[Applause] the following is a presentation of apologetics [Music] press good evening good evening uh it's my pleasure to welcome you here to una if I could have your attention please my name is Travis hunt and I'm serving as this year's student student President at the University of North Alabama Christian Student Center and it's with a great honor that we are hosting this event tonight and we're so honored for your presence here with us this evening whether you're here in the audience or you're one of the thousands watching online thank you for being a part of
this um huge event uh at this time I would like to take the time to introduce our moderator for the evening Dr Brent Olive is the Department chair of the chemistry and Industrial High department and he's also an associate professor here at una he obtained his undergraduate degree from una and he has a master of science in public health and Industrial hygiene from the University of Alabama at Birmingham he also has a PHD in Environmental Health Sciences also from UAB and so at this time I'll give you Dr Olive again let me welcome everyone to
the Beautiful Campus of the University of North Alabama we're glad everyone came out tonight welcome to all those who are also watching on the live stream before we begin please let me welcome and recognize just a few special guests that we have with us tonight we have with us Dr William kale president of the University of North Alabama and his wife BJ Dan Hendrick who serves as the UNA vice president for University advancement and his wife Barbara and also with us this evening dick Jordan who serves as president of the Florence city council and his
wife Libby who also serves on our Board of Trustees as you can see on the screen behind me the topic for tonight's debate is the pain and suffering in the world indicate that the Christian God does not exist we have with us this evening Dr Bart man who will be affirming that position and Mr kyleb who will be denying that let me briefly introduce These two speakers and then we'll talk about the format of the debate and then we will get started Dr Bart man comes to us from the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill he serves there as a distinguished professor Prof a James a gray distinguished Professor he has been there since 1988 having taught for four years before going to UNC at Rucker University while at UNCC he has served as both director of Graduate Studies and also as the chair of the Department of Religious studies he is a graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois he earned his masters of divinity and PhD both at Princeton Theological Seminary he has published extensively in the fields of New Testament and early Christianity having written or edited 24 books numerous scholarly articles
and dozens of book reviews among his most recent books are an English Greek edition of the apostolic fathers an Assessment of the newly discovered Gospel of Judas and also four New York best New York Times bestsellers including Jesus interrupted God's problem Miss quoting Jesus and the book forged among his fields of expertise are the historical Jesus the early Christian Apocrypha the apostolic fathers and the manuscript tradition of the New Testament he is the father of two children a daughter Kelly and Son Derek and he is married to Sarah Beckwith who Serves as a professor of
English at Duke University and they reside in Durham North Carolina let's make make Dr man welcome to Florence Alabama this [Applause] evening again denying the position tonight is Mr Kyle but he graduated from freed Hardman University where he earned a a ba with a double major in Bible and communication and a master of arts in New Testament studies he has worked at a Christian apologist for the last 13 Years in the de Bible in the Bible department at apologetics press he is the author or co-author of more than 25 books dealing with topics such as
the existence of God the inspiration of the Bible the deity of Christ and various other issues relating to Christian evidences his books include behold the word of God a Christian's guide to refuting Mo modern atheism out with doubt truth be told exposing the myth of evolution and how Do you know the Bible is from God he has been in two debates previously defending the existence of God he serves as editor of Discovery Magazine which is a monthly children's periodical about scripture and Science and he is also the associate editor of reason and Revelation which is
a monthly Journal of Christian evidences in addition he has appeared in numerous video series including answering atheism is the Bible from God and truth be told he and his wife Bethany have been married for 13 years and they have three children Drew anac Clair and Reed and they all reside here in Florence let's make Mr but welcome this [Applause] evening the format of the debate this evening will be as follows we'll have opening statements from each gentleman which will last for 20 minutes we will begin with Mr Kyle but and then Dr Bart ER Following
those 20 minute opening statements they'll be a 12-minute rebuttal from Mr but and then M Dr man and then following that there'll be a cross-examination where The Debaters will be able to ask each other questions and those will last for 15 minutes each at the end of those three segments we will have a 15minute intermission cards are being passed around the audience following the intermission we will take questions from The audience but those will need to be turned in before the intermission so if you would like to submit a question please do so submit that
to one of the ushers before the 15 minute intermission of course when we come back from the intermission we will have questions and answers uh from the audience and from our debaters and we'll have two minute answers with each debater having one minute to respond we will have time to Take approximately six questions following the Q&A period there'll be a f minute closing statement from each of our Debaters my job will be to stay out of their way I'll try to keep things on schedule um I've told them I'll try to do so without being
disruptive I've got a little desk bell up here to try to warn them as they approaching their time uh but we'll try to make sure that we're fair and equal and give both individuals The time that they deserve we'll begin with Mr Kyle [Applause] but good evening I'd like to thank all of you for coming I'd like to thank those of you who are watching via internet I'd like to thank the Christian Student Center of unaa I'd like to thank Dr man for his participation in this event and most importantly I'd like to thank God
the all loving all powerful God whose existence all be defending This evening tonight we are discussing the idea of suffering this idea Dr man says is the idea that caused him to lose his faith in the god of the Bible he says that he looked around the world saw the suffering that people experienced experienced in own suffering and came to the conclusion that the Christian God simply does not exist and that's why he'll be affirming this evening the pain and suffering in this world indicates That the Christian God does not exist I'll be showing that
that simply is not the case I'll be showing that the pain and suffering in this world in fact do not indicate that the Christian God does not exist now when we're talking about this idea of suffering there have been many different approaches some people have approached it with very insufficient inaccurate results in fact they have said suffering is something that happens in your mind it's something That isn't real it's illusory and if you could just get your mind right then you wouldn't be suffering and you wouldn't have pain I think you and I both can
understand that when we experience our own suffering and look around at the suffering of others we realize that's not just something in our mind you can't dismiss it like that now other people have taken equally inaccurate views I debated a man by the name of Dan Barker in 2009 and he says If you go into a children's hospital and see the pain and suffering those children experience then you know God doesn't exist well that's just simply not the case I took him up on the challenge I went into the Children's Hospital there in Columbia South
Carolina and the first person who met me was a volunteer I asked her what she was doing there she said she felt like she needed to help as many other people as possible and I asked her why she bent Down and showed me a bullet hole in the back of her head she said several months prior to that she had been sitting in her living room and a stray bullet had come through her living room wall and had struck her in the head she said that she should have died but she attributed her living to
providential interaction from the Lord and she said that's why she felt like she should help other people as much as possible I said the other Volunteers in this particular Children's Hospital would you say that they believe in God and she said oh Far and Away yes most all of them do you see it's it's simply not the case that if you were to go into any Children's Hospital you would just come away somehow knowing that the Christian God does not exist so what are we dealing with then tonight well historically the idea or the problem
of suffering has been put like this if there is an all Lov God and that God is all powerful then why do we have suffering you you see the idea is if God is all loving he wouldn't want us to suffer if he's all powerful then he would have the ability to stop suffering and yet there is suffering now lots of times this has been presented as logical proof that the god of the Bible does not exist in fact there's an unbeliever by the name of JL Mackey who several years ago said yes this argument
is so very strong that it logically Disproves God's existence he said just like a is greater than B and B is greater than C therefore a is greater than C you can take these three ideas that there's an all-loving God who is all powerful and that there is suffering and you can logically disprove God's existence now that happened to be an epic failure in fact he had to come out out several years later and say no you can't do that in fact let me read to you What he said he said and I quote we
can concede that the problem of evil does not after all show that the central doctrines of theism are logically inconsistent with one another now Dr man knows this is the case when we were writing emails back and forth about the proposition I asked him would you affirm the pain and suffering in this world proves that the Christian God does not exist and he said no you can't do that the pain and suffering in this world Does not prove that the Christian God does not exist now that came as a blow for unbelief because there are
arguments that if logically valid and sound would prove that God the Christian God does exist for instance the moral argument the moral argument says if there are objective moral values then God exist there are objective moral values therefore God exist or the telogical argument or the argument from design it says that when you see complex Functionality there must be an intelligence behind it the universe exhibits complex functionality therefore there must be an intelligence behind it now don't misunderstand what I'm saying I'm not saying that unbelief says oh yes those arguments logically prove that there's a
God what I am saying is that if they are valid and they are sound they logically prove that there's a God and that's a debate for another time and I could show that they are but what I'm Saying is the singular argument that has been used by unbelief in an attempt to disprove God's existence on almost all accounts now has been shown not to do that it can be conceited and has been by the unbelievers that you just can't logically disprove God's existence well so what are we dealing with here have we solved the problem
well no otherwise we wouldn't be here tonight would we what are we dealing with then well here's what we're dealing With instead of trying to logically disprove God's existence unbelief now contends that while there might be a god there's just too much suffering for us to believe that he exists you see we can't prove that he doesn't unbelief contends but it sure looks like to us that he does doesn't you see it's not a logically sound argument it's more of a of an emotional appeal now let me show you how this emotional appeal is often
presented Dr manman often presents this Particular appeal in his writing and in his debates by rattling off a series of statistics on suffering I've taken these straight from his debates and writing and here's how that goes often in 1918 the influenza virus killed 30 million people are you saying that a loving God allowed that every 5 Seconds a child dies of starvation that 700 an hour every 1 minute 25 people die of diseases related to unclean drinking water every hour 300 people die of Malaria in the mid 1980s a mudslide in Colombia killed 30,000 people
in one night there are genocides in Bosnia in Rwanda in Dar for the Holocaust The Killing Fields of C a failed marriages homelessness poverty if God acts in this world why doesn't he are you saying that God is allowing this a loving God I don't believe it for a second no that's generally how the appeal is made you see it's not an argument he he would just like you to agree with him on on some Gut emotional level now let me show you why this tactic simply it simply cannot work because if the pain and
suffering in this world argue against God then all of the good things in this world would have to be evidence for God's existence you see if we could then just rattle off a series of Statistics like this then we could establish God exists through the emotional appeal what if we were to say every single day hundreds of millions of mothers kiss their children and tell Them that they love them every day millions of older people are helped across the street by younger people who Gain No survival Advantage from action every second 30 million grandparents hug
their grandchildren or think about them fondly every single minute hundreds of millions of people all around the world eat good food enjoy good strong friendships have good family relationships and you're telling me that this happened because we evolve from Primordial slime over multiply millions of years I don't believe it for a second you see it's an emotional appeal now Dr man understands the force of the this and let me tell you what I mean by that in his book God's problem he says the problem I have is this I have a fantastic I have such
a fantastic life that I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for it I'm fortunate beyond words but I don't have anyone to express my gratitude to this is a deep void Inside of me a void of wanting someone to thank and I don't see any plausible way of feeling it you see to say I'm thankful for something without saying I'm thankful to someone is ultimately a meaningless exercise and therefore if such an emotional appeal were the way to arrive at the truth here all we would need to show is Dr man's fantastic life and his
deep void of gratitude and that would be the evidence we would need to Show that a loving God does exist so let's apply our minds to this idea you see when we do we see that there are several reasons why disbelief in God simply cannot be the answer to the idea of suffering number one disbelief in God is forced to deny that there's any justice and fairness objectively in this world and number two unbelief is forced to deny that there is an afterlife now let let's turn our attention to that first idea the Idea of
justice and fairness after looking at the suffering in this world Dr man said this and I quote I was at a point in my life where I was starting to have serious doubts about my faith because of my sense of fairness of unfairness and Injustice in the world the problem of suffering uh but hold on just a second second where would a sense of unfairness and Justice come from if we are evolved primordial slime hereby chance processes Over multiplied millions of years you see the concepts of fairness and Justice in a Godless World simply have
