Alex O’Connor vs William Lane Craig: Does God Exist? The Ultimate God Debate

William Lane Craig and Alex O'Connor are household names in the God debate. Alex has hosted Craig before on his podcast within reason, but in this episode they go head-to-head at London's Royal Institution. A lot of the discussion focused on Craig's famous Column Cosmological Argument does the universe need a cause, but they also discuss animal suffering and take audience questions. Hosted by Jack Symes after Johnny Thompson was unwell and in partnership with Premier Unbelieveful, I hope you enjoy their discussion. Welcome here to the beautiful Royal Institution Theatre for the question of God. I have the absolute pleasure of co-producing this evening for the first time and in my place my very good friend and the wonderful Johnny Thompson will be hosting tonight's panel. We have two fan favourites returning guests here at the theatre. We know you're big fans of them as well. Hence why the theatre is absolutely packed this evening. Dr Craig and Alex O'Connor joining us again. When they come on stage please give them a massive round of applause especially because Johnny Thompson's here with us for the first time. So without further ado, Dr William Lane Craig, Johnny Thompson and Alex O'Connor! Thank you, thank you for the warm welcome. Good evening and welcome to this beautiful venue where we will be talking about theology, philosophy and religious belief. I am Johnny Thompson and tonight I'm inviting two wonderful guests to explore the question of God for us all here tonight. On my right is a man who has for 40 years made the philosophical case for Christian Theism, the central project of his life. He's debated more atheists in more universities and perhaps anyone alive and somewhere in the middle of all that he's revived a medieval cosmological argument that has been gathering dust since the 12th century and turned it into one of the most discussed arguments in the contemporary philosophy of religion. He is now working on a five volume systematic philosophical theology, having settled the question of if God exists he is turning to the question of what God is like. Please welcome William Lane Craig. And on my left is a man who picked up some of those arguments as a teenager in Oxford and took them seriously, took them apart and somewhere along the way became one of the most watch philosophers of his generation. He's the host of the Within Reason Podcast where he has interviewed the likes of Richard Dawkins, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Slavoz Ezek and of course the man sitting opposite him tonight. He describes himself as an agnostic atheist but a curious one, increasingly drawn to the figure of Jesus and increasingly suspicious of the idea that truth can the truth of things can be exhausted by argument alone. He is the rare treat of someone who welcomes discussion and dialectic rather than point scoring and argument. Please welcome Alex O'Connor. So without any more preamble we're going to dive into the meat of the issue tonight and the first question is a big one. It's view.cray. Should we believe in God and why? Okay. Well I'd like to begin by explaining why I am so truly glad to be here this evening. This event comes midway through a speaking tour of England and after the events on Saturday I came down with severe larynxitis completely lost my voice and it looked like the rest of the tour was in jeopardy. In fact the events in Durham had to be canceled but I want to publicly express my gratitude to our dear friends Dr. Peter and Heather May in Southampton who were able to procure for us a doctor here in London who actually made a house call early Monday morning to our hotel and after looking at us he wrote some prescriptions for medications that put me on the road to recovery thereby certainly saving the event tonight as well as hopefully the remainder of the tour. So I am really glad to be with you. Now with respect to our time this evening this is not going to be a debate between Alex and me rather this is going to be a conversation where we openly discuss these issues pardon me I probably be coughing but I've got my tea got my throat lasages here and so I think we're going to have a great time and philosophers like to make distinctions in answering questions so when Johnny has quite reasons other to believe in God it's important to distinguish between believing in God and believing that God exists. Believing in God means trusting in God committing one's life to God in worship and love and obedience and the reason you should do that is obvious because God is the supreme benefactor he is the source of eternal life the source of forgiveness and salvation so clearly you should believe in God but I think Johnny's real question is well book why believe that God exists you can't believe in God if you don't believe that God exists and in my philosophical work I defended both what I call exterior and interior ways of answering that question exterior arguments and evidences concern of philosophical and scientific arguments that lead to the existence of God for example I've defended six of these in my work first that God is the best explanation of why anything at all exists rather than nothing second that God is the best explanation for the absolute beginning of the universe at a point in the finite past thirdly God is the best explanation for the uncanny applicability of mathematics to the physical phenomena fourth God is the best explanation for the incomprehensible fine tuning of the universe for embodied interactive life fifth God is the best explanation for the objectivity of moral values and duties in the world and finally six the very possibility of God's existence implies that God exists now together I think these six arguments constitute a powerful cumulative case that God exists if you were to ask me why I believe the Christian God exists then we would need to go beyond these arguments to examine the person of Jesus of Nazareth who was this man Jesus of Nazareth and I believe that he claimed to be the long awaited Jewish Messiah the son of God in a unique sense and the divine human son of man prophesied by the prophet Daniel and I think that God vindicated those radical personal claims by which he put himself in God's place by raising him from the dead now I realize that most people think that the resurrection of Jesus is something you just believe in by faith or not but in fact there are four well established historical facts concerning the fate of Jesus of Nazareth that are agreed upon by the vast majority of New Testament scholars that have written on this subject and these would include first his honorable internment by Joseph of Arimathea in a tomb following his crucifixion secondly the tomb was discovered on the first day of the week following the crucifixion by a group of Jesus female followers to be empty third the rather various individuals and groups of people experienced appearances of Jesus alive after his death on various occasions and under a variety of circumstances and finally number four is that the original disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead despite every predisposition to the contrary and I think that when the alternative explanations for those facts are weighed by the usual criteria that historians use for evaluating historical hypotheses then the superiority and plausibility of what I call the resurrection hypothesis emerges that is that the original disciples were right that God had raised Jesus from the dead and so for that reason I am enthusiastically a Christian theist now so much for the exterior way down through history most Christians haven't believed in God on that basis the vast majority of Christians like a medieval peasant farmer or a or someone working in the rice fields of Laos, don't have the education or the library resources or the leisure time to look into philosophical arguments for God's existence or the evidence for the New Testament. Rather, they believe in God on the basis of a personal experience of God in himself. In particular, they've experienced the risen Lord in their lives. The Easter him writer says, "You ask me how I know he lives, he lives within my heart." And I think that that is a perfectly valid way. So even though I am an enthusiastic proponent of evidentiary exterior arguments for the truth of Christian faith, I don't think they're necessary. I think that it's perfectly rational to take believe in Christianity as a properly basic belief grounded in our personal experience of God himself. - Thanks very much. There's a lot there to unpack. And apart from the moment, Alex, any arguments you might have against the existence of God and will park also for the moment the question of Jesus and of Christianity. I was wondering if you might be able to tackle first what the Craig calls the exterior arguments for God, particularly what sounds like. You said five ways. - Six. - Six. - Particularly like a version of a logical argument that he raised at the beginning. - I think the five ways was somebody else. (laughing) Yeah, of course, an atheist engagement, these discussions spends their time doing two things, providing positive reasons not to believe in God. And there's really only one popular version of that. But more often for that reason, they spend their time responding to arguments that have put forward. So Dr. Craig has put forward six of these. And the atheist showbiz to see whether they think that these arguments essentially hold. So for example, Dr. Craig says that God is the best explanation of the finite past of the universe, the fact that the universe had a beginning at a moment in time. And the questions that need to be asked in response to that are did the universe have a beginning? How would we know that it had a beginning? If it had a beginning, how do we know that it needs some kind of cause? And Dr. Craig is perhaps most famous for his column cosmological argument, which seeks to establish these facts, that everything which begins to exist has a cause, that the universe had a beginning and that therefore the universe had some kind of cause. And if the universe is the totality of all space, time, and matter, and the cause of the universe must be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, and so on. Most attention in this argument is given to the second premise. That is that the universe began to exist. Of some of you may be under the apprehension that Big Bang cosmology tells us from a scientific perspective, that the universe had a first moment. That is not true. The evidence for the Big Bang is evidence that sometime around 14 billion years ago, all of space time was condensed into a really hot, really dense state. In order to get to a first moment of the universe, you need to take the observations which show that the universe is expanding, reverse them to get to the hot dense state, and then keep going, pass the hot dense state. And this is what Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose did in the 20th century to show that the beginning of the universe, there was what was called a singularity. This is a genuine first moment where density goes to infinity on some models. And this would be a first moment for the universe. I just want to point out for those who are scientifically minded here that Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking