¶1Well, the online apologist, atheist, and internet infidel communities are all still taking in the striking conversion of Joe Schmidt from a skepticism, atheistic or agnostic perspective to being Catholic, which has just occurred publicly within the last week. and he was featured a couple days ago on Pints with Aquinus in a three-hour conversation. I admit I haven't watched all of the three-hour conversation, but I do want to spend a couple videos at least talking about Joe's response to a couple big issues. Matt Frad raises the issue of hell and specifically the eternal conscious torment view of hell, which is a Catholic teaching. Uh, and then that's what we're going to look at in this video and then in the next video to look at the issue of uh same-sex relationships or homosexuality, right?
¶2So, let's um start off by just playing the cut, but let me just set it up perhaps. So for those who are not familiar, very important for for Joe was the the impact of various miracle claims, claims of healings within the Catholic tradition, which he viewed as vertically persuasive and also then entailing not just the existence of God, but a general affirmation of Catholic doctrine. So that's in the background here. And I I have some familiarity with this literature. A year or two ago, I interviewed a friend of mine, Travis Dums Day, a very wellrespected philosopher of religion, who wrote a book on the miracle, the of the Marian apparition that Zaiton um I'll link that below if you're interested.
¶3And now now Dums Day is himself orthodox not Catholic. But I but I do think those those phenomena are are fascinating and there is something very interesting about them that that if you look closely at them, they cannot easily be dismissed. But I also think um it's a bit of a leap to say therefore we're okay with adoption of eternal conscious torment forever. for example. So, let's uh take a look anyway at uh how Matt introduces the problem of hell and then I'm just going to pause it at various points listening to Joe's response offering my own commentary as we go.
¶4>> Talk about hell. Let me throw an objection at you. It seems unreasonable to think that someone should suffer for all, you know, eternally for a finite number of sins. Why would a loving God exclude someone from his presence as it were for all eternity for five years? Sure.
¶5Okay, I can be down with that. Someone might say, but this just seems unreasonable. It seems like it was a >> All right, so obviously this is the objection of hell being disproportionate suffering. But just take note of the way that Matt describes hell. Hell is God excluding people from his presence.
¶6Now, it's easy just to think about that and say, "Oh, so hell is just a withdraw. God is just withdrawing his presence in a particular way from creatures and they suffer as a result." And it's easy to think that that's not quite as bad as the image of God actively torturing punishing people and torturing them. A couple things here to to keep in mind. However, first of all, have you ever been out of breath? Like in the sense that you could not catch a breath.
¶7I remember reading during the height of COVID the horrifying description of people that could not get enough oxygen in their lungs and they were suffocating and dying in absolute abject agony um because they could not get enough oxygen in their lungs. I myself remember on one occasion when I was um running and I tripped, you know, going cross country, I tripped. I ended up breaking a rib. I hit the ground so hard, but I also had the wind knocked out of me. And for 20, 30 seconds or whatever, I was gasping.
¶8I was trying to breathe and just that that fear that came with that, the agony that came with that. And I say that because I want to give you an example here, an analogy for the way that Matt described hell in this brief moment here of God withdrawing something. Imagine that a person is in a room and you say, "We're not going to punish you. We're not going to torture you. We'll just withdraw the oxygen in the room." That is a lot.
¶9Like that is the barest analogy of what hell is like on the conception that Matt has just given. It might seem kindler and gentler. It's not. On this conception, human God is the source of all life. God is is like oxygen times a million for creatures, for human creatures.
¶10When you withdraw oxygen, people suffer absolute agony as they suffocate. If you withdraw God from people, imagine the agony that they would suffer because the the suffering that comes with the withdrawal of oxygen is just the barest of analogies. That is what Matt is talking about here. whether he recognizes it or not for God to withdraw God's presence from creatures but still uphold them in being because God concurs with all creatures uh preserves them in existence every moment which is why theologians have often noted that the cratio nihilo god bringing everything out of nothing also in a sense creation every moment is sustained in absolute being almost out of nothing not literally but the cratio continues or God continuing to uphold all creatures in existence every moment that will always continue. But God withdrawing God's sustaining presence and life from people is like the withdrawal of oxygen.
