¶1It's ridiculous to cling to those moral intuitions and not submit yourself to Christ. He's been manifestally vindicated by God. He's been accredited to you as a divine legate. So submit your intellect to him. [music] Don't cling to your own understanding.
¶2But our minds are indeed broken. Our intuitions are indeed broken. According to the theodysy, God gave some group of non-human moral agents, perhaps [music] angels, my favorite approach, or perhaps aliens, the power to intervene in the evolution of life on our planet [music] and the foresight to know that if they didn't, things would go badly and evolution would be chalk full of suffering. And you might ask, well, why did God give the angels or aliens this freedom and role? Like, especially given that it risked so much evil.
¶3Well, because doing so enables lots of profound goods. Catholicism is committed to absolute deontology. So certain [music] things are absolutely categorically prohibited under any circumstances. They are intrinsically evil or evil regardless of circumstances or [music] consequences. For example, masturbation is not just impermissible, but it's impermissible under any circumstances, even if doing so would save your own life or the lives of arbitrarily many other people.
¶4I know you're excited to hear me talk about Joe's opinion on masturbation. I'll get to that, I promise. Because strange as it sounds, that particular sensitive topic is actually [music] part of a much broader problem I see with the kind of moral submission to Rome that Joe is now practicing and encouraging other people to practice as well. This is my second video on Joe Schmidt's conversion to Catholicism. This time, I want to talk about why I think this moral surrender to Rome is a bad move.
¶5And like I said in my first video, this ultimately isn't just about Joe. It's about all of us. I think we should treat Joe as a cautionary example and ask what we can learn from what happened to him. None of us is completely protected from this kind of drastic change in judgment. You might think you are more clear-headed than Joe, but the former Joe was pretty clear-headed, too.
¶6He was rational, intelligent, philosophically sophisticated and eventually became a PhD student in philosophy at Princeton. So if someone like Joe can go through this kind of transformation, I don't think any of us should assume that could never happen to me. Put us in the right situation, expose us to the right experiences and influences, and our standards and intuitions can change, too. Now, for those of you who came here expecting me to beat Joe up and tear him apart, I should probably give you a heads up. You might be a little disappointed.
¶7When I was making the first video, I admit there was a part of me that wanted to debunk this guy and somehow smack him back into his former self. [snorts] I think part of that reaction came from the fact that I genuinely had trouble processing how drastic his change had been. And again, my main problem was never simply that Joe became Catholic. My problem was what I saw as a lowering of his intellectual standards and especially his willingness to submit his intellect and moral judgment to the Catholic magisterium. He's now defending Catholicism with arguments that I sometimes find surprisingly sloppy and in a few cases frankly absurd.
¶8But something happened after I released the first video that pleasantly surprised me. Joe actually responded and he acknowledged that some of the statements I criticized from his interviews were imprecise and didn't accurately reflect what he meant. He offered corrections and said he would try to be more careful in the future. Now to be clear, he didn't really change his mind on the underlying issues. He was clarifying his position, but I still think that matters.
¶9His willingness to accept criticism, correct himself publicly, and say, [snorts] "Yeah, I could have stated that better is refreshing to me. That is a good sign that the former Joe is still there somewhere." And above all, he invited me for a drink if I ever in town. So, apparently, we are buddies now. That doesn't mean I'm going to stop criticizing him. In this video, I still want to explain why I think it is unjustified to outsource your moral judgment to a perceived religious authority, especially when the authority starts asking you to override moral judgments that previously seemed extremely obvious to you.
¶10But I don't want to do that by trashing Joe's character or pretending that his conversion somehow made him stupid. I don't think it did. And when I say there is still hope, I don't mean hope that he converts back to agnosticism. I mean I hope Joe retains the intellectual rigor that made his work so valuable in the first place. In fact, I think doing that would make him a much more credible Catholic evangelist.
¶11Anyway, let's get started. I want to go straight to what I think is the core issue and the most troubling part of Joe's surrender of his own moral judgment. It's ridiculous to cling to those moral intuitions and not submit yourself to Christ. He's been manifestally vindicated by God. He's been accredited to you as a divine legate.
¶12So submit your intellect to him. Don't cling to your own understanding. Moral intuitions are just overwhelmingly susceptible to cognitive penetration. I mean, I've just been able to like throughout this process, my moral intuitions have themselves just literally changed. Like the way things seem to me changed.
¶13They're so malleable. It's really easy to talk yourself into an intuition or talk yourself out of an intuition. So like I don't know. This just does not seem to be the sort of evidence that stacks up against leg. No, sorry, no leg, leg, you know, like that sort of thing.
¶14>> Let me pause here and clarify what Joe means by leg no leg. He is referring to the miracle of Kalanda, the story of an ampute supposedly growing his leg back. As a side note, I think Matt Deahanti has thoroughly debunked that miracle and I'll put a link to his video in the description. But Joe's basic point here is easy enough to understand. Suppose you encounter extremely strong physical evidence for a miracle, something like an amputated leg genuinely growing back.
¶15You shouldn't dismiss that evidence simply because the religion associated with it teaches something you find morally objectionable like hell. Your moral intuition may be much less reliable than the physical evidence sitting in front of you. >> Catholicism seems to have internal explanation for why I would have those intuitions and would go astray. Why would have intuitions about the permissibility of homosexuality? So this is called like a debunking explanation of intuitions.
¶16Basically like if you adopt a theory which goes against certain intuitions, it's good to have a kind of explanation by the lights of your own theory why people would go wrong with respect to their intuitions. And that actually mitigates the evidential force of those intuitions because then it's not surprising under the theory that you would go you would go astray with respect to those intuitions. And I just think that Catholicism has plausible internal explanations, plausible debunking explanations of these contrary intuitions about hell and about homosexuality and whatnot. Namely, the knowetic effects of sin, both the original sin and personal sin. So, it's just like I think it's uns we have darkened intellects.
¶17They're not totally destroyed, right? We still have a natural aptitude to discover things and to know things, but our minds are indeed broken. Our intuitions are indeed broken. I grant that moral intuitions generally carry some evidential weight. they they do carry evidential force at least presumptively or defeasably.
¶18My goal is ultimately to temper the evidential force such that like the empirical considerations should win out. From one angle, I can see where Joe is coming from. If we witness something apparently miraculous and the evidence is genuinely compelling, it makes little sense to say, well, I refuse to believe that happened because this religion contains homosexuality. That would be bad reasoning. I can't speak for every skeptic, but if I am not convinced that a miracle happened, it won't be because I dislike some moral teaching associated with it.
¶19It will be because I think the miracle claim itself lacks sufficient evidence. Those are separate questions. So yes, when we assess whether a miracle actually happened, we should try not to let our moral indignation toward the religion interfere with our assessment of the evidence. But this is where I part company with Joe. Even if we temporarily set our moral intuitions aside when evaluating the miracle claim, why should we also surrender our moral judgment when evaluating the teaching supposedly authenticated by that miracle?
¶20Those are two very different steps. I can grant for the sake of argument that something genuinely supernatural happened and still ask whether the moral message associated with it is actually good. In fact, there are several additional inferences Joe needs before he gets from something extraordinary happened to therefore submit your moral judgment. He has to establish that God caused it, that God intended it as a vindication of this particular authority or teaching and that we have correctly understood what God was supposedly endorsing. A miracle, even a real one, doesn't automatically do all of that work.
¶21And Christians already understand this when they deal with other religions. Take the latter day sense. when they appeal to the witnesses of the golden plates. Christian apologists don't always stop at saying the testimony just isn't good enough. They also ask what kind of person Joseph Smith was and whether his life and teachings gave us reason to think that whatever supernatural phenomena surrounded him actually came from God.
¶22Joe does exactly that here. It's called fruits test. >> And the third option is like oh it's just it's just prednatural. So it's demonic forces doing it. And of course, you know, like within our tradition, we have like we have various biblical tests by which we can tell whether or not someone is >> Yeah.
¶23It's not it's not an arbitrary explanation we throw out there. >> No, like there's Jesus gives us the fruits test. So, you know them by their fruits, right? So, like uh is it someone who is a serial liar, a serial fornicator, a serial adulterer who's like claiming that um God I know you know you know who I'm talking about. I know exactly what I'm talking about.
¶24He's like literally claiming that uh polygamy is like an abomination to God, but then is like having polygamous relationships think at least 33 wives. >> Notice what is happening here. When Joe considers a non-atholic supernatural claim, he is perfectly willing to use moral considerations as evidence for determining its source. The miracle might be genuinely preternatural, but the character and behavior of the person associated with it can count against the hypothesis that it came from God. It can even become evidence for a demonic explanation.
¶25But compare that with what happens when Catholicism is on the table. If Catholic teaching conflicts with your moral intuitions about hell, homosexuality, or something else, Joe tells us that those intuitions are malleable. They are cognitively penetrable. Our intellects are darkened by sin. Catholicism itself gives us a debunking explanation for why those moral intuitions went wrong and therefore the empirical miracle evidence should win out.
¶26That seems like a serious inconsistency in the method. With Joseph Smith, moral judgment is allowed to help us evaluate the supernatural evidence. With Catholicism, supernatural evidence is used to undermine the reliability of the moral judgment. So what is the rule here? When exactly are my moral judgments reliable enough to tell me this prophet's behavior is so morally corrupt that these supernatural events may be demonic?
¶27And when am I supposed to say my moral judgment is probably corrupted by sin? So I should submit to the authority authenticated by the miracle. That distinction needs an independent criterion. Otherwise the standard starts to look uneven. [snorts] Moral intuitions are allowed to count against a rival religion.
