Theodicy, God and Suffering - A debate between Dinesh D'Souza and Bart Ehrman

good evening everyone welcome to Gordon College my name is Judd Carlberg and I have the privilege of serving as president here at Gordon I know we have a number of off-campus guests with us tonight and we want to give them a special welcome and I'm glad to see that many students have joined us tonight is formatted as a debate a discussion between two men who you meet in a moment who disagree fundamentally on the issues and that's part of what it means to be in a college with intellectual debate because it's a learning experience for us no matter what position you hold and so I want to welcome you here tonight and I hope that over the next hour an hour and a half you'll stretch your minds and you will be educated about a very important issue that impacts every single person in this room we're going to be moderated tonight by Ryan golf who is the Jerusalem Athens program coordinator and Ryan is going to introduce our guest speakers our debaters and then he's also going to outline for you the format that we'll use in the debate so let's welcome Ryan and our guests to the platform Thank You president Carlberg he said my name is Ryan Groth I work with the Jerusalem in Athens form here at Gordon and it's my honor honor to be moderating this evening's debate tonight's event is part of Gordon's annual faith seeking understanding lecture series the title faith seeking understanding is most clearly associated with the medieval theologian Anselm of Canterbury it was chosen for it suggests our view here at Gordon that our faith should not be a matter of self-satisfied piety and isolation from the life of culture and intellect rather we should be engaged in the great issues and ideas and debates of our day our topic this evening theodicy God and suffering will certainly be no exception before introducing our format and debaters a brief word of thanks is in order to mr. Dale and Sarah Ann Fowler their generosity helps the college flourish in so many ways and we can thank them particularly for supporting this evening's debate please join me in expressing our appreciation to them the format this evening is structured but with some flexibility it will consist of the five elements noted during the during your arrival opening statements rebuttals follow-up statements a 20-minute question-and-answer time and a three-minute closing statements during the QA I will read questions posed by you the audience which you may write on the note cards provided they will then be collected about 40 minutes into the debate if you're doing the math that's around there were bottles just after and if you're now thinking I should have picked up a note card just raise your hand our ushers would be happy to bring you one without further ado an introduction to our debaters this evening Dinesh D'Souza is the president of the Kings College New York City and is a former White House domestic policy analyst a graduate of Dartmouth College he is the author of numerous New York Times bestselling books and is a frequent guest commentator on CNN Fox News and has also appeared on Comedy Central's Colbert Report investors business daily calls him one of the top young public policymakers in the country the New York Times Magazine named him one of America's most influential conservative thinkers a policy analyst in the Reagan White House D'Souza also served as John M Olin fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Robert and Karen rich Wayne fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University please join me in welcoming Dinesh D'Souza Bart Airmen is James a gray distinguished professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill a graduate of Wheaton College Illinois Airmen received his Master of Divinity and PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary since then he has published extensively in the fields of New Testament and early Christianity having written and edited numerous books including multiple New York Times bestsellers scholarly articles and book reviews among his fields of scholarly expertise are the historical Jesus the early Christian Apocrypha the Apostolic fathers and the manuscript tradition of the New Testament like the NESH he has also been a guest on The Colbert Report he is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2009 JW Pope spirit of inquiry Teaching Award the 1993 UNC undergraduate student Teaching Award the 1994 Philip and Ruth Edelman prize for artistic and scholarly achievement and finally the Bowman and Gordon gray Award for Excellence in teaching again please join me in welcoming our airmen having agreed to introduce tonight's topic Bart Airmen will begin well thank you very much it's a pleasure to be with you tonight how many of you would consider yourselves to be committed Christians ok how many of you are pretty sure you're going to disagree with everything I say just three of you very good how many of you were being honest it's a pleasure being with you I I started out my study of the New Testament and theology and my understanding of the world as a very committed Christian when I was in high school I had a born-again experience and after high school went to the Moody Bible Institute where I studied for three years to receive a diploma in Bible and theology after moody I went to Wheaton College which you students I'm sure all know and after Wheaton I went to the Princeton Theological Seminary where I did a Masters of Divinity degree being trained for ministry after my Masters of Divinity degree I was the pastor of the Princeton Baptist Church for a time my point in mentioning this is that I want it to be clear that I started out as a firm believer a solid evangelical Christian and stood in the evangelical tradition for a number of years my views changed over the years to what you will be hearing this evening and I want to give you some sense for why they changed by explaining what happened to me and what happened to my thinking over a period of time when I was doing my PhD at Princeton Theological Seminary I was also teaching at Rutgers University teaching undergraduates and one semester I was asked to teach a class called the problem of suffering in the biblical traditions this is a course that was designed to deal with what the Bible has to say about why there is suffering the technical term for that kind of discourse about suffering is called theodicy the quitz called theodicy comes from two greek words which mean god's justness how can God be righteous or how can God be just given the state of affairs in this world given the misery and the suffering around the world how how is it all fair if a God is in control if God is all-powerful if God is all loving why is there suffering this was in the 1980s and frankly at the time I had trouble convincing my students at Rutgers that there was a problem of suffering they were tempted to be middle class students who were doing very well thank you very much and didn't realize many of them just how enormous the problem of suffering could be this happened to me during one of the major Ethiopian famines and so one of the things that I did was to bring in newspaper clippings and pictures from the newspaper of a woman who was starving to death with a child at her breast who couldn't get any milk who was also starving to death and pointing this to my students and saying this is a problem how does one explain this if there is a God in charge of this world well the class was not so much about the philosophical problems of suffering as about what the Bible has to say about it and studying the Bible what it has to say about it my students and I came away with two major points that are quite interesting and relevant for tonight's debate the first point is the Bible has a lot of things to say about suffering but many of the things that different authors say about suffering in the Bible arnaud with one another for example in the Old Testament the prophets Amos Hosea Isiah page after page of the prophets proclaimed that the reason God's people are suffering is because God is punishing them for their sins they've done things wrong and that's why God has brought so much misery upon them famine drought epidemics military disaster God is doing this to his people in order to get them to return to Him the book of Job disagrees with that point of view according to the book of Job people who do what God wants are the ones sometimes who suffer it is the innocent who suffer whereas the prophets said if you would return to God and that the suffering then would be would be alleviated job indicates the people who turn to God and factor the ones who experienced the most misery it is the innocent not the guilty who suffer and God allows it even though he could stop it the Book of Daniel and the book of Revelation in the New Testament also disagree with the prophets Daniel and revelation indicate that it's not God who causes the problem of suffering it's the forces of evil who caused suffering and it's not against people who are guilty as in the prophets it's against people who are innocent the Book of Proverbs disagrees with all of the ones I've mentioned so far in the book of Proverbs it's neither God nor the forces of evil that are causing suffering the universe according to proverbs is set up in such a way that the righteous are rewarded and the sinners suffer if you are righteous according to proverbs you won't suffer if you are sinful you will but that contradicts what job had to say that the innocent suffer and job is contradicted why what the prophets have to say that God punishes punishes only the guilty and those who turn to God are rewarded the first point that comes out by a study of suffering in the Bible is that the different biblical authors disagree with one another their discrepancies the other point that came out in this class that I taught that I realized I think maybe for the first time in a big way while teaching this class is that the bible does not teach the point of view that many people hold today about why they're suffering I I would imagine that if we did a survey of all of you here