¶11What a horrifying way. What a horrifying thing to experience. And then the way that Matt here just talks in a very casual bllythe way about well maybe they could suffer that unimaginable agony of having oxygen withdrawn from them for 5 years but forever. And I want to say I absolutely agree the horrifying nature of this notion that people would be tortured by the withdrawal of God's oxygen forever. But even for 5 years what would that be like?
¶12belief born out of a more brutal time, especially when you read the likes of Dante and others that we've kind of we've actually progressed in. We we realize now that uh that God's love is greater than our sin. And if God's to be victorious, then surely it's not going to be the case that most people are going to be or even many people are going to be damned. All right. So the other thing there that I want to highlight that Matt said in terms of setting up the question for Job is was this doctrine of eternal conscious torment of God torturing people forever either through actively pouring out wrath upon them or by more passively withdrawing his presence which as I've said is like withdrawing oxygen from a room is are those conceptions not born of a more brutal inhumane time and I would Of course, there's excellent evidence for exactly that.
¶13I mean, the Catholic Church was torturing people in the 14th or 15th or 16th century. So were Protestants. I mean, Protestants were no angels. Just read the martyr's mirror um to look at how Protestants treated Menanites, for example. Catholics and Protestants were both brutish in their treatment of other living creatures, of other Christians, torturing them, killing them in ways that anybody today would recognize to be cruel and inhumane.
¶14So whether you read the book of martyrs, Fox's book of martyrs or whether you read accounts of martyrs mirror from the anabaptist or whether you read Catholic accounts, every Christian in an earlier period was doing not every Christian but Christians why they were doing heinous things to other Christians. In that context, is it not to be expected that our theological conceptions of the afterlife might be impacted by that brutish ethical worldview? Now, I know there going to be some people here are going to say, "Oh, you have a what C. Lewis called the chronological snobbery that you just assume that your views are better because they're the most recent or something like that or you're benited by a modern sentimentalism." It's possible. It's possible that my views on these issues are flawed.
¶15Of course, we're all flawed human beings, but on the face of it, it certainly seems to me that it's wrong to torture people. Um, it's wrong to kill them in the cruel and inhumane ways described in Fox's book of martyrs or martyrs mirror. And thus I do believe that I have insights, moral insights today living in the 21st century that those Christians behaving in what I believe to be a brutish manner in the 16th century did not have. >> And if they were wrong there, it increases the likelihood that they were also wrong when they were theologizing about postumous judgment. And then have you read uh I don't believe in any of the things I'm saying just to everyone who's watching.
¶16Uh have you read uh who's the uh orthodox philosopher >> David Bentley Hart. >> Yeah. Brilliant fellow but who clearly is a staunch opponent of eternal conscious torment. What would your kind of response to what I said be? And then maybe if you can flesh out maybe a more sophisticated argument that David Bentley Hart has put forth and why you disagree.
¶17>> Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I haven't looked into David Bentley's David Bentley Hart's stuff in too much detail. Um, I've looked into some of like the um like more mainstream like philosophy of religion, academic literature on this. Um, but yeah, so I mean, hell was one of my biggest barriers, one of my biggest objections along with various other moral problems, you know, with homosexuality and things like that.
¶18Um, so yeah, how did I work through this? Well, two things to say at the outset. One is that even if I don't have a response to the problem of hell, um >> there's just so much evidence that just utterly inundated me for Catholicism >> that basically I just felt like it was irrational for me to cling to those objections, especially when >> Okay, I just find this to be really unsatisfactory. It may be that u these various miracle incidents that uh that that Joe has has read about and studied and been compelled by provide evidence that God exists. Maybe they provide evidence that the Catholic Church is somehow very central to God's revelation or authoritative in some way.
¶19Does it follow that the Catholic Church in their current understanding of eternal conscious torment cannot be questioned or that these are not significant issues? And I just I don't find that to be satisfactory at all. I find there are still significant objections to the doctrine of hell which might reasonably lead a Catholic to question current church teaching on the doctrine of hell even if they are a committed Catholic. This idea that you've got to go from complete skeptic to accepting everything the Catholic Church teaches without question is I think a pretty disturbing and implausible one. I mean, like again, imagine that you're sitting there with our Lord before he's crucified at the last supper.
¶20You've seen all of his miracles. He's raised people from the dead. You've seen them with your own eyes. He's raised people from the dead. He's given sight to the blind.
