The Sean McDowell Show - Does Evil Actually Prove God Exists? | Christian vs. Atheist Dialogue

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

"If God is good, why is there pain and suffering?". Today, we have a video of atheist professor Paul Rinzler and I to discuss evil. This is our return to the Cal Poly Veritas Forum for a second year this time on the hardest question in apologetics. Not a debate to be won. A real conversation between two people who disagree deeply and like each other anyway. CHECK OUT:Paul Rinzler - Professor Emeritus at Cal Poly State University https://music.calpoly.edu/faculty/rinzler/index.html WATCH: Are Miracles Real? A Christian & Atheist Explore (Veritas Forum) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cWui4CRfZc CHECK OUT: Logos Bible 60 Day Free Trial (https://logos.com/mcdowell) *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [smdcertdisc] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://x.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sean_mcdowell?lang=en Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org CHAPTERS 00:00 – Welcome and framing 00:28 – Sean's opening: four points on evil and suffering 08:19 – Paul's opening: the case from natural suffering 15:43 – A time you experienced pain 21:23 – Is pain part of God's plan? 22:47 – Would a "bad God" explain the world better? 24:04 – Does evil actually exist? 25:47 – Moral evil, free will, and determinism 33:46 – Does the moral project require agency? 36:23 – Making sense of randomness in natural disasters 42:25 – When suffering seems cruel and unnecessary 47:20 – Where do you find hope? 51:21 – What's more powerful: death or love? 54:01 – Advice for students in hard seasons 59:00 – What's the purpose of life for an atheist? 1:02:30 – Can objective morality exist without God? 1:04:46 – Why pursue justice if suffering is endless? 1:08:08 – The biggest doubt about your own worldview 1:10:18 – The question of hell 1:15:02 – Morality, evolution, and caring beyond your tribe 1:20:05 – How do you define love? 1:24:42 – Closing thoughts Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

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That's E-K-K-L. C-O-L. Subscribe now. Life Audio. Good evening. It's a joy to be back. Thank you so much for Veritas for planning this. And a joy to be back.

Paul, thanks for agreeing to do this again. Thoroughly enjoyed it last year. Been looking forward to this conversation for a long time. Pretty obviously, tonight we're wrestling with what can be considered the perennial question about the world. All of us, believer or not, at some point have asked a question. why is the world broken? Is there a God or is there not a God? Kicking this off as a Christian professor, I'm hoping to frame this conversation with four points that might help. First off, every single worldview has to make sense of why there's evil and suffering in the world.

Buddhists have a solution they think works to this. Hindus have to make sense of evil and suffering. Muslims, Mormons, atheists, tonight, Paul is going to give a worldview perspective as an atheist to the suffering and evil in the world. So really the question is, which worldview makes the most sense of evil and suffering? Now, I'm not a Christian because I can tell any one of you who came up to me and said, Sean, why did this evil or suffering happen in my life? I don't know the answer to that. In fact, I don't think we'll know the answer to many questions until we get to the future and we look back and then we understand. Plus, in a Christian worldview, the fact that we're finite and God is infinite, he knows everything and we're limited in knowledge. We shouldn't expect to know everything.

I'm a Christian because as a whole, I think Christianity offers the most intellectually and existentially satisfying response to why there's evil and suffering in the world. Second, it's vital to make a distinction between what might be called the intellectual problem of evil and the emotional problem of evil. The intellectual challenge would be how we make sense of, say, God's power and God's goodness with evil and suffering in the world. The emotional problem is how we care with people, care for people who are hurting, or maybe deal with somebody who's angry at God because of pain that they've experienced.

Now, a Christian response to emotional pain is not to give an argument. Sometimes well-meaning Christians say things that are not only not helpful but unbiblical when somebody's hurting no quote of Bible verse Adam. Don't you know Romans 828 says all things work together for the good? Take that frown and turn it upside down. not only not biblical but not helpful. I think a genuine biblical response is found in Romans 1215, where it says rejoice with those who rejoice,

weep with those who weep. I have a daughter who's 19 years old. She's a college student, got an A on a chemistry test last week. She called me up to tell me, what was she looking for from me? Now I know some of you are thinking, money. No, don't be jaded, not the case. she wanted us her dad to say, and I did because I love my daughter,

congratulations, I'm so proud of you. Thanks for sharing with me. I know you studied hard to meet her emotionally where she's at. Well, same is true when somebody's hurting. A Christian response is to be present with them and hurt with them. And I point this out because oftentimes in our life, we think we want an intellectual response, but in reality, we're hurting and we need comfort and we need care. Third, the problem of evil must be considered. in light of all of the evidence for the existence of God. Now, I think the evidence is quite compelling that God exists. From the shocking discovery in the 20th century that the universe had a beginning,

pointing towards a cause outside of it, from the surprising discovery that the laws of physics are exquisitely fine-tuned for life, discovered by an agnostic, by the way, not a Christian, the discovery of the complexity of life in the cell, the amount of information, arguably points towards an information giver, objective beauty in the world, near-death experiences, the ontological argument, and of course the evidence for Jesus. Now, we're not going to go into that tonight, and I'm pretty confident because Paul and I have had a number of conversations that he has responses to that.

We can go back and forth. But in many ways, if you put it on a scale, the argument against God would be evil and suffering. But on the other side of the scales, what I would consider, a vast amount of evidence from the origin of the universe and the fine-tuning, information of the cell, beauty, objective morality, near-death experiences, and so on, pointing towards the existence of God. In a conversation about whether God exists or not, we need to consider that as well, even though we won't be tonight. the last thing although evil obviously poses a significant challenge to the christian faith i think the existence of evil if it exists is one of the best reasons to believe that god exists c s lewis who was an atheist and then became a christian while at oxford reflected back on when he was an atheist he said something very interesting he said my argument against god was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust but how would i

gotten this idea of just and unjust. A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? C.S. Lewis said, as an atheist, he looked at the world, he said it's unjust. But wait a minute, if I'm saying it's unjust, that implies an objective standard of justice. But how do you get an objective standard of justice if there is no God? Just like a bent stick, implies the standard of straight. So think about it this way. What's more basic truth or a lie?

The answer, of course, is truth. You can have truth, that's the standard, without somebody telling a lie. But a lie by definition is an intentional misrepresentation of the truth. So just like you can't have injustice without justice, you can't have a lie without truth,

you can't have evil without good. Evil is not the opposite of good. Evil is a corruption or privation of good. It depends upon the existence of good. But if there is objective good, then the best explanation seems to be that there's a God. You see, when we talk about evil in the world and suffering,

in part we're saying something's broken. Things should not be that way. things are not the way they should be or they are the way they shouldn't be. Both of those imply a certain standard or purpose or way the world should be. That only makes sense if there's a God and a designer who's built it. Now, of course, the existence of evil, if it implies the existence of goodness, is a piece of evidence for the existence of God. That doesn't tell us why God allows evil and suffering and why God allows pain, I think we'll get to that. But when properly placed, the complaint about evil is one piece of evidence that morality is objective and there's good,

and hence a God. I look forward to getting into it. Thank you. Well, I'd like to thank everyone at the Veritas Forum for inviting me here. I'd like to thank Sean for being my partner again in conversation. And I'd like to thank my wife Robin for helping me think through some of these issues. So I'm going to address the question, how do you make sense of pain and suffering? And why does belief or unbelief in God matter for that question? Well, belief matters especially when you consider natural suffering, which is suffering caused by things like earthquakes and hurricanes. It's not caused by human agency. On the one hand, making sense of natural suffering is easily explained from a non-religious materialistic position in an indifferent universe,

no creator God in a system as complex as the environment on earth with life in it, suffering is going to happen, sometimes for no conceivable reason. But on the other hand, natural suffering occurs on vast, enormous scales that make no sense that a loving, all-powerful God would exist, and I'll explain why. First, God's loving nature requires that God eliminate natural suffering, and the reason for this is not complicated. Love means, that. Love by itself, absent any other factor, does not tolerate suffering. However, other considerations might change that picture, so let's look at some. You could say, well, maybe God did have a greater purpose in allowing suffering to happen. Well, first of all, that's just speculation,

but there's a more difficult problem. The uncertainty in the word maybe creates an irresolvable conundrum. Presumably, we should help people and try to stop their suffering. but on the other hand, maybe we should allow their suffering because there might be a greater purpose in it. The conundrum is that there's no way to decide whether to help them or not, because we don't know if there's a greater purpose or not. We're stuck. There's no way out. Okay, well, let's assume that we do know that God does have a greater purpose in allowing some suffering. We just don't know what that greater purpose is.