relied on some assumptions, in order to extrapolate in that manner, four assumptions in particular, all of which have been disputed by physicists, including Penrose and Hawking themselves, who've since disputed the various assumptions they relied upon to point to a singularity. And in fact, my friend Phil Halper, who was never far away from these discussions either intellectually or physically, high-fell, conducted a survey recently, two of them actually. The most reason why I believe that the largest collection of physicists were surveyed, or at least it was replicated. And the survey asked a number of questions to leading experts. And the only question that got majority consensus at about two thirds, the only one, was that the big bang is not the first moment of the universe. It is a hot-dent state 14 billion years ago. We don't know if or what came before that hot-dentated is simply not something that we can measure. So scientifically, we're not on sort of solid ground. But Dr. Craig is more fond, I think, of putting forward philosophical reasons why the universe must have had a beginning. And these rely on the impossibility of an actual infinite. That if the universe had an infinite past, that would mean that you would have had to traverse an infinite number of moments in order to get to the present. I think I'm fair in saying that this is one version of an argument you would give to say why we would say that the universe has a finite past. Is it, yeah, I mean, plausibly, in order to get to the present, you have to complete the past. But if the past is infinite, you'd have to complete an infinite series. You can't do that. And so you would never arrive at the present. And yet here we are at the present. Therefore, the universe had to have had some kind of beginning. There are other reasons to think that infinities of this kind can't obtain in reality. Dr. Craig is famous for relying upon David Hilbert's famous analogy or image of an infinite hotel, a hotel with an infinite number of rooms. And all of those rooms are full. And yet if somebody showed up to this infinite hotel and desired a room and were told that every single room in the hotel was full, it's easy. All you have to do is tell the person in room number one to room number two. That's one's occupied. So first in room number two, room number three, and number three, you move to four and four to five and so on. And everyone just moves up. And since it's an infinite hotel, there's always an extra number for them to move into. And then the new guest just moves into room number one. And so, as Craig has sometimes put in the past, the hotel would have to have a sign outside that says, no vacancy rooms available. Which, of course, seems like a contradict. [LAUGHTER] I think that man is the one who needs the cup of tea. He never-- he-- he-- he never likes-- Oh, god. Imagine him with these. It's-- it's-- yeah, I mean, it's-- it's-- it's terrific stuff losing your faith in real time. It can make anybody a bit sick. The problem-- the problem I see with this is that it relies upon us-- the might-- [LAUGHTER] Oh, we-- as much as I like air about Johnny, can we put him on mute? [LAUGHTER] The problem is that these assumptions are based on intuition. It seems as though this idea that the hotel would be full and also be able to accept new guests seems like a contradiction. But it's simply not a contradiction. I mean, there are two ways in which we get understand the hotel being full. Either full means that it can take no more guests, in which case, the Gilbert's hotel simply isn't full, because it can take new guests. So maybe by full, what we mean is every room is occupied. That's fine. OK, every room is occupied. But you can also acquire new guests. That's true, even in non-invent examples, like if I had a finite hotel and every single room was full. But if a new guest came into the room into the hotel, I could just build a new room for them. I could say, no vacancy, you know, at least every room is full. And yet, new guests can be admitted. So the idea that every room being full and it being impossible to admit new guests are the same thing is not true, even tribly in the case of that finite hotel. But because we're so used to them coming together, it seems that when they don't, we're in some unintuitive contradiction. But I don't think idea, like concepts like Hellbutt Hotel, are contradictory so much as they're simply unintuitive. And bear in mind that when we are forced into extreme philosophical circumstances, we are very often asked to give up some of our most foundational intuitions. The Christian asks us to believe that God is one and yet three at the same time, which many people find profoundly unintuitive and most of the time is defended as a kind of mystery of faith that will never properly understand. We have to put our intuitions on the shelf and accept that this must be true. In the quantum realm, we're told that particles to be particles and waves at the same time, that superposition is a thing, that people, that things can be in the same place so there's two things can be in the same place at one time, all kinds of assumptions that don't seem to make sense. Now, I think that infinity is surely one of the kinds of pressures that we would expect to upset our intuition in that regard. On the point of the finite universe, could the universe have an infinite past? I really like this thought about having to traverse an actually infinite number of moments in order to get to the present. This is my favorite argument because it's just so intuitive. How could we arrive at the present if you had to complete an infinite to get to the present? My question is this, an infinite number of what? Because of course, potential infinite, Jack Syons, ladies and gentlemen. Oh. Oh no, no. I'm Arnano. I poison Johnny Thompson's like, I can get my seat back. For the sake of the first, Johnny Thompson's just aged about 10 years. Sorry, Alex, you were saying. That's OK. An infinite number of what? Because it seemed intuitive. I was writing about the Kalam cosmological argument recently and I was trying to defend it. And I found myself saying, in order to get to the present, you would have to surpass an infinite number of-- and then I stopped. And I thought, well, what works there? Events. Maybe events. What's an event? I mean, OK, so I pick up this class. That's an event, but that event can be subdivided. It's the event of my cognizing the glass and moving my arm and lifting it up and the friction between the fingers and the cup, okay? So it's maybe just the event of the friction rubbing against the cup, but that event occurs across a period of time and it can be further subdivided into individual moments. Like events can always be subdivided into smaller events as long as they persist through time. You can keep dividing the time in half and say that it's made up of further moments, okay? So maybe like moments then, but what's a moment? Like what are we actually talking about here? Are we talking about, maybe we're talking about some measure of time, maybe we would say something like, well, take seconds, you know, or hours. That's fine. Maybe an infinite number of hours. What's an hour? Because an hour is ultimately based on our, like, orbiting around the sun. But you could say, okay, but if the sun disappeared, we could still keep counting as if it were there and keep the timer going, except for the fact that time doesn't work like that. And time doesn't flow at the same rate at every point in the universe. In fact, the people sat on the bottom row down here are aging more slowly than the people at the top. Congratulations. As Einstein showed us. And so I'm actually not entirely sure what things we're talking about that would need to be infinite and therefore unable to obtain a reality in order to have an infinite past. Now, don't get me wrong. I understand the intuition. It still seems like a hard pill to swallow that the universe might have been past infinite. But it's a pill that many people swallow, not excluding, by the way, a certain Greek marble sculpture you may have heard of called Aristotle, who himself made this important distinction between actual and potential infinities and thought that actual infinities was something that couldn't obtain a reality. And yet Aristotle believed that the universe had an eternal past. He believed that the past stretched infinitely, well, it stretched infinitely into the past that the universe did. And so it seems to me unclear. I mean, the two assumptions built into that particular point, in other words, are that actual infinities are impossible and that a past infinite universe would count as an actual infinity. Dr. Prey, I also know, is a proponent of the A Theory of Time. And there are broadly speaking two, but there are more, but people talk about two. There's this A Theory of Time. The present is all that exists. The past does not exist. The future does not exist. All that exists is the present moment. I also have some trouble with that because I don't know what the present moment is. I don't know when it occurs or how long it lasts. It's very difficult to actually pin that down. It's like an infinitely thin barrier between the past and the present. It's very part of pin down. The other theory is the B Theory of Time, which says that time is a dimension of space. Many people interpret Einstein's relativity in this way. I know that Dr. Craig does not. And in doing so is in the minority of interpreters of general relativity in supporting a neo-Lorentzian interpretation of general relativity, right? Now, neo-Lorentzian, yes. Which retains the idea of an absolute time. I'm not convinced, in other words, that why did I bring up general relativity? Why was I just talking about it? I wanted to. There's two things at the beginning, but you were saying. Why was I talking about it? Johnny was gone. Johnny worded, no. Johnny, are you listening to it? Johnny's not with us anymore. I can't remember where I was going with that. Johnny's in a cup of something. If I don't jump into this conversation. But let's have it. Soon, I'm going to forget all the tickets. I remind just two things at the beginning. Sorry, A-thirmingly, just really quickly. A-thirmingly theory. Very simple. If the past does not exist, as Dr. Craig believes that it does not, the only thing that really exists is the present moment, then to say that the past is an actual infinite. Seens, at least not obvious to me. The future doesn't exist. The future is a potential infinite, because you keep counting into the future on and on and on and on with no end. There's no point to which it's completed and exists as a whole. That would be an actual infinite, and that would be paradoxical. But that doesn't exist yet. Now, it's complicated by the fact that the past sort of has already existed in the past. But it doesn't exist right now. If the past doesn't exist, it seems strange to me to suggest that we can count it as this sort of boxed-off thing that we can point to and call an actually infinite sort of set of things. In other words, I don't know what a moment is. I don't know why an actual infinite is necessarily contradictory. And even if it's deeply unintuitive, sometimes in unusual circumstances, we're asked to abandon our intuitions. And it wouldn't surprise me if, in the case of the infinity, this would be one of them. Two things in