¶21And then you watch him get crucified in bloody fashion. Maybe you even watch him get interred in the tomb. And then you're sitting there in the upper room with the apostles and he's there in bodily form. And he invites you to touch him. And you reach out and you literally poke his side.
¶22You're feeling his side >> and he's breathing on you. He's like literally breathing. It's a very bodily thing. And then he's with you for 40 days and he's eating fish and he's going out there and he's like, "Simon, do you love me?" And like you're hearing all this. You're there and you're you've seen all of this.
¶23Imagine that happened. And imagine as is the case that Christ teaches that there is everlasting punishment in hell for people who are unrepentant mortal sinners. I think if you saw all of that, it would be ridiculous to think, "No, I'm not going to go with this Christ guy because I've got some." >> Okay. So, first of all, I just know the way that Joe speaks here, it's like a preacher, right? Trying to woo and draw people in with his sermon illustration, which is fine, but he kind of he slips into this.
¶24So he gives this long extended discourse on experiencing the risen Jesus and then he just slips in there and Jesus taught eternal conscious torment. Well then should you believe him? Okay perhaps. So did he teach eternal conscious torment? Is the Catholic Church currently correct in its understanding of what Jesus taught?
¶25That's precisely the issue. The fact that you give a long discourse about Jesus breathing on you and watching him eat fish and so on is really neither here nor there to whether we ought to interpret what the Catholic Church's interpretation is of Jesus's teaching as being correct. Those just different issues. So it just seems to me like a a def complete deflection here. And of course there's extended literature on precisely these issues on precisely how you should interpret what is in commonly in English translations eternal punishment in Matthew 25:41-46.
¶26Is that really eternal punishment or in the Greek if it's a punishment of Ionio pertaining to an age is that in fact eternal at all? Is the purpose there to teach about a road map of posumous judgment? Or is it simply in fact just to teach you ought to treat people who are on the margins by loving them and if you do then that is a sign that you are correctly in my will. The whole issue is how do you interpret Jesus's teaching? But Joe just begs the question by assuming oh and we're just going to assume that he taught eternal conscious torment >> like high fallutin abstract theoretical objection that I can't quite work through with hell even though I've seen this guy raise people from the dead give sight to the blind I've now just like interacted with him after I saw him interred in the tomb like okay maybe maybe there's some sort of story that I'm unaware of that but >> okay uh the other thing he says here is he characterizes the objections people have to hell as some high fallutin.
¶27He says some high fallutin objection. It's like a really abstract maybe questionable dubious metaphysical or metaethical objection. It's very questionable, very flimsy. It's not that at all. What it is is a clear, sober reflection on what this doctrine entails.
¶28And even on the gentler version that Matt gave us of God just withdrawing his presence for eternity, I said that is analogous but even much worse than withdrawing oxygen from a person in a room so they can no longer breathe. That is not some abstract high flutin conception. That is you asking to step into the scenario of forever struggling and grasping to catch a breath. And whether you think that is consistent with a perfectly loving God visiting judgment on someone, I've just got to be docel to this guy because he has been manifestally vindicated by God. And that just overcomes my abstract theoretical objection.
¶29Like again and I mean the sort of evidence that we have for these Catholic miracles like we are like one person removed from palpated. >> Sorry. Okay. So he says we must be docel to Jesus. Well you definitely have to trust.
¶30But I think something that that is absent from Joe and his framing here is a recognition that in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the tradition is defined as those who wrestle with God. That is what the name Israel means. It means to wrestle with God. It was the name that Jacob got from God when he wrestled through the night with the angel of the Lord. And that is a incredibly powerful metaphor from the Jewish tradition.
¶31It is one of the great gifts of the Jewish tradition to the world to point out that piety, closeness with God is manifested not simply in being quote unquote docile, but rather in actively wrestling. That's what Moses did. That's what Abraham did when they questioned and challenged God. this idea that you're going to simply accept eternal conscious torment without question because that is what the church teaches your Catholic church even though every fiber in your being may scream as it does for me against that doctrine is being morally heinous withdrawing oxygen from people for eternity so they forever struggle to breathe and can't breathe. What a horrifying notion that is.
¶32The thought that no, you must be docile and accept this doctrine as it's been given to us rather than to be free to question and challenge it. I think this is something very much absent in Joe's theological reflections here, which I find to be unfortunate. >> A reduplication of Christ's passion wounds. We have direct eyewitness testimony from like a bunch of people. We have photographs.
