Pints With Aquinas - DEBATE: Does God Exist? w/ Fr. Gregory Pine vs. Ben Watkins

Episode Date: September 2, 2020

This debate between Fr. Gregory Pine (a frequent guest on Pints with Aquinas) and Ben Watkins took place LIVE on YouTube on Sept. 1, 2020.  Fr. Gregory, a Dominican Thomist, and Ben Watkins, an atheist "apologist," debated the existence of God. Matt Fradd served as host and moderator.  DEBATE FORMAT Opening Statements:      - Affirmative Opening Statement (15 minutes)      - Negative Opening Statement (15 minutes) First Rebuttals:       - Affirmative First Rebuttal (7 minutes)       - Negative First Rebuttal (7 minutes) Second Rebuttals:        - Affirmative Second Rebuttal (4 minutes)        - Negative Second Rebuttal (4 minutes) Cross Examination: (The cross examiner is allowed to interrupt and move the flow of the argument as he sees fit.)         - Affirmative cross examines negative (12 minutes)         - Negative cross examines affirmative (12 minutes) Audience Questions (30 minutes) (Each person gets 2 minutes to answer a question addressed to them and their opponent gets 1 minute to respond) Closing Statements:          - Affirmative Closing Statement (5 minutes)          - Negative Closing Statement (5 minutes)   Become a Patron of Pints With Aquinas: https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd Learn more about Pints With Aquinas: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ APOLOGETICS CONFERENCE: https://www.virtualcatholicconference.com/earlyapologetics2020

Thank you. Thank you. G'day, g'day, g'day, and welcome to Pints with Aquinas. My name is Matt Fred, and I have been off the internet for a month, and so it's good to be back. I'm a little less hairy than I was in the beginning because I like making out with my wife, but she doesn't like making out with a mustache. So you be the judge. Tell me what you think was better. And it's funny, I just ran and got a beer for this debate. I hope you've got a drink there that you'll be drinking, even if it's tea or coffee or something. And the last time I drank out of this Pints with Aquinas beer stein was when I had Trent Horn and Alex O'Connor on the show.

And I was drinking iced coffee out of it. But it's been a month, so I can't drink out of this. But all right, so this is exciting. Really, everyone, you're super welcome to be here. Maybe in the live chat, let us know where you are from. We've got an exciting debate tonight between Father Pine and Ben Watkins. And so in a moment, I will have each of them tell you a little bit about themselves. But I want to kind of just

kind of give you an overview of the debate to come. There's going to be opening statements, 15 minutes apiece, then we'll move into first rebuttals, which will be seven minutes apiece, then second rebuttals at four minutes, then we'll have a time of cross-examination, after that we're gonna have 30 minutes of audience questions, which I will moderate, and then finally we will have closing statements of five minutes each. This way, each person gets a fair amount of time to express their opinion, to reply to what needs to be replied to, to make their case. So I would just kind of invite, I know it's kind of useless saying this on YouTube, but I just invite everyone to try to be

as charitable as possible. If you're an atheist, try to be charitable to your Christian interlocutors. If you're a Christian, don't be nasty to our atheist friends who, you know, God bless Ben for agreeing to come on this little Catholic channel and do this. I think this is super cool. So, all right. So with that out of the way, I'm going to throw up the screen here so everyone can see y'all. We have here Father Pine and Ben Watkins. Why don't each of you take a minute to tell us a bit about yourself. Father Pine, why don't you lead us off? Sure. My name is Father Gregory Pine, and I am a

PhD candidate at the University of Freiburg in Switzerland. I served previously as the Assistant Director for Campus Outreach at the Thomistic Institute. I went to school at Franciscan University of Steubenville and graduated in 2010, upon which I entered the Order of Preachers, and then just kind of did some studies, you know, stumbled along as it were. I was ordained a priest in 2016, and I got an STL in 2017. Since then, I served in a parish in Louisville. I taught at Bellarmine University in the same city, I taught at Bellarmine University in the same city, have done time with the Thomistic Institute, and yeah, just delighted to contribute to some podcasts, sometimes having conversations with Matt, and then Dominican Friars, we have a podcast called Godsplaining, so those are

just weekly 30-minute episodes of all things Catholic, a kind of Catholic miscellany things, faith, life, culture, philosophy, theology, literature, whatever strikes the fancy as it were. So delighted to be here. Thanks, Father. Ben. So my name's Ben Watkins. I'm originally from South Carolina, and I now live in Portsmouth, Virginia. My undergraduate degree was at the University of South Carolina, and it was in mechanical engineering. And I now work at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard here in Virginia refueling submarines. And so I am one of the hosts of Real Atheology, a philosophy of religion podcast,

Philosophy of Religion podcast, where we explore questions in the philosophy of religion from atheist, agnostic, and otherwise non-theist perspectives to see what we can salvage in the philosophy of religion once we have rejected something like theism. And so you can check that out on YouTube, anywhere else you find podcasts. Awesome. Awesome. So I want everybody to know this too, that at the end of this debate, I'm going to be announcing next month's debate. Tonight's debate is, as you see in the title, on God's existence. Next month it'll be on something different. I'll be announcing that at the end of this debate. It's very exciting. I'm very much looking forward to it. As I say, this is on God's existence. Father Gregory is in the affirmative, obviously. It would be awkward if he wasn't. And so, Father Pine, whenever you want to

start, I mean, are you ready? And if you are, whenever you start, I'll just click the timer. Perfect. I'm ready to start. Let's do it. All right. So just a word of introduction or prelude. In my language, I'm sometimes going to presume God's existence, and I'm sometimes going to seek to prove it. I don't mean to be imprecise or to go fast and loose,

but proving it obviously serves an apologetic purpose, so giving reasons for one's belief, as it were, and showing it to be on good, significant, substantial, rational ground or footing. But sometimes I find that it's helpful pedagogically to presume God's existence, because if one spends all of his time, you know, throat clearing and ground clearing or whatever clearing, as it were, then it can be difficult to actually get into the argument. So I'm going to, you know, presume at times on God's existence so that way we can get into the intelligibility of arguments that are a little bit further down the road. So for times when that may prove a stumbling block, I'll do my best to explain it subsequently.

So with regard to the existence of God, first a word on access to the reality, and then a word on proofs of the existence of God, and then a brief word on the worldview which informs the five ways. So first, access to the reality. I think that at the outset, we have to be honest or genuine, sincere, whatever, in admitting that not all have equal access to the reality, as it were. that not all have equal access to the reality, as it were. So here, it's not to say that there are some whom are favored by time, fate, and circumstance, and others who have no recourse, or who are simply without means whereby to discover. It's just simply to say that it's easier for some, and it's harder for others. And it's not because those for whom it's easier are better, and those for whom it's harder are worse. It's just simply to say that the hands are dealt and they're not all of the same nature. And then we go about playing those hands in our attempts at discovery or proof.

So, you know, I, for instance, was baptized three months after my birth. It wasn't something that I chose. And so it was something into which I was initiated progressively as normal for my family, nor was it ever really something that was debated or called into question. It was just you did it. I remember one time asking my father if I could have summers off from going to church. You know, I found that the arrangement with school was very pleasant. I wondered if a similar thing could be done in the case of church. I think it was like I was eight years old or something like that. He said, yeah, you're most welcome to. You just can't live here. So all in jest, as it were. I think also the fact of personal temperament

or disposition has something to do with it. I remember having had a conversation with a friend, and I recall having been stymied by the fact that women tend to be more religious or more broadly religious than men. And I was trying to account for this. Is it just because men stink and women are great? You know, I couldn't come up with it. And she explained to me, take my life, for example. She said, I live in a big city, a big metropolitan area, and I have to walk to a metro station. Whenever I do that, I'm afraid. And I said, okay. And she said, have you been afraid walking to a metro station? I said, no. She said, okay. Well, fear, even just in a kind of natural or negative sense, has some kinship with awe, as it were, or fear of the Lord, wonder. That's not to say that God is creepy or

imposing, but it is to say that when one lives constantly in a reality of dependence, it can be easier to adopt that in other avenues of life. There's also the fact of, you know, time, place, and circumstance. The 21st century is rough. I don't think by any stretch of the imagination that it's the worst, but if you come into a world that is riven with strife or political polarization or a global pandemic, it can be difficult to believe in a good God who has good and saving designs for those in his care. Whereas if you live in a time of relative prosperity or you live in a time where religious consensus is broad and deep, then it can be easier to kind of enter into those commitments.

Just to name a couple more, think about like intermediate institutions. You know, if your family is religious or if your school is religious or if the places where you congregate socially or whatever are religious, it's going to be easier if that's just part of the atmosphere that's in the water that you drink. It's something normal and part of social living. And then there may be the fact of direct intervention. God may prove it, as it were, impress it upon your mind on your own road to Damascus. So I think when I make these arguments, the ones that come, I'm not saying that these should be patently obvious to all who confront them or to all who have them proposed to them. I just want to say that there can be a variety of ways by which one is prepared for these arguments or one is ill-prepared for these arguments, and it's not a

matter of one being bad or good. It's just a matter of having been dealt a different hand. And that being said, I do think that this knowledge is accessible to all persons, to all thinking persons. So then, next, proofs of the existence of God. The kind of classical teaching in the Catholic Church and the tradition that I occupy, that proper to Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, is that the existence of God is something available to natural reason. So it's classed among what are sometimes called the preambula fidei, which would be the preambles of the faith. And those would be the types of things which are, on the one hand, discoverable by reason, but on the other hand, are also revealed.

So there's a kind of overlap. And that is the case because, one, they are accessible, but to get there can sometimes be difficult, okay? So to get there will sometimes be, you know, it'll be time consuming, it will be fraught with many errors, it will be difficult, all right? But God, in his generosity and in his condescension, sees fit to reveal those things so that none would be left without access by virtue of his overabundant generosity and revelation. So simply to say that these things are knowable, but they are tough, and that God reveals them so that all would have access. But again, that's not to say that they are necessarily obvious, okay? So I think sometimes we expect it, or we expect the proofs as they are so stated, to be immediately convincing.

We think about a geometry proof, which kind of gives you this eureka insight. It dawns upon your mind, and it impresses its rationality. Whereas this is not commonly experienced when one encounters the five ways of St. Thomas. Typically one thinks them boring, arcane, overly complicated, and silly, okay? So here you might think that this would militate against God's goodness. If so much rides on God making himself known, shouldn't he have it be more obvious that we come to him? Now, what are some difficulties in attaining to such belief or in accessing this by reason? Well, there's simply the limitations of human nature for one. Mind you, the revelation is addressed to us as humans, but we need to be cognizant at the

outset that we can only know so many things in so many ways, that we are limited by virtue of the fact that we are embodied souls, born at a particular time and place, and subject to all of the constraints in which we find ourselves. Within the Christian tradition, we also talk then about the difficulties introduced by sin, both original and personal. So our minds are darkened by ignorance, our wills are twisted by malice, and our passions are inflamed with concupiscence and undermined by weakness, right? You add to this the fact of one's own personal formation. One may have taken steps down particular roads which preclude the knowledge of God, because God might be seen in those settings as a forbitter of, you know, chosen liberties or

something like that. And beyond, you know, personal formation, there's also the fact of societal or cultural formation. So I would say that now is not an especially conducive time to belief, because it's often construed as something backward, obscurantistic, naive, and dumb. So then, how is one to counter said obstacles? How is one to attain to the faith which Christians seem to laud as so very excellent? I think here, for our own purposes, within the context of a debate founded on reason, we're trying to assume a particular point of view, at the very least. This would be my stated goal, namely the view which St. Thomas adopts in his description of creation, what I call the metaphysics of creation.

