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Sept. 12, 2019 - The Matt Walsh Show
47:38
Ep. 330 - The Non-Existent Vaping Crisis

Trump wants to ban flavored e-cigarettes because his wife doesn't like them. We'll talk about why the talk of a "vaping crisis" is overblown and why this move is politically disastrous for the president. Also, a gaggle of conspiracy theorists rallied in DC yesterday and Hillary Clinton put on the saddest and most embarrassing display anyone has ever seen. Date: 09-12-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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OK, so the media and politicians tell us there's a crisis, an epidemic, an outbreak, a catastrophe.
Amri, these are actual headlines.
These are actual words.
And it's gripping our country.
And worse yet, our children.
Think of the children.
They are caught in the middle of this thing, and the disaster is so very disastrous that the White House is now leaping into action.
President Trump has announced that his administration will move for a ban on flavored e-cigarettes.
So yes, vaping.
Vaping is the crisis.
Vaping is what threatens to bring down the very structures of human civilization.
It will bring about Armageddon if we do not act immediately.
We'll talk about this, this vaping ban, which I think is not only stupid, completely without basis, unjustified, but also politically catastrophic for the president in many ways.
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So, vaping is The crisis that we're dealing with this week.
Trump at the White House yesterday talked to reporters about his plan to ban most, almost all flavors of e-cigarettes.
And, well, I'll play this for you.
And you tell me if his explanation makes any sense at all.
Listen to this.
But we can't allow people to get sick, and we can't have our youth be so affected.
And I'm hearing it, and that's how the First Lady got involved.
She's got a son together that is a beautiful young man, and she feels very, very strongly about it.
She's seen it.
We're both reading it.
A lot of people are reading it.
But people are dying with vaping.
So we're looking at it very closely.
And, you know, if nothing else, this is a conference that's going to let people know about it, because people are going to watch what we're saying.
And parents are going to be a lot tougher with respect to their children.
A lot of people think vaping is wonderful.
It's great.
It's really not wonderful.
That's one thing I think we can say definitely.
Commissioner, it's not a wonderful thing.
It's got big problems.
We have to find out the extent of the problem.
It's so new.
It's so new.
But we're going to find out.
And I hope that parents that Well, okay then.
Yeah, let's ban it because Melania doesn't like it.
That's basically his reason.
to make wise decisions maybe based on what we're saying today but the
Commissioner and Alex Azar they're gonna be coming back over the next pretty
short period of time couple of weeks with some very strong recommendations
well okay then yeah let's ban it because Melania doesn't like it that's basically
his reason yeah my wife doesn't like it so we're gonna get rid of it great idea
Yeah, because Melania's son.
Not his son, Melania's son.
People are harping on that, where he said Melania's son.
And I'm not gonna harp on it, but it is a weird way of describing your own child.
I can't imagine referring to my son as, you know, my wife's son.
Just very strange.
But anyway, he says Melania's son is a beautiful young man, and that's why we should ban vaping.
Alright, great.
Makes total sense.
Now, leaving aside the not insignificant question of whether the president has the constitutional authority to unilaterally ban a consumer product, and by the way, the answer is no, he does not.
Not even close.
I think the question we have to ask ourselves is, is all of this apocalyptic fervor justified?
Is there really anything That might reasonably be described as a vaping epidemic, as we're being told.
And this isn't just, again, the president.
This is the media.
Many other politicians are talking about the vaping epidemic.
Is there one?
Are people dropping dead left and right in the street because of vaping?
The answer, of course, is no.
Not even close.
There have been six deaths in America possibly linked to vaping.
Now, I say possibly.
Now, the media reports it as, yep, these are vaping deaths.
But I don't think we're at a point where we can 100% make that connection.
So these are deaths that are possibly in some way to some degree linked to vaping.
Six.
That's out of the more than 11 million people who report using e-cigarettes.
If you're keeping track at home, 6 out of 11 million, that is a fatality rate of .0005%.
Okay, so that is a half of a half of a half of a half of a percent have died.
By comparison, if you look at other substances that also have a death toll of their own, 88,000 people a year die from alcohol-related causes.
128,000 people every year die from prescription pill-related things.
