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April 20, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:17
GODFORSAKEN? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep314
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Today, a special episode devoted to a single and very important question, which is the so-called theodicy question.
The question of why would a good and benevolent God allow so much evil and suffering in the world?
Now, there have been a number of traditional answers to this.
I'm going to examine them and show how they don't really work.
I'm drawing on one of my earlier books, and I'm going to offer at least the beginnings of a daring and comprehensive answer, one that covers both natural evil, the evil of nature, but also moral evil.
This is classic Christian apologetics, and I hope you find it eye-opening and, in the end, consoling.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I'd like to begin my discussion of the famous problem of evil.
It's a problem of evil and suffering with a quotation from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
In his book called The Antichrist, Nietzsche writes this, If the God of the Christians were proved to us to exist, we would know even less how to believe in him.
So, what's Nietzsche saying here?
He's saying, I don't believe in God.
But he goes, but even if you were to give me definitive proof, even if God were to show up, write his name on the moon, appear directly in front of us in an indisputable manner, Nietzsche's like, it still wouldn't make any sense to me.
I wouldn't know what it means to believe, not just in an abstract God, but in this God.
He's thinking specifically of the God of God.
Now, why would Nietzsche say that?
What Nietzsche appears to be saying is that God, as depicted in the Bible, this Christian God that Christians have believed in for millennia, is not one that can be made sense of or reconciled with the world as it is.
Nietzsche here is alluding to the fact that the world has lots of bad things in it.
It appears to be, in a sense, very poorly designed in the respect that there are so many calamities of nature, there are horrible evils perpetrated in the world, and why would God build a world in this way?
How do you explain this divine architecture that allows for all this?
That's really the question we want to wrestle with here.
By and large, when you talk to people who are non-believers, and particularly the so-called new atheists, whom I've gotten to know over the years, I've debated a number of them in various different venues, typically they explain their unbelief with regard to science.
They imply that the reason they don't believe in God is because science has provided a better explanation for The world and for nature, and you don't need what one of them, Victor Stenger in one of his books, calls the God Hypothesis.
But if you actually listen to these new atheists or read their writings, you notice that they aren't really being fully honest, and it's very clear from both their tone and their content.
Let me read a line from Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion, quote,"...the God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction." Jealous and proud of it, petty, unjust,
unforgiving, control freak, vindictive, bloodthirsty, ethnic cleanser, misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, philicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capricious, malevolent bully.
I think Dawkins worked at that sentence.
He's got a lot of sort of big adjectives in it.
And he's probably very proud of himself.
But I say to myself, is this the dispassionate scientist saying, hey, you know what, I've really looked at all the evidence and I just don't see any?
No, it's clear that this is a guy who's got a major beef with God.
He's got a major grudge against God.
And his atheism comes out of that.
It's not so much a scientific disposition, it is a personal animus that appears to rise deep From the conviction, why did God set things up in this way?
The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker used to be, I think he's at MIT or Harvard.
If he was at one, he's now at the other.
I think Harvard now.
In his book, How the Mind Works, he talks about all the tragedies in the world.
Wars, famines, epidemics, natural disasters.
He mentions the Holocaust.
Epidemics. And then he cites a Yiddish proverb that says this, If God lived on the earth, people would break his windows.
Again, this is not scientific atheism.
It's a kind of anger with God.
God, we're mad at you.
Why did you do things this way?
Why did you do it to us?
And similarly, Bertrand Russell, who wrote a book on Christianity about a century or so ago now, And he says, if the world in which we live has been produced in accordance with a plan, we shall have to reckon Nero a saint in comparison with the author of that plan.
So again, a litany of the sufferings and evils in the world, and then turning around and just blaming it on the author of the world, who is none other than God himself.
So, the point I want to draw out of all this is that the problem, it seems, is not so much that we are dealing with atheism in the classic sense as we are dealing with a wounded, wounded theism.
And what's remarkable about this wounded theism is that it is shared by the professed unbeliever and by the professed believer.
And what I mean by that is that theists, Christians, also develop, particularly when their lives take a turn for the worse and for the far worse.