And here we can think about St. Thomas' revelation, as it were, of essay, of the act of being. The fact that everything that is, is in a particular way. It's in this way or in that way, but we need to account for the fact that it is as it is, or more basically or fundamentally, that it is at all. And this isn't to tell a genealogical story. This isn't to say that we have to come up with some scientific master theory whereby to account for the progressive evolution of things so that they arrive at the present point, because we are not so much concerned with development and dialectic as we are with a kind of vertical vision, and vertical here does not need necessarily to import religious, you know, thought or thinking,

but to say that when we encounter things in the world, we see them as somehow dependent, we see them as somehow given, and that language of dependence or givenness should cause us to wonder, and wonder is the beginning of philosophy. So in this third and final piece, then let's turn to the five ways, the type of reasoning that St. Thomas espouses at the beginning of the Summa Theologiae. So his first question there is about methodology, his second question is proving that God exists, because he's a good Aristotelian scientist, and you can't talk about what a thing is until such time as you have grounded that it is. And so he gives these five ways or these five proofs. And I think that, you know, in the 21st century, some work better than

others, as it were. That's not to say that they don't work or they're bad arguments or need be refuted. I can't necessarily adjudicate that in the time given. But it is to say that some are more appealing to a modern mind and some seem less so. So the fifth way, for instance, I don't think is especially helpful for our conversation today, the fifth way which concerns teleology or things having inclinations towards their ends. The fourth way, which Ed Fazer refers to as the henological argument, is very platonic, okay, and it's something that those not of a platonic persuasion will find strange. You mean to tell me there's gradation in being and so I'm supposed to say that there's a most utmost highest of each thing? Crazy.

Okay. So I think just maybe to focus then briefly on the first three ways, but to take them as a set of arguments. So not necessarily to take them each individually and go through the steps, but rather to think about what they're generally trying to show. These taken together are typically called cosmological arguments because they observe something about reality, whether motion or efficient causality or the fact of there being contingent things. And each observes a similar approach, namely that there's some feature of reality. And when we begin to reason back from it as an effect to certain causes which account adequately or necessarily for it, then we come to some bedrock. And it isn't to say that we looked for a first point in an accidentally subordinated series of causes.

We're not looking for, you know, Enoch was like, you know, is the son of David, and David is the son of Caleb, and Caleb is the son of Benjamin, and Benjamin is the son of Adam. We're not looking to go back, back, back, back, back until we find a first. We're looking to evaluate these things in reality and account for the fact that they obtain. We're looking to account for the fact that they are intelligible, that they are addressed to human minds, and that human minds are capable of accessing and penetrating such realities and engaging with them in such a way as to make sense of life. One of the most basic distinctions that's at work in all of these arguments is that of act and potency. Basically, act is what a thing is, and potency is what a thing potentially can be, or what it could be, provided that it gets sufficient impetus to realize itself in said way. And basically, what all of these different things observe is that

we observe all of these kind of causal chains of act and potency, and we find that certain things go from what could be to what is. And we also recognize the fact that they can't pull themselves up by their own metaphysical bootstraps, and so we need to appeal to something which can make sense of all of these relationships, make sense of all of these mutual entailed networks of causes, and provide for them a space in which it all obtains. So this for us is something that we kind of do on an ordinary and everyday basis. It's not just for professional philosophers. When something happens, you know, on your way to work, you look for an explanation as to why. It's why we look at car accidents, because we want to get some sense

based on the damage dealt to both vehicles, what transpired. So that way we can have some adequate reason for our having been delayed. One of the delightful side benefits of coronavirus is that this has been a lot less frequent and trips that used to take three hours and 45 minutes now take two. But we're getting back into normal and with that comes traffic. So this is something that we just do. We seek a sufficient, we seek a necessary explanation, a sufficient explanatory principle. So we need to account for the fact of things being, or of things being this way. And ultimately we get to the question, or you know, some 20th century philosophers get to the question of why there is something rather than nothing. And a lot of Thomists would kind of take umbrage at putting the third way in such crass terms, but I think it has a kind of apologetic appeal. Because at the end of each of these arguments, St. Thomas is modest in saying that

this we call God. He doesn't say that we've proved God, or we've explained God away, or we've cast sufficient light on the mystery which is at the heart of God. He just says we have gestured towards something which begins to fit the description, and provided you permit me to take you by the hand, I will walk you pedagogically through a bunch of subsequent arguments about simplicity, perfection, goodness, infinity, eternity, omnipresence, etc., so we can fill out the picture which comports with that that is revealed. But ultimately, the reason for which one believes is that it is revealed, and yet our minds, as given by God, are capable of attaining to the truth as it is exposited and as it is explained. So, you know, having proved the existence of God may not be the reason for which many claim there to be a God.

One might hold to it for reasons of belief, for reasons of suspicion, for reasons of opinion, just hedging his bets so that if there is a God, things don't end poorly after this life. his bets so that if there is a God, things don't end poorly after this life. But ultimately, all we mean to say, and it's a modest claim, is that it is knowable as a necessary explanation for the very coherence and intelligibility of reality. And apart from it, things don't hang together as they ought and as they do. Thanks. All right. Thank you so much, Father. All right, Ben. This is awesome. Thanks so much. By the way, Ben, what beer are you drinking before we begin here?

I'm drinking a stout. What are you drinking? I am drinking a Flower Power. Cool. Any good? It's very good. Good. Good to hear.

Well, before we get into your opening statement, I want to let everybody know who's watching. We have well over 1,000 people who are watching this debate right now. And one way you could help this debate and get this kind of really intelligent discussion out there is by sharing it on Facebook or Twitter or with your friends. So maybe text it to a friend even, but help us out by doing that. Give us a thumbs up because that actually really helps the algorithm and leave us a comment in the comment section. We really appreciate it. Okay, just give me one second here. All right, so whenever you want to start, I'll click the 15-minute timer. All right, so those of us at the Real Atheology team want to begin with a sincere thank you to Matt Fradd and Pius with Aquinas for hosting this

debate and inviting us to participate. We would also like to extend our warmest gratitude to Father Gregory for being willing to dialogue with us about the philosophy of religion. We consider it an honor and a privilege to be discussing such an important question with one of the most thoughtful and formidable Thomists today. Last, I'd like to give a special shout out to my team for helping me behind the scenes, recommending literature and providing useful objections, revisions, and advice. Before I begin tonight, I do want to make at least one preliminary remark. While atheism has grown to become more popular in the Western world, thanks to writers like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, we at Real Atheology insist on making a distinction

between what is often called the new atheism and contemporary philosophical atheism. We place ourselves firmly in the latter camp and the contemporary tradition of analytic philosophy, as represented by atheist thinkers like J.L. Mackey, J.H. Sobel, J.L. Schellenberg, Michael Tooley, Paul Draper, and Graham Oppie, among others. In what follows, I will be paying particularly close attention to the precision of language, the clarity of concept, and the rigor of argument. to the precision of language, the clarity of concept, and the rigor of argument. My aim is to provide the listeners with at least three arguments or reasons to believe philosophical atheism is closer to the truth than Friar Gregory's Thomism. And I'll take a moment to lay out the theological concepts we'll be making use of tonight. The question we've been asked to discuss is that of God's existence, but it's important before we do that that we make a distinction between two conceptions of God we can call classical theism and theistic personalism. According to theistic personalism, God is a metaphysically necessary, omnipotent,

omniscient, perfectly good, and perfectly free being. Classical theism affirms four additional distinctive claims about God, that God is simple, immutable, timeless, and impassable. According to divine simplicity, God is utterly devoid of physical, metaphysical, and logical parts, so whatever is intrinsic to God is identical to God. to God is identical to God. According to divine immutability, God cannot change and is devoid of any potential for being other than he is. He is purely actual and can change neither intrinsically nor in his relation to other things. Finally, according to God's timelessness and impassibility, God exists without beginning, end, succession, and duration, and he also can neither suffer nor be causally affected in any way. This distinction between theistic personalism and classical theism matters here because there are a variety of competing models of God within what we can call traditional theism. Many new atheists often misinterpret

the classical theist or Thomist tradition. They think that God is a being within the world. However, God is instead the ground of all being or being itself. Or as Aquinas would put it, God is ipsum esse subsensens or purus actus. With these conceptual points made clear, the first argument I want to lay out is a variation of the problem of evil we can call a Bayesian argument from evolutionary evil. Admittedly, the label problem of evil is in at least one way misleading, because there is not merely a single problem, but rather a family of interrelated problems with several variations of different arguments to the conclusion that God does not exist. A pioneer of this sort of argument in the analytic tradition was the Australian philosopher J.L. Mackey in the early 1950s, but many atheist philosophers like

William Rowe, Paul Draper, and Michael Tooley have developed sophisticated versions of the problem of evil since Mackey's work. What I'll present tonight will be one such formulation, and I will primarily draw from the work of Paul Draper. This argument uses a well-known theory of probability known as Bayes' theorem that allows us to compare competing hypotheses to explain certain sets of data or facts. data or facts. In 1859, Charles Darwin forever changed how we understand ourselves and our place in the universe when he released On the Origin of Species. Darwin laid out how humans and other biological organisms share a common ancestor and evolved over hundreds of millions of years. For this enormous amount of time, biological organisms have experienced mostly profound languishing, predation, starvation, and disease, and relatively little flourishing. Most animals never flourish in their lifetimes,

and even fewer flourish for most of their lifetimes. In fact, there have been more than five mass extinctions. Over 99% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct, and the state of nature is locked in a savage struggle for survival over limited resources. On classical theism, these are neither accidental nor unfortunate byproducts of an intentionally designed process, but rather they are the very clockwork of the process itself. This is the divine means by which God chose to bring about the end of biological diversity through his creative act. In other words, the god of classical theism actively employed widespread languishing and limiting flourishing in his provincial

production of humanity for hundreds of millions of years. In addition to widespread languishing, biologically conscious beings have experiences of pain that are systematically connected to the goals of survival and reproduction, but much of this pain and suffering does not contribute to the biological ends of survival and reproduction, nor to its moral development. Consequently, the process of biological evolution is an extremely inefficient and inevitably cruel means for producing complex life, because it is permeated with gratuitous pain and suffering. From a moral point of view, the distribution of pain in the universe appears random and mostly without much in the way of morally fruitful function.

For example, the pain of a young fawn burning to death in a forest fire is plausibly gratuitous or otherwise unjustified because such suffering is neither biologically nor morally useful. If philosophical atheism is true, there is no plausible alternative to complex life evolving such that it only felt pain when it would aid survival, reproduction, or some morally fruitful function. This is because philosophical atheism implies that neither the nature nor the condition of complex life is the result of a providential and loving act of creation. Since the universe is fundamentally indifferent to creaturely pain and suffering, biologically gratuitous pain is not surprising

on the assumption of philosophical atheism. The biological gratuity of pain, or the pain not geared towards promoting survival, reproduction, or moral fruit, is neither surprising nor unexpected given philosophical atheism. However, similar claims do not apply to Father Gregory's Thomism. It is very surprising on classical theism that an all-powerful and perfectly good God, with radical providence and sovereignty over the precise character and contents of creation, had available to him other means to create than biological evolution, such as special creation. A perfectly good God would plausibly create by different means, given the profusion, duration, and distribution of intense evils that biological evolution implies.

