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William Lane Craig debates Walter Sinnott-Armstrong: evil, suffering and God

This is one of the top 4 best debates that William Lane Craig has ever done in my opinion. (The other three are Craig-Millican debate and the first and second Craig-Dacey debates). If you’ve never seen Dr. Craig in a debate with a non-Christian, this one is probably the best introductory one out there. Dr. Craig is the foremost defender of Christian theism on the planet, and probably of all time.

Sinnott-Armstrong is very courteous, respectful and intelligent scholar and he is very good at defending his side. This is a very cordial and engaging debate, and because it was held in front of a church audience, it was targeted to laymen and not academics. So if you are looking for a good first debate to watch, this is it! Normally, Dr. Craig debates at major universities in front of students and faculty.

There is also a book based on this debate, published by Oxford University Press. I was actually able to find a PDF of it online. I should also remind people that you can get the wonderful Craig-Hitchens debate DVD from Amazon.com if you are looking for a debate to watch, or show in your church, this is the one to start with.

The debaters:

The format:

  • WSA: 15 minutes
  • WLC: 15 minutes
  • Debaters discussion: 6 minutes
  • Moderated discussion: 10 minutes
  • Audience Q&A: 18 minutes
  • WSA: 5 minutes
  • WLC: 5 minutes

SUMMARY:

WSA opening speech:

Evil is incompatible with the concept of God (three features all-powerful, all-god, all-knowing)

God’s additional attributes: eternal, effective and personal (a person)

He will be debating against the Christian God in this debate, specifically

Contention: no being has all of the three features of the concept of God

His argument: is not a deductive argument, but an inductive/probabilistic argument

Examples of pointless, unjustified suffering: a sick child who dies, earthquakes, famines

The inductive argument from evil:

  1.  If there were an all-powerful and all-good God, then there would not be any evil in the world unless that evil is logically necessary for some adequately compensating good.
  2.  There is evil in the world.
  3.  Some of that evil is not logically necessary for some adequately compensating good.
  4. Therefore, there can’t be a God who is all-powerful and all-good.

Defining terms:

  • Evil: anything that all rational people avoid for themselves, unless they have some adequate reason to want that evil for themselves (e.g. – pain, disability, death)
  • Adequate reason: some evils do have an adequate reason, like going to the dentist – you avoid a worse evil by having a filling

God could prevent tooth decay with no pain

God can even change the laws of physics in order to make people not suffer

Responses by Christians:

  • Evil as a punishment for sin: but evil is not distributed in accordance with sin, like babies
  • Children who suffer will go straight to Heaven: but it would be better to go to Heaven and not suffer
  • Free will: this response doesn’t account for natural evil, like disease, earthquakes, lightning
  • Character formation theodicy: there are other ways for God to form character, by showing movies
  • Character formation theodicy: it’s not fair to let X suffer so that Y will know God
  • God allows evil to turn people towards him: God would be an egomaniac to do that
  • We are not in a position to know that any particular evil is pointless: if we don’t see a reason then there is no reason
  • Inductive evil is minor compared to the evidences for God: arguments for a Creator do not prove that God is good

WLC opening speech:

Summarizing Walter’s argument

  1. If God exists, gratuitous evil does not exist.
  2. Gratuitous evil exists.
  3. Therefore, God does not exist.

Gratuitous evil means evil that God has no morally sufficient reason to permit. WSA doesn’t think that all evil is incompatible with God’s existence, just gratuitous evil.

Everyone admits that there are instances of evil and suffering such that we cannot see the morally sufficient reason why God would allow it to occur.

The claim of the atheist is that if they cannot see that there is a moral justification for allowing some instance evil, then there is no moral justification for that instance of evil.

Here are three reasons why we should not expect to know the morally sufficient reasons why God permits apparently pointless evil.

  1. the ripple effect: the morally sufficient reason for allowing some instance of evil may only be seen in another place or another time
  2. Three Christian doctrines undermine the claim that specific evils really are gratuitous
  3. Walter’s own premise 1 allows us to argue for God’s existence, which means that evil is not gratuitous

Christian doctrines from 2.:

  • The purpose of life is not happiness, and it is not God’s job to make us happy – we are here to know God. Many evils are gratuitous if we are concerned about being happy, but they are not gratuitous for producing the knowledge of God. What WSA has to show is that God could reduce the amount of suffering in the world while still retaining the same amount of knowledge of God’s existence and character.
  • Man is in rebellion, and many of the evils we see are caused by humans misusing their free will to harm others and cause suffering
  • For those who accept Christ, suffering is redeemed by eternal life with God, which is a benefit that far outweighs any sufferings and evils we experience in our earthly lives

Arguing for God in 3.

