Within Reason - #59 William Lane Craig - Is Biblical Slaughter Ethical?

Episode Date: March 17, 2024

William Lane Craig is a Christian philosopher and public speaker, who today makes his third appearance on Within Reason. We discuss why Richard Dawkins refuses to debate him, and whether Old Testament slaughter can be justified. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

William Lane Craig, welcome back to the show. Thanks, Alex. It is really good to be with you again. Broadly speaking, what are your opinions of Richard Dawkins? I think he is a very engaging public speaker and interviewer. He's very urbane and comes across as extremely sophisticated. He has wonderful aesthetic tastes and a wide range. of interest. So I find a lot to like about him on a personal level, but I sharply disagree with his

views. I think that he is very naive, philosophically and theologically, which is fairly typical for someone engaged in the physical sciences. Every one of us who tries to do cross-disciplinary work, finds himself disadvantaged in that area or field with which he is less familiar. And I think that Dawkins hasn't made a serious effort to try to understand philosophy or theology. Now, you'll probably know that the reason I'm asking you this is because I recently had Richard Dawkins on my own show, and he had some choice words for you. I didn't bring you up. He brought you up and decided to, well, I'll play a clip for our listeners in case they missed it. I mean, the sort of professional debaters on behalf of religion, people like William Craig, I have no time for him.

I mean, he's got this sort of loud, rather pompous voice. and if you say he says that's a premise one, deduction two and things like that, and the audience, I suppose, is supposed to be impressed. I've had William Lane Craig twice on my podcast, and I always had a good experience with him, having said that I didn't debate him. I don't know what that would be like. Something you're not interested in doing, debating William Lane Craig,

or have the conversation, perhaps, with William Lane Craig? have done, I've vowed not to. I feel such contempt for him because of his, I know whether you've seen his, what he says, says about the, if the lights slaughtering the Midianites and instead of saying what any decent theologian would say, well, it never happened. And this is just an Old Testament story. He says, well, the Midianites had it coming because they were so sinful. And then if you worry about the Midianites. deny children who had their brains beaten out of them, that's okay because they went straight to heaven. And that finishing him off as far as I was concerned for me. I actually wrote a piece

in the Guardian saying, why, I will never have anything to do with him. I suppose before getting into his specific criticisms and giving you an opportunity, I suppose this is something of a right of reply. I mean, I think this is the first time I've had someone on my show three times. You'll be my first person that I've had on thrice, and I suppose part of the reason for that is because I want to offer you a right of reply, Alex, is that I think you are a brilliant interviewer, and your ability in cross-examination is incisive. I think that you eviscerated Dawkins' position in that interview, but you did it so sweetly and so gently that I don't think he had any idea. of what actually went on.

So I appreciate as well. You're sticking up for me. That means a lot. And so thank you. Well, I appreciate that. And, you know, of course, we come from different sides of the discussion here. But in the interviews that I've had with you, I've, let's say, not experienced the same kind of personal issues that Dawkins seems to have in at least his interactions with you, if not in person, through listening to your work in the past. So I was glad to at least just note that those weren't my experiences with you.

But I suppose that today we can put some of those interrogation tactics to the test in the other direction. Because I would love to speak to you about some of the criticisms that Richard Dawkins has made. I think a lot of people are disappointed, as I said to him, that we don't get to see this forerunner of the new atheist movement put the criticisms to one of the forerunners of Christian apologetics in the flesh. so I'll try to act like something of a middleman. But before getting into his specific criticisms, I wonder if somebody came to you as a fan of Richard Dawkins, they read the God delusion, they'd listened to his debates, and you had to explain to them in a sort of a summary,

what are some of the more egregious mistakes you think he makes? I mean, you mentioned a moment ago that you think he, I can't remember the exact words you used, but in terms of him tackling a topic like philosophy, in which he's not an expert, somebody might say, well, what's an example of the kind of thing that you're talking about? Yes. Well, let me point to two things that stuck out to me as a philosopher. First, I thought it was commendable that Professor Dawkins treated the arguments for the existence of God in his book. All too often, the new atheist simply ignored these. And Dawkins, to his credit,

interacts with several of the principal theistic arguments. Having said that, however, I thought that his handling of them was just terribly superficial. He didn't show that he's aware of the best work on these arguments. In particular, his handling of the ontological argument was cringeworthy. It was embarrassing when he said that he raised this objection at a conference of theologians that he attended, and they had to appeal to modal logic in order to answer his objection. And I thought, well, the ontological argument just is an argument framed in the terms of modal logic. So that was unfortunate, I think. And then the other thing that I would

mention is that what he calls the central argument of the God delusion, his argument that concludes, therefore, God almost certainly does not exist, is a tissue of fallacies. Even if you granted every one of his points, which are themselves moot, the conclusion doesn't follow from those propositions. So that it was just a horrible argument. The central argument of the book is vacuous. It's a whole. Well, yeah, for all the talk about atheists simply lacking a belief in God and not having a position,

Richard Dawkins does name one of his chapters why there almost certainly is no God. What is the argument that he presents towards that conclusion? Pardon me? What is the argument that he presents towards that conclusion? It's an argument to say that the appearance of design in the natural world is overwhelming. But nevertheless, Darwin has given it. us an adequate naturalistic explanation of instances of biological design. We don't yet have, he says, a similar explanation in physics for the fine tuning of the universe for life.