¶28But when they count against Catholicism, Catholicism itself is used to explain them away. And I think the fruits test creates another problem if Joe wants to make it this straightforward. The Bible itself gives us people who were genuinely empowered by God despite having pretty ugly personal lives. Samson is an obvious example. The text repeatedly attributes his extraordinary strength to the spirits of the Lord.
¶29Yet Samson was hardly a model of moral character. He slept with the prostitutes, pursued relationships recklessly, acted out of vengeance, and repeatedly behaved in ways that were impulsive and destructive. Yet, Christians don't conclude, "Look at the fruits. Samson's supernatural strength must have come from demons. They make room for a more complicated possibility.
¶30God can work through a deeply flawed person." And the same problem appears with David. David is one of the most important figures in the Old Testament. Yet he committed adultery with Bath Sheba and arranged for her husband to be killed. That doesn't lead Christians to throw out the psalms attributed to him or conclude that his role in Israel was demonic. Of course, Joe could say Joseph Smith is different.
¶31Fine, but that is exactly the point. You now need to tell us what the relevant difference is. A latter day sense can simply respond, Joseph Smith was a deeply flawed prophet. So were biblical figures. God still used them.
¶32And remember, Latter-day Saints don't worship Joseph Smith as the son of God. They regard him as a prophet. So pointing out that he sinned even seriously does not by itself established that any supernatural phenomena associated with him must have been demonic. This is why I don't think the fruit test gives Joe the clean sorting mechanism he seems to want. If serious moral failure can coexist with genuine divine activity in Samson and David, then serious moral failure by itself cannot settle the source of Joseph Smith's supernatural claims.
¶33And it's not just that, it gets worse. If original sin corrupts our moral sense, then presumably it can also affect our reasoning. And that is exactly what Joe says. And I just think that Catholicism has plausible internal explanations, plausible debunking explanations of these contrary intuitions about hell and about homosexuality and whatnot. Namely, the knowetic effects of sin, both original sin and personal sin.
¶34But our ability to see and apply moral truth is deeply wounded intellectually and valitionally by both original and personal sin. Right? We're we are in a postfall world mired in the knowetic or intellectual effects of sin. We have disordered desires and darkened intellects. So if Catholicism is true, it wouldn't be surprising if most people, including sincere, smart, and reflective people, have distorted or unreliable moral intuitions, at least in certain restricted domains.
¶35But now we have a problem. How did Joe determine in the first place that the Catholic miracles are genuine, that they come from God, and that comparable miracles in other religions do not vindicate those religions. He had to use the very intellect he now describes as darkened and broken. Joe spends hours making extremely fine grand judgments about historical testimony, miracle reports, probability, competing explanations, whether something is natural, supernatural, demonic, vindictory, non vindictory, and exactly which doctrines a particular miracle supposedly confirms. And after all that reasoning leads him to Catholicism, Catholicism then gives him a reason to downgrade his own reasoning whenever it points the other way.
¶36That is where I think the framework starts undermining itself. I'm not saying a person who believes in original sin has to believe that human reason is totally unreliable. Joe explicitly says that it isn't. The problem is inconsistency. He trusts his intellect enough to make a long chain of controversial judgments that supposedly establish Catholicism.
¶37But once Catholicism is established, when his moral judgment continues to tell him that something like hell or some Catholic moral teaching seems deeply wrong, suddenly that judgment can be discounted because his intellect is darkened by sin. So apparently the broken intellect is reliable enough to get you into Rome. But once you are inside Rome, its objections can be explained away by Rome. That is a very convenient arrangement. And frankly, even the doctrine Joe appeals to here is not nearly as straightforwardly biblical as he makes it sound.
¶38I could spend an entire video questioning the doctrine of original sin. But just briefly, one of the classic issues comes up in Romans 5:12. Augustine was working from the Latin wording in qu omnis picavverant which can be read as in whom all sinned meaning that humanity somehow sinned in Adam but the Greek phrase if whole pantheism is much more naturally translated because all sinned that is a very different reading now that doesn't by itself settle the entire doctrine of original sin there are other passages other arguments and centuries of theological interpretation involved. My point is that the doctrine is far from straightforward, especially once you bring evolution into the picture. [snorts] Joe himself accepts evolution, which already makes the connection between all of humanity and a single historical atom much less obvious.
¶39If humans emerged from a larger ancestral population, you then have additional questions about who exactly Adam was, what happened to him, and how his act supposedly resulted in a damaged intellect being inherited by every human being afterward. Catholic theologians have proposed ways of answering those questions, of course, but that just reinforces my point. This is a theological construction that requires argument, not some obvious biblical fact Joe can simply invoke to explain away our moral intuitions. And I would encourage anyone interested in this issue to actually study the biblical texts and the history for themselves rather than simply assuming that the church's interpretation must be correct because the church says it is. But let me be clear about something.
¶40I'm not claiming that our reasoning or our moral intuitions are perfect. Obviously, they are not. Human beings rationalize. We inherit cultural biases. We become emotionally attached to beliefs.
¶41We can be spectacularly wrong. That is precisely why skepticism, intellectual humility, and self-correction matter. [snorts] You hold your conclusions with a degree of tentiveness. You keep looking at contrary evidence and when you discover that you were wrong, you change your mind. But what Joe is describing goes beyond ordinary intellectual humility.
¶42There is a major difference between saying my judgment could be wrong. So I should keep examining the evidence and saying my judgment still tells me this is wrong but an authority I have already accepted tells me that my judgment is corrupted. So I should stop trusting it and submit. The second move is not skepticism. It is outsourcing your rational and moral judgment to an authority.
¶43And in this case, that authority isn't God speaking directly to Joe. It is a human institution claiming divine protection from error while simultaneously teaching Joe that his own intellect has been damaged by sin whenever it resists that institution's teachings. Funny how that works. My point is that it is one thing to use your reason and intellect to judge that a miracle really happened and with additional arguments that God is the best explanation for it. I think that kind of reasoning is at least possible.
¶44You still have to rule out other explanations and establish why you think it was God rather than some other supernatural agent. But it is another thing to reach the end of that process and conclude that your own intellectual and moral judgments are darkened. So when they conflict with a human authority, you should submit to that authority even when what it teaches still seems deeply wrong to you. Now you might hear that and think that's crazy. Why would anybody accept that?
¶45But there are some important nuances here and I want to represent Joe fairly. He does say that we should submit our intellect and moral judgment to Christ and by extension to the Catholic Church. But he also makes clear that there are limits. Hypothetically, if the magisterian taught something blatantly absurd or morally outrageous enough, he would not simply accept it. Here is how he puts it.
¶46And this is where it starts to get interesting. I think it is positively irrational if you see all of that to then be like, "Oh, yeah, but he had some teachings on morality that I just I sort of disagree with." >> Go against what popular culture say. >> Yeah, go against what popular culture says. And again, like it's not like at least to me, it's not like he's saying that um good is evil or, you know, like it is per you are morally obliged to recreationally torture children for fun or like 1 plus 1 equals 12. >> Like okay, that that that's discrediting.
¶47You wouldn't like you wouldn't suddenly conclude that oh, I guess I don't know that like recreationally torturing babies for fun is wrong. like no no that's not what would happen. You would submit to Christ's lordship and accept his moral teachings. And so what that shows is that the Catholic Church's teachings on hell and morality which we are by stipulation assuming that Christ is teaching in this hypothetical these are not beyond the fixed point limit. >> So this is where I think some of Joe's skepticism is still intact.
¶48There is a limit to what he still submits to. He calls it the fixed point limit. If a teaching crosses that limit, something like good is evil, 1 + 1 equals 12, or you are morally required to torture babies for fun, then Joe takes that as discrediting. Presumably, at that point, he would have to reconsider something. Maybe he misunderstood the teaching.
¶49Maybe he misunderstood the miracle. Maybe the supposed revelation didn't come from God after all. So despite all the talk about submitting his moral intuitions, Joe has not actually abandoned them completely. Some judgments remain so secure that they function as an ultimate check on the authority itself. And that raises what I think is the really difficult question.
¶50Why do eternal hell, the problem of evil and other Christian teachings Joe once found deeply immoral, unjust or unloving fall safely below this fixed point limit while recreational torture of babies falls above it? What independent criterion draws that line? This is where things starts getting much less clear. >> [snorts] >> Joe tries to explain the boundary by saying that fixed points are beliefs whose denial would undermine our ability to know anything at all or at least drives us towards radical skepticism. >> Moral intuitions against Catholicism certainly are not fixed points whose denial would lead us into skepticism or like morian facts that we know better than anything to the contrary.
¶51>> But I don't think simply naming the boundary solves the problem. My first question is why should that be the boundary? Why should we set the threshold as low as possible where only beliefs whose denial would plunge us into radical skepticism are protected? Why not set it somewhat higher? And how exactly do we identify what crosses the line?
¶52Joe's example is recreationally torturing babies for fun. Okay, but which part of that makes it a fixed point? Is it because they are babies? Because it is torture? because it is recreational.
¶53Because it is done for fun. Suppose the alleged divine authority tells you that you must torture babies but not for fun. It is supposedly necessary for some mysterious greater good that you cannot understand. Does that now fall below the fixed point limit? What if it commands recreational torture of adults instead of babies?