This is sometimes phrased as we can't understand God's reasons or God works in mysterious ways. But this is an illegitimate move for a rational discussion. because it's unfalsifiable. There's nothing we can imagine that would eliminate an unknown reason as an explanation. You could always explain away anything with we can't understand God's reasons.

You could say that to explain away the suffering caused by the most evil God imaginable, wouldn't you? Okay? Well, let's say we can identify a greater purpose. One greater purpose that has been proposed is called soul-building. When suffering instills higher values like

courage or perseverance, another, is the solidarity and bonding that happens among people who suffer together? Well, there's still problems. Remember, God can do anything. So there is always a way for God to achieve a greater purpose without suffering. With one caveat, God can't do what is logically contradictory. He can't make a square circle, a square circle is just an incoherent idea. So the greater purpose, let's say the greater purpose is the solidarity and bonding among people who suffer. Then I agree. I agree. There would be a logical contradiction if God did prevent such suffering because you can't identify your bond through your suffering with others who suffer unless you are also suffering. That's just logically true. But the greater purpose can't be achieved when suffering is so intense that it overwhelms any purpose of growth in a person,

particularly when a person dies while such intense suffering is still going on. There's no time for any growth to take place. Suffering in that case is not soul building, it's soul destroying. Intense pain can destroy your ability to pay attention, to use your higher faculties, to reflect on your suffering, to even hold a coherent thought in your head. And of course, babies and animals who die like that are incapable of spiritual growth to begin with. So imagine it's hundreds of years ago, and you're alone in a forest,

and you have a fall, and you break both your legs, and they get pinned somewhere, and you can't move, and now a forest fire is coming, you can't run away. The forest fire gives you severe burns over your entire body, and you die in nothing but total agony. If you, like God, could go to a person with broken legs in the forest before the fire reached them, would you say, I could rescue you and heal your legs right now and save you from the oncoming fire, but because I loved you so much, I'm going to do nothing and let you die a horrible death. but that will serve a greater purpose.

Oh, but I'm not going to tell you what that greater purpose is. Or would you say, I'm going to break my own legs so we can suffer together and get burned together, and this will deepen and transform our relationship, and you'll see that it's worth it. Well, no one with an ounce of compassion or an ounce of logic would ever say that if they could rescue someone from horrible suffering instantly and effortlessly like God can. How many people have died alone in total agony, natural causes like a forest fire or an earthquake throughout time. How many animals?

How many animals had to suffer being eaten alive? How many humans? Every single one of them, and there's billions of them, show that there is no loving, all-powerful God. Justifying that type of suffering runs the risk of losing sight of the real world. And here's a kind of crazy case of that. Mother Teresa was a Catholic nun who established a mission in India for the poor, and she told the following story at the 1994 National Prayer Breakfast,

and you can look at this story online. She said, quote, One day I met a lady who is dying of cancer in a most terrible condition, and I told her, I say, you know, your terrible pain is only the kiss of Jesus, a sign that you have come so close to Jesus on the cross that he can kiss you. and the patient joined her hands together and said, Mother Teresa, please tell Jesus to stop kissing me.

Now, some people think that's funny, but that patient's intense pain all too firmly planted her in the real world where Mother Teresa romanticized the patient's suffering as a kiss. A kiss is a gesture of affection, but Mother Teresa said that terrible pain is the kiss of Jesus, horrible suffering is affection? where are we?

Let's get back to the real world, and I'll sum up. Involuntary natural suffering for a greater purpose we can't identify or we only think might be there and is so severe that you can't even think and without any time for growth anyway before you die or involving animals and babies and without any identifiable logical contradiction

if it was alleviated and that love by itself would all Always alleviate means that God is not all loving or is not all powerful or is neither or doesn't exist. At least one of those must be true. You choose. Thank you both for sharing those statements. You guys did a good job helping us better understand this question that we're going to be discussing here tonight. So we're here to talk about a pretty heavy and expansive topic, that of suffering and pain.

To start off our moderated portion of the forum, let's begin with some stories. Can both of you share about a time where you experience pain in your life and how did you process or handle that experience? Did that experience influence your belief or unbelief in God? Dr. Rensler, would you like to start? Sure. I'm going to talk about the pain. Hey, y'all, I'm Willie Robertson. And I'm Corey Robertson.

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Be a part of something better. Echo. Echo. That's where I want to be. That's E-K-K-L. Dot, see-O-L. Subscribe now. Of a person and the suffering of myself.

So I was in third grade, and one of my good friends Barb was sitting in the seat in front of me in class, and I'd seen similar things on cartoons, and I had only an idea that I was going to do something really funny, and what I did was just as she was going to sit down, I pulled the chair out from under her. She had no idea I had done that. She went straight to the ground.

Now, she wasn't injured. She was shocked, and it was painful, but there was no permanent damage or anything. but the minute she hit the floor, I instantly knew that I had done something very, very bad, and it still gets me today. I still can't stand to think that I did that to her. That's my suffering. She was just in pain, but I'm still suffering about that.

And I wouldn't say that that is a determinant factor in me deciding whether God exists or not, But I will say this, that because my reaction was instantaneous, it came from a place that I didn't even think about. I mean, I didn't have to, I was in third grade, but I didn't have to have any sort of philosophical grounding for my moral worldview to understand that I had done something very, very wrong. I just knew it innately, and I think everybody has that innate sense of empathy for people. that's just how people are put together. Well, with possible exception to sociopaths, but that's a whole other thing. And that doesn't prove or disprove God's existence,

but it shows that God isn't necessary for us to understand and realize that we have this innate sense of empathy when people are undergoing pain. Thanks for sharing that. I'm turning 50, in May. And I thought at least one person would appreciate that. I did. Thank you. You did. You've been there. You've been there. I tell you that's about two and a half years ago,

I went through the worst pain ever in my life, probably on an eight scale plus excruciated. And I dropped to 135 pounds. And in case you haven't noticed, I don't have a lot of weight on myself anyways. Probably about three or four hours a day. I would lie on my back. in so much pain, I just remember taking a breath at a time, just hoping it would be done. And I'll tell you, it didn't make me question the existence of God for two reasons. One, because my faith is not rooted in an experience or a feeling. I've thought about my life like a fighter pilot. If a fighter pilot is confused and going so fast, they lose what is up and down,

they follow their instruments what is true to guide them. And I think about my faith the same way. My faith is rooted, and I really think Christianity is true from the stuff I mentioned before, the beginning of the universe, the fine-tune of the universe, information in the cell. I think the evidence for Jesus is compelling. So I'm sitting there on my back in so much pain

that didn't make me question God. And the other reason why is if you sign up to be a Christian, you're not signing up not to experience pain. If that's what you think the Christian faith is, you've signed up for a false gospel. If you're hurting and you're in pain right now, I'd encourage you to read the Psalms. Some of the largest category of the Psalms,

there's 150 of them in the Old Testament, and there are songs that are poetic. And they're written by people like David, a man after God's own heart. And he's like, God, why have you abandoned me? God, where are you? God, you're silent, my enemies, are defeating me. And so having questions going through pain and suffering is a part of the Christian

faith. Now, we're going to get to where I think the Christian faith authors us hope and meaning and purpose in our suffering. But it didn't make me question my faith. One of the results, interesting, I've known my wife since third grade. We grew up in a little town called Julian in the mountains of San Diego, famous for apple pies. And we've been married 26 years. And my wife said to me, she said, two times she's seen my life change the most. Number one, actually I was in grad school where I teach now at Talbot School theology, my theology, my philosophy really gave me confidence. And she said, second, as you came through and out of that pain,

you realize your own mortality, God humbled you, God softened your heart, and really changed me in ways that if we were having this conversation five years ago, probably would have been very, very different. Thank you both for sharing those stories. Sean, you kind of mentioned that as a Christian, we don't sign up to just not experience any pain. Do you think that it's a part of God's plan for humanity to endure pain and suffering?