But Darwin's success in biology ought to give us confidence that such an explanation will be forthcoming in physics. Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist. Well, I would ask you to try to point out some of the fallacies in there, but hopefully the listeners can see why that doesn't follow. Even if you grant all of the statements that I just summarized are true, all that follows at best would be you shouldn't use a design argument to prove God's existence. It says absolutely nothing about whether God exists or not. A person might have quite different grounds for believing in God than the appearance of design. So at the very best, it's simply an argument that one ought not to use

the teleological argument or the argument for design. But then in addition to that, several of the propositions that I mentioned are very questionable. For example, that Darwin has given an adequate explanation for the appearance of design in the biological realm is controverted, the claim that that should give us confidence that in a totally different field of science, in physics, in cosmology, that an explanation is right around the corner for the remarkable fine-tuning of the universe. I don't know of any physicist who thinks that that proposition is true. So those would be, that's just the faith of a naturalist, Alex, is all that is expressed by that proposition. There's no basis for thinking that that

statement is true either. Well, if we were to try to present a softer version of the argument, which doesn't conclude so radically that God almost certainly doesn't exist, but rather says something like we can have a justifiable optimism about the ability of science, in many areas, because Dawkins, of course, points to Darwinism as his principal example, but there are lots of areas of science where it appears that there have been explanations wanted for certain cosmic or biological or chemical events that in the past, people have rightly or wrongly attributed to divine agency, which now, although we may not have removed the ability to have divine agency behind the mechanisms that the scientific method has revealed,

we at least don't have the mystery of what those mechanisms are and how something like biological complexity can arise. And so I think Richard Dawkins has said to me on my podcast that he sees something like a trajectory, that there are many things which we used to not be able to explain that we can now. And there's no reason to think that this won't continue into the future. Just to illustrate this, the way that I think about this is stepping into a time machine and going 100, 200 years into the future. and somebody's watching this conversation back and they're saying something like, wow, can you believe that they hadn't worked out

the fine-tuning of the universe yet? Can you believe they hadn't worked out the science of consciousness yet? Wow, isn't that amazing? But what I can't imagine, and that just seems intuitively plausible that somebody could look back in that way. What I can't imagine, however,

is somebody going in that time machine, looking back and making the same comment about the sort of atheist case against God, saying, wow, can you believe it they hadn't worked out the problem of evil yet? Wow, can you believe it they hadn't worked out divine hiddenness yet? And so the arguments that I put forward for atheism, like the problem of evil and divine hiddenness, it seems more plausible to me that we can be optimistic that science will overcome the mysteries that are often used in promoting God's existence in a way that philosophy is not going to overcome the philosophical challenges

to God's existence. Okay, there's a lot to respond to there. I think you're quite right in saying that such a more modest formulation of the argument would indeed be more defensible and plausible. And the conclusion from that argument is that these sorts of quasi-scientific arguments for God's existence are inconclusive and that therefore one ought not to believe in God on the basis of, for example, design arguments, but that says nothing at all about other reasons for theism. And as for the confidence that you speak of, perhaps as someone coming from the other side, I think that we've already resolved the problem of evil, that the problem of evil places a burden of proof upon the shoulders of the atheist that is so heavy that

no one has been able to sustain it. And so I think there's been tremendous progress in the history of philosophy with regard to these anti-theistic arguments. And so I don't think we need to go in a time machine into the future to see the resolution of these objections to theism. I think we've got them right now. But if we did go into a time machine into the future, I would fully expect Alex that there will be philosophical questions about nature and the universe that will remain open questions. And I do not have any confidence at all that this is all going to be simply resolved naturalistically. And as I said, I think that Dawkins' confidence on the basis of Darwin's achievement

is greatly exaggerated. We can talk about that more if you want to, but I don't think that contemporary evolutionary theory bears that out at all. It's extremely controverted today. and therefore I think provides no good grounds for thinking that all of these difficult questions are about to be resolved. Well, I think, as I said to Dawkins, at risk of repeating myself to my audience, I think I agree with his optimism about the trajectory of scientific explanations, but what I don't share with him is the idea that by providing a scientific explanation for a phenomena, you've therefore, let's say, wholly explained it. That is, when Newton describes the laws of gravity, to say that we have a better understanding of how things fall to the ground is true. But to say that we have, to say that we're even a step closer to knowing why things fall to the ground, well, because of gravity.

That doesn't seem right to me. It seems that things don't fall to the ground because of the theory of gravity. Rather, we have the theory of gravity because things fall to the ground. And the actual question of why that happens at all still remains an open question. And so I suppose that's where I disagree with Dawkins, I would say, sure, science may one day completely explain the mechanism behind the Big Bang and the foundational laws which tuned the universe. And maybe there's no divine agency there, but I don't think it removes the ability for divine agency to be injected in the same way that Richard Dawkins does. Oh, well, that's certainly correct that as an argument against God's existence, it's not sound at all. At best, you would just say that these don't offer evidence for God's existence.

