God - For and Against - C4 - 1993

do you believe in God up until two hundred years ago the question would have seemed stupid to most people then God's existence was taken for granted by almost everyone and much of what happened in the world was directly attributed to his all pervasive power but by the 18th century science had changed the way we viewed the world indeed Galileo came to view not only this world but others through his telescope while Isaac Newton showed us why apples fall to the ground because the whole universe is subject to the force of gravity even so most people still accepted the Bible as truth and they continue to believe that all the people living on this earth were under the care of an Almighty and all-powerful God he's also supposed to be perfectly good and perfectly just and yet the universe he has created contains many evils some of which are clearly the creation of humankind itself as one of the natural horrors of earthquakes droughts plagues cancers the list is seemingly endless surely a good God cannot permit a world filled with such evil the dreaming spires of Oxford are a long way from the killing fields of Bosnia the death camps of the Third Reich and the mud filled trenches of the psalm yet it's here amongst the ivory towers of our Kadeem where leaders of church and state have been educated and trained for hundreds of years that the discipline of moral philosophy has been argued and refined in the first of Channel Four's to oxford debates on the case for the existence of God distinguished philosophers theologians thinkers and commentators have gathered along with interested students who will contribute to tonight's debate on the problem of evil we start formally with a proposition there is evil therefore that cannot be a god the case against the existence of God is presented by writer Karen Armstrong the God on trial in this debate is the god of classical theism the first cause of all things the omnipotent creator who is good just and compassionate even though God is essentially beyond time and change Jews Christians and Muslims have always believed that he is active in the world and that his activity can be discerned in historical events but some of these events seem to be lie the goodness and justice of God nature is red in tooth and claw natural disasters flood famine and pestilence caused untold suffering to millions of innocent human beings and what of those evils that are the result of human wickedness according to conventional theology there is nothing in the world that God did not create nothing that does not depend upon him for its existence so in some sense evil must derive from God - if God is all-powerful why does he not smite the oppressor as he promised the prophets of ancient Israel it is impossible to reconcile the Nazi Holocaust the gulag and as we speak the genocide in Bosnia with a God who is rational just and compassionate if God is all-powerful he could have prevented the Holocaust if he could have stopped it but decided not to he is morally impossible and irrational if he was unable to stop it he is impotent and useless the traditional answer is that God does not will evil he merely allows it this studied indifference and detachment might suit the God of Aristotle but it has nothing to do with the God of the Bible what kind of divine personality could look on while the crematoria blazed and six million Jews went to their death if the god of classical theism exists he was present in Auschwitz but if he is compassionate and just how could he have been there and done nothing to prevent it an authoritarian God who controls everything and is therefore literally responsible for everything that happens on earth is equally worrying since it makes God directly accountable for such atrocities as the Holocaust but if we decide to safeguards God's compassion by saying that for some reason it is impossible for God to act what becomes of his omnipotence some Jewish and Christian theologians have recently suggested that God is in fact helpless in the face of human evil but can we really sacrifice God's omnipotence in this way without him somehow ceasing to be the God of classical theism and what use is an impotent God religion of course is not necessarily about God let alone the God of classical theism its task is to convert evil and to help people to cultivate a serious understanding of the sacred inviolable nature of human life in Britain God has simply died as a religious idea for many people who find him incredible irrelevant and boring yet there is spiritual hunger some have attempted to flee the vacuum that God has left behind by seeking the idols and full certainties of fundamental the conventional God should not be used to find an explanation for these dark events in a facile way such a God can even give us a bad example since by allowing these atrocities to happen he justifies our own apathy and acceptance of these profoundly unacceptable happenings our Fitz is a timely reminder that our ideas about God are always dispensable Karen Armstrong thank you passionate atheism father McCabe I would doubt you would aspires but her invite you now to put the case for the existence of God dealing with the problem of evil and the proposition let me remind you that is evil therefore that cannot be a god father McCabe the huge achievement of the Jews in edited by Christianity and Islam was to recognize that the only object worthy of human religious worship had to be not a tribal God not even their own traveled God but the creator of the entire universe this Jewish inheritance is classical theism this tradition doesn't suggest that rather denies that God is a personality like ourselves writ large that would be an idle classical theism asks the most radical Christian of all why is