tonight and asked you why is there bring one of the principal reasons virtually everybody would say is it's because of free will at Rutgers I started calling this the robot explanation I called it the robot explanation because that was the term everybody would use it goes like this if God had decided that we didn't have freewill we would all be programmed like robots and we wouldn't be able to do anything we wanted to do we would only do what we were programmed to do but if we were programmed only to do good of course there'd be no suffering because we wouldn't hurt one another the fact that we have freewill shows that we are not robots and therefore we can do evil to one another we can hurt one another we can oppress one another we can kill one another this is this is as I said what I call the robot explanation and the Bible actually does not have the robot explanation in it in part because there are no robots in the Bible but in part because the Bible has other explanations for why they're suffering the ones that I've just given you a minute ago there are of course hints in the Bible that people can do harm to other people but as I studied the problem with this class at Rutgers I came to realize that there are problems with this robot explanation for one thing it's an incomplete explanation that doesn't solve the problem of why they're suffering you all will remember a tsunami that killed 300,000 people whose freewill caused that or more recently an earthquake in Haiti that killed 230,000 people whose freewill caused that the problem with the freewill explanation is that it doesn't explain natural disasters moreover I think the freewill explanation is philosophically problematic for a reason that a lot of people haven't thought about most people I know who think that who have the explanation that it's all because of freewill most people I know who advance that idea are themselves Christians these are people who believe that when they die they're going to go to heaven they also believe that there will be no suffering in seven and so one might ask will there be free will in heaven if there's free will in heaven but no suffering in heaven that must mean that it is possible to have a world with free will but without suffering so why don't we have a world with free will without suffering well it obviously wasn't set up that way but it means that the free will explanation doesn't really explain the problem moreover I should say that the free will explanation doesn't resolve what I would call the theological problem of suffering the theological problem of suffering is very simple if God is all-powerful he can do anything that he wants if he's all loving he doesn't want people to suffer any more than you want people to suffering and your Allah you're a loving person God can do anything he wants he doesn't want people to suffer and yet people suffer how does one explain that well that's the problem of theodicy most Christians think that God intervenes in history intervenes in our lives in order to deal with suffering God intervenes in our lives in order to deal with suffering so that when something goes wrong we can pray about it and God will help resolve the problem if that's the case why doesn't God intervene more often we all have experienced suffering in our lives and we know of others who have after I finished this teaching this class at Rutgers I experienced a lot of suffering myself as did other people cancer taking away loved ones in the prime of life teenage suicide birth defects failed marriages a friend who escaped the killing fields of Cambodia homelessness poverty starvation we all know people who have had these problems I kept reading about issues pertaining to suffering the Holocaust six million Jews murdered in cold blood genocides in Cambodia Bosnia Rwanda Darfur a flu epidemic in 1918 that killed 30 million people worldwide the flu world poverty and starvation I came to a point where none of the biblical answers or traditional answers were satisfying to me most of the Bible has one thing in common it believes in a God who intervenes in our world that is the basis for the traditions in the Old Testament of God saving the children of Israel and making them as people it's the basis for the belief in Jesus cross and resurrection that God intervened in our world for good God's intervention is what's behind our idea that prayer works but if God intervenes why doesn't he in our world every five seconds a child dies of starvation every five seconds in our world every minute 25 people die from diseases from unclean water every hour 300 people die of malaria if God intervenes why doesn't he intervene the Holocaust genocides terrorist attacks starvation poverty tsunamis hurricanes earthquakes eventually the answers did not satisfy me and I came to be unable to affirm the very basis of my Christian faith I became an agnostic I no longer believed in the God of the Bible I do not believe in a good and all-powerful God who intervenes in this world let me stress that it's not my goal to make anyone else an agnostic and it's not my goal to D convert anyone from whatever their faith is it's not my goal it's not my desire at all it is my goal to get people to think and to be more tolerant of people who think differently from them many of you who are Christian would agree with the statement that God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life but does God love everyone and have a wonderful plan for their lives even for those who are starving to death who are crushed with horrible diseases who are crippled with pain whose lives have been torn apart by the death of a loved one does God love the homeless the hungry the maimed the murdered then why doesn't he do something about it one viable response is to say that God wants us to do something about it and I absolutely would agree with that if I believed in God that God wants us to do something about it we should do something about suffering in our world we should commit ourselves to doing something about our suffering our world we should work to alleviate the suffering in our world absolutely yes but that doesn't answer the theological question why doesn't God intervene I can't believe in a God who intervenes in the world to make it a better place if you do believe in such a god you need to figure out how to reconcile your faith with the facts of reality how do you make sense of this world of pain misery and suffering without coming away with a simple answer a basic answer a simple answer how do you have something that matches the complexity of the suffering this is the biggest question you will ever face as a Christian and even as a human being why is there pain and misery and suffering in the world it's a question that we should all acknowledge and whether or not we find a satisfying answer we should all realize that there is enormous suffering out there and all of us Christian and non-christian alike should do everything we can to relieve it and to help those in need thank you very much opening statement by Dinesh hello everyone it's a it's a real honor and a thrill to be up here discussing an issue of such urgency and importance the problem of suffering is not a problem that is confined to atheists or agnostics it's in fact a problem even more intensely felt by the believer because for the atheist in some ways suffering is not a problem there is no God so this is just the way the world is for the believer however you always have to ask why does God permit tolerate cause a world that looks like the one we have now in some senses this is a very difficult question to raise because we are second-guessing God or basically saying God is an architect he made the world this way and hmm we think he could have done better Bart Ehrman says in a sense how do you make how do we make sense of the world so the first problem we have I think as not just Christians but as thinking people is what position are we in to judge the architecture of the universe in other words before we undertake a project of reason to explain something you've got to ask am I in possession of adequate facts to comment intelligently on the matter at hand if you show up and somebody says here's a bunch of clues don't look at them but tell me who the murderer is you'll say well I can't I don't know what these clues actually mean if you go into a mall or you're outside in the parking lot and you see a big SUV and the door is open and there's a two-year-old child in a in a car seat but it's hot and there's no mom anywhere to be seen what do you say you say that this mom is a negligent person who should be immediately arrested and locked up because she has no idea how to look after her child no because you don't know the mom she might have excellent reason for running out of that SUV maybe your husband is in Starbucks and just had a heart attack and since you are not in full possession of the relevant facts you hold back a little bit you don't know the circumstances over there and so here we are human beings we are part of the universe and we are second guessing the blueprint of the entire universe so my first question is are we really in full possession of adequate facts to be able to say hmm we think God could have done better that's the question that's worth thinking about does our human reason have that kind of a compass or are we rather more like the ant or the dog which have given an algebra problem can use all its reason but still wouldn't in fact solve the problem not because there isn't a solution but because the abilities of the ant are not adequate to comprehend it or not in possession of the adequate data to give an adequate answer now when we think about evil when we think about suffering in some ways to me this is not a problem about the existence of God you can say it's a problem about the character of God in some ways very often people say there's so much suffering in the world therefore we are very doubtful that there is a God who is who exists who would permit such a thing but let's imagine for a for instance that I have a dad who's very powerful who is who has near infinite resources let's say my dad is Bill