And I appreciate your point about the progress of science. I wouldn't in any way want people to misunderstand me to say that I don't believe in the progress of science and that tremendous scientific advances are being made. I mean, right now in physics, the quest for a unified theory of physics is the Holy Grail that would unite general relativity and quantum mechanics. And so we can look forward if we had our time machine to seeing how that will be accomplished in the future, if it will. It may be that the conditions necessary for probing those questions

are so extreme that they couldn't be realized here on Earth then we would run into the limits of science. But I'm not at all pessimistic about the future progress of science. It would just be the point that you're making that that goes no distance toward undermining the rationality of belief in God. Now, I didn't invite you on the show to spend an hour agreeing with you. So I think now is a good time to move on to the actual criticisms that Dawkins has made, specifically in regards to why he refuses to debate you. As I've said before, a lot of people

want to see this debate, and I know that you've offered him the opportunity a number of times, and he's turned it down. And he claims that the reason that he does this, whether this be the real reason or not, the reason he gives, is that William Lane Craig is an immoral person because he is an apologist for genocide, pointing specifically in his original article and original objection to the issue of the slaughter of the Canaanites in the Hebrew Bible, which you've defended as a morally defensible thing for God to have commanded and for the Israelites to have enacted. So what I really want to do now is jump into this story. I want to talk about the slaughter of the Canaanites in the Hebrew Bible, what happened, why it's problematic

and what your moral defense is of that story. So perhaps we can begin by talking about who were the Canaanites? All right. Prior to Israel's liberation from bondage in Egypt, the land of Canaan, or modern day Israel, was populated by a small clans of Pannonite inhabitants. And according to the biblical narrative, these clans of Canaanites were extremely evil. They were debauched morally and opposed God. And God let this go on for 400 years while Israel was in Egypt. But then he called Israel out of Egypt and led them to the land of Canaan and delivered the land over to Israel and said, drive out the Canaanites from the land on pain of death.

And I am giving this land to you, to Israel. So they were the pre-Israeli inhabitants of this region of the world. on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. And as you say, the Old Testament makes it clear that God considered these people to be an immoral people, much in the same way that before the flood of Noah, we sort of have this pleading with God of saying, look, are they not any good people amongst this community? Are you really going to flood the entire world? is there not one person worth saving?

And as far as I know, most people defend God's action here by saying that the answer is no, that the society had become so corrupt that there wasn't any sort of salvageable morality. And suppose, I suppose something like that is going on with the Canaanites here. I suppose... If I might comment, this is not simply biblically attested. I have a colleague, Professor Clay Jones, who has done a study of... ancient literature coming out of pre-Israelite Canaan. And it is horrific the culture that is described there. This was one that practiced not only all sorts of human sexual aberrations,

but also temple prostitution in the worship of God. They practice beastiality. There are texts describing how a buck would be strapped down to a wooden frame. And then women would mount the buck and copulate with it. They were engaged in offering child sacrifice to their gods. And so reading these ancient documents that are from pre-Israelite Canaan really bear out the truth of the biblical description of them, though the biblical description doesn't go into that kind of morbid detail that these documents do. I suppose I intuitively find it difficult to believe that there's not a single person in this community who is not so unsalvigably touched or consumed by sin in this way that the actions we see the Israelites committing on the command of God can be justified.

So to give people an idea, to give them the full picture, we've described to the Canaanites are, and I'm sure you'll have something to say about that. But the reason that this is a problem, the reason why Richard Dawkins is talking about these people, is because, as you say, God promises this land to the Israelites. And he waits 400 years and says this is because the sin sort of hasn't got bad enough yet, essentially. He says it will happen in 400 years because by that point, things will be so bad that this will be worth, this will be sort of justifiably inflicted. But he commands the Israelites to destroy the Canaanites. And the language used in the Bible is quite extreme in a few different areas, talking about

completely destroying a city, leaving nothing alive that breathes in the, and on the point about innocent people, because I know you'll have something to say about that, but we know that there are at least some innocent people among the Canaanites, because in the sixth chapter of Joshua, in the destruction of Jericho, it said that they devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it, men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep, and donkeys. Now, maybe the men and women were immoral. I certainly don't think that children living among the Canaanites were immoral enough to justify their being killed and certainly not the cattle, the sheep and the donkeys. Right.

The difficult, I think, aspect of this is the children. The adults were corrupt. If there was an innocent person among the adults, that person didn't have to be killed. It's important to understand that God's command to Israel was not genocide, despite a superficial first reading of these narratives. More fundamentally, it was a command to drive the Canaanites out of the land on pain of death. No one had to be killed if these tribes would simply retreat and flee in the face of the advancing Israeli army. It was only those who tried to stay behind and resist, who were to be completely exterminated. So people didn't have to die.

