Craig responde a Dawkins sobre o problema do mal e mais.

now a couple of questions uh representative of some others on the problem of evil and one why did your infinitely smart designer invent is it evil you get the idea um and another one Dawkins accuses you of saying that genocide would be acceptable in some context texts have you ever said anything which warrants this View and what do you actually think and I take that to be related to the problem of evil in that uh the claim would be that if you take the Bible as representing the word of God it suggests that he might

be evil rather than good if he in fact did Advocate genocide I am a Christian theologian and so we'll answer this from a Christian perspective from a Christian perspective God didn't invent evil rather he created free moral agents who have the ability either to obey God and do his will or to seek lesser Goods rather than have their Wills oriented toward God as the Supreme good and evil as I understand it is a privation of right order in the creaturely will it is a a an absence of being correctly ordered toward God as the Supreme

good and focused instead on and on lesser good so evil is the byproduct of the misuse of human Freedom which is necessary for us to be moral agents who make significant moral choices apart from that we would be mere animals or robots or puppets and that's not the kind of uh being that God wants now I have have not in any way ever said that God has commanded or could command genocide that's an unsympathetic misrepresentation of what I said what I was dealing with are these narratives in the Hebrew Bible concerning God's commands to Israel

to go into the land of Canaan or the modern day land of Palestine and to drive out the Canaanite Clans or trib tries that were inhabiting the land and in the Hebrew Bible God commands Israelites to go in there and to slaughter uh any of the Canaanites that uh oppose them whether man woman or child they are to be exterminated now anybody who takes the Bible to be historical has got to wrestle with these difficult text the question is how could a God who is all loving all good and all holy issue such commands um

and why would he do so how is there some kind of internal cons inconsistency here and what I argued was that when you look into these in the context of the narrative you find that God held his people Israel in Egypt for 400 years before bringing them into the land of Canaan because he said the the iniquity of the Canaanites is not yet complete these people were not yet so debauched so reprobate that God would judge them and so he held his people in AB bance until the iniquity of these Canaanite tribes was so pronounced

so they were so vile and so evil that God finally used Israel as his means of bringing judgment upon these tribes in the same way that God would later use Pagan Nations like Babylon and Assyria to judge his own People Israel by allowing them to come in and sweep through the land and conquer the people so that this represented God's judgment upon the these Canaanite tribes and when you read the ancient non-biblical literature about these tribes this was a culture that was incredibly evil Clay Jones has written an article on this in philosophia Christi and

which he looks at some of these ancient texts and the sort of the the beastiality and uh human sacrifice and the mockery of of God that characterized this culture was really really vile and and it it raises the hair on your neck to read these texts of what these people were like and it this story of the conquest of Canaan only comes after the story of God's judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah and you may remember in that story Abraham argues with God and says God if there are 50 righteous people in these cities will you

will you destroy them will you destroy the good along with the unjust and God says no for the sake of the 50 I will not destroy them and then like a middle eastern Merchant uh Abraham Bargains with god well God if there are 40 in the city will you destroy it God says no for the sake of the 40 righteous people I will not destroy it and God says Abraham says oh God don't be impatient with me but if there are 10 righteous men in the city will you destroy and God says no for the

sake of the 10 I will not destroy and Abraham doesn't dare to argue any further with God but the purpose of the story which comes in the narrative prior to the conquest of Canaan I think is to emphasize that God is not going to judge these people until they are utterly utterly deserving of judgment uh because they are so debauched so um the the story of Sodom Gomorrah is is illustr of why God held his people for 400 years before bringing them into the land and when he brought them into the land to judge Canaan

what was that judgment it was not to commit genocide that is an utter misrepresentation there was no racial War here there was no command to pursue and hunt down the Canaanites and exterminate them all what was the command the command was to drive them out of the land the land is what is was and remains so all important to these Middle Eastern people who has the land and what God was doing was destroying these Canaanite uh Petty kingdoms as nation states he was destroying these nation states in effect by dispossessing of them of their land

and bringing in the Israelites and giving the land over to Israel as the land of Israel the promised land and if these Canaanite tribes had simply fled before the advancing armies of Israel no one would have been killed there was no command to hunt down the Canaanites no intention to kill them all off and eliminate them it was only those who stayed behind the fight that would be killed uh and in fact there is nothing in the narrative to suggest that any women or children were killed there is no narrative whatsoever that says says that

anybody other than combatants were killed in this cleansing of the land and we really don't know how many actually were killed this was apparently a gradual sort of dispossessing of the land that these tribes occupied so the question is then well how could a God who is all holy and just and loving command such a thing and I think you can make sense of this through a Divine command morality which says that our moral Duties are constituted by God's commands so that when he issues commands to us these become our moral duties so Israel and

the armies of Israel became in effect the instrument by which God judged these Canaanite peoples the adults deserve the Judgment that they they received if they stayed behind now the more difficult problem is the children how could God command that the children be killed because these are innocent and I think what I would want to say there is that God has the right to give and take life as he sees fit children die all the time every day uh people's lives are cut short God is under no obligation whatsoever to prolong anyone's life another second

so he has the right to give and take life as he chooses moreover if you believe as I do in the salvation of infants or children who die what that meant was that these the the death of these children meant their salvation they were the recipients of an infinite good as a result of their Earthly phase of life being terminated the problem is that people look at this from a naturalistic perspective and think life ends at the grave but in fact this was the salvation of these children and would be far better for them than

continuing to be raised saying this reprobate uh Canaanite culture so I don't think God wronged any body in commanding this to be done he didn't wrong the adults because they were deserving of capital punishment he didn't wrong the children if there were any that were killed which we don't know because God has the right to take their lives and he in fact uh in fact they were the recipients of a great good so I don't think there was anybody that was morally wronged in this affair so it seems to me that it is possible for

God to do so I think only one thing needs to be added and that is that God had morally sufficient reasons for issuing such an extraordinary command it it needs to be understood as how extraordinary and out of the ordinary this this command was it is associated with the conquest of of Canaan and the dispossession of the land and giving it to these people and God I think had morally sufficient reasons for doing this because um these people were due for judgment and by issuing so harsh and object lesson to Israel by using them as

His instruments for bringing judgment in this way he emphasized to them as nothing else could do how they were to be a holy people set apart for God himself and not to follow after the Pagan deities of Israel's neighbors not to betray uh their faith and and apostatize and follow these Canaanite Gods like Baal and and mooch and others this was an an object lesson to them to preserve Israel and their and and the salvation of these people through which of course the instrumentality of Israel he would eventually bring the Christ into the world and

affect the salvation of the entire world through Christ so I think God had morally sufficient reasons for doing such an extraordinary uh thing uh which is really unique and uh not something to be repeated or expected in any other time or age