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Hello, friends. This show is standard reason and I'm going Greg Koukl, your host. And I'm broadcasting from northern Wisconsin, way, way north. Some people ask me where is that in Wisconsin? Way, way north. You get to the end of the freeway and they pick up Highway 51 and keep going north. And an hour north of Wausau, the local bergs are Lactiflambeau, Woodruff, Minocqua. Not very big, but they're just the right size for me. And I know it seems weird already mentioned this behind me is not a northern Wisconsin animal head, it's an African animal head. But nevertheless, I am here and rusticating a little bit, but been working a lot and sometimes when I have it's September and you know into October now and leaves are changing and I have a lot of work on the east of the Mississippi. On my weekends I come up here and then I kind of base out of here to do those trips. And that's what's happening for a few weeks for me. Glad to be here and I'm glad that you've joined me. Join me today. I talked in the last show about the podcast that I was a part of a few weeks ago and just aired earlier this week called the Diary of a CEO. And Stephen Bartlett is the host for that. A very big deal, huge audience. And if you want to see that three and a half hour almost interview, you can go to str.org and there's a link there. You can check that out. But you can also I guess there are other ways to do it too, but it's on whatever that's the best way str.org and go from there. But and I mentioned in the last broadcast there's a lot that you can learn. I want to start off this show with some reflections or some some responses to challenges that came up, particularly by Alex o', Connor, a very, very bright athe clever, well educated in theology and philosophy at Cambridge. He's only 26 years old, but I mean I was 26 once too. I became a Christian at 23. I was three years old in Christ. And you know, I had a lot to say even then. But he has a lot more to say now than I had to say then. So he was quite challenging interlocutor opposition in my ideas. And I want to talk about a couple of things that came up issues that he pressed pretty hard on because you may be faced with these also. And I want to let you know how I don't want to say how I responded because I Gave shorter responses than I would do. So now if I was confronted with the same issues and had more time than I did then to talk about them, and I wasn't interrupted like I was a number of times with Alex. But I want to give you a little more substance to it. One of the big things that concerns Alex is suffering. Now you need to know something about his ethical viewpoint, because he is deeply concerned about the issue of suffering. But he is not a moral objectivist. He is a moral non realist or a moral relativist. That is, he does not think that morality is objective in any sense. There are no real moral rules. There is no evil, there is no good. They're just things happen. There's no moral quality to them. But he is a relativist of a particular type. He's what's called an emotivist. So when he tries to cash out the moral project, why is it that people talk in moral terms or use terms like evil and good and the like? What is going on there? Now? Relativism, generally speaking, let me back up. Objectivism says that when people are talking about evil, they're talking about something that's real in the world. It's a feature of reality. It's characteristic of certain behaviors. So when people say rape is wrong or evil or wicked, they're talking about the rape, a property, if you will. You want to get philosophical or characteristic of the action itself. They're not talking just about their feelings. They may feel it's wrong, but they don't mean to say they're just feeling bad about it or feeling it's wrong, but they believe it's actually wrong. Now in a relativist case, they deny that there are objective moral principles like that. And what a person means when he says that things are right or wrong is that they're just right or wrong for them. That's their truth. They wouldn't do that. Or if they did it, they'd think they would be breaking their own private moral code. But they aren't transgressing some transcendent, universal, objective, absolute rule of morality. Part of the reason is that when you start talking like that, you get really close to having to talk about God. Because the concern then is how are you going to ground that is make sense of where this rule or moral system came from and what gives it its incumbency or its authority? What creates the obligation for the person that is under that law? No, they don't want to say that. They don't believe that. They believe it's just A matter of individuals, or maybe a group of individuals, a culture. Okay, so there are different ways to cash out a relativistic way of looking at morality. There is no objective morality. It's just an expression of our own personal likes, dislikes, or convictions. An emotivist takes it one step further. An emotivist is a moral non realist, like a relativist, but they don't