They weren't pursued and chased down until everyone was exterminated. These clans were driven out of the land. They were be destroyed as nation states, but not as individual people. And it's important to understand that for these ancient Near Eastern people, as for modern Near Eastern people, it is the land that is so important. It is all about the land. Even today, when you go to Israel, people will talk about coming to the land. That's how they refer to it. So what God was doing was giving the land of Canaan to Israel and divesting these Canaanite clans of the possession of the land of Canaan. And so they were driven out, and not all of them were killed.

Later in the narratives in the Pentateuch, you find Canaanites still about. So they weren't all killed. If I may, on this point that we've got to so far, firstly, this idea that, well, not everybody's killed because they're given the opportunity to leave their land. They're given the opportunity to be driven out. It's only if they stay and resist that they get killed. And the way you just cash that out is by saying, so they had a decision and didn't have to die. It seems to me that, of course, you're going to understand this is something that God has commanded. So whatever the reason may be, it must be the morally right thing to do. However, from my perspective, what I'm seeing here is a foreign nation approaching the native inhabitants of land which they believe is their own, saying, you need to leave, and when they refuse, killing them, and then saying, well, look, I gave you a choice, didn't I? Because you could have just left. I mean, that, in other words, doesn't seem like much of a defense to me. Right. We were talking about whether or not the Canaanites were corrupt and whether or not this was an act of divine

judgment upon them. But I've not explicated here the moral theory that undergirds my defense of this action. It is very possible that had this been undertaken by human initiative alone that it would have been immoral as the way you described. But the ethical theory that I defend is called divine command morality. And this has two components to it. First is that the good is based in God himself. God is the paradigm of moral goodness. He is by nature, loving, fair, just, and so forth. Second element is that God's nature then expresses itself to ward us in the form of divine commands that constitute our moral duties. According to this theory, moral obligations arise as a result of imperatives issued by a qualified authority. So, for example,

if I were driving and some random person told me to pull over, I wouldn't have any obligation to obey that person at all. But if a policeman commanded me to pull over, then in virtue of his authority, I would have a legal obligation to pull over and obey what he's done. And so the theory is that moral obligations arise as a result of imperatives issued by the paradigm of goodness himself, who is God. Now, presumably God doesn't issue commands to himself. as to what he should do. And therefore, on this theory, God has no moral obligations to fulfill. And therefore, as you rightly said, it's impossible that God could do something wrong

because right and wrong are defined by divine commands, and God doesn't issue commands to himself to obey. So what constraint is there, then, on the moral commands of God? well, it will be his own perfectly good nature, his own just and loving nature that will determine whether or not a command is available to him. Now, what this means is that there are lots of actions then that God can perform that would be prohibited morally to us. For example, you wouldn't have the moral right to kill me. But if God wants to strike me, but if God wants to strike me, me dead right now, that's his prerogative. God takes and gives life, he will. So if God

wills to end the life of the Canaanite children prematurely, that's his prerogative. So God doesn't have the same sort of moral constraints that we do because he doesn't have moral obligations to fulfill. He has to act only in consistency with his own nature. And so when you think of it in those terms, Alex, the problem posed by the conquest narrative is as follows. It's very similar to the problem of evil, that there is a sort of internal inconsistency between two propositions affirmed by the Judeo-Christian faith. The first would be that God is all just and all loving, and the second in this case would be that God has issued a command to Israel to drive out the Canaanites on pain of death from the land. And so my argument is that those two propositions are completely consistent with each other because God wrongs no one in issue. issuing such a command. And if he wrongs no one, then there is no moral constraint on his

issuing such a command. Now, I see a few problems with this, and I think my listeners will too intuitively. There's nothing I can say to prove that that's wrong, that maybe God can just permit things like the killing of innocent children by an Israelite clan. Maybe that is just okay. But the problems this raises include things like this is raised by Randall Rouser. He points out that this seems to undermine our ability to trust moral intuition. In other contexts, such as in the moral argument for the existence of God, you might appeal to the fact that we all know that certain things are morally right and morally wrong. And we sort of use that feeling to say that there must be some objective element of morality in the universe, and we use that to construct an argument

for the existence of God. It seems, as Rousa points out, that nothing could be more intuitively wrong to me in this regard than the killing of an innocent child. And what we're told to believe is that, okay, maybe most of the time that's wrong. Maybe that's always wrong unless it's specifically commanded by God. But sometimes it is actually just okay, as long as God commands it, meaning that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with killing innocent children. It can't be intrinsically wrong if there are circumstances in which it's actually not just permitted, but in fact the thing that you're ordered to do. I would say that it is wrong in the absence of a divine command,

but that God has the ability to override that by issuing a divine command, which then becomes our moral deal. duty. And as long as this ethical theory is possible and coherent, then there just is no inconsistency between his being all good and all loving and is issuing a command of this sort. In the absence of a divine command, as I say, it could well have been immoral. But given the presence of divine command, it becomes the moral obligation of those persons to whom it was issued. So it doesn't undermine our moral intuitions about what's right and wrong. It just introduces the qualification of a divine command.