Gates and I consider him to be a very loving dad and a very powerful man and I look to him whenever I'm in difficulty and then I come across a really serious problem in my life and I look to my father and say help me and he won't help he isn't there so what do I conclude do I say well my dad does not exist no I simply say hmm maybe my dad isn't quite the guy I thought he was maybe I need to reassess my relationship with my dad maybe my dad isn't the person I suspected him to be in other words I began to reassess the character of my dad I don't necessarily question his existence well to me one fascinating aspect of the book of Job is that there is no flinching from suffering in Christianity there is no flinching from suffering there are other religions Hinduism and so on which defines suffering as somehow illusory Maya but not in Christianity there is looking suffering right in the face and yet interestingly in the book of Job while a lot of people speculate why is there suffering it never occurs to anyone in the book to say that there's no God it never occurs to Jobe to say God does not exist that denial of God's existence is in some ways a modern phenomenon excavated out of contemporary suffering now why is there suffering usually in thinking about this problem of suffering or problem of evil we have to make a distinction between what can be called moral evil on the one hand and natural suffering on the other so moral evil refers to bad things that are done by human beings moral agents do moral evil and then of course there's natural suffering I won't call it natural evil because there's nothing evil about a tsunami there's not a tsunami by itself isn't evil now the wreckage it causes is terrible but I'll call it natural suffering rather than natural evil because it's not performed by a human agent so first we talk about moral evil and in some senses I think the defense raised by Bart Ehrman which he didn't actually rebut was that moral evil is comprehensible within the framework of free will it is a fact that if you are going to have free will you're going to have to choose between right and wrong between good and evil to remove for well is to remove that ability to choose it isn't necessarily to make us robots but it is in some sense to make us inhuman in fact what do we call people who don't have the ability to choose right from wrong we call them Psychopaths or sociopaths there are people in a sense who are less than human because they don't have that ability to choose so when people often say and Bart had a litany of moral horrors from Rwanda to the Holocaust to the killing fields of Cambodia did God do those things no human beings did them don't blame God for the Holocaust that was Hitler and the Nazis who did the killing fields of Cambodia well that was the Atheist Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge regime which in the aftermath of the Vietnam War in three years wiped out some two million people Rwanda the Hutus the Tutsis tribal hatreds human beings inflicting terrible things on each other and that is in a sense the great burden of moral choice if you do something terrible it's going to hurt innocent people who had no say in the matter it gives you the awesome burden or responsibility of free choice I'll come back and talk about the issue of free will in heaven but in general the argument that moral evil can be explained as a result of God creating us in His image which is to say free like him in some senses co-creators of circumstances in the universe and that allows us to do some terrible things to each other but then Bart rightly says that's not the end of the story because you do have terrible things that happen that human beings had nothing to do with tsunamis hurricanes natural suffering that seems to come out of you might say the laws of nature and in some ways Bart says if God is omnipotent he could intervene in fact you might raise the question why have laws of nature in the first place no laws of nature no hurricanes no tsunamis no earthquakes why did God create a lawful universe actually there are some people who think he didn't the Muslim scholar al-ghazali says there are no laws God intervenes at every second to make things happen as they do in some sense is the alternative to a lawful universe as you might say a discretionary universe everything happens because God wills it and it doesn't have to happen the same way twice so if you drop a pen it goes to the ground but the next time you drop it it goes right up that would be a whimsical universe unpredictable now try to think about this because Bart said freewill cannot be used to defend against natural evil I insist that it can because in a whimsical universe human action would have no predictable consequence if I were to pull out a gun to shoot you God could block the bullet and therefore my action of trying to kill you my evil action is meaningless because you're not going to feel any pain because a magical hand is going to come in the way and whisk off the bullet so in other words if we don't have a lawful universe in some senses human action in the world becomes impossible our freedom we might still be free but our freedom would carry no consequence because it would be completely unpredictable what was going to happen next now of course we could still have a lawful universe with miracles in other words let's have laws but God just intervenes like once in a while maybe every six weeks not intervenes with little nuisances he doesn't block the common cold but maybe he blocks the horrible hurricanes and tsunamis that killed tens of thousands of people now interestingly when you look at the Bible there are a lot of miracles but to my understanding these miracles by and large are aimed at you might say spiritual benefits and not to contravene the laws of nature for their own sake in other words god parched the Red Sea for the Israelites to cross jesus heals the blind man but he doesn't heal blindness the purpose is conversion it's spiritual there is a contravention of a law of nature but it's occasional it's rare and it's done for a spiritual purpose at no point can I find miracles that are done just because God decides that this law in fact think about it if God had to do miracles that way it's kind of a way of saying that my laws are defective I create a factory to spit out cars but a bad one comes out every now and then I've got to do a miracle to correct it that's a defect why do we have earthquakes the reason we have earthquakes and by the way this is not an argument from the Bible this is an argument from geology the reason we have earthquakes is underneath the earth are massive tectonic plates that move and these tectonic plates it turns out our absolute prerequisites for life on Earth to exist in fact interestingly scientists have looked for plate tectonics and have not found them on any other known star or planet they are unique to earth and the point I'm getting at here is not merely that you need plate tectonics because plate tectonics ultimately separate the land from the oceans if you didn't have plate tectonics our planet mostly made up of water the water would swallow the land and earth would be essentially a water world up to a depth of about 400 feet I get this fact from a book called rare earth written by the geologist Peter Ward and the astronomer Donald Brownlee the point being that plate tectonics is an absolute prerequisite for life itself to exist on the earth and here we can make a broader point and that is as scientists study the laws of nature all the laws the constants of nature the speed of light the electromagnetic force the strong nuclear force they have come up with something that is sometimes called the anthropic principle or the principle of fine-tuning and here's what it means the laws of the universe are fine-tuned for life you could have other laws but if you did you would not end up with creatures like us you might not end up with life at all but if you did you would not get human beings at the end there's a rather startling theological point hiding here the entropic principle by the way usually used to try to prove the existence of some kind of a an intelligent designer I'm not using it for that purpose I'm saying something a little different modern science shows that this universe cannot function with other laws that if you had other laws you wouldn't get Homo sapiens at the end of it so yes God could have made other laws but you'd get a different kind of creature at the end of the process so if God wanted to use a lawful process and wanted to create creatures like us modern science tells us that this is the recipe the laws that exist here and now are the necessary prerequisite for us being here now these laws are in some senses double-edged the sunshine that makes life possible is also the sunshine that gives us wrinkles and sometimes exposes us to radiation cancer the water that we drink without which we couldn't have life well you can drown in it and so these laws are of such a kind that they can by themselves impose hardship and pose suffering but here's the other side of it God has at the same time given us the tools to comprehend these laws and in some ways to overcome them that is called modern science and therefore you can have malaria but we have a cure for malaria if you want to know why people are getting malaria right now and suffering and die from it that's because this cure that we have already is not being adequately and widely enough distributed it exists the fault in other words here is not with a God who allows malaria but with human beings who do not take the actions to in a sense achieve the kind of world that God made it possible for us to live in thank you very much well now here a five-minute rebuttal from each debater beginning with Bart also reminder after the rebuttals will collect your note cards so be thinking of questions you might have for our speakers this evening well I'd like to thank the net for that very interesting and powerful statement I wish my Rutgers students had been so smart I don't think anybody needs to be second-guessing God when it comes to why they're suffering in