We're now in a position to argue that facts about evolutionary evil are very surprising and unexpected on classical theism, and facts about evolutionary evil are neither surprising nor unexpected on classical theism, and facts about evolutionary evil are neither surprising nor unexpected on philosophical atheism. Therefore, facts about evolutionary evil are evidence for philosophical atheism over classical theism. I now want to turn my attention to an argument we can call the argument from freedom. Before articulating this argument, I want to clarify some important concepts. A contingent thing is something that could have been otherwise. For instance, my cat exists. She's right there. But it could have been the case that she never existed at all. My cat's

properties are contingent too, since she could have existed in some other way with different properties. Something's being contingent on the Thomist view is a matter of potentially not existing or potentially being otherwise where potentiality is an unrealized possibility or potency. Using these concepts and that of classical theism, we can now argue by definition that God is purely actual, and whatever is purely actual is devoid of any potentialities. Therefore, God is devoid of any potentialities. We can argue further by definition that a will devoid of any potentialities is also devoid of any contingencies. A will devoid of any contingencies could not have done otherwise, and a will that could not have done otherwise

is not perfectly free. Therefore, classical theism implies God is not perfectly free. But traditional theism implies that God is perfectly free. For example, God could have chosen not to create a world at all. Therefore, God is not perfectly free on classical theism. We can consider Thomism to be false. It's important to notice this entire argument is analytic, meaning that all of its premises are true by definition. None of these premises can be denied without either deviating from traditional theism, classical theism, or their conjunction that we've called Thomism. The last argument I want to present we can call the argument from changing knowledge. This argument begins with the observation that change through time is a real feature of the world,

and that this implies God's knowledge, if he exists, must also change. But according to classical theism, God has no potential to acquire anything new, nor lose anything old, because God is immutable as a consequence of being purely actual. Most of us take the reality of change for granted. Things transition or change from being one way to being another or even to nothing at all. This interplay of the concepts of being and nothingness through time give rise to our concept of temporal becoming. We experience things coming into and going out of existence with the passage of time. For example, it is natural to think the present is currently real after having changed from the past that is no longer real and is becoming the

future that is not yet real. Turning now to the case of us humans, it was once false that humans existed. There was a potential for human existence, but it was not actual in the past. It is now true that humans exist, though. We are currently actual, but our future existence is an open question. It may one day be false again that humans exist. What this shows is that truths concerning humans and anything else spatially extended also changes with the passage of time. The claim that humans exist genuinely changed from being false to being true and may change back to being false in the future. But this implies that God acquires new knowledge and acquires old knowledge with the passage of time because God can only know something if it's true.

In other words, knowledge implies truth, because only what is true can be known. It follows that when humans did not exist, God did not know that humans existed. But now that humans currently exist, it follows from God's omniscience that he must now know this truth. But as we just said,

God has no potential to acquire anything new nor lose anything old, because God is utterly unchangeable or immutable. He is devoid of any potential for change or for being otherwise. He is purely actual and can change neither intrinsically nor in his relation to other things. If God could acquire something new, then he would not be purely actual because he would have the potential for acquiring something new. So God is constantly acquiring new knowledge, implying change or a transition from potency to act. But that's incompatible with what

we just said about God's immutability according to classical theism. As the Thomist philosopher Edward Fieser writes, God would constantly be acquiring new pieces of knowledge, such as the knowledge that it is now time T1 and the knowledge that it is now time T1, and the knowledge that it is now time T2, and so forth. But all of this would involve change, and God is immutable. Fieser is explicit that God cannot acquire anything new, such as new knowledge, as this would involve some transition from potency to act. With all this groundwork laid, we can now argue that if classical theism is true, then God cannot acquire anything new or lose anything old. But God can acquire something new and lose something old, namely knowledge.

Therefore, we can conclude classical theism is false. So far, we've considered three distinct arguments against Father Gregory's Thomism here. First, we saw the argument from evolutionary evil, and how facts about the hundreds of millions of years of non-human animal languishing and the biological gratuity of pain are two powerful lines of evidence for philosophical atheism over Thomism. Next, we saw the argument from freedom, which showed us how God's perfect freedom is incompatible with classical theism. So the conjunction of traditional theism and classical theism, or what we've called Thomism, is impossible. Finally, we saw the argument from changing knowledge and how the reality of change or temporal becoming in the world is incompatible with classical theism. Unless until each of these arguments is shown to be mistaken, I think we have very good reason to prefer philosophical atheism to Father Gregory's Thomism.

I'll now yield any remaining time I may have left. Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much, Ben. Okay, we're going to now move into our first rebuttals, where each debater will have seven minutes. Father, are you ready? I am. I'll start whenever. Okay. are you ready? I am. Start whenever. Okay, so maybe we can just take those three arguments, three, two, one, and then whatever time remains, well, whatever remains to be argued, I'll try to

see if we can address it in the next rebuttal. So first, with respect to changing knowledge, I think here it's helpful to draw some distinctions at the outset in order to clarify what specifically is intended by classical theists concerning the knowledge of God. So I think that God's knowledge is unlike other knowledges, as it were. So in the ordinary course, the knowledge that we gain is by engagement with a thing pre-existing. So I, you know, have a computer in front of me, say I'd never encountered it because I hadn't been to a mall or an Apple store, and then I see a MacBook for the first time, and I'm bewildered, and I, you know, have in my mind a form of the MacBook, but effectively a thing out there has come to be within my mind in the

form of an intentional species. So truth is the kind of relationship between my mind and the thing, and my mind is causally dependent upon the thing which pre-exists my mind. Whereas in the case of God's knowing, God's knowing is itself causal. So I think here again to appeal to the opening statement with regard to adopting a metaphysical stance on reality, it's not helpful to kind of anthropologize God or to think of God's knowing as if it were like our knowing because it transcends our knowing, or at least, you know, such is the claim of classical theists. So whereas we learn from things and have an intentional form impressed by encounter with the reality, extramentum, so in the case of God, the thing reflects the knowledge that he has,

which pre-exists that thing in the kind of ordinary course. So God knows himself, and in knowing himself, he knows all of the ways in which his nature, which you said, you know, ipsum esse per se subsistens, very being itself, can be participated, whether, you know, more or less adequately or more or less efficiently. And those kind of, which seem to us like complex and differentiated things, subsist in God as his nature. So there's no shadow of division in or among them. And that when God, you know, wills that those things be, those things proceed forth from him, and we call them true to the extent that they actually reflect the idea which exists

in God's mind. But the existence that they have in God's mind is of an infinitely higher sort than that of the way in which they exist in reality. So in the case of, you know, God, we talked about one of the things that you said is timelessness or eternity, which Boethius defines not so much as like di-eternity, an infinite extension of reality, but rather a whole and simultaneous possession of endless life. So I think one of the best ways by which to describe it is that God exhausts all that there is of being. So God is, his very nature is to be, and God exists in a way that transcends the limits imposed upon creation by virtue of their form, which is circumscribed, you know, by the matter with which they engage, or the particular act of existence, you know, to which it is wed. So in the case of, you know,

God's knowledge changing, if things were to happen in time, God's eternity is such that it embraces all of being, and God's knowledge is a creative and a causal knowledge. So God's eternity is such that it embraces all of being, and God's knowledge is a creative and a causal knowledge. So God's knowledge is not passive or receptive with those things as they exist in the world. Rather, it imparts to them their very being and makes them to subsist in their proper natures. So with respect to God, you know, we're not so much saying that God is learning from time one to time two based on whether or not humans exist or don't, because our mode of existence is of an infinitely deficient sort, okay? So we are subject to change, and time is the

measure of motion. So time is concreted with reality in such a way that all things that exist, you know, as Aristotle says in outmoded terminology, in the sublunary, you know, are subject to generation and corruption, are subject to alteration, are subject to augmentation or diminution, are subject to locomotion. But God's knowing of those things is not contingent upon their changing within time, because he is creating them to be. He is causing them not only to be, but also to cause, and they're transparent to his gaze in an infinitely higher and rarefied form as pre-existing in a divine idea to which he weds his will. So I guess like a kind of simple version of the argument is to say that God's plan accounts for change while itself not changing.

So just like a parent might say, when my child is seven, I'm going to let her drink water and cranberry juice. But I really want to enculture a healthy sense of temperance in my family, and I think that the excessive focus placed on the age of 21 is silly, so we're going to start drinking beer at home at the age of 14. With respect to the child, it seems like Dad forbade me to drink beer when I was 7, and then he changed his mind and permitted me to drink beer when I was 14. But truth be told, what actually happened was that God had a plan that subsisted in him, as it were, as an exemplarar and was impressed upon the created thing subject to time and change in such ways to register in that as a change.

So that's just a long way of saying that God does not change while himself accounting for change because his providence is pedagogical such that he can orchestrate individual and particular things by virtue of his universal causality, so that they redound ultimately to the end of creation. The second argument. The second argument is a kind of version of the modal collapse argument. And you said it's, you know, it's analytic, and in being analytic, it has, you know, aspirations to be rigorous in its predication, but it does make a kind of sleight of hand with existential qualifiers. So in the case of, you know, divine freedom, we're trying to establish whether or not God is free, and specifically whether or not he is free in creating. So there, I think the focus is on what is specifically meant by divine freedom, again, just to draw distinctions as a way by which to illumine the concepts at stake.

So freedom doesn't necessarily mean, in its first kind of instantiation, the availability of options. So like St. Thomas will teach, for instance, that those angels who look on the face of God are most free while being fixed in the end, yet they have greatest liberty with respect to the means, which is to say that they exist and subsist for the glory of God, but they can choose to do so by praising God, looking upon him face to face, or by ministering among those to whom they are sent, you know, those charged to their care. But it is simply to say that they are free while being fixed in the end. So freedom is not so much a matter of, you know, having options and not being able to abide within or without the options. Rather, freedom is a matter of moving from an interior principle, okay, so freedom would be something proper to an intellectual creature, which can know the good in a variety of ways or see it under a variety of aspects, and then wed one's will to the way rebuttal round with respect to the problem of evil, but rather it is the world to which he weds his will, and it is a world from which he can draw good, namely the good of God's glory and the salvation of souls who need not exist because they serve no purpose for the building up of the divine nature, but rather because they are issued this invitation to live at the heart of the deity and to have for their

own knowing and loving God's knowing and loving of himself, which proves infinitely dignifying and ennobling in turn and is the very source of our own freedom. Okay, thank you. We'll have to leave it there. And Ben, are you ready for your first rebuttal? Feel free to start whenever.

Ben, we can't hear you i don't think maybe you've muted yourself sorry yep no worries yeah no worries at all start whenever that's embarrassing and i did a last debate don't worry it's easy Okay, let me start with my notes. So in Fr. Gregory's opening speech, he made an interesting claim about how not everyone has equal access to God. to God. And I found that claim surprising because I think that shades right into what is known as the problem of divine hiddenness, where if we're talking about a perfectly good being, perfect goodness implies perfect love, and that we are supposed to have a loving relationship with God. But a necessary condition of such a loving relationship would be a belief that the other party exists. I can't have a meaningful relationship with someone I don't believe exists. So that seems to imply that God would always leave every finite person in a position to enter into a loving relationship with God simply by trying at any time. And so

the fact that this, that isn't the case, I definitely think that there's a tension there. So I'd definitely be curious to see what Father Gregory has to say there. But now I want to move towards the five ways. So correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that we've taken the fourth and the fifth way off of the table, at least for now. So that leaves us the other three ways. And so the first thing that I want to say about those three arguments is that I think they commit what's called a quantifier shift fallacy. So there's two types of causal series in these types of arguments, a per se and a per accidents. And so the per se chains are the ones that are relevant here. I'm sorry, I know I'm throwing a lot of philosophical jargon out there.

I probably shouldn't be doing that. But per se chains in each of the ways commit the quantifier shift fallacy because just as it doesn't follow that there's a single unique counselor for all students from the fact that for each such student he or she has a counselor, it likewise doesn't follow that there's a first cause of all chains of changes from the fact that for each such chain, it has a first cause. Even if such things have per se efficient causes, have a unique per se efficient causes, there are no obvious reasons why all things must have the same first per se efficient cause. I know, you know, what in the world does all of this mean? It's philosophical jargon, I know. But so basically what I'm trying to outline is the possibility of a beginningless causal series in which we imagine each, everything that requires a cause, think of like a web, where each point in which the web

is connected to something, that being a unique first cause, but there is no unique one. Each one depends on the other. And so a causal series, whether it be per se or per accidents, need not terminate in a first member. Here is an example of a conceivable beginningless per se causal series, a gunky physical object, we can call it. A gunky physical object is one that is made up of physical parts, each of which is made up of further parts. In other words, it is made up of a series of even smaller or even more fundamental parts. For instance, a human being exists in virtue of parts like hands, feet, and eyes. These parts exist in virtue of even smaller parts like skin cells, bone cells, blood cells, etc. So it might well be that this regress never terminates, since each member has a metaphysics at the core of these arguments.