But it would mean that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with taking the life of an innocent child. Nothing intrinsically wrong with... Well, again, this is going to depend on your moral theory, Alex. I think that right and wrong, moral obligations are determined by imperatives issued by qualified authority. And so in the absence of such imperatives, there literally is no right and wrong. It's a subjective illusion of human consciousness. And I think this is one of the real problems of atheism is that lacking a moral lawgiver and

moral authority, it has no basis for affirming objective right and wrong. These are just either patterns of behavior that have emerged from the sociobiological pressures of the evolutionary process or else their expressions of personal preference and taste. In neither case then are they normative. So in the absence of a moral authority to issue these imperatives, there wouldn't be any objective right or wrong. But given such a divine moral lawgiver, there is objective right and wrong, but that moral lawgiver himself doesn't have the same moral obligations that we do. I suppose if I'm being asked to accept wholesale a biblical morality, I suppose I would look at something like this and, as Lincoln said of slavery, think, if this is not wrong, then nothing is

wrong. I mean, maybe I can't make a moral claim. Maybe I can't say that there, there is such thing as morality and immorality in the universe, but something inside of me tells me that if there is such thing as ethics, it can't look like this. In other words, you're asking me in order to accept the justification for the actions in this story to deny one of the most forceful moral intuitions, the exact kind of moral intuition which you might ask me to rely upon in other contexts to establish God's existence at all? Yes, and as I say, I affirm that moral intuition. If these actions had been undertaken in the absence of a divine command,

it would be objectively wrong. But the point would be is that on a divine command theory of ethics, God is free to issue a command that goes against that so long as it is consistent with its just and loving nature. And so the burden here would be to show that in issuing this command, God does something that contradicts his perfectly just and loving nature. And my argument is that that's very difficult to show because he doesn't wrong anyone, I think, in this. In particular, the difficult case here is the children. And what I would say is, first, that God has the right to take anyone's life whenever

he wants to, unfortunately children die all the time in infancy. And so if God wants to end the life of these Canaanite children early, prematurely, that's his prerogative. But then secondly, on my theology, these children go immediately to heaven. They go to be with God and therefore come to know a life that is more glorious and more happy than anything. conceivable and certainly far better than if they had been allowed to live and be raised in such a corrupt and evil environment as they were in. So it was actually a tremendous blessing to these children for them to be killed and go to heaven and be with God. You must understand how that sounds, saying it was a blessing for these children to be killed

and go to God. I mean, this is something that Dawkins quotes you on directly, and I'm interested in you share my assessment here that even if he's not correct, I can understand why he would hear you say something like that and think that it's morally repugnant, that it's revolting in any other context. If somebody says something like, well, maybe the murder of these children, I suppose you wouldn't see it as murder, but the killing of these innocent children is a blessing to them just seems, again, to run against our intuitions. I mean, you mentioned in the, Alex, I mean, I think it runs against our naturalistic worldview, where one doesn't believe in an afterlife. But on a, a theistic worldview, if these children go to a life more glorious and happy than they can imagine, then it is a great blessing. It's just that modern man doesn't believe. that anymore. There are a few ways that I would maybe respond to that. The first is to say that there are areas like, like take the issue of abortion, for example. Now, you might think that it's immoral to have an abortion because God has commanded that you shouldn't take

innocent life, you know, in the absence of some specific divine command, sure. But a lot of the time in this discussion, people do talk in language which points to how this is, this is bad for the child. You know, you're taking away the life of a child. You're committing some wrong towards the child. This position that you're advocating here would seem to remove the ability to do that. You can still say that abortion is wrong, if you like, but you can't say that in any way harms the child. In fact, it seems like you're committed to the view that it confers a great good upon the child when a parent has an abortion. Absolutely. I mean, what it would do, it would rob the child of the goods of this finite life that he would have enjoyed had he lived

50, 60 years or so. But in place of that, it gives him an eternal life of incomprehensible joy and happiness, which far out balances the loss of those finite goods. So the reason that abortion is wrong is not because it's bad for... The victims. The reason it's wrong is because it transgresses a divine command. It's homicide, and God has commanded is not to commit homicide in the absence of some overriding moral justification, like a policeman or a soldier who needs to take life in order to save life. So it gets back again, Alex, to your ethical theory, whence do moral obligations arise? And I cannot think of any source for moral obligations more plausible than that these arises as a result of imperatives issued by

a qualified authority, in this case the good himself. I suppose I have a few things to say. one is that this seems to you've talked about this in relation to children the children who get killed you're conferring a good upon them because they get to go to heaven but this would surely apply just as much to the adult Canaanites as to the children I mean maybe all of the adult Canaanites were were corrupt and evil but if there were any good people among them it seems like there would be no need to say no no look how corrupt the society was because you know anybody who is innocent and good if they get killed well they get to go to heaven too so it seems like a bit of a disposal problem. Any time that there's any kind of slaughter which involves

this serious challenge of innocent people being put to the sword on the command of a god, you can always just say, well, you know, they go to heaven. So if anything, you've actually done them a favor. It just, it seems like a bit of a disposal problem. And, sorry, it's a solution to a disposal problem. It seems like a disposal problem. What do you mean by that? Like, there's sort of this, this problem of where do these people go? You know, what do we do with these good souls? Oh. And we just say, oh, well, they just go to heaven.

