The TRUTH About 1 Atheist vs. 20 Christians (with Than Christopoulos)

Alex O 'Connor annihilates 20 Christians in the latest Jubilee video. Wait, what's that?

He didn't? What is going on here? Who really bested the other? In this video, we're gonna look very closely at three specific encounters, and we're going to highlight

O 'Connor's tactics in order to determine whether or not he actually challenged the

Christians. To help me, I brought on my friend, Than Christopoulos, who was actually one of the Christians that challenged

Alex in the Jubilee video. So without further ado, let's get right into it. Welcome back to Wise Disciple.

My name is Nate, and I'm helping you become the effective Christian that you were meant to be. Before I jumped into this ministry 100%,

I was a pastor and a debate teacher, and so it's from that weird, unique perspective that I make these videos.

Today's gonna be a bit of a deep dive into theology and philosophy. I pray this blesses you, and if you find this useful, make sure to like, sub, and share this one around.

What exactly about suffering makes this unlikely on the condition that God exists?

I think that if God is loving, then he probably wouldn't want his creatures to suffer, and so I think that the fact that they do suffer makes his existence less likely.

Okay, perfect, and is there some specific aspect of suffering that you're particularly honing in on, horrendous, or whatever that is?

In particular, non -human animal suffering, because I think that Christianity has a celebrated tradition of theodicies trying to explain why suffering exists.

Human free will, the development of the soul, higher order goods, all of this kind of stuff, none of which apply to the suffering of non -human animals.

Have you? So I like what Tim is doing already here. So he's cross -examining Alex's claim with some leading questions that I take it are designed to expose some flaws, some errors in his thinking.

Now, I think Tim is gonna, he's gonna set Alex up to reveal how he's not thinking through this well, and it trades on probably smuggling in some of his own presuppositions, and letting that color how he's framing the issue, and then coming to the conclusion that God's existence is unlikely.

Do you know Tim out there? Tim Howard's actually one of my best friends.

So everything he's saying here is something, it's like a system that we use to respond to the problem of evil, and we've built this kind of together, and we're still building it.

And we're actually bringing in a lot of like novel areas of study for this as well.

So we're going into like the psychology of meaning making, the philosophy of the meaning of life, like stuff you've never heard of before going into the problem of evil.

And so, yeah, everything Tim is saying here, I would endorse. I would probably pitch it a different way just to match my own style.

And I was really wanting to actually go up after him so I could finish off the train.

But yeah, I know, long story short, yeah, I know Tim, he's one of my best friends. Did you guys troubleshoot some of this before you went up, like the night before, or like the week before?

Yeah, well, so something people don't know is I was actually like really sick when we were here.

Oh wow. I was actually very surprised they let me stay on set. I had like tons of Gatorade bottles with me.

So we were troubleshooting and role -playing and like crazy, but at the same time, I was trying to rest up as much as I can.

And we were in our hotel room together, just pacing back and forth, role -playing back and forth with each other.

Tim would say something, I'd be like, no, do not say that, people will not understand what you're saying. And he would do the same thing to me.

So who does the, so I heard role -playing, so good for you, that's a debater move. And you're a debater, so that's great.

Who does the better Alex impersonation when you're role -playing? Probably neither of us.

I can't nail British accent to save my life. Oh yeah, yeah. You know, one of the things too that I noticed here was, cause

I thought of this as I was, so I watched this once all the way through. And one of the questions that I had, and maybe this came up with you or Tim, is like, what is that criteria that Alex is using to determine whether or not something is likely?

Cause the claim is that suffering makes God's existence unlikely. So specifically, what is

O 'Connor's criteria to assess whether or not God exists? Does he ever give one? Yeah, well, so he doesn't necessarily, it's kind of implicitly assumed and Tim, I think rightfully so, just doesn't question that because I think the methodology there is sound.

The basic idea is just you're gonna point to a data point and say, hey, if this hypothesis is true, the hypothesis here being

God exists, if this is true, something I would not expect to see is animal suffering, pointless animal suffering.

And because this is unexpected on the condition God exists, this is gonna therefore be evidence against God's existence.

Does that make sense what I'm trying to say? Well, no, it totally makes sense, but he becomes the arbiter of what is unlikely, right?

Or what he should not expect to see. Yeah, and he tries to, he tries to kind of give somewhat of an argument to tell us why it's unexpected, which is, well, a loving

God wouldn't want to have pointless suffering, but that's not really enough, especially because it assumes, like Tim's gonna point out later, a value theory, which is, well, hold on, just because you love somebody doesn't mean you're gonna stop all the suffering and all this other stuff.

Like there's a lot more that goes into this and they try to get into that, but also just not enough time to like cash a lot of that stuff out, so.

I hear you. Well, let's see what Tim does. Have you heard of the axiological expectation mismatch problem?

I have not. Okay, so philosophers of religion have started to understand that the thing that actually generates a problem between God and suffering is actually the value system you attach to the very attribute of perfect lovingness.

Because the problem of evil is an internal critique, you have to look at a very specific version of theism and how it defines perfect lovingness.

I want to present to you a version where my version of perfect lovingness does not actually constitute a problem and a misalignment, that mismatch between the suffering of animals, that's to say the profusion of suffering of animals and the existence of God.

So let's hear it. What kind of God are we imagining that would allow and oversee and do nothing to prevent billions of years of untold animal suffering?

Right, so again, I mean, this is sort of what I was thinking in my mind before we got on was like, let's expose some of the moves that Alex is making here, right?

And I like what Tim is doing. He's talking to the value system, right, that Alex is using. If there's any way to determine what

Alex values and how he uses those values to come to the conclusion that he has, then that's great for conversation.

And I think what Alex is gonna say is that he believes unjustified suffering is not enough.

Like there's a problem. And that's why he says God's existence is unlikely, which again, simply raises the question, how does he know which suffering is unjustified and which isn't?

Exactly, well, and there's actually a philosophical sleight of hand that happens in this conversation a little bit later on that I don't know if you caught it or not when you watched it, but if you want,

I'll like, I'll cut it when it happens and then I'll see if you catch it. Because you're spot on.

Yeah, I actually would agree with Alex. God is, any instance of unjustified suffering is going to be evidence against God's existence.

The problem is, what does the word unjustified actually mean here?

And that's what Tim's getting at because you can say an instance of suffering is unjustified if you assume a particular value system, but the point is, this is an internal critique, which means if Alex wants to say this argument works, whatever

Christian or theist he's talking to, he has to adopt the value system of that particular Christian or theist.

Exactly. Let's stomp and say, well, I'm not saying Alex is a closeted hedonist, right?

But you can't just say I'm a hedonist and therefore pleasure is the maximal good.

I'm gonna expect the most pleasurable kind of world on the condition God exists. Well, that's not really gonna affect my worldview.

All that says is that the conjunction of God's existence in hedonism is false, not that God's existence is false.

I get the feeling, I'm so grateful you pointed that out, that this basically is going to color the entire conversation that Tim is gonna have with Alex and then

Alex with others, including yourself. We're gonna take a look at that too, but it's this hokey pokey. I'm half in, half out, so I'm gonna hold on to some of my atheistic presuppositions, but also

I'm gonna internally critique Christianity. You can't do that. Yeah, exactly, and I think this is part of the remnant of Alex's old new atheism coming out a little bit because anytime things, at least this is how it comes across, anytime things start going in a way that's not beneficial for his atheism, you'll see that new atheism starting to creep out again, where he'll just kind of divert into a more

I'm not convinced type perspective, rather than really pushing back and engaging with the substance that's before him.

The Dillahunty move, right. Yeah. Let's see a little bit more. Right, so you're talking about non -prevention.