the world asking why there is suffering is not second guessing God presumably everybody thinks that God gave human beings extraordinary intelligence I'm simply asking that we use our intelligence to try to understand our world it's not challenging God to ask why there is suffering in the world Dinesh says what position are we in to ask the question of suffering well we're in the position of being intelligent people who have brains and we should use them the book of Job is a is probably the best-known instance of somebody questioning why there is suffering in the book of Job Joe wants to know why since he is innocent he's suffering any demands that God appeared to him and tell him why he's suffering God finally does appear to job but instead of answering job's question to tell him why he's suffering God says who are you to ask me I am Almighty and you are a peon God's quashes job under his mighty thumb and Jobe rides on the ground in dust and ashes and repents for even asking is that what we should do in the face of the big questions that we have to ask should we ride on the ground and say well I'm not going to ask the question because it's too deep for me to stand should we admit that we can't know and so we're not going to ask I don't think so I don't think the example of Bill Gates deciding to withhold a computer from his son so that his son thinks Bill Gates is somebody different from whom he really thought he was is really an appropriate or an adequate explanation of what we're dealing with with the problem of suffering God is not Bill Gates and he didn't withhold a computer from asan there are people starving to death in this world yes if God's in charge of this world he must be different from what we thought but where does that leave us what is he really like God does intervene in the world according to traditional Jewish and Christian thinking and my guess is the dinesh thinks that God intervenes in the world and that he answers prayer if that's the case why is it there's so much suffering now Dinesh differentiates between moral evil and natural evil and he points out that God did not cause the Holocaust fair enough of course God didn't cause the Holocaust and nobody said that God caused the Holocaust but does God answer prayer or not when six million of his people are crying out to help does he answer or not if you think the answer is no he does not answer prayer what does that do to your faith and what does it do to Dinesh his faith does God intervene in this world or maybe he didn't like those Jews maybe he would have saved the Christians really maybe God likes Oz better than the people are starving to death because we had a very nice dinner thank you very much so maybe God's on our side but he's not on the side of the people who are suffering is that what we want to think is that going to be our theology I simply don't buy the idea that the laws of nature are the way they have to be or we could not have life I think that this is not a solid argument in the least who made the laws of nature you say well if you had some other laws then it wouldn't work this way we couldn't have homeless a pians right within the framework of nature as we have it now we have to have tectonic plates you mean God could not create a world without tectonic plates there have to be tsunamis that kill 300,000 people really there have to be you're telling me that God couldn't do something different God couldn't dream up a world without tectonic plates how limited is God is God so limited that he could not create a world without earthquakes and hurricanes and tsunamis and droughts is that really the case that God couldn't do it if that's what you think then I would say you're probably leaning more toward my direction I don't believe that in fact there could be a God who causes suffering or allow suffering if he could prevent it and I don't believe there was an all-powerful God in the world that in fact you could say that he can't prevent it thank I want to thank Bart for a very powerful and passionate statement which I think raises this debate to the next level because in some sense what Bart is saying is why this world couldn't there be another world better than this one we're in which you not only have human beings flawed as we are here but a different set of laws now interestingly it is the Christian position that there is such a world and the meaning of the fall is that there was such a world weak I don't want to debate whether we whether there was such a world historically or hypothetically but let's zoom in for a moment into the Christian understanding of the fall here's why by the way and I'm not here moving into the domain of Revelation here we have an atheist challenge that says in effect there's a contradiction between Christian theology and the world that we have it so it's very fair to say let's look at Christian theology in the full in other words it's a fundamental premise of Christian theology that this world is not the only world so suddenly you have to consider if this life is one second in an expanse of eternity however agonizing that second what does the plan as a whole say about the ineptitude of God let's say that someone suffers horribly for 50 years but is living in eternity in bliss has God wronged such a person is this proves that God clearly did not exist because in this life only a part of the expanse of salvation God didn't fix his or her problem right then or there are then so the Christian view in other words is much bigger than the hedonistic premise that God's job is to be a cosmic bellboy and make our life as comfortable as possible here and now you've got to look at Christian theology as a whole but now I want to look for a moment at the fall because I think it gets to the heart of Bart's question what was happening in the Garden of Eden basically the Garden of Eden was a place a sphere a dimension if you will under God's direction and yeah there were no laws everything worked well perhaps he was not equal to MC square in the Garden of Eden I don't know but the idea was that God in a sense offers human beings a choice live under God's direction you can call that the discretionary universe our will is subordinated in all things to God's will and so are the laws of nature so is whatever laws operate and even God controls at all no rotten trees no trees no fruit that fall and turn bad now the theme that the message of the fall is that human beings rejected that world not just Adam and Eve because I believe we would reject it again if we were given a chance our freewill inclines us to say no we do not want to live under God's world we want to make our own world and that means we want to live under our will and do things the way we see fit and manipulate the universe and the earth in the way that we deem best not God this is pride this is the fall and what does God do he says okay he gives us the world we want and it's this world now in this world we are immensely powerful we can manipulate nature we can extend life expectancy we can discover cures for diseases but in some ways it's not the perfect world and Christianity does not claim it is Christianity kung fu' innocence claims that this is a world of trial this is the world we wanted that God gave us as a sort of a trial period to decide if we want to live in that other world always available to us in which we operate constantly and unremittingly under God's Authority and God's will that to me is the meaning of the fall the two choices put before us as human beings and it wasn't just Adam and Eve but I believe all of us in this room if made could choose again would choose exactly what Adam and Eve chose which is to live a life in which our decisions are made unremittingly constantly by us and that's the world that Bardis chosen because he says we should use our intelligence and our creativity to investigate nature and to ask why and we do and out of that comes science and out of that comes in a way the cure for some of the problems in the world so God has given us the world he's also given us the ability to function in the world let's come back for a moment to the Holocaust what is Bart asking God to do he's basically asking God to cancel out the free will of the Nazis and Hitler so the Nazis and Hitler say into the concentration camp you go but the jews say god help us and god says sorry nazi sorry hitler your gas isn't going to work in the jews will go but they'll come out perfectly happy ultimately will ultimately the gas will have no effect I would submit that well we might all say in one case God could do it but then what about Cambodia and what about Darfur and what about if God intervened in every case to make this happen what happens to our world in that case yes free will is cancelled out yes evil loses all its meaning but even more significant so does good there's no virtue possible in a world in which God is the great corrector there are no there are no sick people to be cared for because their sickness doesn't really matter there are no hungry people to be fed because they aren't really hungry they just look at God's actually already solved the problem inside of them so I would suggest that in a sense Bart for all his passion hasn't thought it through he hasn't really specified what is this alternative arrangement that he wants what does he want God to do and if God did that what would the consequences be as they played themselves themselves out that is worth thinking about thank you at this time we'll pause the debate for a second the ushers will be coming down the aisles both the sides and the center to collect the questions you have all right so Dinesh I want to know whether you believe that God answers prayer and if you do think so do you think that God sometimes does intervene in our world and the more involved part of that is if you think that God does not answer prayer then I'd like to know and that he doesn't intervene I'd like to know in what sense you consider yourself a Christian if you do think that God enters answers prayer and does intervene then I'd like to know whether it bothers you that God doesn't answer prayer for people who are starving to