The death toll in both of those cases does represent, of course, a small percentage as well, but it's probably a higher percentage than .00005%.
So no matter how you look at it, the numbers do not come anywhere close to justifying words like outbreak and catastrophe and crisis and epidemic, and they certainly don't justify an unconstitutional action from the president.
Not that anything ever could justify an unconstitutional action from the president, but certainly if anything ever could, which it couldn't, this wouldn't be it.
But the panic is, so hopefully by now with all of those facts in mind, if you hadn't done any research on this, Hopefully, just being told that 0.00005% of people who have vaped have died, allegedly, maybe, possibly because of it, that should be enough to tell you this is not a crisis, this is not an epidemic.
If that level of fatality rate is enough to ban something, then we need to ban literally everything.
Because I think any object or substance you can think of Probably kills at least point zero zero zero five percent of the people who come in contact with it or use it I mean, I just any carrots I'm willing to bet that more than point zero zero zero five percent of all people have eaten carrots have died from choking.
I'm I Don't know.
I'm just making that up, but I bet you that percentage is at least around that number probably more than that So that should be enough But the panic that around vaping is even more absurd and counterproductive than it first appears because keep in mind that the majority of people who've gotten sick or died from vaping were using unlicensed black market products.
What they're banning here are flavored, the fruity flavored e-cigarette stuff that you can go and buy at the gas station or the grocery store.
That's not what's killing people.
The very, very small percentage of people who've gotten, who've been killed or gotten sick Most of them, over 80% of them, by the number that I saw, were using unlicensed black market products that they got off the street.
Now, here's the point.
Just put this together.
By outlawing most e-cigarettes, What we're doing is we're, it's not just that we're missing the point and we are outlawing something that hasn't even been caused a problem, but actually we're driving more people towards precisely the kind of vaping that's causing the problem in the first place.
So if the point, if you, if you ban it and you say you can't get it, then the only way people can get it is on the black market, which means now you can have more people going to the black market than were before.
This is a solution to a fake problem that will inevitably cause the fake problem to become a real problem.
In other words, this is exactly the kind of solution our government specializes in.
Now, I just want to stipulate here.
I say all this not because I like to vape.
I don't vape.
I've never vaped.
It's not my thing.
I find it kind of weird, to be honest.
And I think it looks weird, and it looks stupid, in my opinion.
And so, it's just, it's not what I would do.
If I want to smoke something, I'm going to have a cigar on occasion.
Which, by the way, is way more unhealthy than vaping.
And I fully acknowledge that.
Smoking a cigar is like smoking 40 cigarettes at once or something.
It's just an insane amount of tobacco that you are inhaling when you smoke a cigar.
But I do on occasion.
That's my choice as an adult.
The fact that I find vaping to be kind of weird and not my thing, that is not in itself enough to justify sweeping prohibitions.
This fact apparently is news to the president, who thinks that the fact that his wife doesn't like something means that we should get rid of it.
Now, really, my toxin of choice, aside from cigars, is alcohol.
I drink in moderation, but I do like to drink.
Beer, bourbon, whatever.
And it would probably be healthier if I didn't drink at all.
There have been studies that show that whatever, having one glass of wine a day is good for you, or I don't know what it was, one glass of wine a week or something.
So there have been different studies.
But probably overall, it would be healthier if I didn't drink at all.
Probably.
Maybe even I would live longer, a little bit longer.
Like if I'm gonna die at 83, if I am set to die at 83 or 85, let's say, and if I didn't drink, maybe if I'm set to die at 85, if I don't drink, if I do drink, I'll die at 83 or something.
I don't know.
It could be something like that.
They say it shaves a couple of years off your life.
But that's my decision and that's my concern.
And the way I look at it is, it's something that I enjoy doing, and it makes life a little bit more enjoyable.
It's just a small little joy.
And so if this small little joy shaves off a couple years at the end of life, then I'm willing to make that bargain.
I mean, probably if I didn't drink at all, and I didn't eat any red meat, and I never had any junk food, and I just got rid of all those pleasures in life, I could tack on, I don't know, five years.
For me, that trade just really isn't worth it.
What's the point?