no reference point but you don't have to take my word for that let me read to you what anel Atkins wrote in the humanist magazine he said that the concepts of fairness and justice make no sense in nature he said there are simply biological entities doing what they must do wanting what they must want and getting what they can get living by hook Or crook and then dying humanity is part of this in fact he says and I quote and listen to me closely this is not Kyle but's opinion this is anel Adams a an
atheist with a PhD from emry he says the only way to find Justice in nature would be to have it inserted by a Creator God and at some level Dr Herman absolutely understands this and let me tell you why in his Forester lecture in September of 2008 he said this and I Quote suffering comes because we live in a random chaotic world and sometimes we get in the way of it now Dr man and unbelief are are stuck they know that they're really seem to be some things that are unfair and injust but they don't
have any source to arrive at these Concepts so you see they're they're not actually saying some things are unfair or unjust what they're saying is that if there was a loving God these things would seem unfair or unjust but since They deny God's existence they're forced to say that Concepts such as Justice and fairness just simply have no objective meaning now let me read to you what Richard Dawkins the foremost atheist in the world right now says he says and I quote this universe that we observe has precisely the properties we would expect if there
is at bottom no design no purpose no evil no good nothing but pitiless Indifference and yet and yet that's simply not true is it humans do have a keen sense of justice and fairness and that's the exact opposite of what you would expect in a Godless World there really is something wrong with this world because of the sin that was introduced and the pain and suffering that followed but unbelief is forced to say that you know what suffering occurs it's not unfair it just happens you see when CS Lewis was Struggling with atheism he ran
into this problem he faced it head-on and here's what he said about about it he said of course I could have given up my idea of Justice by saying that it was nothing but a private idea of my own but if I did that then my argument against God collapsed too for the argument depended on saying that the world really was unjust not just that it didn't happen to please my private fancy you see our ideas of justice and fairness demand the Existence of God unbelief is not arguing that the world's not fair unbelief is
arguing that there's no such thing as fairness yet in our heart of hearts we know we know that it's the very concepts of fairness and Justice that make us struggle with suffering you see if there really is something that's fair and if there really is something that's just if those are objective values objective values demand that God exist Justice does exist exist therefore God exists now let's go to the second idea and let's see why unbelief fails to understand suffering unbelief fails to understand suffering because it fails to understand the purpose of this life you
see unbelief like that held by Dr man says that this life is all that there is so while you are here you need to grab as much pleasure and enjoyment as you possibly can because there is no life in fact he's often on record as saying things like this this is taken directly From his debates and writing he said that we should order un healthy desserts we should drink fine wine we should grill steaks on the grill we should watch basketball and drink micr brewed beer and we should try to help as many other people
do the same as possible now this approach only works it only works if there is no afterlife life you see if there is an afterlife then the purpose of this world becomes something very different than Try to get as much pleasure as possible the purpose then becomes to forge a character that can live with the Creator forever in the afterlife you see in light of an afterlife drinking beer and single malt scotch seem rather shallow Pursuits when compared to preparing for a life with the Creator you see a failure to grasp the real purpose of
this life will certainly result in Failure to understand suffering for instance if you were to come into my Kitchen and you were to go over to one of my shelves and pick up one of the green pears that are sitting there and you were to bite into it you might come to me and say Kyle you got a peir problem and I would say well why do I have a pear problem you would say well I try to bite into this pear and it's styrofoam I can't eat it this pear is useless it's worthless I
would say hold on just a second I don't have a pair problem you're misunderstanding the Purpose of the pair the purpose is for decoration not not for consumption you see when we are told there's a problem with suffering it's because the purpose of this world is being misunderstood now as we're looking at that it's only in a world where there is no afterlife that suffering could be a problem for an all-loving all powerful God if there is the possibility of a God then there's certainly the possibility of an afterlife and if there is an Afterlife
then it could be just exactly like one first century sufferer said our light Affliction which is but for a moment is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of Glory you see is there a possibility that there's a God in thus in afterlife well Dr man has to admit that that's possible in fact he says and I'm quoting I think the universe is such an amazing awe inspiring place that at the very least it demands some humility and I think the Declaration that there can't be a god is anything but humility that's
why I continue to be an agnostic and not an atheist so Dr man admits there could be a God and if there could be a God then there certainly could be an afterlife and if there could be an afterlife then the problem of suffering is not a problem for the god of the Bible and the Christian God does exist now in light of an afterlife answers to why God permits suffering would become Much much more clear you see it would make perfect Mak sense that God would endow humans with the freedom to choose and that
freedom to choose could allow them to choose either correctly or incorrectly and bring about suffering in their life we could see how a world with natural laws would allow people to forge a character that would allow them to go into the Afterlife you see in a world where you can hear I love you you have to be able to hear I hate you in a world Where you hear I love you have to be able to hear I hate you in in a world where you can feel a warm embrace you have to be able
to feel a punch in the face you see a world with natural laws is exactly what we would expect in a world that is helping us prepare for the after Afterlife now let me introduce you to a man by the name of Bob sperin Bob sperin his brother was murdered his mother died of acute leukemia he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis he's Been on his back for 20 years he lost his daughter Bethany four days after his diagnosis you see Dr man would look at his suffering and say an all loving all powerful God simply
would not allow that Bob sperin looks at his own suffering and he says that Jesus Christ is the solution it's preparing me for an afterlife Bob speron looks at his own suffering and says It's Made Me Stronger it's prepared me for eternity thank you very Much [Applause] well thank you uh Kyle for that very stimulating and interesting uh uh position that you laid out for us and thank you all for coming here uh so just curious I've never been in uh Northern Alabama before uh how many of you are associated with the Church of Christ
right okay so three of you didn't raise your hand uh how many of you consider yourselves Evangelical Christians really interesting huh okay how many of you are here to see me get creamed right so uh it is a pleasure to be here with you even though we have to be dealing with such a unpleasant topic uh it is a painful topic it is a topic that uh none of us takes life likely lightly because all of us suffer um we will ultimately all die many of us will die in pain we all know People who
have suffered we know about people who have suffered uh and it is not a pleasant topic but it's an incredibly important topic it's a topic that we should not take lightly it is one of the big questions that all of us have to confront I am not going to try and convert you to my point of view my sense is that Kyle very much wants you to agree with him uh and I don't mind if you agree With them or not um and I don't mind if you agree with me or not this is too
important of a topic for me to try and win a debate over my goal here is not to win a debate uh I love debating uh I debate a lot uh since I was in high school uh since I got married uh I debate a lot uh but this is not about when a debate let me say that um I started well no let me let me start saying I know Kyle loves debate too and the way I know Kyle loves debate is because of the strategy that he just employed uh and just so you
know what that is uh Kyle has heard me give this debate a number of times and he's read my book on this topic and what he has just done is cited everything I was going to say and shown why I was wrong that's a very nice strategy and it's a strategy I can't employ because I don't know uh Kyle or his work but uh I will not be deterred uh I'm I'm going to go ahead and tell You what I think uh and you know maybe it'll sound more convincing from me than it sounded from
him when he rebutted it I started out as a Bible believing Christian uh I uh when I was in high school I had a born- again experience and uh committed my life to Christ as my Lord and Savior and considered myself at that time as uh as born again after high school um I uh went to Moody Bible Institute for my undergraduate Education uh which I don't know if you know Moody Bible Institute but it is a a solid extremely conservative Evangelical School uh we used to say Moody Bible Institute where Bible is our middle
name quite literally uh after uh after Moody I went to Wheaton College which was Billy Grahams Alma moer um I eventually uh went to Princeton Theological Seminary I went there I was still an Evangelical Christian at the time but I went there Because I wanted to study the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and the world's expert in Greek manuscripts happened to teach at Princeton Theological Seminary name was Bruce mezer I wanted to study with him and so I went there while I was there uh I was the pastor the Princeton Baptist Church for a
year uh preached every Sunday morning and uh went to hospital to visit people to visit the sick I did the regular pastoral duties that one uh Would do LED Bible studies and prayer groups and so on while I was uh in my PhD program at princ and Theological Seminary I started to teach at ruter University at ruter I mainly taught classes in the New Testament and the Old Testament classes on the Apostle Paul classes on the Gospel of John John I was asked one semester to teach a class that was already on the books uh
they wanted me to teach that was called the problem of suffering in the biblical Traditions I thought this would be a really uh interesting and uh important class to teach because I had long thought even at that point in my life that the authors of the Bible are all struggling with this question of why they're suffering ring the authors of the Bible did not have easy answers they would have objected to easy answers many of them you too should not accept easy Answers you should not accept answers that simply confirm what you already think if
you do that then you're no longer thinking you're simply accepting views that you've already been taught or that you've heard or that you've thought since you were young this class on suffering was very important to me I decided that uh what I wanted to do was to look at the various views of suffering found in the Bible because as It turns out there's not a single view of why they're suffering there are lots of different views there are the prophets the prophets of the Old Testament are quite insistent that the reason the people of God
suffer is because God is punishing ing them for their sins let me read for you from one of the earliest Prophets The Book of Amos where God explains why it is the People of God have been suffering it's because God has made them suffer Amos 4: 6 and following I gave you cleanness of teeth in all your cities and lack of bread in all your places yet you did not return to me says the Lord they strayed from God God tried to get them to come back and how did he do it by creating a
famine so they would starve and yet it didn't happen they didn't return I withheld the rain from you when there were still three months To the Harvest yet you did not return to me so he caused a drought that didn't do the job I struck you with blight and mildew I laid waste your Gardens and your Vineyards the Locust devoured your fig trees and your olive trees yet you did not return to me says the Lord he destroyed their crops that didn't work I sent among you a pestilence after the manner of Egypt I killed
your young men with the Sword and yet you did not return to me says the Lord therefore thus I will do To You O Israel because I will do this to you prepare to meet your god oh Israel for Amos the reason people suffer the reason the people of God suffer is because they've disobeyed God and God is trying to get them to return by starving them by creating drought by bringing epidemics by killing them well that's an interesting view is that a view that you want to Have is that the view that you want
that the reason your child died in a car accident because God was punishing you that the reason that your parent died at such a young age of cancer was because God was punishing you really there are other books of the Bible that have different points of view there are some books like the Book of Daniel that say it's not God who's Doing this to you it's the forces of evil that are doing it to you the devil and his minions are doing this to you the demons are doing it to you the powers that are
in this world the evil forces in this world are doing it to you but it's not God Daniel has a very different view from the view of the prophets The Book of Job has a lot to say about suffering and part of the Book of Job God brags because job is so righteous the Satan figure says well he's just righteous because of everything he's got look you've given him everything God says that's not why he's being righteous yes it is no it's not yes it is prove it and so God gives Satan the authority to
take away everything job has he loses all of his cattle all of his possessions all of his children in order to See whether he's faithful to God because of everything he has God takes away the 10 children of job through Satan to see if job will remain faithful job does remain faithful God brags on him Satan says it's because you haven't really hurt him yet no that's not why yes it is no it's not yes it is prove it and so he inflicts job with horrible suffering personally and physically and job still refuses to curse
God testing is the reason for suffering in the Book of Job it's all a test is that what you want to think do you want to think that those five children starve to death I'm sorry that that child starves to death every five seconds a child every five seconds because God is testing somebody or he's punishing somebody another part of job the poems of job have a very different point of view in The poems of job job complains against God and he says that he wants to present his case to God he says I'm righteous
and yet I'm suffering his friends say no you must not be you must be guilty no I'm righteous no you're not yes I am and he appeals to God to appear to him so he can declare his case I am innocent I have not done anything wrong and God Appears to him and instead of God giving job a chance to talk job says Who are you to question me I am the almighty you are a peon you have no right to question the almighty God Wows him with his thunderous presence coming at him from the
Whirlwind and job is withered in the dirt and he confesses and he repents but what does he repent of he doesn't repent of his sins because he hadn't committed the sins he repents that he asked God why it Was happening is that the view that you want that it's wrong even to ask why you're suffering we don't have the right to ask God why this is happening to us there are lots of explanations for why they're suffering in the Bible part of the reason I taught this class at ruter is because I wanted students to