death and being tortured and who are being murdered and so forth I think that God can and does answer prayer I think that God can and does intervene in the world he has and I believe he still does and however I see this intervention in the world as as rare as an expression of God's gratuitous love and something that does not occur on a regular basis in fact if it did there would be no we would we would we could no longer speak of the lawfulness of nature so a miracle by definition is a rare contravention of a natural law but I do believe it does happen and has happened okay from my turn the problem of evil is often seen as a problem for the believer I want to suggest it is a problem also for the unbeliever because if there is no God is it not a fact that we are evolved primates the Darwinian creatures if you will in the world struggling to survive and reproduce without an intelligent designer or a benign creator now if that is the case here's my question isn't it true that the magnitude of human evil defies Darwinian explanation and what I mean by this is that there is evil in nature but evil and nature seems very frugally confined to survival a lion might eat an antelope but have we ever met a line that wants to abolish every antelope off the face of the earth there's no lion Hitler if you will a lion will will when hungry kill but human evil outstrips Darwinian necessity you have people who want to wipe out entire tribes and there's torture and cruelty that seems again to go far beyond the needs of survival and reproduction so what is your explanation if we are Darwinian primates wherefore comes this kind of evil what's its source yeah it's a great question I I'm not sure I'm convinced that human evil far surpasses what you find in the animal kingdom and I don't know what criteria one uses to establish what would be a human evil that goes up to a certain level but beyond that well there must be a god that doesn't make sense to me but I'm thinking about my cat right now now my cat loves torture when it gets a mouse it doesn't kill the mouse because it's hungry it tortures the mouse for it will turn it for hours if I let it this is something that simply happens in the animal kingdom Hitler was an oversized Mouse I think that the Holocaust is I think more readily explicable if humans have no constraints on them from above than it is by assuming that there's a God who answers prayer and so I don't see it as really a problem for I mean you keep referring to atheists which I would consider myself to be an agnostic I consider the enormity of prot of of evil in the world to be a much bigger problem for somebody who has faith in a God who created this world and is in some sense sovereign over this world and occasionally intervene in this world it's a much bigger problem buddy of that sort than for somebody who simply says that it is in fact there is no divine person over this world and control of it no loving creator who is in charge of it that in fact we're just here by ourselves and that's why there are tsunamis and earthquakes and hurricanes and Holocaust my turn right you suggested that somebody who suffers now may experience a billion years of happiness in the afterlife and that therefore I'm not looking at the whole of Christian theology only at a very small sliver and you said that I would prefer that we all lead a hedonist life here on earth I guess I want to know whether you believe in Hell and whether people are are punished in hell and whether it's an eternal punishment and whether God loves the people who are suffering eternal punishment in hell I'm especially thinking of for example somebody in let's say in some part of Africa say in southern Africa who has gotten AIDS or somebody some somebody who is not a Christian who has gone through horrible suffering here in this world and then dies and suffers torment for billions of years so I want to know whether you believe that and if so how that relates to your understanding of God well I'll say I'll answer the question I want to address before I do very briefly the example that you gave about the cat and the mouse because I think it is a in a sense based on a fallacy the mouse was being tortured by your cat is not being tortured in any sense that we mean the word torture if someone is torturing me by playfully tossing me up and down with a big bayonet waiting for me to land on it the reason I'm being tortured is that I can anticipate death I can see it I can imagine it I have the cognitive faculties to apprehend it and therein lies the torture the torture is that I'm being playfully dangled before I'm going to be killed in a manner that I can anticipate there's absolutely no sense that a mouse has the cognitive fast faculty is in fact a parent it seems that no animal does to be able to foresee death to know what death is like to know that it is going to die why does it try to escape because it is it has a survival instinct built into it which is Darwinian so that doesn't mean it has the cognitive fast faculty to know I will die human beings all died Death Comes to everyone the natural instinct that says run away when you see the lion is not the same as the one that and so and in the example that you give the anticipation is necessary for the torture to make sense otherwise of the cat is dangling the mouse and the mouse feels nothing except I'm being dangled up and down there is no torture does the child who is thrown on the bayonet know that he's going to die no but but in that case the evil isn't the intention of the person doing it and in this case the question is whether the cat dangling the mouse is itself engaging in torture in the same way that the Nazis did when they treated the Jews and the way they did okay let's talk about Hell having settled that one hahaha the Christian view of God is that God is salvation right the Bible says salvation is the gift of God now for many years I used to think that the Bible was saying that salvation is the gift from God but no doesn't say that salvation is the gift of God God is the gift God is the gift now we as human beings have the free choice of saying yes to the gift or no so easy as God made it that all we have to do no matter what the wreckage of our lives no matter what the sins we've committed all we have to do is utter the word yes that's it that's the only prerequisite for salvation that does it so if someone says no in the face of a yes and you may enter sign and if God Himself is salvation to say no to God is to say no to what God is that is my definition of Hell if God is goodness purity Beauty truth and you say no to God you are cutting yourself off voluntarily from those divine attributes by your own will and what does God do God merely acquiesce is in your free choice so in this is the this is the simple paradigm there are multiple tough cases what about the Hindus lived a decent life and has never heard of Jesus Christ I'm not addressing those cases I noticed but I'm not ducking them either I'm not ducking them and I'm happy to address the issue because here I think we have a different question which is the Bible says clearly that Jesus is the only way to solve a and I believe that some people interpret that to mean something else all those who have not explicitly accepted Jesus go to hell that is one possible interpretation of the other statement but not the only one and in fact there are many Christians who do not interpret the first statement in the Bible to mean the second statement which is an interpretation of the Bible therefore if you were to ask me what happens to the guy in Papua New Guinea who's never heard of God or never heard of Jesus my answer is I don't know I leave that to God's infinite mercy and justice but no I'm not declaring that that guy goes to hell because I'm not sure that Bible statement a leads to interpretation be my turn oh do we have time okay unless question I'm sorry oh that's where oh yeah one last question it's all yours suffering ultimately is not an intellectual problem it's a it's an emotional problem if you lose a child you might wonder why but really your main concern is to alleviate the suffering how do I feel better how do I have this wound bandaged and and and overcome so here's my question who has a better practical remedy for suffering the Christian who can say to this to someone you know you've lost your son but you have the hope of an afterlife in which you'll see him again offering genuine consolation to a bereaved person in that circumstance or an atheist who says stuff happens you've lost your son there's no explanation there's no remedy get over it as a practical matter who has more resources for coping with suffering the Christians who started the Red Cross innumerable organizations to alleviate suffering or atheism which basically says this is the world as it is yeah actually my view of this you might be surprised to find isn't going to be your view I think easy answers in the face of real suffering are cruel I think when you have your son commit suicide or your daughter get killed by a drunk driver or your wife died because of an aneurysm that the simple comfort of don't worry they're in heaven now really doesn't go very far I think it's a platitude that in fact I find offensive because it doesn't take seriously the real nature of suffering and I'm frankly throughout this entire debate I've been puzzled a little bit by what seems to me almost an intellectualizing of the problem on your part that that you can kind of solve solve it by by coming up with clever answers and this just strikes me like a slogan I think that the way you comfort somebody is you do what the Friends of Jobe did when he was suffering they didn't give him platitudes they came up to him and they sat with him in silence for three days you throw your human support for a fellow human being you put your arm around the person and you tell them that you feel for them and that you love them and that you're there for them and in my opinion that does a world more good than a platitude about the afterlife well Bart let's look at this for a moment because that's a very revealing statement none of us knows what comes