there anything rather than nothing recognizing both that there has to be an answer and that we don't and cannot know what it is we are confronted here by a mystery because whatever would answer such a question couldn't be any part of our universe couldn't be classified as this kind of thing rather than that we simply stand before God in awe and gratitude for the sheer gift of existence and it's a share gift because whatever the act of creation may be it cannot be God attaining some advantage if we ask why would God create the world we can only answer what it must be because he loves and delights in these things being themselves notice that when we say something is bad or on evil we always mean that it is in some way defective failing to fulfill our expectations for this kind of thing evil is not the name of a thing or of a feature of a thing it refers to what's lacking to a thing or a person not to what's there God creates what is there this is not to make evil less real nothing in the wrong place can be just as real as something in the wrong place as we say the hole in my sock and if you inadvertently drive your car over a cliff you will have nothing to worry about it's that nothing you have to worry about defects are of two kinds those inflicted by something else and those peculiar three beings that are self-inflicted not to say there's evil that's just suffered and there's evil done which is model Eve the lamb suffers evil inflicted by the tiger the thing to notice here though is that the lamb doesn't suffer because the tiger is bad but because it's good but a good Tiger it's a tiger that's good at being a tiger that brings it about that the lamb becomes bad at being a lamp becomes mutton instead with evil suffered at least the tiger flourishes while it damages damages the lamb but model evil has no winners the very agent that inflicts the evil is the one diminished by the model evil of course very commonly occurs in hurting other people but that's not precisely what makes it morally evil the model badness is in the agent not at all in the external victim what beggars the imagination about the Holocaust is surely not simply the colossal number of those who suffer actually probably fewer than will be killed by a natural disaster such as the AIDS epidemic know what biggest our imagination is that it was such a staggering case of human moral leave of deliberate and calculated evil done the belief that died at Auschwitz was not the belief in God what died was belief in the inherent and necessary goodness and decency of human beings let's open the debate up now to the floor of writers academics thinkers who were sitting on these benches now the burden lies with Karen Armstrong who is supporting the proposition so most of the people here are here to challenge her argument but she is not without supporters it's the architecture of this Divinity School in the body and library that sets these benches in opposition but I should warn you not to anticipate that each bench speaks with one voice and nor should we anticipate a simple trade of expressions of conviction for or against the existence of God we are here to hear the arguments rabbi Sidney bricht Oh would you like to kick off with your response well I must say I was bored sympathetic much to my surprise with the impassioned atheism of Karen Armstrong than the logical arguments of Father McCabe the Dean of my rabbinical College said to us boys you're selling a stock of trade which died 300 years ago and by which he meant the classical God who's both all-powerful and all good but where I disagree with Karen Armstrong is when she says that to say he is not all-powerful makes him impotent and useless my parents were not all-powerful but they were not impotent and useless in guiding me and helping me to lead what I considered decent life evil in the world doesn't disprove God it proves that there's a need for God to help humanity overcome the evil whether it's within himself or outside himself and I do not see why when there's been so much change in the universe in every area of knowledge in science why are we not allowed to change the god concept why must we be stuck with the God of our forefathers and our ancestors sure do we have a right to change that to the reality of God we don't know anything about weak be sure that nature that reality but we can't be sure is the nature of that god to which we can have a response and who speaks to our human heart but for the mass of humanity who cannot accept God on the basis that God is pictured as all-powerful the challenge for religious people is to come up with a God who can be part of our discourse in our attempt to improve the world and to prevent future occurrences is that an argument professor nationally please well I think the rabbi is absolutely right if you're going to make sense of the idea of a god who's going to be good he's got to be non omnipotent when I first became an atheist I used to argue on the lines of Karen Armstrong I think that's still right if you treat the talk about God being good and just seriously and but I came to realize after reading Hobbes and also reading the Quran that hard this was most formidable of all British political thinkers Hobbes was absolutely right in saying that at least many people when they praise God are not using the terms justice and goodness in their philosophical signification but simply praising a power glorifying a power or this comes out very clearly in the Quran where Allah is presented as a cosmic Saddam Husein omnipotent and concerned above all that everyone should obey and if you don't obey or be tortured forever now you should be met by an old adversary of yours professor Richard Swinburne have you heard that before yes that can I just qualified start with one thing that