Alex O'Connor's Contradiction (On Suffering)

Introduction

Are you one of those crazy people who just love sitting down and watching a 3 hour debate on some theological discussion, or in the case of Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson (with his word salads) - a full 8 hours? Well, I am. From the philosophical debates about the existence of God and the problem of evil, I see that there has been a change of the guard since I was a teen and the level of public discussion has definitely increased in complexity and also sincerity. There have been many great debates - Sam Harris v Jordan Peterson, William Lane Craig v Sam Harris, Trent Horn v Alex O'Connor etc. Trent Horn is definitely a significant force on the theist side and Alex O'Connor on the atheist side. Both are improving on or at least articulating old arguments in new ways that I find intriguing. For example, Trent is improving on the Kalam Cosmological argument (an infinite materialistic past is impossible), and Alex is giving credit where due - that human suffering isn't so much of an issue due to its allowance of higher order values, but he instead focuses on animal suffering (more on this later). I am not so convinced Alex is the "non-resistant, non-believer" he claims to be. 

Alex

Alex has a fantastic accent, sharp wit, and depending on the interview, he has a charming and genuine feel about his discussions. He purports to be a "non-resistant, non-believer" which gives the impression he is very open to believing in God. He even stated in one interview that the main idea that is keeping him from believing in God is the problem of unnecessary animal suffering. While holding this in mind, I do find it suspicious that he finds himself debating frequently against the resurrection of Jesus, the divine command for the Canaanite "genocide", and whether Jesus even claimed to be God. For someone who is non-resistant and has only one mentioned reason for not believing in God, he certainly is very actively opposing Him. There might be more to his story than he lets on. Alex seems to rely on a rather literalistic approach to what I call "lemon picking" which throws a lot of Christians off in debate. Lemon picking is a way of deliberately missing a point and looking at the negative. For example, many Christians use Galatians 3:28 to end slavery - "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus". Alex doesn't believe we can use this passage because it would mean denying the literal existence of male and female. Alex clearly misunderstands the significance of this passage - that slaves and non slaves are equal in the eyes of God. Many of the reasons for slavery throughout history is that slaves are seen as worth less than free people. Galatians alternatively claims otherwise.  

This leads me to the main topic of this blog post... Alex's contradiction. 

Unnecessary Animal Suffering

Alex's main gripe is that he can't understand how a good God could allow unnecessary animal suffering. This is a fair point and shows that Alex has some keen sense of morals. It is a significant Biblical idea that we as imago dei are meant to have dominion and tend God's creations from early times. This means caring for animals is a deep God-given moral compass He has given us. I am glad Alex is using it. Alex likes to weaponize it in his debates. The Knechtles unfortunately appeared to have a rough time chatting with Alex in this short half-hour discussion - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbtajMlNcnw&t=7s. In it at 1:25 Alex says to Cliff that if Alex pushed a button turning Cliff into a random wild animal, Cliff would kill himself immediately because of how miserable his life would be. Essentially, Alex is claiming that there is no value in living the life of an animal. 

Colonising Planets

Is Alex consistent with this proposition? Let's find out. In a debate with a rather worthy opponent - Catholic apologist Trent Horn, Horn pressed Alex on his rhetoric around this issue. He posited to Alex to imagine that all humanity left earth to colonise another planet. Alex has the opportunity to wipe out all nature on earth after we leave with the pressing of a button. Alex essentially gets his wish. He can end all unnecessary suffering. Alex responded basically that he didn't think he would push the button but would rather choose a button that reduced suffering. He provided no metric for deciding at what point is too much suffering - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PF1JgXOKDQ. Trent clearly drives this point home and moves onto why Alex cannot find that metric. Alex's utilitarianism gets in the way. 

Although Alex's concerns weren't really sufficient for determining how much suffering is too much, he did raise an interesting analogy about a deer being caught under a log and starving to death, even without knowledge by humans of this ever happening. This situation of suffering seems pointless to us. I do not pretend to have all the answers, but I think there are possible areas that could be explored further regarding where justified suffering could be found within the experience of animals.

Pain Is Good

First, at a silly level, we might consider us living life without pain receptors in order to minimise suffering (much like zombies or lepers). Clearly, this would be an unpleasant experience. The feeling of a hard day's work is a genuinely good feeling even if I had risked injuring myself doing so (or I had to plan my day so that I wasn't carelessly smashing into everything). This seems like a frightful dream to consider the feeling of having no pain receptors. 