¶54Is that still a fixed point? Or suppose the command is something just slightly less obviously horrific than Joe's carefully chosen example. At what point are you required to say this still seems horribly wrong to me but my moral intuitions are corrupted so I submit. That is why I think this standard needs much more justification than Joe gives it. [snorts] Because if the rule is basically submit unless the teaching is so absurd that denying your intuition would destroy the foundations of rational thoughts itself, that gives an alleged supernatural authority and enormous amounts of moral latitude.
¶55And that seems especially dangerous given something Joe himself accepts. Supernatural signs, even impressive ones, could in principle come from deceptive preternatural beings. So if demons can perform wonders to deceive people, this seem like exactly the situation where you would want your moral judgment functioning as an additional safeguard. Instead, Joe's framework seems to tell us to weaken that safeguard almost all the way down to the point of radical skepticism. I think that is a terrible place to draw the line.
¶56Do we really think that if demons perform miracles in order to deceive people, they are going to follow them up by saying, "Okay, now listen carefully. 1 + 1 equals 12." Of course not. If the whole point is deception, you would expect the teaching to be plausible enough to attract and retain followers. Presumably, Joe thinks there are cults occult movements or false religions in which genuine preternatural activity might occur. He himself has mentioned Joseph Smith as a candidate.
¶57But does Joe think Latter-day Saints are accepting beliefs that obviously crosses their intellectual or moral fix point limit? Clearly not. They don't think Mormonism entails that 1 + 1 equals 12 or that torturing babies for fun is good. They think their religion makes sense. So if Joe's standard is that a teaching only becomes discrediting when accepting it would force us to abandon something as basic as 1 plus 1 equals 2 or torturing babies for fun is wrong then that standard is far too weak.
¶58Plenty of false religions could stay comfortably below the threshold. Mormonism certainly could. That seems like a terrible litmos test for distinguishing God from a deceptive supernatural agent. There's another tension here, too. Christians routinely acknowledge that God can work through deeply flawed people.
¶59David had multiple wives, committed adultery, and arranged for Uriah to be killed. Yet, none of that leads Christians to conclude that David must have been empowered by demons. He remains a divinely chosen king and one of the central figures of the Old Testament. So why does Joe treat Joseph Smith's polygamy and deception as such a strong reason to doubt him? Is lying to your wife worse than adultery and murder?
¶60Maybe Joe has some principal distinction here. But if he does, he needs to give it otherwise his fruits test starts looking pretty inconsistent in its application. And then there is a even deeper problem with the fixed points idea. What if eternal conscious torment actually is beyond someone's fixed point limit? For many people, that is exactly how hell strikes them.
¶61They don't merely dislike it. It seems to them so radically unjust that a perfectly good being could not possibly impose it. So what would Joe say to that person? Would he say, "Well, if hell really crosses your fixed point limit, then I guess you shouldn't become a Catholic." I seriously doubt it. more likely he would try to persuade that person that hell shouldn't count as a fixed point.
¶62Maybe God's justice exceeds our understanding. Maybe our intuitions have been shaped by culture. Maybe original sin has darkened our intellect. In other words, he would argue that the person's boundary has been drawn in the wrong place. But now we are back to the original question.
¶63Who gets to draw the boundary? Consider the opposite case. Imagine someone raised in a highly patriarchal and polygamous culture. He reads about Joseph Smith and simply doesn't have the same moral reactions Joe has. Smith's polygamy doesn't strike him as obviously discrediting at all.
¶64What then? Joe apparently finds Joseph Simmit's conduct sufficiently troubling to count it against the divine origin of his claims. But plenty of latter day saints obviously don't. Ask them whether accepting Mormonism feels anything like accepting that 1 + 1 equals 12 or that torturing babies for fun is good. Of course, they will say no.
¶65In fact, they can turn that same arguments back on traditional Christianity. A latter day sense or a Muslim might say that the trinity looks like the thing that crosses the intellectual fixed point limit. Three persons, one God. That sounds like 1 + 1 + 1 equals 1. Joe would immediately respond that this misunderstands the trinity.
¶66Catholicism isn't claiming that three gods equal one god. He would distinguish persons from being and explain why there is no mathematical contradiction. Fine. But notice what has happened. Joe gets to explain why their supposed fixed point isn't really violated by Catholicism.
¶67At the same time, he gets to explain why his moral objections to Joseph Smith really are discrediting. The latter-day saints can do exactly the same thing in reverse. He can explain why Joseph Smith's behavior doesn't cross the fixed point limit and why Catholic doctrines do. So whose fixed point limits are we supposed to use? Jos, my the Mormons, the Muslims, different people will draw that line in different places.
¶68So simply saying there is a fixed point limit doesn't really solve the problem. You still have to explain why your line is the right one and why someone else's line is wrong. And I think that introduces far more moving parts into Joe's framework than he seems to acknowledge. And it gets worse. If you have watched Joe's recent videos, you might have noticed that almost every time he talks about Joseph Smith, he connects him with occult practices and demonic activity.
¶69>> Is it someone who is a serial liar, a serial fornicator, a serial adulterer, who's like claiming that um God I know you know you know who I'm talking about. I know exactly who's [clears throat] like literally claiming that uh polygamy is like an abomination to God, but then is like having polygamous relationships. He got at least 33 wives. And then he's also like um like sacrificing a sheep to a demon. And then also he's like engaging in all these occult practices that are explicitly forbidden.
¶70>> When we want to attribute like demonic activity in in some situation like to me it needs to be sort of [snorts] an obvious contender. >> Evident signs of deception like the dude is like sacrificing like a sheep to a demon and he's like reading like a sear stone and he's like translating the Book of Mormon when when he's looking at the occult practice while he's doing it. Now, that claim about Joseph Smith sacrificing a sheep to a demon deserves some context. There is a much later account published in 1877 describing testimony from Smith's treasure hunting days in which a lamb was supposedly killed and its blood used in an attempt to overcome a spirit guarding buried treasure. But even in that account, someone else selects the lamb while Smith is described as sprinkling the blood around the excavation.
¶71And we are dealing with a retrospective account published more than 50 years after the alleged event. So turning all that into the clean statement, Joseph Smith sacrificed a sheep to a demon makes the evidence sound considerably more straightforward than it actually is. What is much better established is that the young Joseph Smith participated in treasure seeking and used seed stones as part of the folk religious culture of his time. Even Latter Day Saint historical sources openly acknowledge that. But notice Joe's next move.
¶72He simply calls the sear stone an oult practice as though the label itself settles where the practice came from. Why? The Bible itself contains physical objects used as means of discerning God's will. The most obvious example is the Urin and Tumin associated with the Israelites priesthood and used to inquire of God. The Joseph Smith papers themselves point out this biblical parallel when discussing Smith's sear stones.
¶73That obviously does not prove that Joseph Smith sear stone came from God. But that is precisely my point. You cannot simply say he looked into a stone therefore a cult therefore demonic. Joe needs some nonquest begging criterion that distinguishes an illegitimate occult object from a physical object that God supposedly choose to use as a means of revelation. And even Joseph Smith's background in folk magic doesn't settle that question.
¶74Suppose just for the sake of argument that God wanted to reveal something to a person whose cultural background already included sear stones and folk religion. Is it inconceivable that God might communicate through concepts or mechanisms that person already understood? Christians already accept something rather similar in the birth narrative of Jesus. The magi appear to have practiced astrology, something coming out of a non-Jewish religious world. Yet, Matthew's story has God used an astronomical sign, a star, to lead them to Jesus.
¶75So, apparently, God can meet people within their existing cultural framework. Why then is a sear stone automatically disqualified merely because something resembling it also existed in folk magic? Again, I not arguing that Joseph Smith really was receiving revelation from God. I am asking what Jew's criterion is because the way he repeatedly describes Smith seems designed to make the demonic explanation feel obvious before we even get to the evidence. And that becomes especially important when Joe appeals to biblical tests.
¶76>> Our divine leates, people who are claiming to speak on behalf of God and promulgating relations, revelations, claimed revelations which God puts a stamp of miraculous stamp of approval on. They pass the fruits test with flying colors. They also pass uh the other test in scripture Deuteronomy 13 or 18 are the people claiming to speak in the name of God the creator. >> But Mormonism claims exactly that. Joseph Smith did not tell people stop worshiping the biblical God and start worshiping Satan.
¶77The religion he founded present itself as Christianity. Latter day saints worship God, confess Jesus Christ as savior, use the Bible as scripture and call their institution the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Now Joe can absolutely argue that their conception of God is radically mistaken. Traditional Catholics certainly do, but that is a theological argument. You cannot first define Joseph Smith as someone involved with demonic or cotism and then use that characterization as evidence that his supernatural claims must have been demonic.
¶78That starts getting dangerously close to building the conclusion into the description. And this matters because Joe spends surprisingly little time engaging what the Latterday Saints regard as some of their strongest positive evidence, including the witnesses to the golden plates. I'm not saying that the 11 witnesses are too strong to refute, but their testimony is certainly not something you can make disappear simply by calling Joseph Smith an oultist. If Joe wants to reject that testimony, that's great. Examine the witnesses.
¶79Examine their relationships to Smith. Examine what exactly they claim to see. Examine naturalistic explanations. That's what I would do. That is the kind of scrutiny the former Joe would have insisted on.
¶80But here, labeling Smith's practices as occult seems to do too much of the work. It allows Joe to move past the harder questions. How reliable were the witnesses? Did anything supernatural actually happen? And if it did, what caused it?
¶81Anyway, here's the larger point. If Joe thinks he can dismiss Mormon miracle claims, partly because Joseph Smith fails a moral test. What happens when someone applies that same method to Christianity? Suppose someone says, "Fine, maybe some of the Christian miracle reports are impressive. Maybe I even think something supernatural happened.