Or setting up the system that is natural selection, such that it relies upon things like predation and disease.

Well, the first part is I don't agree with the whole setting up the system part. So I'm not one of those theists that believes that God does this select and pick idea of creating worlds.

I don't think that God actually creates worlds. I think that God lets worlds develop, a hoarding in a certain way, but because God can oversee an overarching narrative, he knows exactly how he can redeem anything.

Go, Soak. Oh, the first time, sorry, go ahead. Could God have made it such that animals were all herbivores instead of carnivores?

Can I say something about that really quick? Yeah, sure, yeah. This was one of the most misunderstood aspects of what

Tim was trying to get at in their conversation. Like this was the moment, and I knew as soon as those words came out,

I saw flags come up. And even now, I notice that comments coming up, because what they heard is, well,

God didn't create earth or God didn't create the universe or anything like that. All Tim is really saying here is that before creation, it's not that like God had, like reality one, two, and three before him, and then he sees everything into the future, and then everything happens in like a static line kind of a thing.

Instead, what Tim is saying is like, no, you have types of worlds that God wants to create, and he creates like an initial world segment, and then from there, the things that come about are not necessarily coming about, he knows they're gonna come about, but they come about through non -deterministic and non -fatalistic means, if that makes sense.

And so there's kind of a co -creation and collaboration from God behalf on creation to kind of create the narrative of reality that's coming about.

That's a really sophisticated view, but it's really important because then that completely takes down the thing

Alex said prior, does that make sense? No, it totally, well, and this is one of a number of explanations that Christians have given throughout history for how things work, how

God created and all of that, and so that's fine, because I'm sure somebody in the audience is like, well, that's not my view, that's fine.

But this is supposed to be, again, an internal critique of Christianity, which means that if you have a

Christian that is not because it's ad hoc or they're trying to answer Alex, but because they actually were just trying to understand how

God has created, and they have come up with this explanation that he needs to take that seriously, and it appears that he has not.

Yeah, exactly. Wow. He could totally do that. Okay, so had he done that, here's an instant way to reduce by orders of magnitude the amount of suffering that exists.

But hold on. Well, so the carnivore thing, right? So this assumes that carnivores are somehow inflicting unjustified suffering on animals, which again, from Alex's limited perspective of looking at things with his own two eyes, it seems unjustified, but he has no idea whether God, even

God was the one who set up this carnivorous system in the first place. I have a friend who has a theory, and actually, it's not novel, he didn't come up with it.

C .S. Lewis has brought this up. Plantinga has brought this up. It's the angelic fall hypothesis. And again, it's this idea that physical evil, natural evil, what

Alex is reaching for right now is not actually God's fault, that the corruption of creation, which the

Bible does touch on later, particularly Romans, Paul talks about this, is groaning at the chance to be fully redeemed through the work of Jesus Christ.

And so it's like, okay, well, if that's the case, how did we get there? Angelic fall hypothesis is also something that you could put on the table, but Alex, I don't think

Alex knows any about any of this. Yeah, yeah, I know 100%. The other thing is, there's a lot of answers to this particular question too, but it also goes into a different philosophical sleight of hand that Alex is gonna go into as well a little bit later.

And so I'll keep it there for now. Just put that aside for a second, and we'll bring it back up as this progresses.

Okay. That's particularly assuming a value theory already that I haven't told you I'm adopting that has a problem with the evil.

So I have to give you my value theory first for you to show that misalignment. Let's hear it. Perfect, okay. So my value theory says that it's not, the most important thing about a sentient creature is not what merely happens to them.

It's about the total timeline of their life and where their life permanently ends. Meaning, if you were to judge an author of a narrative and the first few chapters, let's say, there's a lot of bad things happening, but the end ends with this crescendo where there's victoriousness, there's redemption, there's beauty, and everyone in the story actually endorses their entire existence that they lived.

They can look at their whole, hold on. They can look at the total timeline and they actually each subjectively come to the conclusion,

I'm glad I was made and I totally see what my suffering was for. That's the particular I'm using with.

So we have to judge, hold on. John Hicks says, we have to judge the very nature of God's lovingness by what he does in the end, not these few time slices that we observe right now.

For you to show that there's a problem, you have to show to me that the suffering of animals cannot be transformed, are intrinsically cut off from being transformed into a life that they will endorse.

There's a couple of theses on the table. Okay, sure, go ahead. So help those of us who are not tracking in the greater audience.

Is Tim pointing to the promised redemption of a physical creation? Is that what he's doing? Correct, yeah.

So let me break it down a little bit more too because he started this off with a particular question that he's answering, right?

Because my axiology, and I would agree with him here, is that the most important thing that happens to any agent or creature, right, is how they integrate their life and how they integrate their suffering into their psyching, their meaning making capabilities and all this other stuff.

And so all that really means is God is justified in allowing suffering so long as that event in my life is not the type of event that whether it's in this life or the next life, it's not an event that I can look at my life on the whole and go, yeah, my life was worth living.

That is the point he's driving at. And so when he says, you know, you're not gonna judge a book by looking at one chapter and you see this one battle, you're gonna look at the whole thing, especially the ending.

And if you look at the ending and you see that all these people look back on their lives and see them as worth living, including animals, then

God is justified in allowing all that suffering. Does that make sense? Yeah, so it seems like Tim is saying that animals at a certain point will have a level of sentience where they can assess these things.

Yeah, and so this is where things can get a little dicey, depending on Christian traditions and what you wanna believe in or what you're against.

And I fall in the camp, and Tim does as well, where I think all animals will be universally redeemed.

And I think they'll be either granted some sort of praiseworthy status, and he brings it up in this discussion, where just like when you pet a dog, the dog feels something.

You can tell the dog is feeling something because it's being praised and it accepts the praise and endorses the praise and is happy and all that stuff.

Other philosophers and theologians, and if you even look at church history, I think Maximus, the professor was one of them, the confessor, sorry, where they actually believe that animals will gain some sort of rationality as well.

And both of those ideas on the table, I'm very open to. Which one do I lean on? I'm not too sure.

But - Part of this is that the Bible doesn't say a whole lot.

Yeah. It says key things in certain places, but doesn't really fill in a lot of the blanks.

And so again, I mean, I spoke about Romans 8, right? The creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

And so it's like, what? The whole creation has been groaning for this? Like, what does even that mean?

But then we have Isaiah. Isaiah says, right? Like, the wolf shall dwell with the lamb.

And it's like, there will come a day when this paradise will actually take place. How? How does this work?

And this is where you're filling in the blanks. Yeah, exactly. And so the main, the really big key here is that a lot of people might even say that this is an ad hoc move.

And what, if Alex would have said that, or if anybody does say that, there's a few ways

I would respond. One is that I think you can actually motivate this idea of this post -mortem animal life independent of Christian tradition.

And you can actually motivate it strictly from theism to an animal afterlife. You can kind of get like an a priori philosophical argument.

But also you can kind of support this idea through scripture and through church tradition as well. And so the main point here is just because we are putting this on after the fact, that doesn't mean that it's ad hoc and therefore hurts the

Christian story at all. It's only gonna be ad hoc if the probability of an animal afterlife given theism is really low.

And we have arguments independent of any of these discussions to say, no, the probability of an animal afterlife given theism is actually really high or even entailed.

And so therefore it's not ad hoc. Does that make sense? Yeah. I'm sorry. No, no, no,

I'm tracking you. And this would absolutely make my mother extremely happy. Let's see a little bit more.

Cool. Are you talking about the end of their life is in their end of life on earth or are you talking about the afterlife? Antimortem, postmortem.

Okay, because if you're just talking about life on earth, then I would say that if you were, if you had an author writing a book. Okay, wait,

I'm sorry to pause so quick. Notice what just happened. So he asked Tim a question and Tim said, antimortem and postmortem.