But that's my concern.
That's my business.
That's my decision, is the point here.
You don't have to agree with it.
Doesn't matter.
You know, I don't care what your opinion is.
I don't care what the opinion of the president is.
I shouldn't have to care.
You can give me your opinion.
You shouldn't be able to impose it.
You shouldn't be able to say, I don't personally like that thing, so therefore, let's get rid of it.
That's not how it's supposed to work in a free country.
But if we are going to start banning unhealthy substances, the thing is, We have a lot of banning to do before we get to the comparatively mild and safe e-cigarettes.
And we shouldn't start with alcohol either.
The government tried that once, you may recall, and it didn't turn out very well.
The leading cause of death in America is obesity.
So with obesity, now you're talking about something that maybe you could actually call a public health emergency.
People are very fat in this country, and they're only getting fatter.
Yet soda and fast food, which are two staples of Trump's diet, by the way, remain not only legal, but are often marketed specifically to kids.
So how are you gonna say, we gotta get rid of the fruity e-cigarettes because kids are using them, meanwhile you got Happy Meals that, I mean, what do you think's gonna kill you soon?
If you eat fast food every day, or if you vape every day, who's gonna die sooner?
Let's do a race.
Have one person eat fast food every day, have another person vape every day.
Who lives longer?
What do you think?
Or who gets to their gravestone sooner?
Let's put it that way.
Probably the person with the fast food.
Yet that's still legal.
Because if I feel like having an unhealthy lunch, I'm going to have an unhealthy lunch.
I don't care what your opinion is.
I'm just going to do it because I want to.
Because I'm an adult.
And this is America.
This is one of the things that's supposed to set us apart from other countries.
This is completely insane.
It really is an insane move by the president especially.
And I think politically disastrous.
Now, banning vaping, who is that going to appeal to politically?
We've talked about whether or not this makes logical sense, and it doesn't.
So this law cannot be logically or morally or legally justified on a constitutional basis.
But then let's ask a more peripheral question, which is, does it at least make political sense?
And the crazy thing is, it doesn't even make political sense.
So it's a bad, stupid policy that won't even help President Trump politically.
Who's it going to appeal to?
This is going to appeal to a certain collection of, basically, Fox News-viewing baby boomers that see kids vaping and they say, ah, these stupid kids with the vaping, get rid of that!
It's going to appeal to that particular set of people.
Those are going to be the only ones who are in favor of this.
The thing is, though, There's a lot of people in that group, but it's a comparatively small group.
And the other thing is, President Trump already has those people.
Fox News viewing baby boomers are 100% behind Donald Trump.
They're going to be there in droves already.
So then you have to look at, who are you potentially alienating with something like this?
Well, primarily millennials, younger voters.
And those are exactly the voters that Trump does not automatically have.
Those are the ones he needs to win.
He won in 2016, and I keep saying this, I know that there are Trump fans who want to believe that Trump won by a landslide and it was just a huge outpouring of support, and it wasn't.
He won with 3 million fewer votes overall, and he won because of a few hundred thousand votes in a few states.
And he was helped by the fact that the Democrats put up, in the general election, easily the most unlikable major party candidate ever in American history.
And even with that advantage, he won by a few hundred thousand votes in a few states.
It's a razor-thin margin.
And considering he's not going to again have the advantage of running against Hillary Clinton.
That's not going to happen.
As much as we would like it if it did.
So he's going to probably need more votes than he had last time.
He's not going to be able to skate by with what he had last.
He's going to need more than that.
He needs to build his coalition.
Which means doing more than just appealing to the Fox News viewing baby boomers.
And by the way, no disrespect to those.
If you're in that camp, no disrespect to you.
I'm just saying, you're in Trump's corner?
Great.
He needs more than you.
And he needs millennials, and this, at least some, he needs a certain coalition of younger people, and this is the kind of thing that just isn't gonna help.
And I'm not talking about just people who vape and won't like it.
Like I said, I don't vape.
I'm extremely annoyed by this.
Because I really hate it when the government does this.
When the government starts banning this nanny state BS, I hate.
I hate it on principle.
They started banning large sodas in New York.
I hated that too.