So I just want to put that concern to the side, and I only mention it because... What was I going to say? There's a gap problem. That's where I was going with this. So, but there's two unique gap problems here. So the conclusion of these arguments is that there is an unactualized actualizer, But that's what the conclusion of the argument is. But the conclusion that we want to get is something that's purely actual. So I think there's a gap from unactualized mover to something being purely actual. Now, this is already with a contested metaphysics in place. But even if we assume Aristotelian metaphysics in play, I think there's still a gap there. Now, Friar Gregory mentioned, I think, the second gap,

or at least alluded to it, in that these arguments don't get us to a being that is perfectly good. So these arguments are entirely compatible with a being that is not worthy of our worship. And so if that's the case, we're going to need further argumentation to fill this gap. Let's see. Um, let's see. So with my last minute, I want to say something about existential inertia, what we can call existential inertia. It is insufficiently justified as to why something needs an actualization of its very existence. Such a concurrent, sustaining actualization doesn't even seem to be a real feature of reality. concurrent sustaining actuation doesn't even seem to be a real feature of reality what is the

justification for thinking that the substance itself is right here right now being moved from potential to actual with respect to its existence and not just with respect to its aesthetic properties you don't need any immediate i do not see any immediate difficulty with saying that an object is reduced from potential to actual when it was caused to exist at the beginning of its existence and from then until something comes along and causes it to cease to exist. There isn't any causal

process which sustains in being, but rather it persists in actual existence as existential inertia, as it were. And so I will yield, yeah. Feel free to wrap up your thought there. No, I was saying I don't have any time to yield.

I was going to yield the remainder of my time, but it was there. No problem at all. Thank you so much, Ben. Okay, Father Pine, we're getting now into our second rebuttals. So each of you will have four minutes. I want to ask everybody watching

to please consider sharing this right now and giving us a thumbs up. We have over 1,200 of you watching right now. And I don't know about you, but it's a nice break to all of the politics and the craziness that's going on in this country to contemplate the higher things, the things that are more beautiful and more sure. So maybe share this with your friends on Facebook or Twitter and give us a thumbs up. Father, when you start, I'll click the four-minute timer. Perfect. Okay. So based on the one argument that I left unaddressed from the opening statement

and then the two that you introduced there, we have three on the table. So I hope to address a little bit the problem of evil, and then we can pick it up again in what follows. So with respect to the problem of evil, maybe just a couple of introductory words. It's not going to resolve the situation because Western civilization has been kind of caught in the grips of this question for its entirety. So just a quick word from Herbert McCabe, a 20th century Dominican of the English province. He says, when confronted by suffering, we are liable to two apparently contrasting reactions. We may reject God as

infantile, as unable to comprehend or have compassion on those who suffer and are made to suffer in this world. Or on the other hand, we may find, as Job did, that it was our own view that was infantile. We may in fact come to a deeper understanding of the mystery of God. So here, again, just to kind of direct our attention to the metaphysical view, and to hold off at arm's length the tendency to anthropomorphize, and to hold God to a criteria which is foreign to him, to his nature, which exceeds that of ours, in a way surpassing the way in which we exceed the nature of a fly. I think also of the introduction that T.K. Chesterton wrote to the Book of Job, where he says, you know, when God shows up in Book 38 of the Book of Job, after all of these different kind of dialectical engagements with these four men who have tried to reason with Job, God doesn't come with answers,

he comes with questions. He comes with questions that are even more agnostic than the ones that we ourselves have posed. So I think with the problem of evil, we need to be content with this type of questioning. St. John Paul II says at the end of Salva Fici Doloris, which is addressed to this meaning of human suffering specifically, and evil in particular, that God does not answer directly, and he does not answer in the abstract, this human questioning about the meaning of suffering. Man hears Christ's saving answer as he himself gradually becomes a sharer in the sufferings of Christ. So whenever we talk about the problem of evil, you focus especially on animal pain, but whenever we talk about the problem of evil, we do so treading kind of lightly, cognizant of the fact that many people suffer it existentially

in a way that's terrible. So I don't mean for explanations to make light of that or in any way to explain them away, because such will decidedly not be possible. But just some opening things. First, we want to kind of keep off at arm's length this tendency addressed in the 20th century, whether or not, you know, those who are accused of it are guilty of it is another matter, but this idea of ontotheology, treating God as if he were one, you know, kind of cause in and amongst a kind of mess of causes, and you acknowledge that, so we just again point to the fact that God transcends the world. So if God is whatever answers our question how come everything then evidently he is not to be included amongst everything God cannot be a thing an existent among others it is not possible that

God and the universe should add up to make two again if we are to speak of God as causing the existence of everything it is clear that we must not mean that he makes the universe out of anything whatever creation means it is not a process of making here, when we talk about God's kind of like interaction with or relation to creation, we have to be very cognizant of the fact of his transcendence, and that he is not just a particular cause, but rather a universal cause who actually imparts to beings their very being and their capacity to cause as secondary subordinated instrumental agents in their proper right. So God doesn't, you know, simply have causal competence over this or that form, but over being itself. Like you said, ipsum esse, per se subsistence.

And so with agency, the standard of flourishing is set principally by the nature of the agent. And with art, the standard of flourishing is set exclusively by the nature of the thing made. But with creation, there is no antecedent potentiality in light of which the act is judged. For whereas on the one hand, to make is to actualize a potency, on the other hand, to create is to produce the potentiality as well as the actuality. So when we evaluate whether or not God is defective or guilty of neglects, we need to be cognizant that God creates the very conditions under which it is possible for there to be a defect. And I hope that we can pick up the theme again in what follows. Okay, thank you, Father Gregory. Okay, Ben, whenever you're ready, I'll click the four-minute mark. Okay, I'm not muted this time, right? No, you're great. Excellent. Excellent. All right. I'm good to go.

All right. I want to first say something about Father think that the rebuttal does not clearly work on a metaphysics of time like presentism or growing block theory. It cannot be presently true that God's knowledge of the past existence of humans consists in his causing or orchestrating the past if the past does not exist. The past is not still around for God to be causing it. It also cannot be true that God's knowledge of the future existence of designer babies, assuming designer babies will exist in the future, consists in his causing or orchestrating the future if the future does not exist. The future is not yet around for God to be causing it. So how is it that even now God knows of past and future truths, even if the past and the future do not exist? So that's what I would want to say about the argument from changing knowledge.

what I would want to say about the argument from changing knowledge. Now I want to spend more of the time on the problem of evil, because I think this is by far the most important argument, and I think that it can't be that God only is required to do what he explicitly agrees to do in the Bible. Firstly, we do not need to read the Bible to determine what covenants God presently has with us humans. If we have the intuition that God would never allow pointless or otherwise gratuitous suffering, then we are prima facie justified in believing that he never would. In other words, our intuition tells us what covenants God has made with humans, our rational intuitions, I should say. Secondly, since God knows of all the objective reasons that pointless suffering is bad, and he is able to prevent such suffering, it does not matter what agreements nor promises he has made. These reasons for preventing suffering are normatively binding for all

intelligent beings, including purus actus. Thirdly, if God is to be conceived as loving in any sense, like we said with divine hiddenness, it is simply absurd that he does not will our well-being. So he must be motivated to prevent us from suffering needlessly. And another thing I'd like to say is that even if God is not an agent on classical theism, like we would understand it with us humans. He is still identical to his act of creating, sustaining, loving, knowing, etc. Actions can be morally evaluated, hence there remains a question as to whether God, you know, whether it's a good action, a bad one, or a neutral one. And the evolutionary argument from evil

constitutes powerful evidence that God is a bad action. And so I'll go ahead and yield any remaining time I might have there. Okay. Because that's what I'd want to say about the problem of evil. Okay. Yeah.

Thank you very much, Ben. All right. So that concludes, let's see, our second rebuttals. So now we're going to be moving into a time of cross-examination. I want the audience to remember that the cross-examiner is allowed and even expected to interrupt and move the flow of the argument as he sees fit. So, for example, if Ben is asking Father a question, he doesn't feel like Father's asking it, he's very welcome to cut him off, and that's not to be considered rude at all. That's just part of it. So we'll begin, Father, with your...

You have 12 minutes to cross-examine Ben, and then Ben will have 12 minutes to cross-examine you. So as soon as you start, I'll click the 12-minute timer. Okay. So just maybe we can work on the problem of evil for a bit. When discussing animal flourishing or the experience of animal pain, specifically with respect to extinction, you said over 99% of species are presently extinct that once were. You sometimes will describe such a thing as malevolent, you know, or pointless, I think. But some of that language is itself teleological,

insofar as it presumes that there is a good way by which things ought to be conducted, or one who is, you know, a putative God ought to conduct them. So what would you say is the purpose of life? Ooh, that's a big one. Okay, so I would first contest that this language implies anything teleological. So I'm skeptical of teleology in nature, but I would say that it is certainly normative, meaning that it is reason implying. So if I say something is good or good, then I mean that we have sufficient reason to want it for its own sake. And if something is bad, then we have reason to want to avoid it. And with respect to reason in that regard, do you mean human reason? So I mean reason as in the capacity, the universal capacity to come to knowledge. So reason with a capital R.

Now, there are reasons, which are considerations which count in favor of having certain beliefs or performing certain actions. So, for example, the fact that some argument is valid and has true premises gives everyone reason to accept this argument's conclusion. Similarly, I would say something. So pain is something that everyone has reason to want to avoid. So when you say what is the purpose of life so that that question is going to automatically presuppose that there is a natural teleology, or there is some aim at which we should ought or must be aiming towards. And so my— So I guess I just want to go back briefly to the considerations of reason. So reason with a capital R. Maybe this is crassly materialistic, but where is that, and what does it subsist? To what extent do we have access to it? It's abstract.

So we would have access to it in the same way that we would have access to mathematical truths or to modal truths, so what is possible or necessary or contingent, or non-moral normative truths, like the truth that I mentioned earlier about evidence, about how we should, ought, or must accept the conclusions of valid arguments with true premises. So these are necessary truths that are true in all possible worlds, but they don't add anything ontologically weighty, so to speak, to our view. So this is what's known in the literature as ethical non-naturalism. And so I believe that moral facts and natural facts are two non-overlapping domains of facts. In the Aristotelian model, moral facts are reduced to a type of natural fact. So I think that reduction is impossible. If two thinking persons disagree as to what pertains to reason with a capital R, how does one adjudicate claims between or among them?

Dialectical process. So a process of trying to resolve disagreements and appeal to reasons and evidence using arguments. Okay. And do you think that that can continue to remain contentious or will it be patently obvious to all parties at the end of said dialectic that what is true is true? So based on human nature, it will not. So if we had ideally rational agents in which all – no agent was being distorted by any distorting influences, then yes, the – if every agent was fully rational and was examining the evidence in the same ways, the universal ways prescribed by reason with a capital R, then yes, they would come to the same conclusion. ways prescribed by reason with a capital R, then yes, they would come to the same conclusion. Okay, so in the case of specifically the argument against God's existence because of the problem of evil, what do you think are the pertinent principles derived from reason with a capital R to which thinking men have access that can be dialectically adjudicated and, you know, like impinge upon the

current conversation? So I think there's three moral principles that are at least worth appealing to here. The first will be a Kantian moral principle. So it's the idea that we should ought or must act only on those principles that everyone could rationally will. So these principles would look like, do not steal, do not lie, do not cause unnecessary harm, do not injure, do not disable, things of that nature. Now, the second moral principle we can appeal to is a form of consequentialism. And so it says that we should ought or must act only on those principles that would make things go impartially best. And the third moral principle we can appeal to is a contractualist one in which we should ought or must act only on those principles that no one

could reasonably reject. And so I believe that all of these moral principles are climbing the same mountain, so to speak, in the sense that they will all, the principles that they prescribe to us, will all meet at the peak of the mountain. They'll all give us the same answers to our moral questions. And so that moral philosophy consists of trying to understand all of the non-moral facts of any situation, and then how to apply these moral principles to those non-moral facts to then get the right or correct or valid act that we should ought or must do. Let's say with respect to the second of those principles, because I think kind of in the background right now, I have it in my mind that some of those principles, like those who occupy the traditions which enunciate those principles might deny, you know, one or the other of the principles that you listed kind of as part of that constellation. I think specifically with

respect to like Kantian and then consequentialist being at loggerheads. So with respect to like the consequentialist one, with respect to consequences of an action, obviously within the utilitarian literature, there's some debate as to whether one ought to maximize, you know, for oneself personally or for a common good, whether that ought to be short term, whether that ought to be long term. What criteria then do you use to establish what types of consequences you're looking for? So I am what's known as a rule consequentialist in that sense, in that formulation of the consequentialist principle, in that we are looking for a set of describable rules that we can then act on. So not only do I think reason is objective, but I also think that it is

self-conscious. And so if reason is self-conscious, when we make some judgment, that judgment contains within it the very judgment that I think this judgment is valid. And so that is very, I think, very, very, very important. And so you can't leave that out. That's why I don't just, you know, throw out a consequentialist principle. I think the Kantian one is important too, because I think there is a continuum between our intentions and the consequences. If we're going to have good consequences, good consequences will come from good intentions. Now things might fall short, you know, and have bad consequences

in that way. But this is just a way of cashing out moral terms in consequentialist terms. So this in no way implies a tension with the Kantian principle that I mentioned earlier. So the Kantian principle says that all of the principles that would make things go impartially best, the ones from the consequentialist one, just are the principles that everyone could rationally will. So I will make a bold claim tonight and say that they're just the tension that is often seen between deontological, consequentialist, and contractualist theories is largely superficial. I think they largely agree. I think they will mostly give us the same answers to our moral questions and they will be the right answers to our moral questions.