there, I think an important bill. One is Alex Gavre, sort of, Zeno's paradox sort of thing when you say, "I don't know what a moment is, and you can sort of keep breaking it up into little parts." As one sort of infinite, infinity argument. And the second one was, does it make sense to have an infinite chain that expands the other way? And so, do you want to say something like, it was time isn't infinitely divisible? And second, now how do you explain if there is an infinite chain? Do you want to say there's a first course to that as well? How do you explain the infinite chain? Well, I think it's more important, a jack-to-back-up, and assess the accuracy of Alex's summary of the arguments. Because I think a lot of the quibble here is merely semantic, rather than substantive. Now, as Alex correctly suggested, the most controversial premise of the column cosmological argument is the premise the universe began to exist. And in support of this premise, I offer two philosophical arguments, which Alex distinguished, but perhaps not clearly enough. The first one is based upon the impossibility of an actually infinite number of things. While the concept of actual infinity seems to be a perfectly consistent mathematical concept, once you try to instantiate that in the real world, it results in all sorts of, I think, truly intolerable situations that suggests that an actually infinite number of things can't really exist. The second argument is independent of that first argument. It doesn't deny that an actually infinite number of things can exist, but rather says that an actually infinite number of things cannot be formed by successive addition. And this is the connection with the Xenophe's paradoxes that you mentioned. Jack, the version of Xenophe's paradoxes called the dichotomy says that before Achilles can cross the stadium, he has to cross halfway. But before he can cross halfway, he has to cross a cornerway. Before he can cross a cornerway, he has to cross an eighth of the way and so on, add infinite them. The implication is that Achilles cannot even move because before he moved any distance, he would already have to have moved half of that distance. And therefore Xenophe concluded that if reality is made up of these sorts of intervals, that motion is impossible, which is observed because obviously motion exists. Now, this version of the Kalam cosmological argument is just like the dichotomy paradox, except to pull out the initial point, because Achilles has a starting point. But an infinite past, as incomprehensible as this seems, has no starting point. So you just mathematically pluck out that initial point and push it back to infinity. Instead of descending intervals like one half, one fourth, one eighth, you make all the intervals equal and they go back to infinity without beginning. That does nothing to suggest how that infinite past could have been traversed one interval at a time. Now, Alex, you asked, "Well, what are those things?" Like that are traversed. And I interjected their events. And in my work, I discusses what is an event. It's a type of change. And to make sure that all of the events are actual and equal, we arbitrarily conventionally specify some chosen event as our standard event, say one hour or one day. And then we ask, "How many standard intervals are there in a beginning was past?" And the answer can only be an actual infinite number of such events. And these events don't all have to exist at the same time. These events have been instantiated in reality, like a falling series of dominoes. That's the analogy I also like. A falling series of dominoes, the last domino falls today, but there was never a first domino. It's been beginningless. So you can specify a certain standard event arbitrarily, and then ask how many have elapsed, and the answer will be actually infinite. So that would suggest that an actually infinite pass cannot elapse. Now, you're quite right, Alex, in saying that Aristotle, nevertheless believed in an eternal beginning was universe. But he said the past is not actually infinite, but potentially infinite. But here I think Aristotle is clearly conceptually mistaken. An actual infinite is a collection which is complete. All of its members are in that collection. But a potential infinite is a series that is at every point finite, but indefinitely increasing to ward infinity as a limit, which it endlessly approaches, but never arrives at. So if the series of events in time is endless and will go on forever, the series of events later than any moment in time would clearly be merely potentially infinite. New events are added with each successive moment, but you never arrive at an actual infinity of events. By contrast, if you look at the series of events in the earlier than direction, that cannot be potentially infinite, because in that case, the past would be finite, but growing toward infinity in a backward direction, which contradicts the forward flow of time. So I don't think that those answers to the column cosmological argument are at all convincing. Now, in addition these two philosophical arguments, I was stunned to discover in my work at the University of Birmingham and my doctoral work that there are actually two scientific confirmations of the beginning of the universe. And notice the terminology I use there. Scientific results are always provisional. They're never certain. But we have these good philosophical metaphysical arguments for the finitude of the past. And what contemporary science does is it confirms those arguments that is to say the hypothesis that the universe began to exist is much more probable. Given the contemporary evidence of astrophysics than it was without it. And so this is not refuted, Alex, by the survey you mentioned, where the scientist said that the Big Bang refers to this early hot dense state, not to the initial singularity. That's a merely semantic point. That is just saying that the label, the Big Bang, that label is given to this earlier hot dense state. It's not the label of the singularity. And that's quite true. But that isn't to deny the reality of the singularity or to say that it didn't occur. Hawking and Penrose whom you mentioned in their 1996 book stayed. And if I can quote from memory, today almost everyone believes that the universe and time itself had a beginning in the Big Bang. So the finitude of the past, let me now add an additional point, doesn't require a singular beginning in the universe. Hawking and Hartle, James Hartle of University of California, Santa Barbara offered a quantum physical model of the universe that resolved the singularity. They were able to round off that initial space time segment of the universe so that there is no singular point like a cone has. A cone has a point in which it cannot be extended. That's where the point is. A cone can be extended in the other direction. The standard Big Bang model has the geometry of a cone, but the Hartle Hawking model got rid of that initial point by rounding it off through the use of imaginary numbers for the time coordinate. So their model has a finite past, a beginning of the universe, but is singularity free. And so don't think that my argument for the finitude of the past, the beginning of the universe on the basis of astrophysical cosmology or Big Bang theory, assumes it has to be a singular beginning. There are plenty of non-singular models with beginning. So that would be the first body of evidence is this astrophysical evidence from the expansion of the universe, but then very quickly, the second scientific confirmation that I don't think you mentioned is the evidence stemming out of the thermodynamic properties of the universe. The universe on a large scale is simply a gigantic closed system because on naturalism, that's all there is. And there is nothing outside of it. So if it were infoted in the past, its entropy production should have increased and increased and increased so that it would now be in a dark, dilute and lifeless state. And since we are not in such a state, we know that the universe must have had a beginning in which it was in a low entropy state, extraordinarily low and has since been increasing in entropy as it's endured. And this is called the past hypothesis. It would be in a state of heat death if it was the case. In pre-relativistic physics, this was called the heat death of the universe. But in relativistic physics, the heat death could be either cold or hot, depending on whether the universe would expand forever or will we be alive. It's death is a whole cold, it's not a good thing. I do want to respond though to the point about metaphysical intuitions and the tragedy at some point. OK, we'll get to that. Perhaps. I also want to make sure that we have time to talk about proactive case against God's existence, which is equally important to this discussion, but the clam is your ground, stop Craig. Yes, I was with a friend who was yesterday who smoked cigarettes. And I realized that if you wanted to, if you want to give up smoking, all you have to do is just take the remainder of your tobacco and just smoke half of the remaining tobacco every single day. And that way you'll never run out, but you'll never have to buy anymore. Of course, constantly dividing in this sense has been problematic for thousands of years and has prompted lots of people to develop metaphysical positions on, for example, time being discreet. If you need, which is in fact true to half the distance that we're doing here and here, in order to clap, you have to half it first, you have to half it again, you have to half it again. Many people say that they're therefore must be some kind of ultimately small kind of distance. But for our discussion, this would be an example of a potential infinite. We're constantly dividing, dividing, dividing, dividing. And as we well know, that infinite series can just be completed. You can prove that just by clapping your hands. Dr Craig said that in order to define what an event is, you just sort of arbitrarily pick a moment of a sort of duration of time and just count how many of those there have been, for example, hours. But the point is that there is no such thing as an objective hour. There's no such thing as the length of an hour. I mean this seriously, if you went when satellites were first sent into orbit around this planet, scientists of general relativity told the technicians and the companies that the clocks will literally run at a different rate because of the effects of Earth's mass on the ticking of time. And the government didn't believe them. And so the original satellites were sent up with two clocks, one which is an accordant to a general relativity and one which is an accordant with this sort of commensysical view that time ticks normally for everybody no matter where you are. And guess who was right? It was the government. I'm just kidding. It was the scientists. Time doesn't tick consistently in this way. And so to sort of pick an arbitrary length of time like an hour and just say that that's something that will have gone on infinitely into the past. I just don't think that's how time works. And I don't think that like metaphysically speaking to call that an event makes much sense. I mean like you just, you said that the problem with Aristotle and his interpretation of the past as a potential infinite. This is a sticking point I suppose. You can help me out here. I