I don't live in New York and I don't drink soda.
I still hate it.
I don't like being treated like a child by the government.
And I don't like it when government officials try to impose their own personal preferences on the public.
All right, let's see.
I thought this was interesting.
Just really quickly, I wanted to mention this.
Back in 2009, archaeologists unearthed two skeletons in Italy, dating back to maybe the 4th century AD.
And these were skeletons that were buried holding hands, apparently.
And when they were dug up, they were still holding hands.
The skeletons became known as the Lovers of Modena.
Anyway, so we knew about that and so you see the skeletons holding hands and you start coming up with all these narratives of some romantic epic that must have led to these two lovers supposedly dying together holding hands.
Well, scientists have just completed some studies on these skeletons and they've discovered based on the proteins in their tooth enamel, Which is amazing, by the way, that they can do this.
1600 years later, they can analyze protein in tooth enamel and come to the conclusion that these were both males.
Both guys.
Which means that they weren't lovers because back in the 4th century, they weren't going to bury two gay men together romantically with their hands clasped.
That wasn't the culture back then.
So they were probably family members or maybe soldiers who died in battle or something like that.
In any case, this is what just jumped out at me about it.
Isn't this interesting that they could determine the sex of people who lived 1600 years ago?
Sixteen centuries, and they can tell the sex of these people.
Hmm.
Hmm.
It's almost like, I don't know, but it's almost like sex is a physical trait that can be scientifically determined by observation.
It almost seems that way, doesn't it?
If we can go back to people who died over millennia, a millennium ago, Find out their sex it would seem that sex is a therefore a
biological trait I don't know, but that's just that's that's how it would
seem to me and
in all seriousness, we are I We're gonna get to the point
with this woke gender identity
stuff on the left We're going to get to the point where basically archaeologists and anthropologists and scientists who deal with this stuff won't be able to do their jobs anymore.
Because eventually the left's going to notice that, hold on, wait a second.
If we go back and we start saying, you know, digging up skeletons and saying what's sexy to people, that completely undermines our entire gender identity thing.
And so eventually they're going to circle back and say, no, no, you guys can't do that anymore.
You're not allowed to.
All you could do is dig up a skeleton and say, we know nothing about it.
This is just, this could be anything.
Might not even be a human.
Who knows?
All right.
You want to see the saddest thing of all time?
Hillary Clinton participated in a, an art exhibit in Venice that involved her sitting behind a fake Resolute desk for an hour and reading her emails.
I'm not kidding.
This actually happened.
Take a look at this.
Here's a, here's a photograph of it.
There she is.
Um, Yes, this was an art exhibit.
She went to Venice and she sat behind a fake presidential desk and read her emails.
Well, I have nothing else to say about that other than that really is the most pitiful sight I have maybe ever seen.
I mean, it almost makes me want to cry, and I don't even like Hillary Clinton.
It just, it's so sad, and just embarrassing.
You just, you want to, you cringe into a, into a small, tiny little ball.
Well, this, okay, so that, either that was the most pitiful and saddest thing I've ever seen, or maybe it's actually this, I'm not sure.
There was yesterday, on 9-11, there was a QAnon rally in D.C.
And Will Sommer of the Daily Beast, he took some pictures.
He went to the QAnon rally, took some pictures of it.
Here's one of his pictures showing this rally.
Obviously, as you can see there, very heavily attended.
And that, again, is the QAnon rally.
Now, if you're not familiar with QAnon, it is It's basically the uber conspiracy theory.
All of the conspiracy theorists got together and they said, listen, our theories aren't quite deranged enough.
We need something bigger.
We need something dumber than anything we've conceived before.
And they came up with this mega conspiracy that brings all the conspiracies together.
And as I understand it, the theory is, and it's all very convoluted and as conspiracy theories tend to be, And everyone sort of has their own slight variation and twist on it.
But as I understand it, and all the people that showed up in DC, this is what they believe, that there exists this massive but secretive cabal of Satanists who are running the world and they're pulling the strings, you know, behind the scenes on everything that happens.
The small group of people, they determine everything with their godlike powers.