Part of God's plan that we endure pain and suffering? We can't survive without pain. Pain is not bad. Pain is like on your dashboard of your cause, If a signal's up, it's like something's wrong with a car. So we need to have pain to survive. What happens sometimes with lepers, there's a professor by name of Dr. Brand,

who went and studied with certain leper colonies. And what leprosy can do is sear the body's ability to feel pain. And you quite literally self-destruct if you can't feel pain. touch something hot don't realize it's burning wreck your hand some who stepped in a nail and destroyed their feet so god has blessed us with pain sensors to survive and thrive within the world without it we couldn't live on the flip side i don't think we could have the pleasures that we have without pain i think they go together but i don't think we could even be here if it were not for the existence of pain thank you for that um paul from your perspective you mentioned something

of kind of an evil God that could be justified in your opening statement? Do you think it's more reasonable to believe in a bad God or no God given the presence of pain and suffering? Yeah, that's an interesting question, and I think it's the philosopher Stephen Law who has written about this extensively. And he doesn't say that the evil God is more likely, but he says, given the balance of good and evil in the world and given one apologetic, and apologetic that, well, you wouldn't really appreciate the good if you didn't have the evil.

That would be a totally different thing. He says, we can just flip that and think of an evil God that lets you feel some good so the bad stuff feels even worse because you're missing the good stuff. And his point is that just based on the evidence of the mix of the evil and good in the world, there's no way to decide between those two. So I wouldn't say it, it shows it that God is evil, but now we have a kind of a question mark. And I guess my opening statement said that, well, the question mark is, is God really loving? So I think that's as far as I would go. Can I follow up with you? Do you believe evil actually exists? Is it real? Is there real evil in the world? Because you kind of talked about good and evil, as if they're both real things and counterbalance

one another, which raises kind of the question where they come from, you know, a material universe. So I was referencing what Stephen Law said, and he was kind of entering into the Christian apologetic of why is they're evil and why is they're good. So for myself, I wouldn't call it evil because I think evil has certain theological Christian connotations that, of course, I don't adopt. I would say bad things happen. People suffer. People have sometimes pain that they don't want. Sometimes people have pain that they do want, like when you go exercise and it's a good workout. That can be a type of pain. But I wouldn't, I think, I wouldn't use the word evil. I would use the word suffering or bad, something bad or something you don't prefer. Can I ask one more just for

clarity? Not meant to be gotcha question, but I have to know. So an example of like torturing a child for adult entertainment. Yes, that's suffering. Yes, it's bad effects. I have no. no problem saying that is evil and twisted and morally corrupt. What would you say to that? Is that now evil or is that just bad and suffering? I would say it's really twisted. It would take a sociobacter. Morally twisted or?

Sure. Yes. Morally twisted. That is not a good thing to do. That is not a good thing to do. Okay. All right. Fair enough. Thank you for sharing that. In order to exhaustively address the topic of pain and suffering, we're going to now dive deeper into considering the different types of pain and suffering. And so I want to first touch upon suffering in light of morality.

And so based on your worldviews, how do you make sense of pain that's directly caused by people's actions? Is suffering that results from people's actions just unfortunate, or can we hope for justice, and that these experiences would ultimately be rectified? And Sean, would you like to go first? Sure. So we've shifted, you raised the question of natural evil in your talk, which is fair. That's an important question. Now we're talking about moral evil, which are choices that individuals make,

murder, theft, etc. Would you agree with that, that distinction? Okay. So before we go any further, there's a challenge for the naturalistic worldview and that if there is no soul and if there is no God, why determinism is not true and why actually there's no distinction between natural evil and between moral evil. So if there's no soul and God doesn't exist, everything is chemicals and motion, laws of physics. And so many atheists seem to me there's two options.

I debated Michael Scherer on this, and Schumer's like, we have free will, and I was like, explain. He's like basically magic popped into existence, which is a non-explanation. Or Sam Harris argued he wrote a whole book on it, how we're like puppets on a string, and there actually is no free will. So in many ways, the fact that we make this distinction and we all recognize it

kind of tells us that we think we have choice, we think we have agency, which is arguably best explained by us actually having a soul. Now, with that said, I would say this is where God has given us free will. If God is going to make us as beings who can love him and love others, we have to have the option to not love him and not love others. Otherwise, we're coerced. So if there's something valuable in relationships, in marriage, in parenting, friendship,

if there's something valuable in that in which we choose to be faithful to people, that's going to require something like free will for that to actually happen. And so if God gives us free will to do good, you're going to have the example that you gave of people having free will to do evil. Now, one other thing on this, it sounds like this is a two-part question, is there any hope? Well, I'll be really honest with you. Today was a pretty tough day for me. We had some friends reach out to us, and I'm going to try to keep this vague,

whose child was really severely abused. And she testified today. And we got a text back that the sentence was not remotely fitting to the crime. Now, a couple things. If there's such a thing as justice, then the punishment should fit the crime. That's one piece of it. Second, if he gets off, he's probably going to go do it to somebody else, which is terrible. But in part, if the government here is not going to deal with it, then to me, in an eighth

atheistic universe, people get away with all sorts of morally twisted, evil, wrong, bad things, because there is no hope beyond the grave that justice will be met. So I think there's moral evil like you described. I think it's obvious because we have choice and agency and we have a soul. And I think God being the ultimate governor in a sense, who we're accountable to, means that even like that fellow today who did horrible evil things will be held accountable. for that. Thank you for that.

Would you like to respond? Yeah. So we have to be careful that the desire for ultimate justice, for all the injustices to be taken care of in the afterlife, don't influence our decision as to whether there is going to be an afterlife or there is going to be somebody who will take care of all that injustice in the afterlife. It's a little too enticing. So, I mean, I don't want to reduce this down to whether does God exist or not,

because, well, that is the ultimate disagreement between us, when everything will come down to it. But the atheist is perfectly comfortable with saying, well, this is just the way the world is. I mentioned in my opening statement that we're in a universe that is indifferent to us. bad things are going to happen, and if I may slip into the vernacular, excuse me, shit happens. And people can get away, geez, just look around the world, pick up any, look at any headline, and you can see bad people getting away with doing bad things, and they don't get the justice that they deserve.

It happens. The hope that we have is that it's going to be up to us to refine our social systems and to refine our sense of justice so that we can hold people to account and that's just something we have to get better at. And let me go back to one of the things you said earlier on. By the way, before I come back, with that vernacular, you're like... Hey, y'all, I'm Willie Robertson. And I'm Corey Robertson.

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echo is not just faith-friendly it is faith-driven be a part of something better echo that's where i want to be that's e k-k-l dot see a will subscribe now okay we're not doing this in a church just for the record but you know keep going just for fun or it would have been cool had we done it in our church it would have been even cooler the the difference or the lack of a difference you mentioned about uh natural evil and moral evil, if determinism is true and we don't have free will, well, then it's just chemicals moving when a person does a bad thing, it's just chemicals moving when a snow slide happens and there's an avalanche, and it hurts people. So at some level that's true. Determinism would say that, but you can still make a distinction between moral evil and naturalistic

evil by saying moral evil happens when all those chemicals are doing what they're doing, within a human being. And natural evil is the stuff that happens outside of that human being. And that human being is a real special thing because you can talk all you want to rocks up on a mountain, and you're not going to convince them not to do a rock slide that's going to kill people. But you can talk to a human, and even through deterministic procedures, you can modify their behavior. You can't do that with natural evil. Okay, so you're not persuading, you're not convincing. You're controlling somebody through modifying their bodies because we're physical systems.