realize that it's a problem and that there are different Explanations the explanations that Kyle just gave are not the main explanations of any of the authors of the Bible in fact you can argue these explanations were very much tangental to any of the authors of the Bible my students at ruter when I was teaching this class I'll have to admit one of the biggest problems I had was getting them to see that there was a problem with suffering there's a problem while this Class was being taught it was during one of the Ethiopian famines you
probably remember those famines back in the 1980s in this particular famine it was especially horrible one out of eight people in Ethiopia died because of this famine was this God punishing them was it him testing them what good do attest somebody if they die is it that he he um was trying to show them that they have no right to ask Why they suffer one out of eight died what I had to do in this class was to bring in newspaper clippings from the newspaper and show them a woman who was dying of starvation with
a child on her breast who wasn't getting any milk they were both going to die if you believe in God this is a problem you should not settle for simple answers even if they're given to you by somebody who is a very convincing speaker and is very Confident you should think for yourself and try to figure out why you think there is such suffering in the world well after I taught this class um I kept thinking about the topic and I thought about it for another 20 years before I wrote my book that dealt with
the issues in the class the book that deals with the biblical views of suffering a book that came out about 5 years ago or so six years ago during those intervening 20 years I kept Experiencing suffering uh either personally or seeing it firsthand cancer taking away loved ones in the prime of life Teenage suicide birth defects failed marriages a friend who had escaped The Killing Fields of Cambodia homelessness poverty and I kept reading about suffering in the world wars genocides in numerous places Cambodia Bosnia Rwanda darur ethnic cleansings the flu epidemic that Kyle wanted to
write off 30 million people died of the flu more people died in America of The Flu in 1918 then died in all the wars of the 20th century combined of the flu it wasn't because of their Free Will I got to a point where none of the biblical answers or the traditional answers were satisfying to Me the answers may be satisfying to you it may be enough to say to you look you have free will so of course you can use your free will to hurt people and so people will be hurt when you exercise
your free will and that's why they're suffering that may be satisfying to you um it may be satisfying to you to think well okay it's bad now but I'm going to die and I'll have an afterlife and so it'll be made right then that may be enough for you if it's Enough for you fine I used to believe in a God who intervened in this world when I was a Christian that's the God that I believed in the god of the Bible is a God who intervenes he intervenes to circumvent Free Will and he intervenes
to overcome the laws of nature God can do minor Miracles like making an iron ax head Float On The Water God can Do spectacular Miracles like parting the Waters of an entire sea so that the children of Israel can walk through on dry ground while the entire Egyptian Army is destroyed when the waters return God can make the sun stand still in the sky for an entire day so Israel's Army can win their battle making the Earth stop rotating with no physical a effects recorded God can intervene in nature God's son in the Bible is
born of a woman who has never had Sex as an adult his son defies the law of nature at will Walking On The Water calming the storm with a word Healing The Sick raising the dead himself rising from the dead the god of the Bible is bound to no natural law he defies natural law whenever he wants to do good for his people people when people are suffering the god of the Bible intervenes he saves them from slavery in Egypt and he saves their souls for Eternity God intervenes in the Bible and so my question
is and has been now for a number of years if the god of the Bible intervenes why doesn't he intervene the Holocaust killed six million Jews and 5 million others homosexuals polls various people 11 million people does God intervene when people are suffering or Not there are genocides there are terrorist attacks God intervenes in the course of nature in the Bible but what about that child who dies every 5 Seconds what about those 25 people who die every minute because they have unclean water what about those 300 people who die every hour from malaria if
God intervenes why doesn't he intervene I know many of you think that God does intervene regularly for me I have questions let me reaffirm I am not intent on converting you to my point of view but if you think that there are answers to why they're suffering I want you to think more about it and I want to I want you to question your answers especially if you're given easy answers Easy answers are almost certainly wrong if you can explain the greatest problem that the human race has ever faced in 20 seconds or less you're
probably Mis explaining it I simply want you to think I want you to realize that in fact the Bible is a complicated set of books with a number of different views of things including by the way two books that explicitly Den that there's an afterlife the Book of Ecclesiastes and The Book of Job there are numerous views in the Bible and there are numerous views that have developed since then and the best thing we can do as human beings is try to figure it out for ourselves thank you very much Mr Mr Kyle but will
have 12 minutes for rebuttal and then Dr manman will have 12 minutes to respond to his comments how many of you in here have ever suffered raise your hand please how Many of you still believe in God oh most all of you I thought uh the statement you should not accept answers that confirm what you already think that statement simply is not true suppose I were to say 2 + 2 equal 4 do you already think that sure but then suppose I were to say if you take one and you take one more and you
add one more to that and one more to that how many do you have oh four oh but that confirms what you already think so you shouldn't accept That and then if you were to use that type of reasoning if you have come in here and you did not believe in a God because of the idea of suffering then you shouldn't accept anything that Dr man has said this evening now I would totally agree with Dr man in a couple of areas number one I would certainly agree with one of his very first statements here's
what he said what Kyle has done is just quoted everything I've said and shown why I'm Wrong totally agree with that I would [Applause] absolutely the second thing that I would totally agree with Dr Erman on is he said he did not come here to win a debate now I think that if you listen listened to his statements that you understand he wasn't making logical arguments he simply said well if that's all right with you then fine you can but I'm going to have this and and I'm going you see that's just simply not a
way to Arrive at truth and then he concludes by saying if there is a simple answer you shouldn't accept it do you understand that when he said if you can give an answer that s the problem of suffering in 20 seconds it's most obviously wrong what answer has the unbeliever given us to solve the problem of suffering now I want you to count see how many seconds this takes there is no God that's the answer we've been given That's a simple answer that that just is not correct now let me move forward and I want
you to understand that I'm not a attacking Dr man in any way Dr man is as qualified and as credential and as prepared of an individual to debate this topic as anyone he has literally written the book on it you see there are simply inconsistencies in the idea of unbelief and so when a person adheres to this idea that there is no God there Obviously going to be inconsistencies in that idea now Dr man is better than most people at covering those inconsistencies up but they are still very much there let me show you what
I mean by that Dr man made this statement he said the prophets say that you or the people in the Old Testament were suffering because they had done something wrong he said the prophets do not talk about innocent people suffering well that's simply not the case let Me let me read read for you Isaiah chap 57: 1 and 2 Isaiah one of the primary Prophets The Righteous perishes and no man takes it to heart merciful men are taken away while no one considers that the righteous is taken away from Evil he shall enter into peace
they shall rest in their beds each one walking in his own uprightness in fact Dr man understands that the prophets have more than one view on this topic let me show you what has happened here when you go To the Bible and understand this to make the philosophically sound case that the pain and suffering in this world do not indicate that the Christian God doesn't exist you don't have to use the Bible you don't have to now you can because the Bible is is logical it provides sufficient answers but you don't have to you can
make that case without the Bible but he says the idea of free will that just doesn't answer the problem of suffering well let's see what he means By that the other day I read about a guy who walked into an emergency room he had an arrow stuck right through his eyeball it was out the back of his skull he had tried to pull it out the emergency medical people wouldn't let him if he did it was going to kill him it it barely missed an artery that would have killed him by 1 millimeter now they
ask him why he had an arrow stuck through his eyeball and he said well me and my buddies were out drinking and we decided That my buddy told me to to put a beer can on top of my head he'd shoot it off with a bow and arrow now the guy lost his eyesight in his right eye whose fault is that are you going to blame God for the loss of that man's eyesight no certainly we understand that Free Will makes a lot of sense when we look at the suffering that we've experienced or the
suffering that other people have experienced in fact Dr man understands this completely and Here's a quote from him he says the Free Will argument can of course explain a good deal of the evil in the world around us from the Holocaust to the disaster of 9/11 he says yes you can explain and this is a quote what happened in Nazi Germany and in Stalin Soviet Union or in the ancient worlds of Israel Mesopotamia Mesopotamia by claiming that humans used their freedom badly now here's where you got to pay real close attention to what Dr man
does He's been doing it now for about the past six years or so he says okay Free Will answers a lot of suffering but are you saying that a baby died in a tsunami because of someone's Free Will no no we're not who who is saying that there might be some people out there that that are saying that but we're certainly not we're saying that Free Will does answer a lot of suffering now it's a good answer to much of the suffering that we see and listen you and I both know that We know that
we have used our Free Will and it's brought suffering on us and on others and Dr man admits that now let's move to the next idea the idea of punishment he says hey uh punishment are you saying that's a sufficient answer to all of suffering nobody said that what he's trying to say is that the Bible has to have one answer that answers every single instance of suffering whoever said that if a if a person takes a pressure cooker and turns it into a bomb And takes it to Boston and detonates it and kills three
people and wounds another 264 is it legitimate to punish that person absolutely when they get a 23-hour a day lock down surveillance and they are suffering why are they suffering because they are being pun punished in fact in the Dan in the Michael Brown debate that Dr man had he said I'm a firm believer in punishment in fact if we didn't have punishment we Would sink into chaos is punishment a legitimate answer for some types of suffering absolutely positively no one can morally argue with a now let's look at that next idea third all of
us know that some suffering can be Redemptive by Redemptive what I mean is you could produce a greater good by allowing someone to go through some type of suffering now Dr man knows this is the case in fact he says when he was in high school he got hepatitis he said he was a Mediocre second baseman but when he got hepatitis it made him stay in and study for the debate that year I think his his team might have won the National Championship in debate that year and he said the hepatitis is what caused him
to pursue his academic career and now here's what he says I can't describe how happy I am that I got he atitis sometimes something good can come out of suffering so could it be that God is Allowing some suffering to bring about a greater good yes but then Dr hold on just a second I don't see how a child dying in a tsunami could bring about a greater good well we didn't say that that type of answer would apply to that particular instance of suffering in fact what I want you to see is that in
all of dr's writing and spech there's only one kind of suffering that he does not agree has been answered yet and that's the suffering of an Innocent person by a natural disaster now here's what I mean if there were a person who suffered and is Innocent by a natural disaster he says that has yet to be answered let me show you why that's the only one that he says is left if it's suffering by a person who is Not Innocent you could say well that's punishment for what that person has done if it's suffering at
the hand of some other person you could say well that's free will which Dr Herman ad Mitch is a Legitimate response If the child lives you could say that is suffering that is Redemptive it's there to produce a greater good and Dr would have to admit that could be the case now here's the irony of it when you go to the Bible you will see that Dr man even admits and I'll give you the quote when discussing the answers to suffering that the Bible presents he says how does one explain the suffering of the righteous
for that another explanation needs to be used for Example that all will be made right in the end there it is the final piece of the puzzle you see if there is an afterlife that can give us not an easy explanation because they're still going to be hurt there's still going to be sorrow there's still going to be pain but it can give us a legitimate explanation for why there is suffering in the world that's why Isaiah says that the righteous suffer yet no One considers that the righteous is taken away from Evil what's he
saying other than when an innocent person suffers they go to an afterlife where all is made right and there again we would certainly have to agree with Dr man when he says if that is convincing to you then you should accept that it's right in fact when Dr ER says if God intervenes in this world why doesn't he I want you to understand there again It's not a logical argument it's just a question you know you could simply say it Dr man claims to uh claims to want to help the homeless in fact Dr man's
given lots of money to help the homeless but in his house and in Durham North Carolina there are plenty of rooms every single night that simply have room for homeless people if Dr man really cares for the homeless then he could let them sleep in those rooms every night if he doesn't care for them why doesn't if he Does care for them why doesn't he let them sleep there which is not an argument and all Dr man would have to show is hey look there are very good reasons why I don't allow them to do
that and then he would just list several it's not an argument it's an emotional appeal now if you listened closely you heard the answer is that one minute you heard the answer in Dr man's statement he said Jesus Christ intervened in this World to save people from what do you hear him say it their sins you see God's never intervened just so you can have a pleasurable existence for 75 or 80 years and then gone to sleep and never woken up God's intervention has always been designed to formulate a character in you that can live