In other words, when the animal's alive, after it's dead as well. And then Alex goes, well, if you're just talking about when it's alive. Yep. Dude, he's not even said.

If you have a book and you see this one snapshot, what really matters at the end of the day is the ending of that book.

And Alex just talking about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've noticed what

Alex does often is he wants to keep reshifting the frame.

So it's always back to his frame, his way of thinking. He's gonna explain it very articulately because he's actually a pretty smart guy, but that's not, in a lot of cases, not substantively answering the challenges that he's facing.

I'm trying to figure out the relationship between that author and the person in the book. And that person in the book shows up for five seconds in the first chapter and is a child who almost immediately dies of cancer in an incredibly painful way.

And there's no development. There's no sort of bringing back to life and suddenly everyone's grateful for it. It is just this miserable, tragic experience.

And I asked, well, what did the author, not want to do for the story of the book, but want to do for that character? I think it'd be pretty damning.

And also when it comes to animals, we're talking about animals who are predated on from the moment that they begin existence.

They sort of have disease. Zebras, when they're killed by lions, are often too big to be killed instantly.

So they die over minutes with their windpipes caught in the jaws of a lion. How can this be developing a zebra, which by the way, probably doesn't even have the same kind of first -person conscious experience that humans do in order to sort of rationalize and abstract and learn from their sort of past and morally develop in that way.

They just suffer. And what kind of God could oversee this? Okay. A God who promises that he will redeem the corruption of creation, right?

Exactly. And he smuggles in his own views again and puts aside all of Christian theology and the things that Tim is talking about again, right?

Right. Because he says, well, what if we have this child that dies and there's no afterlife and all these other things, then how has

God justified? But it's like, that's not what's on the table on my worldview. Why are we smuggling in this idea that the child's just gonna die and there's no afterlife?

That's right. Where's that coming from? Yeah, well, not from us. That's why this is not an internal critique of Christianity because there are answers to these questions.

It just seems like Alex doesn't like those answers or whatever is his motivation, but therefore he wants to say

God's existence is unlikely. What somebody should ask him at some point is what he makes of the promises of God for the physical creation and to physical animals by taking him to those passages, right?

Romans 8, Isaiah 11, there's others, right? Like, what do you think about that?

Like, if this is an internal critique, is it off limits to bring in scripture at this point? No, no, it's totally within the bounds of what we can do.

And if you do that, Alex is just gonna say, well, I just don't believe that's true. But that just begs the question against the worldview you're trying to argue against in the first place again.

Yeah. So what's your take on this? Yeah, what did Tim call it?

The mismatch problem? Yeah. Do you think that this was a good approach for Tim or so far, what do you think is happening?

Yeah, so the axiological expectation mismatch problem, it's not the approach to the problem of evil, right?

I actually liked that he brought it up because we were talking about this before we went on. And I told him, if you're gonna bring this up, you have to do it in a good way, not a way that makes you look like a snob.

And he pulled it off perfectly because everybody's laughing, right? But it's an important part to bring up and I'm glad he did it.

Whether or not the setting was the best place to be conducive to this conversation, I'm not sure yet.

But it's an important part because it goes again, back to that original point I was trying to make, which was, hey, this data point that you're pointing at is only gonna be evidence against God's existence if it's unexpected in God's existence.

But the only way you're gonna know if something is expected or unexpected on God's existence is gonna be in light of some sort of value theory that you can join to God's existence, right?

So again, much like if hedonism is true, well, and God exists, if those two things are true,

I'm gonna expect a world where pleasure's maximized and pain minimized. But if we live in a world where things like courage and virtue and love and sacrifice and forgiveness.

Beauty and redemption, all these things are really important, valuable things, which I would argue they are, then

I'm gonna expect a reality like the one we live in. Right? Right. That's good.

One of my favorite quotes from a philosopher that I'm really affected by, he in his book on animal suffering even says something along the lines of, he's like talking about the

Lord of the Rings and all these really beautiful stories. And he says like, we all long in our deepest selves to be part of a story like this, even if we don't have the courage to face and pursue them ourselves.

In our deepest selves, we want to be part of them. We just don't seek them out of fear. And I think that's exactly what's happening when it comes to these discussions as well is people

I think in their deepest selves recognize that the story of reality that we do live in is beautiful.

It's just, we also value comfort and pleasure and all these other things. And sometimes we let our fears and our selfishness get in the way of properly assessing what's truly valuable.

That's good. That's good. So there's a lot of assumptions on the table again. Again, you're assuming a particular value system that I'm not laying out.

I'll tell you what I'm assuming here. What I'm assuming here is that God would, a good God would not allow unnecessary suffering to obtain. Okay, gotcha.

Here comes the philosophical slight. Here comes the philosophical slight of hand. Do you agree with that? We can talk about unnecessary suffering.

We're talking about the justifying norms for suffering. You're saying it has to be in terms of necessity, which is an evil is only authorizable by God if it's in connection to a greater good or prevention of a greater evil, correct?

If there's some kind of justification for allowing that suffering. Yeah, but you're saying it's a necessary connection. Why are you, what's the term necessity doing here?

So perhaps I should say unjustified instead of unnecessary. Okay, so we both agree. I do not believe that God can authorize justifying.

You got it? Did you catch it? Yeah. Right? Well, it's a shift. Yeah. All he did is change his language, but said the same exact thing by assuming value theory.

Cause the value theory is saying, that Alex is assuming is saying, God is only going to allow justified suffering, which we both agree with.

The question is, what is that justified suffering? Tim is saying, well, it sounds like you're saying is that the only type of suffering that's going to be justifiable is suffering that is going to be necessary for the unique instances of goods it's coming, that God is trying to bring about.

Like, in other words, if my son falls off the bike, I'm only justified in allowing that fall.

If that fall is going to bring about things that could not come about if it wasn't for that fall.

But I'm going to say, well, that's kind of ridiculous, actually in practice, we don't really live our lives like that. And we don't think of justification that way.

We think of justification in a slightly different way, which is God is going to be justified in allowing suffering so long as some good can come out of it.

But also so long as that suffering is intrinsically redeemable in suffering that the agent can look back on and retroactively endorse and say, yeah, my worth is still worth living in spite of that.

Do you think that Alex, just a lot of what Tim is offering him is just going right over his head.

And so he's just trying to, I don't know, remain composed and then just say what he can.

That was kind of my take in a lot of this engagement. Yeah, I can't say for certain.

I feel like more than likely, this is something Alex has never run across before. And so it's really easy to think, to like hear the words that Tim is saying in this instance and think, okay, he's running this argument because he's been doing it.

Alex has been doing this for so long. You might think like, yeah, I'm not really going to hear anything new here. And so you might just assume he's trying to run like some sort of argument you've heard before, but he's just saying it in a weird way.

That's like the charitable invitation. Right, I mean, this is. He's just trying to survive.

Yeah, this is why I just, I don't know if I said this right at the outset. I absolutely despise this kind of format.

Because what we're trying to do is take the deepest riddles of the mystery of the universe that are revealed in the special revelation of God, right, through Christianity.

And we're trying to what, splice it up into, ah, we're going to say a bunch of stuff and then we're going to get flagged if somebody doesn't immediately understand what we're saying and dismissed.

Like that's a recipe for disaster. In front of you, you have people raising flags in your peripherals. I'm not complaining.

Like we knew what we were signing up for, but we also didn't anticipate how tough it was actually going to be.

Yeah, I hear you. I agree with you. Let's keep going. Tell me how that example that I gave you, the deer with its leg starving is justified.

Because it's intrinsically redeemable. And the norms I'm working with is not this necessity condition that you're working with.