Karen Armstrong said about omnipotence God is supposed to be omnipotent he can do anything but classical theism always qualified that will almost always qualified that by saying he could do anything logically possible anything the X account of which did not involve a self-contradiction so if there the charge from evil is that there is in turn is that there isn't an omnipotent God if it must share but it's logically possible that is to say there's no contradiction in supposing that God can bring about certain a good states without at the same time bringing about evil states and there's the rub because that certainly God could give us lots of kicks of pleasure without any evil being with it but if he's to give us some of the greater good I'm afraid that evil must come with it temporary limited evil suffering of not tremendous cosmic significance but nevertheless evil with it EDIS though the question is God's intervention in reasonable ways for man's intervention also happens the Holocaust has been called in issue man had a pretty good idea of Auschwitz and Treblinka and it was open to man to bomb the marshalling yards and the railway lines and man in the person of Sir Arthur Harris in the commemorating the strand chose to bomb Dresden and innocent people instead whether that is a comment upon man which said these are covered upon man whether it has also come too far god he's perhaps at the heart of everything we have to say because if we can go back to father McCabe's analogy of the tiger and the lamb it's elegantly put it's it's as sophisticated as you would expect it to be from father McKay but it is sanitized the tiger he says was a good tiger doing that part of creation for which God had intended him but then Hitler was a good Hitler cholera is a good cholera the National Rifle Association is a good National Rifle Association all the means by which evil comes are good at accomplishing that a number of points there pick one um I think that Taggart is a good tiger it's that kind of thing it is a tiger and it's good at being and tagging I think that Hitler was very bad at being human and that's the kind of thing he was and when we at most people Esper's would agree to talk to him as a good Hitler makes no sense it's not the way we the way we use the word good but that he was a it was not didn't succeed in being a good human being I think that most of us would probably be Peter body because I do think that at the center of Christianity is the idea of the personality and love of God although we have to be careful about how we use those words I think that their ideas which if we give up then she's right in saying we give up God and therefore I tend to favor her approach in a very real way if in fact you look at the Gospels we don't in fact have a picture of an omnipotent God we have a picture of a God who is in fact considerably constrained the one thing that pleases promised his disciples was not that everything would go well but the the light he represented wouldn't be put out far from along Nippert God we have a God who comes into a world sunk in darkness and has to fight against it in many ways I want to stand with Karen Armstrong at the side of the lime pits and for blinker and outfits and I want to share her horror at what happened there and I think that any attempt to theologies in the presence of that or to excuse God I'm very uncomfortable with but while I stand there with her I want to take a different end position from her I want to say I share her horror I share her outrage at what happens and I cannot actually understand the meaning or the reason for that but having said that I am willing to trust even though I can't understand and I would be proud to stand with her there and to respect the fact that she says I stand and reject that God hopefully then we could turn away and flare a joint endeavour to fight against that sort of evil a proposition is that the receiver therefore they cannot be our God rather than that cannot be God and we are hearing of more than one God perhaps already in this debate but that wouldn't surprise you dr. Atkins from what I hear this evening a license to go out and raping and murdering after we close down it's going to be a wonderful evening because I shall give people the opportunity to to find their God in the face of my actions and I find that an extraordinary proposition I think it was I think it was um Voltaire who said that people who believe in absurdities commit atrocities I think we certainly see that in our current world but I also think this evening we are seeing that people who believe in absurdities commit are committed to intellectual contortion because they set up this absurd idea that there is this thing out there this unknowable thing up there that we have to spend our life khau time to and then we have to rationalize as what we actually stick in going on around us we see people being slaughtered we see people perhaps not by me later this evening being raped and murdered but certainly being raped and murdered and I think that it's extraordinary that God has let people indulge in that kind of activity I think we can actually see the origins of what it is that um father McCabe and once my mother Armstrong were four what we're saying that if we see why we have come to the point where we think that there is a sense of good and a sense of evil in the world and it must be in the survival of our species we must find the origin of the way we behave and therefore our judgment about what is good than what is wrong in the fact that we have found a way of surviving sitting beside us is to Eva Haman can you enlighten Peter Atkins who finds extraordinary contortions and in the arguments for the distances are super I'm not sure that I'm able to enlighten him but what I would