through the afterlife God's intervention is much more valuable and important than the transient making your belly full for a Day or two Jesus Christ fed 5,000 but they were going to hunger again but that's why he said I am the bread of life because God's intervention is for eternity thank you very [Applause] much okay thank you very much uh this is getting Lively the uh I do a lot of these debates and the hard thing is always that um there are so many points that You want to raise and to object to uh and uh
it it's difficult especially doing these kinds of responses so I pretty very much appreciate uh Kyle's very coherent uh and and uh compelling response um it wasn't completely compelling to me uh and Ne was his original presentation which is what I want to talk about first I was interested that Kyle uh began talking about this woman who um was in This uh nursing I mean in this Children's Hospital who had a bullet in her head um and uh that um you know did make her lose her faith in God in some ways it improved her
faith in God when he was giving that analogy suddenly what crept into my mind was this the scene that we see all the time on television where there's a an airplane wreck and uh half the people in the airplane are Killed and they're talking to a Survivor and the Survivor says I just thank God that he spared my life and you wonder what exactly is this person thinking that God intervened for him but not for the hundreds of people who got killed really you want you're you're that important that God saved you and not someone
else Um yes many people suffer and their faith sees them through their suffering and sometimes their suffering strengthens their faith if you're in that position uh I've got nothing to object to I know Kyle finds that offensive because he thinks it's not logical and that what we need to do is be pressing logic we need to have have logic we need logical explanations everything has to be logical you can't have an emotional Appeal we need to have the logical answers I'd be happy to debate Kyle on logic but the problem of suffering cannot be solved
like a mathematical equation it's not whether 2 + 2 equal 4 or not it's your life and the lives of your loved ones the lives of people around you the lives of the people in our world it isn't a matter of logic and math it's a matter of figuring out how To make sense of it all I was interested in Kyle's initial Point uh during his presentation uh when he when he stated that somewhat to his surprise I did not want to argue that suffering proved God didn't exist I I'd say more than surprised Kyle
in fact was disappointed because that's something he could really go for he could show you can't prove it and I didn't want to argue that you can prove it because I don't think you can prove it we're not Talking about proof we're trying to figure out how to make sense of this world that we live in how do you explain it the issue is not proof the issue is explanation the reason emotional appeals matter is because we are not simply computers with logical workings inside our head we are human beings and we should do not
we should not deny our Humanity if suffering is not an Emotional issue for you I I have nothing to say to you if it's not an emotional issue for Kyle I've got nothing to say to him because it is an emotional issue and we should treat it as such Kyle wanted to go through a uh list of reasons for suffering sometimes it's punishment but not always punishment okay so sometimes God is punishing people so Kyle thinks that sometimes God Does starve people to death as Amos says is that what you think too or that God
causes the droughts or that God causes the wars God causes our soldiers to be killed in Afghanistan God caused Vietnam to teach us a lesson I can't prove to you that that's wrong but it doesn't resonate with me I really hope that's not what you think at the end of the day Kyle wants To appeal to the afterlife as the explanation for why they're suffering it's an interesting idea what Kyle doesn't point out is that throughout history the majority of people in the majority of places have not believed in an afterlife incl including much of
the Hebrew Bible the Old Testament in the Old Testament some Authors do believe in a shadowy place called shol it's not a place of punishment for your sins and it's not a place of reward for your righteousness it's just a place that people go when they die and they just kind of exist there there are other authors who have a different point of view including as I pointed out before the authors of Ecclesiastes and J Ecclesiastes is my favorite book in the Bible Ecclesiastes says that life doesn't make sense I don't think Kyle would like
that but for Ecclesiastes life doesn't make sense it comes and it goes and it's hard to figure out the meaning vanity of vanities all is Vanity van in the Book of Ecclesiastes refers to the Mist that's over the ground for a little while that the sun burns off it's here for a while Then it's gone and that's what life is it's here and it's gone what does Ecclesiastes think about the afterlife Ecclesiastes chapter 9: 4 and following whoever is joined with all the living has hope for a living dog is better than a dead Lion
The Living know that they will die but the dead know nothing they have no more reward and even the memory of them is Lost now you can easily go to other per passages of the Bible that affirm that there is an afterlife and you say well so Ecclesiastes didn't really mean it well the author of Ecclesiastes didn't know that those other authors were going to be writing their books this author doesn't believe that there's an afterlife either does the author of job as Waters fail from a lake and a river wastes away and dries up
so Mortals lie down and do not rise again until the heavens are no more they will not awake or be roused out of their sleep I myself no longer believe in an afterlife of course for years I believed in an afterlife and I believed pretty much what Kyle thought that the suffering now is going to be taken care of then what is right now what is wrong now will be made right then Injustice will be taken care of then I simply Don't believe it anymore I think when we die that's the end of the story
I I know most of you don't think that and aren't going to think that I came to think that for a lot of reasons one has to do with the physiology of our brains if somebody does a brain operation on you your personality changes well what's your real personality then it depends on the makeup of your Brain when your nervous system no longer exists you can't feel anything thing you can change who you are you can take away every memory that you've ever had by operating on the brain we are our bodies in my opinion
you might think that it's depressing that in fact this life is all there is in fact I didn't want to become an agnostic because I thought there'd be nothing to live For that is absolutely wrong as it turns out since this life is all there is I relish this life more than ever this is a precious existence we have and we should love it as long as we have it we should enjoy life as long as we can but to enjoy life as much as we can if we are human it means helping others who
can't enjoy life during the time of this debate There will be over 1,400 children who die of starvation we have to help them more during this debate there will be 600 people in the world who die of malaria we have to help them more throughout the world there are a billion people who don't have clean water every day 4,000 people die from diseases from not having clean water we need to help the suffering more there are natural Disasters mudslides that kill 30,000 people people overnight tsunamis that kill 300,000 people in one blow we have to
help people more here's what I would like Kyle and I are not going to agree on whether the problem of suffering calls into question the existence of God I think yes he thinks no most of you are on his side but how about we agree on one thing That whatever we think about the existence of God and whether we can come up with answers for why they're suffering or not whether we come up with explanations for suffering or not whether we're satisfied with the explanation for suffering or not can we all agree that no matter
what our view about that is we will do more to help those who are in need thank you we will now have a period of Cross-examination where both Debaters will be at the microphones we'll begin with Dr man he'll have 15 minutes to ask questions and then Mr kyut will have 15 minutes to ask questions as well okay I'm not sure how this is supposed to work so I think I'll just ask some questions that occurred to my mind so um Kyle my first thing is um you uh you pointed out that uh that some
philosophers have said that there are uh That there's a problem with suffering because and it works kind of like a logical Sy syllogism that there are three statements that that people want to affirm And yet when you affirm them there seems to be a a contradiction somewhere in there it see seems to be anyway which is that God is all powerful so he's able to do anything that he wants which I I assume people when they say that they don't literally mean he can do anything he wants he can't make a Triangle four-sided I mean
there's some things you can't do but but but okay with with limit except for nonsense God can do anything he wants second God is loving so he really doesn't want people to be in pain and misery and third there is suffering people are in pain and misery so that that's some people presented that as a logical uh problem and uh you pointed out that um that now somebody who used to say that's a proof that God doesn't Exist no longer thinks it is a proof that God doesn't exist do you know anybody who says that
in fact that proves God doesn't exist and if so uh who who who says that and why do they say that okay great question uh the reason I think I'll ask you or I'll answer your last question first the reason they would say that is because unbelievers I feel have been looking for complimentary evidence for their disbelief in God to the evidence that we Have for God's existence so when we present logically sound valid arguments like the moral argument that says if objective moral values exist then God exists objective moral values exist therefore God exists
I think the unbelieving community recognizes the force of that and says now we want one of those and so a man by the name of JL Mackey he was one of the four most atheist in the70s 80s he put forth this idea that the problem of suffering Logically proves that God does not exist in fact I think William row also tagged along with him but then a man by the name of Thomas B Warren who wrote his doctoral dissertation at Vanderbilt University came forward and said hold on just a second Dr Macky uh isn't it
true that there are some presumed premises in your statements that you can't really validate and it shows that this is not a logical problem isn't it true that number one like you said one of the Presumed premises is that a loving all powerful God when we say all powerful we don't mean that God could do anything that that we would say just exactly like you said he can't make a a square triangle God cannot lie he can't do things that would violate his nature and so when Dr Warren pointed those out to Dr Mackey he
had to come forth and sayoh you know what yeah there are hidden premises in there and so you're right this logical problem supposed logical Problem does not prove logically that your God doesn't exist now he went on to say I don't believe he does and I'm going to try to change the issue but logically it doesn't yeah yeah so that's my question though I mean who does say that logically it proves that God doesn't exist JL Mackey was one he's the one who changed his mind right what's okay so no one else that you know
of no absolutely not they can't they can't say it anymore I mean it's a specious argument because that's not an argument anybody makes that's my point uh I don't know on believers who say God must not cannot exist logically because of the problem of suffering and so when you when you attack that argument I don't know what you're attacking because that's not an argument people use have you ever heard of JL Macky yes I have what's it got to do I'm talking about today in the 21st century okay what I was saying is and You
don't seem to know anybody who makes that argument so I don't know why you're arguing against it what I'm not what I'm showing is that it's not a logical problem for God and unbelievers try to make it one and they just simply couldn't you just said that nobody does because we disproved [Music] it we did okay and and just so I have I I I associate With unbelievers and I've never heard anybody make that claim and apparently you haven't either because you have one example from what was it the 1970s you haven't heard anybody make
it now because so let me ask another question and get on to something else you you you make a lot of argument about um uh what you call the moral argument that that since there's Justice there has to be some kind of moral absolute for there to be just am I saying that Correctly is that how you put that uh I would just state it like this uh if objective moral values exist then God exist objective moral values do exist therefore God exist so you think objective moral values exist absolutely uhhuh one Justice how how
much cultural anthropology have you studied um not much right I figured that out because cultural anthropologists subject rather strenuously to the idea that there are moral absolutes because Different societies are absolutely committed to different moral values what do you do about that okay I would just simply say that just because some people disagree about what you would call moral values doesn't mean that there are not some objective moral values for instance when you say I looked around and I saw things that were unfair when you say unfair what do you mean my point is that
what I say is unfair is different what from what Somebody uh thinks is unfair in a different Society let me give you an example there are uh there are societies that believe in blood Vengeance who believe that if your relative is murdered by somebody the right thing to do is to murder the murderer do you agree with that moral judgment I would say that God from his Nature has issued certain uh prerogatives to people for Instance in Romans chapter 13 the Bible says that governments have the right to implement laws that are in accordance with
God's nature that would punish a person who does something wrong so yes if a person takes a pressure cooker and detonates it at the Boston Marathon and kills three people and wounds another 264 I believe that God has empowered our government to assess the nature of that crime and then say yes that person could legitimately Be sentenced to uh capital punishment and that would be legitimate right that's not what I'm talking about though I'm talking about societies where blood vengeance is the right thing to do if you murder my brother then it is the right
thing for me to do to murder you do you think that that is a moral absolute no not the moral absolutes are the ones that you happen to agree with no certainly not in fact you mean there are some that you don't agree with I Would say there are some in other cultures people who for instance if a person said it's moral for three men to marry one woman or for three women to marry one man uhuh I would say number one where are you getting that and they would just simply have to say Well
they're making that up out of their what if they said that's what Abraham did okay if I were to look at that I would simply say number one Abraham also lied about numerous Things and God doesn't doesn't condone that Abraham did numerous things that God doesn't condone so if we were to say if that's what Abraham did did just because Abraham didn't doesn't make it right does God condemn it God certainly does condemn Abraham's lying and God condemns he condemned his polygamy you never read that he condemns his polygamy but that was certainly under a