¶82But when I look at the moral teachings associated with the biblical God, I find things that I simply cannot reconcile with perfect goodness. Well, Joe accept that as a legitimate reason to withhold belief in Christianity. Take the very passage Joe appeals to Deuteronomy 13. He emphasizes that Israel is told not to follow a miracle working prophet who leads people after other gods. But keep reading verses 8 through 10 don't merely say don't believe him.
¶83They say the person who tries to lead you to another god is to be put to death. That is a very different matter. It is one thing to say this prophet performs wonders but he is directing us toward the wrong god. So don't follow him. It is another thing to say and therefore kill him.
¶84And this part barely enters these apologetic discussions. Joe talks about Deuteronomy 13. Tren hope talks about it. Cameron Bertusi talks about tests for false prophets. But when this passage is used as a neat test for identifying demonic deception, the death penalty sitting right there in the same chapter tends to disappear from the conversation.
¶85Non-Christians like me notice things like that. Joseph Smith may have been morally corrupt. Fine. But Joseph Smith wasn't claiming that God commanded his followers to execute everyone who refused Mormonism. The Old Testament, by contrast, contains laws imposing death for certain forms of religious apostasy.
¶86And then we get to something even harder. The conquest of Canaan. The biblical text depicts commands to destroy entire populations including children and Christian apologists have spent an extraordinary amount of effort trying to reconcile those commands with the goodness of God. William Len Craig gives one of the most striking defenses. What I would say is first that God has the right to take anyone's life whenever he wants to.
¶87Unfortunately, children die all the time uh in infancy. Uh and so if God wants to end the life of these Canaanite children early uh prematurely, that's his prerogative. It was actually a tremendous blessing to these children for them to be killed and go to heaven and be with God. >> But I think this response misses the central moral problem. The question isn't simply whether God has authority to end a human life.
¶88The question is whether commanding human beings to slaughter children was morally good. Having the authority to do something does not automatically make every possible use of that authority morally justified. Joe himself seems to recognize this principle. He says that if God supposedly commanded something like torturing babies for fun, that would be discrediting. He would not simply respond, "Well, God created the babies, so he has the right to do whatever he wants with them.
¶89So why does the moral alarm suddenly disappear when the command changes from torture these children to kill all these children? We are not talking about the one tragic death. We are talking about the deliberate killing of potentially large numbers of children as part of the destruction of an entire population. Why doesn't that cross Joe's fixed point limit? If becoming a Christian requires me to say that killing those Canaanite children was ultimately just good or perhaps even as Craig puts it a tremendous blessing for the children themselves, then Joe cannot simply say that Christianity never requires us to affirm something that strikes us as profoundly morally wrong.
¶90Because for many people, including me, this is exactly such a case. And this brings us right back to Joe's treatment of Joseph Smith. Joe looks at Smith's polygamy, dishonesty, and alleged oult practices and says in effect, "These are bad fruits that counts against the claim that God was behind this supernatural event." Okay, but then why can someone look at the commands to execute religious denters or slaughter Canaanite children and reason in exactly the same way? They might say, "Perhaps something supernatural really did happen around Christianity. But if the being behind these revelations comments things I regard as gravely immoral, then perhaps I should question whether that being is actually the perfectly good God.
¶91Maybe it was some lesser supernatural being. Maybe the human authors misunderstood whatever revelation they received. Maybe there's some other explanation. Joe doesn't have to agree with any of those possibilities, but once he allows moral considerations to help him distinguish divine miracles from demonic ones in the case of Joseph Smith, he cannot simply rule out that same kind of reasoning when someone applies it to Christianity. And this is where the fixed point problem becomes unavoidable.
¶92If torturing babies for fun is enough to discredit a supposed revelation, why is kill all the babies in this population safely below the line? That needs an argument. You cannot solve the problem simply by saying God had a reason. Because once mysterious reasons are enough, even Joe's favorite fixed point example becomes unstable. Someone could just say, "God commanded the torture of those babies for some mysterious greater good that you don't understand." Joe obviously wouldn't accept that.
¶93Neither would I. So, the real issue is not whether God might have reasons beyond our understanding. The issue is how far we are supposed to suppress our most basic moral judgments before saying no this counts as evidence that something has gone wrong with the supposed revelation. And if Joe is willing to use that reason against Joseph Smith, I think non-Christians are perfectly entitled to ask why they cannot use it against the Bible. And this isn't just a problem for non-Christians.
¶94What happens when Christians themselves think a Catholic teaching crosses that fixed point limit? Take eternal conscious torment. I'm not talking about some hypothetical person here. There are plenty of Christians who believe in the same God Joe believes in, believe Jesus rose from the dead, and yet think that a just and loving God would not subject people to everlasting suffering. They remain Christians.
¶95They simply conclude that the traditional doctrine of eternal hell is mistaken. So what is Joe going to say to them? Is he going to say, "Well, if eternal conscious torment genuinely crosses your fix point limit, then you are justified in rejecting Catholicism." I doubt it. Joe himself says that hell was one of his biggest moral objections. But he eventually concluded that the miraculous evidence for Catholicism was strong enough that he should stop clinging to that objection and submit his intellect and moral judgment even if he couldn't completely resolve the problem.
¶96So presumably if another Christian says no eternal hell crosses my moral limit, Joe is going to try to persuade that person that their limit is in the wrong place. Maybe God knows something they don't. Maybe their conscience is more formed. Maybe their moral intuitions are too culturally influenced or too malleable. But then I don't see how Joe is consistently applying his own method.
¶97On the one hand, he says that if Catholic teaching crossed his fixed point limit, that would be discrediting. On the other hand, when somebody else actually thinks a Catholic teaching crosses their fixed point limit, I seriously doubt Joe would say, "Fair enough, then you shouldn't be Catholic." That is something I think Joe needs to think much harder about. And I'm not done yet. Killing innocent people under ordinary circumstances is obviously prohibited in Christian ethics, but the biblical God can apparently command the killing of people for some higher purpose that we may not fully understand. So apparently there are circumstances in which preserving innocent human life is not the highest moral consideration.
¶98Okay, if that's how God operates, then that's how God operates. What can I say? But then Joe tells us that there are other actions which are absolutely prohibited. No exceptions, no greater good justification, nothing. >> Catholicism is committed to absolute deontology.
¶99So certain things are absolutely categorically prohibited under any circumstances. They are intrinsically evil or evil regardless of circumstances or consequences. >> Okay. What actions are so intrinsically evil that they can never be done under any circumstances? I'm dying to know.
¶100>> For example, masturbation is not just impermissible, but it's impermissible under any circumstances. Even if doing so would save your own life or the lives of arbitrarily many other people. So let me make sure I understand this moral framework. The God of the Bible can command the killing of Canaanite children for some greater purpose. But God could never permit masturbation even if masturbating would save arbitrarily many human lives.
¶101Suppose somebody points a gun at me and says masturbate or I kill you. According to the principle Joe just described, I should refuse. Saving my own life doesn't make the acts permissible. Joe, can I be honest with you? That looks like an incoherent ethical system to me.
¶102And I have a very hard time believing that this reflects the values of the real God, assuming God exists. I know your video series is supposed to persuade people toward Catholicism, but for me, this part does almost the opposite. Now, I can understand why Joe and other Catholics might be impressed by healings, apparitions, eucharistic miracles, or alleged revelations that seem to support particular Catholic doctrines. To be clear, I personally wasn't persuaded by those cases, and I explained why in my previous video. But even if I grant for the sake of argument that some extraordinary supernatural events really happened, there's still a huge gap between that and accepting the entire Catholic moral and theological system.
¶103Take Maran apparitions. It isn't as though Mary appeared publicly in front of everybody and unmistakably announced an entire Catholic catechism. At Fatima, for example, the doctrinal content comes from Lucia and the other children's report of what Mary supposedly told them privately. And even then, did Mary ever appear and say, >> "Thou shalt not masturbate. Not ever." >> No.
¶104To my knowledge, none of these apparitions announced the Bible is inherent. None announced transubstantiation is true. None gave us a philosophical defense of eternal hell. Non said the Catholic magisterian is the final infallible authority on doctrinal disputes. Joe himself distinguishes between miracles and the particular doctrines they supposedly vindicate.
¶105So even granting some Catholic miracle claims there are still additional steps required before you get to every Catholic doctrine. And that matters. If a doctrine still doesn't make sense after examining the arguments for it, then the answer shouldn't simply be, well, there were miracles, so I have to find some way to make this doctrine work. At that point, apologetics can very easily turn into rationalization. And I really don't want to see Joe go down that road because the former Joe was precisely the kind of person who would have pushed hard against that kind of reasoning.
¶106There's another way this heavy emphasis on miracles can backfire. Take a look. People have been going there seeking healing since the 19th century. The first cures were officially recognized in 1862. More than 160 years later, how many cures has the Catholic Church officially recognized as miraculous 72.
¶107That is the current number given by the Lord sanctuary itself. It also says that more than 7,000 healing cases have been reported to its medical bureau. Now 72 unexplained or medically extraordinary recoveries might sound impressive in isolation. But what does that number actually tell us? To make a statistical arguments from Lord, we would need to know how many sick people have gone there over those 160 plus years, what illnesses they had, how many comparable patients recover unexpectedly without visiting Lord, and whether the rate of unexplained recovery among Lord pilgrims is actually higher than the relevant background rate.