like to do is to contribute perhaps a concrete reply to Karen Armstrong's argument and I to find myself surprised that in some ways I would echo some of her thinking but before that I need to say that I was brought up in a Jewish family and lived in Germany until 1939 and a family that was touched by the Holocaust with one survivor and one survivor from my not nuclear family but an aunt and my own experience of living in Nazi Germany until 39 certainly made me feel the absence of God and during my adolescence I could not believe that there could be a God who could allow that kind of evil but I have come over a period of 60 odd years to believe that the power of love is stronger than the power of evil and the surviving aren't that I referred to said to me that she learned that in three years in tourism stardom I feel that one has to go out and look for God because God's around us and if we turn our backs on him and I'm sure in the concentration camps the backs were turned on God and the evil took over and I really believe that God is there if we look for him I because people turned away from God they were punished in the concentration camp I believe that the force of evil and the devil will tempt us extraordinary thing is very much around as well rabbi where is God the answers where you let him in and where'd you say it yes that's very reasonable and credible I don't understand is why we're arguing about the goodness of evil obviously there has to be evil in the world the rabbi of rabbinic master said if you if God hadn't created the evil inclination men would compete they when their families they wouldn't have children the purpose of God is to help us restrain the evil to sublimate it to help us to live with it and to have to do something with it to make a better world out of never for me Karen orbiting Karen Armstrong was arguing that we could accept an omnipotent God and I'm supporting the view that the counsel of God can change it's been said here fine let's find a God who we can talk to him and can inspire us that must be a limited God for the atheists who won't have any trouble any God it's not an answer but for me and for many others quickly Peter help of wait yes I want to address the the improved human creatures that you think God should have created who could he cause suffering to each other having thought for some time about this I think the ideal shape is round like billiard balls will bounce off each other rather like the dodgems if you like wouldn't do any harm for that of course we'd have to be insensible as well so we'd never fall in love constantly can never be projected so you know what sort of creatures would these improved human beings being given to be human thought I think that is that is a weakness for the tremendous sense of moral superiority which one season it appears here he admitted it himself who said he felt a bit uppity leaving in Karen himself of course tells us that this is a discovery of the last 50 years in last fifty years that she's advanced of people of advanced sensitive people like herself had advanced to this understanding but we've which means that God is in prison and charged by and charged with moral superiority I would say that the corporate moral superiority of a church which can confront the evil of the archipelago and give us a word god of the white sea canal and say out of that came a number of serious distinguished believers is putting those relating the alloy to the clinker in a remarkably new way and seeing a byproduct as God's laboring life I wanted to take up the profound truth that I think rabbi brick Ito gave us earlier on when he spoke of to the heart of this argument by saying that his parents had seemed omnipotent and of course were not but neither but absolutely they were good absolutely they were reasons for all kinds of good in his life and that therefore it was not necessary to take up with God the Great God the great promulgator argument sufficient to take up God the body of ethics God the admonished sure of kindness and mercy God many virtues a compromise puts the rabbi if you like in grave danger of being accused by conservatives with them without capital C's of being trendy of being a sort of Jewish answer to David Jenkins he can live with this he's offering if you like a minimalist case but it seems to me the one that's easily the most attractive because if we adjust God because of what we now know about man we can surely justify that by going back to the fact that historically we have always played with God to make him fit the purposes of man they see God in the sort of light that rabbi Brickner was describing to us and as far as I'm concerned that is the intelligent compromise to the questioning tonight in political terms it's a sort of them a sort of Harold Macmillan a shweta kind of God whereas Father McCabe is stuck whether he likes it or not despite his political position with godless misses that I think that's historically quite false that in point of fact the reason why they're developed in the Western world a conviction about the influence value of human beings was not at this spontaneously erupted in people's consciousness but that they became convinced that people all people who were created and redeemed by God and therefore were of infinite value it was a religious conception which produced the ethical idea not the other way around that God is very good but isn't omnipotent for this reason that if that's right then it seems to me that we don't have any if you're a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim and you believe that God isn't omnipotent as well as very good then ultimately you don't have any sure ground for your faith in as much as you can't be sure that God is going to win that good is going to triumph over evil in