system that he never says he condones it and so just because you don't don't read that God condemns something doesn't mean that he condones it for instance when God says uh if a person slaps you on the right cheek turn to him the other also in that instance God doesn't condemn the person who's slapping you on the cheek now just because he doesn't say right there I don't condemn that doesn't mean he condones it so absence of a statement from God in a certain instance certainly doesn't mean that he condones a practice Right um okay
I think [Applause] um okay let's just move on on we're not going to see eye to eye the reality is that the Patriarchs in the Hebrew Bible behave in ways that later are condemned by God but they're never condemned for the Patriarchs to do them so uh there's a reason for that and it's a reason that you would know about if you would study cultures more broadly our problem is We're used to our society and we think that our society has the right moral values when it comes to what's really right and what's really wrong
so monogamy is really right I I happen to be a firm believer in monogamy but there are other cultures that don't believe in monogamy so where do you find the moral absolute is it does it just happen to reside in America there are societies that believe in blood Vengeance well is that right or wrong if it's right or wrong why does one Society get it right and the other wrong is it that the Americans are the ones who get these things right so uh that would take us all night let me just make one statement
on that uh there's a an atheist by the name of Michael ruse who says that the man who says that it's right to torture and rape 5-year-olds is just as wrong as the man who says 2 plus 2 equals 5 and it seems To me that if if you guys are listening and paying very close attention to what he's saying here he's saying that if you have a an idea in a a certain culture that something's all right then another culture can't say that there's anything wrong with that you've got your culture we've got our
culture and yet that's exactly what the world did to Nazi Germany at the nurburg trials they put the leaders of the the Germans on trial and the Germans said we weren't doing Anything wrong according to our culture we we needed to exterminate the Jews it was our law to exterminate the Jews it was helping Germany and Robert Jackson who was the what the attorney general for the United States of America said no they have violated a higher law than the regional law of Germany now where do you get a higher law than a cultural law
that's exactly what we're dealing with here see Dr irman says there's no higher law no that's wrong have you heard have You heard me say that yes what you said was when did I say that you said In some cultures some things are morally right in other cultures other things are so you can't say one of those is right I'm asking you whether you think that there are moral absolutes and where you find them other than in your own mind where do you find them sure the moral absolutes stem from the nature of God It's
the nature of God to punish people by killing them let me me in the Bible in the Bible the nature of God is to punish people by killing them or starving them or bringing drought against them or bringing uh epidemics against them that's the nature of God so what exactly do you draw from that for moral absolutes well as you're look at that uh if you were to say okay it's immoral for God to kill a person well if God is the Creator and he's all knowing then God certainly understands that if a person has
committed something that's worthy of death then yes certainly they could be killed now when you say what do I Come Away with from statements like uh God starves a person or God kills a person if I were to look at societies today and say is it ever morally right to kill a person well the answer to that from the bulk of Juris Prudence is that if a person commits a crime that is of such a Nature that it deserves to be punished by death then yes it would be morally is it right to starve somebody
to death well if you are looking from God's perspective and there is an afterlife then a time period on this Earth of something happening has to be viewed in the afterlife for instance no I mean I'm asking do you think it's right for you to starve somebody to death okay no certainly I haven't been given that prerogative by the Creator but it's in The nature of God you said no no I said your moral rights are given to you by God this is what God does and so why isn't it right for us to do
it okay perfect now that's where you got to make a distinction watch the distinction here if you say that it's right for an authority figure to do something that doesn't give everyone the right to do that you said you said your moral absolutes come from the nature of God they either do or they don't no they Certainly do now watch this if we say a society has a government that has a right to chain up a person and put them in prison for life okay if we say that then would we draw from that okay
you as an individual have the right to chain up a person in your basement okay do governments have the right to starve people to death as punishment governments have the right to put people to death do they have the right to starve people to death well if it was a Watch this let me let me go back to what I was about to say on that uh if you view it in if you if you take it in view of the afterlife then starving a person to death for a brief time here is a brief
time you starve them to death they're dead okay now watch that watch the thought you starve them to death they're dead where okay so you're saying it is okay to starve people to death because it's only a short while after all it only takes about 20 days so That's okay because they have eternity is that what you're saying okay now is it what you're saying are you saying that it would be all right to give some my question is it what you're saying I'm saying that God has the prerogative to take a person's life I'm
asking whether you have that prerogative or whether we of a society have the prerogative to do what God does which is starve people to death yes or no you do not have the prerogative to do what God does unless He has all moral AB salutes that's right he does okay all right all right uh let me ask you here in your book and various places in fact tonight I think you said you say that you actually do hold a Biblical view of suffering and you say that that view is the view of Ecclesiastes and in
your debate with theza you say that the the dest soua you say that the biblical view Of Ecclesiastes is that a lot of bad things happen but a lot of good things do too so enjoy your life while you're here eat drink and be married that's right says seven times in Ecclesiastes okay now uh par pardon me if this seems like a jump but let me ask you this statement in your book God's problem you made this statement now it seem like a jump but listen closely if you don't mind whenever they were actually written
the Books of the penit contain very ancient understandings of Israel's relationship to God God the only true God the one who created the heavens and earth now do you believe that the Israelite God is the only true God the one who created the heavens and earth do I believe that M no I was talking about what the authors of the Bible believed okay but right here in this statement you say whenever they were actually written the pent contain very ancient understanding of Israel's Relationship to God the only true God the one who created their understanding
okay so you don't believe that I'm an agnostic okay right of course you don't uh now I took that quote out of context on purpose to show that without not out of context actually what you quoted is what I said their understanding is that this is the one God who created heavens and earth it's right there in the quotation you read okay well I'll just but I'll read it again but it says uh Whenever they were actually written the books of the PUK contain very ancient understandings of Israel's relationship to God the only true God
but yeah yeah they understanding it doesn't say they're understanding but anyway that doesn't matter because that's exactly what it says their understandings of God the one who created heavens and earth okay well that that's not what the statement says but watch this now if you have a Bible would you turn to Ecclesiastes chap 12 for me if you don't mind uh I don't need to what what do you want to know Ecclesiastes 12: 13- 14 would you read that for mean the conclusion of the book yeah yeah yeah do you know anything about the historical
critical study of the Book of Ecclesiastes I do but would you mind reading it can you explain what redaction is uh certainly no editing but if you don't mind reading it Now the man told you that he has a Biblical View and his view is the view of Ecclesiastes and I want you to listen to the end of the book of Ecclesiastes and see if you would agree with that assessment okay so this is a setup I mean his whole arguments of course have been setups because he he doesn't want me to explain this he
simply wants me to read this I'll read it if you don't mind no let me explain it and then we'll read it well Let me read and then you can book of Ecclesiastes now let me go the book of The Book of Ecclesiastes is one of the more complicated books in the in the Hebrew Bible because Scholars for over a hundred years have recognized that in fact it went through multiple editions including if you wouldn't let me including a redactor who added an ending in order to change the meaning of the entire book this is
what the ending says the end of the matter all has been heard Fear God and keep his Commandments for that is the whole duty of everyone for God will bring every deed into judgment including every secret thing whether good or evil okay now uh I I knew that he would say well that's redaction that's not really what the book says so let me go over to no it is what the book says it's what it says in its final redaction okay so if that's what the book says then he certainly doesn't have the view of
Ecclesiastes I do have the View of Ecclesiastes drink and enjoy life while you can because it's only here for a fleeting bit okay let me go to Ecclesiastes 11: 9 and following Rejoice oh young man in your Youth and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth walk in the ways of your heart and in the sight of your eyes but know that for all these God will bring you into judgment okay that's not there is nothing better for Mortals than to eat And drink and find enjoyment in their toil this I
saw is from the hand of God okay so drink and enjoy yourselves notice if he gets to pick out any single verse that he wants to this repeated seven times in the Book of Ecclesiastes now notice this verse right here in Ecclesiastes 7:29 truly this only I have found that God made man upright but they have sought out many schemes does that sound like Dr man's view that he says is from The Book of Ecclesiastes it's certainly not vanity of vanity says the teacher vanity of vanity all is Vanity what do people gain from all
the toil at which they toil Under the Sun a generation comes a generation goes but the Earth Remains the Same the sun rises the sun goes down and hurries to the place where it rises all streams run to the sea but the sea is not full to the place where the streams flow there they continue to flow all things Are wearisome more than one can express the eye is not satisfied with seeing or the ear with hearing it's all vapid and it's all going away we should enjoy it while we can as he says seven
times eat drink and enjoy your life now if you're noticing what he's doing he's trying to burn time and if he picks if he just gets to pick anything that he wants to sure that's the beginning of the book and what's the end the yeah the end now let's go to this Next question now lots of times uh Dr man wants to at the end of his discussion say well this is what we can agree on let's just all agree to do more and help others and certainly we definitely need to help others but I
want you to see why Dr ER is in such a tight spot on this is this a question it certainly is here you go u in your uh Forester lecture in 2008 uh a young lady came to the front of the Podium of of the Auditorium and she said why is it you don't want people to suffer do you remember what you responded to her I don't even remember the lecture okay here's what you said you said why is it that I don't want people to suffer I don't know I'm made that way I don't
have deep philosophical reasons for it it's just part of being humans humans evolved that way yes do you remember that no okay do you agree with that yes Okay all right now you said that humans evolved just so that they don't want people to suffer absolutely that's what scientists tell us deny what science says but that's what scientists tell us okay now let me read a statement that you made in your Christmas longings Blog 2013 good grief how much of my writings have you read most of them are they really that good well I was
just thinking I have learned a lot more about suffering this last Year but if uh [Applause] let let me let me do go ahead and read this to you here's what you say you say uh most people and I'm going to stress most here in our society value themselves egotism self-centeredness Rule the Day most people don't give a blank about the pressing problems of of our world most are far more interested in how much money they can make now your next statement on your blog 20 uh in July 25th is there is suffering because people
are able to do nasty things when they want and they often do them yes usually because it advances their own purposes so now you said that I don't know I don't have deep philosophical reasons why I don't want people to suffer we're just we just evolve that way now if you were to ask according to your statement most people who value themselves and are ego istic and self-centered if you said why are you Egotistic and self-centered and you don't mind that you're not helping people or you don't mind that you do nasty things often to
others and they say I don't know I don't have deep philosophical reasons for it I just evolve that way would that be a sufficient answer well it's kind of like asking it's kind of like asking if Christians have moral absolutes and they know what is absolutely right to do why is that They do so many wrong things does moral absolutes make anybody more righteous do you think okay now exactly in this statement I can give you a deep philosophical reason why people should be kind and help others you can't and that's the point oh but
I don't think it's a matter of philosophy I think it's about it's a matter of of social reasoning it's about Society it's not about philosophy This isn't a I'm I'm not giving Phil philosophical proof there are social reasons for us to behave the way we should behave doesn't have to be a philosophical proof for it sure so if a person says if you say you shouldn't do that to someone else and they say well that's just the way I evolved I don't have a philosophical reason for it yes I should what do you tell them
I think that morality is something That we need to understand among ourselves and enforce among ourselves I think that there are certain things that are wrong to do it is wrong for you to beat your child now if you say well unless you have moral absolutes you have no reason to think that actually I do have reasons to think that I think it's wrong yes but you have no reasons to think that okay well what reason I mean what reason do I Need to see some somebody suffer and say I don't want that well it
it's you certainly do need a reason because I don't need a reason because I don't want it I don't have a philosophical moral absolute that says beating children is wrong it just I know it's wrong and so do you and it's got nothing to do with your platonic ideas about moral absolutes okay so if you were to go to a person and say this is wrong and they Say I don't need a reason to say it's all right to often do very nasty things to people I don't need a reason to show you that the
strong survive I just think it's the right thing and I don't have to give a reason you think that would be all right my view is that you come up to them and say look there are moral absolutes and let me give you the philosophical argument for that to show you there are moral absolutes and you're not going to be effective Either you're not going to change that person from doing what they they want to do because you think you have a philosophical argument okay you you might not be effective but you would be correct