Just so I understand. Same thing, right? Because the physical system has that capacity for logic and reasoning and empathy and all of that. And you can encourage someone, you can bring out that natural empathy. Or, you know, if a person has brought up a certain way, that whatever natural empathy they have might be, never encourage and tamped down, or it could be encouraged and brought out. But I think the question is how, because I'm here to persuade people, appeal to ideas and make a case that they think about something.

Oh, you know, I think Paul's more convinced in this one. I'll believe that. No, I think Sean made a good case. I'll believe that. I'm appealing to minds and reason and rationality, which seems to me what universities are built on. So if natural evil is really no different than human evil, we call it the same thing, but it's still determinism in motion. It seems to me the whole moral project collapses then, because I don't say to a hurricane, you shouldn't do this or a virus, you shouldn't do that. But I say to people, you shouldn't do that. But it was Kant who said, ought implies can. ought implies can. So the whole moral project, we're talking about the problem of evil. The moral project

implies that we're agents with choice. So I say to you, you shouldn't do fill in the blank because you have the choice to do that or not do that. You ought to do this because you have a choice to do that or not do that. So like moral blame, if I blame somebody, I don't blame a hurricane, but I blame a person because they should have known better and acted differently. I give moral praise over here because somebody acted in a good way, and we want to hold that up to an example other people follow. But that only makes sense if we actually have free will and reason and rationality and can choose. But if moral evil reduces to natural evil, it seems the entire moral project goes with it.

One more counter-reply. I don't see why there's any reason why deterministically people don't have agency and make decisions and consider, you know, have empathy for other people. There's nothing about determinism that would say you can't do all those things that you mentioned that are really the moral project. I think the challenge is in your argument you said there's three premises for God. There's three options. Either God's not a good, God's not all powerful.

or God doesn't exist, right? Those are the three logical options. Well, either it's determinacy or it's free will. If we are determined by laws of nature, we don't have free will. If we have free will, we're not determined. So I think that's the root of the question. I think the materialistic worldview reduces to determinacy. It seems like you agree with me, and I just don't see where the moral project fits in.

And we could go down this road, but there's one area I did want to agree. with you on from before. You said we shouldn't believe in heaven just because we desire it. I totally agree. I think both sides, you can make the argument that somebody, not you, doesn't want to believe in God because they don't desire accountability for their life. And I want to believe in heaven because I want there to be justice. Truth should not be determined by our wants, but by evidence, I think that's an area we would agree on. Yeah. Thank you both. Kind of touching again on the natural causes in suffering, this type of suffering can come from seemingly random events, such as natural disasters

like we touched upon. And so, based on this worldview, how do you make sense of the randomness element in these catastrophes? Would you like to start? On one level, there's no making sense of it because random stuff happens. I mean, when you calculate the digits for pie, they're random, and there's no sense that you can make of it. So given the complex world that we live in, weird things are going to happen. And, you know, deterministically, there is a reason why all that happened,

but it's so fantastically complex that we can't calculate it, we can't figure it out, so we kind of just have to say, yeah, we can't explain it, we can't show all the steps in why it happened. But it still is happening due to the laws of physics and all of that. So the randomness, how bad things can happen to people randomly, there's a flood and one person drowns,

and the person right down the street doesn't drown. Why did that happen? It's something we can't figure out, but that doesn't mean that you have to think there's some grand mystery. just a problem so complex, we can't solve it. So with natural, I hesitate to use the term natural evil because I think evil implies agency. It's natural disaster, certainly pain and suffering results, but the term like you said, that is used is natural evil.

So four points come to mind. Number one, we need certain natural disasters and processes to actually have a functioning planet. So 99% of viruses are positive. 1% are potentially harmful. Get rid of viruses and human beings are gone. One reason would be to limit the growth of bacteria. We don't have viruses to wipe them out. We're gone.

Things like earthquakes. Less than 0.02% of earthquakes cause any suffering or pain for human beings. Get rid of earthquakes and we're not here again. whether it's our iron core, kind of a protective force from rays from the sun, circulating some of the elements, we need earthquakes to have a planet capable of supporting life. Things like forest fires, we need fire. These are processes that we actually need.

In fact, interesting enough, during Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, 1958 to 62, they're trying to get rid of sparrows and pests, and they killed like millions of sparrows of sparrows. pharaohs. It had a massive backlash because then the locusts went wild and destroyed all the crops. So we don't always know, back to your point, we don't always know what purposes are for things. But there's a very fragile balance in nature when we think I could just get rid of that. And then the world would be better. It's like, wait a minute, you don't quite know what that does in the scope of things. Now, the second thing I would say is in Christianity, the world starts good,

Genesis chapter three we have the fall. It actually says in Romans 8 that creation groans. So these natural processes have been affected and upset, and the apple cart's been turned over by sin in some capacity. The world you might say is broken. Third thing I would say is natural disasters cannot be separated from moral evil. So for example, why did the earthquake in San Francisco in 1989 have a third of the less of the devastating effect than certain earthquakes in Haiti.

The buildings were not built to be earthquake-proof. There's been a lot of corruption and evil that has taken place by people in power that's intermixed with the natural disasters and exacerbates the suffering. All of us know that happened in COVID. Now, I'm not going to take sides. The last thing we want to discuss is politics, but we can all give our favorite example of the pandemic, something somebody did to exacerbate suffering and evil.

finally on the random one that's a fair question and i think we kind of agree to one level on this paul why did this flood kill this person not that person in some ways i don't know the answer to that i'm not god god is sovereign now i'm not working this into my system to get god out of a problem this is built into what it means to be god god is infinite god is all knowing god is eternal we are finite limited knowledge and temporal. So I don't think we should expect to know God's ways because of the vast epistemic distance between us and between God. The further thing on random, I would say, is maybe if the highest good, if God exists, the highest good is to know God personally and to experience eternal life with God. Maybe in a world in which we can't.

can't always see the patterns is a reminder to all of us that we can't just trust our health, we can't just trust our finances, we can't trust the government. This world is not eternal and we can't control it. And we look beyond ourselves to something eternal. So even the rich could get wiped out. Even the powerful could. I think that randomness could, the one reason for that randomness could be that God wants us to turn to him in our suffering and our pain. and our evil. That could be one reason why. Thank you for that. On that topic, does the same go for personal suffering that we can encounter that seems cruel and unnecessary, like unexpected death, or things like that where it's super

emotional and painful, and it seems like it's hard to justify a good God with pain and suffering, such as that on that personal level? You're looking at me, so this is for me. Yeah, this is true. Sorry. So I totally agree with the way that this is framed. There is horrific, terrible things in the world that all of us, regardless of our worldview, hate and wish we could stop.

But you said it at least twice. You said what seem to be a certain way. That's the key. We don't always know. We don't know what's going on. We don't know what God is doing. We don't know how it affects other people. We can't possibly know, nor should we be expected to know.

So I agree. When I look out things, I'm like, I don't get it. That makes no sense. That seems crazy. But I have a limited, finite perspective. I cannot see, nor should I be expected to see from God's perspective, how he could possibly use something. So I don't see this as a maybe that's a 50-50. I think it's what we would expect if there is a God and we're not.

