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

The Problem of Evil and Non-Human Animal Suffering

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, Sam?

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 novel areas of study for this as well. So we're going into the psychology of meaning making, the philosophy of the meaning of life.

Wow.

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'd be like, you 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, because 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?

Because 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, and 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 a lot of time to like cash a lot of that stuff out, so.

I hear you, well, let's see, let's see what Tim does.

You've 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, let's just say the profusion of suffering of animals and 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 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 like 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.

All 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, 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.

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 on the internet, I see 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 God had 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 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.

Okay, 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 live.

They can look at their whole, 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, you know, in the greater audience.

Yeah.

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.

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

But

Well, 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 had an author writing a book and it's happening.

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,.

Whoosh,.

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 is 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? 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.

Redemption.

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.

Okay. 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 saying, what's the term necessity doing?

So perhaps I should say unjustified instead of unnecessary.

Okay, so we both agree. I do not believe that God can authorize justifying.

Yeah. 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. Because 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 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 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, 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.

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.

Unjustified suffering.

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 where 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?