Mine is about redeemable suffering, redeemability, or we call it defeasibility.

If that suffering can be defeated within the creature's life, and I'll define what I mean by defeat, which is that they can retroactively look back at what they went through and integrate it into their life history where they look at their life.

Hold on, I have to interrupt because the example I gave you is one where the deer dies. Yes, the deer dies. But here's the thing. He doesn't get this at all.

It won't be like brought back to life. Yeah, he's not tracking what Tim is saying.

You're probably talking about this post -mortem example. I'm gonna put one thesis on the table. There's two philosophers that defend exactly what this goes through.

One defends that animals will be given a martyrdom status while God will be able to present himself in a way to animals in the afterlife, such that in the same way you could give praise to a dog and a dog emotionally recognizes that he's loved and that his life is worth living, right?

To these animals that suffered like that, there's one view on the table, which is that God will give them a praiseworthy status where they will be able to actually see that.

Can we talk about that claim? Because these animals are suffering for what? I mean, God might cause them to suffer a bunch. God might cause them to suffer a bunch and then essentially redeem them in the afterlife.

But what for? Like why do that? For their redemption, right? He's answering his own question.

It's not just that. Okay, so this is another philosophical side of hand that happens here. Tim is talking about justification, not motivation.

There's a huge distinction between the two because the suffering is only unexpected if it's unjustified.

If we can point to the fact that it's justified, it's no longer evidence against God's existence. What Alex is asking for is a psychological motivation for why

God would allow these things to happen, but we don't have to give that in that moment because the moment we give that, by the way, if it's sound and it works and it's well -connected to the idea that God exists, now that suffering becomes expected on the condition

God exists and is therefore evidence for God's existence. So there's a slight of hand here happening.

I don't know if he's doing it on purpose because there's a really important distinction between divine justification and divine motivation.

We don't have to give the motivation. All we need to do is give the justification. That's good. This is about to wrap up because Tim is about to get,

I think, voted out. If I were to punch you in the face and then give you $20 ,000 afterwards, you might be grateful for the $20 ,000, but why couldn't

I just give you the $20 ,000? Well, see, so that's assuming, so I saw your debate with Trent. You've been voted out by the majority.

Please return to your seat. So in your opinion, did Tim, is that the right approach, what

Tim did? Was there a better one to take? So this is total hindsight question now. What do you think? Yeah, I mean,

I would have personally worded things differently, but not because I don't like the way

Tim has presented stuff it's just my own style to present things. I can't think of a better way that Tim could have gone about this.

I think he did a really good job and I think people were voting him out because they weren't understanding what he's saying.

And I think people were voting him out because they wanted their shot at him too. Like you even showed it on the camera.

Like people had their flags raised, but then they're like nodding their head in approval of what he's saying at the same time.

I'm like, what are you doing? Put your flag down. My feedback to Tim right after this was, hey, you showed a little too much of how much you know.

And what I meant by that was like, you're talking about all these different theses that you can talk about. Just give one and run with it and go from there to save time and not give them.

You get what I'm trying to say? Yeah. I think that was maybe the one thing he did wrong. I have a critique of this as well.

I feel like we could sprinkle that in because actually you're up next and maybe we can talk about that as it applies to you.

My next claim is that there is insufficient evidence to believe in the resurrection. Here comes

Dan. Here comes Dan. Those were the only moments

I could actually get up. I just didn't want to hurt anybody. That's good. The interdisciplinary question for the resurrection of Jesus.

And in my experience, it kind of boils down into two categories. The prior probability of the resurrection of Jesus and the data itself.

So what I'm really - So actually before we get into it, so we talked about this beforehand. This was not the real first time you engaged

Alex. Can you tell us quickly about that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's two times you'll see in the video that I'm engaging

Alex. This first time is actually the second time. It's just edited to look like it's our first interaction.

The first time I talked to him was on Christology. The second time is on the resurrection. Okay. So this is

Alex. He's already kind of gotten a sense of what you can do and where are you going to take him. So let's see what happens.

Interested in the historical case of the resurrection of Jesus. Okay. I want to ask a clarifying question because I would love to talk about the data.

But if I were to give you a model of the gospels that I would call like the historical reportage model, which would say something along the lines of the authors of the gospels were close to the times and places of the historical

Jesus. They rooted their historical work in eyewitness testimony and did not feel the freedom to make up historical facts.

Because of that, we can extract all the testimonies from these gospels and we have access to what the original eyewitnesses actually said and did.

Okay. So for me and my audience real quick, unpack this historical reportage model and also tell us what the goal was going into this.

Yeah. So I'm going to get a little dorky. So just tell me to dial it back if I need to.

Because you'll notice, I actually began by asking a question about the prior probability of the resurrection. And which is a really important thing because to the skeptic, you can give them all the evidence you want for a miracle and it'll still never be enough in your testimony.

And that boils back down to Hume. If your audience is familiar with them, Hume is going to say something like no amount of testimony is ever going to be enough to ever overcome the low prior probability of a miracle.

The prior probability of something is just the probability that some event happened independent of any evidence that you have considering just what you know about the world.

And so I asked the question the way I did because what I wanted to stop from the outset is giving him all this evidence and then for him to just go, well that's not enough,

I'm not convinced. Right. And then wasting all that time when I could have just talked about what's really more important, which is the prior probability.

From there, the historical reportage model, for more context, there's a huge debate amongst even

Christian scholars between two models of the gospels. The historical reportage model's gonna say that the gospels are primarily a history and when there's differences in the gospels, we can explain those through harmonization rather than fact -changing literary devices.

On the other side of the coin, you have other scholars who are gonna be literary device theorists and they're gonna explain those things by saying, well they felt the freedom to do fact -changing literary devices just like any other

Greco -Roman author would have felt. A big example is. As long as the meat of what they're relaying was actually historical.

Correct. So one example might be, people will point out this contradiction between John's gospel and the synoptics where John's gospel moves the date of the crucifixion to Thursday where the synoptics have it on Friday and people will explain that by saying, well

John moved it to Thursday for X, Y, Z theological reasons. But a surface -level reading of the

Greek text will show you that John uses the word badoskevi, which is Friday. There's no disagreement. Right, right.

Right, but that's kind of the difference here. I fall in the camp of the historical reportage model and this is really important because if you pay really close attention to sophisticated skeptical arguments against the reliability of the gospels,

Alex is gonna say things like Matthew made up the flight to Egypt for X, Y, Z theological reasons or to put

Jesus into prophecy or this author made up this fact for X, Y, Z theological reasons.

So therefore we can't take any of it as historical. He might say you can take it as historical but you just can't trust enough in the reliability of these gospels to actually have what the original eyewitness has actually said.

So what's interesting here is you anticipated where he was gonna go because that's precisely what he ends up doing.

So tell us a little bit more about that. This is the night before or several days before.

Are you thinking about what he's going to say and then formulating your response in anticipation of that?

It's kind of multi -edged here and I mean this in the most humble way possible but if you watch this interaction very closely,

I think you'll be able to tell that I'm like three, four steps ahead of him the whole time. Like the moment he starts speaking,

I know exactly where he's probably gonna go except for one moment. But so one end of this is the fact that I've just kind of been doing this long enough to know what all the arguments are.

I've studied the skeptical scholars and I know almost every argument out there when it comes to this stuff.

And on the other end, I just watched hours and hours and hours of Alex talking about this.

He's done this before. And I've just triaged his favorite points and it sounds really dorky but if you've watched like Casino Royale where they're counting cards and doing probabilities, it's like that's going on in my head as this is happening.

Oh yeah. No, everything that you're doing is precisely what somebody should do in debate.

