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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

Bible study: Was the resurrection body of Jesus spiritual or physical?

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One of the leading naturalistic attempts to account for Jesus’ death, empty tomb, post-mortem appearances, and the early proclamation of the resurrection is that the disciples had individual and group hallucinations. In this case, the New Testament authors would not have meant that the resurrected body of Jesus was physical. But is that what they recorded?

Here’s a quotation from my friend Eric Chabot, from his blog Think Apologetics. He explains why Paul’s use of the word “resurrection” to describe what the other witnesses saw means bodily resurrection.

He writes:

The two words are used for resurrection in the New Testament “anastasis” (rising up) and “egersis” (waking up), both imply a physical body. Furthermore, the use of the word “opethe” (the Greek word for appeared) shows the Gospel writers did believe that Jesus appeared physically. “There you will see (opethe) him” (Matt. 28:7); “The Lord has risen and has appeared (opethe) to Simon” (Luke 24:24). When they used “opethe” here, it means that He appeared physically to them.

OK so all the words they used for resurrection imply a physical body.

But what about the word for body. Do they imply a physical body?

Yes:

So when Paul gives his list of appearances in 1 Cor. 15, the issues becomes whether the appearance to him is the same as it was to the disciples. There is no doubt the post resurrection body of Jesus (after the ascension) had to be somewhat different than the body the disciples saw. Also, whenever the New Testament mentions the word body, in the context of referring to an individual human being, the Greek word “soma” always refers to a literal, physical body. Greek specialist Robert Gundry says “the consistent and exclusive use of soma for the physical body in anthropological contexts resists dematerialization of the resurrection, whether by idealism or by existentialism.” [9] Furthermore, in N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God shows that the Greek word for resurrection which is “anastasis” was used by ancient Jews, pagans, and Christians as bodily in nature.

What about the nature of Paul’s appearance? Was that a hallucination, or seeing some objective reality? Did the people with Paul see or hear anything?

Eric Chabot writes this in another place:

The Bible says, “they heard” the same voice Paul did ” (Acts 9: 7). But they “did not see anyone ” (Acts 9: 7). Notice Paul was physically blinded by the brightness of the light. One way or the other, the experience involved something that was external to Paul. It wasn’t something that was the same thing as a vision that Paul talks about in 2 Cor. 12:1. Furthermore, the phrase “he let himself be seen’” (ōphthē , aorist passive, ), is the word Paul uses in 1 Cor. 15:7 to describe of his own resurrection appearance as the other ones in the creed.

Paul didn’t get a bodily resurrection appearance, but he got an objective appearance that people nearby could see (as a bright light) and hear. His appearance, coming 5-8 years after the appearances to the disciples, should not be seen as overriding their appearances, which were appearances of the bodily resurrected Jesus.

If you want to read something a little more challenging, I found a paper from the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) from their journal, where it talks more about soma and anastasis. If you want a bit of a challenge, download the PDF and read it. It’s by Kirk R. MacGregor and the title is “1 Corinthians 15:3B–6A, 7 And The Bodily Resurrection Of Jesus”.

News

For the first time, young men are more religious than young women

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I noticed an article in the Financial Times about a growing divide between young women and young men. Young women are  increasingly leftist, and young men are increasingly conservative. Surveys of young men and young women have found that young men are more conservative on abortion and LGBT than young women. And now young men are more religious than young women.

Now, I want to be clear in this post that I am not criticizing all women. I am criticizing the majority of YOUNG WOMEN. Older women don’t usually have these problems, especially married older women.

First, let’s take a look at the previous article, from the far-left UK Independent:

An analysis of survey data from across the developing world had found that “a new global gender divide” is emerging. The analysis, conducted by the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch, showed that the developed world’s young women have rapidly become more liberal. Young men, however, have either become more conservative (as in the US) or been much slower to become more progressive (as in the UK). Gen Z, Burn-Murdoch concluded, is “two generations, not one.”

