This Question Could END Christianity! | Pastor Reacts

Alex O'Connor’s Challenge to Christianity and the Problem of Suffering

Alex O 'Connor thinks he's cornered Christianity with one of the toughest questions imaginable. Look at this.

Do you think she did something immoral?

Yeah, she disobeyed God.

And what did she eat from the tree of the...

I'm not sure.

She ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So she ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, implying that before she ate a bit, she didn't have a knowledge of good and evil. How can she have done something immoral before she ate it?

Wait a sec, does Alex have a point? How could Eve really be on the hook for the fall? Did Alex just unravel Christianity in one question or is he completely missed what the scripture is actually teaching?

Let's jump right in. Welcome back to Wise Disciple. My name is Nate Sala and I'm helping you become the effective Christian that you are meant to be, which entails apologetics. And we're gonna see some challenges to the Christian faith today, but we're also gonna get some clear answers.

Amen.

Make sure to like, sub and share this one around if it blesses you.

I think the irony is that we're in a context of a discussion where usually the boot is on the other foot and I'm sort of being told that as a non-religious person, as an atheist agnostic, I don't have a satisfying explanation.

What am I gonna say at the footstool of somebody who's dying of cancer? But it sounds to me...

Well, hold on a second. If he's being told that he does not have a satisfactory explanation to give the dying child at the bedside, it's probably because there is no satisfactory explanation that an atheist can give, a materialist can give, or whatever Alex is.

What would that be? Sorry, kid, the universe doesn't care about your cancer? That's not satisfactory, right? What's interesting to me is Christians get faced with this question. So Greg Kokel is getting faced with this at the moment, but then they get belittled because atheists don't like the Christian answer.

But it's absolutely fair to ask atheists what they have to offer the dying cancer patient as well. If you remove the dam, what do you propose to put in its place to stop the rushing of the waters? And what Alex wants to do is critique the Christian answer, but refuse to offer one of his own.

At least today, we don't have a very plausible alternative in Christianity. For example, I did have a few questions which maybe I'll be permitted the time to ask. And I don't wanna bang on about this, but it's important because this is, ultimately, you're here to represent your view and a worldview more broadly.

And this is, to me, the question, is the question of suffering. And you've explained your views about the fool, and I wanted to let you put them in full before I asked a few questions. But the first question that jumps out at me is the question of pre-human suffering.

We're not the first species to inhabit this planet. And before we existed, billions of years, I don't know if you believe that the earth is four and a half billion years old, but billions of years, hundreds of millions of years, at least, of animal suffering.

Like, and that is experienced. And you could say that it somehow is less relevant or doesn't matter as much. But if you saw me right now step on a dog's tail and watch it squeal, you'd tell me to stop because you know that absent just the effect that that has on our human situation, that's bad for the dog.

That kind of stuff was going on for hundreds of million years before humans were around. That means before the fool.

Yeah, that's true.

Emotivism, Moral Language, and the Charge of Smuggling in Ethics

Okay, so he wants to talk about pre-human suffering and animal suffering, but I don't think he's gonna be straightforward about this. What he's going to do is he's going to assume that everyone agrees that suffering is bad.

And I think they do. In other words, he's going to leverage our social attitude against suffering so that he can critique Christianity. Now, this actually becomes a problem twice because if he's doing so as a test of coherence to Christianity, well, then he's missing key data to make the conclusions that he's making.

In other words, if he wants to suggest that there's some kind of problem between the notion that God is good and also animals suffer or even people suffer, because they were talking about children suffering a moment ago, well, then he's missing key information for him to draw that conclusion.

He's drawing somewhat from the text of scripture, I take it, but then he's stopping short and he's drawing a premature conclusion. That's the first problem. Or it could be another one. So if he's talking about suffering out of his emotivist framework, which is how he identified himself in this talk, which by the way, I'll leave a link for the whole entire discussion below, but this is how he identifies himself as an emotivist.