But, there's someone deep on the inside, someone I guess at the White House or maybe at the Pentagon, I don't know, someone named Q, a code name Q, and he's sending messages through internet message boards letting everybody know about the efforts by Trump and by, I guess, Q. Is Trump supposed to be Q?
I don't know.
Probably not, right?
I don't know.
But, anyway, Trump is working behind the scenes to destroy this cabal of Satanists.
And Q is telling everybody about it on the message boards.
And so Q is the kind of savior figure, along with Trump.
And he tells us all these stories on the message boards, and some people believe it.
Now, of course, in reality, if anyone cares about reality anymore, Q is just an internet troll who made up a story and posted it online, provided no evidence, provided absolutely no reason for anyone to believe it.
He just said it on a message board, and a bunch of people read it and said, yeah, I'll believe that.
Sure.
Why not?
It really is no different from if I were to make an anonymous fake Twitter account and then claim that I have access to a secret government time machine and I am traveling through time and tweeting back and telling everyone what I see.
I send out a tweet like, hey guys, hanging out with Christopher Columbus.
Everyone smells bad.
Which side note, I've always thought that it'd be cool to be in a time machine, but what I always think when I think about time machines, the first thing I think is how bad everyone must have smelled up until about maybe 1950.
And so then I think I actually wouldn't want to travel back in time.
Anyway, um, and then imagine I were to do that.
And then people were to see those tweets and a few people were to say, wow, well, this must be true because it's how someone said it.
Therefore it's true.
How else could someone say something if it isn't true?
It does.
Listen, I'm not trying to join the dog pile on these maniacs, but it does bring to mind a question we've talked about before, but that I find endlessly fascinating, a psychological question of why people go for this stuff.
It's certainly a minority of people, and you can tell from that picture there, it's a rather small minority, but it also is a bigger group of people than you would like to believe.
Like with the flat earth thing.
I talked about the flat earth theory a while ago on the show.
And I discovered that, yeah, of course, the vast majority of people believe that the Earth is round, but there is still a sizable minority of people who actually believe that the Earth is flat and that there's a conspiracy among NASA and all these government agencies to delude us to the fact.
And so that's the question is, why do people, how do people believe this?
Why?
And the answer I think is that we as human beings are amazingly adept at convincing ourselves to believe things
that we want to be true.
And it's hard to understand how that's even possible, even though to some extent we've all done it and we all do it.
And that's why we have to work so hard to be critical thinkers.
And that's why we have to constantly be stopping and reassessing our own beliefs, even our deepest held beliefs.
We have to constantly sort of turn the mirror back on ourselves and look and inspect and evaluate those beliefs.
Because we know that it is so easy for people to believe things that are crazy and to convince themselves of things just because they want those things to be true.
And so it's easy for us to say, well, yeah, obviously people do that.
A lot of people do it.
Everyone does.
But not me.
I don't do that.
That's an everyone else problem, not a me problem.
But we know everyone does it.
And so I think that's why we have to, even if we're not QAnon people, We probably have a few beliefs that if we were to just stop and reevaluate them, we would realize, wow, there is no reason for me to believe this.
I just do.
And so that's why we have to do that.
Now for me, there's, I feel like for my, no, I know that I have this problem too.
Like I said, we all have, we all have this problem.
I also, I guess because I'm neurotic, I also have an opposite problem.
So I have both.
My opposite problem is I'm also very good at convincing myself That things I don't want to be true are true.
So I'm very good at, this is where hypochondria kicks in, where I could, I mean, I could, you tell me about a disease, any disease, and I can convince myself in five minutes that I have it.
I can really convince myself that I have that disease and really believe it.
Even as I realize that what I'm doing, that this is, there's no, I'm just, I'm inventing this, it's all psychosomatic, I can still convince myself of it.
I don't know why I do that, but I do, because I'm also insane.
The human mind is a very strange place.
We'll go to emails, mattwalshow at gmail.com, mattwalshow at gmail.com.
This is from Teresa, says, Dear Matt, I am a 22-year-old woman from Vienna, Austria, and I listen to your show almost every day.
In a recent show, you were talking about rights and the fact that the word is being used too much for things that are luxuries and conveniences rather than rights.