God. So if you come to my house and Paul were hanging out, having a drink, and I'm like, you know, there's a flea in here and you're like, I don't see it. Well, you shouldn't expect to see a flea. But if I said there's an elephant and you don't see it, you should expect to see the elephant. Should we expect to know all of God's purposes for even what seems the way you described it? I would say no. I would say no. So let me respond to that. Sure. I mean, that's true as far as it goes, but the problem that creates is that there's, you can't judge whether something would be from God because, or something is according to God's plan or not, because you kind of throw up your hands and say, I can't understand how God would

do this. At that point, I think the intellectually honest thing to say is that that is that, that something that argues against the existence of a loving, all-powerful God, rather than the opposite. So you said God's plan or God's will. I read all the verses in the Bible. Hey, y'all. I'm Willie Robertson. And I'm Corey Robertson. We partnered with ECHL. It's a new platform, not just streaming. Movies and series that are safe for your family. I love a podcast. Plus ECHLECHL Daily Devotionals. ECHO. Hey, really, what is ECHO? Echo is my pet school.

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Subscribe now. Talk about God's will all over the place, whether it's First Thessalonians 4, whether it's Daniel 4, Romans 9. And the Bible talks about God's will on two levels. One is God's moral will. honor our parents, tell the truth. Care for the poor. Care for widows. Do just things.

I'm reading the Old Testament prophets right now, and over and over again, it's like God gets so angry because people are taking advantage of widows, taking advantage of the poor, not being humble and just and loving. That's God's will. Second is God's sovereign will,

which we don't understand, and we never could understand. That's what it means to be God. So God's sovereign will can give us trust that God is moving the world in ways towards his good. But when it comes to God's will, it's clear in Scripture that we are supposed to do good things and then trust God with the results from that. So I don't see why that flips the point that I made on my head in this argument against the existence of God. I get the distinction between – I was referring to God's sovereign will.

If you kind of wall off God's sovereign will and say, you can go and say it could be anything. That is, God could be the most evil God imaginable, and his sovereign will would be beyond our judgment. We couldn't say that it was good or bad. That, I think, is a wall that prevents you from using your judgment and making a determination and accepting that, hey, this doesn't fit. This could take us a little aside, but I don't know what it means to say an evil God. If evil is a corruption of good and depends upon the existence of good, an evil God would require a standard this God is corrupting above itself

that actually would be God, so to speak. So I don't know what that evil God would mean, but if there were such a being, I have no interest in defending that God. I'm talking about the Christian God and how it makes sense of sovereign will. So that's a fair objection to another perspective, but I don't think would address mine, if that's fair. We can move on. Transitioning into a little bit more of a hopeful perspective, how do you guys find hope amidst the pain and suffering? And does your justification of God not knowing and kind of the God knowing more than we would, does that give you hope?

in what ways how you can kind of, I guess, grapple with that. Because it seems like some people would say, oh, that's not enough to just say that I don't know or that God knows more than me. But I guess for both of you guys, how do you find hope amidst this pain and suffering? Sure. I'd be happy to. So in John 1633, Jesus says, in this world, you will have trouble. But take heart, I have overcome the world.

I really believe that Jesus lived and died and rose again on the third day and defeated sin and death has already been defeated. I believe that. That's a separate topic. Obviously, we're not having tonight. But that gives me hope. That gives me confidence that in the midst of suffering, when I don't know why it's happening, and it seems egregious the way you're describing it, that God is sovereign and he's good. and he's already shown that death doesn't have the last word. So because I think God exists and I believe that God is good, that gives me hope when I'm suffering. I get hope from other believers who have suffered well.

Right now, some of you've maybe seen Ben Sass, former University of President of University of Florida, Senator from Nebraska, dying of pancreatic cancer, was given three months to live. And he's out there talking about, how he believes in Jesus and it gave him hope and a peace. When he has a death sentence, he did an interview in New York Times, Ross doubted it, and he's bleeding all over his face, and he's like, I'm going to see my Savior.

And Jesus has risen from the grave. So I could hope from believing that and looking at other Christians who suffer well. And I also get hope at the times in my life, I'm getting old enough to look back and be like, at times when things seem ridiculous, and the pain was so overbearing, and I didn't understand why God allowed it. I'm able to more so look back and see it. Now, sometimes God heals and sometimes God doesn't, but I thought of this right now. I'm literally dropping a video Friday of a neuroscientist who had a,

he was told, your life is going to end, you have a terminal disease, he prayed and experienced a supernatural healing. Now, the Bible doesn't promise God will always do that, but sometimes he does. And that gives me hope when I suffer and see other people suffering. I have a question. Sure.

Would you say that you experience any other type of hope besides what you get from Christianity? Any other kind of hope? Yeah. Sure. I mean, it's not my supreme, my ultimate hope, but I have hope. I mean, politically at times, I'm like, I've got hope in this guy. Sure. I mean, we're obviously not going there.

I have hope in certain scientific research that they're going to discover things. I have some hope in AI. I have some concern, but AI has been used to solve certain diseases they found. So sure, there's other things I find hope. But my deepest hope that gives me meaning, 100% found in who I think Jesus is and the fact that he's risen from the grave. So I think that's something else that not only you and I would agree on, but probably you and other atheists would agree, was all that other type of hope. So all that other type of hope beyond the hope you get from Christianity is the hope that atheism.

the hope that atheists have, which probably everybody has. The Christianity stuff just gets slathered on top of it. So sure, atheists have all those similar types of hopes that everybody has. Can I ask you, how do you think about, like I ask myself this question sometimes, what's more powerful, death or love? If Christianity is true, love is more powerful. If atheism is true, death is more powerful. Talk to Dr. Freud about that. He'd have something to say about that.

I wish I could talk to Dr. Freud about that. But what gives you hope? I mean, basically, philosophy throughout the history of the world is about dealing with and confronting death. So government, AI, all those things run out when you face death. What gives you hope or confidence as you face death? the only, well, I don't have any hope for the afterlife. So, but that's okay.

So I guess you brought it up, I'll go there. You have three options. You can change something. You can accept it, or you suffer. And one of the things people suffer the most about is the fear of death. And if you live long enough, you can come to accept it. you can't change it. So if you're not going to change it

and you're not going to accept it, your only hope is to suffer about it. And if you come to accept it, this is just the cards, you're not going to get six jokers in a card of five stud poker. That's just, that's not what the game is. The game here is that we're not going to live forever.

So once you accept it, and it's a hard thing to accept because evolution is created, created us to want to live. We wouldn't be here that didn't create us like that. It's a hard thing to accept, but it's possible. Think about, and I'll bet you you can do this too, you think about a really bad thing that happened in your life that made you suffer. Have you eventually come to accept it? I mean, I can think of things in my life. Yeah, you can eventually come to accept it. You understand this is just what the reality is. And actually, whether you believe

in an afterlife or not, you still have to accept that death in this life is going to happen. And even religious people apparently aren't happy about that, although if you've got the afterlife, why does it matter so much? But even religious people have to learn to accept that death. That's something everybody has to do. I wish you luck. You can do it. Thank you both.

Before I give the floor for the last question, This is the time for the audience to scan the QR code to go on Slido to submit your questions for our speakers. And for you guys, do you have any wisdom for us Cal Poly students about how to maintain hope in the midst of a trial or a tough period of time in life? Well, humility says I'm not going to give you any wisdom, but I can say something. So if you hope that you're going to do well on a midterm, don't hope. Study. Walk into that midterm knowing, hey, saying, I know that material because I studied on it. I don't have to hope that I'm going to do good on it.

I know I can. And for anything that we hope for in the world to make a better society, to have better laws, to have better politicians in office, to have better friends, friendships, whatever it is. Of course, everybody hopes good things are going to happen. I hope I win the lottery. But do something about it. I'm not saying go out and buy a lottery ticket.

Don't do that. But for the things that are important, it's more important to do something about it than merely to hope that it's going to happen. Part of the nature of this dialogue is about pain and suffering and how we make sense of it. There's a new book that just came out.