Pain Is Necessary

Moving to another level, it is often said that suffering is necessary for higher order goods such as love, kindness, mercy, and compassion. I emphasise the "necessary". Jesus said that there is no greater love than one who lays down his life for his friends (John 15:13). If God wants to express Himself (as Creator) as the greatest expression of good, then this may be why God allowed/caused evil to enter the world in the first place - so that the greatest expressions of love could become a potential reality. God expressed this through His Son Jesus Christ on the cross. There is a certain beauty with higher order goods that you do not get without suffering. I am glad that Alex acknowledges this in multiple interviews. However, one could imagine that suffering might be reduced so much that all unnecessary suffering ceases to exist and therefore maximising the good ratio. Though, I am not sure that this is possible.

If we wanted to witness the "greatest love" of someone giving their life for a friend, I suppose we could minimise suffering so that only one person needed to experience this, almost like a single exemplar of suffering for us all to observe and feel pity for. Maybe, there is an exemplar "murder" story we all "know" about. Although this scenario allows us to maybe understand or empathise to a small degree with the exemplar/s of suffering for each scenario, there feels like a certain travesty and arbitrariness about it that is difficult to explain. I would argue that the exemplars alone are not enough to qualify as producing that "higher good" within us. Much like merely seeing someone garden and consequently getting a sore back and limbs is not enough for us to enjoy the relief of putting their feet up and resting after the fact. Having the ability to participate or the potential to participate in a higher good holds its own value. It must follow that if we have this potential to experience a higher good then we must also have the potential to experience suffering.

The very existence of suffering just being around the corner (as horrifying as it may be at times) provides within us a feeling of a need to band together and to help each other that in itself is valuable. We don't know when suffering will impact us, but through compassion, mercy, and love, we can experience pleasure of being in unity with others in the face of  real potential of suffering. This is infinitely more valuable than minimising suffering to a mere exemplar and addresses the real difficulty of deciding what unnecessary suffering actually is. Minimising suffering doesn't produce a ratio of more good.

Pain Is "Good/Necessary" For Animals Too

If this idea can work for people, then why could this not work for animals too? Alex frequently uses the deer being eaten by a lion as an example of unnecessary designed suffering in nature. I cannot speak as completely understanding (if at all) what the life of a deer may be. For a start, as many philosophers claim, there is a certain extra level of suffering a human can experience than an animal. An animal might experience suffering, but not the despairing self-awareness kind of suffering that true consciousness brings. They might feel pain, but not necessarily think, "I am in existential pain, and this is unfair". Animals don't have the ability to suffer as much as people, or at least they experience a different kind of pain to us. 

I wonder if a similar concept of the value of life and the real potential of suffering could be applied with deer as with people. Even though being hunted down and eaten by a lion is truly terrifying, could it be valuable for a deer to experience the safety of a herd instinct or comradery, even in the face of real dangers? A lion likewise, experiencing its own unique version of the herd instinct as they hunt together? These positive experiences of animal behaviour may be worth the suffering involved. This is the reason why when we step back, it would be difficult to push the button that exterminates all non-human life on a planet because there is something inherently valuable about nature and its own experiences. Many ultimate Sci fi movie villains attempt minimising suffering through extermination... we all know this is wrong and is actually destroying all that is good with it.

Higher Goods Within People

If animals may garnish some form of good through the real risk of wide spread suffering as people do, people can also experience higher order goods from animal suffering. Many people such as the SPCA here in New Zealand exist so that they can exercise a higher order good of caring for at risk animals. They cannot reach and save every animal from every situation, but the very knowledge that suffering is happening outside of their perceived control motivates them to creatively act to minimise "unnecessary" suffering. In a way that makes the unnecessary suffering a necessary part of motivating the greater good of SPCA's mission. Without the sense of a natural world run by natural laws where real risks and the potential of suffering exists, we can never experience these higher order goods.

This argument can be placed into a polly syllogism:

1. If God embodies the highest form of goodness, then His nature necessitates self-expression through creation.
2. In creating the world, God actualised the potential for widespread animal suffering as a means to manifest essential goods.
3. The existence of widespread animal suffering is necessary for cultivating higher-order virtues in humanity, such as compassion, mercy, and concern.
4. Additionally, this suffering plays a role in fostering lower-order goods in animals, such as the herd instinct, which contributes to survival and social cohesion.
5. Therefore, the actualization of widespread animal suffering within creation is justified as a means of producing both higher and lower-order goods.