Okay. I think, well, we only have a few minutes left. Three minutes left. So I think basically with respect to that, we could do more in terms of like drilling down on foundations or foundationalism as it were, but there are certain things maybe just to kind of like grant for one little cash out point, I suppose. It sounds like in your description that you have God construed as a moral agent who is subject to these rules, which rules are available to reason and which should be agreed upon universally by virtue of, you know, like the kind of three sub-postulates that you describe. So I think within that, you know, you have God's construed as a moral agent who himself is liable

to or, you know, kind of judged within the context of this arrangement. I think in this, you know, you certainly have the advantage of being largely – adopting a critical stance because you need only prove that the thing itself is morally opprobrious or contradictory or et cetera. Maybe just to kind of move the conversation briefly into a positive vision, what would it look like – what would a world look like in which there was no animal suffering? I don't know if you have some theory as to what that would look like. Heaven. We'll just say heaven. We'll throw that out as a logical possibility. something as to what that would look like. Heaven. We'll just say heaven. We'll throw that out as a logical possibility. Okay. And what would heaven look like? No suffering. Okay. And what would be the mechanism for which one, or mechanism whereby one arrives at heaven? The mechanism, but I have no idea. So I don't know how nonphysical and physical things causally interact.

So when our physical body dies and our nonphysical soul, so to speak, goes to heaven, the relation of goes to heaven, I don't know. I don't understand it. So on the kind of like the plausible alternative for something as we currently experience, it would be that things would just be created in a state of bliss? No, not necessarily in a state of bliss. So a world of no suffering could be morally indifferent. There could be nothing good in it whatsoever. So everything could be morally neutral. You could have a world of disembodied minds that don't interact with one another. And so maybe that world is not in itself good or worth creating, but it's a logically possible

world. And so we can then start to think of good things that come from our interactions with other agents. So if we now think of a possible world like heaven, where we have disembodied minds that do interact with each other, there's still possible loving relationships there. There's a possible infinite loving relationship there with God himself there in heaven. So we would have a direct access, I think, in heaven to God's a direct access, I think, in heaven to God's unsurpassable goodness and love. I mean, he would be perfect goodness. And so for an infinite amount of time, we would be able to come into a loving relationship with such a being. And do you think that vision of heaven necessarily entails that there be no matter? So, no, I don't think it necessarily entails that there be no matter. I would actually have to think about whether there would be matter or not. So I have it conceived in my head as a

disembodied mind, so that it's not somehow constrained by matter. But maybe matter can be a part of it. I don't know. I'd have to think about it more. All right. So now we're going to have Ben Watkins cross-examine Father Gregory Pine. And again, Ben is more than welcome to interrupt Father Gregory to move the conversation along or to change topics altogether. Whenever you're ready, Ben, start and I'll click the 12-minute timer. So I just want to start off. So when I approach philosophy of religion from an analytic philosophy perspective, I start in the vein of Paul Mosier in that I start with the concept of a being that is wholly worthy of our worship, meaning that it's always worthy of our worship. It's not contingently worthy of our worship. It always is demanding of our attention and reverence and respect. And so I think from that initial concept, the divine attributes follow. And so we end up with the attribute of perfect goodness.

So this is the divine attribute that is driving the reasoning of the problem of evil. So on your view, since you deny that God is a moral agent, in some sense, you deny it. But is there a sense on your view in which God is praiseworthy or blameworthy? If God does have acts, those acts have consequences for the world, is he praiseworthy or blameworthy for those acts in such a way that he would always be worthy of our worship? So I guess short answer is no, because to be morally praiseworthy or blameworthy entails that one is subject to a norm which transcends his nature. So St. Thomas has this argument when he talks about the possibility of will in the angelic intellect. And he says, picture a hand that it's etching.

And let's say that that hand, you know, were the very standard of its etching. Then that hand could not but etch well. you know, were the very standard of its etching, then that hand could not but etch well. So, you know, to the question whether I ought to have etched this way or that, one would simply respond, I etched, and that's a sufficient justification. Whereas he says, if it is subject to a higher standard, namely like a notion in the mind of the artisan of what good etching looks like, or a standard, you know, kind of piece that he wants to replicate, then we can say that it more or less closely approximates the standard itself. But in the case of God, there is no law, as it were, higher than his nature. And here you kind of get into the euthyphro problem, right? Which is, you know, there's like a big scholarly literature on that, and certainly like a lot of exciting

arguments to rehearse. But the basic idea is that God's nature is good, but in a way that it's not that it's anti-moral, it's more so like trans-moral, in the sense that goodness has a prior metaphysical definition before it comes into the adjudication of moral claims. So it has a kind of ontic character in the notion of classical theism. And basically, like Aristotle and St. Thomas begin with the observation that we call those things good which we desire. So it's kind of phenomenological. It's the thing towards which one has an inclination by virtue of the fact that his nature is suited to it. And then, you know, he introduces conversations surrounding like perfection. You know, we call that thing perfect, which lacks nothing proper

to its nature. And then final causality, it's the type of thing which accounts ultimately for the movement of a nature towards its full realization. So in the context of a conversation about God's goodness, what we're talking about is ultimate desirability, and a lot of times St. Thomas will kind of include in his arguments this idea that God is universally true and universally good insofar, you know, we go back to the notion of ipsum esse per se subsistence. He just is being, right? He be, he is in all of its various modes and modalities. He's wholly uncircumscribed. His very nature is to be, esse. And so God is not circumscribed or limited by having his form contracted to a particular

actus ascende or to a particular kind of bundle of matter, but rather he subsists in the mode of perfect being. And so in that sense, we would say God to be good. So when St. Thomas advances his argument from question two in the Prima Pars, then he goes towards simplicity, which you gestured towards, you know, that God is not complex, that DDS there, and then perfection, and then he builds up two questions there, five and six, on God's goodness. And the kind of ultimate fruit of which is simply to say that God is, and that we are made for God. And so with respect to, like, you know, your consideration as to whether or not one is always

worthy of our worship, for him, the virtue of religion, which is a potential part of the virtue of justice, which governs this idea of worship, he thinks that it's available to us by reason. Mind you, it's complicated by original sin, but it's still something that we should realize is immediately attendant upon our natures having been given. So because God is creator and end, we owe him worship by virtue of the fact that he is our causal and primal source. But we need not fear that because there is no higher law by which to norm God that he can subsequently like go off, you know, willy-nilly, because that's to import, you know, anthropomorphizing criteria into the adjudication of God's actions. God need not explain why he did this or that,

he simply is. And for us, the kind of stance is not so one of putting him in the dock and accusing him of wrongs, but rather, you know, like in a theistic tradition, is of adopting a contemplative stance and saying, like, what is the meaning of this? And by asking what is the meaning of this, one, you know, lays the groundwork for having that unfold in his or her life as, you know, he suffers God's timing and permission and comes to discover that this was all for the good. So like a kind of classic Augustinian thing is that God only permits evil to befall to draw forth from it some kind of good, like a textured good, a rich good, a beautiful good. And I've been talking for too long, so I'll stop. It's all good.

we're having fun so um this view seems quite reductionistic then when it comes to our moral concepts it seems that goodness and morality are being reduced to god and god's actions so what ought to be reduces in some sense to what is so So this is the famous is-ought gap from Hume. It doesn't seem that we can fully cash out all of our normative concepts in non-normative terms. So is the is-ought gap something that worries your Thomist view? You know what I view? How do you, you know what I mean? Like, how do you, onto the, is odd gap, is what I'm, I'm not trying to set up a gotcha question. No, no, no, I got it. I'm laughing because I'm just like a swaggering

punk kid Thomist, you know? So I'm like, let's go. Let's go. So, so St. Thomas, you know, he anticipated it and it doesn't scandalize him, largely because, you know because he's indebted to Aristotle for his basic groundwork. But I think that for us, a lot of this kind of movement from is to ought, it comes connaturally. I don't think we're too terribly scandalized by it when it does arise in our moral reasoning. So, like, you take a simple example of the fact of, you know, I have teeth, and my teeth are covered with enamel.

I have 28 of them. I want to keep them free of cavities. I don't want to grind too much because then I'm going to have to get work done later. And so I take care of them in a particular way, certainly inspired by the counsel of my dentist, who I'm actually going to see next Thursday. So I'm looking forward to that. See you, man, on Wednesday. Yeah, what's up? um see you man on wednesday yeah what's up um so i you know i floss i brush i mouthwash i you know gargle whatever that is salt water for you know oral hygiene sake uh basically because i don't

want to spend a lot of money down the line on you know oral work and i don't want to cost my province money because i'm already irresponsible when it comes to taking care of my body with like knee injuries and stuff like that so i don't want to give them further cause to think I'm reckless. So I just went basically there from an is to an ought. Now, mind you, you know, like different analytic philosophers have a way by which to describe that as a kind of suppositional or hypothetical or conjectural or conditioned mode of argumentation. But I just basically said, like, I have teeth that I want to work. And so I ought to treat them in a certain way. And it kind of impinges upon me as a rule, right, as normative. And so I think that our life is just surrounded by these types of things, whether or

not we acknowledge them. And it shouldn't it shouldn't be for us too terribly trying when we get to kind of higher order moral moral arguments. Mind you, they are more contentious, and they're like more specific or particular determinations of the moral law, and so they're going to be more contentious by virtue of the fact that you've introduced like matter and contingency and all kinds of wild excitement. But, you know, going from an is to an odd is something that we do daily, and it doesn't cause us too terrible heartburn. So I think that what we do is a kind of metaphysical morals with whether or not we acknowledge it. So to go from metaphysics to morality is something that's just in our DNA.

Awesome. So that's what I wanted to comment on the normative bit. So moving to views of free will for you. So how do you avoid the implication or potential implication, I should say, of determinism on your view? So I'm still relating to this problem of evil. Sorry, I'm all over the place. With God sustaining the world in being. So God is sustaining the world in every moment through his act, his activity. But so isn't God sustaining the bad actions of individuals? So that seems to be, you know, again, I'm not trying to set up a gotcha question, but how do you reconcile that tension there?