after death right you haven't been to the other side of the curtain I know but you just said you did no you said I didn't say I did I said you are offering someone earlier you talked about people living forever in the a pile of having suffered here I said that is a sin heaven I said it's a central proposition of Christian theology which it is and you agree with it don't you and I agree with it on the basis of Revelation but okay well but I want but I want to I want to come to your point as a matter of Reason engaging you as an agnostic right here we have death it's the final wall or curtain none of us have been to the other side right there is no other side well there's something that comes after death whether it's life after or nothing but but what my point is we are not in a position to know something is not nothing either there is life after death or there isn't ya can use the call third option there's no other side that's a nothing that's not of something all right you wrote a book about it the point I'm trying to make is that you are declaring to be a platitude something that is very much an open question a real possibility in other words it's a yeah you're admitting it's a possibility you don't even agree with no I'm in a normal debate if we were debating the existence of God the burden of proof would be on me because I'm saying there's a god and I would need to prove it in this debate the burden of proof is on you because you're saying there is an inherent inconsistency between Christian theology the Christian God all-powerful benevolent and the framework around that God and the reality of suffering so I am perfectly permitted to say okay let's see if there is this stated inconsistency this theology posits the afterlife I don't have to prove it I'm simply saying once you look at the full framework the inconsistency disappears yes you've intellectualized the problem that's why we're having a debate but I don't mean to imply that suffering doesn't remain a deep problem or a deep mystery the point I want to make about life after death is human there is something in human nature that longs for life to go on cultures throughout history and all religions have posited the afterlife as an arena of cosmic justice now they could be making it up but they could also be right so why would you dismiss a real possibility which gives real hope and real consolation as a platitude because it is a platitude you're saying it's ok with a platitude is it a platitude is that you have just told somebody whose daughter was killed in a car wreck that it's ok because she'll be in heaven now I don't think I said it was ok I said that despite the intensity of this this does not provide comfort it has for millions of people through history it's created enormous guilt as well it's created terrible suffering from people who think that they shouldn't mourn somebody because after all it was God's will it's created pain for people who feel that that mourning is inadequate because they should be actually mourning more most people feel like you know if my child is in heaven then it should be ok well it's not ok if I may our first question which each of you which each of you will get two minutes to respond to each will go in the same order the first question has to deal with this with an extension of this this discussion so we'll deal with it in two minutes responses very similar to what we've just been discussing what do you do to help alleviate the suffering in our world book Bart you first and then Dinesh this is asking what we personally do yes yes okay good great uh yeah I it's an interesting question because when I became an agnostic I thought I was afraid to become an agnostic in part because I thought that that would really change my moral compass and that I would become what what Dinesh is describing as a hedonist and that it would all since this life is all there is all I would be interested in doing would be seeking out my own pleasure because if there's no afterlife why not let's party it turns out it's not that way at all I have found that in fact being an agnostic has made me more concerned for the welfare of my fellow fellow men and women that in fact I am more concerned about issues of justice in the world and oppression and poverty and homelessness and hunger what why I mean what do I personally do I give away tons of money I try to help people who are homeless and who are hungry far more than I did when I was a committed a committed Christian that doesn't mean that every agnostic does but I think that it's false to say that since Christians started the Red Cross they're better than the atheists well one could point to all sorts of charities that are run by people who are not people of faith Doctors Without Borders would be an excellent an excellent example people who are agnostic or atheist are just as ethical as as Christians and they are just as concerned about issues of justice and poverty and oppression and hunger as Christians and I think that in fact all of us whether we happen to be Christian or not should should in fact Ratchet it up a notch because I think in fact all of us can do more and we don't need religious reasons to do it I do think we can do more we should do more and there are atheists and some sometimes atheists are exemplary in their altruism philanthropy and so on as a matter of data or not to go by personal anecdote but to look at facts it is the case that there are important differences there was a study recently published by the sociologist Arthur Brooks called who cares and it looks in America at who are the people who do the most in terms of charity not just in terms of giving money but volunteering time and it divides America into four groups the secular the religious conservatives the religious liberals the secular conservatives and the secular liberals and it concludes at the end of a of the study that the group that does the most in America today are the religious conservatives the group that does the second-most are the religious liberals the group too does the third most are the secular conservatives and the group that does the least which happens to be the group that has the most resources are the secular liberals so that for example a secular liberal in San Francisco making three times the income of a religious conservative in Tupelo Mississippi will give approximately the same amount in real dollars in charity so obviously the guy the religious conservative having much less is giving proportionately far more again I don't want to make too much of this but I do think it is a fact that the data seem to show that a belief in in God and in Christianity does seem to motivate acts of altruism and sacrifice and we do see those quite obviously in the world our next question is for Bart why do you call yourself agnostic not atheist why a minute would say it again why do you call yourself agnostic and not atheist yes okay so why agnostic and not atheist so I you know I didn't know until I became an agnostic just how militant both atheists and agnostics really were I always thought they were just kind of the same thing but they're not it turns out that atheists get really angry with agnostics who refuse to be atheists the way the way I usually put is that and all atheists think that agnostics are simply wimpy atheists you know they can't really fess up and and awe like Gnostics think that atheists are just arrogant diagnostics the reason to be a nag not so in agnostics and atheists the my definite this is another problem everybody defines these terms differently even atheists and agnostics so let me tell you my term my definitions my definition of an atheist is somebody who declares that there is no God who just says they don't believe that there there is a God there is no God an agnostic says I don't know now I don't believe in the God of the Bible and so if that's the definition of an atheist that I'm an atheist I don't believe that the God I don't believe in God who created the world who called Israel to be his people who gave Israel his law who sent Jesus into the world to die for the sins of the world who raised Jesus from the dead I don't believe that God exists is there other some other greater force in the universe I don't know and neither does anyone else I think that at the end of the day we're all agnostics even the atheists I think that the universe is such an amazing awe-inspiring place that at the very least it demands some humility and I think that the declaration that there can't via God is anything but the declar is anything but humility and so so that's why I continue to be an agnostic rather than an atheist thank you first of all the believer is much closer to the good agnostic as you described him than you realize think about the connotations of the term believer a believer is distinguished from a knower if you know something you wouldn't say you believe in it you believe in something when you don't know for sure I would I believe in the planet Uranus I've been there but I believe it's out there I wouldn't say I believe in my brother because I know the guy so knowledge is of a different status than belief the reason we call ourselves believers is we don't know in fact that's why there's faith faith is the bridge between belief and knowledge now I don't want to comment too much about on board because I don't what I want to say is this and this strikes me as sort of interesting about people who are on the rampage against belief Bart's written a lot of books misquoting Jesus can't trust the Bible whoa whoa whoa whoa I am NOT on a rampage against belief well that is absolutely false all right you're the bunker of belief no you are a questioner of belief I'm a debunker of fundamentalism okay and well and you should be but um because well that's a different issue well Bart's debunking his old self and maybe there's good reason to alright point I want to make is this about agnostics and that is agnosticism really implies a sort of openness perhaps even indifference because if you really don't know that what do you do generally you ignore it I don't know if there's life on other planets but I don't go debating