Conclusion

In the end, it is difficult to separate the necessity of suffering from higher and lower order goods. In Scripture, God went into a long monologue with Job challenging Job to understand his own limitations of insight. Job was humbled by this monologue. Ultimately, we cannot see all the necessities of any single event, but because God is good, we can trust that He has a greater plan for good that sometimes only He is aware of. This is infinitely more reassuring than the purposelessness of an atheistic view on suffering. We can speculate, but ultimately it is His prerogative to run this universe as He sees fit.   

Faithfully Valuing the Limits of Scripture (PART 7 - HOW TO READ)

This series explores the nature of Scripture (specifically those aspects which many of us find uncomfortable) and what our approach to Scripture should be as a consequence. This exploration is needed because our intrinsic human biases cause us to assume that God's nature / aims / priorities / etc all line up with our modernistic worldview, which focuses on detailed accurate synergistic information. However such an approach to Scripture clashes with many of its properties. Our response tends to be to curate Scripture, or to minimize our engagement with the aspects we find difficult to explain. Instead, we should engage with all of Scripture as God designed it, and challenge our perspective on it when needed. What does it look like when we value the uncomfortable aspects of Scripture?

The series so far:

1. Introduction
2. Progressive Revelation
3. Relationships and Cognition
4. Morality and Evil
5. Coping with Evil I
6. Coping with Evil II
7. How to Read (this post)

So far I've spent a long time justifying my belief that God is more interested in the meta-cognitive goals of person-hood, expression, and relationship. Now I want to start exploring the practical aspects of reading Scripture. 

Scripture's purpose, specifically, is to be a collection of some of the individual progressive revelations of God's person-hood throughout history, which taken together He has deemed to be the most universally useful expression toward encouraging relationship with Him. It does this in an incredibly dynamic way. If we focus on cognitive information and a harmonious synthesis of theology, we can miss a lot of what the Bible has to offer toward relationship with God, and at its worst it can lead us to minimize aspects of Scripture to the point that they are almost useless to us. How should we approach Scripture keeping relationship in mind, and balancing the usefulness and limitations of cognition toward this ultimate aim? I have some general principles to share, but this is something I'd like to grow in more, so please share your own thoughts!

How to Read Scripture:

1) Immerse yourself in the passage, allowing every aspect of yourself to be impacted by the experience. We don't expect each expression of a person to be perfect and balanced - and likewise with each revelation - but they are unique and beautiful and insightful. By reading Scripture and inviting the Holy Spirit to speak through it, you are touching an aspect God, a deliberately designed expression of Himself! Never let this slip by you. 

2) Utilize flawed cognition to your relational advantage. Despite its limitations - which I have emphasized in my defense of God's relational aims - cognition is central to our approach to Scripture for obvious reasons. Firstly, Scripture is written in a language, meaning cognition has to be engaged to even start experiencing it with your other non-cognitive faculties. Secondly, 'Immersing yourself in the passage' is something that's not under much of our direct control, since all our faculties are overwhelmingly influenced by external circumstances, our subconscious, and each other. However, cognition is unique in that it is also (at least partly) consciously controlled, which gives us an avenue to steer and focus our other faculties of experience. If we are discussing how we should control our approach to Scripture, this control has to occur through our cognition. 

3) Attempt to cognitively understand what God intended for people to experience from his designed expression in Scripture. How Scripture's designed relational purpose is realized - or whether it is realized at all - varies between individuals. Our cognition needs to understand the intended experience if it is to steer our experience in the right direction. 

4) Deliberately consider multiple different experiences of God from the passage in mind. I think this is one of the most productive ways to attempt to properly experience God's expression through Scripture. These different perspectives help us break out of our worldview and so avoid subconscious worldview hijacking of our cognition, so we can consider God's intentions for the passage more clearly. But more profoundly, they help us stick to the first principle of relational experience (rather than cognitive accuracy). If we understand another person's relational experience, it allows us to experience an echo of God ourselves. In addition to the hypothetical 'universal intended experience' we're trying to understand from a passage, it's as if we were experiencing a personalized expression of God by proxy (albeit one with greater potential for error in our understanding, and with less universal benefit than Scripture itself). 

5) Start with some 'high yield' perspectives. Perhaps most useful is that of the original intended audience or of the author, since these are clearly going to be integral to God's intended experience of his expression in that passage of Scripture[1]. Also helpful to consider are the experiences of early and/or orthodox church consensus[2]. A final group of helpful perspectives are those of individual saints who you discern to be relating well to God in a holistic sense - these may be dead or living saints, famous or privately known[3]. 