Well, I am a Catholic myself and believe in God-given rights.
I find it hard to argue for the existence of objective rights without invoking a religious belief.
Rights are, by your statement, something that doesn't have to be given to the individual by an authority like the state.
But then, what are rights?
How do we know, without arguing religiously, that we even have rights, like a right to life, etc.?
Does the fact that we are alive conclude that we should have a right to live?
Just decided to play devil's advocate on this one.
Thank you for your great insightful show.
So this is a great example of, and I didn't even plan it this way, but this is a great example of what I just talked about.
This is turning the mirror back around and re-evaluating your own beliefs and the things that you just assumed to be true.
And so you should be commended for that, Teresa.
And that's a good question.
We talk about this idea of rights, we take it for granted, but what actually is it?
Where do we get this idea that people have a right to anything?
Maybe no one has a right to anything.
I think that Yeah, I was talking recently about the book Sapiens by Yuval Harari, and a book that, as I said, I found interesting, even though I disagree with 85% of it.
He argues that rights don't exist.
He says that they're just a cultural myth that we came up with because, for sort of obvious reasons, it makes society work.
Now, that is from his presumably atheist perspective.
And from that perspective, he's right.
I think.
Without God, the idea of rights has no real objective meaning.
A right is then determined culturally and politically, because where else could it come from?
If there is no God, if we live in a material universe, And everything is subject to the laws of nature and there's nothing beyond that.
Then rights are just an idea.
Then it is really a myth.
It's a story.
It's a narrative that we've come up with and we tell each other.
And we agree to it culturally and politically.
Anytime we use the word rights then, we use it in the sense that I would use it if I said something like, you know, I have a right to X amount of money from my employer.
What I would mean by that is, this is the amount we agreed to.
It's not that it's God-given.
It's not that I just could march in and say, I have a right to this money.
No, it's that we sat down, and we agreed to X, and so I have a quote, right to it, because that's what we agreed to.
So in that case, a right would be, it seems to me, an arbitrary thing.
Like, we agreed to this amount, we could have agreed to that amount or that amount.
I mean, this is just the amount we agreed to.
So then rights would be, from the secular perspective, rights, it would seem to me, are arbitrary things that we agree to as a society.
That's what rights become from a secular perspective.
The deeper sense of rights, it seems to me, that's entirely religious.
And see, that's the problem when people, we get into this discussion about was America founded on Christian values and so on and so forth.
It's clear that our founding fathers, many of them, were not Christian.
Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, many of them were deists.
Which is to say, not Christian by any stretch of the imagination.
But they did believe in God.
They did believe in some sort of creator.
And it's clear that although our country wasn't founded on Christianity in the sense that it's not a theocratic state, it was founded on a religious notion of human rights.
There is no other way to put it.
That's what it says in the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration of Independence explains what the founders considered rights to be, and they said rights are things that are endowed by the creator.
If there's no creator, there's no one to endow them, and then rights are, as I said, arbitrary things that we came up with.
And I don't think there's any way around that.
So I guess that's the answer.
If you believe in God, then I think you can talk about rights in a way that is coherent and makes sense.
But you can't really talk about it in an entirely secular way.
Now, if a secularist or atheist out there wants to try to meet the challenge and give me an objective definition for rights that does not rely on anything metaphysical, I would love to hear it.
I don't think you can though.
All right, this is from Andy, says, hi Matt, your reminiscing of 9-11
made me realize that you and I are the same age.
So my crucial question to you is, what are your top five albums of 2003?
Mine are, five, Room on Fire, The Strokes, four, Heavier Things, John Mayer,
three, Shoots to Narrow, The Shins, two, Love is Hell, Ryan Adams,
one, Elephant, The White Stripes.
Second question, when you become our supreme theocratic fascist dictator, will in the club, 50 cent, be vilified and cause for a swift execution when played, or will it be allowed if it's enjoyed ironically?
So I like this question, it's very specific.
2003, I had to go look up what albums were released in 2003 and I found out there are a lot of great albums.
Maybe that's why you chose the year 2003.
A lot of great albums came out in 2003.
Here's what I would say.