guys who think there is I don't know if there are unicorns I don't believe there are but I haven't written any books called a unicorn delusion the end of unicorns unicorns are not great so and Bart's not in the company of the New Atheists I have to say but nevertheless I do want to make the point that there is something about this new atheism the aggression about it and its obsession with God one of the my atheists debating partners Christopher Hitchens I think he probably thinks a lot more about God than a lot of lukewarm Christians so there's an interesting thread that links belief and aggressive unbelief dinesh the next question is for you if we would all reject God's will and the fall and if God is all-knowing wasn't God's test a big joke because he created us knowing we'd fail a test is not well first of all it's important to realize that when we think about God's foreknowledge God knowing in advance let's say that Adam and Eve would sin God doesn't does not have foreknowledge in the sense that we normally think somebody predicts that the stock market will go up or go down and claims to know they have foreknowledge but that's because they're living in time and the Christian view God is outside of time he's time operates as a line God's on on this side of the line he can see the past the present and the future so God doesn't have foreknowledge he just as knowledge so your question has to be recast does knowing what someone will do in a given situation invalidate the free choice or the value of the person making their own decision I might know for example that my 15 year old daughter I don't know for sure but let's say I did would become a doctor and yet I tell her Danielle you go to school look at what subjects interest you and choose freely where you want to go I happen to know what she's like I happen to know our interests let's say I know for sure that she'll go to medical school nevertheless my knowledge imposes no restrictions on her choice she is completely free to go in any direction she wants so God's knowing what man will do with free will in no way cancels out the value of that free will I have no opinion on the subject Bart the next question is for you actually in your critique of the Bible you did not address the most powerful answer to suffering namely a God who lives and dies in this suffering world to rescue us how do you respond to the answer of the cross yes I I think that is a powerful answer to to suffering I don't think it's a biblical answer of the Cross is obviously biblical in my book I talk about the cross as a in in the context of understanding that suffering can be redemptive and often in the Bible is redemptive that there can be redemptive suffering so there are a couple of kinds of redemptive suffering that I think all of us experienced I mean sometimes something really bad happens to us that turns out for the good and so often there's there's a silver lining and so the well we all have instances in which something bad happened to us that were you know 20 years later we're really glad it happened to us because it changed our lives in my case when I got hepatitis when I was 16 I was not particularly happy about the situation and I was I was laid up and was unable to do anything in the middle of the summer and but it what it ended up doing is making me starting to read books and to start focusing on the debate topic that was going to be that year's debate topic in high school and it turned me from being a very mediocre second baseman that summer to being somebody very interested in academics and if that had not happened I never would have become a scholar so there's a redemptive side to that suffering of hepatitis very minor instant but there it is there's other suffering though which is more than just a silver lining some redemptive suffering means that suffering actually produces an ultimate good and this would be the teaching of the Christian teaching of the cross that the suffering of Jesus on the cross brought about salvation and that salvation therefore requires suffering I think a lot of agnostics have trouble with this understanding that God required his son to die on a cross in order to bring salvation because for many for many unbelievers it it seems like God really didn't need a human sacrifice if God wanted to forgive people why didn't he just forgive people or in Dinesh's terms if God just demanded a yes why did he demand a blood sacrifice yes would have been sufficient thank you very much so it is it certainly as a teaching in the Bible that that suffering brings Redemption but I think it's a it's a point of view that outside of the Bible nobody we don't have anymore so it's interesting that people subscribe to this idea when it's in the Bible but they don't think about it in in their lives we don't think that we have to sacrifice our children so that we'll have a happy life so so that's an interesting phenomenon the the particular question though is is God suffering with us and I would suggest at that point of view is a modern theological point of view which is a very powerful point of view but it's not a point of view that the Bible advances in the Bible God does not suffer with us I agree that that is a modern reading however I want to say this about the issue of Christ's sacrifice and atonement the important thing to realize about sin is that at a human level it cannot be atoned for think about something that you've done that's really wrong let's say I commit adultery against my wife or you do emotional harm to someone how do you atone for that you can say well you say you're sorry but that doesn't remove the crime or the offense you can say I'll be nice to them from now on but that's no atonement you should be nice to them in the first place how do you cancel out the bad thing that you've already done you can't you've done it so how are sins to be atoned for by anyone they can't be what's done is done so if God is a God of justice there needs to be a tone 'men tant do it there needs to be either damnation or somebody has to do it for us that's the meaning of Christ's sacrifice it's not a matter of suffering with us which is a modern and I agree a little bit of a touchy-feely view of the matter but removing the touchy-feely Ness of it there still has to be atonement and without the atonement the yes doesn't work so it isn't just God saying say yes it is say yes to Christ's sacrifice and then the pathway is clear so there's nothing for us to do except to say yes but that's because the atonement has been done by someone else and that is in a sense by God himself our last question from the audience this is to both of you Bart we'll start with your answer and then follow with delicious without God's character as a basis for good how do you measure evil with herbs or without what I'll read the question again without God's character as a basis for good how do you measure evil without God's character for good how do you measure evil I think that it's it's it's a problematic statement to think that we know what is good because of God because where does one even start with that let me let me start with the Bible this is from the Book of Amos in the Old Testament where we hear about the character of God Amos chapter 3 I gave you empty stomachs in every city and lack of bread in every town yet you didn't return to me says the Lord in other words God made them hungry he starved them I withheld rain from you when the harvest was still three months away I sent no rain on your town yet you did not return to me I sent plagues among you as I did to Egypt I killed your young men with the sword this is God speaking I filled your nostrils with the stench of your camp yet you have not returned to me I over threw some of you as I overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah yet you have not returned to me God starves people he creates drought he creates military disaster and he murders them so that they will turn back to him how do we measure the goodness of God is are these good acts is our morality to be based on the actions of God should we starve our children to get them to behave not give them anything to drink murder them so that they will do what they're supposed to do I think it's difficult to say that our morality is based on the morality of God because the morality of God is portrayed in the Bible at least would be considered by almost anyone as a rather dubious morality you say yes but he was God absolutely that's right that means though that God's standards are not your standards so where do you get your moral standards from well if it's from God then you must be starving your children according to Amos anyway I would suggest we know what's good and evil because we know what's good for one another I think Jesus is the one who had it right you should love your neighbor as yourself Jesus wasn't the first one to come up with this idea or the idea that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you this is not distinctive to Jesus this is a teaching found throughout the religions of the ancient world you should do to one another as you as you should do to someone else what you want them to do to you I think this can be a basis of morality you treat people the way you want to be treated you don't need God for that I don't believe in God and yet I try to follow this principle it's a principle that people have dignity as human beings and should be treated as human beings they should be treated the way we want to be treated you do that and you lead a good life and I don't believe you need God for it it's true that there's nothing uniquely Christian about the golden rule but there is something very uniquely Christian about the idea of forgiveness which does not appear in any other religion there is a saying in Christianity that the New Testament is in the old conceal'd and the Old Testament is in the new revealed this is another way of saying that as Christians we don't read the Old Testament as the Jews did in other words it's not the end of the matter and you can't take a passage out of it whether of a ham sacrifice or any other and read it in complete isolation the early Christians