So I mean, good for you. I wanna play this and then I wanna ask you a question because I think it'll help those who are trying to keep up with the historical reportage model.

So who do you think are the eyewitnesses that the testimony is being based on? So this is where I'm not a walking encyclopedia but I would say if you looked at all the testimonies, we have 21 unique testimonies that are gonna be polymodal in nature.

They're gonna have semblances of independence and interdependence and some dependence because of the synoptic problem, all that stuff.

If we were to get there, would that be enough for you to say the probability that the resurrection happened relative to any other countering theory is higher?

No, I didn't think so. So that tells me then that one - Okay, that's the wrong answer, hold on. It could be the prior probability still.

That's the issue. Wait, yeah, tell me. Because if that's not enough evidence - It's not that. I think that the authors of the

Gospels, specifically on the resurrection, can't be trusted to be giving an accurate account of what happened. Yeah, that's why I'm asking if we had this historical reportage model and that was true.

So tell me, is this a question about his intellectual honesty?

So if the historical reportage model were true, would Alex concede then that the resurrection did happen, or at least it's trustworthy, the account?

And so you're seeking to determine the exact conditions that would cause him to change his mind. Am I on the right track?

Yeah, and more precisely what I'm doing there by asking that question, again, is I'm asking that conditional question because if he says no to that, that tells me historical reportage model arguing is a waste of time.

It's all about the prior probability of the resurrection that I have to focus on. So it's determinative too for you.

You're trying to figure out which, it's almost like you had briefs in your mind mentally that now you're trying to figure out which next brief to pull out, right?

Yeah. Did you have high hopes that you were gonna get a moment out of him? No, no.

Or was this more of you flagging to the audience, hey, pay attention to this. He is unwilling to concede any reasonable scenario for the resurrection.

Yeah, that was what I was trying to get at. Well, I was trying to have an honest conversation and then the backup plan is like, okay, if he's not gonna play ball, hopefully the audience can just pick up on the moves that he's making.

And I just, I messed up at trying to do that because I'm not that good at debate. Well, he's fast.

So let's see what happens. If it were true that they were reporting historical events then it would be a historical event, yeah. So let me clarify one.

I don't think that they are. Yeah, I got where you're coming from. Let me clarify one thing here. The historical reportage model does not entail what the reporting actually happened.

All I'm saying is that we can extract from there is that these were the actual eyewitness testimonies to the risen

Jesus. Okay, so I have a question for you. Do you think that Jesus is the only person outside of the people that Jesus and the apostles rose from the dead?

Do you think that he's the only person in human history that's risen from the dead? Yes. Want me to explain that pause?

Yeah. Yeah. I wasn't expecting that question. And so that pause in my head, I'm going, where is he going to go with this?

Because I want to make a resurrection resuscitation distinction. But if that's not where he's going with this, then he could go this way on this route and this route.

Yeah. Yeah, so I was just not expecting that question. That's all good, man.

Matthew's gospel in Matthew chapter 27 says that at the time of the death of Jesus, the graves of Jerusalem opened and the holy ones got out of their graves.

And then interestingly says, then after the resurrection appeared to many, many of them walked around appearing to many.

Do you think that that happened? So I would just say that. So at this point, have you in your mind, have you had a chance to flesh out what you wanted to do with Alex?

Or is he sort of trying to shift and change the subject on you? He's shifting to gospel reliability at this point.

And so he's bringing up this issue with the raising of the saints in Matthew's gospel.

It's not mentioned anywhere else. And I knew exactly where I wanted to go with that. But this is where I, in my opinion, he started filibustering me and not letting me answer the questions, if that makes sense.

Yeah, well, it seems like that question, the question that he's asking now, and I've actually,

I've seen him do this to other people. It's driven more out of a sense of incredulity, in my opinion, and not out of,

I don't know, some internal critique concern or unique challenge of historicity. What is not given for the resurrection accounts of the other saints that he's talking about now at the end of Matthew 27, are actual eyewitness testimonies from the apostles along the same lines as when they claimed to eat with Jesus, when they claimed to touch his wounds, et cetera.

So like, even if we wanted to suggest that the account in Matthew 27 is something other than a real historical event,

I take it that's your view. I think that's mine. I don't think it should be - Oh, I actually think that, I take the view that this probably happened.

Oh, okay. We can dig into that if you want to. Well, I was gonna say, I don't think it should be immediately evaluated as the same thing as the historical account of Jesus' resurrection.

And I'm now paraphrasing other biblical scholars who have said the same thing. But what, so what do you think about that?

Yeah, so my perspective on this is, I think this probably actually happened. I just don't think it was a big event in the sense of a quantitative thing that happened.

Skeptics themselves even like to point out that most people weren't buried in a rock -cut tomb or any of these other things.

And Matthew explicitly references tombs. And I think these were resuscitations as well.

The fact that no other gospels talk about this isn't really troublesome to me though.

And the reason why is because at the end of the day, it's an argument from silence. And the long story short is when you're doing probabilistic reasoning, silence when it comes to history is not that strong of an argument.

At best, it's maybe very, very weak evidence against an event. We have tons of places where our intuitions about what an author would and would not mention or even know or not know about are just completely subverted.

And so this is where I would have gotten dorky with him if he would have let me, but we couldn't get there.

I mean, what you're saying is there are many different reasons why somebody will take up a pen and report on the same event or on the same occasion in history.

And if they have competing motivations for that, they're gonna leave out certain things and put in others.

So yeah, that totally makes sense. Let's keep going. That if the historical reportage model is true, then yes.

But hold on. The problem there is those are also talking about resuscitations most likely, not resurrections.

Yeah, but what we're talking about here is the graves of Jerusalem opening and many people getting out of their graves, walking around Jerusalem and appearing to many people.

If I say yes, what's at stake there? If this happened, this would be the most extraordinary event that's ever happened in human history. And yet -

And then you're gonna make an argument from silence. No, the most extraordinary moment in all of history is Jesus' resurrection, right?

Yeah. There is no religion that has persisted for 2000 years around unnamed saints that walked out of the tombs in Matthew 27, but there is one centering on the person and work of Jesus Christ, right?

Not only that, but Alex is just presuming what the ancient Jewish writer would have been thinking.

Like he's anachronistically making a prediction of what somebody would deem worth writing about based off of what he thinks is gonna be extraordinary or important and all this other stuff.

But that's not how you do history. Well, and that's, but again, I mean, this is what I meant by incredulity.

He is a materialist, or at least he speaks like one. I don't know where he is actually on that. And so of course that's extraordinary that people came back from the dead, but when you have a people that actually believe in the supernatural realm and believe in miracles and take it for granted, then of course that's not actually that extraordinary.

You're right. It's amazing. I appreciate what you're doing here.

I have a question for you about strategy in just a moment from there. Some arguments from silence do work. It is not reported.

I understand that, but then that's only one piece of evidence that you're gonna use. It's not reported anywhere else. It's not reported in any of the other gospels.

I understand. It's not in Josephus. It's not in Acts. So that's one data point. It's not anywhere. So, but hold on, let me finish this thought because this is important.

Most Christian scholars, I think, so people like Dale Allison, for example, believe that this didn't actually happen.

Well, I'm not interested in what Allison's gonna say. The door that this opens. What I'm interested in is what the data says. So if we have the historical reportage model, right?

But you keep saying we have this model. That's fine. Let me give you some evidence for the historical reportage model.

If this model is true, one of the things I would expect to see would be things like undesigned coincidences within the gospels.

Yeah. Tiny little interlocking. Okay, for the sake of time, I understand what you're saying. So I think that a lot in the gospels is historically reliable and a lot is not.

Things like undesigned coincidences are really - So are you taking a pericope by pericope approach to this or how is like, what methodology are you using?