Number one, I'm gonna agree with you, Elephant, The White Stripes, great, great rock album.
Two, I'm gonna go Jay-Z, The Black Album.
Three, Decoration Day by the Drive-By Truckers, because I really like the Drive-By Truckers a lot.
Four, the Outkast album that came out the year, I forget the name of it, I didn't write it down.
And then five, I'll go with The Shins, Shoots to Narrow.
Now, when you mention In Da Club, that's just a great classic song, so I know it.
In fact, If you enjoy it, ironically, that's when you're going to be in trouble, because there should be no irony.
That is just a good, solid song.
And I will stick by that to my dying day.
This is from Simon, says, Hi Matt, I am a former atheist and currently a Christian.
I really enjoy C.S.
Lewis's books about Christianity, Screwtape Letters, Problem of Pain, and Mere Christianity are all really insightful books that have strengthened my belief.
Atheists often talk about pain and suffering as proof that there is no loving and good God.
This argument is easy enough to debunk.
In short, I say that our suffering is a result of our abuse of free will.
However, humans suffer for other reasons as well, the most obvious of which are natural disasters.
Us Christians believe that God has orchestrated the flow of events in the universe which has caused the world to be set as it is.
The one anomaly is the free will of human beings.
Natural disasters are obviously not products of humanity's free will.
I have heard Christians argue that God uses natural disasters to punish humans for our sins.
However, infants are among the victims of these catastrophes who are unable to sin for the time being.
I am very curious as to where you stand on this issue and how you argue against these atheists.
You've probably talked about this in the podcast before, so I apologize for asking such a normal question.
Well, Simon, I don't...
I don't think the problem of suffering is easy enough to debunk, as you say.
In fact, I don't think it can be debunked at all.
I wouldn't use the word debunk.
And I suspect that if C.S.
Lewis were alive today, and I think Problem with Pain is a great book, which is one of the best treatments of this question that I think has ever been produced by a Christian.
And one of the things that makes it a great treatment is that it's simple, it's easy to
understand.
There are a lot of Christian philosophers out there who have dealt with this in a more intricate,
denser kind of way, but a lot of those books can be very hard to read and understand.
C.S. Lewis was great at breaking it down, simple concepts, everyone can understand it.
Anyway, but I suspect that if you were to talk to C.S.
Lewis, if he were alive today, he would say that, no, I didn't debunk the problem of suffering or the problem of pain.
Wouldn't use that word at all.
In the sense of, I don't think we can say, well, see, here's why they're suffering.
I've proven it.
Next question.
That's over.
I don't think we can do that.
It is a live question, as it were, and I think it will remain a live question forever, partly for the reason you mentioned in your email, that suffering includes lots of things that are not directly the result of human choices.
Natural disasters are one of them.
Dorian destroyed the Bahamas.
Nobody in the Bahamas did anything to cause that.
That's not how hurricanes work.
We know how weather patterns work now, and we know where they come from.
It's a meteorological phenomenon.
And that's it.
That's how they happen.
And it's not just natural disasters.
I saw something on Twitter yesterday, a picture of a four-year-old child that a mother had posted.
A four-year-old child with leukemia who was leaning over a toilet, vomiting.
And a picture that just, as a parent, absolutely gutted me.
I cannot imagine Going through that.
I cannot imagine my child going through that and me as a parent having to watch helplessly.
It's unthinkable.
It's the worst thing in the world.
I can't even... It takes my breath away just thinking about it.
So, did that four-year-old choose that?
Is that his free will that caused cancer?
Obviously not.
He is suffering entirely apart from his own choices.
And there are many other examples.
There are billions of examples we could list of suffering that people go through that they didn't cause.
So, the free will answer doesn't entirely solve the problem, especially when you take into account the view of God As the sort of ground of all being, which is Paul Tillich's phrase, Tillich was a Protestant theologian, 20th century, would I guess be considered liberal, which I think is maybe an oversimplification, but his ideas with God would be, many of his ideas about God in the Bible would be rejected by most Christians, myself included.
But, if you understand that phrase a certain way, at least this is how I understand the idea of God as the ground of all being, which maybe is not how Tillich understood it.