understand the idea that the future is a potential infinite because what it hasn't happened yet. But the past is an actual infinite because it has happened. But neither of them exist on your view. I broadly speaking, I'm a B theorist about time, which I know you've said in the past and I assume you still think of the case. If the B theory of time is true, the column cosmological doesn't work. Right. I think that it's more difficult to put through on a B theory of time. My, could we remind audience I'm not sure what B theory of time is? Oh, what Alex has put his finger on is a very profound metaphysical issue about the nature of time that divides philosophers. The so called A or as I prefer now, the tensed theory of time says that tenses like past, present, and future are objective features of reality. And the temporal becoming is real. Things really do come into being over time and go out of being. The tense last or B theory of time says that our experience of tense is illusory. There is no objective difference between past present and future. Rather, this is a subjective feature of human consciousness. And similarly, temple becoming is unreal. It is an illusion of human consciousness, all events in time are stretched out like a spatial line and are ontologically on a par. Now in my original work on the column cosmological argument, I just assumed the truth of the A theory of time because it seems so obvious to me. This is the common sense view of time. And while I was vaguely aware that there were some philosophers who held to the tenseless theory of time, I discounted them. It's not really serious. And then I discovered that in fact this is an enormous debate. And so in my subsequent work, I wrote two book length treatments of these issues. The tense theory of time, a critical examination, and the tenseless theory of time, a critical examination, both published by Cluer, academic press, and available in which I heard. In the name of the bookshelf outside. Oh, I doubt it's these highly academic books are too expensive. Get them with the library, you know, or on interlibrary loan. But anyhow, I tried then to give a robust, philosophically deep defense of the A theory of time and critique of the B theory of time. But the point I was going to make is that other proponents of the column cosmological argument, like the Singapore philosopher Andrew Loke, have defended the column argument even given a B theory of time. Alex, from one of the questions, of course, the relevance of this is the difference between the future and the past on the A theory of time. In your view, Dr. Craig, neither of these things exist. They're not real. Right. And the idea is that because the past has sort of already happened, we can count it as an actual infinite. Right. It's part of the actual world. It's actualized. But not anymore, right? Everything that has happened up to the present is part of actuality. It is complete. It is over. It's the past actual. Yes, it's actual, but it doesn't exist. I'm using the word actual here in the way philosophers talk about actual worlds. Yes. This actual world has been instantiated up to the present moment. And those events can be counted. We can ask if every how many prime ministers have there been in a past that goes back forever and ever and many prime ministers have served an infinite. It doesn't have any number even in this universe. There would be an actual infinite number. But of course, but the point is that the future doesn't exist either. And I think I suppose the problem is giving actuality to a past which doesn't exist and not giving that actuality to a future which doesn't exist, but will exist. I think doesn't make a lot of sense. And I'll tell you why. For example, you would agree that God knows everything that will happen in the future. Yes. He knows right now and you believe that God is in time as well. So God right now, even though the future hasn't happened yet, he knows everything that will happen in the future. The future will happen. We can, at least God could, sort of conceptually, metaphysically kind of put a box around it in the second. So God knows what's going to happen in the future exactly as much as he knows what has happened in the past. The idea that because the future hasn't happened yet, it therefore has this sort of non actual status. I want to say that like if neither of them exist, the thing that matters is like to what extent can we say, well, these are like sets which like conceptually exist, which like we can sort of conceptually put a box around and at least for God himself, he'd be able to do that just as equally, just as easily for the future as the past, right? It's a, not quite sure if I'm finding the right words to say what I mean here, but you see what I'm saying, which is that the future does exist conceptually is actual in the sense that God knows exactly what's going to happen. It's already there. And it is in fact going to occur infinitely could forever. Could be that all of that future is already like conceptually there in the mind of God. And yet that's not actual. Can we have a response on this? I want to give them either of them exist. Aware of time and one Alex to give the the argument against God's existence as well. So maybe you'll reply on this in particular. Okay. Well, I think the key word here is conceptually yeah, Alex. Even if it is true that the set of events that will happen is actually infinite. The point is that the series of events, the concrete series events in time is not and never will be actually infinite. It is always finite and always increasing. And the reason for that is that from any event you number and start going forward for any number n and plus one is always a finite number. So if you were to try to instantiate that set of future events in reality, one member at a time, all you would do would be to generate a series that is potentially infinite, but you would never be able to instantiate all the members of that. The same is true of the past. If you were to instantiate past days one by one and keep going, you could go on potentially infinitely. The point is that if the only thing that exists is the present and we start counting into the future one by one, then yes, that's essentially. That was kind of crazy with you that the set of past events cannot be instantiated, one member at a time. That's the Zeno's argument. But it isn't instantiated in reality. The point is that if it can't go backwards, why can it go forwards? If the present is all that exists. Well, I understand in the theory question, the answer would be because this is the nature of temporal becoming. There are two directions in time, earlier than and later than. And so even tenseless time theorists will say time is anisotropic that is to say it's not the same in all directions. There are two directions in time and they are not the same. Yes, but time is not only anisotropic, it's asymmetric in that there is one unique direction of temporal becoming and that is later than. When an event occurs, the next event that occurs will always be after it, not before it. Temple becoming in a backward direction is metaphysically absurd. So this is due to the asymmetry of time. And I think this is an asymmetry or symmetry breaker that people like Alex Maltas and Wes Morrison, who you know are looking for, between the past and future series of events that allows you to say the arguments against the beginning was past are sound, but they do not imply that the future cannot be endless. So let me ask the question more specifically then, as pertain to God's knowledge, as I mentioned a moment ago, yes, you said God knows, let's say the contents of every hour into the future right now. If the future has no end, now I understand if God is in time and finds out every hour what happens, that's potentially information that is going on. But God knows right now, the contents of an infinite number right of future hours. So God is currently apprehending an actually infinite number of physical temporal things. Yes. Which means that God is in apprehension of an actually infinite number of physically instantiated things, even if they haven't been instantiated yet. This is a great question. It's a great of jazz. What the credit of the arts, my jaw, do here is to somehow import into God an actually infinite number of things. So as to contradict the argument and so the ideas, well, maybe God has an actually infinite number of thoughts or ideas or something of that sort. And here I think that classical theism is quite correct and saying that even though the range of the things that God knows is limitless and infinite that doesn't describe the mode of his knowledge. God's knowledge, I think, is non-propositional in character. He grasps the whole of reality as a seamless whole. He doesn't grasp it as fragmented into individual propositional bits. Rather it is us. We finite knowers who fragment God's undivided knowledge into these propositional bits so that we can understand them. But when we say things like God knows that tomorrow I will have pizza for lunch, that doesn't mean that God has this individual sort of thought. in his mind. And so this is a kind of modified doctrine of divine simplicity, that though I'm critical of it in many other respects, I think it does provide a very attractive model of the load of divine cognition. So I'm interested in then the specificity of God's knowledge, the specificity. Yes. And like what your theory of truth is, because I don't know what your theory of truth is, mine is not the correspondence theory of truth, but it's the most popular theory of truth that for some kind of belief to be true, it must correspond with the fact of reality. I can understand the idea that God kind of insuates all truth all at once or something. That's fine. Okay. The truths that he knows that he apprehends have to correspond to reference. There have to be things which they refer to. If it's knowledge of the physical world, the correspondence view of truth, which means the reality is as God knows it to be. So even if the mode of God's knowledge is instantaneous, the content of that knowledge consists in reference to an actually infinite number of physical things, something you say. Well, now you're not importing these into God's mind. It sounds to me like you're wanting to have an actual infinite number of propositions that God knows. And here again, I would say that that describes the range of God's knowledge, but not the mode of His knowledge. And as an anti-platenist, I don't think the propositions exist. Yeah. I mean, there are just ideas that we have in our minds, but there isn't any such thing as the proposition, like so Conor is British, that's out there. But there is such thing as an Allah and you'll be pardon me. There is such thing as an Allah, an Allah, a minute. Well, I think an hour is a conventional unit of time. It's not as though hours and Wednesdays and January's actually exist. Those are conventional. And we might have lived in a different, like the ancient Babylonians had a sex-agessimal system of time reckoning. Yeah. Earlier, when I pointed this out and said that an hour is sort of arbitrarily defined by the sun, you say, well, we can just take that arbitrary measurement and use it as our sort of unit of events and say that if that went on into the past infinitely, it'd have to be an infinite number of them. And of