Sure. So this is a bit – in the Augustinian kind of Thomistic tradition on this, the teaching is that evil is a privation of the good, a privatio boni. So asking the question, what is God doing with evil, is a kind of category error. It's to point at something which is not. So now, mind you, evil can be very forceful, terrible in an existential way, but we shouldn't accord to it the status of being. So when St. Thomas does his metaphysics of evil, he asks, you know, about the four causes. So you've got the efficient cause, which is like the agent that brings it about. You've got the final cause, which is the purpose for which. You've got the formal cause, which makes the thing

to be what it is. And you've got the material cause, which is the stuff out of which, or stuff in which the form adheres. And when he asks about evil, he said, you know, the material cause is the act itself, because it adheres in the act, but that itself is good. And God sustains the act in being insofar as that act is, and that is a good thing. Then he asks with respect to the form, it's here you have the, it's a privation, so it's what ought to be there and is not. It's a kind of disorder. So in the concrete instance of, you know, sin within the theistic tradition, you have a variety of goods on offer and you're choosing in and amongst or between them. Uh, and you affirm a lower good to the detriment of an affirmation of a higher good. So I'm toddling down the street. Okay. On the left side of the street, there's, um, let's say

somebody trying to parallel park their car. And it's clear to me that like one of their mirrors is broken and that they're partially blind and that there's a high risk that they're going to run over a water main. One minute. And like, you know, things are going to go terribly. And on the other side, there's a Chick-fil-A and they have a sign outside that says free spicy chicken sandwiches, well done fries and Chick-fil-A sauce. And I'm like hemming and hawing, like, what do I do? And I dart into Chick-fil-A. That's sinful because I affirmed a good, right?

So I had as the object of my act something good. But in so doing, I subverted an inclination to what is in, you know, like a higher, a more substantial good. So there, it's about affirming a good, that privation is about affirming a good, but one that's deficient by comparison to what ought to be there. The efficient cause is just the human being, and the final cause is a kind of madness, right? So the final cause is, it's trained on this good, like Chick-fil-A, but it's to the detriment of the other thing. So with respect to God supporting evil and being, God is supporting agents and their acts, and he's giving them at all times at least the grace sufficient to turn to him to make of it something beautiful and good.

As to whether or not they choose to accede to that offer, to consent to and cooperate with it, is another thing. But God is positively, like agentiallyentially initiating something that is good. Okay. All right. Excellent. Well, that does it for the cross-examination period. Guys, we've both been drinking a bit, father some water, me and Ben some beer. Do the two of you need to have a two-minute break

before we get into our 30-minute Q&A session from YouTubers? Or are you feeling good? I'm good. I feel great. All right. Okay, excellent. I feel like I got too much beer left. I'm going to flush this chapstick.

This has been really cool, and it's been really great to see in the comments people commenting how great it is to see two intelligent people having a discussion that's charitable as well as sort of philosophically rigorous. So good for you guys. All right, so before we get into this 30-minute audience questions, a couple of things I want to say.

If you haven't yet liked this video and shared it, please do that. Please subscribe. It really helps the channel out. We want to do these debates once a month so we can have these intellectually stimulating conversations for you and your loved ones. And you can help us just by giving us a thumbs up, sharing the video with your friends on YouTube or Facebook rather. That would really help us out a great deal. Also, I want to remind

you at the end of this debate, I'm going to be announcing next month's debate. Very excited about who we have in store for you. So please stick around for that. And so now what we're going to be doing is taking 30 minutes in which we'll take Q&A. Now here's how it works. Each person gets two minutes to answer a question addressed to him, and his opponent gets one minute to respond. So I'll begin, for example, by taking a question for Father Gregory Pine. He'll have two minutes. Ben will then have one minute to respond. The next question will be two minutes to Ben. Father Gregory will respond. So as you're writing in these questions, please keep in mind we want to get equal amount of questions for both. So here we go. This is like the most work I have to do all night. I just get to sit, drink, listen to you amazing people, and here we go. This is like the most work I have to do all night. I just get to sit, drink,

listen to you amazing people. And here we go. Now we've got to actually do some work. So let's do this. All right. So this first question actually comes from Trent Horn. So it's nice to have Trent listening. Trent did the debate last month. He says, my question, does Ben's, so this first question for Ben, does Ben's argument from changing knowledge require the A theory of time or presentism to be true? Go for it. Oh, you might be muted. Dang. Twice in a row.

Start whenever. So it does not presuppose. So certainly the example in which I use the language from the present or the past not being real, the present currently being real, and the future not yet real, that language certainly sounds like presentist language. But that was an example to clarify the concept of temporal becoming. But that was an example to clarify the concept of temporal becoming. So even if we had an eternalist view or a view in which all points of time are concurrently real, it would still be the case that the proposition humans exist changed throughout time. And so it would still be the case. So the intuition that the argument is appealing to is not one that has to do with time, but one that has to do with knowledge. And it's that you can't know something that's false. And so if it's false that humans existed, God didn't know that. And so that would be true of a certain time slice in the past, whereas in the present time slice, it would now be true that humans existed. So at some point, God's knowledge changes. So you can use an eternalist model, a president's model, or a growing block model? And this question now draws to my attention how

misleading my past, present, future example could have been in this, so I appreciate that question. No problem. Okay, Father, you have a minute to respond. Yeah, I guess just again to gesture at this metaphysical stance. So according to God, the primacy which he has in the metaphysical order, and to look at it not so much from the vantage of time, though of course we are accustomed to rise from what is better known to what is lesser well-known. So we're going to analogize, we're going to draw examples from our experience, reason back from effect to cause, whenever we talk about God and we limit ourselves, you know, to the ambit of reason. But in this particular case, it's just decidedly the fact that time is contingent,

that time is causally subject to the reign of eternity, and that when we talk about eternity, it's not so much helpful to think about it as extended time in two directions that has neither beginning nor end. That's just semp-eternity or di-eternity. It's not eternity in the strict sense. What we're talking about is God's possessing being in one whole and simultaneous embrace and imparting to all things at all times, which are equally present to him in what Boethius calls a nunc stans, an eternal now, the being in which they subsist. Excellent. Okay, thank you very much. All right, this next question is for Father Pine.

Classical Theist says, Father Pine, could you comment on the existential inertia objection to the five ways? Start whenever. Sure. So the existential inertia objection says basically that we can rely upon, if there were a creator at the outset, we can rely upon that thing to subsist, provided that it gets this initial boost. So I think a good argument that is leveled against this is one taken from Frank Sheed in his book

Theology for Beginners. He says, picture an artisan, picture a carpenter who makes a chair. You know, he takes wood in this particular instance, and from it he fashions his end product. And then let's say that he leaves his workshop or he sends his chair to a consumer. Absent him, right, when that thing has departed from his immediate presence and causal action, it subsists by virtue of the thing from which it is made, namely wood. Okay, so it subsists by virtue of the material which undergirds it. But he says, when we're talking about creation, we're not talking about a particular type of change or artifice. We're talking about making something out of nothing, ex nihilo, not de nihilo, but

ex nihilo. So there's nothing presumed to the creative act. So then let's say that God the artisan, you know, fashions for himself a human being. Were God to leave the metaphysical room, that thing would have to subsist by virtue of the substance from which it was made to speak improperly, which is nothing. So we would talk about that creature as nothing. So there's a sense in which what we're talking about with respect to God, again, infinitely transcends our notions of making or fabricating. Rather, we're talking about him imparting the very act of to be, which does not adhere in the matter by virtue of any intrinsic Okay. Ben, you have a minute to respond. So I'll use my time to try to help clarify existential inertia, because I know that we're using philosophical jargon here. So my objection is to the idea that God sustains everything in being at any time,

such that if you were to take God out of the picture, everything would cease to exist. to take God out of the picture, everything would cease to exist. And I'm saying that no, after the Big Bang and events such as that, everything stays in existence just on its own existential inertia. It doesn't need some sustaining cause at every moment to actualize a potential. And so what I asked in my objection is, what is the justification for thinking that the substance itself is right here, right now, being moved from potential to actual with respect to its existence and not just respect to its aesthetic properties? Okay.

Yep. There we go. That does it for that. I tried to get it out as quick as I could. Yeah, it's tough work. You did great. Okay, this next question comes from Chris Donahue and is for Ben. He says, if there is no God or intelligence to create good or bad,

how can there be debate on what is morally good or bad to do? debate on what is morally good or bad to do? So I do not believe that good or bad are created in the sense that these are contingent things that a world can just have or not have. So in this respect, I believe that moral properties like goodness and badness or rightness and wrongness and principles that make use of those concepts are more like mathematics or modal truths or logical truths. They are necessary truths. They are true in all possible worlds. So when the question is asked, if these aren't created, that's already a loaded question because it's assuming that these are things that are created out of some material. Well, I don't even think they're material. I think they're abstract. So they're, you know, they're the exact opposite of something material. If we're using, you know, Aristotelian concepts here, like they could not be more different types of things.

And so much like the property of being evidence, like the fossil record is evidence for biological evolution, but I don't have to go into the fossil record and dig around for this property being evidence. Similar when there's some act that's good, I don't have to go around and look in some ontologically weighty sense for this property of goodness. So the concept of creating good or evil already makes the mistake of giving good and evil this kind of concrete reality, ontologically weighty concrete reality, that I would just deny as an ethical non-naturalist. All right, thanks very much. Father, do you have anything to respond? Yeah, maybe just simply to say that I don't want

to import too much reliance upon the existence of God to ground moral claims as to whether or not, you know, you eventually end up at that bedrock. That's a longer discussion. But I think maybe just the most basic claim that issues from what we had described earlier on the subject of going from is to ought, that good is a relative claim, not a relativistic claim, but that good is a relative claim to a nature, and that what we're asking about effectively is flourishing, and that flourishing needs the full realization of a nature or the kind of progressive accumulation or assimilation of accidental properties which give that nature its fullest expression. You know, we talk about it in human terms as happiness. And so we call those things good which promote it in a, you know, like in a real sense, and you have to afford some space here for

self-deception and yada yada, but we call those things good which promote the flourishing of a nature, and we call those things bad which derogate from it. So I don't know that it need rely too terribly much on God, at least for its kind of initial explanation, it's simply to say whether or not something accords with nature. Okay, excellent. Next question is for Father Pine, who has two minutes to respond. Tom Lachlan says, Father Gregory, what is the purpose of suffering in relation to love? Right. So I referenced earlier a work by St. John Paul II called Salva Fici Doloris,

and in there he gives a variety of things. And you can think about this, especially at the foot of the cross, how suffering reveals the depths of love and obedience. You can think about how Christ drew near to those who suffered and suffered in our nature. You can also think about how, like in the case again of Christ, how the suffering of Christ makes possible truly meaningful suffering. So the suffering of Christ is especially revelatory of the love with which he merits our salvation, the lengths to which he is willing to go in saving sacrifice, but it also affords us an entry into a meaning that would not ordinarily open up before our own suffering, which to us can strike us as insane, madness, like the craziest stripe. St. John Paul II writes, in the cross of Christ, not only is the redemption accomplished

through suffering, but also human suffering itself has been redeemed. So you can think about, maybe in a more kind of basic or natural way way how suffering calls upon our deepest stores to manifest moral integrity. You can think about your experience of hiking and you want to be tested to the limit. You know, it's just I find it sometimes unsatisfactory just to take a kind of rambling walk in the woods unless you have really good company. What I'm more interested is, you know, suffering for a view, striving for something that is more delightful by virtue of its difficulty. You know, there's no food that's as delicious as camp food, even though it's super simple and oftentimes gross, but when you're that hungry and you strive that hard, it's excellent. And so I think that suffering kind of, like, can manifest more clearly the work of grace in an afflicted nature. It can kind of call forth

from us this response. It can conform us to Christ. It can form all of these different connections in the heart of the human person. Okay. Ben? So I want to use my minute to just refocus the question to the arguments that I gave tonight. So I focused on evolutionary evil for a reason. So the evil that I'm appealing to is non-moral agents or they aren't moral agents. So these responses might work for soul building of persons. But when we're thinking about the hundreds of millions of years of gratuitous suffering and mostly languishing and relatively little flourishing, and the fact that God is sustaining these at every moment, all of this gratuitous pain and suffering, I think there's a very, very serious tension there with God's love. How can a loving being choose to create in this way for hundreds of millions of just gratuitous

suffering and languishing? And so I think that those other responses, while they might be plausible when applied to human persons, when we apply them to non-human animal persons, they don't help us at all understand God's love in relation to pain and suffering and languishing. All right, this next question is for Ben, and it comes from Brianna. Next question is for Ben, and it comes from Brianna. She says, how do you objectively judge pointless suffering versus non-pointless suffering? Is all suffering bad? So this question is a little bit hazy.