The same kind of grudge, the same kind of questions about God and directed toward God.
God, why did you do this to me?
What's wrong with you?
Couldn't you think of a better plan?
Maybe you didn't cause this, but weren't you in a position to stop it?
Isn't that what it means to be omniscient and omnipotent?
Here's a line from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.
One of the Karamazov's sons, a guy named Ivan, is horrified by the suffering in the world.
He talks about soldiers driving their bayonets through little children.
And then he has this very poignant statement.
He says, you know...
He says, I'm told that it's all necessary, all the suffering to maintain the harmony of the world.
But he says, quote, I don't want harmony.
The price of harmony has been set too high.
We can't afford to pay so much for admission.
And therefore, he's now talking to God, I hasten to return my ticket.
It is my duty, if only as an honest man, to return it as far ahead of time as possible.
It's not that I don't accept God, Aloysia.
I just most respectfully return him the ticket.
So what you have here, and this is from an unbeliever, Ivan, but he's stating a sentiment that believers will identify with.
Why did God devise the world in this way?
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I'm continuing my discussion of the problems of evil and suffering in the world, the so-called theodicy problem.
By the way, if you want to read more about this, pick up a copy of my book.
In hardcover, it was called God Forsaken, but in paperback, they changed the title.
I wasn't entirely in favor, but it's called What's So Good About God?
And I'm drawing on that book in this episode today, and I'll probably only be able to touch on a few of the key points, so I'm not going to be able to go as in-depth as I would like.
Maybe some other time we'll do a whole course, a whole series on this issue.
But I mentioned in the last episode that this idea of putting God on trial and saying to God, in a sense, can you account for the evil and suffering in the world?
This isn't just something that atheists do.
They do it to score points.
But there are believers who fall into a situation where they also have a beef with God.
And very often it's for personal reasons.
You lose a family member, you lose a sibling or a child, and you go, oh my gosh, so suddenly all the deep faith that you thought you had all along starts to crumble away.
Now, one guy that I've debated on this topic, and I would call this guy an ex-Christian.
This is Bart Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
He was raised as a fundamentalist.
He was raised as a kind of conservative evangelical.
And he says that he lost his faith over this issue, over the problem of evil and what he calls, quote, unspeakable suffering.
He goes, that's the reason I lost my faith.
And when we were having one of our conversations, and this, I think, if I remember, was on a campus, he began to say, I discovered that there's, you know, hunger and starvation and famines and poverty.
And I'm like, Bart, you're in your 50s.
Did you discover that, like, now?
Haven't you known your entire life, if not your entire adult life?
That the world is full of suffering and that suffering is pervasive in all societies.
It seems to me a little unbelievable that this is some kind of a midlife discovery on your part.
But nevertheless... Ehrman continued to insist that his so-called deconversion, that's his phrase, was because of this.
And he said, it's not that I don't believe in God, Dinesh.
I'm not actually quoting him.
He goes, what I don't believe is the God of the Bible.
Because he says, I read in the Bible that you've got this God who cares about us.
And you've got this God who had his own chosen people.
And he looks after them.
And he works miracles for them.
And he shares their suffering.
And then I read about Jesus who healed the sick and gave sight to the blind and made the lame hungry.
But he goes, where is that God?
Why isn't he in full operation today?
So this is Ehrman.
And I said to Ermin in our debate, I was like, well Bart, you know, what are the, what are the tragedies that you've experienced directly that in your mind call God's existence or God's benevolence into question?
And then Ermin says this, and he writes this actually in his book called God's Problem.
He goes, he goes, his life, he goes looking at his own life, he says, I am fortunate beyond words.
And he says, but I don't have anyone to express my gratitude to.
He says, there's a void inside me, a void of wanting someone to thank, but I don't have, in a sense, he says, anyone to thank.
Why? Because he doesn't believe anymore in God.
So, I'm thinking to myself, here's a guy who sees his life as a gift.
He wants to thank someone for the gift.
Obviously, he didn't give himself the gift.
