guess what i gave a tedx talk which you can now watch via the link in the description it's quite exciting if you ask me i've never done one before and it'd be great if as many of you as possible could go over watch the video and give it as much engagement as possible speaking of engagement i've also been trying recently to put more content on my instagram page that's exclusive reels and igtv videos so it mean a lot to me too if you could follow me on instagram if you're not doing so already it's only
a tiny proportion of the people who are subscribed to me on youtube who are following me on instagram but i'm trying to boost that platform so if you can go over there and give me a follow that would be greatly appreciated too but anyway let's get on with today's video now i know that it's quite a bold claim that i've made in the title to have put my finger on the single biggest problem that christianity as a religion faces but let me explain i want to put forward in this video what i think is the
hardest objection to respond to if you're a christian now as you'll probably already know the most famous problem that you have if you want to say that the christian god that is an all-loving all-powerful god exists is the positively colossal amount of suffering infused into the human experience suffering is so omnipresent that most of our time spent existing is time spent trying to avoid it eating to avoid starvation working to avoid poverty sleeping to avoid fatigue watching youtube videos to avoid whatever it is that you're supposed to be doing right now and that's when things
are going well in life god also throws into the bargain of living existence which nobody agrees to enter into by the way unpredictable diseases miscarriages natural disasters and the existence of tick-tock why would an all-powerful god who truly loves us permit such suffering to overwhelm our living existence and this problem for religion is called as you'll likely know the problem of evil but there's something missing from this picture i'm not just here to restate the problem of evil as if it's anything new there's something else right there exists such an obvious and overwhelming version of
the problem of evil that it bemuses me that so many philosophers leave it entirely out of the discussion or at best relegate it to a passing paragraph or a footnote or something i'm talking of course about the problem of animal suffering now before you think i'm just getting all vegan on you again don't worry that's not what this is i know how sensitive some of you are to me pointing out that our own treatment of animals is so poor that it almost reaches god-like proportions but that's not what i'm here to talk about today right
animals suffering in factory farms for instance can easily be explained away by the christian as a result of human free will i'm talking about something else i'm talking about the suffering of animals that isn't human created the suffering that exists in the wild as a result of natural processes and by the way the reason this video is called christianity's biggest problem specifically rather than just religion's biggest problem is because i actually think that some other religions like islam have bigger problems than animal suffering but animal suffering is still a problem for other religions like islam
so although in this video i'm going to respond to william lane craig a christian on the subject do bear in mind that these arguments should apply to any god who claims to be morally perfect so this is the basis of my claim if the problem of suffering is historically one of christianity's biggest problems then the problem of animal suffering is its biggest so i should probably begin by unpacking why animal suffering is such a problem worth addressing in the first place if human life is as i've argued infused with pain then non-human animal life is
defined by pain animals in the wild are subject to endless torment from all angles of their existence they suffer from predation by other animals wild dogs disembowel their prey venomous snakes cause slow internal bleeding and paralysis crocodiles drown large animals in their jaws and animals also suffer from rampant disease dehydration and starvation they have to contend with forest fires and floods and a whole manner of other terrifying natural disasters david attenborough the celebrated nature documentary filmmaker once said about his documentaries people who accuse us of putting in too much violence should see what we leave
on the cutting room floor nature just really isn't a pretty place and not only do wild animals suffer in these extravagant ways that humans generally do not like having to live with the very real possibility of being mauled to death at practically any moment it's also true that compared to humans an astronomically higher number of wild animals exist so unfathomably high in fact that we can only estimate how big that number actually is the number of wild vertebrates alone is thought to be somewhere between 10 to the power of 11 and 10 to the power
of 14. that's 10 with at least 11 zeros after it we're talking trillions of animals each one of whom will under the unairing supervision of an all-powerful all-loving god likely experience more fear devastation and suffering in their lifetimes than we human beings are even capable of imagining so this is the problem that the christian has to contend with how can god permit such insidious levels of unthinkable suffering well it's not like christians don't have a response to the problem of evil there are many quite famous attempts to reconcile the existence of evil with a loving
god the problem is that a great many of these attempts which are known as theodicies by the way simply don't apply to non-humans for instance one popular theodicy states that evil and suffering exists as a result of human free will right if humans are genuinely free they'll sometimes commit and permit evil but this doesn't explain why a tree falls onto a deer's leg causing it to starve to death in confused agony it's also sometimes asserted that human suffering is justified because it will be compensated for in the afterlife but unless you believe in some doggy
heaven or that jesus died for the sake of your pet hamsters sins too this also doesn't really fly for animals it's also sometimes said that suffering exists because from it more good can emerge but what good emerges from animal suffering and how does it benefit the animals most animals are non-rational creatures they can't learn and intellectually grow in the same way that humans can what greater good could possibly be served by allowing a koala bear to be burned alive in an australian wildfire well fear not because in 2011 two very eloquent philosophers stephen law and