  1. If God exists, gratuitous evil does not exist.
  2. God exists
  3. Therefore, gratuitous evil does not exist.

Four reasons to think that God exists (premise 2 from above):

  • the kalam cosmological argument
  • the fine-tuning argument
  • the moral argument
  • the argument from evil

48-year-old divorced single mother seeks bailout for $430,000 of student loan debt

If there’s one area where I feel comfortable leading a woman, it’s education, career and finances. I wasn’t born in the USA, so it was quite a struggle to know how to navigate education, career and finances. But I did it, and I learned how to do it. And I like to share what I learned with Christian women, so that they don’t end up with a useless degree and a bunch of student loan debt.

Here’s a story about a woman I didn’t advise, reported by the far-left Business Insider:

Maria had a goal to teach at a university full-time. Today, she “absolutely” regrets pursuing that goal.

While Maria’s undergraduate education, which she completed in 2001, was funded through scholarships and Pell grants, she knew more advanced degrees would give her a leg up in university teaching — especially as a woman in the industry. So she pursued a master’s degree and a PhD, the latter of which took seven years to complete.

[…]Now, at 48 years old, Maria’s student-loan balance is $430,000…

[…]As a full-time human resources representative and part-time adjunct professor in Michigan, Maria now makes a five-figure salary while supporting her 15-year-old daughter on her own, with very minimal child support from the father.

[…]Of her total student-debt load, more than $70,000 is interest that accumulated while her student-loan payments were on hold, during which she cashed out her 401k and lived on unemployment benefits.

[…]Maria even filed for bankruptcy in 2018

I don’t recommend doing a degree in non-STEM fields, they don’t pay. I don’t recommend spending 7 years with no income for a PhD. But notice how society gives her free money to subsdize these poor decisions. She got free scholarships, Pell grants, child support, unemployment benefits. The article doesn’t mention if she got alimony, too. And she filed for bankruptcy… screwing her creditors out of what she owed them. Who knows what other social programs and tax benefits she got? While other women do STEM degrees, work in the private sector, marry and stay married, she’s been doing life on easy mode, passing off the costs of her poor decisions to the people around her. I don’t want women to make decisions that impose costs on their neighbors.

And now, she wants to get a bailout from taxpayers:

The Education Department recently announced reforms to PSLF, which included going back over denied applications and payments to the program. So there’s a chance that Maria may earn a quicker route to loan forgiveness. But with her current financial outlook, she’s not confident she can complete the program and wants President Joe Biden to do more to help millions of borrowers with debt burdens.

The article notes that teachers and other public sector “workers” can default on their loans and pass the costs along to taxpayers:

Maria does not work enough hours to qualify for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, which forgives student debt for public servants, like teachers, after ten years of qualifying payments.

Just understand that if society pays women to make poor decisions with their education, careers and finances, then more women will do it. That raises the costs on the men that pay taxes for this, reducing their ability to get married and conceive children. If men are paying for this woman’s mistakes, they can’t pay for their own marriage and parenting plans.

Consider this other article from the far-left Business Insider:

There are over 4 times as many scholarships restricted to females as there are restricted to males.

This is despite the fact that about 60% of college students are women. Why are we focusing on subsidizing the group that’s already doing well?

By the way, the author of the first Business Insider article, is a recent journalism graduate (expensive university) living in expensive Washington, D.C.. She advocates for bailouts through her journalism. She probably has massive student loan debt, too. It seems like choosing easy non-STEM majors, going into debt, then hoping for a bailout from socialism is quite common.

According to far-left Yahoo News, women hold two thirds of the $1.4 trillion outstanding student loan debt:

Women hold nearly two-thirds of the outstanding student debt in the U.S., according to the American Association of University Women. And, they have a harder time paying off their debt compared to men. Prior to the student loan forbearance period, 70% of men made at least their required minimum monthly loan payments, while only half (54%) of women said the same, a recent survey by D.A. Davidson found.