I ordered it and I'm working through it. It's called, Tell Me Where It Hurts by Neuroscientists, and I know Dr. Zoffness. And she describes how there's been, maybe you could use a term of revolution in neuroscience. We used to look at pain as mechanistic and physicalist. Like if a car is broken, fix the door. If the house is broken, broken, fix it physically.

But now we have a much more multidimensional. you might say holistic approach that involves body and soul to be a healthy person. So pain comes from things like trauma in the past, stories we remember all the way back in third grade, that's amazing you remember that. It comes from our emotions. It comes from our experiences. And the stories we tell us deeply shapes our pain. So in the book she describes, you find this fascinating, Paul,

is at this construction site, this guy who's working jumps off a four-foot ledge, lands on a nail on his boot, and start shrieking in pain. Rush him to the hospital, give him pain like anesthesia to deal with it. They take off the boot, and the nail went through his toes. Didn't even hit him. What triggered is his pain was the expectation, the people around. him previous experience. Then they took another person from a construction site and shot a nail gun and this person saw the nail go and disappear. But then later on over the next few days,

started feeling jaw pain, just didn't feel right, went to the doctor, and the nail was embedded in his jaw. But he didn't feel it because he was convinced that he had seen feel it as badly. He had seen the nail go elsewhere. The point is, pain is, pain is. not just physical. It's the beliefs that we have. It's the stories that we tell us, which does help us weigh into animal pain a little bit. I know that would take us aside, but so much of the pain we have is not just our physical bodies, but the despair, the hopelessness, the lies that we tell ourselves. Now, this revolution, neuroscientists, of course, I'm a Christian, so I'm going to interpret this way. I'm like, yeah, this is what we'd expect, because we are body and we are soul. This is

why Paul can write a letter called Philippians from a Philippian jail about joy, because our circumstances don't determine us. And as a Christian, I really believe that there's purpose in your suffering. God will walk us through our suffering. There's eternal life. That's why First Peter 5.7 says, cast all your anxiety upon him. It's actually care for our bodies, but our beliefs about these things can help us deal with pain and suffering. And that's why I think some of the beliefs that Jesus offered line up with, believe it or not, the human flourishing project, beliefs in like gratitude, which the scripture is full of commanding, you flourish most as a human being as a sense of gratitude. So if you want to deal with pain, hurting your life and culture this,

care for your bodies, but also care for your souls. Because we're both. Thank you both for that. I'm going to ask a few questions that have been submitted in the slide-o from our audience. Our first one is towards you. What is the purpose of life for an atheist? Ah, the purpose of life. Oh, that's an easy question.

So there may not be one. that is, unless it's given from beyond you, you have to make it yourself. And, well, I guess I'm speaking from my perspective, I guess that's all I can do. But I'm really happy I get to make my own purpose. I get to determine what sort of person do I want to be within limits. That is, I'm still evolution constructs me in a certain way that limits that. Within those limits, I get to decide what type of person do I want to be? What do I want to do with my life?

I have a finite time on earth. How do I want to spend it? You can create your own purpose. And in fact, religious people do that as well as atheists. So the purpose of life. Actually, it just occurs to me that I answered the question, what's the purpose to a life? That's the question I really answered. The purpose of life is actually to go on living.

I mean, again, evolution has constructed life to build organisms that will leave descendants so that they can leave descendants, and that's why life exists. The purpose of life is to live. The purpose of a life is your own choosing, and that's a beautiful, that's a great thing. Go for it. Make your life what you want to call.

to be. Sean, would you like to respond to that at all? Sure. Thank you for that response. I think I would say if a naturalistic evolutionary account is true, you're absolutely right. There is no objective purpose to life. We might feel that we should care for our neighbors or do good or tell the truth, but this is, as Michael Ruth says, a trick played upon us by our biology to get a to behave to pass on our genes into the next generation. So if that's the case, and we're talking about a life is what you choose, then no life is objectively better than any other life. My question is, do you really believe that? Do you believe that Hitler's life was not objectively worse than Mother Teresa's life spent caring for the poor and marginalized and sacrificing for them. My suspicion is,

God agrees, the lights came on. I mean, my goodness, I'm just kidding. That's not my evidence. Don't write that one off. I think all of us know that there's better ways to live life than other ways. I mean, if our sense of morality is just tricked in us by evolution and somebody says, well, my purpose is I do want to torture. kids for pleasure is not doing something objectively wrong. I think we all know that's wrong, which means there's something right, which cries out for a bigger explanation. That's how I see it. So my purpose in life is to love God, love others. We just skipped over the issue of objective morality last time we talked, and it looks like we're going to have to do it again. Um,

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dot see you will subscribe now all all i can say is that there once you accept what morality is which is concerned for the well-being of conscious creatures and if it's not about that then i don't know what it's about once you accept that then there are objective things things that you can objectively say that will enhance well-being of conscious creatures and things that will degrade it and the things that enhance it are the things that are morally good and the things that degraded are the things that are morally bad. Objectively, you can say that. Lots of gray area in the middle, but that's true for any moral system. So there can be objective morality in an atheistic world being. If we grant your premise, that we have objective duties to other beings and moral obligations

to them. No, my premise was morality is about the well-being of conscious creatures. That's the definition of what morality is. And is morality about anything besides that? So I think morality is about ethics. It's about right and wrong. What we should do, what we shouldn't do. And so the question is,

do I have a moral obligation to care for other beings that have evolved? It's kind of begging the question by saying, well, this is what morality is. So we therefore have objections to other organisms and we can objectively assess it, that's something that has to be ground and explain, not just defined into existence. It's not what morality is.

It's what morality is about. The content of morality is concerned for the well-being of conscious creatures. If that's true, and if it's not, I'm waiting to hear what it possibly could be about, other than that. If that's true, then there are objective things you can say that will answer,

degrade the well-being of conscious creatures. Okay, so I think we're going to go round around in this way. Yeah, but if next year, I'm down, let's do it. Good. We'll let that one go. Fair enough. Okay. This question is for both of you. Why should we pursue justice or empathy when suffering seems endless?

Go ahead. Don't let what you can't control, stop you from what you can control. If everybody was like, well, I can't do everything. so I'll do nothing, then more people will suffer. Of course we can't do everything. You and I agree. Like so much of life is like realizing what can I do and being content with that.

In some ways, I say, I thank God the people in my life who've been kind to me, who've been gracious to me. They didn't say, well, you know what, I can't stop all evil. So I'm not even going to help John. All of us in some way here are the recipients of somebody who did an act of kindness or courage or bravery or justice to us. Now, why does this matter for you? When I was a college student, there was like a season where I was like paralyzed in the sense of like, what am I going to do with my life? And I read a book by a former U.S. president who said, if you try to figure out what you want to do in your life, find a way that you can make somebody else's life better.

And I was like, A, that is so simple, B, that's profound. Because I think God has wired us in a way that we actually love him and love others. We actually flourish better. Our culture is obsessed with think about yourself, live for yourself, be happy, define yourself. And during that ethos, it's like depression and anxiety and loneliness are going off the charts. But if you just say, you know what, I want to be happy to find yourself. to love other people and I want to care for other people and I can't do everything, but I want to do something, guess what? You'll actually help somebody and make a difference and you'll feel good

doing it because the purpose of life is to love God and love others. And when we start thinking less about ourselves and just sacrifice for other people, if more people would do that, we could make a significant difference. So young people, don't focus your life on how do I make money? How do I get successful? How do I get followers? I'm turning 50. That stuff is empty. That stuff is empty. If you focus your life on, like what Jesus said, talked about love God and love other people. Seek first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added unto you. I am telling you, you will wake up someday with a meaningful life, knowing you made a difference for somebody and did something good. I can sum up my answer to that by very quickly agreeing in one sentence with the first part of what Sean said.