His parents were the instruments of the gift, his life, but they didn't create the gift either.
And... Yet he doesn't want to thank God.
Why? Because he blames God for all this suffering.
But it's not suffering that he himself has experienced.
It's other people's suffering.
Well, who's suffering? Well, apparently it's the suffering of people who live really far away.
Like suffering of people in Mogadishu, Odinesh.
You know, you come from India.
You should know the suffering of the people in the West Bengal, the people in Sri Lanka, the people in Thailand.
So the weirdness here to me is this.
You've got Bart Ehrman.
Who is interpreting the suffering of others to point to the non-existence of God, but those others don't feel that way at all.
The people in third world countries aren't rejecting God.
In fact, historian Philip Jenkins says that there is a kind of massive revival of religion, and particularly of Christianity, around the world.
Or think also about previous eras when suffering was much greater than it was now.
I mean, people grew up with horrible diseases.
There were no pain-killing drugs.
Infants and mothers routinely died during childbirth.
And at the same time, there was no big atheist revolt in like the 6th century AD or the 12th century where people go, Oh, our suffering is unbearable.
Let's blame it all on God.
That didn't happen. So at times in the past when suffering was worse, and in other cultures where it's worse today, you don't have this kind of intellectual rejection of God.
What I'm getting at is that this problem, the problem of theodicy, this problem that says in effect that there is an inconsistency, In positing an existing and benevolent God on the one hand and accepting and looking at the problems and suffering in the world on the other, this is a little bit of a Western phenomenon.
This is in fact, and I think I'll focus on this in the next segment, this is not a problem that occurs in any other culture and it doesn't occur in any other religions.
This problem simply is unique to the West and the developed West and it's also unique to Christianity.
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The problem of theodicy, the problem of why would an omniscient and omnipotent and a just and a benevolent God allow, not just allow suffering and evil, but so much suffering and evil in the world?
This is a problem unique to the West, and it's also unique to Christianity.
In other religions, the problem just does not exist.
Let's look at the ancient Greeks and Romans.
The ancient Greeks and Romans were not atheists.
In fact, on the contrary, they believed in many gods.
They were polytheists.
And they tended to identify gods with nature.
There's the thunder god, and there's the river god.
And, of course, later those gods were personified into the goddess of love, becomes Aphrodite.
And there's a god of the sea, and that's Poseidon, and on and on.
And Zeus is kind of the greatest of all the gods.
And the Greeks didn't bother to defend the justice of these gods or even their compassion.
On the contrary, the Greeks kind of almost bluntly admitted, you know, these gods have their own concerns.
We humans are far from their immediate concerns.
Now, sometimes they take an interest in us, but very often that's a playful interest and sometimes even a malicious interest.
These gods can be capricious.
They can be angry.
They can be cruel. And so human suffering doesn't really need an explanation to the degree that the gods are causing it at all.
It's because they're bad guys.
It's because they, although very powerful, and these gods, although they're not omniscient, they know a lot, much more than humans, but they don't know everything.
And the Greek and Roman gods are not omnipotent either.
They have a lot of power, but they don't have unlimited power.
And so, in a sense, the Greeks created, you might say, gods who were larger than life, but were not the same as the monotheistic god of the Jews and the Christians and the Muslims.
Let's turn to Islam.
There's no theodicy problem in Islam because God is seen as so above humanity, so beyond question, so that it's kind of blasphemous to even ask these kinds of things about God.
The term Islam itself, as many of you know, means subordination or submission or giving in.
So the job of human beings is to is to kind of yield to the greater wisdom of God and not to interrogate God. God is the one who should be interrogating us.
And here is a Saeed Hussain Nasser in his book the heart of Islam and he says in contrast to the modern West he says in the Islamic world this question meaning the question the theodicy question has hardly ever bothered the religious conscience of even the most intelligent people or turn them away from God.
This issue does not exist in Islam. Let's turn to Buddhism and Hinduism.
Well, in Buddhism and Hinduism, you have a remarkable answer to the problem of suffering and evil.
And the answer is, incredibly, that evil and suffering are not real.