I mean, it seems like a difficult pill to swallow. And what I was wondering is if, despite what your philosophy is, do you understand that intuition? Do you understand why when Richard Dawkins looks at this and thinks it's yourself? It's so powerful. But, boy, just to really. I reiterate again, what is the problem here? The problem is whether or not there is an internal inconsistency in the Judeo-Christian worldview between affirming that God is all good and all just and affirming that God commanded Israel to drive the Canaanites on pain of death out of the land.

And so the question is not, are these things true or did this really happen? It's only a question about, is there an inconsistency between those two propositions? And I think that given a divine command theory of morality, we can see that those propositions are quite consistent with each other. Now, that says nothing about whether or not it's true that when you die, you go to heaven or that, There is immortality beyond the grave, but those beliefs are part and parcel of the Christian, Judeo-Christian worldview. And so the question is, does the Judeo-Christian worldview have an inner inconsistency here? And although Dawkins himself has never interacted with my theory here, in my debate tour

with his comrade Lawrence Krause in Australia, we talked about this. And Krauss finally admitted that, yes, I had succeeded in showing that there is no inconsistency between these two propositions. Dawkins quotes an article that you wrote in response to this issue. And I suppose I should read the point that he pulled out, which summarizes this position here. You said, so whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgment. not the children for they inherit eternal life so who is wronged ironically i think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the israeli soldiers themselves

can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children the brutalizing effect on these israeli soldiers is disturbing i must say that the disturbing thing to me there is i can't shake this feeling and like i say You know, I have respect for you as a thinker and a philosopher, and I always enjoy our conversations, but hearing somebody talking about the, the slaughter of admittedly and explicitly innocent children, not to mention animals, as well as the eradication driving out of an entire society, and to say that, well, the people who really suffered here were the soldiers who had to kill the innocent woman. It just in a way that I, like I said at the very beginning of this segment, there's nothing I can do strictly speaking to prove that this is, that there's no justification for this. But if there is anything that I've ever heard in my life that jumps out of a page with pure moral repugnance in the way that it meets my ears, it has to be something like that. Well, I've really thought hard and dispassionately about this. Alex, and I tried to think as hard as I could. Who has been wronged in this action? And it's very

difficult to think of anyone who has been wronged by God in commanding this. And then it hit me, well, what about the Israeli soldiers themselves? Because we do know from soldiers who suffer from PTSD, that the brutalizing effects of war upon soldiers is terrible and can be destructive. And so I explore at some length. What about the wrong done to these soldiers who had to carry out this command? Is there any motivation that might justify giving such a command of them? In the original article, I suggest that, yes, indeed, there are goods that would be achieved by having them carry out this command and that God would have morally sufficient reasons for doing that. That's in my original question of the week number 16, if people are interested in following it up, where I argue that, in fact, even the soldiers themselves would not be wronged by God issuing such a command. but I was looking for anybody that God had wronged.

And, you know, the atheist philosopher, British philosopher Daniel came responding to this sort of tiff between Dawkins and me. He said, I think that even though I'm not a Christian, he said Craig's position is entirely reasonable that the children are not wronged in inheriting eternal life. We're all going to die. Someday, many children do die, and God's taking the life of these children prematurely doesn't commit a wrong against them. It's actually they're good. Now, don't let anybody say, oh, well, then we ought to go kill children. No, that would transgress a divine command against homicide, and therefore, in the absence of a divine command,

that would be morally wrong. It is only given this divine command from the paradigm of goodness itself that one would be morally obligated to carry out such a horrific action. But look, you know, one of the things that Randall Rolster talks about as well is this example of someone who in 2004 committed infanticide killed her own child and says that she did so because she believed God was commanding her to. Now, it will be easy enough to just say, I just don't think God was commanding her to. But the question I want to ask is, given everything you've just said, how can we know this? Because generally, if I ask somebody, look, if God told

you to shoot up a primary school, would you do it? And what they tend to say is something like, well, I wouldn't believe that was God because that runs against his nature. The problem is that, sure, you might want to say that, you know, just asking a mother to kill her child for no apparent reason might run against God's nature. It just seems to me that intuitively, if we didn't have this story in the Hebrew Bible, if the story of the Canaanites didn't exist, and we were speaking in the hypothetical, and I said, well, what if God told you to, I don't know, walk into somebody's land and not just drive them out, but if they refuse to go to kill them and then come back and kill the women and kill the children, and in fact, kill the the animals too. And if they leave the animals, they get punished for not killing the animals as well. What if he told you to do something like that? And I imagine what somebody, the only thing somebody would be able to say is that, well, of course, God wouldn't tell me to do that. And that's how I know that I wouldn't want to follow that command. But that's exactly what's happening here. So it leads us to a radical moral skepticism, in other words, is Rouse's critique.