Don't let the good be the enemy, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Suffering is going to happen. There's no indication we're going to get rid of it, get rid of all of it, anytime soon, every single time you help somebody, you reduce somebody's suffering, you're taking one step on that road of a thousand steps. Thank you both. Another question we have is, what is the greatest point of doubt for both of your worldviews, what caused you to question what you believe?

Paul, would you like to start? I think the greatest doubt I received. We talk about this last time, perhaps, is the fine-tuning argument. I think the fine-tuning argument ultimately fails, but it's the one that gave me the most pause. I said, oh, we have to look at this. And, you know, I researched it and I studied it and eventually come up with what I think is a good answer to it. So I think the argument fails. But that's the one that made me do the most work.

I think hands down our conversation tonight is the biggest challenge to the existence of God or the goodness of God. In some ways, I was somewhat reluctant to do this conversation because I was like, I'm starting on the defense trying to justify God. I was like, but you know what? People have this question. And it's a real question. It's a fair question. And we should ask it. And I think what makes it so hard is two things is evil and suffering seems and appears random. as we've talked about. But it's not just intellectual. It's emotional.

We feel it. We've experienced it. And that's different than, like, fine-tuning has implications for God, but it's math and astrophysics. It's logical, right? But the problem of evil hits in our guts. When we see kids suffer,

when we see pain in the world, it's natural to have doubt and have suffering when it comes to that. So, as I said a few times this discussion, I think if we ask if God exists or probably exists, I think the weight of the evidence points strongly towards the existence of God, but the problem of evil, understandably, raises doubts, it raises questions, and I don't think anything else arguably comes close to that.

Another question we have is more towards Sean. Would a fair God subject a person to an eternity of damnation in exchange for a finite human life, human lifetime of sin on earth? This is the big question, and this is probably the second toughest question behind evil, by the way, since you ask for one, that's all I gave you,

about hell. So realize, hell and evil are the flip-side questions. Evil is, look at all the suffering in the world. Why doesn't God do anything about it? hell is God's dealt with evil but he's done it too much so you kind of can't say God hasn't done enough and God has done too much at the same time you got to pick your poison so to speak now with that said there's one main reason that I believe in the reality of hell I don't like hell if I had my

druthers we talked about desires earlier if I had my druthers based on my opinion I would get rid of it because of loved ones who I know the thought of them going there is heroin. The main reason I believe in hell is because Jesus believed in hell. And he talked about it. Read Matthew 25. Now, if I was going to give you a clinic about being an NFL quarterback, none of you should show up. I got no credibility in that realm.

But if Herbert, my man, we're going to have a good year. San Diego shows up. Listen to him. He's got the goods. Who has the most goods to speak on eternal things who's ever lived? I realize I haven't established this tonight. But I'm going with the virgin-born, sinless, miracle-working, son of God, who resurrected on the third day. And hands down, has changed the world more than anybody who's ever lived.

Every religion wants to claim Jesus for their own. Everybody does. just about, I'm going with that guy. So whether I like it or not, I think Jesus teaches the reality of hell. Now, the answer to that question would be one of two things. Either when people are in hell, C.S. Lewis argued that people keep sinning and gnashing their teeth and rejecting God for eternity, hence it's infinite, or the nature of our sin is contingent upon the being we sin against. So if you harm an animal, that's messed up. But the nature of our sin is contingent upon the being we sin against. So if you harm an animal, that's messed up, but that's not equal to harming a human being.

Harming a human being is not equal to harming and rejecting God who is infinite. So the question, I think, stems upon us rejecting the free gift of eternal life that God freely gives us. If God is infinite, then the penalty itself would be infinite. I fully realize hell, we've just begun to be infinite. that conversation. That's a whole other one. But in fairness, if there's not objective morality, then you can't complain about evil, and you also can't complain about hell. The very objection assumes there's a real right and there's a real wrong, which I think points towards the existence of God. Do you like to respond, Paul? Well, I can go in a couple of different ways.

I guess I'll go this way. The, oh, the bad. God. I made a mistake earlier and you caught me on it about the evil God, well, but that assumes a whole lot of theological things. And I use that phrase. So let's talk about the bad God. Wouldn't the bad God put, make people suffer horribly for a year? Oh, but I can think of an even worse God, somebody who would make people suffer for two years. I can think of an even worse God, somebody who would make people suffer for two years. I can think of an even and the worst God you can imagine would be a God who would make people suffer forever, await. That is hell, isn't it? This is the same problem. What's the difference between the evil and the good God? We can't tell them apart. I have another question centered around morality. Can objective morality exist absent God and how do you define bad with the acceptance of pain and suffering. We're cycling back. We are. The topic is evil, so it makes sense who would come up. Do you want

to address that? Well, I guess I already have. I don't know if we can pick up, you know, I think objective morality is possible given the definition of morality, but we've kind of been around that. So since the question came up, I think we're defining objective morality differently. There's a difference between behavior that we can... Hey, I'm Willie Robertson. And I'm Corey Robertson. We partnered with ECHL. It's a new platform, not just streaming. Movies and series that are safe for your family.

I love a podcast. Plus ECHL Daily Devotional's. Hey, really, what is ECHO? Echo is my pet school. Okay, dumb. Echo is not just faith-friendly, it is faith-driven. Be a part of something better. Echo.

Echo. That's where I want to be. That's E-K-K-L. C-O-L. Subscribe now. Objectively see if it helps us flourish or not flourish. And behavior that is wrong because of the kind of behavior that it is, regardless of the consequences that it has. That's what I mean by, and I would argue that most people

mean by objective morality, torture an innocent child for fun, it's the same effect whether you did it for fun or not, but it's the fun and the intention that makes that particularly evil. So I would argue you cannot have objective moral values and duties if there is no God. I think Fyodor Dastievsky, the Russian novelist, is right. Without God, all is permissible. I don't know how you get moral obligations. I don't know how you get free will and choice that we have without God and a soul. I don't know how you get objective human value,

where I have duties to treat you differently than a plant or a chair if we're not made in the image of God. And by the way, this is not just me arguing this. There's a lot of people like Michael Rusegan, atheist philosopher, who's like evolution, our belief in objective reality is a trick from our genes. We don't really have objective moral values and duties if God doesn't exist. So on the flip side, if we do have objective moral values and duties, then that's an argument that God does exist.

That's how I see it. So the trick of our genes that you mentioned, it's kind of hyperbole. It's the fact that, of course, doesn't everybody in the room think, have the most concern for your family? And then you have the most concern for your friends. And then you might even have concern for your community in that circle to expand. stands out. And this is completely expected on naturalism because we are a social species and that's how we survive. So that type of morality where we care about things in that order and maybe animals are out here. Maybe for some people like vegans, animals are in here,

but that's okay. That variability is, again, completely expected under naturalism. That that doesn't pose a problem for naturalism. It's not a trick. It's how we're put together. And of course we would be put together to care about the people closest to us because that's going to be the thing that makes evolution succeed.

And it's more about just acknowledging that fact as a reality. You know, I come back to this kind of theme a couple of times tonight. You just have to accept the reality of it. and then move move on from there. Whether you like that reality or not isn't an argument for or against it. You just accept that that's the reality.

By the way, somewhat quick, I think I agree with you on that, that if an evolution naturalistic account is true, we would most care for those immediate to us and then it expands out. Bart Ehrman, probably the most leading atheist in the world, last month, released a book called Love Thy Stranger, and he argued that throughout the history of the world, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, cynics, Stoics, Epochurians, there was a sense of caring for your people group.