insisted that every passage in the Old Testament must be read in the light of the new era launched by Christ and then the documents that came out of that so for example Abraham's sacrifice of his son in which the son says to his father where is the lamb and Abraham says God will provide a preview of Christ who was the Lamb of God to come in the new testament so again if you cut off the New Testament and read passages from the old becomes difficult to explain or defend but read as a whole the Bible conveys a very different message now I want to make a final and important distinction here that gets lost nobody is claiming I'm not that morality that morality requires the Bible or God for us to recognize it it's not as if when I read the Ten Commandments I said hmm thou shalt not kill Wow I had no idea I thought killing was great but now that I read it in the Bible I gotta stop doing it I already knew it was wrong I already knew stealing was wrong I already knew I shouldn't covet my neighbor's wife or his goods I knew all that stuff before I ever read the Ten Commandments how did I know it because morality is built into human nature it is what Adam Smith called the impartial spectator the voice within of course the atheist has that voice the atheist is human he has a human nature he has morality there's a separate question what is the source of the impartial spectator and human beings believer and unbeliever alike where does that voice come from that not only has no Darwinian explanation but often blocks Darwinian imperatives I want to have sex with every beautiful woman with his little voice and my head goes don't do stop this voice which seems to come almost from outside of me and yet speaks with unimpeachable authority I don't have to obey it but I can't avoid that authority that voice may need to have some external and divine source so two separate issues morality is in all human beings but can it be explained without ultimately pointing to a divine source I'm not sure thank you will now begin our closing statements as has been our order all night or will lead and Dinesh will conclude our evening apart well let me thank you all again for being both attentive and kind to to me during this during this debate and thanks to Dinesh for a a lively exchange I'd like to conclude by talking about how I personally deal with the problem of suffering my view as it turns out as a biblical view it's the view of the book of Ecclesiastes according to the book of Ecclesiastes there's a lot that we can't know about this world a lot of the world doesn't make sense sometimes there's no justice things don't go as planned or as they should a lot of bad things happen but there are also a lot of good things that happen the solution to life is to enjoy it while we can because it is fleeting this is the main teaching of the book of Ecclesiastes this world and everything in it is temporary transient and soon to be over we won't live forever in fact we won't live long and so we should enjoy life to the fullest as much as we can as long as we can that's what the author of Ecclesiastes thinks and I agree the idea that this life is all there is should not be an occasion for despair and despondency but just the contrary it should be a source of joy and dreams joy of living for the moment and rheems of trying to make the world a better place both for ourselves and for others in it this means working to alleviate suffering and bringing hope to a world without hope the reality is that we can do more in dealing with the problems people experience in our world to live life to the fullest means among other things doing more there does not have to be world poverty the wealth could be redistributed and still there would be plenty for plenty of us to be stinking rich there don't have to be people sleeping on the streets in my city of Durham North Carolina children don't really need to die a malaria families don't need to be destroyed by waterborne diseases villages don't need to die of massive starvation old people do not need to go for weeks on end without a single visitor children don't have to face the prospect of going to school without a healthy breakfast by all means and most emphatically I think that we should work hard to make the world the one we live in the most pleasing place it can be for ourselves we should love and be loved we should cultivate our friendships enjoy our intimate relations cherish our family lives we should enjoy good food and drink we should eat out and order unhealthy desserts we should cook steaks on the grill and drink Bordeaux we should walk around the block work in the yard and watch basketball we should travel and read books and go to museums and look at art and listen to music we should make love have babies and raise families we should do what we can to love life it's a gift and it won't be with us for long but we should also work hard to make our world the most pleasing place it can be for others whether this means visiting a friend in the hospital giving more to a local charity or an international relief effort volunteering at the local soup kitchen or expressing our opposition to the violent oppression of innocent people what we have in the here and now is all that there is we need to live life to its fullest and help others as well to enjoy the fruits of the land in the end we may not have the ultimate solutions to life's problems but just because we don't have an answer to suffering does not mean that we cannot have a response to it our response should be to work to alleviate suffering wherever possible and to live life as well as we can thank you very much want to thank you for coming to this debate I want to thank Bart for what has been really an interesting and spirited exchange I think at the end of the day of course we should enjoy life of course life is a gift and in some senses I think it's a gift we don't fully appreciate because if we think about our lives and this would apply not just to you and me but of all the guys I grew up with in India on the streets of Mumbai when we look at our lives we can always identify some bad things that happen to us Bart's hepatitis me standing at my father's grave we remember these incidents and they bother us and we ask why and yet at the same time if we were to think not about our life but about the last week or the last month or the last year and someone said could you list the good things that have happened in your life this list would be inexhaustibly long it would be it would overwhelm if he will for most of us the hepatitis and the anguish of standing at my dad's grave now life is short and in its brevity there is great value God doesn't run us by the way with death and God has given to different creatures different life spans to the elephant 150 years to the dog 20 to the fly a few days is God being unjust to the fly no because the fly is still ahead of the game when we look at our life even people who have suffered a lot rarely commit suicide even amputees and people in wheelchairs hang on to life even people at the very old cling to life why because by their own computation and by their own balance sheet the plus side is greater than the minus side even by their calculus it's better Bart ultimately has the burden of proof in this argument because he's saying that the existence of suffering and its magnitude in some senses makes incoherent or makes implausible the existence of God his method of proof has been to look at the answers to suffering given in the Bible the arguments that he claims doesn't work I want to suggest that this argument is a little bit of a non-starter for me because the Bible does not contain any arguments at all on any subject the Bible doesn't try to prove why they're suffering or why there isn't the Bible doesn't try to prove there's a god the Bible simply declares it the Bible doesn't try to prove that Jesus is the Son of God but merely a sorts it the Bible is not a book of proof it is a book of Revelation it says this is the way things are so for Bart to look to the Bible and say I don't find the answer I'm looking for why and the Bible doesn't say why is in some senses I think to be looking in the wrong place or to be reading the Bible in the wrong way philosophically suffering is a problem as preachers who ask why we're gonna be asking why and we don't always know the answer but the reason that job submits to God is not that God overpowers him ultimately job just wants to know that there's a smarter guy than him who's in charge and when God shows up and says to job did you make the universe are you responsible for the arc of the sky are you responsible for the rising and the falling of the Seas Joe's humility is to recognize in a sense that no we humans in a sense not that we don't have reason but is our reason of a sufficient compass to proclaim judgment on the creator of the universe sort of like saying is Hamlet in a position to dispute William Shakespeare no shakes your stands outside the play is in some sense the cause of the action within it we are creatures within the play trying to understand the action as Hamlet does but in some sense we have to ask what can we say about the God who is the author of the play and I think the proper response in that sense is job's response submission worship and humility thank you very much enjoyed it I'd like to thank you again for joining us

Channel: Gordon College

Views: 456,704

Rating: 4.7204409 out of 5

Keywords: gordoncollege, faithseekingunderstanding, dinesh, dsouza, ehrman

Id: Isg6Kx-3xdI

Length: 102min 27sec (6147 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 07 2010

Reddit Comments

[u/vgunmanga]

Fuck, I hate Dinesh. If you can get him to admit people have morals without religion, he comes back with the cop out "People innately have morals because god".

You can't have a debate with this guy. In his mind he's right no matter what.

[u/HitchSlap92]

Wow. That was BRUTAL.

[u/WonderbaumofWisdom]

How vague of a Christian can you be before you're an agnostic?

[u/Tim_Buk2]

Love Bart's expression when D'Souza says that forgiveness does not appear in any other religion apart from Christianity!