Oh, I don't think it does that. But notice what you're raising here now is an epistemological question, not a metaethical question. This is now no longer a question about whether or not it would be right or even obligatory to carry out such a command. The question now you're raising is an epistemic question about how could I be sure that God has, in fact, issued such a command. And in the case that you mentioned of Andrea Yates, this was a severely mentally disturbed woman who was hearing voices and was schizophrenic. And it might well be the case that epistemically Alex, that no one would be justified today in thinking that God had issued such a command. It would be plausible to think that they ought to conclude that in fact they're hallucinatory or schizophrenic

or mentally ill and go see a counselor. But that's an opportunity. me question about how did God communicate his revelation to Joshua and these Old Testament Israelites in such a self-authenticating way that there was no doubt that this was being commanded to them. It is an epistemic question. It is an epistemic question here, but I suppose what I'm pointing out is an implication of this view, which is that at the very least, if I were to hear a very convincing voice tonight telling me to go and murder children in a primary school tomorrow. And I fully believed it was the voice of God when I woke up and I couldn't shake it. I could say, look, you know, maybe I should, maybe I should go and get

tested for, so I feel fine. I feel rational. I seem rational. Maybe I should go and see if there's something wrong with my brain. But the one thing I can no longer do, I think, is say something like, I know I must be going crazy because, you know, God would never tell me to do something like that. I'd have to at least consider the possibility that God actually is telling me to go and do something like that because there are instances in the Hebrew Bible where God does tell people to go and kill innocent children and you would say justifiably so. So I'm removed of that ability to know for sure that I'm deluded. Yes. Well, it's true that it would be possible, but as I say, there's nothing in the argument for the consistency of these propositions that would imply that anyone would

ever be justified in believing that they had received such a command, because it would go against what our normal objective moral duties are. As you say, we have strong moral intuitions that taking innocent life is morally wrong. And so for us to believe that God is commanding us to do that would require just incredible overwhelming justification, and it may well be the case that nobody today would have such a thing. That's just, I'm not interested in defending that epistemic question. Just to be clear, where you said that it's possible. You mean, it is possible, even if, as you say, the epistemic question is a separate thing, whether we could know this is the case, it is possible that God could command something so intuitively immoral as walking into a primary school and shooting it up or something?

It's possible that he could command such a thing. It would be consistent with his nature, in other words. Yeah, is it possible? I mean, that one seems to me to be plausibly contrary to his moral nature, but it is possible for God to issue commands that would override what our moral duties are. Sure. Yeah, I would say that it is possible, but that's not to say that anyone would ever be justified in believing it. Now, a final line of questioning here, because I know the time is short, is specifically about the accusation that this is apology for genocide. I've heard that when people ask you about this and they say the genocide of the Canaanites, you don't like that description, to put it, to put it lightly of what happened here. but I'll tell you why I think it might be a suitable descriptor here.

Okay, because the language of the Hebrew Bible is quite extreme in saying that we should be destroying them completely and leaving nothing alive that breathes. Now, you have pointed out that God actually does say to drive them out. And it does seem that after these military campaigns, there are still Canaanites who are alive. But yet it does seem to me that, for instance, on the issue of driving out, well, if we look first at Deuteronomy where God says, however, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving to you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them. And then it lists a number of peoples, including the Canaanites, as the Lord your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they teach you to follow detestable. things and so on. It says, do not leave alive anything that breathes, destroy them completely. Now, it may be that the Israelites failed to do so, but it seems like the commandment is clear. Now, where it says to chase them out, we have in Joshua chapter 8, when Israel had finished killing all the men of eye in the fields and in the wilderness where they had chased them,

and when every one of them had been put to the sword, all of the Israelites returned to I and killed those who were in it. Twelve thousand men and women fell that day, all the people of I. So it seems here that, yes, they were chased out, but the Israelites then chased after them once they had been removed from the city, killed them out in the wilderness, turned around, came back, killed everyone else who was left in the city, and who would that have been? It would have been the women, the children, the disabled, etc. So it seems to me that even if we have, you know, God's saying that you just need to chase them out, and even if, you know, they don't end up in practice all being killed, it still seems like this could be described as

at least an attempted genocide against the Canaanites. Well, I don't think it is an attempted genocide because if they would flee and leave the land, the judgment of God would be accomplished and satisfied. As I say, the judgment was to destroy these petty kingdoms as nation states by deviant, them of the land, and the land was being given over to Israel. It wasn't important that all of these people be exterminated because of their race or ethnicity. That wasn't the point. Rather, it was that none of them were to be left in the land. The land was to be cleansed of these people by driving them all out or killing those who remain behind. The point,

The point was that there were to be none of these Canaanites left in the land. But in the case of I, it seems at least implied here that even after chasing them out, that they've been chased out into the field and in the wilderness where they had chased them, it says, and every one of them had been put to the sword. And so it seems to me that you've kind of caught chasing these people out of the land and then chasing after them and killing them and then coming back to kill everybody else. Yeah, I take it that this was the aftermath of a battle, and that they pursued the retreating forces and destroyed them. So this was a part of a resistance movement on the part of these Canaanite peoples and the aftermath of a battle.