even think that moral statements even make any sense. They're not even propositional statements. They're not true or false in any sense, because they aren't statements at all. So when a person says rape is wrong to an emotivist, all that person is really saying is rape. Ugh, yuck. And when they say Mother Teresa is kind or noble or virtuous, they're not saying anything about Mother Teresa. They're not even saying anything about her behavior. They're just saying something about their emotions. Mother Teresa. Oh, yay. Yeah, great. That's it. So in a certain sense, I guess I could say that an emotivist is a relativist at an even lower level because they're not even willing to acknowledge the propositional value of even relativistic moral statements. Okay, well, Alex o', Connor, the person, the atheist who sat across the table from me for five hours during that podcast that was edited down to three and a half about, he's an emotivist. He's an emotivist. And so when people look at something that many would characterize as evil or wicked or wrong, he doesn't, he doesn't even acknowledge that that's the case. He's just saying that. I guess you, I don't even know if you'd say that the person who says it is even saying they don't like it. Maybe, but all they would be saying really, if he was to put it in his terms, would be, yuck, yuck. That's all. So now this is his view, and I know it is his view because I don't know he expressed it quite so clearly in the event. But I've seen podcasts where he's talked in more detail about his emotivism. He had an interaction with Sam Harris, who is also an atheist, one of the so called new atheists, one of two that are left along with Richard Dawkins. The other two have died. And they were talking about his moral view and he was very clear on it. So I'm not misrepresenting Alex o' Connor here, but here's the odd thing is Alex was taking up a stance against me, because in my worldview, I could not make sense out of all the suffering that you would have in the world, particularly animal suffering before the fall, because I talked about the fall, had an impact on the world. What about all those animals that lived, however, long before the fall itself? What about that? What about their untold suffering? Millions and billions of years of animal suffering is the way it kind of characterized it. What about that on your worldview? Your worldview can't make. Let's see. I think the way he put it is, how can your worldview be plausible when it can't even explain that? Now, I think our worldview can't explain suffering is certainly from the fall, since the fall. And he brings up. And he brought up about a mother whose child is dying of cancer. And are you going to say, oh, your mother's child, I'm sorry, to the mother, your child is dying of cancer and suffering this awful thing because two people, millions or billions of years ago, whatever it was tens of thousands of years ago even, they did something bad. They ate from a fruit of a tree. And that's why your kid's dying of cancer. Now, this is the way you characterize it. And of course, a very uncharitable way of putting it, but nevertheless, that's the way he's hammering away at me. Okay, now, so I want to say a couple of things about this, and I was able to make some of these points with some clarity, but not as forcefully as I would have liked. And looking back, like I mentioned in the last show, it's almost like things are happening in slow motion and you can see things that you didn't see before. But in the fog of war, as it were, it's a little more difficult. Understandable. Everybody who is involved in those kinds of engagements, maybe even Alex himself, as he's looking back, has these kinds of realizations. Oh, I could have made better use of that particular moment than I did. All right, But a couple of thoughts, and that is, let's just talk about animal suffering. Okay, before the fall, because he focused in on that. Okay, what about all those animals before the fall? We'll get to after the fall in just a moment. But before the fall, what about all that suffering? Well, and he made, of course, the situation look really, really bad. Now, I thought of an illustration that I could have used to make the point that I did make. But this illustration would be more powerful, I think, because both. There were two of four members on that panel that were British. Stephen Bartlett, whose show it was, and Alex o'. Connor. They're Brits. Okay? If you ever, ever been to England, you know, when you ride the tube, the underground, the subway they call it in Chicago, there is a, there is a, a sign painted on the sidewalk, on the edge, by where you get on to the, the platform, rather, and where you get onto the, to the underground train. Okay? And anybody who's been to England know what that sign says because it's all along there over and over and over again. And to English, American ears, it sounds a little odd, but English people know exactly what it means. And I could have asked him that. What is that sign, Alex? The sign is mind the gap. Mind the gap. Mind means pay