Young women today don’t like to have to “settle” for a lower cost college in a city with a lower cost of living. Like the Business Insider reporter, they want the Sex in the City lifestyle. So they go live in an expensive city, and run up debt doing useless degrees at an expensive university. And sometimes overseas! As you can see from the chart below, women avoid hard STEM degrees. But those programs are hard for a reason – they pay more money.

The best majors for women to avoid student loan debt
The best majors for women to avoid student loan debt

My thoughts

What I wanted to do here is report to you what happens when I try to coach young women about their decisions in education, career and finances. And keep in mind, I’m doing this from a position of starting out in a foreign country, earning a BS and MS in computer science, graduating debt-free and working 22 years full-time. I had a $1.3 million net worth by age 45 (including the new construction home I bought for cash). So I have achievements here.

I run into the student loan debt problem while dating Christian women for marriage. Christian women seem to be even less likely to do hard degrees than women on average. You see a lot of art, music, English, journalism, etc. degrees there. I show them that student loans are a risk factor for divorce, and they also set back the plan to stop paying rent and start having children. I also show them which majors pay the most.

Here’s what I usually get in response:

  • Women think that they will be an exception to all studies and reports showing that the likely consequences of their actions.
  • One woman dismissed the need to clean up her finances  because God decided what degrees I would have, and how much I would earn, so I had no authority to advise her from my experience.
  • Other women say that I am only doing what makes me happy, and they must do that too. (Note: I cried in second year calculus after failing the first test).
  • I advised a 29-year-old woman with $25K of student loan debt and was working as a waitress to take a job I found her as an IT project manager. She said “No! Being a waitress is the easiest job I’ve ever had!”
  • A 30-year-old woman with $23K in student loan debt wanted to do a Masters degree in Europe. I told her to pay off her loans first. She got two useless Masters degrees in Europe, and never worked again.
  • I’m told that there is no rush to get out of debt to afford children, because women can have children in their 40s.
  • I’m told that it will be fine for the children if she has to work to pay off her debts, because daycare and public schools work better for children than stay-at-home moms and homeschooling.
  • I’m told that the $30 trillion national debt and bailouts for student loans, etc. are no big deal because the government can just print more money.
  • I’m told that I can fix her financial problems by working harder and longer. One of my friends actually married a woman with $200K in student loan debt in order to get his green card, so some men take this deal.
  • I’m told that too much planning feels bad, and I need to be more spontaneous and adventurous. One woman literally said “I don’t want to make decisions based on fear”.
  • A famous Christian apologist woman (not WIA) told me that I can’t judge a woman who has student loans because if God forgives a woman, then a man can’t exclude her from marriage.

I’m not going to run a marriage that way. I have goals.

Men can’t afford BOTH bailouts AND marriage

So, my point is that we have a real problem with figuring out how to get women to make better decisions about education, career and finance. I want to help them. I really do. Because we are $30 trillion in debt now, and we simply don’t have enough money to keep bailing out people for student loans. And the problem will only get worse, as the younger generation of losers keeps making poor decisions and demanding that someone else pay for their mistakes.

Men don’t marry women who are bad with money. Money is one of the biggest causes of divorce, and divorce is a financial disaster for men because of anti-male divorce courts.

The number of men who can afford marriage and children is declining because they have to bail out all these reckless, irresponsible young women through their taxes. We need to fix this problem.

House Democrats vote against resolution condemning attacks on churches

I thought this vote from Wednesday was very interesting. A lot of Christians think that choosing a political party is a lot like choosing your flavor of ice cream. You choose the one you like, the one that makes you feel good and look good to others. But actually, one of the political parties condemns the persecution of Christians, and the other one is all in favor of it.

Consider this article from Daily Signal:

Over 200 House Democrats voted Wednesday against condemning the slew of attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers that have occurred since the leak of the draft opinion indicating that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade.

H. Con. Res. 3 (expressing the sense of Congress condemning the recent attacks on pro-life facilities, groups, and churches) passed 222 to 208, with three Democrats supporting it.

At least 78 pro-life groups and 108 churches have been attacked since May, according to Catholic Vote trackers. Vandals have often tagged these buildings with threats such as, “If abortions aren’t safe, neither are you,” making the attacks incidents of suspected pro-abortion violence.