and so if that person continu I think you would be incorrect now notice this I think you would be incorrect why do you think that because you don't have deep philosophical reasons for that you just evolve that way you think that without Moral absolutes you can't make statements of right and wrong and you have said that's true I just don't think we should do this that's right there are things that I think we shouldn't do we shouldn't starve our children to death to punish them okay do you think we should drink not because there's some
kind of platonic form up in the heavens that indicates what our moral ideas ought to be it's not that there are Absolutes it's it's that we know as people what we what is right and wrong for our fellow human beings and yet when he says we know as people the Nazi Germans didn't know the people you really want to go into Nazi Germany and what the Nazi Germans believed watch this most people in our society value themselves egotism and self-center Rule the Day do you disagree with that now he said we you disagree with that
he said we as people know What's right do you disagree that most people are entric I certainly do not okay so when he says we we as people know what's right according to these most people they are simply saying hey I can do what I want to a person I evolve that way and you can't tell me that what I'm doing is wrong now let's move on and go to this next question I certainly can tell them they're wrong I do all the time okay do you think we should drink micr brew Beer no you
say you should you in fact let I don't think we should I don't think it's a moral imperative I mean I think you're crazy if you don't okay so when Dr man says I think we should do this or I think we should not do this when he just said it's a moral imperative he it's not a moral imperative I know that's what you're saying and up to this point you have said there are no real moral imperatives that's why it's not a moral Imperative okay now just get that he just said there are no
moral imperatives just put that for the record next question all right in your uh conclusion of most of your okay let me go to this next question in the brown debate you say I am a firm believer in the punishment of the wicked and you say otherwise we would sink into more into chaos if we didn't punish the wicked do you still believe that yes okay uh is this related To suffering sure here we go if there were an all- knowing supernatural being would it ever never be moral for him to punish a person I'm
sorry what just explain what this has to do with suffering okay you know that's a great question in your book God's problem how the Bible fails to deal with our most important question why we suffer you have a very long section on punishment and so I am taking a section out of that book you're asking would if there's a if There's a Divine being could he punish people just as the way I think so hypothetically if there's a Divine being yes he he could punish people okay so you think that it would be morally acceptable
for a God to punish some people um I mean it's it's such a hypothetical question for me because I I don't have the mind of God because I don't I mean I don't believe God exists I think part of the problem is that you think you've got the mind of God that You know what these moral absolutes are in God's mind how do you know the mind of God sure and there would only be one way to do that you yourself are not an absolute okay you are not an absolute would you question here you
asked me the question how do I know the mind of God there would only be one way there's one way you can know the mind of Dr man if he tells you what he's thinking there's one way you can know my mind if I tell you what I'm thinking there's only one Way you could possibly know the mind of God you follow my thought I think yeah let me ask you this though do you know what I'm thinking what he's thinking do you know what I'm thinking I do according to your writings yeah but maybe
you don't know what I'm thinking what am I thinking right now you haven't told me so I wouldn't know exactly that's my point you think God has you think God has told you everything thank You we're entering into our question and answer session we appreciate those in the audience for submitting questions we have time for about six so we apologize if we were not able to get to your question but we do have uh six questions here to pose the format will be we'll ask a question of one debater who will have about two minutes
to answer and then in each case the other person will have a minute uh for rebuttal and so we'll we'll try to stay on time we'll Try to let them answer the questions as well so the first question is for Kyle how can we be sure that the scriptures today have been accurately preserved that's a great question in fact when you're studying the inspiration of the Bible there are several questions that you have to ask the text that you have you have to ask yourself number one does this text exhibit characteristics of a book that
would be from God and what I mean by That is you have to show that this book does things that are superhuman it does things that simply could not be done by regular human authors and so if I were to say what's the lines of what are the lines of reasoning that could show the inspiration of the Bible I would simply say that the Bible contains accurate predictive prophecy the Bible contains scientific forn knowledge the Bible is accurate in its factual details and has Not had to have a second addition Etc now when we say
how do we know that it's accurately been transmitted uh this question is worth of an entire debate because what Dr man I think will probably say is no you can't say that it's actually been uh brought to you from the original authors etc etc but what I think that you absolutely will be able to show is that the text that we have in front of us is the text that the original authors pinned in 99% of the text that we have in the very small percent of places where there are differences between a certain copy
or another copy the things with which it deals are very very minor now what Dr man would say is no they're not minor they're actually of very large significance to your faith they're not and that would be another debate for another time if you were to read FF Bruce's book the Canon then you would see the lines of reasoning that Show us and I want you to to listen this closely that show us that the book that you're holding right here the the Bible is the most widely attested most accurately translated book from ancient history
of any book that we have and so I would just simply say in order to answer that question we'd have to go through quite a lot of showing okay here are all of the thousands of manuscript copies that we have Etc and here's why you know this is this reading Etc thank One minute yes so uh thank you this is a great question and um let me just throw out a few num numbers for the New Testament we have um over 5,500 surviving Greek manuscripts these manuscripts that we have are far more than we have
for any other author which is great the problem is these manuscripts all differ from one another no two of these manuscripts is exactly alike they're all different Scholars don't know how many differences There are in the manuscripts some estimate there are 300,000 differences some estimate there are 400,000 differences the reality is there are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament we don't have the originals we don't have the words that Mark or Peter or Paul wrote we have copies of copies of copies most of the copies hundreds of years
later all of them with differences as a result Scholars disagree on hundreds of passages just in the New Testament about what it originally said okay second question will go to you Dr manur you said that the theological view that Christ is a God who suffers alongside us and for us is a powerful theological view you clearly have a level of respect for the Christian message you have probably been asked this many times but what would it take for you to come to Christianity I um I want to stress that in none of my books and
in none of my debates uh none of my public talks have I ever understood myself to be opposing Christianity I'm not opposed to Christianity uh I uh I think Christianity has done a world of good in the world and I think it continues to do a world of good especially Christians who really practice their faith in the teachings of Jesus that you should love Your neighbor as yourself uh and so I am not an opponent of Christianity I am opposed to certain forms of fundamentalism uh fundamentalist Christianity that believes that the Bible is the inherent
word of God I think is demonstrably false and demonstrably dangerous I will never ever become a fundamentalist Christian I leave open the question of what happened s to me in the future I think that a person needs To be open to what happens to them to where they go in their life's journey if you aren't open to where you're going to go in the future then you're just going to be running in place uh I believe that I will change uh and I hope that I change whether I come back to Christianity or not uh
I uh I don't know if that'll happen and I don't know what it would take but it seems to me no more likely than that I would become um some other religion uh Jewish for example uh Or or other things sure and I would just go back to that statement that he said the he said that you that the Bible is demonstrably not inherent and inspired well that's just simply not correct the Bible is not demonstrably not inherent and inspired the truth is you can demonstrate that it is uh interesting quote from Dr man I
think in the history of the Bible page 125 he says we are in a better position to know that the words the New Testament What the words of the New Testament originally were than for most other books and that certainly is true not only are we in a better position to Know Than for most other books but we're in a better position to Know Than virtually every other book that's been written in ancient history because as he said we've got more manuscripts than any other book now when you're looking at that idea of Jesus Christ
coming to suffer with us I want you to put a put put a mental note On that because that happens to be a very important Concept in this idea of suffering okay question for you Cal why didn't the god of the Bible make earth similar to heaven where the beings possess free will but they love God and they commune with him you know that's a great question when we look at what God did according to what he said then we see that in the very beginning that's exactly what God did God gave humans Free Will
in Adam and Eve in the garden of Geth in the garden rather of Eden now did they freely choose to disobey God and because of that freedom to choose were they ejected from the garden yes now here's what I think is very interesting when you look at the idea of Heaven were the original beings in heaven given the same freedom to choose it looks certainly like they were and that's why Satan was cast out of heaven now sometimes it's presented well if God Can make a place like heaven where we will have free will and
if we die here and we're going to heaven after this life and we'll still have free will but we won't sin does that mean that somehow God can make us have free will but guarantee that we won't sin two things on that heaven is a place where people who have chosen CH en to adopt God's will for their life are then ushered into an after life so when we look at Heaven it's a place where people who Were on Earth but have chosen to give up their will to God that they end up in heaven
as many people have said Heaven is a prepared place for a prepared people and it very easily could be that those people who attain Heaven you still still could have free will in heaven but God knows that no one in heaven will choose to sin and so his forn knowledge that he knows you will not choose to sin makes it where he can say no one will sin in heaven he doesn't force that Choice but he knows it and so then he can accurately say there will be no sin in heaven one minute yeah I
think this is an excellent question because some people argue that uh people have to have free will because if they didn't have free will they'd be programmed to be robots and then then who wants to be programmed as a robot so they have to have free will since they have a free will they're able then to violate God's will what Kyle is saying is that it's Going to be different in heaven because heaven is going to be populated by people who have chosen to do God's will I find this completely unsatisfying Christians today have chosen
to do God's will but they still sin so surely in heaven they will still be able to sin by that very logic why would they not be able to sin in heaven if they're able to sin here so maybe they don't have the same amount of Free Will in heaven but is that what you really want to think it Seems to me that this is a problem that really is a very large for anyone who thinks that Free Will is the answer for why they're suffering okay our fourth question to you Dr irman uh it's
I guess it's a lengthy question with many questions but they're all around the same idea so if life is so precious if I only get one chance at this why should I help anyone if I only live this one time with the purpose to Experience as much pleasure as possible why would I waste my time helping someone else in fact why should I care about anyone at all why not take what I want and do what I please if this is the case wouldn't people like gask Khan be the most successful humans ever when I
was debating uh my faith and and try and struggling with my faith and seeing whether I thought that it was reasonable I wrestled with just this Question I thought if I if I give up my faith in God won't I lose all my moral compass won't I won't I just be left a drift living a self-centered egocentric life where I just cram in every pleasure that I could and don't care about anybody else I I thought that was a real danger until I became an agnostic and I realized those fears were completely groundless I have
no temptation to live simply for myself in order to seek Pleasure and most agnostics don't either you might think they would but they don't why because we're human we know what it means to be human and we cherish the human it's important for humans to live for one another this is how we are this is how we have evolved I know Kyle doesn't believe in evolution and he doesn't believe that I should have any moral judgments or any views of justice and oppression and so forth unless there are moral absolutes But I can tell you
that I don't have those moral absolutes and I'm still every bit as moral as he is or as most human beings are it's not because I have moral absolutes it's because I'm a human being and this is what it means to be human okay with all due respect I think he missed the question the question was if a person wanted to say hey I think that getting the most that I can and taking it from others is the way to live how can you tell me not to what he said Was well I just think
that most agnostics and unbelievers just don't think that way and yet And yet when you read his writings they're suffering because people are able to do nasty things when they want and they often do them usually because it advances their own purposes next quote most people in our society value themselves egotism and self-center Rule the Day most people don't care uh most don't give about the pressing problems Of our world Etc one more I'm constantly amazed at how many people our world don't respond at all or respond so very little to the suffering of fellow
humans you see what he's saying is we don't really have to have a moral absolute we just really all should feel this way and yet in his writings and in his list of the suffering that goes on in this world he recognizes we don't all feel this way so what we're asking really ultimately the question is how can you say one way Is correct and another way is not and ultimately Charles Darwin said it perfectly he said if a person doesn't believe in God or future rep retribution or reward he can have as far as