attention, look out for. And the gap is the space between the platform and the train. There is a space engineered between the platform and the train. So you have to step over the space, obviously, to get into the train. Don't step into the space and fall in the hole. Mind the gap. Now why is that gap there? That gap is dangerous. People could fall into that and hurt themselves. Well, the gap's there because people are down there to ride a train. And the train needs to have a space between it and, and the platform in order for it to run properly. Point being, every single thing that is engineered for a purpose presents us with a trade off. Okay? So you get the train running smoothly because there is a gap. But the gap itself creates a liability. And you have to be careful that you don't get injured by the liability that is necessary for the train to do its function. This is true in everything. And so when it comes to suffering of animals, what is suffering? That's the experience of pain. Well, why do animals feel pain? Why does anybody feel pain? Because it's a design feature. It's something that is designed and it is a very sophisticated physiological response. Pain. And by the way, pain occurs on many, many different levels. You can bang your shin, you can stick yourself with a pin, you can hit your finger with a hammer. You could have a headache, you could have a stomach ache, you could have a heartache. All of those are different kinds of pain. All right? So pain is very sophisticated, but it's there for a reason, because it's meant to signal that something is wrong and to cause you to pay attention to the thing that's not right so you can fix it and not feel the pain anymore. Pain is a design feature. It's made for a reason. But like any other designed thing, there's going to be trade offs. And so when animals bump their shin, okay, well, that causes pain, but then don't bang into that next time. That's the signal. And if an animal gets burned in a wildfire, they stay away from the fire, the lesson, so to speak. But some animals get caught in the fire, they fall into the gap, and that's the trade off. Now, I have a suspicion about animal pain, and that is, I don't know that animals experience pain in the same kind of psychological way that we do. But this is just another issue. It may not be as bad as we think. And sometimes when there's terrible circumstance with a lot of pain, animals go torpid. They just kind of give up and they're not jumping around in agony, they just relax. And it's. I don't know about this, but I have this suspicion that part of the design of animals is that when they go into that kind of circumstance where they're going to where the lion is devouring the kudu or something like the head on the back here, that they just go torpid, they just kind of relax and then maybe all that pain shuts off because they don't seem to be reacting like we might react if somebody was eating us. And maybe we wouldn't react that way. I don't know. Nevertheless, that issue aside, my point is that they're trade offs, okay? So that, I think is a fair rejoinder response to the challenge about pain. That in so many things that are designed for something good, there is going to be a trade off, and the trade off is a bad thing. But the thing that creates the possibility of the bad thing is a good thing. And the presumption is the good far outweighs the bad that you get from the trade off. Just like most people get on the train and don't follow the gap because they're minding the gap and they get to where they want to go. All right, so that's one thought about the animal suffering business. Now, there's another thought that I had, and this goes to the point that Alex was making about how uncharitably he characterized the decision of two people, Adam and Eve, having a consequence down the line of breaking the world. Pardon me, breaking the world. And this is part of the point that I offered him. When they disobeyed God, they broke their relationship with God, they broke their relationship with each other. That was obvious, each of those in the account. And they broke their relationship with the environment. The world had changed. Some kind of impact. I don't know all the impact. I don't know if there would have been Earthquakes or tsunamis before the fall like there was afterwards. Haven't worked that all out. I don't know. But nevertheless, we do know there was an impact on the environment. The whole creation groans Paul says in Romans 8. Now there's a figure of speech, of course, but there's something going on there and waiting for its adoption. Maybe it's correction, it's fixing, as it were. All right, but it was this whole effect of this, the decision of Adam and Eve that affected all of mankind was just minimized and dismissed in almost a coarse fashion. And he kept pressing that particular point because, hey, these are people that are listening, that are suffering, and this is what you're offering them. This is no comfort whatsoever. Now, we did get around to some answers to that, but I want you to think of two different things. First of