You might think, what kind of crazy nonsense is that?
Isn't suffering real?
Don't you feel the pain?
Isn't evil real? Can't we see it in the world?
Well, in a sense, Hinduism and Buddhism offer a kind of philosophical explanation that the world itself, including our experience of it, is unreal.
In other words, the world of our experience doesn't really exist.
Now, we think it exists, but that's because our minds are playing a kind of trick on us.
That suffering is not caused by the world.
It's caused in our mind.
And the remedy for suffering is quite literally to change our mind.
So, enlightenment, nirvana, the idea of rising to a kind of higher consciousness is ultimately figuring out this conundrum.
And so, the way to deal with suffering is to recognize that suffering and evil themselves are illusions.
You can't blame them on God because they are not real in the first place.
Even while offering that philosophical answer in the Bhagavad Gita, in Hinduism there's a kind of second answer, which is not entirely consistent with the first, but has its own inherent plausibility.
And this answer can be summed up in the simple word karma.
So karma here means sort of just desserts.
And in some sense, what the Hindus are saying is that suffering is deserved.
Deserved? Well, deserved in terms of what you did in your previous life.
This is, of course, the famous Hindu doctrine of reincarnation, which is that the sins of one life are sort of requited.
Or pay it back in the next life.
If you live a very good life, well, you're going to have a very good fate in the next life.
If you're a horrible person and act badly in one life, you'll get your just desserts in the next life.
So, in fact, you might even end up not even as a human being at all, but arguably as a cockroach or some kind of despicable insect.
So reincarnation is a philosophy that you get what you did before.
And you can see there's no problem of justice here because justice is given perfectly to everyone, but not in the same life.
So the Hindus will admit, in our life, sometimes bad guys end up ahead and good guys come to grief, but it's like not to worry because all of this will be corrected in the next life.
Now, interestingly, in Christianity, suffering is real.
Evil is real. And so the problem persists.
Why would a benevolent God, who could have set things up differently, who could have, it seems, reduced the amount of suffering in the world, but nevertheless, he didn't.
And the question is, why?
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Feel the difference. In my continuing discussion of the problem of evil, I want to look at some commonly given explanations for why we have evil and suffering and death in the world and show why they don't really work, or at least they don't work adequately.
They don't give a full and satisfying explanation, which means that we need something better than what I'm about to offer here.
Evil and suffering are the product of the fall, the product of the sin of Adam and Eve, and that in committing their sin in the Garden of Eden, that sin was then, you may say, bequeathed to us.
And in Christianity, it's sometimes called original sin.
Now, original sin is in fact a sort of a doctrine in Christianity, but it's not something that is explicitly stated in the Bible.
The Bible never explicitly says that somehow the sin of Adam and Eve was sort of genetically transmitted to all their descendants.
Some of this has been implied and drawn out as subsequent doctrine, but at least in the modern era, this concept that guilt can be inherited doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.
It's very difficult for us, at least in the modern world, to believe this.
Now, it's true that We recognize that if in ancient times and also in modern times, there is a sense of guilt that has consequences for future generations.
And so, for example, if your great-grandparents in Germany were Nazis and they came to a horrible end, the effects of that Are going to be felt by the children of the Nazis and the grandchildren of the Nazis.
So, in that sense, parental, the effects of guilt can be transmitted.
But that doesn't mean that the evil itself is transmitted.
If someone is born the son of a Nazi, that doesn't make him a Nazi.
That doesn't mean that he bears, if you will, the moral responsibility for what his parents or grandparents did.
Obviously, he doesn't.
So it's one thing to endure the effects of previous sin, but it's a whole other thing to say that that sin somehow is transmuted to you.
So I don't think that that by itself quite works.
And then you have the idea that suffering in the world is a just punishment for evil deeds.
And we hear that all the time.
And I have heard it going back now to the 1980s when there were a couple of preachers, not many, but some, who would say things like, you know, AIDS is God's punishment.
And so, in other words, our society is getting what we asked for.
This is almost a certain version of the karma argument.
