Truth Unites - Alex O'Connor on Animal Suffering: Christian Response

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

Gavin Ortlund responds to Alex O'Connor's comments in recent debates about animal suffering as an argument against the existence of God. My full video on angelic fall theodicy: https://youtu.be/p0G-3eFHeq8?si=FN-afzSmnR7r85u8 My 2015 article in Evangelical Quarterly: https://truthunites.org/mypublications/   Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

In several recent debates about the existence of God, Alex O'Connor has brought up the issue of animal suffering. That deer leg trapped under a branch on its own, no moral free choice, no moral soul development, no people looking at this with a chance to save them, giving them an ability to achieve some higher order good, just starvation for, say, I don't know, a week before finally being stumbled upon by a mountain lion

who will kill it by sticking its jaws in its throat and it will die excruciatingly over the course. of a few minutes, this kind of thing happens routinely throughout the animal kingdom. I said that if I gave you the opportunity right now, if I said that you were about to become a random wild animal, somewhere in the world right now, when I press this button, I think you would kill yourself before I had the opportunity because you know that you're about to enter a life of untold misery. The question is, why? Why has this allowed it? He's using a famous example here from the philosophical literature. I think it goes back to William

Roe, but the idea is a deer is caught in a forest fire. This is terrible to think of. It dies slowly, dies horribly, suffers, and the question is, how is this consistent with an all-powerful and good God? Tough question, something we've got to think about there, so we're going to work on it in this video. This came up also in a recent discussion in London, where one of the participants, Philip Goff, who's a professor of philosophy at Durham, appealed to animal suffering, and he framed his comments like this. He says, on the one side you have suffering, especially animal suffering, and on the other side you have the fine-tuning argument, and they're pushing in opposite directions, and it almost feels like a tie.

So we're in this situation where the believers are tying themselves up in knots trying to explain suffering. The atheists are tying themselves up in knots, trying to explain fine-tuning, when in fact there are middle ground options that can elegantly account for both of these data points. Now, I don't know if he would say it is a tie between the two, but it seems like these two issues are both there, and so for him, they necessitate a different conclusion.

I think, if I understand him correctly, he advocates for a kind of God, but not the traditional God who's all powerful, but a God of limited power. Now, I find this way of framing these two issues suffering, animal suffering, especially, and fine-tuning, a really fascinating way of looking at the world, because it's looking around and noticing two things about our universe that seem to be in tension. On the one hand, the world is ordered. On the other hand, the world seems cruel. And so the order seems to push in one direction and the cruelty in another direction. However, that could give the impression that fine-tuning and animal suffering are equally forceful for their respective conclusions. But if you had, you know, 30 on one side and seven on the other, you wouldn't call it down the middle and say it's equal.

You'd say, no, it's 23 in the direction of one side. So what we need to do, and we'll try to do in this video, is weigh the relative strengths of these two issues. And it should also be said up front here that the problem of suffering and evil is arguably the great, greatest and most powerful argument against God, whereas fine-tuning is only one among many, arguably equally, or roughly equally, forceful arguments for Theism. So animal suffering is definitely surprising on Theism, but on atheism, it's not only fine-tuning that is surprising, it's a lot more that is surprising, arguably, like consciousness and morality, maybe even contingent reality at all. So, of course, it would take a lot more to establish that and

argue for that, I'm just mentioning that because I don't want us to think like fine-tuning is the only thing we're focusing on because we're going to put a lot of focus on that in this video. Now, a bit later in this discussion in London, Alex references this issue of animal suffering and its comparison with fine-tuning that has come up. And he seems to think that animal suffering is the greater problem because he poses the question of which is more likely to be resolved 80 years from now. And fine-tuning consideration is a difficult one, but ask yourself just intuitively, if in, say, 80 years from now, you were watching somebody looking at an old screening of this recording.

They're watching it in 80 years, and one of them says, gosh, can you believe it? They hadn't worked out the fine-tuning yet. That seems plausible. But can you conversely imagine them watching it and going, gosh, can you believe it? They haven't worked out the problem of evil yet. They hadn't explained why suffering exists.