But it's a distinct Christian ethic that we ought to care for those outside of our people group. So when we hear of a natural disaster, we feel an obligation to care for those in the other side of the world in light of natural evil and suffering. Bart Ehrman argues that this is the ethic of Jesus. So hospitals, orphanages, nursing homes, that we care for people outside of our kin group, and we have an obligation to do so,

many atheists are admitting and claiming this is uniquely a Christian ethic. So do we just have a responsibility wired to us by evolution to those around us? Or do we actually have an obligation to care for those beyond us? I think we do. I would argue in your heart and your mind, you know it's a better life to rather than work for yourself, give yourself away for others? If so, that points towards something in the ethic of Jesus about the world, about what is actually true. We have another question. How would you define love in a way that does not allow for suffering? That does not what?

In a way that does not allow for suffering. How do you define love in a way that does not allow for suffering? Is that what you said? Yeah. May I? Okay, please. Yeah. I thought this might come up.

So let's say you have, and by the way, you have to think about love without any other factor thrown in, love in and of itself. That's an important distinction to make. So you have a child who is suffering very badly. And you have one parent whose reaction is an immediate trying to do everything. everything they can to help that child not suffer anymore. Then you have another child suffering equally as much. You have another parent who sits there with their arms folded and does nothing. Which one of those is the loving parent? That's as best a definition of love as I can imagine. Love is the care and concern for, is a deep emotion that expresses, that when expressed

comes out in care and concern for another person's well-being. I think we're close on that, maybe a little bit different. I think along with love, we feel an emotion, but I can still do the loving thing, whether I feel that emotion or not. I agree. And I think you agree with that. I think love is when somebody's development and life

becomes as important to you as your own. And love is demonstrated by what we sacrifice. for. We all know this. If I love my wife, I sacrifice my time for my wife. I sacrifice for my kids, if they're important. We know what we love by what we sacrifice for. In a sense, you might say what we suffer for. Now, of course, as a Christian, I'm going to say the ultimate act of love is to lay down your life, and I think that's what Jesus did for us. He laid down his life to save us from the penalty of sin. That is the greatest act of love.

John 1513, Great love to have no man than this, that a man laid down his life for a friend. I know you would lay down your life for your lovely wife who I've ever met twice because we know sacrificing is ultimately where value is. And so to love is going to require some kind of suffering. Now, as you talk about a parent, I think I agree with you

in the sense that I want to provide. protect my kids from suffering, but if I do it too much, they will never grow up. There's some suffering we have to allow to grow and mature and develop, and how we balance that as the trick. And of course, the analogy with God breaks down. Me and my kids is different than God governing an entire universe and giving us free will is not directly the same as a parent, although there's some overlap there. We were talking about whether you and I will learn anything, and I just learned something, I think I'm going to promote, I'm in the beginning stage that are promoting, I guess what I'll call a non-cognitivist theory of morality. That is, it's not

something you think about. It's not something you have to put together logically, necessarily. And the reason I thought about that was another incident that happened to me where I wound up getting somebody stabbing me with a screwdriver in my arm at Laney College in Oakland because this person was trying to attack a teacher. And like a fool, I went after the person. And once I caught up with him, I didn't know what I was going to do with him. But he knew what he was going to do with me. Sounds like courage to me, man. But I didn't think about doing that.

She was being attacked. I just did it. because I think can something be the right thing to do and the stupid thing to do at the same time? Maybe. Sure. So it's not a matter of having it to fit

into a large philosophical framework. Free your mind and your ass will follow. All right. As we near the end, I just want to provide a space for any last closing sentiments or topics you guys maybe miss that you want to talk about? I better not follow that up with anything.

No, I think you'll want to not land on that last line. In that case, go ahead, whatever. That's the title of a funk song, by the way. I can't sum up the evening, so I'm going to go in a slightly different direction. I would encourage everybody in the audience to go to the Wikipedia pages on critical thinking and informal fallacies. Because how we think about things, Sean and I are doing our best to make sense of things here, those two pages will give you a starting point for trying to make sense about things just in general. How should you think about something? Teach people how to think,

not what to think. An informal fallacy is something like the argument from incredulity where somebody will say, well, the living cell is so amazing, God must have created it. And there's a ton of the other ones. It's a lifelong study, and colleges and schools don't do enough of that. I strongly encourage you to do that. Over to Sean. The emphasis on thinking and reason and irrationality, I could not agree more, and would definitely give an amen to that one. Since the question is on pain and suffering, I'm going to end with this story. So in the 1800s, there was a priest by the name of Father Damien, and by his own volition, he chose to go be a priest for a colony of lepers

who were suffering profoundly on the island called Molokai, with full awareness of what it could cost him and the way it could affect him. So he went, and for years he preached to him, he came to him, he counseled him. He just cared and loved for this community. But after 12 years, he stood in front of this colony, and he said two words that changed everything. He stood in front of him, and he said, we lepers. Open up his robe, and he showed the first signs of leprosy. That was pretty obvious that he cared about him before this. But what happened on that day? he actually became one of them.

He wasn't just an outsider who was showing empathy to them. He's now an insider, and he understood, and he experienced the pain, and he ended up dying of leprosy and sacrificing his life for them. I'm a Christian apologist, and I'm a Christian evangelist. I actually really believe this stuff, and so it should be no surprise to you that in the end I'm going to bring it back to Jesus. I think this example of Father Damien is the best example of what I know of,

how Christianity uniquely addresses pain and suffering. God doesn't just give us a holy book as much as I love and treasure the scriptures. God doesn't just send a prophet. It doesn't just speak in nature or conscience or dreams or visions. God sends his son, Jesus Christ, human flesh, to be born of a woman, woman and step into and experience human pain and suffering. So Hebrews 2 and Hebrews 4 says,

we do not have a high priest who doesn't sympathize with us. The very beginning, I said the emotional problem of evil is when people are hurting, hurt with them, and be present with them. Friends, it's only in Christianity that God takes on human flesh and actually understand. understands our suffering. If you've been betrayed by a friend, Jesus is like, yep, that happened to me. Physical pain, he's like, yep, I've been crucified. It's only Christianity that God takes on human flesh,

understands our pain and our suffering, dies the cross for us. Hey, y'all, I'm Willie Robertson. And I'm Corey Robertson. We partnered with Echle. It's a new platform, not just streaming. Movies and series that are safe for your family. I love a podcast.

Plus Echle Daily Devotionals. ECHL. Hey, really, what is ECHO? Echo is my pet school. Okay, dumb. Echo is not just faith-friendly, it is faith-driven. Be a part of something better. Echo. Echo.

E.E.S. Where I want to be. That's E-K-K-L. Dot, C-O-L. Subscribe now. The third day rises from the grave and defeats sin. So I think that tells us God gets it, he understands, gives us hope in this life, because our suffering has meaning. to our character. It has meaning to other people who are watching. I think when Christians actually suffer with hope, non-Christians look on and like, wow, you actually believe this?

It has meaning for eternity, but gives us hope after the grave. To me, when I was asked to speak on pain and suffering and evil, I can't make sense of this apart from the person of Jesus and what he did on the cross. I think that's what gives us the deepest sense of hope. meaning. So my last word of encouragement is if you're not a Christian, study this, read critical theory. I love that. That is not critical theory, critical thinking. That was definitely not what you meant. You didn't mean critical theory. Correct that one from the record. Critical thinking, read that, but also one assignment. Read the gospel of John. You're here. Either someone dragged you here. I bet most of you are really curious about this question of people in suffering.

You want to know. You want to make sense of it. Friends, just read the gospel, John, and ask yourself this question, who is this person of Jesus? Is he really who he claimed to be? And why is he turned the world upside down more than anybody else? That's my encouragement for seekers. Genuinely, thank you, John and Paul, for this time and giving it up and just having an amazing evening. Thank you. Good job, Bob.

More than good. Right, John. I'm good. Hey friends, if you enjoyed this show, please hit that follow button on your podcast app. Most of you tuning in haven't done this yet. And it makes a huge difference in helping us reach and equip more people and build community. And please consider leaving a podcast review. Every review helps. Thanks for listening to the Sean McDowell Show, brought to you by Talbot School of Theology at Biola University, where we have on campus and online programs in

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