[…]Quoting similar figures to those in the FT, and noting that political views have become more tightly bound to personal identity, a Washington Post editorial warned that members of Gen Z will struggle to pair off romantically.

Young men, statistically speaking, are more likely to side with the weak against the strong. Since abortion harms unborn children, and divorce and same-sex marriage harm born children, men typically oppose these behaviors. But statistically speaking, young women more often side with the selfish adults against the children.

Naturally there are exceptions, but the statistics show that young men are more conservative on moral issues than young women. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the issue of abortion, which is really just about whether selfish adults can resort to murdering their own children in order to escape the consequences of no-commitment sex.

In September 2024, Gallup explained how young men and young women view abortion:

For this, Gallup reviewed 24 questions from its trends archive that measure Americans’ beliefs or positions on widely debated policy-related issues, and that Gallup has asked frequently enough to produce sufficient sample sizes of young men and women across the three periods… On five of these, the percentage of young women holding the liberal position has increased by more than 15 points. These have to do with the environment, abortion and gun laws.

  • Young women have become 18 points more likely to support broad abortion rights, saying abortion should be legal under any or most circumstances (rather than in only a few or no circumstances). Their preference for this position rose from 42% to 60% between 2008-2016 and 2017-2024.

The number for young men is much lower than 60% at only 48%!

So, what happens to young men when they take these traditional MALE positions on issues, and society disapproves of them? Well, they turn to God for vindication of their good moral views. If society won’t approve of young men for protecting the unborn from abortion, and protecting children from divorce and same-sex marriage, then young men will have to find their vindication somewhere else. And that somewhere else is God.

Here’s the latest from the far-left New York Times: (archived)

For the first time in modern American history, young men are now more religious than their female peers. They attend services more often and are more likely to identify as religious.

[…]Among Generation Z Christians, this dynamic is playing out in a stark way: The men are staying in church, while the women are leaving at a remarkable clip.

Church membership has been dropping in the United States for years. But within Gen Z, almost 40 percent of women now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, compared with 34 percent of men, according to a survey last year of more than 5,000 Americans by the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute.

To be accurate, I don’t think that young women have been more religious than men. If you look at the kinds of books that young women tend to read, it’s more about comfort and life enhancement. They are not looking to get their orders from God. They are looking to get their desires met by God. And you can see that coming out in the new trends of “manifesting” that is so popular with young women.

By contrast, young men are more likely to turn to apologetics, science, history and theology. Young women were only “spiritual”, they were not looking to sacrifice themselves in order to serve God. You can see this by looking at what books young women and men read. Young women tend to read people like Rachel Hollis,  Rachel Held Evans, and Sarah Young. Young men see religion as being about their duties to others. They read people like J. Warner Wallace, Frank Turek and Sean McDowell. They want to learn how to tell people the truth, and tell people right and wrong. They want to lead in moral and spiritual areas. They want to make the world a better place for the weakest people.

How did this happen? Well, we have had generation after generation of pietistic Christian parents and pietistic Christian pastors who thought that it was the height of chivalry to only apply the Bible to young men, and never to young women. Young men need to be “challenged”, but never young women. People acted as if women had some sort of hotline to God through their emotions, and could never be judged for any of their questionable policy preferences and choices.

My question for you is this: do you think that these pietistic parents and pietistic pastors will finally stop asking the question “Where are all the good men?” and start asking a much better question “Where are all the good women?” Because I can tell you right now, conservative religious men are not going to be interested in dating or marrying these secular leftist young women.

Marriage is a huge risk for young men, in a world of no-fault divorce, biased divorce courts and feminized public schools. Good young men are not going to take those risks just to give secular leftist young women their “happily ever after” once they tire of “having fun” with hot bad boys, and want to settle down. And no amount of shaming and blaming is going to force good men to take those risks.

By the way, I’ve noticed that a lot of good young men are now seeking out friendships with more traditional older women. They are looking for sanity, and validation for their good moral and religious views. That’s not surprising. They’ll go where they are respected.