¶33We have videos of Padre Pio. I also have a photograph the day that he died and he didn't have scars despite the fact that it was like deep wounds for 50 years naturalistically inexplicable. We have photos. So I had to accommodate myself to the facts. >> Mhm.
¶34>> I had to accommodate myself to the facts. And so basically the evidence I thought was very similar in kind uh and very forceful, very similar in kind to the sort of evidence I would have if I saw Christ basically with my own eyes uh and then Christ taught hell. And in that case, I should not be clinging to my own um object. >> I I just think it's interesting. Again, he goes on and on and on about things like the um the miracle claims that have persuaded him in the Catholic Church.
¶35Gives incredible detail to that. And then he sits he slips in there and Christ taught hell. Like Christ taught eternal conscious torment. Well, says you. What is actually going on here?
¶36I I so I I guess what is going on here is Joe is reasoning something like this. If the saints uh if there were miraculous events, miracles involving saints related to or within the context of Catholic doctrine, Catholic community, then that thereby affirms all Catholic teaching as authoritative and correct. And I just think that doesn't follow. I think that God very well could have performed miracles within a Catholic context without thereby intending for that to affirm as correct and unquestionable all Catholic doctrine including doctrine about eternal conscious torment. So ultimately all of this comes down to Joe repeatedly just slipping in there.
¶37Jesus taught eternal conscious torment which again I would say is question begging because there are many Christians for good reasons. David Bentley Hart certainly being one of them who would question exactly that assumption. >> I just think okay there's some way to respond to this. Maybe I don't know how. Maybe it's difficult but listen philosophy is difficult.
¶38You put a 100 philosophers in a room and you're going to get 307 answers to a philosophical question or puzzle because and you know they're applying methods with applying their uh taking their intuitions and trying to get to verdicts but they just radically go astray all the time. So like humans were not the greatest at these abstract speculative theoretical philosophizing and so it wouldn't be surprising at all if I just am making some mistake in my assessment of the hell arguments because those were just like >> okay now there's here's another kind of argument. So he's he has been peeling appealing to the authority of the church based upon miraculous events and that's been his sort of primary response here. Now he's um arguing for a sort of radical epistemic humility infallibility about moral intuitions and our ability to reason philosophically. a different kind of argument.
¶39And I've already noted, yeah, I could be wrong about something like that, that it's wrong to torture people forever, for example. But you always want to ask, are the arguments against the intuition stronger than the arguments for the intuition? Or maybe not the arguments for the intuition simply, but even just the intuition itself. You can give me arguments that u to to use the example that that uh Eleanor Stump has given that I've often cited. You could use arguments to try to argue in principle for the the moral permissibility, the ethical propriety of Mangala's uh experiments on twins.
¶40these horrific Nazi experiments. You could argue maybe not that the experience experiments themselves were successful, but you could argue in principle philosophically for them. And I I'm just going to say that um I'm pretty skeptical that any argument you could ever come up with would be stronger than my intuitions that such actions were morally abominable. Just like I mean if Peter Singer argues in principle on a utilitarian ethic for the defense of having sex with animals which he has done right Zuhilia as it's been called. He could argue for Zilia and I'm going to just say I'm going to venture to say without even having looked at the arguments that I'm skeptical that any argument he could come up with would be stronger than my intuition that such actions are inherently wrong.
¶41I I I would think or hope that Joe would be sympathetic with that, that he would recognize the power of intuitions against having sex with animals, would kind of be a defeater defeater for any arguments or likely be a defeater defeater for any arguments you might want to profer in favor of having sex with animals. But then I would I would wonder why couldn't he similarly recognize that the strength of intuitions against torturing people forever withdrawing oxygen from them which is God's withdrawal of his presence from them would be something equally horrific to which we might our intuitions might be a defeater defeater even against the miracle claims and the current teaching of the Catholic Church. It's theoretical speculative philosophy and I don't know maybe there's something I'm missing and still I wanted to dent its evidential force in my mind and there were various things that did that but fundamentally >> how I got over it was I am a finite limited fallible creature. Um God has manifestly vindicated his church and maybe I don't know exactly how to respond to it but I submit my intellect and will to what is being manifestly promag promugated to me as truth with divine stamp of approval. So, that's like the fundamental response that I have now.