So she asked, is all suffering bad? I'll take that question first. So I believe that suffering is in itself bad. So I think that we all have reason to want to avoid suffering. But I also believe that suffering can be instrumentally good. So Friar Pine was giving us some excellent examples of that. So this is the difference between an intrinsic good and an extrinsic good. So the first question asked about a moral epistemology. So how do I objectively judge something

gratuitous or non-gratuitous? So I did mention earlier how I think that reason is both, one of the unique features of reason is that it's both objective and that it is self-conscious. And so when we make a judgment, that, and if that judgment is true, it does not depend on any character of the person making the judgment. So that's how judgment is objective. And also judgment is self-conscious in the sense that it contains within it the very judgment that what i am judging is valid so if something if i am making a judgment that i believe to be valid and the truth of that judgment does not depend on any character about me then i have made an objective judgment that i am aware of its own validity. Okay, thanks so much. Father Pine.

Yeah, I think certainly the argument concerning animal suffering is a good one, and I think every theist has to contend with it. I recently read an article or an essay by David Foster Wallace called Consider the Lobster, where he goes to the Maine Lobster Festival, and he's talking about the world's largest lobster cooker and all the ways in which it seems unnecessary suffering goes into the preparation of this particular meal and how people delight in it. He thinks in a way that he finds at the very least distressing or troubling, and he has to reconcile this with his own consumption of meat. So I'm alive to the conversation, but I think that the question of whether suffering is pointless or whether it has a point is a good one. And I think that that kind of falls to the non-theist to give criteria for explaining such a thing. And, you know, I think that we can see clear examples as to why there would be a point for it or how animals being

subjected to human ends can bring about great goods in the human community. And while certain other instances of suffering to us do not make sense, you know, like why do lions need to eat antelopes, we can appreciate a kind of wisdom at work when you begin to get at it. All right. This next question is for you, Father, from Gary Burke. He says, Father Gregory, please explain free will versus God's omniscience. Am I right in saying that just because God knows how we will exercise our free will in our lives does not make our outcomes predestined?

That's a good question. So St. Thomas asked this with respect to—so it's in the Prima Pars when he asks questions about God's power and specifically about God's providence. And he's asking, how is it that God causes free agents to act? And we're worried about violence or coercion, but St. Thomas allays some of those fears because God is able to be more interior to us than we are to our very selves and to operate within us in a way that is more natural to us than is our own movement, because he's the very giver of our liberty. So I think he'll go on to say that God causes necessary things to happen necessarily, and contingent things or free things to happen freely. So such is the nature of God's causal power, that not only does he cause a thing to be,

but he causes the very manner in which that thing unfolds. So in the case of necessary thing, God causes them to be and causes them to be or to cause necessarily. But in the case of free things, God causes them to be and causes them to cause freely. So God gives us our agency, and he gives us our agency as something that is super determined, that is to say, has for its end God, who is universal truth, and as a result, underdetermined, insofar as particular goods, no one particular good, will entirely command our attention, because by comparison to the universal true, or the universal good, it does not wholly sate our desire. So we're always making these comparisons, and able to adjudicate in and among, or between, different goods in a way

that leaves us underdetermined with respect to them. So God is causing us to be, causing us to cause, but causing us to cause freely or contingently, such is the nature of his causal power. Okay, Ben? I just want to point out how much awe I'm in that he was able to answer that question in two minutes. That was incredible. So I'm not going to respond too much to what Father Gregory said there, because that's kind of an in-house debate among theists. So I'll put on my theist hat. And when I imagine myself being a theist and trying to answer this question, I am more sympathetic to what is known as open theism, which just bites the bullet, saying that, look, God can't know the future actions of perfectly free creatures, but that doesn't count against God's omnipotence, because it's logically

impossible to know the future actions of some perfectly free creature. And so I would just invite other atheists, or atheists, other theists interested in that question to check out that position. It is controversial, but it's the one I prefer. All right, thanks so much. This next question is for Ben, and it comes from Sorter. He says, what is the warrant or justification for inferring that an instance of evil is gratuitous, metaphysical, from its seeming epistemic to be gratuitous if God is good. Shall I read that again? I think I got the gist of it. So there is a well-known principle in epistemology called the principle of phenomenal conservatism. And so this principle says that if something seems like it is the case, then we at least have prima facie justification that it is the case, obviously in the absence of defeaters.

And so this is one way of answering that question is just appealing to a principle of phenomenal conservatism. But there's, I think, a much bigger, more important moral question here that requires us to go even further than the principle of phenomenal conservatives. And those are those three moral principles that I appealed to earlier, the Kantian, contractualist, and consequentialist one. Because again, so moral philosophy is all about taking these moral principles and systematizing our moral intuitions to apply them to actual acts and traits of character or states of affairs. And so I think that is really what's driving the moral reasoning within at least my version of the problem of evil, of the movement from seeming like an unjustified evil to something actually being an unjustified evil.

Father? Yes, so within the Thomistic tradition, something would be judged as gratuitous or non-gratuitous vis-a-vis its end. So to adjudicate said claim, one has to have some knowledge as to what the thing is and what the thing is for. So you're making substantive claims as to what constitutes animal flourishing, but also substantive claims as to where animal flourishing fits within the ecosystematic harmony of the world. And I think there, you know, a good thing to introduce into the conversation is the purpose for which God creates, which is not out of need, but rather as a kind of manifestation of his glory. So, you know, at its kind of outset, that might seem to complicate the argument more,

but God is not about a work of, you know, serving the particular needs of one or other thing in the universe, rather, he's making manifest His attributes, so that in the contemplation of that ecosystematic harmony of created things, we could have some insight as to His nature. And so, like, with respect to evolution, for instance, God can fill creation with abundant testimony of His goodness, not only synchronically, but diachronically. All right. Excellent. Man, it's hard to spit out a good answer like that in a minute, isn't it? Okay. It really is. Next question is

for Ben. This comes from Dan Lindstrom, one of our patrons. He says, awesome debate. My question is for Ben. Given that Father Gregory replied to your problem of evil objections by suggesting that you might be treating God as one moral agent among many, would you agree with that assessment?

Or do you believe there's a difference in moral standards for God versus humans? So I do not consider God to be above morality or something, just like I do not consider God to be above mathematics. So God couldn't make 2 plus 2 equal 5, and he couldn't make torturing children good. I think these are things that would transcend the nature of a God. Now, for this debate, I realize that classical theists want to resist those claims because they want to deny that God is a moral agent. And I think that waters down the concept of God, which is one reason why I pressed the point about being wholly worthy of worship. So I think that once you take away these ideas of God being praiseworthy for his actions, because he acts in ways that are worth acting for, you lose this idea of a being that's wholly worthy of our worship. And so you get this kind of abstract ground of being that doesn't really respond to the religious concerns that

people might have when they're, you know, approaching these questions, you know, does God exist? Well, yeah, but he's this abstract ground of being that just, you know, his actions are not really morally valuable. A lot of, you know, his nature is a mystery. I think it waters it down. So in this sense, I lean more towards the theistic personalist camp than I do the classical theist camp. But for this argument I tried to focus on perfect goodness and use the Thomistic model and not deviate as much as possible from that. Okay, Father, would you like me to reiterate that question? I'll just launch. Go for it.

So St. Thomas talks about a threefold way by which we reason back from effects to the cause in our kind of inquiry into God's nature. And he says we observe first the via causalitatis, you know, the way of causality. So when we observe like a good thing, as it were, or something that comports itself good, we would reason back to a God who is good. But then he says we next observe the via negationis or remotionis, the way of negation or emotion. And we say that God is not good in the way that we are good. You know, we're good in a composite way. To even say, like, you know, Ben is good is to attribute goodness to Ben by way of a copula, which seems to suggest some type of, you know,

composition, so we want to deny that of God. And then third and finally, he says we have to observe the via eminentiae, the way of eminence, to say that God is good, but in a way that transcends our goodness. So I don't mean to say that God is amoral, but that the nature of goodness at work in God is of a sort higher than we experience and beyond our comprehension, and that that is the prime analogate, and that our notion of morality should be subject to it. Okay.

All right. A question here from Cathaholicism. He says, Question for Father Pine. What would you say to an atheist that brings up old sun worship and parallels of it in Christ's sacrifice? Old sun worship and parallels of it in Christ's sacrifice. I think that's a great question, too. I'm excited for that one. it in Christ's second life? I think that's a great question too. I'm excited for that one.

Perhaps more broadly having to do with parallels that we find in pagan religions that seem to be mirrored in Christianity. Oh yeah, sure. So I think that Christianity is aware of parallels in pagan religions and not scandalized by it, and sometimes very consciously adopts the content of those pagan religions within itself for evangelical ends. Whether or not that's colonialistic or imperialistic is for another day, but there's a kind of recognition that, like, a Thomist would say that the natural law is at work in our members, so we're inclined to the preservation of our existence by virtue of the fact that we're substances. We're inclined to the procreation and education of children by virtue of the fact that we're animals. We're inclined to know the truth about God and to live in society by virtue of the fact that we're rational. And so knowledge of God and ordering

our lives in accord with that knowledge, which God can share, you know, kind of in a natural ambit, is part of what we all share as human beings. And that may have various expressions, but it should come as no surprise that it crops up here and there. And so like, for instance, in creation accounts, the Genesis accounts are very conscious of other ancient Near Eastern myths, but they consciously transpose the content of those myths as a way by which to be more revelatory. So they take something close to the people's experience, but then they transpose it into a higher register by virtue of the revelation which God is sharing. So God is the author of Scripture, inspires the sacred author, and illumines, you know, his mind such that he is able to relate something of the very mysteries of the Godhead. So from the, you know, creation accounts, we know that God is one, that God is good, that evil is introduced by human choice, and that it's outside of God's perfect will,

but that God can use it as a way by which to bring about something beautiful. So I think that, with respect to, like to sun worship in particular, I don't know much of other religions on the particular theme, but I know that this idea of interpersonality being at the heart of the triune God, that love is the deepest thing in reality and transcending reality, and that it's a relationship into which we are welcomed, and that it expresses itself in familial terms, should come as no surprise to us, not because we invent a God of our own cultural imagining, but because God addresses himself to us in Revelation such that we would be

accommodated to the divine mystery. Excellent. Okay, Ben? So I want to say that I think that this objection being put forward is often put forward in bad faith and is often not a valid argument. So with that said, I think the relevant argument is one about a question of religious disagreement in that not that these other religious traditions resemble other traditions but that the very fact that these religious traditions disagree is surprising if there's a perfectly loving god so i think that's the much more pressing objection than the fact that these other you know sun gods type exist with parallels to the resurrection story. I think that's trying to answer a different question. That's not answering the question, does God exist? That's answering a historical question of how did certain religions come about and in what areas and what affected them. I'd like to kind of conclude by asking you, I'll give you each two minutes, to give us

the, in your opinion, the best argument for the other side and why you think it fails. So Father Pine, I'll ask you first, what do you think the best argument is for atheism? Why do you think it fails? And then I'll ask Ben what the best argument is for theism and why he thinks that fails. So, Father, feel free to go whenever. like there are a panoply of options or a cornucopia of options, but that those people are made by virtue of their traditions incapable of hosting arguments or debate with those of another persuasion. And so it seems like human discourse has become like naturally balkanizing. It's headed off in a variety of directions and no one is actually having real or substantive

exchanges. I mean, like just the conversation tonight is encouraging by way of counterexample. But I think that it's possible, you know, to host real engagement in and among traditions, but it means becoming a native speaker of another tradition if you're going to do the work of translation rather than just taking your language and importing it into another setting. So like, you know, Ben did his homework and, you know, he knows Aristotelian Thomism well, which is awesome. I don't know that I know the tradition that you occupy as well, but it's an aspiration to actually host a substantive

debate, and I think that that gives me encouragement that pluralism is not beyond the pale, that it's something... There is good and legitimate diversity within the world, but I think that it's ordered dynamically towards unity, and I think that a lot of people in the 21st century despair of that, but I do think that it is ultimately possible.