I'm taking a story by story. I don't think that the - I think that's the, I don't think that's a good methodology. I don't think that the graves of Jerusalem were opened. I don't think that there were people walking around -

I understand where you're coming from. But if that's the case, then that means that at least the author of Matthew is willing to invent stories of resurrection in order to make a theological point.

You're making a big inference there, right? Because - Yeah. So two questions for you. Yeah. What's running through your mind at this moment, right?

Cause now it's sort of becoming the view, no offense to anybody who likes that show. And also -

I don't even know what that is. Oh yeah. Oh, good. Amen. But also why, so zoom all the way out.

Why take this particular approach with regard to the historical reportage model?

Why not just go in and sit down and just pepper him with cross -examination questions, revealing the flaws in his claim?

Yeah. I don't know what was going - at that point in time,

I'm going, man, I can't get a word out and I don't know how to get out of this without looking like a jerk.

That is what's going through my head at this moment. Because he's throwing all these claims at me and I'm like,

I have to refute all them, but I can't get a word out. Yeah. And so that's what's going through my head and I had no clue what to do at this point in time.

That's honestly, cards on the table, what was happening. I could respond to all of those if I had the chance.

But the question is which one to choose. Rhetorically. Yeah, which one to choose to respond to, right?

Yeah. So let's back up. What about this historical reportage model? Like, why do that?

Why not just go in with leading questions? If you realize, right, because it seems like everybody averages about maybe two minutes or I don't know what it is, and then they're voted out or they run out of time.

Why not just come up with some questions to ask? Mainly because I suck at it.

I'm just not a good cross -examiner. I'm not a good cross -examiner. Oh, okay. That's really what it comes down to, is

I don't know how to phrase it. Because I hear the answers to all that stuff and I'm just not a good cross -examiner.

I don't know how to ask those leading questions and all that kind of stuff. I gotcha. I tried to come up with questions in my head while we were role -playing and nothing ever worked.

Like, when I'm in my element, it's when I can respond to things in a situation where I'm actually allowed to speak, and yeah.

And I totally get it, you know, there's a, I'm not sure if this is the video for it, but there is a method that I teach, or I taught,

I used to teach my students, where you would basically follow a three -step process to get to leading questions.

It begins with the point that you want to make. So clearly you went in there and you had lots of information, great points to make with Alex, but you see what he does, you know?

It's like, okay, yeah, but, and then he just changes the subject or he reframes or whatever he does to filibuster and get out of it, right?

And so it's, you would take the point and then identify sort of one key, big idea, maybe two within that greater point.

So if you think more sententially, so for example, I think that Alex's methodology of assessing the resurrection is flawed or something like that, right?

Then you would zoom in on methodology, right? And then you would flip it into the form of a question, you know, like, so Alex, do you, well, here's a good one actually, concede for a moment that miracles happen, right?

Cause this is kind of what you were doing a moment ago. Alex, concede for a moment that it happens. What would be your methodology to determine that Jesus actually rose from the dead 2000 years ago?

And so now he can't bring in and smuggle in his presuppositions that materialism is true and miracles never happen.

Now he's forced to actually come up with some kind of criteria that aligns more to a historical reportage model.

Yeah, I tried to do that in the beginning too actually, right? Oh yeah. Getting him to the conditional, the historical reportage model, this would just be, wouldn't this just be kind of the inverse of what

I tried to do originally or am I not? Well, but then, yeah, no, right. But then you would have to, you would have to force him to answer your question.

And when he changes the subject, you say, well, you didn't answer the question, so let me ask it again, right? You know, your honor, you know, permission to treat the witness as a hostile witness.

You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna decide. That makes sense. No, that's good. That's good. Oh, go ahead.

Like I said, I'm just not, I'm just not a good debater in that sense, like. Oh yeah.

I got substance, I got arguments, but it's like, as soon as rhetoric gets in play, I'm like, man.

Well, I'm gonna. I'd make a bad politician. So I'm gonna ask you, well, you did, you're not a bad politician, actually, because you pulled a

Vance, you pulled a JD Vance, right? I don't care, Margaret. You did the whole, I don't care what Dale Allison thinks, right?

So good for you, man. That was. But that's because I actually meant it. I actually meant that.

Like, I know what Allison says. I don't really agree with him. Why should I care what he says? I care about what the argument and the evidence says.

Right, which is precisely the spirit of what we're talking about now, right? That's extraneous and irrelevant.

Let's just stay focused on what I'm asking you about, right? I do actually have a question about whether, like, what you would do if you were to sit with Alex tomorrow, but let's keep going with the video.

Okay. I know, I know you like to, for instance, you like to talk about the flight to Egypt, and you like to say that Matthew invented the flight to Egypt.

Luke. No, Luke's the one that doesn't mention it. Matthew's the one that mentions it. Sorry, sorry,

Matthew. It's okay, it's okay. Yeah, Matthew. Good catch. Typically, the way you run this argument is Matthew invented the flight to Egypt.

Luke doesn't mention it. The reason why Luke doesn't mention it is because it didn't happen. Matthew mentions it, and he tells us why, to put

Jesus into prophecy. Here's a counter hypothesis. Sure, sure. What if it's just the case that Matthew is not making up historical facts, and he's doing some sort of midrash?

And what I mean by this is that he's looking at this historical thing that happened, the flight to Egypt, and taking this

Hosea passage, which, by the way, would be kind of a clunky passage to use if you wanted to make up a historical fact for prophecy.

Good for you, good for you, by bringing up midrash. By the way, so Jewish midrash was a way for authors and rabbis to expand on certain theological concepts by writing in things that did not actually happen.

There's a more, go ahead. Yeah, midrash is a really generic term.

I didn't get into the weeds when I said this. I think it's called

Peshim, is the specific type of midrash that I think is happening here in Matthew. And you can see this happening in the

Dead Sea Scrolls with Isaiah, for instance. And what I think is happening is Matthew's looking at this

Hosea passage, and he's finding a typology in it, and looking at the historical fact, which is the flight to Egypt, and finding the typology and putting it together.

But he's not making up history, he's just finding the pattern. Yeah, so there's a broad category.

Sometimes there's things that maybe didn't happen, but they would write it in in order to interpret, and the picture

I have is filling up fully this bowl of information. So for example, like Moses dies in Deuteronomy, but you have midrash that sort of have this scene of God bearing

Moses, and what they wanna do is they wanna interpret that particular scene. And that's where I was going, was Matthew does the same thing like, yes,

Jesus actually does flee to Egypt with Joseph and Mary, then they come back, and Matthew's goal is to interpret that in a midrash, right, that becomes a midrash.

And the other direction I really wanted to go with this, this was, in hindsight,

I don't know why I thought I could have gotten this out, given how things were going, but most people aren't aware of the external confirmation we have for the flight to Egypt as well.

Because if you read Josephus, right, we read about Archelaus, it sounds like you know about this, so I'll keep it short then, but you read about Archelaus in Josephus, Archelaus is only mentioned once in the whole

Bible, and in Matthew's gospel, you read about Jesus' family coming back to Jerusalem, they hear

Archelaus is reigning over them, and Joseph goes, well, shoot, I don't wanna do that, and flees to Galilee, and that's all we hear about that.

Well, it's not until we read Josephus that we find out, after Herod dies, Archelaus takes over that area, and he had just massacred a bunch of people and canceled

Passover, and you have all these people fleeing out of Jerusalem, just about at the same time that Joseph is coming back home, and it's like, well, yeah, of course, he's gonna run into people that are running away, and they're gonna hear about what

Archelaus did, so of course he's gonna divert to somewhere else, and that's an external confirmation that the flight to Egypt actually happened.

