lined on both sides of the street by bars and the robot goes into bar number one has a whiskey goes into bar number two has another and bar number three eventually the robot falls flat on his face in the street and then i say bad robot i gave you free will and you chose to drink alcohol and the robot goes yeah but you made me with the proclivity to alcohol in other words when i think about sin and about temptation i'm tempted by a lot of things but one of the things i've been never tempted by is drugs why because i actually just never i've never understood the point of drugs like why fry your brain in this way i don't get it so the point being that i'm just not drawn to drugs you can have drugs all over the place and i'll just walk right by so why didn't god make all of us like that toward all sins meaning we'd have free will we just wouldn't be that interested temptation wouldn't actually tempt us i think the answer to this question actually comes out of the fall where in the garden of eden god actually gives man two choices and i'm not just talking about adam and eve i'm talking about all of us and what are the two choices you can either go god's way or we can go our own way by the way that's the meaning of the the symbolism of the fruit and the garden god says don't eat from this fruit why no reason god doesn't give a reason why because if he gave a reason we would be doing it based on the reason but what god is saying is listen i'm god this is my way everything in eden operates by my plan so you have a choice of going with my plan or you can kind of go with your own plan i'm going to let you decide which of those two options you want and of course man not just adam and eve but you and me we say okay god we want to go our own way we don't just want to do evil we want the right to choose what is evil that's why it's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and god says okay if that's what you want you can't live here because this is a place that operates by god's plan you have to go out into the world but it has to be a special kind of a world it has to be a world that operates according to law it can't be a whimsical or miraculous world why because if it is then freedom doesn't mean anything imagine if you live in a world where when you throw a ball up sometimes it goes up and sometimes it stays put imagine living in a world where sometimes the sun comes up and sometimes it doesn't sometimes bullets kill people and sometimes they don't what would your freedom even mean because you could never see the consequences of your actions they wouldn't be predictable so in order for freedom human freedom to be meaningful we have to live in a lawful world a world of laws now even though we might say we have to live in a world of laws we still haven't explained why we live in a world of these laws why do we live in a world that allows so much calamity so much suffering so much disease natural suffering why are there earthquakes well interestingly a 100 years ago 200 years ago there was no human answer to that question why are there earthquakes it just seemed like the gods must be angry and there was a massive earthquake in the 18th century in lisbon and voltaire basically wrote a poem saying god you're a lousy architect couldn't you have designed the world better not to have this kind of calamity well the point was that voltaire was completely ignorant of geology he didn't know he was thinking that the way the earth is earthquakes are just some kind of add-on that god could easily have removed but today we actually know a lot about the earth why do we have earthquakes we can answer that question the reason we have earthquakes is underneath the earth are massive giant plates and they're also giant plates under the ocean floor this is called plate tectonics and these plates happen to move now by the way today we know about hundreds of millions of stars other planets how many other stars and planets have plate tectonics the answer is none as far as we know it's unique to earth and how many planets have life as far as we know none life is unique it seems to earth to the best of our knowledge and those two facts are actually connected in other words plate tectonics is essential to life on earth why first of all what plate tectonics does is it separates the land from the ocean notice that we live on a planet that is two-thirds water if there was nothing separating the land from the water all the land on the earth would be submerged in water to a depth of 400 feet very good for the fish not so good for you and me all terrestrial life depends on land and plate tectonics does about 10 other things it's a planetary thermostat it regulates the temperature it protects the earth from lethal radiation and coming from outer space it promotes biodiversity on the earth so the bottom line of it is no plate tectonics no human life and possibly no life at all but think about that if that's true then it follows that there actually is a reason for earthquakes obviously we don't like them but if it is true that those same earthquakes that do kill people are responsible for the existence of life on the earth itself it becomes a little silly to then complain it's kind of like the guy who says well listen you know i really don't like the sun because if i hang out in the sun too much i get skin diseases but the sun actually has to be where it is for human life to exist the sun is actually eight light minutes away from the earth if the sun were further away we'd freeze if the sun were a lot closer we'd bake the sun is exactly where it ought to be people say well i'm really upset because there was a horrible forest fire well yeah but fire is actually essential to civilization no fire no civilization so when you complain about fire you got to keep in mind that this very thing you're complaining about is essential for you to live in the way that you do now i want to extend this argument more broadly to make a more general point we live not just on a planet that is built a certain way but we live in a universe universe that is fine tuned for life to say the universe is fine-tuned for life is not to say that the whole universe is built only in order for life to exist on one planet but it is to say that if the universe were built differently life on the earth would not exist or anywhere else the whole universe has to be built one way to get life even on one planet in it this is called the principle of fine tuning sometimes called the anthropic principle now the anthropic principle has been known for 25 years it's one of the most important findings of science in the past half century atheists agree that there is fine-tuning but there's a big debate between the christians and the atheists and the christians say fine-tuning means that there must be a fine tuner god and the atheists say fine-tuning well maybe there are other universes maybe we don't have to have a god and so on so this debate has been going on but i actually want to set that debate aside and ask a different question what are the implications for a fine-tuned universe for evil and suffering now what's the fine-tuned universe well one physicist says it's a bit like this it's like god is sitting at a desk and