Yet as of Wednesday, authorities had not arrested anyone in connection with these incidents. Democrats like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been loath to condemn or even acknowledge the attacks.

The Biden administration isn’t very interested in prosecuting domestic terrorism when it’s committed by the secular left against churches and crisis pregnancy centers. But they are VERY interested in using the power of the law to go after the pro-life taxpayers who pay their salaries:

The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has refused to share with The Daily Signal whether it is prosecuting any of these cases under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which “prohibits threats of force, obstruction and property damage intended to interfere with reproductive health care services.”

Meanwhile, that Civil Rights Division charged 26 pro-life individuals in 2022 with violations of the FACE Act—though the legislation protects both pro-life pregnancy centers and abortion clinics, as a DOJ official noted to Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, in December.

Also in December, Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta revealed that DOJ has been targeting pro-life activists through the FACE Act as a response to the overturn of Roe as she delivered remarks at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division’s 65th Anniversary.

Now, I heard a lot secular leftists concerned about the January 6th demonstration. They weren’t concerned about the Capitol Hill police officer who murdered the unarmed protestor, they were concerned that people who disagreed with socialism were allowed to demonstrate.  But do you know what the secular leftists were not concerned about? Antifa and BLM committing insurrection in Washington, D.C. in 2020.

Here’s an article from Real Clear Politics dated May 2020, to remind you about that:

We are witnessing glimmers of the full insurrection the far-left has been working toward for decades. The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis was merely a pre-text for radicals to push their ambitious insurgency. In a matter of hours, after the video of Floyd began circulating the internet, militant antifa cells across the country mobilized to Minnesota to aid Black Lives Matter rioters. Law enforcement and even the state National Guard have struggled to respond in Minnesota.

Portland, Oakland, Los Angeles, Dallas and Atlanta are just some of the other cities waking up and finding smoldering ruins where businesses once operated. Nearly 30 other cities experienced some form of mass protest or violent rioting. At least three people have been killed so far.

Antifa, the extreme anarchist-communist movement, has rioting down to an art. The first broken window is the blood in the water for looters to move in. When the looting is done, those carrying flammable chemicals start fires to finish the job. Footage recorded in Minneapolis and other cities show militants dressed in black bloc— the antifa uniform — wielding weapons like hammers or sticks to smash windows. You see their graffiti daubed on smashed up buildings: FTP means ‘Fuck the Police’; ACAB stands for ‘All Cops Are Bastards’; 1312 is the numerical code for ACAB.

Last night, rioters reached the gates of the White House, possibly the most secure location on Earth. There, they chipped away at the barriers piece-by-piece while law enforcement struggled to respond. One Secret Service officer reportedly had a brick thrown at his head. Footage recorded at the scene showed him blood-soaked. Police were eventually able to repel masked rioters by using pepper spray and tear gas. That worked, for now.

The militants uprising across the country want a revolution and they don’t care who or what has to be destroyed in the process. If their comrades die, they are elevated as martyrs in propaganda. Death is celebrated.

At its core, BLM is a revolutionary Marxist ideology. Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, BLM’s founders, are self-identified Marxists who make no secret of their worship of communist terrorists and fugitives, like Assata Shakur. They want the abolishment of law enforcement and capitalism. They want regime change and the end of the rule of law. Antifa has partnered with Black Lives Matter, for now, to help accelerate the break down of society.

The US is getting a small preview of the anarchy antifa has been agitating, training and preparing for. Ending law enforcement is a pre-condition for antifa and BLM’s success in monopolizing violence. Those who are harmed first are the weak and vulnerable, the people who cannot protect themselves. Small business owners in Minnesota pleaded for mercy, even putting up signs and messages in support of the rioters, but to no avail.

The Biden administration wasn’t interested in investigating or prosecuting their friends in Antifa and BLM. No, no. They have to go after peaceful pro-lifers. You can’t trust those Christians, what with their marriages and their children and their jobs and their church attendance. Everyone one of them is a potential terrorist!

The problem with people on the secular left is that they primarily form their beliefs based on feelings. What makes them feel good. What makes them look good. So, an insurrection committed by their own side produces no outrage. Billions of dollars of damage from Antifa and BLM is no concern to them. But if the TV news anchor tells them to be outraged at January 6th people walking around the Capitol, then they will be outraged. It’s just like the “two minutes hate” from 1984. These are not rational people. They’re lemmings.