¶42>> Okay, I'm I'm going to stop there. Um, he does say more and um I'll I'll link the the uh this exchange below so you can watch the whole thing. But really, those are the two big things. It's like I'm fallible. God has confirmed the church.
¶43I'm going to accept what the church says. I'm just going to leave it, I guess, to all of you to think whether you think that's an adequate response. I will say maybe one more thing that later on in in the um in in this exchange. Joe is also going to explore some possibilities to defend hell by suggesting maybe it's really it's not as bad as we think. He's going to say, well, maybe you know the the level of suffering is much lower than we think and so on.
¶44Uh, I think all of those are are frankly just attempts to uh they're tacid acknowledgments of how abominable the doctrine is and then attempts to refashion the doctrine into something else which is consistent with church teaching technically and yet somewhat aligned with our profound moral intuitions against the immoral egregiousness of the doctrine. And so, for example, um I mean, he's going to say, well, maybe there's just like everyone has 2,000 units of suffering and they begin bad, but then they forever they they go they they decrease by half every year. So, let's say your first year in hell, you have uh one doer. I know that um I've seen like utilitarians sometimes have talked about suffering and pleasure, a suffering unit being a dollar and a pleasure unit being a heaton. So let's say everybody gets $2,000 for eternity units of suffering and the first year or thousand years or whatever in hell you get one dollar.
¶45The next thousand years you get half a dollar. And then it keeps going down and down so that ultimately everybody in eternity will only have $2,000, but it will never end because it's always going down by half every year or something like that. And again, I just think those are attempts to try to make this doctrine fit with with our conceptions. But look, if you're going to take, sorry, with our moral intuitions, but if you're going to look at what Jesus says about hell, if you're going to look at what he says about weeping and nashing of teeth, outer darkness, a fiery furnace, uh if you're going to look at what John says in Revelation with these images of a lake of fire in Revelation 14 and 20, and if you're going to begin with the assumption that these are reflecting an eternal, never- ending torment, you simply don't find this kind of kinder, gentler version of hell in those images. So, if you really are concerned with an eternal conscious torment hermeneutic of Jesus of the book of Revelation, you're not going to find it in this kinder, gentler hell.
¶46Because these images of hell are all unmitigated horror. They're not slightly boring. They're they're not just a little depressing. They are absolute horror, terror, an image, a metaphor of being thrown into fire and writhing in flames forever is not the dolord decreasing by half every year for eternity. So I think really Jay Bucheski is a well-known Catholic philosopher and he has some pretty strong language that he talks about when he was a nihilist.
¶47He talked about nihilists knowing in some sense through natural law, knowing that there is objective good and evil, objective right and wrong, and yet making themselves stupid because they were committed to neihilism. They had to somehow convince themselves that there is in fact no objective good or evil, right or wrong. And I have some sympathy with that kind of critique, but I can't help but think it applies here as well. That you try to convince yourself that the doctrine of God submitting people to eternal conscious torture, withdrawal of oxygen makes sense. And so you like will say, "Well, I'm a fallible human being and look at the miracles of the church." And then you're going to say, "Maybe hell isn't that bad.
¶48It's just kind of a a declining suffering forever, which doesn't show a serious engagement with the eternal conscious torment interpretation of the New Testament documents. Just doesn't. So you end up kind of selfdeceiving yourself because you really want to be a Catholic and accept everything as the Catholic Church currently teaches. What I would be much happier with is this Joe saying I'm a Catholic. I'm compelled by Catholic doctrine.
¶49I'm not compelled by eternal conscious torment. However, uh maybe he's more compelled by Hanzer Rambazar's hopeful universalism. I think he should be which is consistent with Catholic doctrine and then to be a little more skeptical about some of these doctrines rather than to spiritualize what he said was essentially his obesence, his complete acceptance of things. You know, as Ignatius of Loyola said, even if the church says white is black, I would believe it. Well, how about recognizing um this theme that I talked about in the Judeo-Christian tradition of wrestling with God and wrestling with doctrine and not necessarily accepting a doctrine that is abominable and trying to make yourself believe it just because you've become a Catholic.
¶50So, those are my thoughts on um Joe Schmidt's conversion to Catholicism in relation to the doctrine of hell.