course, if they go infinitely into the future, there would have to be an infinite number of them. But that's okay, because they continue to obtain. It's a potential. Now, let's go ahead and know is the confidence that's right now. Let's go back to what I said. With respect to these past intervals, even though the interval we select is conventional. The number of those intervals that have occurred up to now has to be actually infinite. It cannot be finite. But the number of those hours that occur later than any event, if temporal becoming is real, right, is always finite and always increasing. Infinity is a limit, which is endlessly approach, but never arrived at it. And the sign of this kind of ending is the lasiate or lymniscate that's used in calculus. And in that case, as I said, even if we concede that the set of all events that will happen hasn't actually infinite number of members, the point is that if you try to instantiate that one member at a time in reality, all you get is a concrete, potentially infinite number of members. I'm really enjoying this. And I want you to be able to respond. I just want to remind you just for your own arguments. We're probably 15, 20 minutes from audience questions. So we haven't gone actual infinite amount of time. So if you? Yes. Very good. Thank you. That's all I want to get in with the quip. If you want to, if you wanted to bring in your objection argument, just be aware of those. Yeah. Okay. But it's how you want the set. I wonder if I might get a replacement from my team now, which is gone. I'm sure we can. Where's Johnny? He could make it. Yeah. I think you're quite right that we should spend a little bit of time on the alternative. I suppose to wrap up here, maybe I can just try to say relatively uncontroversially, this will depend on what you think ladies and gentlemen about the comparison between the past and the future. If the present is all that exists and neither the past or the future exists, is there a relevant metaphysical difference? Maybe it's the fact that the past has already happened. But from a sort of bird's eye, God's eye of you saying that the past has already happened and the future will happen and both can be known with equal apprehension and equal certitude. It seems to me that from that God's eye perspective, both of these are sort of equally plausible. Now maybe there is some actually infinite number of future events that God knows of, in which case I would say there could be an actually infinite number of past events that God knows of too. And of course, if you try to instantiate these one by one, you'll never get to the end. But that works in both directions. And as you say, Dr Craig, that's not how God's knowledge works. He doesn't think through these propositions one by one. He knows them all at once. And you said, even if we say that the set of future events contains an infinite number of members, if you try to instantiate them one by one, you'd never get to the end. That's fine. But the set, as it exists right now, that set, as it exists in the mind of God. The only on plateenism, as I've said, I don't believe in the reality of these abstract objects. I think they're like mathematical fictions. I agree. The only thing that exists is what they refer to. The thing that exists, not necessarily this example, the set of all past presidents of the United States. What are the members of that set don't all coexist? No, they don't coexist. But they exist. What I mean says is that the concepts that itself has to refer to a thing in the physical world, in the real world. I shouldn't say the physical world. You know, even that isn't true, Alex, because in set theory, most members of sets are not concrete individuals like you and me and mountains and pebbles. But sets have as their members other mathematical objects, numbers and curves and things of that sort. So that the whole thing is, I think, a sort of exercise. Of course. But then you would just say that those numbers being not a plateenist don't exist. They're conceptual. Yeah. You would say that everything that set theory sort of deals with that's purely mathematical is not real. It's purely conceptual. Yeah. So it's purely a set which contains reference to real physical things in the world. Those physical things in the world have to exist. And if there's a set right now, no, I think they've been the set of past US presidents. They don't all exist right now. And yet that's clearly a set. And it can be number. You can say there've been 47. Yes, US president to be clear. 46, didn't Harris. Who was it with the one twice? Well, yeah, some have served two terms, right? Yes. So I met the 47th term. I know. I know. And yes, but the set exists now is what I mean to say. Not like what I mean to say is that the, okay, the set of all US presidents as a, as a concept exists right now in my mind. There it is. There's the set of all US presidents. Now, the members of that set might not all physically exist right now, but every single reference of the members of that set is something which at some point exists in physical reality. Yes. And here is a very, very interesting, I think, logical mistake that people like Malposs, who argue similarly, they infer that because each member of the set will be instantiated that all the members of the set will be instantiated. And I think that Bertrand Russell exposed the fallacy of this thinking through his version of the Tristum Shandy paradox where Tristum Shandy tries to write his own autobiography, but he does so, so slowly that it takes him a whole year to record the events of one day. And he says that this read, I'll never finish my autobiography. Yes. Well, didn't disagree with that. All he said was that if Tristum Shandy is immortal, then no page of his autobiography will remain unwritten. Yes. So each page will be written, but the autobiography will never be finished. All the pages will never be written. This is incredibly mind bending, but I think is relevant to this issue. Yeah. Look, thank you. It's difficult here because I think we could keep going back and forth forever. But that wasn't even on purpose. That was an accident. Really. But I think I would be remiss not to. And the thing is, you know, I had intended to respond to various of the arguments that you proposed at the beginning. We didn't even do the other premise of the Kalan cosmological argument. Well, and the conclusion, too. And so, quite. So I'm a little bit stuck for choice here. So I try to defend the proposition that things can begin to exist without a cause. Or it's asking you in the space of 10 minutes to tell me why God allows suffering. Perhaps for balance, we should go with the latter. I think the main reason that people have for not believing in God. And we didn't have a cause. course, the resurrection, goodness. The main reason people have not believing in God is the existence of evil or suffering. I prefer to say suffering, because evil is a sort of morally-led term. And to me, this argument is sort of endless and never makes very much progress in the sense that people suffer. And theologians have the odysses for why they suffer. Because of free will, it's because of now. - But don't just think that genuine advance was made by Alvin Plantinger and his discussion of the free will, not really. But what I mean to say is that, no. - You don't think he put the depth now to the logical version of the problem of evil? - I'm not convinced in that, like, I'm not sure that the logical problem of evil ever really held up. But I kind of, I don't, - Oh, well, that's all right. - I kind of don't want to, that's progress. - But I kind of don't want to talk about that, because I think that there is a class of individuals who are usually completely ignored in the discussion of suffering. And so, of course, non-human animals. - Yes. - The odysses that are provided for the reate for the, for suffering, the existence of suffering, the fact that there's human free will, the fact that there was a fall, the fact that our souls will somehow be developed, the fact that higher order goods like bravery and courage can be achieved are plausible. But none of them apply to non-human animals, none of them apply to these animals who for hundreds of millions of years. - Yeah. I've written quite a bit on the problem of animal suffering. - I know. So perhaps we can rehash it, because I'd like to know why it is that you think that for these hundreds of millions of years, suffering is the defining quality of the animal experience, to the extent that this is the mechanism God chose to bring about complexity of life on Earth. Survival of the fittest is the same thing as the death and destruction of the unfit. Disease, predation, starvation, for hundreds of millions of years. And for some reason, when we get to humans, something kind of special happens, we're in salt, whatever it might be, such that our suffering gets to be redeemed. But not theirs. I mean, if I were to go into the details of what happens to animals in the wild on a regular basis, I probably couldn't upload this footage to YouTube because it would get flagged for being too extreme. As you well know, so perhaps in the time remaining, we could talk about why it is you think that God would not just allow this, but build it into the very mechanism by which life comes to very, in its complexity on Earth. The question here is whether or not the existence of animal suffering in the world is more plausible given naturalism or atheism than it is given theism. And I would argue that animal suffering is vastly more improbable given naturalism or atheism than theism. And therefore, even if our inability to penetrate divine psychology and say what, reason would have God would have for choosing an evolutionary process. Which I think we can speculate about, nevertheless, the balance of probability is overwhelmingly in favor of theism. Animal suffering is more plausible, probable on theism. Now, why do I say that? Well, the reason is because if naturalism were true, then it is incomprehensibly more probable that there wouldn't even be life, much less sentient life that could experience suffering. And of course, we're back here to the old fine-tuning argument, partly, that given the fine-tuning of the universe, this is vastly more probable given theism than given naturalism. And so, in a sense, the existence of animal suffering as well as human suffering is actually evidence, but theism, because if naturalism were true, it's overwhelmingly more probable that there wouldn't be any sentient life enhancement of suffering. Yes, I understand this line of argument. Pardon me? I understand what you're getting at. The issue is, I feel like it kind of sidesteps the concern. A sidestep? It sidesteps the concern. Yes, it does, because there are many people. There are many people who believe, for example, that there is some kind of naturalistic explanation for fine-tuning, even if we don't know what it is. There are people here who disagree with you, Dr. Craig, that think that those arguments aren't strong, at least to the point where they remain agnostic about the existence of a god, such that the only data that they can really touch and feel that really sort of strikes them as the most sort of important implausible is the existence of animal suffering. So I suppose I could frame it this way. Suppose it were the case that all else were equal. That