on the desk are 30 different dials every dial is set to an exact number the point is that you cannot move the dials at all if you do no universe no life stephen hawking in one of his books says that if you walk into the room and if you touch one of the dials this is the rate of expansion of the universe and you move it not ten percent not one percent one part in a hundred thousand millionth million the universe would have recollapsed on itself none of us would be here to have this conversation the universe has to be exactly the way it is light has to go as exactly as fast as it does gravity has to be just as strong as it is in order to have conscious rational beings who can then contemplate the universe so what does this mean to me what it means is that if god wanted to make human beings he used exactly the materials and the rules and the laws of nature that were needed in order to produce us yeah god could have used other materials he could have used other laws but then he wouldn't have gotten us it's kind of like this if i'm a master musician and i want to make i want to create a very unique and particular type of sound i'm going to play mozart but in a very particular way and so i build a special violin and this violin has to be exactly 13 pounds no more no less and it has to be made not just of wood but a particular kind of wood and it has to be have so many strings and they've got to be strung just so no tighter no lesser now again if i'm omnipotent i could build a different violin i could use other types of wood i could i could make the strings looser or tighter but if i did i would get that resulting sound why because to get that sound these are the requisite materials think of it this way if i wanted to build let's say i mentioned earlier the cathedral of notre dame and i'm god could i have built it in any other way no could i build it out of invisible materials well it wouldn't be the cathedral of notre dame could i have built it entirely out of glass wouldn't be the cathedral of notre dame the cathedral of notre dame requires bricks and spires and in certain dimensions and this particular blueprint and even if i'm god there's no other way to build it otherwise it would be something different now what am i saying what i'm really saying is we have in from modern science a unique new type of explanation for evil and suffering namely god fine-tuned the universe because he wanted to make human beings now even some christians would say well wait a minute what are you saying dinesh god is omnipotent he can do anything surely he could have gotten human being some other way but i think that this notion of omnipotence is a little bit of a misunderstanding omnipotence does not mean that god can do anything god can't do anything can god tell a lie can god abolish himself out of existence no so god can't do anything can god make two and two equal something other than four can god draw a triangle on a flat surface and get something other than 180 degrees if you look at the word omnipotence it doesn't mean anything look at the word omni great potence or potency power that's what omnipotence means you have unlimited power but even if i have unlimited power i still can't draw a triangle and come up with any other result in 180 degrees no amount of power changes that now i've spoken a little bit about evil and suffering i know my time's a little limited i want to fast forward a little bit and i want to ask a specifically christian question which is how as christians can we respond to terrible evil and suffering how do we see the atheist says no answer to it if you go to an atheist and say something terrible happened why why did this happen the atheist answer is that's just the way things are you can't blame god there is no god this is just the world as it is you have to basically deal with it so the atheist counsel in terms of suffering is basically one of despair there's no explanation but what about the christian answer is that can the christians do better you know if you pick up christian books about suffering you often get a very straightforward answer which is how can we be consoled about suffering and the christian answer is we are consoled by because of the sufferings of christ christ suffered we worship a god who suffers different than a lot of other gods and since our god suffers this is a way in a way to be consoled by suffering but when i thought about that explanation i found it very puzzling for many weeks i just sat thinking about it thinking that to me doesn't make any sense so what if christ suffers how does that help my suffering in other words if i go to a doctor hey doctor i've got a pain in my chest doctor says dinesh i've got a bigger pain in my chest i'd be like what the heck how does your pain help my pain maybe i need another doctor so in other words why did christ have to suffer what does christ suffering even do well i want to answer that question by suggesting to you that suffering is the currency of love and what i mean by that is that suffering is actually not only the best way it's kind of the only way to really measure the extent of love if i were to get a call uh tomorrow from my mom in india hey dinesh your fourth cousin whom you hardly knew has died in a car accident i'd be like gee mom that's really sad and then move on to another topic why because i don't know this person very well i have a generic sense of sympathy but that's it but on the other hand if my daughter was killed in a car accident that would be catastrophic that would ruin my day my week my month my my year why because it's a measure of how much i love my daughter you suffer in direct proportion to how much you love someone well jesus suffered not because he had to but because it was a measure of how much he loves us suffering is the currency of love and that to me suggests a way that we can even cope with suffering how by offering it back up to christ by if you will putting it at the foot of the cross now by the way when we do that our suffering isn't needed by jesus it it's not it doesn't help with his atonement in fact it doesn't do anything directly for him the atonement is free but if you think about it as humans when christ offers our salvation there's not a whole lot we can offer him back it's a free gift what can we do to deserve it nothing so all we can do is take it and say thank you but with suffering we do have a chance to give something back what we're really doing is we're saying to christ look you died and showed how much you love me i'm offering my suffering to show how much i love you the suffering if you will is placed at the foot of the cross and i think if we do that we can in a very small way participate if you will in the terrible excruciating loneliness of calvary thank you very much thank you thank you you

Channel: Liberty University

Views: 106,423

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Keywords: Liberty University, Convocation, Liberty, Christian, education, convo, college, university, community, praise, speaker, worship, student, Dinesh D'souza, King's college, NYC, Empire State Building, evil, good, God

Id: foOmdp0Sj-w

Length: 37min 25sec (2245 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 30 2012