God is the ground of being in the sense that God is the source of all being.
God is the necessary reality.
Everything else is contingent upon God.
God is what, another way of putting it, God is what holds all things in existence.
So, you know, the old children's song, he's got the whole world in his hands.
In a sense, I think that's true.
You know, in a metaphorical sense.
He's not literally with physical hands holding up the globe, but in a sense, he holds all things in his hands.
Nothing can exist outside of God's will.
There can't be anything existing where God goes, gee, I would really like it if that didn't exist, and I would stop it from existing if I could, but I just can't, my hands are tied.
That can't be, because then God would not be all-powerful.
So if something exists, then it seems to me that God must not only accept that it exists, but must in some way maintain it, must keep it in its being, because otherwise it could not exist.
That is not to say That all bad actions that people do is really God doing them.
I'm not saying that.
But I'm saying all things that exist, all phenomena that is, you know, all natural phenomena, all of that must be held in existence by God.
Right?
I don't see any way around that.
This makes the problem of suffering more profound because then we must ask, you know, when a person has cancer, When a child has cancer, is it not the case that in a certain sense, God is holding that cancer in existence?
What I mean is, God could snap his fingers, metaphorically, and the cancer would go away.
But he doesn't.
Most of the time.
God could have made all four-year-olds impervious to cancer.
Now, that's not—and why didn't he?
And that's not an easy question for Christians to wave off.
I think sometimes we wave this off and we say, wow, that's stupid.
Why would he have done that?
You can't ask these questions.
You can't ask these questions.
And they're good questions that don't have easy answers.
Because after all, if you were God, that's what you would do, right?
And you can say, well, yes, but you're not God, and we cannot understand the ways of God.
That's true, but when we call God loving, We can only understand love as, in some sense, analogous to human love.
If it isn't, you know, if God's love is not, in any sense, analogous to human love, then it doesn't make any sense for us to call Him loving, because then that word doesn't really mean anything in relation to Himself.
So it must be, if we are supposed to understand God as being loving, then His love must be, in some way, analogous to our love, although a perfect version of it.
And so then, We would say, well, you know, why wouldn't God's love prevent four-year-olds from getting cancer?
Because if I could, I would.
So, there are only three ways of answering this.
We talk about the problem of suffering.
As you said, the easiest version is, why does God allow bad people to do bad things?
Okay, free will.
Got that.
I think that's as close to debunking as you can do for that part of the question.
Gotta have free will.
If we don't have free will, then we're just robots.
We're automatons.
What's the point of existence in that case?
And if we can't choose to do evil, then how can we really choose to do good?
How can we choose to love if we can't choose to hate?
All of that.
Great.
Okay.
Element of the problem of suffering is what we're talking about right now natural disasters children with cancer to me that is like where it re that's when you're the rubber really meets the road with this question and That's when all of the trite pat Simple answers just do not work.
So But it seems to me that there there there are three ways of answering this riddle About for instance just using this example of children with cancer, okay?
One there are three possible answers that a person could give one God is not really loving.
Two, God does not exist.
Three, God is loving and does exist, and childhood cancer fits into that picture in some way that we cannot possibly understand or conceive.
As Christians, we give the third answer, right?
But the third answer isn't really an answer exactly.
It's the admission of a lack of answer.
It's the faith that someone other than ourselves has the answer, namely God.
And that's the best we can do, I think.
There is no debunking here.
I think there is only a humble acceptance of our own ignorance and a faith that some deeper truth, some as yet unseen clarity exists outside of our realm of understanding.
I've thought a lot about this problem, as I think you have and a lot of people have.
I've thought a lot about it.
I've read a lot about it.
And my conclusion is that that's the best we can do.
There must be an answer.
I don't know it.
And that's the problem of suffering as I see it.
But, you know, it's something we, you know, that also means that we don't just, I don't think we ever get to a point where we can just put it on the shelf and say, yeah, forget about that.
You continue to think about it and meditate on it and, you know, pray about it and think about it and study it and maybe you'll come to a better conclusion than the one that I've arrived at, which, as I said, is not really a conclusion at all.
Alright, we will leave it on that.
Rather morbid note, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.
Godspeed.
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