the end now that is the ground of the Christian Hope and the Jewish hope and the Muslim hope and if that ground is not there then well the Jewish hope designed to set ground never acquires faith the only faith that a religious person has to have that fit that victory will ultimately go to the good over the evil and that is the concept of in that day the Lord will be king of all the universe and all of the BEI images means thank me but but not if the essence is that God has to have a victory in the end and that's and that's what gives our history meaning a fulfilling across the whole point because our conception of what is good changes as the years go by what survives in giucose will be thought to be good so inevitably watching on everyone thought to be good no self-destructive behavior never thought people to be good know anything it won't survive that's the point very only the idea I think it's quite by the idea that there was a sense of God the Creator creating a sense of oneness of mankind humanity and a sense of goodness was always there the problem of Rose when people thought his goodness was associated with his power and the old testament said if you do good you'll be rewarded it didn't happen that way so they said you won't be rewarded now you'll be rewarding the world to come that doesn't help us suffering in this world so this is where we have to readjust we have to say God needs our help he is there to move us on to create your path and sniffing or recognizing that we are created in the image of God and that from that the argument of free will has to be looked at because if we are created in the image of God then we are co-creators with God but we have the freedom God isn't the only one who is omnipotent in that sense we have the freedom God intervene and the exodus to liberate the Jewish people why didn't he intervene at Auschwitz and the point is that probably God only intervened to the extent that he inspired Moses to take a slave people and give him freedom and give him a constitution of the Ten Commandments and but we I think we have to accept that God works through humanity and to think that he can intervene in an omnipotent fashion is what destroys our faith in Him because he doesn't do it feel that the case for people against God will appeal to people the more they feel that the own evils in the world are pains and the only goods are pleasures there is a great value in people having an opportunity not just to have kicks of pleasure but to really be involved with other people and to make choices that make a difference to the future of the world we have the right with respect to those whom we are in a parent situation visa vie to allow them to suffer a little for the sake of their greater good we have this right to have limited extent with respect to our own children we allow them to suffer sometimes for the sake of a little good to them God is so much more responsible for our existence than we human parents are for the existence of our children therefore he who keeps us in being every moment will has the right to allow us to suffer for a limited period in order that we may make up real contribution to the world by choosing whether to be courageous in the face of it whether to help other people who are in difficulties if we didn't have that choice we would have lost a tremendous significance for what happens in the world it was despicable nonsense if I may say so I think I would like to see you nailed to a cross in order that you should experience they the extremes of pain I would like to see you raped I would like to see you hung hang hung drawn and quartered that will make me feel very comfortable because it would give you such pleasure in some senses be the god I believe in was nailed to a cross God's own self in one sense and I think we've been to glibly accepting the classical philosophical statement of God which even father McCabe in the way he's argue is pointing towards the at least the God who is the father of Abraham Isaac and Jacob and and even more so the God who is the father of our Lord Jesus Christ who who is not just simply this abstract entity who is omniscient and all the rest of normal impotent and absolute God he is that but then we have to qualify what we mean by those terms they will refer to the God whom we people have actually experienced and I think one's got to take on board that in some sense the omnipotence is limited by his richest women who said God can only do that which is logically possible and doing only Lord know that which is not about which there is a fact of the case right so there's already a qualification along misuse the rabbi's said that God needs us but I also think it's the other way around that we need God it's a two-way process and I don't want to apologize at all or be defensive about the idea that God's omnipotence is in some way limited I don't think that's a reduction in the our image of God it's a strengthening of the image it's a strong personal image it's a God who loves and calls us to respond at enormous cost yes there is an omnipotent power there but it's a power of love which can overcome even in the Gulag and even in Auschwitz does that mean prevent it know that it does mean overcome the trivialization that can take place with great and enormous cost and I think if you read the Bible that is the sort of power we're talking about not the sort of power that's been suggested so where's Karen got it wrong I think that Karen is I'm very close to Karen I want to put my arm around her shoulder and say that I am very very close to her and everything she says and I think that IM f-- apply emphasize and agree with a very large part of a message where I part company is in the final conclusion not necessarily an intellectual glance because I share our