¶108Without that comparison, 72 is just a numerator without a meaningful denominator. Spontaneous remission happens. Diagnostic errors happen. Unexpected recoveries happen. Medicine sometimes simply cannot explain why one patient improves and another doesn't.
¶109So the important question isn't have some people experienced medically unexplained recoveries at Lord. Obviously they have. The important question is, do medically unexplained recoveries happen at the Lord's significantly more often than we should expect anyway? And unless we can establish that, I don't think the raw number of Lord cures gives Joe anything close to the evidential force he thinks it does. A mystery is not automatically a miracle.
¶110And it's not just that. If God is really in the business of healing people today, why doesn't it happen more often? Why is God holding back? If spectacular well doumented healings through mar operations can convince people like Joe that Catholicism is true, why not provide more of them? What about people whose evidential threshold is higher than Joe's?
¶111Are they simply not worth giving stronger evidence to? Or forget miraculous healings for a moment. Why doesn't God intervene more effectively in a sexual abuse happening within his own church? He wouldn't even have to suspend the laws of nature, nudge a bishop to investigate, make a cardinal suspicious at the right moment, push church leaders toward stronger accountability before hundreds or thousands more children are harmed. Is that asking too much?
¶112Instead, these scandals become one more perfectly understandable reason for people to doubt that the Catholic Church is specially protected or guided by God. And that brings me to a story Joe himself talks about quite a lot. Maria Goreti. If you don't know the story, Maria was an 11-year-old Catholic girl. A young man named Alexandra Serinelli tried to force himself on her.
¶113When she resisted, he stabbed her 14 times. She survived long enough to be taken to the hospital and dured surgery and died the following day. Before dying, she forgave Alexandro and said that she wanted him with her in paradise. Years later, while in prison, Aleandro reported a dream in which Maria appeared to him and handed him 14 lilies, one for each stab wound. He eventually repented, returned to the Catholic faith, and radically changed his life.
¶114Joseph's Maria's story had a major emotional impact on his conversion. In fact, he says that after watching a video about her, he cried. >> Along this path, I start like watching some videos just about saints. I don't know how exactly I came across them. Maybe it was because um like again like Cameron introduced me to like Father Carlos Martins and then I know he he had this video on Gabby after hours which was on St.
¶115Mary Grey. >> So I watched that and after it I just ball I ball my eyes out and I'm like this is so beautiful. So, it's just this story of radical love, radical forgiveness, and it's just so beautiful. >> I actually understand that reaction. Maria's forgiveness is moving.
¶116I find it moving too. But my takeaway is about human goodness. It shows how extraordinary human compassion and forgiveness can be even in horrifying circumstances. God, on the other hand, is strangely absent from the part of the story where Maria actually needed him the most. This story could happen in a godless universe.
¶117A young girl could be brutally murdered, forgive her killer, and her example could later transform him. None of that requires divine intervention. But if God does exist and was providentially involved in this story, then I start asking very different questions. Why did God let Alexandra successfully stop Maria 14 times? Why let an 11-year-old girl who was herself a devout Catholic die such an agonizing death?
¶118If the beautiful ending is supposed to be Alexandria's repentance, surely an omnipotent and perfectly intelligent God could have found another route to that outcome. St. Alexandra the dream before he murders her. Have Maria appear to him that night and say you are free to do what you are planning. But God sees you and you will answer for it.
¶119That doesn't remove his free will. He can still attack her if he chooses. It simply gives him another reason not to. And if a dream like that could help transform Alexandro after he murdered Maria, why couldn't God use something similar before the murder and spare her life there? must be countless possibilities available to an all powerful God.
¶120That is what troubles me when stories like this are presented as examples of beautiful providence. Maria's forgiveness is beautiful. Alexandra's eventual repentance is good, but neither of those facts explains why Maria had to be stabbed 14 times and die in order for the story to reach that ending. If [snorts] God could achieve the same good without allowing an 11year-old girl to be brutally murdered, then I have a hard time seeing her death as part of some beautiful divine arrangement. To me, the beauty belongs to Maria, not to God's decision not to intervene, which brings us to the problem of evil and suffering.
¶121Why is there so much suffering in the world? If God is perfectly loving and all powerful, why wouldn't he create a world with less of it, especially less apparently pointless suffering? And here's the basic issue. If God's intervention at the Lord counts as evidence for a compassionate God, then God's apparent failure to intervene in countless other cases has to count in the other direction. You can't count the cases where God supposedly steps in as positive evidence and then simply filter out all the cases where he doesn't.
¶122That's not how rational inquiry works. The former Joe understood this very well. When it comes to human suffering, theist at least have some familiar responses available. They can say suffering may build character, deepen moral growth or creates opportunities for courage, compassion and forgiveness. But animal suffering makes those responses much harder.
¶123If evolution is true, sensient animals have been suffering through predation, starvation, disease, parasitism, and natural disasters for millions of years long before human beings existed. Most of those animals apparently get no lasting benefits from any of it. One possible response is simply to give up one of the traditional divine attributes. Maybe God is extremely powerful but not omnipotent. Maybe he cares about us but is not perfectly good.
¶124Maybe he simply cannot prevent all of this suffering. That doesn't prove there is no God. It eliminates or at least counts against the triom god. And that distinction matters. The problem of evil is not necessarily an argument against every possible deity.
¶125A limited god could exist in a world full of suffering. The tension arises specifically when we add omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness. The former Joe knew that in fact evolutionary animal suffering was one of the things that originally drove him away from Catholicism. Near the end of my freshman year in high school, my faith began to deteriorate. I started reflecting more deeply on the evolutionary process and its brutality really troubled me.
¶126For hundreds of millions of years, animals have been ripping each other to shreds in predation, parasetizing one another, and languishing from starvation, dehydration, disease, and natural disaster. It seemed like the very mechanism, the very engine of God's creative process was eons upon eons of suffering and death and languishing on the part of innocent animals. animals who didn't deserve that suffering, many of whom didn't seem to benefit from it, at least at first glance, and where God easily could have created through much less gruesome means. How could this be the creative choice of a perfectly good, perfectly loving, all powerful God? I wondered.
¶127>> That is still the question I'm asking, and so far I haven't found a convincing answer. So, how did Joe resolve it? What is revealing is that by his own account, he didn't really resolve it. the miracle evidence became strong enough in his judgment to reduce the evidential force of the problem. >> So how did you overcome the problem of evil or have you?
¶128At the time I didn't overcome it. It was just a persistent thorn in the side. But I didn't overcome the problem of evil until I basically got overwhelming miraculous evidence for Catholicism. Once I had that I was like okay I must just be missing something. You know >> that line is important.
¶129The suffering itself didn't suddenly become less horrific. Joe didn't discover an explanation that made millions of years of animal suffering finally make sense. He became convinced by other evidence and concluded that there must be an explanation somewhere even if he didn't know what it was. He makes the point even more explicitly in his conversation with Trent Horn. >> It never it as in the problem of evil never quite went away.
¶130It was really just a matter of like denting its evidential force. So Joe is pretty explicit here. The problem of evil didn't go away. He simply came to think that the miracle evidence was strong enough to outweigh it. But I think there is a problem with that move.
¶131Even if I grant the miracles, what exactly do they establish? At most they might give us evidence that some supernatural or divine agency is at work. They do not by themselves show that this being is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. A being could be enormously powerful and still limited. It could heal people, produce apparitions, reveal hidden information, perhaps even manipulate matter in extraordinary ways without possessing unlimited power or perfect goodness.
¶132So even if I granted Joe every miracle he wants, the problem of evil would still raise a separate question. What kind of god are these miracles evidence for? The miracles might count against atheism. Fine, but they do not automatically answer the objection that the amount and distribution of suffering seem much more difficult to explain if the being behind reality is perfectly loving and all powerful. And Joe knows that.
¶133Now, one of the central motivations for positing a limited god is that it allegedly helps with the problem of evil. Like, after all, if God's knowledge or power or goodness are limited, you know, maybe he can't stop the various evils or, you know, he just doesn't know about them or, you know, maybe he's not good enough to care about them. Um, but this is just like not a credible motivation given the full range of theistic evidence that needs explaining. Right? Like if limited God hypothesis are to predict the data anywhere near as well as theism, the limited god needs to be able to explain contingency.
¶134The existence of the universe, the existence of physical laws, the fine-tuning of law structures, the fine-tuning of constants, the existence and character of the psychophysical principles, the fact that we systematically avoided skeptical scenarios, the fact that evolution took a highly precise and fortuitous course that ensures moral and opor knowledge and aesthetic experience, the amount of beauty in the world and religious experiences. But the level of power, knowledge, and goodness required of God in order for these data to be like remotely well predicted by limited God hypotheses is enough knowledge, power, and goodness to significantly reduce the amount, kinds, and intensity of evil in the world, to establish meaningful reciprocal relationships with every non-resistant finite person, and to remove religious diversity. So any limited god hypothesis, which can even like approximate theism's explanatory power, is also going to face the biggest objections to theism. You might have had trouble following Joe's logic there. And I think there is a reason for that.
¶135He moves past a crucial step very quickly. His argument is basically this. A limited God might initially seem attractive because it can explain evil. Maybe God lacks the power, knowledge or goodness to prevent all of it. But Joe says that once this God becomes powerful and knowledgeable enough to explain the universe, finetuning, consciousness, beauty, moral knowledge, religious experience, and everything else, then this God would also have enough power, knowledge, and goodness to significantly reduce suffering.
