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

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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
News

Information Enigma: 21-minute video explains intelligent design

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The video is here:

I have read and listened and watched a lot of material on intelligent design, but I have never seen so much value packed into such a short lecture. I really hope you’ll watch this and that it’s helpful to you.

Summary:

  • the big question when discussing the origin of life: where did the information in living systems come from?
  • Until 530 million years ago, the oceans were largely devoid of life
  • In a 10 million year period, many new forms of animal life emerged
  • New biological forms of life require new information
  • the discovery of DNA shows that living systems work because cells have information that allows them to build the components of molecular machines: cell types, proteins, etc.
  • can random mutation and natural selection create new functional information?
  • normally, random mutations tend to degrade the functionality of information, e.g. – randomly changing symbols in an applications code does not usually introduce useful new functions, it usually renders what is there non-functional
  • the majority of possible sequences will NOT have functions, so random mutations will more likely give you non-functional code, rather than functional code
  • example: a bicycle lock  with 4 numbers has many possible sequences for the 4 numbers, and only one of them has unlock functionality, the rest have no functionality
  • if you have lots of time, then you might be able to guess the combination, but if the lock as has 10 billion numbers, and only one combination that unlocks, you can spend your whole life trying to unlock it and won’t succeed
  • how likely is it to arrive at a functional protein or gene by chance? Is it more like the 4-dial lock (can be done with lots of time) or the 10 billion dial lock (amount of time required exceeds the time available)?
  • the probability is LOW because there is only one sequence of numbers that has unlock function
  • consider a short protein of 150 amino acids has 10 to the 195th power possible sequences
  • if many of these sequences of amino acides had biological function, then it might be easier to get to one by random mutation and selection than it is with a lock that only unlocks for ONE sequence
  • how many of the possible sequences have biological function?
  • Thanks to research done by Douglas Axe, we now know that the number of functional amino acid sequences for even a short protein is incredibly small…
  • Axe found that the odds of getting a functional sequence of amino acids that will fold and have biological function is 1 in 10 to the 77th power
  • Is that number too improbable to reach by chance? well, there are 10 to 65th atoms in the entire Milky Way galaxy… so yes, this is a very improbable outcome
  • can random genetic mutations search through all the sequences in order to find the one in 10 to the 77th power one that has biological function? It depends on how much guessers we have and how many guesses we get in the time available
  • even with the entire 3.5 billion year history of life on Earth, only about 10 to the 40th organisms have ever lived, which far smaller fraction of the 10 to the 77th total sequences
  • even with a very fast mutation rate, you would not be able to reach a functional protein even with all that time, and even with all those organisms

I was once having a discussion with a woman about the research that Axe did at the Cambridge University lab. He published four articles in the Journal of Molecular Biology. I held out one of the papers to her and showed her the numbers. She said over and over “I hate the Discovery Institute! I hate the Discovery Institute!” Well, yeah, but you can’t make the Journal of Molecular Biology go away with hating the Discovery Institute. JMB is peer-reviewed, and this was experimental evidence – not a theory, not a hypothesis.

We have been blessed by the Creator and Designer of the universe in this time and place with overwhelming evidence – an abundance of riches. For those who have an open mind, this is what you’ve been waiting for to make your decision. For the naturalists who struggle so mightily to block out the progress of experimental science, they’ll need to shout louder and shut their eyes tighter and push harder to block their ears. Maybe if they keep screaming “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” over and over to themselves, they will be able to ignore the real science a little longer.

News

Is David French right to say that teachers who talk to 5-year-olds about sex aren’t “groomers”?

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Sometimes, I get really annoyed with moral relativists for being too compassionate with predators. Whenever I feel like that, a trip to The Federalist to read their amazing women authors fixes me right up. They have so many great authors there. Right now, I am reading everything I can find by Elle Reynolds, Kylee Zempel, Jordan Boyd, Margot Cleveland and Joy Pullmann.

This article from the splendid Kylee Zempel at The Federalist is a must-read. I loved every word!

She writes:

The ranks of progressives and unmistakably pro-LGBT media — who spend their days throwing around insulting hyperbole like “Nazi,” “fascist,” and “silence is violence” — are being joined by so-called conservatives who’ve taken it upon themselves to lecture those to the right of them that ackshuuully it’s not appropriate to call the kids’ entertainment creators and state-sanctioned educators who insist on sexually indoctrinating 5-year-olds “groomers.”

Who are the so-called conservatives?

Here’s David French, who used to be conservative:

David French Groomer

And this guy from National Review, which used to be conservative:

National Review Groomer

Kylee continues:

Have the “conservatives” resisting the use of the “groomer” label forgotten about the concerted effort by gender activists to host drag-queen story hours for little children in taxpayer-funded libraries or “drag-tastic” camps at museums? Have they not seen the pornographic books introducing kids to gay sex and masturbation?

How about government schoolteachers’ documented cult-like allegiance to gay pride? The cover-up of sexual assault resulting from trans bathroom policies? Or the coaxing of children into sex confusion and dangerous gender-bending interventions and then hiding it from their parents?

Have they not heard stories of young people who internalized backward notions about human sexuality during their formative years, were utterly failed by every institution that should have helped them correct course, then underwent destructive procedures that left them full of regret, just disfigured shells of the unique and beautiful people they were created to be?

How about tongue-in-cheek confessions from choruses of gay men that they’ll “convert your children”? Or even manipulation by the president of the United States that those who don’t abide by LGBT orthodoxy “don’t see” and “don’t respect” transgender people and that so-called gender affirmation is the best way to keep kids “safe and healthy”?

There’s a word for adults who build trust with children then condition them in sexual matters without their parents’ consent or knowledge in order to manipulate them for their own pleasure: It’s groomer.

Kylee goes on to quote a list of grooming behaviors from the American Bar Association website. Among them, she finds exactly what the teachers are banned from doing, e.g. – “discussing sexually explicit information under the guise of education.”

She adds:

According to the website ChildHelp, which seeks to prevent child abuse, “grooming includes … gaining trust and access … playing a role in the child’s life, isolating the child, [and] creating secrecy around the relationship.” It goes on to say that signs of grooming include… “talking about sexual topics that are not age appropriate.”

So yes, this is a texbook definition of grooming. David French disagrees, but remember, in 2019, David French called “drag queen story hour” in schools “a blessing of liberty“. This isn’t his first time deflecting criticism of LGBT activists grooming children for sex with adults. He isn’t trying to protect children from predators. He isn’t a good man. He has given up on the male responsibility to protect the weak from predators. He would prefer to virtue signal to the secular left instead.

Open Secrets Teacher Unions
Open Secrets Teacher Unions

You have to focus on what groomer allies write about. They aren’t writing anything against the secular left. They aren’t writing about fathers losing their children to teachers who trans kids. They aren’t writing about parents being arrested for mis-gendering their children. They aren’t writing about the far-left LGBT radicalism of teachers. They aren’t writing about the labeling of parents who dissent from secular left indoctrination as “domestic terrorists”. Etc.

In every case, the fake conservatives have their sights firmly set on ordinary conservative parents, and their children. They want to protect the places where Democrats wield power – like public schools. And when the state comes along to seize the children of Christians, because those parents were supportive enough of LGBT rights, you can bet that the false conservatives will support that, too.

I’ve been writing about what the secular left is doing with children in the schools, divorce courts, etc. I also supported the candidate that pro-life groups endorsed in 2020. I’m a real conservative. David French is not a real conservative. Remember how he sided with far-left public schools against parents. He’s more interested in defending grooming of children for child abuse than your rights as a parent. Can we just judge him by his actions?