what? That all else were equal. That otherwise, apart from this piece of data. Oh, oh, apart from this piece of data. Oh, but why should we make such a. Like the path of such that all else were equal when it's not? So that we can isolate this particular point of data and see if it at the very least decreases the probability of god's existence. So you're saying what if animal suffering were just as probable on naturalism, as on theism, then what? I'm saying let's grant the existence of animal suffering and say given that fact about the universe. Like, okay, let's grant that there is a universe that exists. Let's grant that as a universe exists that abides by physical laws. Now, if you want to say that we can't have the conversation about why animals would be allowed to suffer until we've addressed the fine-tuning argument, then we'll probably need a bit more time, but also I don't think that that functions for people who simply are willing to say, "Well, I just don't agree with the fine-tuning argument." I still want to know how that is to go with the loudness. If that's to be more than just an opinion or psychological, autobiographical comment, they need to give some good arguments against the fine-tuning argument. My impression from reading the literature is that today, this fine-tuning argument is the argument for the existence of God that has taken most seriously by non-theists. Can you take Alex's, just looking at the systemic problem of evil, the problem of evil against theism from evolution by natural selection, ignoring the others? Yeah, well, I'm going to self-count against Alex. Because I did say I think we can speculate about God's reasons for allowing an evolutionary history to the world. It seems to me that God's overall purpose for creating life on Earth is for the purpose of human salvation, and that His goal is to create a world in which the optimal number of people would freely come to know and embrace eternal salvation, which is an incommensurable good to which the suffering in this world cannot even be compared. And I don't think it is at all improbable, not in a wit improbable, but only in a world suffused with natural and moral evil that the optimal number of people would freely come to embrace God in His salvation and so find eternal life. And that could well be the reason for creating the world with a new evolutionary history that involved, as you say, a lot of animal suffering. So the suggestion would be that an animal like a zebra which gets its windpipe caught in the jaws of a lion, which is how they're often used to it. The jaws of a lion, which is how they're often predated upon. There's no human ever sees, there's no humans ever aware of, there's no other animal as you've been ever aware of. It's somehow necessary, the conditions under which that occurred are somehow necessary to bring people to salvation in Christ. You know, this is the interesting thing about the natural world. The tiniest perturbations can over time have a kind of ripple effect such that enormous consequences can follow from seemingly trivial incidents like a zebra is having its trachea, which collapsed. This is called the butterfly effect. And it's illustrated in chaos theory and in quantum theory as well. So that I think we're in no position at all to say when we see some instance of evil, that God probably doesn't have a good reason for permitting that to occur. I expected to believe that God is somehow bound by this precarious butterfly effect from a particular insanciation of animal suffering that somehow brings about salvation, that without which God could have found no way to bring about the same salvation. It seems, it seems, it seems, it seems. Well, we agree, John. I mean, see, this is again where we're into the realm of pure speculation. But I'm saying it's not implausible that only in a world suffused with natural and moral evil that the optimal number of people would find eternal salvation. I mean, think of the results of that evolutionary history of the earth. The primeval forests that were laid down now form the basis for the fossil fuels that have made modern civilization possible. Should God have instead created what's called an omphalos world with the mirror of peace? appearance of age rather than having an actual evolutionary history that would be intolerable we'd have to as regard most of our empirical beliefs about the past two minutes to come in. As if those are the only two options. I mean, the idea that, you know, because we rely on fossil fuels temporarily at a point in our sort of human technological trajectory that relied on animals becoming fossilized. And the only way that God could have provided us the fuel to bring about the industrial revolution would have been to create fossils which look like their ancient animals, but actually we could have just used a different fuel. Pardon me? He could have just used a different fuel. A different fuel? A different fuel. A different fuel? Well, see, then you're totally into pure speculation, you know, about world-operating according to different laws of nature and so forth. We have no idea what that's like. So remember, this is supposed to be an argument for atheism. It's the atheist who bears the burden of proof of showing that God cannot have morally sufficient reasons for creating a world with an evolutionary history. And I think that's a burden of proof the atheist cannot bear. I just find it difficult to believe that God is somehow constrained by these, like, environmental conditions such that He can't bring about the world He wants, which is a flourishing world of humans who freely choose to come to know Him without the existence of fossil fuels. Well, yes. It's a matter of whether or not it's plausible that in order to create a world in which the optimal number of people come to freely know Him and embrace salvation, that that world would involve a very considerable degree of natural and moral evil. And I don't know how the atheist could show that such a thing is improbable. By saying it's impossible, but seemingly implausible. I mean, it just seems that you can understand how it seems on the surface, extremely implausible to say that God could not maximize salvation without fossil fuels. Well, we don't know. We don't know what would happen in such a world. It's like I keep one alternative that God created an unfollowed world that has coal beds and oil, fields, and so forth. I will never were the result of decayed vegetation and eons and eons of primeval forest. And that would force us to regard the past as largely illusory. Now, then you could say, well, maybe could have created different laws of nature and things right? But then we don't know how many people in those worlds, the very fundamental laws, it doesn't embrace different laws of salvation. I mean, what about a world in which animals exist and function in the same way, but they're not sentient. But what? But they're not sentient. They're not sentient sentient. Well, why not? Why should it? Could you have a dog or a horse or a sheep that functions and isn't sentient? It wouldn't have any pain or weariness or should be good. No consciousness. Of course you could. You think so? Absolutely, yeah. Like, why not? You could have, if the reason why these animals exist are for things like laying down the ecosystem, there is absolutely no reason to suggest that there couldn't be an animal which mechanically functions in exactly the same way as an animal that has sentient, but it's not in fact sentient. It still moves away from certain inputs in the way that, you know, metal can react to environment by rusting. An animal can react to an environment in particular. And extremely complex ways just sans consciousness. I mean, I struggle to believe that God can be sat around with his angels saying, "I want to be an animal that doesn't do a pain." I mean, angels saying, "Do you really think that it's possible?" It's the atheist who needs to show that a morally perfect God should have chosen a world like that, if it's even possible, rather than the world like this. And it's not clear to me that that is obligatory. The atheist seems to know more about divine psychology than I think he really does. But I really wish Johnny was still here, so he can interrupt you. I really, really don't. I can't ignore the sentience of the people who were here who brought the questions along this evening. Thank you everybody. We've got loads of hands up already. Please keep your question brief, snappy, so we can fit in as many as we can, respect for your fellow audience members. If you can direct it at one of the panelists, and if I can encourage them for snappy replies, as well, we can try and get through as many as possible. We'll stop from the left. Thank you both. Alex, I've seen seagulls float on air, and they clearly seem to be delighting at dogs, animals. I think you put too much emphasis on suffering, where I think the animals can delight in their life and play. And Bill, I remember last event you mentioned that the purpose of life is salvation, and that it was to behold God and to glorify in him. Don't you think God could be more like an artist, and all of creation is this beautiful thing that he's creating? Alex? Yeah, I mean, animals can surely take the light and things too, but I think if you look at the totality of the natural world, particularly historically, and add up for pleasure and the suffering involved in animal's existence, I think there's good reason to think that the suffering outweighs it. I mean, the number of vertebrates who are even alive on the planet today is so large that we can only possibly estimate it. And if you think about what the average day must be like for one of these animals, constant thread of predation, it might well be. But what I would recommend is there's a chap called, I think his name is Brian Tomasic, and he has a website called something like wild animal suffering.org or something. And he recounts. He talks about this stuff. He talks about what life is actually like for a wild animal. What kind of experiences they can expect to go through? What kind of suffering they can expect to go through? And I think that you're mistaken. But even if you weren't, even if there was lots of pleasure in the life of an animal and then a bunch of intolerable suffering as well, you would still be left to explain why that suffering exists. It's not as simple as just compensating an animal by saying you're going to have a good life and you're going to suffer seemingly completely unnecessarily in ways that you will certainly never understand as an animal, definitely not. And yet, this seemingly could have been avoided, but I'm also going to give you some pleasure. And so I guess it's kind of fine. In other words, it doesn't actually do away with the problem of evil, even it's the pleasure kind of balances it out or even exceeds it. You would still be left with the unexpectedness of suffering, at least that kind of suffering. And I think that if you look into the experiences that these wild animals go through, it's not as, as you know, high flying as you say it is. It's true to us. Can I ask for another question? Well, I'd like to respond. Brief one if we can. Obviously. I think the questioner makes a really good point. And that is that animals live basically very happy lives that typically end suddenly because of animal predation. So I was talking