¶136But that last part is exactly what needs to be argued. I can understand why creating a universe like ours might require extraordinary power and knowledge. But why does it require perfect or even nearperfect goodness? The existence of beauty and good things in the world certainly suggests that the creator might value some good things. But that doesn't get us all the way to omnip benevolence.
¶137Maybe this god is extremely powerful, extremely intelligent, and only moderately good. And frankly, that seems to fit the world at least reasonably well. We see extraordinary beauty, pleasure, love, and flourishing. We also see staggering amounts of apparently unnecessary suffering. [snorts] So, I don't think Joe has removed the appeal of limited theism.
¶138He has mostly asserted that any god capable of explaining the positive evidence must also be good enough to prevent much more evil. But why? That is precisely what the limited theism denies and limited theism has no problem accommodating miracles either. A tremendously powerful but morally limited God could heal people occasionally. He could produce apparitions.
¶139He could answer some prayers. None of that requires him to be perfectly good or committed to preventing every terrible thing that he could prevent. In fact, the very selective pattern of alleged miracles might fit a limited god more easily than an allloving God. Take Lord again. After more than 160 years and enormous numbers of pilgrims, the church has officially recognized only 72 miraculous cures.
¶140So even on the Catholic account, miraculous healing is extraordinarily selective. A perfectly loving and all powerful God now has to explain why he heals this person but leaves countless others to suffer. A limited God has much less to explain. So miracles do not solve the problem of evil by themselves and they certainly don't establish omni benevolence. But Joe cannot simply settle for a limited god because by this point he has become convinced that Catholicism is true.
¶141And Catholicism doesn't teach that God is merely very powerful and somewhat good. God is supposed to be perfectly good. So now Joe has a strong motivation to find an explanation that preserves what he already believes. Catholicism is true and therefore God must still be perfectly good despite all this suffering. To his credit, Joe admits that he doesn't have the answer printed now.
¶142But he does have a candidate that he seems to find especially promising, the omission theodysy. And this is where I think things become really revealing. Because if you want to see just how far Joe is now willing to go to reconcile animal suffering with an all good God, this is probably the clearest example. Now, I know this video is already going long, but I want to spend some time on this because this is where I think the pressure to preserve the Catholic conception of God starts producing explanations that are much harder to take seriously. And ironically, the picture Joe ends up considering starts to look less like straightforward Christian providence and more like a quasi cosmic story.
¶143So the basic problem here is that you know the brutality, horror, suffering and languishing pervading the evolutionary process is much better predicted by naturalism than theism. >> Actually suffering is not just better predicted by naturalism but also limited theism. Having that option in is very important because we can have all the miracles pointing to a supernatural agent's existence but that agent isn't necessarily all loving. >> So first up is the omission theodysy. And here I'm drawing on an excellent paper by uh Brian Cutter and Philip Swinsson in the resource document.
¶144Leont theodysy that has the power to explain why there is so much evolutionary animal suffering, why that suffering looks roughly like it would happen if life was allowed to evolve uninterrupted in a universe like ours, and why the distribution of suffering looks kind of random. The omission theodysy delivers precisely that. According to the theodysy, God gave some group of non-human moral agents, perhaps angels, my favorite approach, or perhaps aliens, the power to intervene in the evolution of life on our planet and the foresight to know that if they didn't, things would go badly and evolution would be chalk full of suffering. Consequently, God tasked these beings with benevolently directing the evolutionary process. Unfortunately, this group freely omitted performing their divinely appointed role resulting in what we see, namely a random-looking distribution of suffering right from the beginning of sensient life's evolution.
¶145And you might ask, well, why did God give the angels or aliens this freedom and role? Like, especially given that it risked so much evil. Well, because doing so enables lots of profound goods. Specifically, if the non-human moral agents did the right thing, then a slurry of intrinsic values would have been instantiated. Intrinsic values that could persist and add up over the course of an infinite afterlife.
¶146But these values, for example, the value of relationships forged by making a significant difference to the well-being of others, or the value of being responsible for good things and avoiding bad things, could only have been attained if were the agents to freely not help, things actually would have gone much worse. That's what makes exercising their high stakes freedom well facilitate better relationships for all eternity, right? Like either better relationships between those agents and those they help or better relationships between those agents and God. And it's just not at all implausible that for example my relationship with you could be better for all eternity because I say saved your life or made some other significant difference to your welfare such that had I not done so your life would have been much worse. And the added relational benefits here can aggregate for all eternity.
¶147either to an infinite total amount or to a very large finite amount that outweighs the relevant suffering that God risked in creating these agents with high stakes freedom and adopting a policy of non-intervention if they freely advocate their divinely appointed role. And to complete the theodysy unfortunately the moral agent or agents responsible for benevolently guiding the evolutionary process dropped the ball. And notice that God's policy of non-intervention, if the agents dropped the ball, is justified by the fact that this makes the agents real difference makers in the lives of other creatures. Such that had the agents not helped those creatures, the lives of those creatures would have been much worse. And that requires God not to swoop in and improve the lives of those creatures if the agents dropped the ball.
¶148And yeah, and yeah, while this policy does risk a lot of suffering if the agents drop the ball, that risk is justified by the overwhelmingly greater benefits attained if the agents do the right thing. As a result, the theodysy seriously dense the force of the argument from evolutionary animal suffering. >> That's a lot, and calling this a flawed explanation would be an understatement. Now, to be fair to Joe, he's not saying the omission theodysy is definitely true, but he calls the paper excellent. He says the theodysy delivers precisely what we need to explain evolutionary animal suffering and concludes that it seriously ds the force of the problem.
¶149That is what I find so disappointing. I could spend an entire video on this one proposal, but let me focus on what I think are the most obvious problems. First, notice what this explanation is doing. The problem is that hundreds of millions of years of predation, starvation, disease, parasitism, and painful death look very difficult to reconcile with a perfectly good God. So the theodysy insert another group of agents between God and the evolutionary process.
¶150God supposedly gave angels or perhaps aliens responsibility for guiding evolution in a benevolent direction. They failed. They dropped the ball. And because God wanted them to be genuine difference makers, he deliberately chosen not to step in and clean up the consequences of their failure. So now all of that animal suffering can be blamed, at least in large part, on these intermediary beings rather than directly on God.
¶151But that already sits awkwardly with the picture we get in Genesis 1. Genesis does not portray God as delegating the creative process to some group of beings who then catastrophically mismanage it. God creates, God orders, God sees what he has made and repeatedly God calls it good. The omission theodosy introduces a completely new layer into that story. Somewhere behind the scenes, another group of moral agents was apparently supposed to manage evolution failed spectacularly and God then allowed the consequences to unfold for hundreds of millions of years.
¶152And the stranger part is that these agents are not introduced because we independently discovered evidence for them in evolutionary history. They are introduced because they help protect the perfect goodness of God from the evidence of animal suffering. That should immediately make us cautious. And there is something else about this structure that I find striking. One of the recurring impulses innostic systems was to create distance between the highest god and the deeply defective material world by placing some lesser being or beings between the supreme god and the world we actually experience.
¶153I'm not saying Joe is agnostic. Obviously, he isn't. But this move has an uncomfortable resemblance. The world looks too brutal and defective to be the direct product of the perfectly good God. So, introduce lower agents who are responsible for the mess.
¶154In Jo's version, the answer becomes something like God didn't want evolution to be this horrific. He gave other beings the job of fixing it. They failed and God chose not to intervene. But now compare that with what Joe says when he argues against the limited theism. >> The fact that evolution took a highly precise and fortuitous course that ensures moral and oporary knowledge and aesthetic experience, the amount of beauty in the world and religious experiences.
¶155Did you notice the inconsistency? When evolution produces consciousness, rationality, moral knowledge, beauty, psychophysical harmony, and other valuable outcomes, Joe counts those as evidence of God's providential guidance. But when that same evolutionary process produces predation, parasitism, disease, starvation, and immense suffering, suddenly the responsibility shifts to fallen angels. Why should the good outcomes tell us something about God's character while the bad outcomes tell us about the angels? And there's an even bigger problem.
¶156Did God know the angels were going to fail? If he didn't, then we have a problem with omniscience. But if he did, then God knowingly handed them the responsibility while already knowing the result would be hundreds of millions of years of animal suffering. At that point, introducing angels doesn't really remove God's responsibility. God still chose the arrangement and even after the angels supposedly failed, God could have intervened.
¶157Joe's answer is that allowing these creatures genuine responsibility has intrinsic value. God wants them to be real difference makers. If God simply swooped in whenever they failed, their choices wouldn't carry the same significance. But that doesn't justify almost unlimited non-intervention. We give people genuine responsibility all the time while still placing limits on how much damage they are allowed to cause.
¶158A parent can give a child real freedom and responsibility without standing there while the child burns the house down because stopping him would diminish the value of his agency. Why couldn't God do the same thing? Let the angels make meaningful choices. Let those choices have real consequences, but put some limits on how much suffering innocent creatures have to endure. because the angels failed.
¶159And Christianity itself makes this non-intervention argument even stranger. Christians believe God eventually will intervene in a massive way. Christ returns. Evil is defeated. Creation is renewed.
¶160The present order comes to an end. So apparently preserving creaturely responsibility does not require God to remain hands off forever. Then where is the threshold? Why was preserving angelic responsibility worth hundreds of millions of years of predation, starvation, painful death, etc. But at some future point, God can finally say, "Okay, that's enough." and intervene.