Okay, thanks, Ben. So I think that the best argument for theism is a form of teleological argument. So a lot of apologists are familiar with what is known as the fine-tuning argument, and so this argument claims that there are constants that are within a very, very narrow range to permit life, and that this is surprising. And I actually think that that argument doesn't go far enough. I think that the universe could be seen as being fine-tuned for moral agents, not just life. So the argument for moral agency, it seems like the world is designed for moral agents to make morally significant decisions. And that this is not, that this is very surprising on naturalism. This is not something

that naturalism would predict antecedently, but it is something that theism would predict antecedently because theism entails the existence of at least one perfectly good being, God. And so I think that gives at least prima facie evidence that there are moral agents to theism over naturalism or something like naturalism or philosophical atheism. And so the objections that I think apply to that most are that that argument assumes a libertarian conception of free will. And so I'm a compatibilist about free will. Now that's a rabbit hole. So I won't go down that road yet. Then the other thing is the problem of evil. So obviously there's evidence on the other side, and so I think that the evidence from the problem of evil outweighs the evidence from moral agency. And I'm also so skeptical of nonphysical minds, so I believe that all mental activity is based in brain activity. So this is another way in which I am skeptical of the argument.

But I think it's the best one for theism. Okay, excellent. All right, well, thanks so much for that. All right, well, we're about to wrap up here with five-minute closing speeches, presentations from each of our debaters. But lads, take a breather for a moment because I want to say thank you to one of our sponsors, and that is Halo. you you So, we are going to go into our five-minute closing statements, and we'll start with you, Father Gregory, and then Ben.

So, whenever you want to start. Okay. I think maybe for the last thing, just to talk a little bit about the argument of divine hiddenness. So my familiarity with the argument comes from Travis Dumsday, who I think teaches in Edmonton, but he wrote an article in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly on the theme, which I found very helpful. So the basic statement, as Ben said, of the argument for divine hiddenness is, you know, if so, basically, if so much rides on our

believing in God, why doesn't God make himself better known? And you might permit yourself the imaginative exercises of thinking through what that would look like. You know, God could take it upon himself to interrupt the halftime show of the Super Bowl, or God could end the coronavirus now, or now, or now, and leave some permanent sign in the clouds as to why he permitted it and why he healed it and what ultimately we're all supposed to think about him. But God doesn't, or it seems that to the present moment, he has not yet. And when he did take human flesh, he did so in a kind of Roman backwater among a people who were relatively insignificant in the tendency of world history and who it can be argued may not have left

the mark that other contemporaneous civilizations did so so what is god's what is god's aim or what is god's end in being so sneaky so maybe to kind of spell it out more rigorously and philosophically we can think about the objection in these terms god God loves us, and he promotes our good. Our well-being involves having a positive relationship with God, so it's necessary that we believe that God exists. God, as the one in the driver's seat, must need to secure this belief, and yet many do not. So therefore, God does not exist. So I think here we can just gesture briefly to a correspondence between human nature and God's mode of revelation. We said that God could have chosen to reveal himself in any number of ways, but he chose the way that he did.

And for us, it's not to say whether or not we think that he could have done better, but to consider precisely why he did what he did. So think about our own human nature, namely as embodied souls or ensouled bodies, who come to our end by many movements. So our lives, whether you think them good or bad, have the shape of a kind of narrative. They have a kind of dramatic flavor or color to them. And we are able to kind of wend our way here and there through a variety of choices and experiences and, you know, life events to a good or bad end, as it were. And as we know, like Solon is quoted as having said, call no man happy until he dies. So our lives have a real import to them, and they are only said to be tragic if they fail in the ultimate sense. The only ultimate loss or failure, the only real tragedy, is not to become a saint, as Leon Bloy has quoted as having saying. So God addresses

himself to our human natures, which are decidedly on the way, and he does so in a way that is dramatic, that is compelling, that has a narrative shape to it, because Christ himself took human flesh and told a story in his flesh, a story in which evil asserts itself in terrible fashion, think of the import of our having killed God, but yet triumphs by virtue of love and obedience, love and obedience to the Father and love for us who are destined to share with him a life forever in eternity. So God, rather than kind of running roughshod over our human nature, he does not see fit to dehumanize us, but rather addresses himself to us in subtle and in varied forms, by sending prophets, by sending the law, by gradually educating us in morality such that when he came on the scene,

we would be well-suited to recognize and to worship him. And so God gives us hints so that we might inquire further. He gives us indications so that we might read the signs. God gives us hints so that we might inquire further. He gives us indications so that we might read the signs. God gives us little by little, step by step, himself ultimately under sacramental signs and in varied ways so that we could ask questions. You can think about the Gospel of John, how oftentimes a revelation is usually preceded by a question or by a misunderstanding on the part of the apostles. God wants us to ask. God wants us to inquire. God wants us to draw more and more, further up and further in, into the heart of his love for us, so that once we have become more and more established on that solid ground, we need never fear departing. But even if we should, God has accounted even for that, because

one may depart from him in the order of transgression, only to return to him in the order of mercy. And as 120th century Dominicans said, at every moment of every day, God is offering to even the most hardened of sinners at least the grace sufficient to pray. So God wants your friendship, as it were, and he gives himself to you, but not in a way that is discourteous or, again, overwhelms our humanity, but one that is addressed to us as reasonable beings, as ones destined by virtue of the image of God at work within our members to life with him forever. 20 seconds. Okay. Thank you very much, Father Pond. Ben, you have five minutes whenever you'd like to begin. Let me begin my closing statement by first thanking Father Gregory for having such a great discussion with me tonight.

These discussions are always super fun for me, and most of all, they help me grow in my philosophical work so much. I also cannot thank Matt Fryad enough for agreeing to host us tonight, so cheers to him as well. I don't want to introduce any new material, so I will merely content myself with reviewing the arguments that I've already given tonight. So recall that I began tonight by clearly outlining the theological concepts that I was going to make use of, and then I gave three arguments that attack the concept of classical theism that is at the core of Father Gregory's Thomism. So my first argument was an argument from evil. We saw that complex life has biologically evolved over hundreds of

millions of years. This history of sentience contains facts about the flourishing and languishing of complex life, as well as the biological gratuity of pain in the course of that history. These evolutionary evils constitute some of the most powerful evidence against theism because most of these evils seem unjustified or otherwise gratuitous. And theism implies there are no unjustified nor gratuitous evils. Therefore, we reasoned that facts about evolutionary evils constitute strong evidence against theism. My second argument was the argument from freedom. We saw that traditional theism implies that God is perfectly free. This means God's act of creation was contingent because God could have reframed from creating anything at all. However, this idea of

could have done otherwise is incompatible with classical theism because that view implies God is purely actual. If God is purely actual, and contingency is a necessary condition for the ability to do otherwise, then it follows that God, contrary to traditional theism, is not perfectly free, because his will does not contain the potentiality required to actualize something other than what he does well. And that's a contradiction. My third argument was the argument from changing knowledge. Here we saw that change through time is a real feature of the world, and it implies God's knowledge also changes with time. But according to classical

theism, God has no potential to acquire anything new nor lose anything old, including knowledge, So now these arguments may not be convincing to you, and I'd be surprised if they convinced anyone who is already deeply committed to a Catholic or otherwise Thomic tradition. But I do believe that is not a fault of any party here tonight. I believe this is the nature of reasonable disagreement in philosophy. These arguments are first and foremost tools for us to think about the question of God's existence for the rest of our lives. The question of God's existence is a perennial question of philosophy. It's not going away, and neither myself nor Father Gregory have had the last word here. However, our engagement might just help give many of you a deeper insight into an imposing view, or possibly to your own view. Perhaps it will start pulling the threads within your web of beliefs that eventually leads to an unraveling of some aspect of your worldview.

of beliefs that eventually leads to an unraveling of some aspect of your worldview. These are the deeper thrills of philosophy, after all. It's what keeps us engaged. It's what keeps us coming back and yearning for more and more discussion. I'm fond of saying that we have nothing to lose and everything to gain from an honest pursuit of truth for its own sake. I'll leave everyone here tonight with some of my favorite words from Thomas Jefferson, which are, question boldly even the existence of God. I'll go ahead and rest my case here. Thank you for giving me a fair hearing tonight, and cheers to everyone. Yeah, okay, that was awesome. Well, thank you, Father Pine, and thank you so much, Ben.

Okay, that was awesome. Well, thank you, Father Pine, and thank you so much, Ben. What I want to do now is tell people about some of the things that we have coming up here on Pines with Aquinas. But before we do that, I'd like to kind of, again, let both of you tell our audience where they could learn more about you, listen to your podcast, if you have books or whatever. So, Father Pine? Sure. So, things you can check out from the Dominicans in my province are the Thomistic Institute, uh, which is a research institute of our faculty. You can check it out at thomisticinstitute.org for, uh, live events. And then there's a podcast called the Thomistic Institute and then, uh, some video courses online. You can check out the quarantine lectures from the past six months and then Aquinas 101, which is a kind of step-by-step walkthrough of Thomistic

philosophy and theology that's ongoing unto ages of ages until Jesus comes back. And then Godsplaining is a podcast of some friars of our province, and the register on that's a little bit more conversational. So 30-minute episodes once a week, a Catholic miscellany where it's, yeah, Catholic faith, life, philosophy, theology. We just did an episode on Ernest Hemingway and literature. We just did an episode on judgment and judgmentalism. We just did an episode on conversation regarding race in America, things like that. So a variety of things that you may find pertinent, helpful. So yeah, check those things out. All right, Ben? You can find us at Real Atheology, a philosophy of religion podcast. So we have a Facebook, a Twitter, an Instagram. We have a blog um our podcast is available on apple podcasts um and

youtube wherever wherever your favorite place to get podcasts we're there and um we really are committed to trying to um kind of undo the damage of the new atheism in trying to facilitate healthy dialogue between theists and atheists. So we welcome everyone of all stripes, especially people who are honestly seeking for truth, and we hope that we can provide you with some tools to help you on your journey. Well, that was definitely demonstrated tonight, Ben. You were very charitable as well as intelligent, so thank you so much for that. Thank you. I want to let everybody know that we are hosting the largest Catholic apologetics conference in the world this October. We have an online way of going about it, and then we're doing an offline one. So October 23rd through 25th, go check this out. I'll put a link in the

show notes. We're going to have over 100 presenters. We're expecting over 60,000 people to be present virtually. We also have an offline conference that's only available to our patrons. So if you wish you had become a patron, that would have been a good reason. This is going to be fantastic. Father Pine, am I right in thinking that you will be at our offline North Georgia Mountain retreat thing? I'll be there. Yeah. So exciting. Ben, check it out. We're doing a whiskey tasting night. We're doing a cigar night. We're actually having a cigar aficionado coming up. And then my wife will be there to talk to women if they

don't want to smoke cigars and drink whiskey. You had me at whiskey and cigars, man. So that'll be fun. And then I want to let everybody know about our debate next month. It's going to be between Stephanie, well, formerly Stephanie Gray, now Stephanie Connors. She will be debating Dr. Malcolm Potts,

who is a human reproductive scientist from Berkeley on the topic of abortion and whether abortion can ever be justified. So this is going to be a fantastic discussion. Obviously, it'll be a little different to the previous two debates we've done on God's existence, but we'll hope you'll join us for it. I'll put that up over the next couple of days so you can learn more about it, but that's going to be a very exciting debate as well. All right. You guys are awesome. Thank you so much for all the work that you put into this, for being so respectful and so intelligent and very articulate.

It was terrific. It was an honor. I had so much fun. Thank you, Father Gregory, for agreeing to do this with me. Thank you, Ben. It was fantastic. It was a treat. All right. Bye.