Well, then he's got a whole other set of issues. Now he's operating from a non-rational stance altogether. According to emotivism, there is no rational substance to our ideas about morality because emotivism says that morality is only emotion.

When we talk about good or evil, we're just emotionally venting. We might as well be grunting at that point. Calling God evil or cancer evil or wicked, it really equates to God, boo, cancer, boo. That's not an argument.

There is no rational teeth to that. Can you see that? And that means emotivism cannot bear the existential weight of the problem of suffering.

That's true.

The second question I have.

Let's do one at a time. Yeah, and I don't entirely know how to answer that. Part of the problem comes when you create a world in a certain way that has certain cause and effect kind of things. So pain is there for a reason.

Pain is there so that you can avoid something that's harmful to the body. When you start feeling pain, you withdraw from it, in a very simplistic sense. It also has a downside. And the downside is that pain is painful and sometimes dying is very painful too.

So there's a trade-off there. Now, I haven't worked all those details out, okay? But what I look at is a larger picture because I can't refine all of those things for my own thinking. The larger picture is we both, we all live in the same world that is filled with pain and suffering.

So then the question is, who has the best explanation writ large about how that works? There's no explanation, or maybe some, are going to go very granular and get the, here's why your baby is suffering in this moment for this thing.

We're not gonna be able to do that. But we can understand why the world is broken. Now, if you don't hold that the world was made for something better, then the world we see right now is not broken. It's just the way it is.

So what Greg is doing here is actually what he should be doing. He's laying a framework for the audience to recast this issue in a proper light. Alex wants to put all the focus on the Christian and his perceived problems with Christianity.

Greg is simply reminding everyone that Alex is actually not off the hook for evil and suffering in the world. Nobody is. Everyone has to wrestle with this existential problem as it turns out. And from the Christian perspective, the atheist answer that there is no such thing as objective, moral, good and evil.

It thoroughly diminishes the experience of those who do suffer. At least Christians can honor what people are feeling and call it for what it is.

It's evil.

When they go through something wrong or when they suffer, that's wrong. Christians can say that. That should not happen. Under the moral subjectivist view, what are they gonna say? Animal suffering, children with cancer,.

Boo, right?

There is no moral assessment whatsoever that we can make that would make any sense. But we constantly make moral assessments, which is why you're bringing this issue up about suffering.

I've been very careful to avoid moral language for precisely this reason.

Let me explain how what I'm, it seems to me that you are bringing, kind of smuggling in moral categories with the suffering issue. Because if I said, I don't care about the suffering of millions of years of organisms that had experienced pain, that kind of casts me in a kind of a negative moral light.

You don't have to say that. It does seem to me that you're smuggling in the notion that suffering is bad morally.

I know that people often do that. I'm specifically avoiding that because I've had this conversation 100 ,000 times. And that's the accusation that gets brought up. And some people do do that, but I'm specifically, you can rewind the tape.

I make great pains. I don't say the problem of evil, for example. I say the problem of suffering. If you said that you didn't care about suffering, I would say that you're probably just being inconsistent with your Christian worldview, for example.

I wouldn't say that you're doing anything immoral in the context of this conversation.

So I'll accept the qualification.

So what I'm saying is that if Christianity were true, we would not expect the kind of suffering that is present in the natural world. I'm not saying that on my worldview, that suffering is.

Okay, so what Alex is doing is one of the things that I offered a moment ago. This is a test of coherence with regard to Christianity. He's not exactly saying that, but that's what's going on. If Christianity says that there is a God and he is good and animal suffering exists, these concepts do not cohere.

These dots do not connect. They actually contradict. And as I said a moment ago, Alex is not bringing all the available evidence to the table before he draws his premature conclusion. And here's what I mean.

The Bible itself takes into consideration suffering. You know, look at this. Second Corinthians chapter four, verse eight. Well, hold on a second. There are all kinds of passages like this, you know, and I won't get into the exhaustive list of these, but this was the first one that came to mind.