But even then, I thought to myself, well, if AIDS is God's punishment for people supposedly committing these horrible sins, there are lots of people who are committing the sins who don't get AIDS. And then second of all, there are children who get AIDS. They obviously aren't committing these sins.
You have people who get AIDS from a blood transfusion.
So it doesn't really make sense to blame the kind of tragedy of AIDS on behavior when the behavior doesn't automatically produce that result.
Now, I've heard it said that bad things in the world happen to good people.
But listen, given human beings the way they are, there are no really good people.
And so no one can say, I'm a good person, nothing bad should happen to me.
The idea is no, no one's good.
And so we don't have a basis for complaining about evil and suffering because we don't qualify as good people.
Now, strictly speaking, to me, that's true.
But even so, it doesn't explain the fact that there are various degrees of good and evil in the world.
Some people are clearly, in their actions, maybe in their thoughts, better than other people.
And those people, if there was true justice in the world, the people who are less bad should have less suffering.
And the people who are more bad should have more suffering.
But we know that the amount of evil and suffering in the world isn't distributed that way.
It's proportionate to how good you are, how bad you are.
In fact, it seems to be pretty much indiscriminate.
You know, a really good guy, and he's in his 30s or 40s, and he gets cancer, that's the end of him.
You know, someone who's a really bad guy, but they seem to live a flourishing life, beautiful homes, lovely cars, everything that their hearts could sort of want.
And you go, wow, the world in that sense is not fair.
And of course, the idea that life isn't fair is something that we even teach young children so that they can be sort of ready for the world.
Suffering as a benefit to all involved.
This is the idea that suffering, even though it may be bad for you at the time, you may think it's bad for you, and when you look back on it, it turns out to be a benefit.
And I think that this doesn't really work because, well, it works for certain types of suffering.
You know, Dinesh, you were in the confinement center.
You really didn't like it. But you know what?
You learned a lot out of it. So in retrospect, it was kind of a benefit to you.
That's true. But none of this really deals with what one writer, this is Marilyn McCord Adams, calls horrendous evil.
And in her book, which is called Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, she talks about horrible suffering.
I mean, a woman is raped and her arms are chopped off.
A prisoner is tortured physically and psychologically, so his entire personality disintegrates.
A woman is forced by terrorists to choose which of her children should be killed next.
A group of captives is made to watch its loved ones being maimed and disfigured.
A man watches his wife and child suffer a slow death from starvation.
These are horrendous evils, and it's hard to imagine that even later you're going to look back and go, well, you know, it hurt at the time, but I mean, I'm really glad it happened to me now.
No, you're never glad it's happened to you.
These are evils that are always going to be bad and some better explanation is going to have to be given for why they exist at all.
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The main thrust of the argument against God that says, in effect, why would God create the world in this way?
Why so much evil?
Why so much suffering?
Well, all of this comes down to a claim that human beings are in a position To be able to assess the architecture of the world itself.
In other words, the question I'm raising here is the question about the limits of human reason.
The atheist or even the believer who's questioning God will say, in effect, there's no good reason for this.
But what they really mean is not that there's no good reason for this, but I can't see a reason.
And there's a huge difference between I can't see a reason and there is no good reason.
So here is an atheist, William Rowe, academic, in a famous article.
He begins by describing a scene of a fawn, a little deer, Dying in agony in a forest fire.
He goes on and on with the description.
Then he says this. Is it reasonable to believe that there is some greater good to justify the suffering?
And then he goes, it certainly does not appear reasonable to believe this.
So far as we can see, the fawn's intense suffering is pointless.
And the key terms I want to highlight are does not appear and so far as we can see.
And, by the way, in philosophy there is something that is famously known as the no-see-um argument.
And the no-see-um argument can be explained in this way.
If I were to tell you that there's millions of bacteria in your eyes and in your ears and in your mouth...
And you say, I no-see-em.
Well, that's called a no-see-em argument.
The fact that you don't see them doesn't mean they aren't there.
In fact, you might need a microscope to see them.
It may take special knowledge and special insight to recognize that this is, in fact, the case.