¶161What changed? If divine intervention destroys this important good of being a real difference maker, then why is the final intervention acceptable? And if it doesn't destroy that good, why allow all of this suffering in the first place? Joe also talks about the relational value created when creatures freely help other creatures, perhaps with benefits that continue for eternity. Frankly, I have trouble seeing how that rescues the proposal.
¶162Most animals don't seem to have anything like the mental capacities required for gratitude, moral recognition, or a meaningful relationship with the agents who supposedly help them. Think about insects, fish, or very simple animals. So for this eternal relational payoff to do any real work, Job seems to need an additional assumption that these animals somehow survive death and are transformed enough to become capable of understanding what happened. Recognizing what the angels did for them and participating in those relationships. Maybe that is possible.
¶163But now we are adding another layer of speculation to an already highly speculative story. And here's [snorts] the most obvious problem with all this talk about the great goods that could have come from giving the angels this responsibility. God supposedly knew they were going to fail. So all these potential goods Joe talks about the relationships, the responsibility, the eternal benefits were never actually going to materialize in a way the theodysy imagines. God knew that from the beginning.
¶164He knew the angels would drop the ball and he knew what the result would be. So appealing to what could have happened if they had chosen well does very little to justify what God knowingly chose to permit in the actual world. And there is something morally disturbing about the whole setup. What kind of perfect goodness allows innocent creatures to suffer so that someone else can have the freedom to make a real difference? The angels get the valuable opportunity to choose well or badly.
¶165But when they choose badly, the animals are the ones who pay the price. And God supposedly thinks it is better not to step in because otherwise the angels would no longer be genuine difference makers. But what about the interests of the animals? Why is the angel's freedom to make a meaningful difference more important than the animals interest in not being torn apart, diseased, starved, or eaten alive? If God deliberately creates a system in which one creature's morally significant freedom is purchased with another creature's suffering, that seems to create a new moral problem rather than solve the old one.
¶166And once you generalize that principle, things get even stranger. Is that why God allowed Maria Goret to be stabbed 14 times? Because Alessandro needed the freedom to make a genuinely consequential choice. If stopping someone from doing evil somehow undermines the value of their agency, then what exactly are we asking for when we pray God stop him, change his heart or protect this person? Would then divine intervention interfere with precisely the freedom that Jose has such enormous value?
¶167And what kind of moral principle are we supposed to take from this? Imagine Alexandra was about to attack someone else. Should the police stand back because restraining him would interfere with his ability to make a meaningful difference? Of course not. We normally think there's something morally good about restraining an evildoer precisely because the victim's life and safety matter more than preserving the offender's freedom to carry out the harm.
¶168The Bible itself repeatedly praises protecting the vulnerable and restraining wrongdoing. So it is difficult to understand why when human beings prevents evil that can be morally admirable. But when God allows it to continue, we are told that perhaps he is preserving the tremendous value of the run towards freedom. If that principle sounds morally unacceptable when we apply it to ourselves, I don't see why introducing angels suddenly makes it a compelling defense of a perfect goodness. And there is another problem.
¶169If the freedom to make genuinely consequential choices is so valuable, what happens to that freedom in heaven? Under the omission theodosy, the life possibility of dropping the ball is supposed to be part of what makes creaturely agency so meaningful. Fine, then why not preserve that in heaven? Let humans and angels continue to have the ability to fail catastrophically, harm others, and ruin things there, too. By Joe's logic, wouldn't that make their choices even more significant?
¶170But Christianity normally describes heaven as precisely the state in which the redeemed no longer seem against one another and no longer inflict this kind of suffering. And the same question applies to the angels on Joe's proposal. Angels can apparently exercise their freedom so badly that they fail a divinely assigned task and the result is millions of years of suffering. So what happens to the faithful angels after the final judgment? Do they still retain the capacity to drop the ball in some catastrophic way?
¶171Could one of them fail tomorrow or a billion years into eternity and once again cause enormous harm? If the answer is yes, then heaven still contains the possibility of catastrophic failure. But if the answer is no, if the faithful angels eventually reach some condition in which they remain free while no longer being capable of causing horrors like this, then Joe has the same problem with angels that he has with humans. Apparently, meaningful freedom does not require an everlasting possibility of catastrophic evil. So, Joe seems to face a dilemma.
¶172If choices in heaven can still be meaningful and free, even though creatures are no longer able to commit horrific evil, then meaningful freedom clearly does not require the life possibility of catastrophic failure. And if Joe says heaven is different because our wills are perfected, then the obvious question is why couldn't an all powerful God create creatures with that kind of freedom from the beginning or at least bring them to that condition much sooner? while require hundreds of millions of years of suffering as the price of real agency. Either way, heaven makes the appeal to catastrophic freedom much less convincing. Look, I know Joe is not fully endorsing the omission theodysy.
¶173He's offering it as one possible solution, but the fact that he thinks it is an excellent candidate is already telling to me. If I were still a Christian, I might simply admit I don't have a good answer to evolutionary animal suffering. I would rather leave the question open than entertain an explanation involving angels secretly being assigned to manage evolution falling spectacularly and God deliberately refusing to intervene for hundreds of millions of years. I think this reveals something important about the pressure Joe is under intellectually. On one side, he has miracle claims that he finds personally overwhelming.
¶174On the other side, he still has the problem of evil and other objections that he once considered extremely powerful. Once he becomes convinced that Catholicism is true, though, those objections now need to be reconciled with that conclusion somehow. And I think that is where motivated reasoning can start creeping in. Explanations that the former Joe might have regarded as highly speculative can now be treated as serious possibilities because they preserve the conclusion he has already accepted. Catholicism is true.
¶175Therefore, God must still be perfectly good and loving despite all this suffering. Joe himself says that the miracle evidence changed how much weight he gave these objections. And eventually he goes even further. He argues that once Christ has been sufficiently vindicated by miracles, we should submit even when his teachings conflict with our moral judgment. Here's one of his favorite thought experiments.
¶176If you're sitting there with Christ, you see his miracles. You see him miraculously duplicate all the loaves and the fishes and whatnot. You like you see him heal people. He's like, "Get up and walk." You know, he's like, "So that you know that the son of man has authority to forgive sins. Get up and walk." And the person gets up and walks.
¶177You see all that. You see him crucified. You're there next to the blessed mother and John at the foot of the cross. You see him and then later on you're interacting with him in his glorified body. You see all that and you know it just so happens that he has some moral teachings that great against your moral intuitions.
¶178>> It's ridicul I I think it's ridiculous if you're in that epistemic situation. It's ridiculous to cling to those moral intuitions and not submit yourself to Christ. He's been manifestally vindicated by God. Okay, if you are sitting there with Christ, that is a pretty enormous if. Because Joe wasn't sitting there with Christ.
¶179He didn't personally watch Jesus restore sight to a blind man. He didn't watch him multiply bread. He wasn't standing at the cross and then three days later talking face to face with the resurrected Jesus. And I agree with Joe that this would be an extraordinarily powerful epistemic position to be in. If I personally witness all of that under good conditions, I would take Jesus extremely seriously, too.
¶180But that is not Joe's epistemic position. Joe encountered historical reports, modern miracle claims, alleged apparitions, testimony about saints, eucharistic miracle investigations, and other evidence that he thinks points toward Catholicism. That is a very different epistemic situation from personally standing next to Jesus and watching those events unfold. If you personally watched Jesus heal people, heard him teaching directly, saw him die, and then encountered him alive afterward, you would have direct evidence both of the miracle worker and of what he actually taught. Catholic miracle claims involve many more layers of interpretation.
¶181And here's another difference. If I had actually followed Jesus around and heard him teach, I wouldn't need some later institution to tell me what Jesus said, I would have his teachings directly. That takes us into one of Joe's major objections to Protestantism. Joe thinks Protestantism puts far too much responsibility on individual believers to figure out doctrine for themselves. Here's how he puts it.
¶182Like now in order to figure out religious truth, we have to become like mini popes who only settle on theological views after a diligent scientific examination of individual controversies and after learning like Hebrew and Greek to solve some of these centuries old debates between Catholics and Protestants and also among Protestants themselves. Like that's your model for how God intends for us to discern religious truth and that's your model for how religious truth should be promulgated and safeguarded? H how has that worked out since the advent of Protestantism? Has it led to the unity that Christ prayed for? Or has it led to the interminable doctrinal disputes and a schism fest?
¶183I'll let you answer that for yourself. >> I'll answer Joe's question with another question. If the mini pope model has worked so badly and miracles are supposed to give us a much clearer way of discerning religious truth, how has that worked out? Because people disagree about miracles too. People disagree about whether Fatima was supernatural, whether Zetun was really Mary, whether Eucharistic miracles are genuine, whether Joseph Smith experienced anything supernatural, whether some wonders are demonic, and what any of these events are actually supposed to mean.
¶184So miracles don't eliminate interpretation. They just give you another body of evidence that has to be interpreted. And there is an irony here. When Joe tries to distinguish genuine miracles from counterfeit ones, where does he go for his criteria? Back to the Bible, he appeals to passages like Deuteronomy to work out how false prophets should be identified.
¶185And when he wants to establish that Christ founded an authoritative church whose teachings we should submit to, he again goes back to the scripture to passages like Matthew 16, Matthew 18, John 21 and so on. So the argument still depends on Joe interpreting the Bible correctly. He is effectively using his interpretation of scripture to establish a principle that says ordinary Christians should not ultimately rely on their own interpretation of scripture. And then Joe says this. If in order to determine whether say Fatima was demonic, we need to settle this arcane dispute about the precise interpretation of a passage of Hebrews and where you guys have the novel interpretation devised by fallible men 500 years ago in contradiction to the 1500 year long perennial understanding of the church no less.