It just seems to me more intuitively plausible that one of those problems is a problem that will be solved, and one is not. But, as I say, that's just a hunch. But I would be curious to hear more about why he has that particular hunch. This seems to envision a particular trajectory of how our knowledge is going to keep unfolding. I think this would be more forceful if a possibility was proposed and put out onto the table for what kind of solution could emerge to explain the fine-tuning of the laws of nature,

the initial conditions of the universe, the physical constants like the speed of light and the cosmological constant and so forth, the unimaginable precision. of these laws and initial conditions and constants seems best explained by design, and it's not easy to see what could happen that would tip the scales toward some other explanation, like chance or necessity or something like that. I'm just not sure what that could be. I'm looking down the road 80 years in the future, and I don't have that same intuition that he does. At the moment, the best response seems to be the multiverse theory, but even that has some real challenges that I try to work through in this video. At the end of the day, I just think

the fine-tuning argument remains on the table is really forceful. And I know I'm not alone in that because you can find a lot of scientists who are not biased toward theism who acknowledge the power of this argument. And if you're in these discussions, you know these kinds of quotes like Fred Hoyle stating that a common sense interpretation of the facts suggest that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and Paul Davies' testimony and many, many more examples could be given. So the question we want to vet here, I want to put out is, is animal suffering? equally forceful in the opposite direction. In other words, is the theist in as much of a bind to explain that as the atheist is to explain fine-tuning? Here's why I would say no. To me,

theism seems like the larger and more capacious worldview that can simply absorb more data. So yes, animal suffering is really difficult, but in this large and complicated story where you have these different layers of reality, physical reality, spiritual reality, etc. There are ultimately some possible answers, albeit complicated ones. Whereas atheism, to me, I'm stating my conclusion how personally up front, I'll explain this as I go, atheism feels like the more restricted and cramped worldview where you just have less absorbing power. You know, it's hard to make sense of things like fine-tuning and consciousness and other things like this. And the basic thing I want to get into here is just to propose that

In the philosophical literature, there are a number of animal suffering theodices. A theodicy just means an explanation for evil. In 2015, I published an article in the journal Evangelical Quarterly, and I'll link to it in the video description, where I laid out a taxonomy of different theodices for animal suffering. And I put them into four different buckets. So these include things like soul-making theodices, greater goods theodices, nomic regularity, things like this, all applied to the animal kingdom. But here let me develop the one that I find most compelling, though some people will laugh at me for this. And that's the angelic fall theodicy. Stated simply, the world is broken. Okay? We explain the order and the cruelty because they're both true. We don't need to dupe ourselves into thinking that it's not

ordered or that it's not cruel. It is cruel. It is a good thing gone wrong. The world is a good thing that has become broken, evil has infected the world. Now, all Christians believe this in some way or another, but many Christians think that the time at which the world became broken or fallen, we often say, was just a couple thousand years ago when human beings fell away from God. Angelic Fall Theodicy is simply a way to say, nope, it happened earlier. It happened way back when the angels fell away from God. Now, again, people laugh at this idea, they find it bizarre. I would just say there are some things that are crazy when you first think about them, the more you think about them, the more you say, wow, that actually has some power. That's how I feel about this. In my article that I link to,

I may lay out my full case. Actually, I also have a video on this, and I'll link to that as well. You can watch that for the full case. Let me just put it like this. If people think, oh, this is such a bizarre and complicated idea that the fall of angels could impact physical creation, I would counter by saying you could see this, especially for people who are already open to the idea of demons, like Christians, for example. you get to see this as a somewhat simple and intuitive claim. It's basically saying natural evil began when evil began. Or put it differently, nature fell when the first creatures within nature fell. Or put it even more simply, creation broke when creatures broke. It kind of makes

sense. It's basically taking the classical theological principle that evil corrupts nature and applying that early on, in fact, are the earliest evil. Now, I'm going to link to the other places you can chase this down here. Let me just say a few things about it here and apply it to this discussion that has been going on with people like Alex and others. I will say this. This idea has been taken seriously by some pretty heavy-duty Christian thinkers like the great philosopher Alvin Plantinga, the wonderful Roman Catholic theologian, Hansa Z. von Balthazar, the Scottish Reformed Theologian Thomas Torrance. And one of the things I always talk about is it's present in the writings of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. How I wish, I could have been a fly on the wall at the

Inklings meeting when C.S. Lewis read Chapter 9 of the book, The Problem of Pain, to see Lewis Tolkien's reaction, because the big question I have is, did one of them influence the other? Or did they just both independently have this idea because what Lewis describes basically is what is fictionalized in the Silmarillion. This is how the creation of Lewis of Tolkien's universe happens. And I'll say more about that. But fascinatingly, this very point came up in Alex's debate. And Alex brings up C.S. Lewis as well, but he mentions a different aspect of C.S. Lewis's thought. C.S. Lewis, of course, has a chapter in the problem of pain where he discusses the suffering of animals. You know how he solves the problem? He says that they didn't really experience pain.