I can see for his mode of operation only to follow those instincts and impulses that seem best to him okay fifth question to Mr Kyle but can the biblical author's views on suffering be brought into harmony why or why not oh that's a great question in U An interview with David in Dr man on Focus 580 was asked by David he said uh so are you saying that there is one answer to suffering and he said no he said in fact there can't be just one answer to suffering and that's exactly right you see the
Bible doesn't say there's one answer to suffering when it isn't it ironic that these 66 books that we call the Bible happen to make a perfect philosophical and emotional case for the answer to suffering yes Free Will answers much suffering like Dr manman said yes punishment could be answer to some suffering yes some suffering could be Redemptive yes there could be an afterlife and every one of those answers happens to fit perfectly in the text that we have in the 66 books of the Bible yeah I obviously have uh as you'll be surprised to hear
the opposite point of view uh I think that in fact uh authors of the Bible have different understandings of why they're suffering in some instances it's it's possible to reconcile what one author says with another absolutely uh if you want to say sometimes God punishes sometimes it's a test yes you can reconcile some views other views you cannot reconcile the apocalyptic view that it's the forces of evil that are punishing the people of God is at odds with the prophetic view that God is punishing the people people of God the Apocalyptic view emerged out of
the prophetic view in terms of chronology the prophetic view was first and then Jewish thinkers became dissatisfied with that and developed the apocalyptic view which stands at odds with it both views stand at odds with the view of the Book of Job both the view that that it's it's uh well especially the view that you have no right to ask why you suffer that's not a view most of the authors of the Bible have so I don't think that They're reconcilable okay last question this is posed to you Dr man do you believe that evil
can be objectively recognized as opposed to subjectively if so upon what is that answer based I won't go into the question about whether there are such things as objectives what I will say is that we cannot be [Music] Objective in the sense that we would have any ability to recognize an objective absolute the reason is because we are subjects we have subjective views of things whether we want to be objective or not we are raised in certain ways we're given certain perspectives and certain uh worldviews we're given certain religious beliefs that we inherit from the
time that we're young we have likes and dislikes and loves and Hates there are things we appreciate things that we don't appreciate there are things that we think are good and things that we think are bad and all of these are different for all of us why is that why is it that we all have different likes and dislikes and loves and hates because we're subjects even if there were some kind of objective reality out there that is in theory the objective view of right and Wrong we wouldn't be able to access it because we
don't have an objective way to get there we can only use our subjectivity even if we say that the answer is in the Bible you have to read the Bible and you have certain interpretation of the Bible and your interpretation of the Bible is different from someone else's interpretation of the Bible why is it that people who claim we have moral absolutes disagree with each other all the Time why doesn't the absolute give them the absolute same answer it's because we are subjective people thank you I think that right there is the Crux of the
issue let me uh read you a statement from Dr man there's something wrong with this world now is that an objective statement or a subjective statement you see the truth of the matter is we can objectively say there is something wrong with this world and when I say that what I mean is if there Is a sense of justice and fairness and if this world were all that there is and there is no afterlife then yes you could State there is something wrong with this world and when he states that he doesn't mean well think
there's something wrong with the world if you don't that's fine he means no there really is something wrong with this world and if that's true if some things really do seem like they are unfair then unbelief cannot be the Answer and so what he's trying to say there is no you can't really say something's wrong with this world you can't really say there's anything that's just or fair but that's not true some things are in just some things are unfair and knowing that proves that there is a God thank you again for the questions we
will move now to closing statements we'll begin with Dr man each gentleman will have five minutes for their closing Statement well uh thank you Kyle this has been a very stimulating debate I hope you all have uh enjoyed the back and forth uh more than I have um I don't like talking about this subject uh I wrote my book on uh the problem of suffering and uh for about a year after that the only thing anybody ever wanted me to talk about was the problem of suffering and uh frankly I I find it uh depressing
um I would rather Try to deal with the problem of suffering than to try and talk about it uh and um so uh but here we are I think it's important for us to talk about because as I said at the outset it's the most important uh question that we have to deal with as human beings many people that I uh have confronted and been confronted by after writing my book uh have told me what the answer to suffering is um several people During the intermission uh told me what the answer to suffering is uh
they were able to tell me what the answer to the problem of suffering is in about 20 seconds or less I I object strenuously when Kyle says that my answer is there is no God and he gets a laugh that's not my answer I think it's a very complex matter for why there is suffering in the World and our responses to suffering ought to be equally complex you most of you most of not all of you most of you are people of Faith you firmly believe in God you firmly believe in Jesus Christ you are
committed to Christ and to living ways that reflect the Life of Christ if you believe in God you think that he gave you your intelligence what I ask is that you use Your intelligence I'm not asking that you simply accept everything that somebody says who happens to disagree with something you already thought but I am asking you to think seriously about whether your answers to these questions are satisfying to you whether they're really satisfying to you when your child dies are you satisfied with the with the Comfort you're given by the idea that She'll be
in heaven to see you later is that satisfying for you when you think about the thousands and millions of people in the world who are dying of starvation are you satisfied that it's because of free will or because there's an afterlife and it'll be made right later are you satisfied with that if you're satisfied if You' thought about it and you're satisfied with it fine if you're not satisfied with it think harder about Other ways to figure it out it is a horrible world we live in most people don't live the kind of lives that
we are able to enjoy I obviously don't know any of you personally but you you're here and you're wearing clothing and I assume that you've got a home to go to and that you probably have modern conveniences you Pro many most of you have cars and televisions and you've got some degree of Luxury when millions of people are starving to death in our world millions of people are suffering because of natural disaster millions of people are suffering from the ravages of war and drought and famine an epidemic it is very difficult indeed to come up
with satisfactory answers whether you are a Believer or not my view of things is that at the end we may not come away with answers that are absolutely Satisfying this is a difference between Kyle and me Kyle appears to think he has the answers I have the questions and and I don't find his answer satisfying my view is that we should wrestle with the questions and wrestling with the questions is more important than coming away with easy answers my other view is that in some instances we may just come away saying I don't Know if
you're a believer that would be it's all a mystery if you're a non-believer it would simply be I don't know at the end of the day though my view is that even though we can't always have an answer for why they're suffering we can always have a response to suffering our response should be to help people who are in need as much as we can and as often as we can if we don't do that we're not being human and if you're Christian you're not being Christian I hope all of us will be more human
at any rate and I hope those of you who are Christian will be more Christi and let us together try to solve the problems that are confronting our world as people suffer and die every day thank you very much sure appreciate all of you being here to consider this very important matter I want to just go back over a few things that were done in this debate just so that they'll be in your mind Here at the end uh when we were talking about the things that are in Ecclesiastes and the things that are in
other passages Dr armman often says well one view contradicts another view Etc but then when you go to the verse he says well that verse wasn't really in the original writing uh redactor put that in somebody edited that in I think it's interesting that in his book did Jesus exist he's talking about people who claim that Jesus never existed and Here's what he says here we find again textual studies driven by convenience if a passage contradicts your view simply claim that it was not actually written by the author and I think that sometimes is very
much what we see when he says I hold the book of EC I hold the view of Ecclesiastes and we go to the end of Ecclesiastes and we see the conclusion of the whole matter fear God and keep keep his Commandments for this is the whole of Man well I think we can see that the view of Ecclesiastes is not exactly what we were told by Dr man now as he concludes his discussion another thing that I think we need to to carry away from this is Dr made two statements that that I think are
very very pertinent number one he said okay Kyle wants you to think about this stuff but isn't suffering an emotional issue well certainly it very very much is an emotional issue but shouldn't we also Not only treat it as an emotional issue but as an intellectual issue as well absolutely when is the last time we heard unbelief say you Christians are just are just thinking way too much about this well sure it's an emotional issue but it's certainly an intellectual one as well that's why a person would write an entire book about it that's why
he would be in four or five debates on the subject it's something that needs to be discussed rationally and when we do Discuss it rationally we saw several things we saw that there are justifiable reasons why an all loving all powerful God would allow suffering in this life we saw that the idea of Free Will answers some of that the idea of punishment could possibly answer some of that the idea of Redemptive suffering could certainly answer that and we know of instances in each one of our lives where those things are the case now after
after you deal with this Intellectual idea of it what do we have then with people who simply say well well that doesn't matter I'm still not going to believe in God Dr man made a statement in his book does Jesus exist he says anyone who chooses to believe something that's contrary to the evidence that an overwhelming majority of people find overwhelming over overwhelmingly convincing will not be convinced simply will not be convinced and you see I Think that's what we're dealing with here it's not as if unbelief can say well here's the problem with God
they just simply say well well I don't want to believe it in fact I think you heard those exact words almost from Dr man toight tonight now we all understand there's some suffering that no words can touch what do you do about the Deep suffering that words just simply are inadequate to deal with I think it's Interesting there again I don't think you'll be surprised I'm going to be quoting Dr man here he said I think you do exactly what job's friends did when they came to job they sat with him and suffered with him
he said I think that's exactly what you do you suffer with people now isn't it interesting that when we look into the Bible we see someone suffering with us you see not only does the bible give us logical Answers to the idea of suffering but it reaches down to the heart of it to the emotionally wrenching issues of unspeakable suffering and it says oh there's somebody who does suffer with you you see the answer to suffering in the Bible is not a logical syllogism it's a man it's God in the form of man coming to
suffer with us Jesus Christ and so The next time we wonder and there will be a next time where is God when I suffer that suffering that words can't touch we should think he's exactly where he was when his son hung on the cross and suffered with us thank you the debate has just concluded between Bart Man and Kyle but and we are waiting backstage and we're going to conduct interviews with both of these gentlemen in just a few minutes but While we wait while we are waiting for them I wanted to offer just a
word of explanation about the number of viewers that we had tonight tuning in to gbn in fact we understand that uh there was some difficulty with some logging on to the gbn website and that is because the sheer number of people that tried to log on tonight just overwhelmed our website and we got that corrected after a little bit we also found out there were some problems with one of the Roku channels And again I think the same explanation uh but that's encouraging to know how many people actually were trying to watch the debate tonight
and we are very thankful for that in just a moment we're going to have Dr man out and we're going to ask him some questions let him give us his feedback on the debate uh but while we're waiting for that I want to ask um uh Dr Dave Miller some questions and get his observations from the debate uh Dave there was a an illusion made to Free Will in heaven Dr man was asking uh suggesting that Kyle had a contradiction saying that we have free will now indicating God loves us but in heaven that free
will will be limited or taken away um can you comment on that address that you know that very point was brought this is a standard atheistic tactic it was brought up in the war and flu debate back in 1976 if if we have free will in this life and can freely choose to do wrong what would keep us From doing the same thing in heaven I thought brother Warren had the definitive answer and it's certainly a Biblical concept uh for one thing will be in heaven not earth you know Earth is a realm in which
we are subject to all kinds of Temptations and very specifically the fleshly body which the 1 Corinthians 15 clearly states we will shed we will have a new body and therefore we're not going to be subject to the same Temptations to which we are Subject now and then secondly there's the idea that um when you get to heaven that is going to be such an accelerated existence that you and I cannot even grasp or fathom scripture has to use apocalyptic infira of language to even convey the concept so in such an accelerated existence we're not
going to be subject to the same form of Temptation to which we're subject now uh the beauties of heaven will be such that we will not even entertain in fact I uh wanting to leave or to sin in fact I suspect we will be overwhelmed by the presence of theity okay they are telling me that Dr man is on his way so momentarily we will have him here with us to get his feedback and thoughts how he thinks things went tonight and we're looking forward to that I think he's here he's here okay here he
is with us hi Dr manman Don Blackwell hey D hi Dr Dave Miller good to see you we appreciate Very much you taking the time to let us ask you some follow-up questions after the debate and uh we appreciate the gentlemanly manner in which you conducted yourself tonight thank you um thought I would ask you um at the start was there anything that frustrated you with the debate tonight you know the most frustrating thing about debates is that when somebody uh when your opponent says something in the middle of a 10minute speech or a 20-