I wanted to get into that. Right, well, he didn't, there was no chance, right?

Let me ask you this, did you bring all of this up because you wanted to propose that the resurrection of the saints in Matthew 27 is also a form of midrash?

No, so the way the clip was actually edited, it actually cuts out a rhetorical move

I made, which was previously to this, there's probably like a four or five second, maybe six,

I don't know, time kind of operates weird in those settings, where Alex was actually starting to talk about contradictions, and what

I did is I cut him off, and I go, yeah, sure, let's talk about your favorite one, and then that's when

I start saying, you like to talk about the flight to Egypt, and so what was going on there was me trying to take back control of the conversation so I can get us back on track.

I see. Yeah. I think you've, you know, you end up, well, let's finish this segment.

Because that Hosea passage is not inherently - I think we might be getting slightly off, I have to be allowed to speak here. I think we've been slightly off topic.

The problem with the birth narrative story is not just that a story is being invented to fulfill prophecy, although we're told that that's why it's done.

The problem is that it contradicts the other account of the family game. Well, I'm totally fine with that. So if you look at the birth narratives altogether, I think there's room for one discrepancy, and that is that Luke doesn't mention it.

I think that's - Well, Luke says that they go to the temple. What? Luke says that they go to the temple. Yeah, I - Hold on.

I'm going to agree with you. Let me finish it. Luke says that the family go to the temple and present Jesus in Jerusalem. Matthew says that they go to Egypt.

They're very far away from each other. And we're told that they stay in Egypt until after the death of Herod. This is a contradiction. So, again,

I actually agree - Okay, pause. You've been voted out by the majority. Please - So, my read on this situation is

Alex has no idea what you're talking about. Really? You know, which I, it's, that is not either, it's not either of your faults, you know, so much as it's,

I just fault the format. I think this is horrible to try to wrestle with the complexity of scripture. If you could, let me ask you this question.

If you could go back and do this segment over, what would you do or say differently? I think

I would have, and tell me if you think I'm wrong, I think I would have started the same way, kept along the same track, but instead inserted more questions so that way when he tries to divert, he would have stayed on track.

The other thing I wish I would have done is because this was our second interaction. And in our first interaction, again, because of editing, you don't actually see me say this.

In our first interaction, I said something along the lines of like, look, I'm just gonna use Mark's gospel because I know you don't think

John's gospel is historically reliable and all this other stuff. I'm gonna play by your rules here. And what I wish I would have done is in the second track, gone, hey, you played by my rules on this, play by mine here, historical reportage model, and then moved on.

I don't know if that's a good rhetorical move or not, but I wish I would have done that. No, I mean,

I'm tracking you, you know, and there's a bit of rock and roll here where a debater gets to decide stylistically what he wants to do or not.

Like I said, I think it's hard, right? But with the time that you have and the time constraints and all that, probably the best thing to do would be to try to find three or four key questions that are absolutely devastating.

And then just as he tries to like weave like Neo in the matrix, you just go, hold on a second, you're changing the subject. Let me just answer my question and then let him flounder.

All right, two things. Have you heard of the cloud rider motif? No, I don't think so. Okay. Oh, the cloud rider motif.

Yeah, okay. Then I'm assuming you've heard of like the two powers in heaven motif. No. Okay, there's a

Jewish historian named Alan Seagal. He wrote a book called The Two Powers in Heaven. And what he talks about is there's this weird thing happening in the

Hebrew Bible where there's almost like two Yahweh figures that they point to. So some verses, for instance, will say like Yahweh rained down fire from Yahweh.

And so Philo of Alexandria in the second temple period talks about this two powers in heaven motif.

And he says like, there's two Yahwehs. There's the first power and the second power, but they're both Yahweh. It's almost like a sort of proto -Trinitarian view.

That's one. So let me ask you right at the outset, are you setting up the two powers? Let me back up.

Say a bit more about the two powers for my audience. But then my question is, are you tying the two powers to Daniel's vision of the son of man?

Yes. Yeah. There's actually a few different moves. This is why I called it like kind of puzzle pieces.

Because to truly understand what's happening in Mark's gospel, you have to contextualize those words with what the second temple

Jew would have been thinking with those words, right? And so for the two powers in heaven thing, if you look at the

Old Testament, you'll see tons of places where you have the angel of Yahweh, the word of Yahweh kind of being meshed and synonymous with Yahweh himself.

And so like, it seems like there's two God figures in the Old Testament that are separate, yet they're still

God in the same being. And a good scholar to like read about this is

Michael Heiser in his book, Unseen Realm. He talks about this. He does a really good introduction to this in I don't remember which chapter.

But the basic idea is like, the ancient Jew would have had some idea of like a multi -personal

Godhead. They just didn't have a post -council of Nicaea metaphysical model of the

Trinity cashed out, that's all. And so this is really important because this is a motif and an accepted one in the

Old Testament and in Jewish times up into the time of Jesus, which by the way, if a lot of people don't know this, this was actually anathematized by Orthodox Jews after the outset of Christianity.

That sounds a little - Yeah, in response to Christianity. And so that's kind of the two powers in heaven thing.

Do you want me to say anything? So strategically, strategically, cause I'm about to play this clip. What you're doing is you're setting up the frame.

The frame is the two powers of heaven in order to then look at Daniel seven and Mark where Jesus refers to himself as the son of man to answer the question, because the challenge here that Alex has given in this segment is that Jesus never claimed to be

God. Yeah. So that's your strategy. The other part of this is that cloud rider motif, which

I talk about in here because those are really important. Cause I actually give a concession during this argument to Alex where, cause he's going to want to say, well, the son of man only just means the human one, but that's like playing right into my hand anyway, because Daniel seven talks about the son of man who is the cloud rider.

So he's talking about the human one, who is the cloud rider. Who does that sound like?

Well, that sounds like God incarnate. Right. So that's kind of the whole setup here. All right, let's play.

One thing that I'll just kind of put there for now. Another puzzle piece here is you've heard about the cloud rider motif. So in the

Greek texts, in the Baal cycle, we see Baal referenced as the one who rides the clouds.

And I think you can see that actually adopted by the Israelites in the Hebrew Bible as well. So Psalm 104 is like an exaltation

Psalm and actually talks about Yahweh being the one that rides the clouds in heaven. He is the king.

I see that as kind of a polemic of calling Yahweh the king over Baal. Are we on the same page there? Sure. In the

Daniel seven, you'll see a messianic passage there about how God will come down and you'll see the son of man come, riding in the clouds of heaven and his kingdom will be an everlasting kingdom.

Do you think Daniel thought that the son of man was going to be God since he says that he's riding on a cloud? This is a really interesting point. I know that he did.

It was a derailing punch, wasn't it? Is that what he was doing there? He was derailing you. Is that what it was?

Okay. I mean, it is. I thought he was just genuinely kidding. I mean, there's a charitable way to look at this and then there's a sort of more non -charitable tactic way of looking at this.

I think he's messing you up. He was a Jewish writer. I lean on saying yes, but I don't know if I can say that with absolute certainty.

Do you think the prophet Daniel was expecting the Messiah to be God? I think so. Or sorry, the son of man to be God. Because it's irrelevant.

It doesn't matter what Daniel thought. What matters is what Daniel relays through a vision because the meaning of the vision can find its fulfillment in Jesus Christ later.

And what matters even more is how Jesus and eventually Caiaphas would have understood these passages, right?

Because if Daniel didn't think this, the prompt is Jesus never claimed to be God, but if Jesus would have probably thought that he's

God given all these things, then it doesn't really matter at the end of the day. You hit it. I think you're going to touch on this.