He says that they're in pain, but they don't realize it. This to me is literally an unsentical statement. I think that that actually doesn't make sense. If you want to take that line, if you want to say, well, that's defer to CS Lewis, look at what he says on the suffering of animals. And I'll ask yourself, if you'd be okay, torturing a dog, because ultimately, although they look like they're in pain, they're not really experiencing it in the way that a human is. Now, I agree with Alex that this part of CS Lewis's response is not ultimately helpful. What Lewis says, though, is not that animals don't experience pain, but that they lack the centralizing conscious awareness that organizes that pain such that it constitutes suffering

in a morally relevant way. But I would agree with Alex that that's not the most helpful response. I've talked about this a lot in that article, but basically, while maybe there's not suffering or even pain in the lower forms of organic life, you know, like you've got plants and fungi and insects and so forth. When you get to the upper level animals, it's harder to say that. And, you know, just intuitively, this seems really problematic. We used to have rescue dogs. Dogs that have been abused are distrustful of certain kinds of human beings. They certainly act like they have a sort of awareness of suffering.

And even if they didn't, if it was just pain but not suffering, it's hard to say that that's not morally serious without that leading to the conclusion that like the pain of infants, of human infants, isn't morally serious. And there's a lot of other reasons why I would agree with Alex on this point. I don't think we just want to say animals don't suffer. But that is not Lewis all that Lewis said. That was a more cautionary point. He makes three points in chapter nine of the book, The Problem of Pain.

the title of that chapter is on animal pain, one of which is angelic fall the odyssey. And then he reiterated that and defended that in a dialogue back and forth with the philosopher C.E.M. Jodd, who had criticized it. And then all these passages are linked, and I work through them all in the article linked, and they're cited in that article. And then seven years later, when Lewis published miracles, this passage is less known, but I'll put it up. You can see he says the same thing. He says, basically, there's a difference between the imperfection of nature and its depravity, and the depravity is the result of sin, not just human sin. And I like this last sentence, nature has all the air of a good thing spoiled. That's kind of like what we're saying here.

The world is broken. It is ordered, and it is cruel, and theism can accommodate all of that. So let me address one of the concerns here, though. So full case for angelic theodicy, angelic fall theology, look at my video, look at my article. Here's one concern that I want to address, and this is something that Phil Halper raises, namely that this would make safe. the creator. Animals have been suffering for hundreds of millions of years before humans existed. The other point that you need to take account of is that evolution, mass catastrophes like the KT event that wiped out the boundaries, these are the engines of how we got here. So if you're going to blame it on Lucifer, if you're going to blame it on him, that makes him the

author of our creation because had these events not happened, had evolution not worked the way it did, we wouldn't be here. Now, I'm sorry to talk about my own writings, but I do have another article coming out in the theological journal, Thameleos, that addresses this exact concern. So you can look out for it. It'll come out probably sometime in 2025 or something like that. It's called Angelic Fault The Odyssey and Dialogue with Tolkien, Augustine, and Aquinas. And I'll just describe it here so you can read it when it comes out if you're interested and be aware of the basic thesis. What I do is I describe the role of angels in Tolkien's creation account in the Silmarillion. By the way,

And I give some reasons to believe that Tolkien's own angelology or doctrine of angels is reflected in the metaphysics of this fictional universe that he creates. So you can't just say, oh, it's a work of fiction, so it doesn't tell us anything about his views. And then I work through Augustine and Aquinas, and their angelology, and basic, especially this question of the role of angels in creation and in the governance of the world. and I point out that they regarded angels and the physical universe as tightly interrelated. So physical things like stars are entrusted to the angels for oversight. Augustine's only question is whether the angels inhabit the stars or merely direct the stars. That the stars take their cues from the angels is just assumed. The only question is the nature of that.