to one evolutionary biologist, Jeffrey Schlauss, who thinks that animals are basically very content and happy with the lives that they live in, that this isn't really the normest problem that atheists would like to claim. This results from anthropopathism where we project human feelings on animals like bambi and thumper and so forth. And that's actually long as Michael Murray shows in his book Nature, Red and Truth and Claw, even sentient animals like sheep and goats and dogs and cats, while they have pain awareness, they do not have that second order awareness of knowing that they are themselves in pain, which human beings as self conscious subjects do. And that makes human pain and suffering qualitatively distinct from animal suffering. I'm sorry. I have to put my foot off. This idea that animals suffer, but they're not aware that they're suffering is to me a self-contradictory statement. To suffer is to be aware that you are suffering. You cannot be in pain without knowing you're in pain. That is the same thing as not being in pain. And if it is not the same thing, if it turns out it's fine because these animals, although they suffer, they don't know that they're suffering. So it doesn't really matter. I don't know if any of your pet owners, you believe that your animal, when it's in pain, doesn't somehow know that it's in pain. But good news, but it doesn't matter too much. It's a great kill. I'm going to put my foot down. Take a question over here. Then you should be able to do question from this young lazy. They'll be able to do whatever you want. I miss Johnny so much. Why not? I like to jump then. Why not break their legs? You just stick. Why not? You need. I'm sorry. Why? Leg breaking would be sweet relief for me at this point in time. Your question, and if you can direct it to Bill Orl, Alec. I'm sorry. Like, if somebody asks a question, I will take the time to say what I'm about to say, which is this. Why not break the legs of your animals? Why not rip off their tails? Yes, they may suffer, but they don't know that they're suffering. Because that was the only way to divine command to steward the earth and to care for the earth. But we have a divine command. Why not? Why not? Why not? So that'll pollute the oceans. Because that'll destroy the forest. It's not because they suffer. It's because we have a stewardship from God. It will bring about suffering. The reason why we steward the earth is because if we don't, then creatures who inhabit the earth will go on to suffer. That's why we don't worry about environmentally polluting Mars because nobody lives there. Well, I don't think that's correct, but I do want to get to other questions. What are the grounds for saying? Your question here. Thank you. Um, I was. It's noticing a lot of your abutals to his arguments were that I find it implausible to believe that a God would allow that, and I was just wondering why we should expect to put our human knowledge and our human morals on a being that quite frankly isn't human. Thank you. Because we're also told at the same time that this God imported us with moral intuitions. In fact, one of the arguments that Dr. Craig gave in his original six was a moral argument where he says oftentimes that since objective morals exist and objective morals can only exist in so far as they're grounded by God, we therefore know that God must exist. Now how do we know that objective morals exist? How do we know that? Because God has placed within us, He's written the law on our hearts, He's placed within us extremely strong intuitions about the nature of right and wrong, about the idea that there are right and wrong things and some apprehension of what those things are. And yet in the face of animal suffering, in the face of biblical slavery, in the face of biblical genocide, I'm told to abandon these intuitions. The very intuitions that I'm supposed to rely upon to prove the existence of the God who will dain that scripture in the first place. So maybe you might be quite right to say that I shouldn't be able to take my moral intuitions and trust them and say that they're real and that they're accurate. But if that's the case, then you've undermined one of the reasons why we believe in the existence of God as the grounding of morality, because that relies on the intuition that objective morals exist. And the intuition that animals don't know that their suffering is one of the strongest intuitions that I think that I hold. I would like to know what the grounds are for thinking that the suffering is different. I'm serious. I really like to know what the grounds are because Dr. Craig said that animals don't have this kind of self-awareness. How do we know that? There are, this is a whole new field of scientific study called animal consciousness. In 2016, I believe, a new journal was founded on animal consciousness. And most animals, most organisms are not in any way conscious. They have no sentient states, spiders and insects and worms and algae and so forth. Aren't sentient beings? When you get to vertebrates, then scientists begin to detect states of mental awareness that would be shown like pain awareness. But there doesn't seem to be a self-consciousness in the sense that human beings have it. It was the answer. In order to be aware that one is oneself in pain, one has to be self-conscious. And that, that, that, that, Alex is just, you know, pretty common property that apart from the great apes, there's no evidence of self-consciousness in the natural consciousness. That's actually the test. What? Yes, what the test of that was, how you know. Well, they use like the mirror test where chimpanzee has a white streak on his face and they put a mirror in front of him. He sees a chimpanzee with the white streak and he reaches up to wipe it off. This seems to show a sort of. And the mirror test has been passed by animals who don't have, who are supposed to not have the self-awareness that you say that. This is a great field of ongoing study. Every single, every single test of self-awareness that we've ever devised has been passed by animals who, according to your theory, should not pass it. No, I don't think that's, that's the case. It's true that the point is that the mirror test is a very primitive way of testing self-consciousness. So if you're interested in this in my systematic philosophical theology, I believe it's in volume three on the doctrine of creation. I have a fairly extended discussion of this topic and show that there are even degrees of self-consciousness from primitive intuitions like the mirror test and the chimpanzee to full agency of being a self-conscious first person's perspective. No animal has that first person perspective that can say, "I think that." And then describe the self-aware pain as, that's not what pain is. It is. It does involve self-consciousness that I am myself in pain. Knowing that you were in pain is the same thing as being in pain. No, it's clearly how is it? How is it, can you, can you describe to me what it would be like to be in pain and not know you're in pain? Imagine that you were really worried about your taxes, but you didn't know that you were really worried about your taxes. That just doesn't make any sense. To be worried about something is to worry about it. If an animal lacks self-consciousness, but have a pain awareness, but it wouldn't be aware that it is itself in pain because it doesn't have a first person perspective. So who is the pain happening to? It's happening to the animal. And that pain is either morally relevant or it's not. If the idea is that not having another person is morally irrelevant, that you're making strong distinctions there, what I said was that animal pain is qualitatively different than human suffering. And therefore we shouldn't assume too readily. Of course it's different, but in the same way, I mean, pain is an experienced phenomenon. We cannot get into the heads of other people and other animals to know what their pain is like. But we do know, for example, that other animals are far more driven by their sensory inputs than any kind of rationality which they simply don't have. So for example, no one has a trouble. No one has trouble accepting that a dog's sense of smell is so much more intense and acute than we could ever possibly imagine. An eagle's eyesight is so much more intense and acute than we could ever possibly imagine. Why? Because evolutionarily, they rely upon those more than other animals do. Animals having no rationality rely upon their immediate sense data and their reaction to the world of pain. We have better reason, I think, to think that these animals experience more pain, not less. And so at the very least, I think we need to be equal. I've heard you say in the past, Dr. Craig, that like this, look, you've got to do more than just give your opinion on this. Alex, you need to cite scientific literature that supports that because the material I've read and cited says something quite different. So can you tell me what it is about an animal's brain specifically that's different to a humans, which means that they're not in, um, in self-awareness? Michael Murray's book that I cited before, he says that some people speculate about the development of the frontal cortex in the human brain that helps to give this first person perspective. But in talk with Michael about this, he says this is very speculative. It's not just it doesn't help, but there could be that. It's not just sexual. I think we're getting distracted here by, no, it's not just speculative. You should have a quick reply. Well, it's not just speculative. It's not just speculative. I think it's incorrect. I think it's false. There are human beings who have lost their prefrontal cortex, who still have a sense of self, who report that they are in pain and know that they are in pain. We literally have. There is a famous patient called patient R sometimes affectionately known as Roger, who lost his prefrontal cortex due to the Herpes virus. They then do, they run tests on him. They put his hand in ice cold water and he tells him, I'm in pain, I'm aware that I'm in pain. So we know for a fact it cannot be. But that would suggest that Michael Murray's speculation is incorrect. I think it is. There's question of it. What is different about the brain that would mean that they don't. For all it's a library of books and has been holding that microphone far too long. Hello, sorry. As a vegan, this is a very sensitive topic for me. So I'm very happy that I get to say my word in this. Firstly, I would like to say quickly that I've read the Bible and there's a lot of animal suffering in it. I think we're all familiar of that, especially with animal sacrifices that go on. So I would like to cite Peter Singer, who is a founder of preference utilitarianism, who says that animals are capable of having preferences to not be in pain. And to bring it back to what I heard growing up a lot as a Christian, nothing is capable with God or something. So if God is capable of doing everything and every possible world is capable with God, why would God create a world where animals can experience pain and suffering? But maybe if you believe they can't reason, why would God create animals only to experience suffering? Bill, a question straight to you there. As you're answering, can we have a question from somebody on the balcony if possible? I can't see up there