Look at this.

We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed. Perplexed, but not driven to despair. Persecuted, but not forsaken. Struck down, but not destroyed. Always carrying in the body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.

Verse 16. So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this, here it is, light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.

Affliction, and particularly this word in the Greek, connotes suffering. It brings in this idea of persecution and distress, you know, which is what Paul was talking about at the outset. That's why I started back up here in verse eight.

But wait a second, Nate. How can God allow this type of suffering if he's good?

Right?

It's because God recognizes that suffering can be useful. Suffering can produce something good on the other side of it. That means that suffering in the biblical scheme is not something to be avoided, but understood as having redemptive potential.

And that only trades on having the proper eternal perspective. That's why Paul finishes this entire sentiment with verse 18.

Look at this.

As we look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

Okay?

See, this doesn't make sense to an atheist.

Why?

Because they don't believe in God. They do not believe in a supernatural realm. And if there is no God, there is no redemption of suffering. There is no heaven. There is no resurrection, you know? And so when people die, that's it.

They cease to exist. But when children of God die,.

Okay?

They are, as Shakespeare suggests, changing stages, you know? If all the world's a stage and every man and woman merely players, well, then the dead or the dying, they walk off stage and onto a new and better and glorified one.

Amen?

That's why this test of coherence does not work for a lot of atheists. It's because they don't really think about these things. They don't consider the full totality of the testimony of scripture. Now, Alex's concern seems to be for animals who suffer not merely people, but he doesn't know what God will do with animals who die.

You know? Nobody does. Because the Bible doesn't really talk about it. But that's the thing. You know, it's, the Bible not talking about it is not the same thing as the Bible saying nothing will be done about it.

And actually the few times that the Bible does talk about this, it seems to suggest that animals themselves will play a role in the restoration of creation and the new heaven and the new earth.

Okay?

Look at this.

Isaiah chapter 11, verse six, the wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together. And the little child shall lead them.

The cow and the bear shall graze. Their young shall lie down together and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's den.

They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. This is an eschatological passage that clearly teaches that in the end, not only will there be a restored harmony and peace between people, there will be a restoration of animals and the natural order as well.

How that plays out with animals who currently live now, I don't know. But that's what I mean. Like there already appears to be an indication for the regard of animals and their restoration in the fullness of time.

Isaiah talks about it here. He picks up this same topic again in chapter 65. Paul alludes to this in Romans eight, when he says that all of creation is groaning for redemption. This is also suggested by John again in Revelation 21 five.

So, I mean, this is what I meant a moment ago. Alex is missing key pieces of information and drawing a premature conclusion that Christianity fails the test of coherence. It doesn't.

Wrong and must be fixed. And there's some moral element. I'm not saying that at all. All I'm saying is that it is unexpected if Christianity were true, that that suffering would be as it is. Well, the way in particular, the non-human animals.

No, I understand that.

Okay.

And the way I'm looking at it.

Do you understand that I'm not smuggling in those moral? Sorry, because you said that I'm smuggling in moral terminology.

No, okay, I buy that. It's okay. I understand your point. Did you have a second question?

I did.

Which is that if the fool is the explanation for, shall we say, the moral evils that people commit, like the Holocaust, the reason why people have a proclivity to commit the Holocaust is because of the betrayal of God's trust.

A few million years ago, whenever it was, you think it was. If Adam and Eve's transgression is the explanation for why humans have a sinful nature and act upon sin, then why did Eve act upon the sin before the fool had happened?

Eve must have had a proclivity to sin in order to portray God in the first place. And so I don't think it suffices to say that the explanation for why we have human beings with a proclivity to sin, like Adolf Hitler, is because of the fool if the fool is a result of a proclivity to sin from Eve.

So we move past something, and I wasn't going to say something, but I just, for the record, I want to call this out. Alex admitted about a minute ago that there's nothing morally wrong with animal suffering on his view.