But this is the limitation of the no-see-em argument because...
Because it simply shows that you are not in a position to know something that is in fact the case.
And by the way, these no-see-um arguments occur all the time in ordinary life.
You're in a shopping mall, and you see a vehicle.
The passenger door is open, and you see an infant is strapped into a car seat.
There's no mother in sight, and it seems unbelievably dangerous to leave a child like this.
And so you're like, listen, I'm going to call the cops.
This is a very negligent mom.
She obviously doesn't have any idea of what her parental responsibilities are.
She's unfit, probably, to even raise children in the first place.
Now, this is a perfect no-see-um argument.
As far as you can see, there's no good reason why the mom would leave her child unattended in a car seat in a car with the SUV door open.
But just because you don't know the reason for it doesn't mean that there isn't a reason.
There could be 10 reasons I can think of off the top of my head.
We don't know the character of the mother.
We have no idea what circumstance might have caused her to do this.
Maybe the mom had to run after her other small child who ran out of the car without warning into a parking lot and is about to be run over by a car.
So the mom was attending to that situation.
Or maybe she rushed into the grocery store.
She just received a frantic call from her husband who suddenly collapsed of a heart attack.
So, given our limited perspective, it's premature to leap from the, I can't see the reason, to therefore there is no reason.
And by the way, this is something that we see in the Bible itself in the famous story of Job, because Job is constantly asking, like, why is this happening to me?
I'm a just man. I don't deserve this.
Why is it happening to me?
Now, the beauty of the Job story is we actually know why it's happening to Job, because while we can see Job and his friends down here, and Job and his family down here, we can also see God up there.
God is involved in this kind of debate with this character called Satan, or the Satan, and they're arguing about whether or not Job's fidelity to God is only because he's prosperous or not.
And so, in a sense, God and this Satan enter into a bet So that's the real reason, by the way, that Job is suffering.
It's not because of what Job did.
So when Job says, I don't know the reason, it's not because there isn't a reason.
We, the reader of the Bible, know the reason.
But Job doesn't know it. And what happens at the end?
Well, God shows up at the end and he talks to Job.
And this is what God says.
He basically says to Job, you know, you're kind of a no-see-um guy.
Here's God. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Do you know the laws of the universe?
Is it at your command that the eagle rises to the height to make its nest?
So what is God saying here?
What God is basically saying to Job is, Job, listen, you have the human perspective, but you don't have the God's perspective.
In other words, you don't have the God's eye view.
I'm the only guy who sees everything at a single glance.
You don't. So, God is reminding Job of his very narrow circle of knowledge.
And the issue isn't here that God is misusing his power in some way.
It's just that the world itself is incomprehensible because human knowledge is so limited.
And in a way, Job gets it.
Because some people think it's kind of mysterious that at the end, Job kind of submits and he goes, okay, I give in.
But the reason Job gives in is he knows that God has a good point, that only he, God, knows what's really going on.
More and more parents are fed up with today's public education.
There's a groundbreaking new documentary you need to see.
It's called Whose Children Are They?
Now, I had the writer and producer of the film on the podcast just a couple of days ago, I guess late last week.
This is a documentary that exposes the indoctrination, the anti-American curricula, the critical race theory fanaticism, the sexualization of children, and more.
And the documentary is available on SalemNow.com.
Whose Children Are They?
features empowered parents, brave teachers, frontline experts who pull back the curtain exposing the hidden agenda in American schools.
It's a movie you're going to want to see.
Here's a short clip.
Public education has gone off the rails.
You cannot use racism to eradicate racism.
Whose children are they?
Go to SalemNow.com.
When we think about evil and suffering in the world, we can divide it into two categories.
The first I'm going to call natural evil or natural suffering, and the other is moral evil and the suffering caused by that.
Now, the difference here is that natural evil are the evils, in a sense, that can be attributed to nature.
I'm thinking of things here like tornadoes and hurricanes and earthquakes and disease, natural calamities.
And this would include the calamities of the cruelty in the animal kingdom.