¶186Like surely you can see that it's not reasonable to expect the illiterate peasant to solve these arcane theological and hermeneutical disputes about the meaning of certain terms in like coin Greek and whether St. Thomas' or others harmonizations is like are hermeneutically sound. >> I actually sympathize with the concern. Of course, we cannot expect an illiterate medieval peasant to learn Greek and Hebrew, study textual criticism and independently resolve centuries of theological controversy. But then look at the alternative Joe is offering.
¶187Take the Buenos Eucharistic miracle. An ordinary person looking at that host would have no way of knowing that the reddish material supposedly contain myocardial tissue. To establish that, you need microscopy, hisystologology, medical expertise, preservation procedures, chain of custody, expert testimony, and confidence that the sample examined by the pathologist was actually the material taken from the host. A medieval peasant could not verify any of that either. In fact, most of us cannot independently verify it.
¶188We have to rely on investigators, doctors, witnesses, documents, laboratories, and ultimately our judgment about whether those people and institutions are trustworthy. So Joe has not escaped the problem he raises against Protestantism. Instead of saying, "I need experts to help me understand Greek history and biblical interpretation," we now say, "I need experts to tell me what this tissue sample is, whether the sample is authentic, whether the chain of custody is reliable, whether the medical interpretation is sound, whether the event was supernatural, and what theological message God intended by it." That doesn't look epistemically simpler to me. And the Bible itself complicates Joe's picture. The barrians are praised in Acts 17 precisely because they received Paul's message and then examine the scriptures daily to see whether what he was saying was true.
¶189Think about that. They are checking the teachings of an apostle against scripture. Luke doesn't rebuke them for acting like many popes. He commends them for it. Now, obviously, Catholics have ways of fitting that passage into a Catholic understanding of authority.
¶190Fine. My point is simply that the Bible does not present careful personal examination of religious claims as some obviously defective model that Christians should avoid. And then we come to another tension in Joe's argument. If God really intended the Catholic magisterian to function as the final doctrinal authority for the entire world, why make the evidence for that authority so indirect? Joe's answer seems to be, "The miracles make it clear." But do they?
¶191I discussed this in my previous video. The miracle evidence Joe presented struck me as deeply underwhelming. If God wanted to make transubstantiation unmistakably clear, surely there are much clearer ways to do it than having a consecrated host develop a reddish substance that to the naked eye could easily look like mold or bacterial growth. and then require modern hisystological examination to discover that some material on a slide supposedly resembles heart tissue. And even then we are left arguing about chain of custody preservation who handled the sample, what exactly was tested and whether the extraordinary conclusion actually follows from the laboratory findings.
¶192So now we have a strange combination when Joe wants miracles to identify the Catholic Church. The miracles are clear enough that rejecting their message becomes unreasonable. But when we point out how ambiguous, incomplete or contestable those miracles are, Joe can appeal to divine hiddenness. Perhaps God intentionally gives enough evidence for belief while leaving enough ambiguity that people can still resist. But then what happened to the argument that miracles provide this wonderfully clear scalable alternatives to endless theological interpretation?
¶193You cannot lean on their clarity when you want them to authenticate Rome and then lean on their ambiguity when someone asks why a loving God didn't make the authentication much clearer. At the very least, Joe needs to explain how those two claims fits together. If God appeared in front of me, performed miracles that left me genuinely convinced that I was dealing with God and then told me to follow him, I understand why that would carry enormous authority. But at some point, we need to be clear about what kind of authority we are talking about. Suppose I think there is nothing morally wrong with a loving same-sex relationship, but God tells me that it is wrong.
¶194If my response is simply, "God said so, therefore I must condemn it," then the moral reasoning has effectively ended. I may still use the word morality, but what I really mean is obedience. God does not approve of this. Therefore, neither may I. And perhaps that is what religion ultimately demands.
¶195But then it should be spelled out clearly because once the reasoning behind the command no longer matters once my own moral judgment is something I'm expected to distrust whenever it conflicts with authority. I start wondering what exactly I'm becoming. What kind of moral maturity are we cultivating if the mature response is ultimately to distrust our own judgment and defer to authority? What kind of intellectual maturity are we cultivating? If after years of learning to reason carefully, question assumptions, weigh evidence, and recognize bad arguments, the mature response is ultimately to set all of that aside and submit.
¶196And really, that is the point this entire video has been building toward. Everything I've said in this video and in the previous one eventually brings me back to those questions. And those questions are especially for you, Joe. After everything I have tried to lay out, I hope I have earned the right to ask you those questions. Seriously, what worries me is not that you became a theist or a Catholic.
¶197What worries me is that you seem to be placing a limit on how far you are willing to follow your own intellectual and moral judgment. I don't mean that you stopped thinking. Obviously, you haven't. You are still extremely intelligent, extremely analytical and capable of sophisticated arguments. But there now seems to be a boundary around that reasoning.
¶198Reason can lead you toward Catholicism. It can defend Catholicism. It can generate possible explanations for things that trouble you. But when your deepest moral judgment finally collides with what the church teaches, the judgment that is expected to give way is your own. And to me that feels less like the fulfillment of our rational and moral capacities and more like slowly surrendering part of them.
¶199Sometimes listening to you now I get the uncomfortable impression that the central question has shifted from what is actually right to what must I believe and do if this authority really speaks for God. Those questions can overlap but they are not the same question. And I think we can see that shift in some very concrete moral questions. Take masturbation, contraception, and consensual samesex relationship between two adults who love each other. [snorts] The question increasingly seems to be less about what exactly is wrong with this?
¶200Who is being harmed? Why should I regard this as morally bad? and more about has God forbidden it? Is this grave matter? Could this put me in mortal sin?
¶201And once that becomes the decisive question, the moral reasoning starts to play a very different role. [snorts] You may not independently see anything seriously wrong with the act. Your moral intuitions may strongly resist condemning it. You may even have arguments for why you think it is harmless. But if you have already concluded that the Catholic Church speaks with divine authority, then the conclusion has effectively been settled for you.
¶202Your task is no longer primarily to determine whether the act is wrong. Your task is to bring your judgment into conformity with what you believe God has revealed through the church. And your explanation for removing some of your older videos illustrates this. You didn't say you removed them because you had discovered that your arguments were logically invalid or that new evidence had refuted them. You said some of those videos defended things you now regard as gravely wrong and could lead people into grave error or sin.
¶203You even said keeping those videos up is comparable to knowingly living online content that advocates killing non-white people. That tells me something important about what has changed. Even if you cannot see why masturbation, contraception, or a loving same-sex relationship is morally wrong, that no longer matters in the same way. If the church says, "God forbids it," then your judgment is expected to yield to the church's teaching. At that point, the decisive reason starts sounding less like, "I understand why this is wrong and more like God condemns this, therefore I must condemn it, too." And that is exactly what worries me.
¶204>> [snorts] >> You can spend years learning to reason carefully, question assumptions, weigh evidence, and examine your moral intuitions. But if whenever those judgments finally conflict with church teaching, the mature response is to distrust yourself and submit, then what kind of moral and intellectual maturity are you actually cultivating? You cannot spend the entire journey telling me to use reason, evidence, conscience, and moral judgment to search for truth and then once I arrive at your preferred institution, tell me that those same faculties become suspect whenever they lead somewhere inconvenient. That is not the kind of intellectual life I want. I want to become better at reasoning, not merely better at obeying.
¶205I want to build an internal reservoir of knowledge, judgment, empathy, skepticism, and moral courage. Resources that I can draw on when somebody tells me something is right, even though every part of my moral judgment is telling me that something is terribly wrong. And that matters especially when the person or institution making the demand claims divine authority. Because history gives us plenty of examples of people who sincerely believed that an authority spoke for God. Sometimes resisting authority is a moral failure.
¶206But sometimes resisting authority is exactly what moral courage requires. And if a religious system gradually trains you to distrust your own conscience whenever it conflicts with the institution, I think that should concern you, Joe. It certainly concerns me. Maybe some people genuinely prefer having an external authority settle these questions for them. Continually researching, questioning, weighing competing interpretations, living with uncertainty, and accepting responsibility for your own conclusions can be exhausting.
¶207I understand the attraction of having an institution say here is the answer. You don't have to keep wrestling with it. But Joe, is that really you? Is that the kind of intellectual life you actually want? Because there is a cost to handing that responsibility away.
¶208You may gain certainty. You may gain unity. You may gain the comfort of knowing that someone else has already decided. But what are you giving up in exchange? And I would ask the same thing of everyone watching this.
¶209At the end of the day, nobody else can make that decision for you. Not Joe, not me, not a priest, not a pastor, not a magisteria. You have to decide what kind of person you want to become. For me, I would rather live with uncertainty and remain responsible for my own judgment than gain certainty by surrendering it. And if God exists, I would hope that honestly using the mind and the conscience I have, questioning, reasoning, caring about suffering, and trying to determine what is [music] right to the very best of my ability is not something he would condemn me for.
¶210If anything, I would hope that is exactly what he would want me to do. And with that, thank you so much for staying with me all the way to the end. I'd really like to hear what you think. [music] So, if you have any feedback, disagreements, or thoughts of your own, please leave them in the comments. And if you enjoy this kind of content and would like to support the channel, please consider supporting me on Patreon.
¶211I also want to thank Charles for being a mindful partner. Your support really helps me keep making videos like this. Anyway, thank you all again for watching and I'll see you in the next