intellectual problems that's why I don't like Richard Swinburne's intellectual solutions I think it's obscene to try and defend the suffering of the world and the way he does for clarification as a point I wanted to ask rabbi Sydney brick - you said god only intervenes through humanity so what's the source of evil the world has to be heaven libido the drive life drive is evil competition as evil aspects to it that's the way it is it's like this it's we have to learn to live with the evil within ourselves and we don't deny it or nor do we say that we don't want to have it we work with it and we and we refine it and we and the whole basis of religious teaching is to teach us how to restrain it sufficiently so that we can live with our fellow human beings we don't cross the red light because it's dangerous not only for ourselves but for others to cross the red light is to give him to the evil of wanting to be the first one to get to get across the road it's what is unfortunate is that we seem to suggest that that evil is a bad thing evil isn't this necessary for the progress of mankind no one denies that but what where religion comes in and where the brief and God comes in is to help us cope with the evil within us and to refine it so that out of evil does come as someone pointed out some good it's a quite a hard line to evangelize on could we talk about Auschwitz a little since it's being mentioned and since my views are being characterized as morally obscene I'd like to focus on the hardest example for myself I hope in taking this example I went bethought morally callous obviously Auschwitz is a horrible thing and I don't wish to deny that and please don't let anybody think that anything I say is going to in any way suggest it isn't but that having been said God wants the best of us he wants us to be heroes he's not interested in us just having a quirks little tingles of pleasure every now and again he wants us to be worthy people be great people and we can only be great people if they're a great choices for us and Auschwitz gave us great choices it's not something I wish to see repeated but one can be grateful for what was shown on that occasion and finally there is this great good for the victims that perhaps even they did not always appreciate that they were of use one of the terrible things that can happen to a man in our world is not to be of use not to be of any use at all to anybody one thing that the victims of Auschwitz were were abused because it was their suffering which provided the opportunity for the German guards who are also human beings and also had terror tremendous choices to make the choice maybe you can be grateful for that too that's because both speakers mentioned the Holocaust and and you have chosen to address the agony and everybody would like to respond to you sister Eva Heyman first I do think it's obscene to say that people who suffered in the Holocaust were of use but I do feel that the arguments we've used tonight of necessity tend to be theoretical and the person who survived my family and who was able to say after three years of being in camp that she got to know God got to know God through the love expressed by some of her the other inmates that doesn't justify the evil appears professor Swinburne as having said something which was very brave and quite outrageous and which was a stunning instance of mystical masochism there can be no God that comes out of the monstrous evil of Treblinka travels Brooklyn a svet a schvitz and all the others that can weigh for a second in the balance the conversion of some people the pro-lite private religious experience of others the music of the Irving shul half and the other people who wrote before they with gas which can weigh up any weight against the grief suffering and misery of human beings who used to be described as God's creatures but whom I would argue we should think of as our own creatures because man having free will without God knows that if he encounters evil he will not invent a theological conundrum to see its validity he will see in it the thing he must fight humankind has seen the most terrible concentrations of evil in the 20th century at the same time that it is understood more deeply what evil is and why it was fight against it I had hoped just possibly that Professor swim man would take the 1/2 tolerable car that was available to him in this argument and say man is enlightened by a vast evil into understanding what evil is and instead he slopes off into the path of people having heard little religious experience who seems to meet frankly a trivialization of a vast evil the memorial to Vietnam a much lesser evil is pit lined with cement and slate going down into the ground and it seemed the best statement that anyone in Washington could find to describe what had happened responding to a great evil like that an empty hole in the ground is the only answer we've got in God's terms because this has happened in the face of God and made a nonsense of the great claims to man there is and can only be the building of defenses against evil I think the only serious problem of evil is the problem with what always to do about it I don't see God as negotiating with the Jada's at Auschwitz I see him as dying in Auschwitz to use Karen Armstrong's phrase but when God dies when the Christian God dies he doesn't just die he rises again and hope rises again God has created evil to give us the opportunities to make heroes of ourselves by fighting it I would rather say the nature of man is good and evil and God has given us a challenge to overcome the evil and become good or better but surely this is a problem and we are the creation of God allegedly we are the creation maybe all if there are so much evil in us and original sin there's also several speed