This is all, if you will, the evils of nature.
And then you have a moral evil.
So let me talk in this segment about natural evil.
Because when you begin to look at these things individually, and in this book, What's So Good About God?
I have a couple of chapters where I go into great detail about them.
But here I just want to take the single example of earthquakes.
Again, something that seems kind of pointless.
The earth kind of cracks open and causes an earthquake.
Houses tumble down.
People are smashed to death.
Calamities are caused by earthquakes.
But why do we have earthquakes?
Well, for centuries, nobody knew.
It just seemed like earthquakes were one of those horrible things that happened, almost like a defect in the architecture of the world.
of God's creation.
But now we know that earthquakes occur and this is actually the way in which modern science comes to the benefit of apologetics.
The atheists think that science is their weapon.
No, science cuts both ways and there is scientific evidence that supports And helps to explain such questions as why we have earthquakes.
Well, it turns out that plate tectonics, which is the movement of giant plates under the Earth's surface, it's the movement of those plates that causes the earthquakes.
Now, this plate tectonics, as it turns out, is absolutely essential for the existence of life on Earth, and particularly of human life, mammalian life, the life of mammals.
Why? Because without plate tectonics, the Earth and the oceans would not be separated from one another.
In fact, the oceans, which, by the way, make up about 70% of the entire surface of the Earth, would swallow the land and would swallow the land to the depth of 4,000 meters.
So what that means is that without plate tectonics, we would all be drowned.
I mean, humans would all be drowned.
Of course, it would be good for the fish, but there would be...
We would lose most of the biodiversity of the planet.
And it turns out that plate tectonics does all kinds of other things in addition to this.
We need carbon dioxide.
Without it, the Earth would basically resemble Antarctica.
And it's the plate tectonic system that apparently recirculates all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, keeping the level of greenhouse gases and therefore the Earth's temperature stable.
I'm now quoting from A textbook which says the tectonic system serves as a planetary thermostat helping to regulate the Earth's climate and preventing the onset of scorching or freezing temperatures that would make life, and certainly human life, impossible. So what am I getting at with this?
What I'm getting at is that plate tectonics, the very process that gives rise to earthquakes, is also a process that is vital to sustain and enable human life on Earth.
So in other words, we owe our existence, in part, to plate tectonics.
And this is the point, is that God has created nature in a way that the good things that come out of nature...
Also produce bacteria and viruses.
By the way, most bacteria are beneficial.
And so you have an ecosystem.
That's the word we use today, and we use it mainly in the connection of the climate debate.
But there is such a thing as an ecosystem.
And the point about an ecosystem is an ecosystem is a series of connected parts.
Now, some people think that you can change the ecosystem by getting rid of parts over here and getting rid of parts over there.
And yes, you can. But if you do that, you're going to get a different ecosystem.
And the point I want to make is that at the deepest level, if you change the ecosystem, you're not only going to get a different world But you're going to get different creatures that inhabit that world.
So the point I'm trying to make here is that the world has the kind of creatures that it has now, including that creature called man, who can not only live in the world, but can experience the world and experience suffering, and can also raise the question, why do we have evil? Why do we have suffering in the world?
That kind of creature that has rationality, that has a...
I mean, we're creatures that don't just inhabit the world.
We're creatures that can interrogate the world.
And my point is, those kinds of creatures are created and sustained in a certain type of environment.
And the point I'm getting at is, if God wanted to make creatures like us, He created the environment that sustains creatures like us.
Now, you might say, and I'll address this in the next section, wait a minute, God is omnipotent.
He can do anything. So, He could easily have made creatures like us, but created a different environment for us, and it would all be okay.
And I think that this argument is nonsensical.
It makes absolutely no sense.
If God wanted creatures like us, He made us in the way that it is required to have creatures like us.
And I'll discuss that further in the next segment.
I am going to conclude my discussion of the problem of theodicy.
And as you know, because of the limits of time, only touched upon some aspects of this complex problem.
But here I want to discuss a point that a lot of people think is obvious, but is in fact not only not obvious, but doesn't make any sense.