You can go back and take a look at it, okay? So the question that you have to ask yourself as a fly on the wall in this conversation is, which view has better explanatory power? The one who says there is real evil in the world or the one who says that there isn't?

Now, I'm going to be honest with you. So now he's shifted. This is another question that he wants to ask. I struggle with stuff like this, with questions like these. This is actually fascinating to me.

I heard that Alex went to Oxford and studied theology there. Okay, I'm not fully familiar. I don't watch a lot of his videos, but that's what I heard. And I think that's correct. If that's the case, shouldn't he already know the answer to the question he just asked?

Didn't they teach him this at Oxford? It seems strange that they would skip this part. So the challenge is, how can human beings have a sin nature or a proclivity to sin, as he calls it, from the fall in the garden?

When it appears that Eve already had that type of proclivity before the fall.

Okay.

By the way, what do you think the answer is? Have you ever thought about this? I'll give you the answer, the Christian response, but what do you think? Let me know what your answer is in the comments.

This has been discussed within the church. And I'll just tell you, the problem is in the way that Alex is framing the question, but let's see how Greg responds.

Augustine, the Fall, and Human Freedom Before Sin

Well, the nature of freedom, in my understanding, my view, is that it can initiate things, okay? You don't have to have, in a certain sense, deterministic element in your soul that forces you to act a certain way.

Why did Adam and Eve, Eve in this case, act the way she did? Because she was capable of initiating a free action.

Do you think she acted in a moral way?

And this free action in terms of rebellion, okay? That's the nature of freedom, okay? I can't get into her mind. And I think sometimes asking questions like this, why did she, under those circumstances, do what she did?

I can't answer that.

It's hard not to see questions like these as anything other than uncharitable, particularly from someone who, again, studied theology at Oxford. It's hard to imagine that they would not have taught about the doctrine of the fall.

So there's a couple of categories that go along with this. And I always screw this up because it's in Latin. It's passe pacari and non passe non pacari, okay? These are Latin phrases. They come from Augustine, and it simply refers to before and after the fall and what was going on with Adam and Eve, you know?

What was going on in terms of their choices and decision-making? And I should say, there's another one too. It's passe non pacari, okay? So before the fall, Augustine said that mankind's first freedom was, the freedom of the will, was the ability not to sin.

That's passe non pacari. They also had the ability to sin. That's passe pacari. So Adam and Eve before the fall were both passe pacari and passe non pacari. This, I think this comes from Augustine's writings in the city of God.

So if you want to go deeper on this, I encourage you to look it up. But this is where Alex's question is confused because passe non pacari does not mean that Adam and Eve will never sin. It means that they have the freedom to not sin.

They had a choice in ways that we do not today, you know? And that's how you have to think about it. You have to think about it in contrast to mankind now because now we are all non passe non pacari. That is, we are not able to not sin.

In other words, we are bent spiritually towards sin in a manner that Adam and Eve were not. That's the difference between us and our ancestors. And that's the fall. The corrupt bent we all have now towards sin is a product of Adam and Eve's choice.

But their choice was performed as unbent creatures, you know, those who are not affected and corrupted with sin natures. So what does that mean? You know, well, at the end of the day, Adam and Eve had the ability to choose in a way that we do not.

They were able to obey God and could have chosen obedience without the saving grace of God because they had no corruption to overcome at that point, because this was before the fall. You following me?

That's Augustine's position. That's the position of the reformers, as far as I understand. And I think this is correct.

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as a Test of Obedience

Do you think she did something immoral?

Yeah, she disobeyed God.

And what did she eat from the tree of the...

I'm not sure.

She ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So she ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, implying that before she ate a bit, she didn't have a knowledge of good and evil. How can she have done something immoral before she ate it?

Can I ask you a question?

Hold on.

No, this goes to a contradiction of my view, so I just need to clarify this, okay?

You understand what I'm saying, right?