I guess it seems to me like if a moment ago you say, well, they didn't have to die because they were given. the opportunity to leave. And here's an instance where, well, they do leave, but they get killed anyway. Well, yeah, but only after being in a pitched battle against the forces of Israel. And so they went after the retreating armies to eliminate that that's very different than people seeing the Israeli forces advancing and vacating the cities and leaving the land. And if they did that, nobody had to die. So they were to cleanse the land of these people by either driving them out or exterminating

those who were still trying to stay. So you, Dr. Craig, are a Canaanite. You wake up and you find yourself in the land. And through essentially accident of birth, you've been born into a community that has raised you to have quite immoral tendencies and practices. You're surrounded by all kinds of sin and you engage in it yourself. Right. Yeah. Don't make me sound like an innocent victim. If I'm one of them, I am an incredibly evil and reprobate person. I suppose there's a whole other question which we don't have time to go into about the fact that being born into such a society

might be a little unfair if it almost necessitates you become an immoral person. But the question I wanted to ask is, suppose you are such a person, right? A foreign nation is approaching with their swords and they say to you, leave this land or we're going to put you to the sword. My question to you is, are you justified? Is it, is it justified for you to fight back? I mean, ultimately, it's not justified because it would be transformed. a divine command, and therefore wouldn't be justified, but I could well understand again how epistemically one might feel justified in resisting this foreign army, though I hope that if I were in such a condition, I would have the good sense to get out.

in in that case can you do you think that richard dorkins to wrap this up to come full circle is being completely irrational or understandably wrong or maybe there's some truth in it if his worldview is correct where do you land in terms of what he's doing when he makes this response hearing everything and say i just don't want anything to do with you where do you what do you think I mean, there's a lot of levels on which we can answer this. I think that my position on the Canaanite conquest was God's gift to Richard Dawkins because it enabled him to find an excuse for not debating me that gave him the moral high ground, whereas his other previous excuses like that I'm a creationist or he's,

busy or it would look good on my resume but not on his. All of those many, many excuses fall flat. But this one, you see, gave him the moral high ground for refusing to engage and therefore was very convenient for him. Having said that, I think it's entirely understandable why one would be troubled by this. I remember when I first heard Philip Quinn, a philosopher, at the University of Notre Dame, speak on divine command morality, and these cases in the Old Testament. It made me feel terribly uncomfortable. I mean, it is very difficult. But as a philosopher, I'm required to say what I think about something, not how I feel about it. And when I dispassionately weigh Metaethical theories about the sources of moral obligation and prohibition, I can't think of

any other moral theory that better grounds objective moral values and duties than divine command morality. And I think the naturalist is bereft of any basis for affirming the objectivity of moral values and duties. And that theory has the implication, it seems to me, that since God doesn't issue commands to himself, that he isn't bound by the same sort of moral rules and duties that we are. That doesn't mean that he's completely unconstrained, rather the constraints on what he commands must be imposed by his own perfectly just and loving nature. And therefore, it would be impossible for him to issue commands that would be incompatible with his own moral character. So it's not arbitrary or capricious. And therefore,

the whole question devolves to this in issuing these commands, did God wrong somebody in a way that would be inconsistent with his justice or with his love? And I couldn't think of anybody that he had wronged in that way, except perhaps for the soldiers who had the grim duty to carry out these awful commands. And even in their case, I think, there can be moral justification for issuing such a command. So I feel forced to this position

by my reflection upon the objectivity and basis of moral values and duties. Well, I've told you how I feel about it, And I know that we're out of time. It's a shame that we won't get to see you and Dr. Dawkins, at least it seems, have this conversation directly. But Dr. Craig, I really do appreciate you coming back on the show, especially to defend what is on the surface, a difficult and as far as people like Dawkins would see it, indefensible position. So it means all the more that you would be willing to come on a show like this and defend that position. Now, can we add one thing here at the end that we didn't get to?

Of course. One of the commendable, and for me, surprising things about Professor Dawkins, is that he understood what the implication or the importance of this objection is. This is not an objection to the existence of God. This is not an objection to the moral argument for God's existence. What isn't an objection to? It's an objection to biblical inerrancy. And therefore, Dawkins will say, sophisticated theologians will say,

that this story in the Old Testament is simply false, that it's either legendary or else Israel carried away by its nationalistic fervor thought that God had given them a divine command when they really hadn't. So that what this calls into question is not any of the core doctrines of the Judeo-Christian worldview, but simply a view of biblical inerrancy. And I gathered from Dawkins' comments to you that he doesn't seem to the think that that's really a very serious objection. I think that he's probably familiar with a lot of British Christians who are not committed to a doctrine of biblical inerrancy, and therefore don't feel that this affects the core tenets of a Judeo-Christian worldview. And I think that's

quite right. So that even if I'm completely wrong in what I've said, I don't think that it has tremendously significant implications for the truth of the Judeo-Christian worldview. An important clarification, and I think you're right that Dawkins did see the objection he was raising as something that one can respond to by simply saying, well, I don't think these stories occurred. What that says about the viability of the Bible, of course, is a separate question, but I'm glad we got to at least get a mention at the end there. Dr. Craig, thanks again. It's been... Thank you, Alex. Good to be with you. Let's just say I'm interested to see what people are going to say about this one.