And that is the idea that God could somehow have created us and created the world I'm going to refute it by offering what I'm going to call the only way argument, which is to say... That God made the world in the only way that He could, given the result that He wanted.
Now, to try to illustrate this point, I'm going to give a couple of examples that I hope will at least begin to make sense of it.
Consider, for example, a maze.
You've seen these mazes when you were a kid.
And the characteristic feature of a maze is that there are many wrong ways to get from the start to the finish, but there's only one right way.
So what that means is that if you want to get out of the maze and get to the other end, there is a single path that you have to take in order to get there.
And this is the point I want to make about God, is that God starts out by saying, I want to have a universe in which you have creatures.
And the creatures are gonna be like this.
And I want at the end of this process to have creatures that are conscious and creatures that are rational.
And I want to have a specific type of creature that I'm going to call, or that will later be called human beings.
And they're going to have these characteristics.
And so since I want to have those creatures, that's the end of the maze.
I'm going to take the path using the materials that produce those creatures.
These are creatures of flesh and blood, so I'm going to use the materials that produce all that.
I'm going to navigate my way, if you will, through the maze.
God takes the appropriate path to achieve his own destination.
So, I'm not saying by this that somehow God is constrained by the laws of nature, by the way.
God made the laws of nature.
And laws, by the way, don't make anything.
So, laws don't sort of create the universe.
This is kind of a common fallacy.
Oh, we have a universe that's created by laws.
No. That's kind of like saying that, you know, if I have two marbles here and two marbles here, that it's the law of two plus two that equals four that gives me the four marbles.
No, the law by itself doesn't do anything.
The marbles themselves have to exist independently of the law, and the law is merely a description of how many marbles are on the table.
The law is a feature of language and of the human mind, and it's describing a reality that's not inside the human mind, but is in fact on the table.
Now, another example that might help make sense of all this is think of a violin.
So a violin is an instrument and it produces a certain kind of sound.
And it produces a certain kind of sound because it's made in a certain way.
Now, here's the point.
You can make all kinds of objections to the violin.
Oh, that violin is too heavy.
Oh, that violin is really unwieldy.
Oh, there are too many strings.
And all those objections would be valid, but they don't make any sense if you want that kind of a sound.
If you want that kind of a sound to come out of an instrument, you have to make the violin that way.
There's no other way to make it.
Yeah, you can make a guitar, but then you get a different sound.
You can make a piano, but you'll get a different sound.
You can make any other kind of instrument, a harmonica, a bongo drum, whatever, you're going to get a different sound.
And that's the point here, is that it is a wrong understanding of omnipotence to think that God can make a banjo that's going to sound like a violin.
No. God understands that if you want to have a material world and you want to have a lawful universe, then certain types of materials created by God are going to have certain kinds of sounds and certain kinds of effects.
And so God goes, listen, I want to have violin music, and so I'm going to make a violin.
I want to have human beings, and so I'm going to create the kind of world that gives rise to and sustains human beings.
I'm going to have a sun that is at a certain distance from the earth, and In other words, the architecture of the universe is devised in a manner that is created to produce God's intended result.
This is not a limitation of God's omnipotence at all.
So I think the issue here is that many people think omnipotence means that God can, quote, do anything.
God can do anything. And so this results in all kinds of confusion.
But... God can't do anything in that sense.
I mean, can God tell a lie?
No, He can't tell a lie.
Why? Because it is the nature of God not to lie.
So, it's not a limitation of God's omnipotence that God can't lie.
Can God make two and two equal five?
No. Why?
Because omnipotence doesn't mean, in a nonsensical way, doing anything.
Can God make a stone so heavy that even he can't lift it?
All these conundrums rely on a certain kind of foolish understanding of omnipotence, which treats omnipotence as literally the ability to produce contradictions.
Can God take a married woman who has had children and make her into a virgin at the same time?
No. This is not what omnipotence means.
Omnipotence simply means unlimited power.
And so God has unlimited power to do what it is possible to do.
And in this sense, God has created a world that has suffering and has evil.
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