that far, but if you can find someone, then we'll take that question next, Bill, your answer. So help me to understand what they cite Peter Singer told us he used to be a preference utilitarian. Now he's a hedonistic utilitarian again. So the morally relevant features pain and suffering, why would God allow so much pain and suffering? It's in Scripture. It's there. Well, I think we've already addressed this question. Extentively, it's not implausible that only in a world suffused with natural and moral evil, that the optimal persons, optimal number of persons would freely come to know God into salvation. So what the atheist asked you to show is that there's some other world feasible for God in which, on more optimal balance of people, freely come to embrace God in His salvation in this world. And there's no way the atheist could prove such a speculation. Can we find the question? Can we make sure the next question? It just, just, I think it was a different question. She asked about the Bible being full of animal suffering. It's not just the existing animal suffering which God permits. It's the animal suffering that God commands throughout the Bible. In the book of Joshua, he tells. The Israelites to hamstring horses when he's just when he's committing a genocide against them to hamstring the horses Which seems completely unnecessary. Yeah, Jesus sends demons into a flock of pigs who then go and drown themselves in the ocean It seems that if there's any kind of like care for animals and stewardship over the earth that we're supposed to have It seems that God isn't setting a very good example in Bible question from the top So I think a lot of this has boiled down to some kind of argument from fine tuning whether that be about moral properties and all physical properties or whatever right and Craig has rejected the idea that all of these physical or moral constants could just exist out there right we have to have some explanation for them and that explanation flows from the nature of God But one thing I've always been confused about is if say the physical qualities that make up our universe are necessarily explained by God's existence How is this any different from them just existing as a brute fact out there if they necessarily follow from God's existence? Why is that different from the universe like just existing without a personal creator? Yeah, so if the question The constants lose nature fine-tuning. They're necessary to God's nature. Why is that more probable to say the part of God's nature rather merely just a part of the world why positive fine tuning is part of the Galcon So the question I thought the question was about moral values and do you say it's about the fine tuning? The blend was that so we had the world is organized as such that it allows for Being such as us that can engage with each other Let's say what's about fine? Well, the the reason is that within the parameter of universes governed by the observed laws of nature in order for intelligent interactive life to exist the fundamental constants and quantities of nature have to be fined tuned to an incomprehensible Precision otherwise the universe would be life permitting and not just life prohibiting There wouldn't even be chemistry. There wouldn't even be matter in the absence of this fine tuning So it is next to impossible that all of these life permitting constants and quantity should fall by accident into the infinitesimal life permitting range it is vastly more plausible that there is an intelligent creator of the universe who has determined the fundamental quantities in constants of the universe to be life permitting So that the so that life will exist the question is specifically asked what the difference is between saying that these constants flow necessarily out of God's nature or just sort of flow necessarily out of some kind of brute fact and I think the answer is will like if God has a will He would will that the that the constants were a certain way whereas some brute facts just the universe itself would not have that kind of will But the question there to ask is why is it that the meta-conditions are set up to make it so difficult to bring about a material world There's a really interesting argument for nozzusism in here by the way ladies and gentlemen Which is that the creator of all things doesn't want a material world to exist and so sets up a condition such that it is infinitesimally Difficult Formulation of the question of our So the intention is explained by a intentional agent who brings about the material world but the meta-conditions making it really difficult to bring about a material world Means that the creator of all things doesn't actually want that material will question from the man with the great beard and the longest conceivable arm That's you yeah when this session started all those units of time ago I thought Alex O'Column was going to give us arguments against the existence of God And it seems to me that what he has said is a loving God could not allow human suffering a loving God could not allow animal suffering I'm sorry animal suffering or human suffering is not evidence for the existence of God one way or another What you do start with a proposition is that more likely that God exists or not and speaking for myself and for the reason that Dr. Craig advance I think the balance of the argument God exists and if we then try so why do you do this? Why do you do that? I don't know. I'm not God and I did as Alex O'Column Alex Was Was that a question Joining in the debate at this point. Well if I might just make a comment on that one the question I think is actually making a very good point. It's been said that one man's modus Tolens is another man's Modus ponens I write That is to say the theist can agree that if God exists then gratuitous that is unnecessary purposeless suffering does not exist if God does not exist Or rather if God exists. I'm sorry if God exists then gratuitous suffering does not exist But then the theist can say we have very good arguments and evidence that God exists and Therefore follows and gratuitous suffering does not exist. That's the logical consequence and so Dan Howard Snyder and his anthology on the problem of evil says the problem of evil is really only a problem for theists who have Losing grounds for theism but if you've got good grounds for theism The problem of evil isn't a problem as the questioner said we don't know why God permits We spent the suffering in the world, but that's irrelevant to the fact that if we have good grounds for believing God exists Then that gives good grounds for thinking that the suffering in the world really isn't gratuitous But serve some greater good. We spent most of our time this evening discussing one premise of the column cosmological argument Which I don't think is sound I think there are lots of very good arguments with the existence of God. So I'm an agnostic I think there are good reasons to believe in God. I think there are good reasons to doubt those reasons I think there are good reasons to doubt that we can even fully understand what we mean when we use a word like God It would depend on what you mean. We've been talking about the Kalam. I found it unsound That's all I gave you one reason to suspect that the God that William Lane Craig is suggesting which is an all loving God which by the way Many arguments to the existence of God Conclude that God must be loving and So in the case of those arguments the problem of evil does actually provide a good reason not to believe in that God Of course we haven't had time to get into that and when it comes to talking about even this one argument Which I don't even think is the strongest argument by the way. I just think it's probably the most popular I feel so I It's up to you to decide if you think that I've even had the time to explain my case properly But of course we did and it was 10 minutes long we didn't even begin to talk about the concept of animal suffering And I think that if you if you want to just sort of dismiss that as well I know God exists so God must have some kind of reason than fine But that's not the conversation we're having over here The point that you've been making is that animal suffering and human suffering is evidence against the existence of a creator God What I'm saying is it's neither evidence for or evidence against a creator God is to side on other criteria completely So would you say that the existence the existence of suffering is more or less expected on the hypothesis of theism or atheism or do you think they are genuinely equal? Accepted by whom what do you mean? It's by you. It is irrelevant. Tell me what you think you would expect to find If there were a God who were invigilating I am not God and either you you're going up out the wrong way the first thing you've got to say to yourself What is the evidence for a creator God and is you've been fairly conceited just now the arguments foreign again? But the idea that suffering in animals all right suffering it you We're gonna move to a question over it. You have to reply is Alex a brief repiting if you're if your vision of God If you're vision of no, we're not doing that we're not doing that Your vision of God if your vision of God is some kind of impersonal entity which creates the universe at some first moment in time due to the impossibility of an actual Infinite regress and then just doesn't give a squat about suffering If that's the God that you believe in then fine Don't do that. That's not the God that most people are worshipping in church That's not the God who supposedly resurrects Jesus from the dead for the purpose by the way of human salvation Meaning that actually at least in the case of human beings their mental states do actually matter quite a bit Which I mean which means that if there is some unexpected aspect of that mental existence That needs to be explained and is less expected on the hypothesis of theism of course Christian theism of course Christian theism Then it is on naturalism Which is not to say we're gonna take we're gonna take this question over here from the judgment Which is not to say the naturalist state your question It's not really a mystery. I'll be greatly appreciated. Thank you You don't you don't get to receive that mic from away from that as well. It'll be a bloody night. Jesus You don't get to resist people's being owned by shouting out and then when I respond to you point over there for the next question That's not how this works It's not how this work If you want to keep shouting responses That's fine if you want to keep shouting responses that is absolutely fine. I'm going to do the same thing Are we done now? Your question, please You you said your belief is formed partly on personal experience and partly on these arguments you make and I can't understand how It would be fair that a loving God would allow Some of us to be here in London in this year hearing these arguments and and some people would have been very isolated Hundreds of years ago not not get this chance to I know people who whose belief is formed largely on these kind of these kind of arguments So I can't see a world in which a loving fair God allows people hundreds of years ago to know I don't know if you're going to get the right answer. I'm not going to get the right answer. Thank you so much. I know us on YouTube for more shows like it. We will see you soon.