but there's also if we have original sin if we have always evil in us that leads to things like the concentration of the helmets isn't this a major but no but if I didn't God give us with a greater propensity to choose good rather than tsubasa I just wanted to say something about suffering I think people think that because they haven't suffered too much themselves they think it's good for people to suffer I don't think it's good to suffer at all or if you break your neck or you'll have AIDS it's it's awful and what we want to do is to find ways to to stop suffering and the concentration camps weren't good they were bad and we ought to own up to the fact and and we ought to do emphasize I said that at the start I horribles but the point is whether God should allow human beings the opportunity to let horrible things occur or whether he should nanny them whether he should let them be masters of their fate to a considerable extent or whether he should stop them all the time well I'd like to bring in the people who will be carrying this debate through the next 30 40 50 years some of you are young what do you think of what you've heard tonight yes I'd like to say that it's always seemed to me pathological that when we suffer pain we want others to suffer the pain and the impotence - if I have a toothache seems to me the sensible thing that I shouldn't want the dentist to feel the pain the toothache ought to be impotent in fact I want him in his compassion to have a certain distance from the pain and a certain potent capability to fix the pain focused on the back to tonight's that evil may be defined as the absence of God and to father makeban I would say that there is a sense however in which I think that actually evil is more than the sum total of each individual's negativity and I think that is that which the church has absolutely failed today to address and if I could just say a couple of things perhaps in direction of current Armstrong I'm slightly surprised actually that she was simultaneously find it difficult to believe in original sin and understand - wits because I think there's a sense in which one does absolutely explain the other I am going to pause you there because you will get the chance to speak with each other and we're running out of time the penultimate word goes to father McCabe yes in two words I think Jeff um one night I said myself and I said I'm afraid still hold this that I do not understand and think I could I couldn't expect to understand why there is moral evil in the world I could understand easily where that is pain in the world we have clear explanations of this now model evil does no good to the world at all all countries suffer but the second thing I want to do if I may is to warn my fellow Christians and other fellow Jews against the temptation to think they can get God off the hook by saying that is not omnipotent after all these you know things prevent him from doing if God is nomina patent this is because there must be forces which he cannot control this means that God is one of the creatures in the universe now if this is true then every case made against God is absolutely valid in fact the God who is not even if omnipotent seems to meet in excellent description of the devil a very large powerful force in the world empty human and wanting to destroy us and people who imagine that Christians wish us to worship that the devil naturally and quite rightly say the hell with Christianity well I think you provoked what could be another power of reaction but there is no time for it Karen Armstrong if you can be as admirably concise as father McCabe I'd be grateful well I think that we Christians Jews and Muslims have a great deal to learn from Buddhists some of whom feel that the idea of God is an unreligious even a blasphemous idea and one of the dangers of the idea the traditional idea of a totally good God is that it makes it makes it traditionally for very very difficult for us to face the evil in ourselves and the end result of that has been that we've often projected it out onto other people for example the Jews in in Europe what perhaps is important however that we shouldn't jettison from religion is at the idea of prayer or the idea of a struggle to try and understand try to face the horrors of the world and ultimately to try and find some ultimate value and meaning in human life against all the dispiriting evidence to the contrary now we may as the spiritual writers say come up against a Cloud of Unknowing a dark night of the soul I personally don't feel after Auschwitz that we should engage in worthy justifications of an old idea of God I think we should the Cloud of Unknowing and say that in the face of the evil we've seen in this century we don't know and let us keep silent in the dark carry on storm fashion atheist and she was more festive they thought about it very much but because disguise yourself but I'm in IR weatherize yes it's it's not sufficiently from becoming a know the experience traditional is swimmers was in sometimes meaningless because if these the Oxford debates on the existence of God have reached no unassailable conclusion you're surely not surprised but I hope you have been enlightened stimulated by the arguments as well known as exasperated are outraged by the discussion is here tonight which we add in humility to the centuries of debate held in Oxford where the talking goes on we must now say goodbye next Saturday the debate centered on creation or evolution is science good evidence for God and that's at the same time 7:00 o'clock

Channel: Glenn Morris

Views: 12,465

Keywords: God - For and Against, Atheist (Religion), Atheism (Religion), God (Deity), Evil (Quotation Subject)

Id: aivRDaTnx8M

Length: 50min 32sec (3032 seconds)

Published: Sun May 11 2014