minute speech And something about three minute Mark you really want to get in there because wait a second I want to object to that and so tonight was no different from any other debate that's that's just that's just how it is it's the nature of the Beast I wondered about this um Kyle cited a number of your writings and he did that over and over yes and uh you made a comment about that at one time U were you surprised how much time he had spent in preparation or how much of your Writings he had
well I thought it put him at an unfair Advantage um because you know he's combed over my writings to try and find internal inconsistencies and contradictions and I I could very easily explain every one of these but that opportunity wasn't wasn't really presented so he never like said it doesn't this contradict and so then I could explain well you know that so um you know I would have preferred actually uh arguing issues um rather than simply Arguing about whether I contradicted myself someplace or other was there anything tonight that you would have done differently maybe
that you were disappointed in your own performance um I'm not sure I would have done anything much differently I think the hardest thing with a debate like this is doing the re because um it's um if you don't know what the other person's going to say it's very hard to Come up with a rebuttal on the spot and the problem is that Kyle knew exactly what I was going to say because I've done this debate five times and he's read my book on it so uh so it's not difficult to come up with a rebuttal
in that case but it is very difficult on your on your feet to come up with something so uh I think I but there's nothing to do about that I mean that's just the way that's just the way it is I'm asking you some human interest Questions here and um let me put you on the spot um do you feel like Kyle did a good job as a debater uh no he's a terrific debater absolutely terrific debater and he he knows the strategy and he knows the audience and those are the two main things you
you obviously have to be rhetorically effective which he is uh he's a very good public speaker and he knows uh how to uh address an audience that's favorable towards him uh it would have been it would have been a Very different debate with a different audience um you know I've I've had this debate at Chapel Hill uh where I teach um where the audience wasn't predominantly church people and it's a very different debate in that setting right yeah it's uh interesting you made a reference to uh variation textual variations and hundreds of thousands of those
I believe you said 3 to 400,000 and this is kind of your area Of expertise right yeah and in fact uh Dr Miller and I were discussing this I think he had a question for you along those ask you you went to Princeton and got to study under Dr meder yes which I suppose you could say would be at least one of the foremost textual critics in the 20th century I suppose would you say top 10 top 20 oh top two he um spent so much of his life authenticating the integrity and authenticity of the
of the text and obviously believed I I presume I've not looked in carefully to his religious but I presume that he believed uh that that is the word of God and he also spent a great deal of time as you you know as you point out saying there's 300,000 400,000 textual variants in the 5,500 plus manuscripts but as a textual critic he did not believe that that implied that we could not know substantially the word of God today but from what I'm hearing you say in your other books Jesus Interrupted in some of these other
books you have broken with that Viewpoint that's right and that occurred in the the shift that you said the con that you took when you went to ruers uh that that that had nothing to do with my becoming an agnostic um but it was a realization that I had fairly early on uh but Bruce mezer and I actually uh both saw this as an academic question rather than a theological or religious question uh he And I co-authored the uh the uh the new addition of his textbook on the manuscripts of the New Testament uh he
asked for me to be his his co-author uh he read my book misquoting Jesus and told me that he liked it very much so uh we we actually agreed on academic issues even though we had different religious perspectives did he believe though that the text that well you know westcot and H 999 1000s of the New Testament text we know to be reconstructed we know that we Have it um I you know he probably on occasion did put percentages on it you know the problem is that when you come up with a statistic like that
it's impossible to verify I mean the value of a statistic is it gives you something verifiable so suppose you said 99.5% of the New Testament is the original well you don't know that unless you have the original to compare what we have against if you had the original you could take what we have and see oh it's 99.5% the same but without the original you don't you can't do that well but taking the 5,500 plus and laying them side by side you can you know whether or not you have the original you just may not
know which one it is on any given textual variant but you are aware of the information that would be in either one and then there's the issue that the vast majority of these really do not affect absolutely no they don't affect lot as far as Christian doctrine is concerned Oh yeah as far as much of anything concerned I mean Mo most of these differences show that scribes couldn't spell any better than my students can so uh so uh absolutely I don't deny I've never denied that I've always said that most of these differences are immaterial
some of them are extremely important um did did uh did the Gospel of Luke think that Jesus death was an atonement for sin it depends on which variant you go with did John's gospel think that Jesus Was the unique God depends which textual variant you go with I could go down a whole list list of ones that really matter and the reality is this is just a a statement of fact experts in this field disagree on hundreds of places in the New Testament so um but they disagree on these very point in other words you
know did it did it did it have the or did it have was well they do disagree on those but they disagree on important places so Um that's why we have textual scholarships still because we we haven't we haven't gotten back to the original if we if we had the original there wouldn't be no there'd be no need for textual scholarship well isn't that that's really not textual is it because if you have all these manuscripts you can come to a conclusion you can give your arguments as to why it would seem the original read
this way isn't that really not the issue here the issue is Does the New Testament teach the deity of Christ that's not really a textual Vari issue that's a theological issue or hermeneutical issue right but I've never I mean that isn't what we're talking about we're talking about the text we're not talking about the theology we're talking about do you know what the authors originally wrote or not I hate to uh interrupt because this is such a great discuss but we are limited on time that we're here tonight we want To thank you so very
much for giving us a few minutes of your time you're welcome thank you very much appreciate it I hope you have a good night great thank you we should in just a moment be uh joined by Kyle butt and we're going to talk to him about his assessment of the debate tonight hey kle how are you I'm doing great good to see you outstanding job I appreciate that thank you so much for Taking a few minutes to talk to us we know you've got to be exhausted after the debate tonight uh we want to no
time off no no time off back to work well tomorrow's a Saturday so I was hoping to get to rest at least a day or two we wanted to ask you a few questions that are human interest questions U obviously you spent a tremendous amount of time in preparation for this debate as was obvious by the number of quotations that you made uh in fact Dr man seemed quite Taken back by the amount of preparation can you tell talk to us about that U sure and I I'll tell you why I do that it it's
one thing to stand up and say this is the position this is correct and here's why but unbelief is not a rational logical position and I don't mean that to be offensive at all to any person what I mean is God has provided us with the logical rational evidence to come to the conclusion there is a God so if you don't come to that conclusion It's for some other reason generally speaking what I have seen it's because there's something else you want more than the truth and so if that's the case then the writings of
unbelievers are going to contain inconsistencies and so you can say if if he says that things are unjust and unfair here but then over here he says no there's really no such thing as Justice and fairness that's just a cultural construct that's made up one culture makes theirs up another Culture makes theirs up well then that's just an inconsistency and so we can say unbelief is inconsistent but it's much better to say unbelief is inconsistent and Dr man is forced to we can show that by these two different statements Dr man has made we asked
Dr man this question it'd be interesting to hear your thoughts on the same question was there anything tonight that frustrated you anything anything that frustrated me not necessarily I uh I was very Surprised to hear Dr Man simply admit there are no objective moral values I had not seen him do that before in fact I have seen him say there is something wrong with the world there is Injustice things are unfair and when he said you know what if a person wants to believe yes that's wrong and another person wants to believe this is wrong
then hey I just tell them you should know better somehow do you think that was something knew he embraced tonight because he was Backed into it that's what it looked like to me now and I say that simply because as as you could see I've scoured every one of his writings and I've hardly ever seen him take that position If Ever I mean I would I guess I feel like I would have found that somewhere right right and so I just felt like tonight he just thought you know what yeah the the moral argument does
make sense it it is logical proof for God if objective moral Values exist God exists so instead of denying the moral argument he simply said well objective moral values don't exist right well then you can't have Justice and unfairness if that's the case that's right absolutely Dave did you have any questions on your mind you've got a lot of notes Here well following up on that very point for him to say that uh you know I when I thought about becoming an agnostic I thought I might lose my moral compass but I didn't You know
flu tried to bring that up you know brother Warren said you know why aren't you living a certain way and he said oh I'm married have two daughters I'm a moral guy well they they sidestep the point the point is your philosophical position your your approach to life demands that you have no moral compass so the fact that you have chosen to have one is subjective but that's inconsistent with the position that You've adopted that's the point that we're trying to make to them sure and you made it well right and what I what I
there again going back to the was I FR frustrated by some things what he just kept saying is we're humans we know that and yet in his writings he said most humans do nasty things to other people and say there's nothing wrong with it well if if humans somehow know this but he admits all along the way most humans don't and then you say well can you tell Those humans can you give them a reason not to and he says well I I just think they should know well that's just not how you can arrive
at that as he said that's not a very satisfying response right it's just not it's just not did um did you have other things that you were wanting to get to tonight but you just ran out of time well yes and only one major thing and that's often he says the positions of the different Bible writers are Contradictory well now what I was trying to show with Ecclesiastes was he said Ecclesiastes does not talk about the afterlife oh and then in the very conclusion of it it happens to in the conclusion of chapter 11 it
happens to in several different passages happens to but he just said well if I read this passage over here and it says not then I don't have to worry about that passage what I was trying to show was you take anything out of context and sure you can Make say whatever you want to right what I think is so very interesting like he says apocalyptic literature like in the Book of Daniel he said that says that evil forces are doing bad things and it doesn't say that God's punishing people but do you know when you
look in the Book of Daniel who is it that punishes Nebuchadnezzar for the arrogance that he that he has claim in the whole Kingdom's his well God is doing that punishment so what I find it Very interesting you can take the Book of Daniel the apocalyptic that he says contradicts job and those and you can find every single instance of God punishing Nebuchadnezzar the children of Israel being punished and that's why they're in Babylon Daniel rising to the top and being elevated because he's being righteous every single instance you can find in the Book of
Daniel and so if I had time to really lay that out I boy I sure would have lik to said okay Hold on you just said Daniel contradicts Joe but but what about the end of Daniel where it says the wise person wins Souls because there will be a judgment as we were watching backstage we were experiencing some frustration over his misuse of the Book of Ecclesiastes right to continuously quote things which the whole theme of the book is I tried these and they were wrong here's the right conclusion so I know that was frustrating
and blame it on the Redactors right right yes um how did you feel you did tonight is there anything you'd have done differently looking back I know I'm putting on the SP no no that's a the the truth of the matter is I ask every faithful Christian that I knew basically to pray for I studied as hard as I could for a year on the topic and I don't know of one other thing that I would change the way I did it now looking back do I have some human flaws that probably may come across
a little Arrogant that might look uh a way I'd rather them not yes but do I think that the truth was presented in a way that God is glorified and everybody can see that the that the problems or the faults or the the instances where it wasn't done well was because of myself and not the truth yes and so yeah well I thought you did a great job well sure thank you so so much for uh letting us be here and for letting us interview you oh glad to do it glad to do it great
to see you Glad of you my friend a appreciate it thanks a lot well we are very thankful that we have had the opportunity to talk to these individuals about the uh debate and how they felt like they did tonight and to discuss some things a little bit further it has been an exciting night and we are appreciative that you have tuned in to be a part of this we would like to express our appreciation to the university and their staff for the Tremendous assistance that they have given in making this a reality especially we
express appreciation to the Christian Student Center for hosting this event tonight and on behalf of the Gospel broadcasting network I personally want to Express gratitude that we have been allowed to carry this and to air this debate tonight to the audience we want to thank all of those who were physically here and those who have tuned in the number was very large tonight and I want to thank Dr Dave Miller for being here tonight and participating and being the the brains and the wisdom behind this commentary and discussion and we're going to wrap up for
now thank you for being with us and we wish you a good [Music] night [Music] n [Music] this has been a presentation of Apologetics press an organization dedicated to the defense of New Testament Christianity visit us on the web at apologetics press.org or call 800 23485 58