Yeah, I understand entirely, sure.

If she hasn't eaten from the tree.

Of the knowledge of good and evil, she doesn't know good and evil.

So how does she know that she hadn't yet eaten from the knowledge of good and evil?

Golly, dude. I know to some of you, this is probably compelling. To me, this is a complete misunderstanding of what the Bible is actually teaching. And again, I just, I want to point this out. What Alex is doing is trying to get people to think that there is some kind of contradiction or inconsistency in the Christian worldview.

So actually, let me do this. I'm going to play this one more time because this is key, watch this.

Do you think she did something immoral?

Yeah, she disobeyed God.

And what did she eat from the tree of the?

I'm not sure.

She ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So she ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, implying that before she ate of it, she didn't have a knowledge of good and evil. How could she have done something immoral before she ate it?

Can I ask you a question?

Hold on.

No, this goes to a contradiction of my view, so I just need to clarify this, okay?

You understand what I'm saying, right?

Yeah, I understand entirely, sure.

If she hasn't eaten from the tree.

Of the knowledge of good and evil, she doesn't know good and evil.

So how does she know that it's evil, if she hasn't yet eaten from the knowledge of good and evil?

The answer is, she doesn't need to know good and evil in order to know what the word don't means, right? Look at this. Genesis chapter three, verse one. Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made.

He said to the woman, did God actually say you shall not eat of any tree.

In the garden?

And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it lest you die.

Now there's the word don't, right? Don't eat of the fruit of the tree in the midst of the garden. What's the operative word there?

Don't.

It's like, I mean, if I told you, hey, I want you to come over to my house and hang out in my backyard, I'm gonna be barbecuing. But you know what? Stay away from that one plant over there in the center of my yard.

That's a Connecticut zoink. Do you need to know what a Connecticut zoink is in order to obey me? No, you just need to understand the word don't, right? This is what I mean. The question confuses knowing good and evil with knowing God's clear command.

Eve didn't need to grasp the depths of morality in order to obey God. She simply needed to trust and follow his command. The whole issue was not about ignorance of right and wrong, by the way, but about whether that she would submit to God's authority or exert her own authority.

And I'm gonna show you actually what the Bible is saying about the whole entire scenario here of choosing the fruit. I'm gonna show you that. This is precisely what plays out. Watch this. Genesis chapter three, verse three.

God said, you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree. That's in the midst of the garden. Neither shall you touch it lest you die. But the serpent said to the woman, well, you will not surely die for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

There's the temptation. It's right there. You will be like God, knowing good and evil. Now here's the irony. Had Adam and Eve obeyed God, they would have eventually learned these categories, right?

Why?

Because God would have taught it to them as they spent time with him. That's what he does later for the Israelites. It stands to reason that he would have done this. He would have done the same for Adam and Eve, but instead they chose to disobey God and to seek something their own way.

They didn't wanna know it God's way. They wanted to fulfill their own desire. Desire is key. How do I know that? Because that's what the Bible actually says. Look at verse six. So here's the moment. When the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.

And she also gave some to her husband who was with her and he ate. Why did Eve eat of the fruit? Because she desired to be wise without God. This whole line of questioning is thoroughly confused from Alex.

And I'll show you why that really is in a moment.

Knowledge of good, the word knowledge oftentimes in the Hebrew is talking about experience, okay? It is not talking about a mental awareness, okay? She wouldn't have been, she wouldn't have not been able to even understand the command not to do something if she didn't have those moral categories.

I think that's part of the image of God in man. Consequently, she knew she ought not do it, but she still chose for whatever reason to do that. And that act of disobedience created a big mess.

What that means is that the fool does not explain the proclivity to sin because Eve already had it. It does not explain the existence of evil because knowledge of that already existed before she committed the fool.

It also doesn't explain the origin of suffering because of course, Eve's punishment for eating from the tree of the knowledge of evil.

Well, you're talking about suffering prior to human beings in animals, okay?