william lane craig both previous guests on this channel by the way debated god's existence dr law brings up the problem of animal suffering and so we can now turn our attention to what dr craig often cited as christianity's greatest public defender has to say about it now let me say one more thing about animal predation and suffering since this featured largely in his argument number one animals are part of a broader ecosystem in which the human drama is played out and such an ecosystem must be balanced if it's to be viable it is no accident
that every ecosystem involves predators of some sort for example i also recently saw a program on television about how the canadian authorities are reintroducing wolves into the wild in canada why because in the absence of these predators the caribou herds were overpopulating because there was none no one to pick off the diseased in the aged and as a result they were over grazing and therefore dying of starvation the predators actually enhanced the survivability and the health of the carol blue herds on which they prayed okay so craig's argument is this if an ecosystem is unbalanced
leading to an overpopulation of prey this prey will die from starvation since there won't be enough food to go around by ensuring that predators exist to pick off the diseased and the aged the ecosystem is balanced preventing that starvation but there are just a multitude of problems with this right first it's of course true that in practice any functional ecosystem we know of requires predators and prey in order to be balanced but why does this need to be true in principle the laws of ecosystems as they stand require predation but are we expected to believe
that god couldn't have made these laws differently is god constrained by these laws that's the implication of saying that an ecosystem must be balanced in this way that god couldn't have created a balanced ecosystem using other less painful methods in other words the laws of ecosystems somehow constrain what god is able to do are we really to think that the laws of ecosystems are more fundamental than god is no god is the creator of the laws of ecosystems and so can't be bound by them and besides granting that god does need to balance an ecosystem
predation is not the only way to do it god could have for example limited the number of times an animal can reproduce as a way of preventing overpopulation a form of cosmic contraception there's definitely a joke about a condom brand in there somewhere but no for dr craig god limiting an animal's sexual potency or any other kinds of painless methods are not possible options for combating overpopulation no the only way that god can save these animals from overpopulating and starving to death is to introduce savage predators who maul them to death in some of the
most painful ways humanly imaginable that's the only way to balance the ecosystem i mean come on when a lion kills a zebra the zebra is usually too large to be killed instantly and so is often asphyxiated to death writhing in pain over slow minutes-long death i mean even if predation really is the only way to stabilize an ecosystem there's still absolutely no reason why it would need to be so painful and so gruesome god could provide for these animals an instant death or at least one that's less painful but he doesn't he allows that zebra
to suffer for minutes whilst its windpipe is caught in the jaws of a lion just imagine for a moment what it must feel like to be that zebra none of this is necessary for ecosystem stability if you truly are the omnipotent creator of natural laws and dr craig is arguing that predation is justified since it prevents prey from starving to death but is the fate of being preyed upon and eaten alive really that much better than starvation would you given the choice rather die from a lack of food or from being painfully mauled to death
by a large wild animal i'm not sure i have a particular favorite it's hardly a merciful deal that's being offered here god is so loving that he saves these animals from starving by ensuring that they're ripped open and eaten alive before they have the chance to starve wow what a glorious and loving thing that god does for these animals and why should these animals even be suffering from so much starvation in the first place that still needs to be explained and also bear in mind that predation doesn't even get rid of starvation just some starvation
even with predators there are still animals starving to death in the wild so if the reason that god created predators was to save prey from starving to death why are some animals still allowed to go on starving to death anyway none of this makes any sense and on top of even that note that the same justification that dr craig is using here could also apply to human beings there are currently millions of human beings lacking food and at risk of famine in south sudan and starvation is one of the most painful things that a person
can go through but don't worry i have an idea let's go to south sudan and introduce some wild predators maybe some wolves or some large bears to painfully maul these people to death after all if we didn't do this they'd all starve by allowing them to be preyed upon by wild animals to pick off the diseased and the aged we reduce their numbers and balance out the ecosystem leaving more food to go around and minimizing starvation how merciful of us so who's for it yeah i didn't think so now okay you may think that i'm
being a bit unfair here right there are obviously many other methods we can use to reduce starvation in south sudan that don't involve killing people with wild predators but yeah that's kind of the point right if we humans have the power to reduce human starvation without necessitating them being mulled to death by wolves then you can bet that god has the power to reduce elk starvation without necessitating them being mauled to death by wolves the idea that permitting this kind of unthinkably painful death is the only way to prevent them from starving if you are