all, I want you to think about this. And again, this is what I wish I would have said. And if I had the opportunity, again, this is what I've said. I'd say. December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl harbor, after which, immediately we declared war on the nation of Japan. And Japan's ally, Germany, under Adolf Hitler, just a couple days later, did something really, really stupid. He declared war on the United States. Now, it's really stupid because Hitler can't reach the United States with any of his armies. He can't touch us. But what happened in Pearl harbor and then the subsequent declaration of war by one man, Adolf Hitler, awoke a sleeping giant that had unbelievable industrial capability and a massive amount of people that were really angry. And five years later, see, this is 41. War ended in 45. Four years later, the entire nation of Germany was reduced to rubbles, principally by the air attack, but also by the ground attack. Everything was blown up, everything was leveled, sometimes with atrocious fires, firebombing with the strategic bombing strategy of the Allied forces because that's what was necessary to end the war. In other words, all of those innocent civilians died. Who died, died horrific deaths because one man made a decision that affected all of them. So as odd as it might sound to Alex o' Connor that a woman's child might be dying of cancer because Adam and Eve disobeyed God some time in the distant past, and he called them mythological individuals. Well, if they were mythological, then that isn't the reason they died. But in any event, that's the way he characterized it. The idea of two individuals influencing an entire massive population of people is not odd. We deal with that all the time. People make stupid decisions that have A ramification on all kinds of people that are otherwise innocent, nevertheless, they still suffer. That's called cause and effect. If you don't want to bring the moral element in, if you're willing to put the moral element in, then that's called sin. And sin has an impact on people that are not even involved in the original action. That's the destructive nature of sin. Now, I just mentioned if you want to bring the moral element in, but Alex o' Connor doesn't want to bring the moral element in because he doesn't believe in the moral element. He believes that any moral statement is just an emotional outburst. That's wicked. Well, all you're saying is, ugh, yuck. Ugh. That's all you're saying on his view. And it occurred to me during this cross examination, because that's what it amounted to at that particular point in the conversation. And when Alex kept pressing me, you have to have an answer for this because there are people hurt. I wish I would have said, you know, Alex, this whole line of questioning really mystifies me coming from you. Because on your view, when it comes to animal suffering, and by the way, his view is that from a naturalistic perspective, we can explain this. This is just what happens in nature. Darwinism and whatever. Okay, yes, but obviously. And this was obvious to me, and I pointed this out, though he. He dismissed it, obviously, he is associating some kind of moral quality to animal suffering. He's not complaining about vegetables falling from the vine. He's talking about animal suffering. And therefore the suffering of animals has an intrinsic, in his view, moral element to it, which is why there's the complaint. If all he's doing is expressing his emotions about animal suffering, who cares? Lots of people don't care about animal suffering. Okay, no, his complaint and his attempt to make Christianity look bad is that animal suffering, it must have a moral element to it, or it's not an argument against the Christian worldview. It just isn't, any more than dying tomatoes is. But he said, I'm very careful not to bring any morality into it. Yes, you're right. And I conceded, yeah, you're right. You didn't bring any morality into it explicitly, but certainly it's there implicitly. He is smuggling it in. All right, but he has no right to do that because he's an atheist. And the thing I wish I would have said more clearly is this line of question is confusing to me because, Alex, you don't think animal suffering has any moral component to it whatsoever. It's not bad as far as you're concerned. But I'll take it a step further. Your position is worse because you don't think this mother who's suffering with her child dying of cancer, the that suffering has any moral component to it either. Your view is uglier than mine, than you're trying to make mine out to be. Now, I didn't say that. But that's what it amounts to. And if you're ever caught in this circumstance again by an atheist who's even a moral relativist, it's not as bad as an emotivist, which is much more dismissive of the anguish that a mother might have about her child. If you get encountered by somebody like that, you can just say, hey, what's your solution? And you're going to tell what? You're going to say what to the mother whose child is dying of cancer? I have something to say. The world's