Let's play it. That's a motif only applied to God. So you have this clouder inner motif. By the way,

I do think that there are multiple things which people, even in Jesus's time, thought only God could do. Things like forgiving sins.

And when Jesus does these things, he's not doing so in order to prove that he's God, but in order to prove that the son of man has the authority to do that too.

This isn't that kind of an argument. This is an identification thing. So as Jesus is claiming to be God. That's where I'm going. So we have these puzzle pieces in place.

If you fast forward to Mark's gospel, and I'm going to use Mark. Let's do Mark. Here we go. Jesus before Caiaphas in Mark's gospel,

Caiaphas asks him, who are you? And instead of just explicitly saying, I am God, Jesus quotes

Daniel seven, saying he is the son of man, the human one, who will write on the clouds and calls himself the second power.

So you have this two powers in heaven motif, the two powers, they're both God and the cloud rider motif and the son of man.

He's quoting Daniel seven to identify himself. After that, Caiaphas tears his robe and cries blasphemy.

And that's it. I do think that Jesus is making some pretty extraordinary claims to himself, such as being the son of man, but I still don't see why he's claiming to be

God. If the - Did you see my face when he said that? Yeah.

I was so disappointed. Like he, cause he only talked about the son of man thing. And then

I don't know if you've watched, but like my body language, I didn't even know I did this, but like, I remember watching through this and I was like, oh man, that's the moment where I'm like, oh.

Yeah, yeah. But it's just a son of man. I go. I mean, he doesn't, but that's what

I mean. That's the same thing. And we talked about this in the previous segment, like you bring him up to the edge and instead he's like,

I'm not convinced. It's a Dillahunty thing all over again, right? Why, Alex, did Caiaphas cry out blasphemy?

Because it certainly is not the case that claims to be the Messiah in and of themselves were sufficient to be indicted on blasphemy charges.

But Caiaphas cries out blasphemy. Also, why did the Jews and John take up stones to kill

Jesus because they understood him to be making himself out to be God? That's John 10, right? It's, yeah.

There's so many places I could have gone here. At this moment, I knew there was not much more

I could do because at this moment, I'm also looking at the timer next to us. Oh yeah. And we have like 15 seconds left max.

And I'm like. Oh wow. Yeah. Well, I mean, you're, well, okay, let's play this out.

The way that he was trying to reveal his divinity to people. It'd be a strange and convoluted way to do it. Psalm 82 also talks about God.

Okay, I don't want to move past that actually. I'm sorry, pausing so quickly. He has no idea about the Jewishness of Jesus at all.

That's only strange because. Right. Cause it's only, I'm sorry.

It's the. I didn't mean to cut you. I'm like, I'm excited. Go ahead. Yeah. Well, I am too, right? It's only strange because Alex is reading the

Bible from the perch of 21st century England. You know, it's not at all strange. If you do the work to understand the historical context,

Jesus was Jewish. He was speaking to a Jewish audience. This is how rabbis spoke in the first century. Go ahead. Yeah, and that's why

I said, well, this wouldn't be strange to the ancient reader of this text. They would have understand exactly what's going on, which moved the way.

Well, look, I'm sorry, man. We ran out of time, but I want to make sure to carve out a little bit here so that you can have some, you know, closing statements or something like that.

But like, what your thoughts about going up against Alex?

What's your take on what he did there? And also like, what's it like just staring him down in the moment?

So one, I gotta say like the format, yeah. It was really difficult, but I really have to say

I'm like actually very thankful for the chance to even be there in the first place. I don't think I'd ever get a chance to actually talk to Alex in the first place if it wasn't for that.

Second of all, I don't think Alex is doing anything like dishonest or anything like that.

I don't actually even, I still don't really understand the ins and outs of rhetoric in a debate. I was just thankful to get a chance to talk with him.

And we went out to eat at a bar afterwards and we had a great time talking about way more stuff.

So that was really fun because we actually got to talk without the rhetoric and that was really fun. He's just doing what he's supposed to do in that moment.

I don't know, I don't fault him. It was fun. So I think you've already sort of answered my last question to you, which was if you could sit with Alex again, where would you go?

What would you say? Like in a debate format or just like? I guess like, so I have a very,

I know this is crazy to say, cause I'm a debate teacher. I make these videos all the time. I have a very low view of debate. If the goal is to change people's minds, whether it's your interlocutor on stage, cause forget about that.

It's like what you just said a moment ago, he's just wound up ready to go. Or it's somebody in the audience. I think in today's day and age, debates are not the format for that.

But so non -debate, just you and him eating wings or something at a bar, where would you go?

Conversationally. It seems like the thing he cares about the most right now is like the historicity of the gospels.

And if that's what it is, then let's talk about that. And I would, whatever it is that he's really like, really cares about at the moment, that's the thing

I think I would wanna talk to him about. And yeah, that's what I think I would wanna do.

And yeah, let's go sit down, get some wings, get a beer. And just chill and have like a fun time talking about this stuff.

Cause I also don't like debate. I see it as like a necessary evil for the type of ministry work that I do.

I'd rather just have a good time and talk to people and seek truth together. I love it.

From my Baptist audience, a beer is an alcoholic beverage that is also carbonated and hits different than juice.

No, I totally understand what you're saying there. And I, you know what

I'll do? I'll pray that because you've had this initial engagement, you know, maybe you guys exchange contact info or not, who knows, maybe there will be a time in the future where you get to do this again, you know?

Yeah, I'm hoping so. I would love to have a chance to actually get to talk with him like in a long form discussion with none of that extra pressure that comes with the timer and the peripherals and all that stuff, so.

Yeah, I think you did a really good job, dude. I especially considering,

I guess you're saying like you haven't really done a whole lot of debates or at least the segments of debate like cross -examination is not fully developed, you know, as part of your skill sets.

Dude, I think you did an amazing job. Tim, please relate to Tim. What a great job.

It's really hard. Like I try to, I don't feel like I'm overstating. It's very difficult.

The blood's going, you know, you can sometimes hear your own BPMs in your ear.

I was also, again, terribly sick. Like if you, Tim will tell you, the night before we were driving home and I looked at him and he like talks about this because he thinks it's hilarious because in our group,

I'm kind of like, I'm like the tough guy of the group. And he looks and like looked at him like, don't talk, just drive.

Drop me off at the front, you can go park the car. And then like, I was in rough shape.

So that was the other part of this as well. Wow. No, man, you were a good ambassador for Jesus Christ.

And I want to thank you. I guess I should, on the way out, I should probably say, is maybe somebody who's wondering, like if this format comes up again and a

Christian wants to come and sit with an Alex or maybe somebody like Alex, my advice for anybody would be to considering everything.

Right, and I've said this already, but I'll just repeat it. You should probably interrogate the claims that the person is making and seek to develop leading questions in order to expose the presuppositions that go into forming their claims.

I know it's difficult. That's where the anticipation comes in. You probably suspected it was Alex ahead of time.

So you know what he's going to say. And that's where you can jot down these things and then role play those questions, right? And then when they squirm, right?

Because then you say, hey, you're not answering the question. Before we go anywhere else, would you mind just answering my question?

Because really what happened and why Alex I think availed himself well up there was because most of the people that came up to him didn't do that.

Instead, they wanted to tell him things, defend their own claims, even though he was the one making the claim and it allowed him to flip the tables and interrogate the

Christians in which case he gets to get off scot -free and he's not challenged or at least challenged to the way that he could have been.

Yeah, no, a hundred percent. I wish I would have, one, I wish I had the skills to do that.

And two, I wish I would have done that. Who knows, man, you might get the chance again.

That's all the time that I have for this video, ladies and gentlemen. Make sure to check out what Than is up to. He's part of the team over at Inspiring Philosophy with Mike Jones.

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