the omnipotent creator of the universe verges on one of the most ridiculous things that i have ever heard so that predators are an essential part of an ecosystem in a world without predators the insects would soon take over since there would be nothing to eat them and all the animals would soon die because all the vegetation would be consumed by insects once again dr craig assumes that the only way to control population sizes is by killing individuals within that population no mention of any other methods that god might have available to him but also was
it not within god's capabilities to make it so that insects and wild animals just eat different things we need predators says dr craig because otherwise nobody eats the insects and the insects will eat all of the predators food and the predators will die yeah as if it literally wasn't possible for god to provide different foods for wild animals and insects the only reason this problem even exists in the first place is because of the way the ecosystem has been designed you can't just say god needs predators because he designed a world that needs predators that
doesn't explain anything and to reiterate even if the animals really do need to be preyed upon for whatever reason the process could have been made a lot less painful but it wasn't now pause think about this what would we expect to find if we assume that there is no god and animals in nature are just randomly mutating and evolving and competing for resources with no divine guidance well we'd expect pretty much exactly what we observe in the real world a messy bloodbath and a struggle for survival and what would we expect to see if we
assumed the existence of an all-loving and all-powerful god maybe some level of suffering that we might not be able to fully explain but nothing even remotely approaching the level of horror and pain that actually exists in the natural world it is incalculably easier to account for this suffering on an atheistic worldview now let me say one other thing however that is a result of recent scientific discoveries that shed remarkable light on the problem of animal suffering in his book nature red in tooth and claw published by oxford university press michael murray explains that there is
really a three-fold hierarchy of pain awareness on the most fundamental level there is simply the reaction to stimuli such as an amoeba exhibits when you poke it with a needle it doesn't really feel pain there's a second level of pain awareness which sentient animals have which is an experience of pain and animals like horses dogs and cats would experience the second level pain awareness but they do not experience a third level pain awareness which is the awareness of second order pain that is the awareness that one is itself uh himself in pain for that sort
of pain awareness requires self-awareness and this is centered in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain a section of the brain that is missing in all animals except for the higher primates and human beings and therefore even though animals are in pain they aren't aware of it they don't have this third order paint awareness they are not aware of pain and therefore they do not suffer as human beings do it is difficult to express just how disturbing it is to see people still peddling this cartesian fantasy that animals don't experience pain what exactly is it to
be in pain pain is an experience it's not a thing you can touch or measure it's something that exists in the minds of conscious creatures you cannot be in pain without being aware that you're in pain if you're not aware of any pain that just means you're not in pain pain is an experienced phenomenon by definition if you're not experiencing it it's not there if pain doesn't necessitate the experience of pain in this way then what is pain does it just mean damage or something's natural function being inhibited well this would mean that a table
is in pain if i take an axe to it no to suffer is to experience suffering saying that you can feel pain without being aware of it is like saying that you can feel sad whilst thinking that you're really happy no if you feel happy that's what it means to be happy you can't be happy if you're not feeling happy and you can't be in pain if you don't feel that pain to deny that animals can feel pain is a desperate excuse to justify animal suffering it doesn't explain animal suffering simply denies its existence but
it gets even worse right let's just say for argument's sake that craig is correct animals don't suffer they're not aware of any pain that they're ever in this has some radical implications right if animals don't suffer then there's no issue doing things to them that appear to cause suffering so if i have a dog there's no reason why i shouldn't throw that dog on a fire cut off its tail and poke its eyeballs out with a fork i mean why not the dog isn't suffering so what's the problem the dog isn't aware of any pain
if you want to accept craig's position here you have to say that it's perfectly okay for us to treat animals in literally any way we please since they literally cannot be harmed craig says he is an animal lover now this is a tremendous comfort to those of us who are animal lovers like myself or to pet owners even though your dog or your cat may be in pain it really isn't aware of being in pain and therefore it doesn't suffer as you would when you are in pain so i can't help but wonder does craig
think that it's okay for me to torture dogs and cats i'd imagine he'd say no but if animals genuinely can't suffer then there seems to be no reason why i shouldn't be able to do this if animals can't suffer then there's as much harm involved in me torturing them as there is in me chopping down a tree so do you think that it's okay for me to throw a dog onto a fire i didn't think so and if you don't it must be because you can see right through this sinister nonsense about animals being incapable
of suffering it's time to relegate that ridiculous and untenable position to the history books a stain on the course of moral progress and if christianity really can't come up with a better response to the problem of animal suffering then i'm afraid to say that it should be relegated to the history books as well i've been alex o'connor or cosmic skeptic make sure to follow me on social media for more content and exclusive posts i also want to take a moment to thank my supporters on patreon especially my top tier supporters for helping to keep this
channel afloat if you like what i do please do consider becoming a supporter at patreon.com forward slash cosmic skeptic thank you as always for watching don't forget to subscribe and i'll see you in the next one