I'm talking about suffering in human beings.

Before the fall of man. It does explain the fall of man because human beings made a choice that they could have made differently, but they didn't. And their rebellion against God, it had a consequence.

I don't think it could be called a fall.

And this is why the rest of the world has unfolded the way it has, why there is suffering, evil in the world. A naturalistic explanation can explain, oh, suffering before, suffering after, but you've been very careful to make it clear that there's no moral ramifications to this at all.

It seems most people are pretty aware that there are moral ramifications. So if your worldview does not have a way of making sense or moral intuitions about suffering, even animal suffering, it's not an adequate worldview.

Greg with the jab there. Okay, okay, here's what I want you to see because Alex completely misses what's really going on when Adam and Eve eat the fruit. And I suspect a lot of us don't really fully understand what's going on here for various reasons, you know?

So let's go back to Genesis. And actually I'm gonna go back one chapter to Genesis chapter two, because this is where we actually see the phrase, right? This is God speaking, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat for in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.

Now, a lot of us see this phrase and we make a big deal about the tree. And well, the fact that it was a tree is a big deal. So I don't wanna downplay that. Don't hear what I'm not saying. But what we do not appreciate is the actual phrase, the knowledge of good and evil.

You realize this is a Hebrew idiomatic expression and it has a very particular meaning, not only here, but in other places in the scripture. It refers to something specific. So let me show it to you this way.

There is something in biblical hermeneutics called the rule of first usage. And I've talked about this in previous episodes. The rule of first usage basically says that whenever you find a concept in the Bible for the very first time, that phrase or concept then shapes the way it's understood throughout the rest of the Bible, wherever you are in the Bible.

All right, you with me so far? Did you know that this phrase, the knowledge of good and evil is found in other places in the scripture and it has particular meaning. All right, look at this. Deuteronomy chapter one.

Now in Deuteronomy one, the Lord says that the Israelites will not enter the promised land.

Why?

Well, because they have rebelled. They have become an evil generation. That's verse 35 right there. But okay, but wait a second. God says that the children will enter the land. Okay, well, okay, what's the difference, right?

The adults are condemned for their unbelief and their wickedness, but the children of the adults are excused. Not because they are completely oblivious and they have no idea what good and evil are as categories.

I never even heard of this before, right? It's because they lack full discernment to be able to determine for themselves what is good and what is evil.

Why?

Because they're too young. They're not mature enough. Verse 39, and as for your little ones, who you said would become a prey and your children who today have no knowledge of good and evil, they shall go into the promised land.

Again, they're not completely ignorant of these moral categories. To degrees that are appropriate to their age, they know about these things. No, the Bible is communicating something else. Whereas the adults have exerted their own moral authority and chosen evil, the children are too young to figure this out and are therefore exempt.

All right?

Now this becomes even more clear in 2 Samuel with King David. So in this part of the scripture, there is a, for reference, there is a woman of Tekoa who praises King David for his ability to discern good and evil.

But the concept is exactly the same. It's the knowledge of good and evil. What the lady is saying is, David has the ability to determine what is right and wrong in the same way that a divine being like an angel of God does.

Look at this.

In verse 17, in your servant thought, the word of my Lord, the King will set me at rest. For my Lord, the King, David, is like the angel of God to discern good and evil. The Lord your God be with you.

See, that's David's ability. He can determine what is right and wrong.

Why?

Well, because he's King and he can make those moral judgments with authority.

All right?

Do you see how this phrase is idiomatically understood? This, the knowledge of good and evil is about having the discernment to determine what is right and wrong for oneself.

All right?

Here's one more. In this example, actually, is as clear as day. So Solomon asks the Lord for an understanding mind.

Okay?

This is 1 Kings 3. And he wants to have this kind of understanding mind so that he can perform his duties as a King in a very specific way. And here comes that phrase again. Give your servant, therefore, an understanding mind to govern your people that I may discern between good and evil.