And Augustine talks about how the fallen angels are thrust down into the lower regions of the world as a kind of incarcerate. So this world, this physical world, is their prison until Judgment Day. And he talks about how angels don't do Creation X. Nealo, like God does, but they are, they do have a role in creation, including the production of physical nature. Similarly, Thomas Aquinas teaches that the angels are part of the universe. They do not constitute a universe of themselves, but both they and corporeal natures unite in constituting one universe. That's the kind of sentence I didn't think it was as amazing as it was, and then as I read it

over and over the years, I go back to it and I say, that's an amazing sentence. Angels and physical natures unite to constitute one universe. Like Augustine Thomas also says that all corporeal things are ruled by the angels, and he emphasizes that, again, the current location of angels and demons where they await final judgment is within what he calls our atmosphere. So the point is what emerges is this, the classical way of thinking about angels is they're very tightly interwoven with physical creation. They're involved in its creation. They're involved in its governance. They're here. You know, they're not far off in some separate realm. So when Lewis and Tolkien advocate for angelic fall the odyssey, and when Tolkien

fictionalizes that in the Silmarillion, they're drawing from that classical account of angelology. A simple good way to get into it. You could say angels are the governors and preservers of the very structure of physical reality. This is how S. Louis describes angels in that hideous strengths. He calls them those high creatures whose activity builds what we call nature. Here's how Tolkien put it in a letter. The rebellion of created free will precedes creation of the world, and Ea has in it sub-creatively introduced evil, rebellious, discordant elements in its own nature, already when the let it be was spoken. This might address Phil's concern here because basically what this does is it makes angelic faulty odyssey less arbitrary. So sometimes

people have this false idea that this idea is like demons are going around doing things to physical objects, the direct local activity of demons on creation. That's not the idea. The idea is that the introduction of evil itself brings corruption. So because spirit, and physical reality are kind of intertwined down to the roots. So you might even put it like this. You might say, how could the fall of angels not impact physical reality? Just like how can it be if a pregnant woman drinks a lot of alcohol that it wouldn't harm her baby? She's connected to her baby and our physical world, like the stars, are connected to the angels. That's a classical way of thinking about it. I mean, that's Augustine and Aquinas, you know. So that kind of makes sense

of then why their fall would have an impact. Something like this can fit with Genesis 1, because in Genesis 1, what you have is the God's creative work as imposing order and light onto chaotic darkness. Genesis 1, too, as these Hebrew words, Tohu, Vavohu, and those words are only paired in two other passages in the Hebrew Bible,

both of which are depicting the desolation of sin. And it looks like Genesis 1 is God imposing order and goodness onto chaos and darkness. Now, if that goes too far for you with Genesis 1, just go this far. Genesis 1 never says the world is perfect. It just says that it's good. And you know it's not perfect because when you get to Genesis 3, you find the serpent shows up and he must have come from somewhere.

So all that is to commend Angelic Fall Theodyssey for further consideration and address one of those concerns that comes up. You sell a little bit there with Phil about the arbitrariness of its mechanism, or as he put it there, does this make Satan the Creator? well, Christians have always thought that the angels are involved in creation and stewardship of the physical world. One final thought. Here's a final benefit to, if you're a theist, to what that means for animal suffering. It means you get to say it's really, real evil. In his final response to the philosopher, C.E.M. Jod, Lewis argues that the very strength of our judgment against natural evil itself suggests theism.

He says, I know there are moments when the incessant continuity and desperate helplessness of what at least seems to be animal suffering make every argument for theism sound hollow. Then the old indignation, the old pity arises, but how strangely ambivalent this feeling is, if I regard this pity and indignation simply as subjective experiences of my own, with no validity beyond their strength at the moment, which next moment will change. I can hardly use them as standards whereby to arraign the creation. On the contrary, they become strong as arguments against God just insofar as I take them to be transcendent illumination to which creation must conform or be condemned.

They are arguments against God only if they are themselves the voice of God. So if Alex and Phil and others want to say that, you know, animal suffering is more of an internal critique or a point of inconsistency for a theist, that's fine, okay. But anybody who wants to say animal suffering, the parasite in the cow that horrifically devours it from the inside out, that's really evil, that it's not the way the world is supposed to be. Theism gives you a way to say that in a very clear and robust sense, and it also happily gives you a way to say that's not the way the world will always be. All right, well, let me know what you think of the comments. Thanks for watching, everybody.