broken, and there's a way to unbreak it. And God has provided a way to unbreak it. And it doesn't mean your child is not going to still die from cancer now. And it's not going to be anguish for you now. I don't think it was. Was it Job who said men born of women are full of anguish as the sparks fly upward? It's a nasty world we're in, and it's nasty because the world is broken. And we all know that, except for Alex. O' Connor doesn't know that. He doesn't believe the world's broken, it just is. And so he has nothing to offer that mother. He has no counsel, he has no comfort that he can offer her. We can, because at least in our worldview, there's comfort that can be offered. Let's just say even if our view isn't true, he's saying if our worldview is true, there's no comfort. No, if his worldview is true, there's no comfort if ours. There is comfort even in the midst of that tragedy. For one, we could say that is tragedy. And the word tragedy has a moral element to it. It's not just something, yuck, that happens to us. It's something that ought not have happened senseless in a certain sense. Yet it does happen because the world is broken. And we know why it's broken. And we know that there's a fix, and that's at the end of the story. But the fix is coming at the end of the story to the world. But right now, the fix is coming to human beings who are part of the breakage and the breaking, and that fixes forgiveness. And by the way, I made a point about that, about the judgment that's coming that got completely eliminated from the final cut. I did my best. I did get aspects of the gospel in. In ways that I thought were appropriate for the conversation. I didn't want to barge in bludgeoning people with it because that would not have been helpful or persuasive. But I did make one shot and it got cut out. But we do have an answer, and it's an eventual answer. And the suffering, now it's redeemed. It's redeemed. It's called soul making. Soul making. So we can make sense of the suffering before the fall because pain is a design feature and there's a trade off for it. We can make sense of the suffering after the fall, human suffering, because. And the brokenness of the world. And by the way, I understand that there are Christians who don't think there was any suffering before the fall, and the young Earthers, and I respect that view. So you don't face the problem that I would face and what I was facing with him. But we can make sense of the suffering after the fall because that's the nature of the fall. We can make sense of the fact that two people can make a decision and chart a course that affects billions of people down through time, because that's the way human decisions work. And Hitler declaring the war on the United States of America is a perfect example. And Japanese attacking resulted in the destruction of their country too, even though people didn't choose that for themselves. That's the way that works. That sin has consequences in the lives of people who did not participate in the sin. It's just the way it is. But there is a rescue. And by the way, in our story, evil is not the problem that many people think it is, because it's part of our story. And our story is not over yet. All right, let's take a quick break and I'll come back to calls after this. Do you have a passion to train people in apologetics but you don't know where to start? You may be interested in starting an STR outpost. STR outposts are local communities of Christians seeking answers to the hard questions about Christianity. Each outpost is led by a qualified director who trains others with STR content and curriculum in their local church. By becoming an outpost director, you'll be equipped with the content and coaching you need to lead your own outpost. We currently have around 160 outposts spanning 38 states and in eight other countries, and we're adding more each month. If you're interested in learning more about starting an outpost or you want to find a current outpost in your area, visit str.org outpost you can also email me trippallman outposttr.org friends, if you like this broadcast, I know you'll love Strask. It's our shorter 20 minute podcast where I am paired with the wonderful Amy hall, and together we answer the questions you send us on Twitter. Strask is released twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays, and it's only about 20 minutes long, so it's perfect to listen to on your morning jog or while driving around running errands or cleaning your garage or just plain loafing at home. Amy and I tackle your questions on theology and ethics and culture and lots more, offering our insight on the questions you're asking or the challenges you face. You can listen on Apple podcasts or wherever you download your own shows. Just remember, send us your questions on Twitter using the name of the podcast. Strask. That's Strask. All right, friends, Greg Koko back with you here, and I have Raimi on board here with a question about autism. And Amy, glad you called. What's up, Ramey? Rather. Sorry, am I supposed to push that button? I guess I am. Okay.