6) Allow your cognition to function naturally and form a harmonized view of God as a person. Try to see God through each of the expressions you experience which you deem to be intended by God, or genuine healthy relationships. Remember you are trying to understand a person in the light of all their complex expressions. Don't make a God up who wraps perfectly around all these 'experiences' (this can never take into full consideration the dynamics of person-hood). Instead try to understand the God who expresses Himself in these ways. 

7) Don't let our modernistic worldview hijack your cognition and make an idol of it. This is an imperfect process and does not define 'relationship', though it is useful and natural.  Do not be distracted away from the aim of relationship with God.  Remember that the hypothetical 'universal intended experience' is actually going to be a spectrum of experience, just like any public expression in earthly relationships. Do not become obsessed with the difficulties of forming a harmonized view of God. Focus on God's intentions for Scripture (rather than picking 'the best' interpretation), and focus on God as a person (where Scripture springs from Him, rather than the reverse). Where cognitive perplexity exists, relate to God through this (some perplexity is a normal part of any relationship).

Its more (or less) intuitive

This approach is fairly intuitive and natural - read the passage for what it is, and consider the spectrum of legitimate ways to experience God through it (even if they contain different mixes of cognitive gaps). Despite its simplicity and intuitiveness, this approach IS difficult - because our worldview isn't happy with cognitive gaps, and because this approach requires us to put aside our preferred priorities and seek God as HE wishes to be found.[4][5]

Summary:

Reading Scripture should utilize cognition to focus the rest of our faculties and allow our whole being to experience God as He intends. At the same time we need to be vigilant not to focus excessively on our cognition, or elevate its importance above other aspects of relationship. One way to do this is to deliberately consider the spectrum of legitimate experiences of others through Scripture - including the original audiences and authors, church consensus, and individual saints. We should let our cognition form a harmonized view of God, a God who would express Himself through all these experiences. But there will always be perplexities of person-hood and relationship that our cognition cannot 'solve', and we need to be careful not to assume that this means something is 'wrong', and not to let this distract us from relationship.

• Are there any other reading / interpretation techniques that you feel are important to enhance a proper relationship with God?
• Do you agree that considering a variety of perspectives is important?
• Do you agree that considering the whole experience - not just the cognitive aspects - is important?
• When deciding which experiences are useful to consider in your interpretation of Scripture, how much attention do you pay to the cognitive aspects of that experience?
• How do you feel about accepting inevitable perplexities when it comes to forming a harmonize cognitive view of God?

Coming soon...

• Next I'll deal with some further issues people have with this approach to Scripture, specifically how it can seem to threaten traditional theological processes and the concept of 'inerrancy'.
• After that we'll explore some specific examples of progressive revelation and how a relational approach to Scripture leads ancient and modern saints to Him, but through different cognitive paths. 

Footnotes:

[1 - When attempting to understand the experience of the original audiences and authors, it can be helpful to remember how progressive revelation functions to serve relationship with Christ. Each passage was written to enhance as much as possible the revelation of Christ to the intended audience, taking into account their interpretive bias, and the historical processes God intends to drive as part of his expression to mankind. Thus this consideration can be helped a lot by an understanding of the times and cultures and language etc (which can seem daunting), but a lot of this can be gleaned from the Scripture itself. Important things to remember is that these audiences did not have subsequent revelation to balance their cognitive experience of God, that they had different priorities and worldview to us, and that they had genres of language that we aren't too familiar with in our modernistic society .]

[2 - Church 'concensus' is clearly not unanimous, and has also frequently been plagued by political and selfish motivations. However, the greater unity there is among those who seem driven by a desire to relate to the God of Scripture, the more authority this consensus has as a legitimate intented experience of God.  After all, the church - functioning this way - is the means by which we trust God to have chosen and preserved Scripture in the first place. This kind of concensus can allowing many doctrines labeled as heretical by the modern American/Western church, and can also be troubled by the influence of the current worldview (e.g. Greek thinking paved the way for modernism and tended to idolise cognition).]

[3 - The more you know a person yourself and are persuaded of there relationship with God, the less 'orthodox' their cognitive views need to be in order to be useful. Conversely, some 'orthodox' saints may have an experience of God that is less than convincing, and so may not be worth considering.]

[4 - Our modernistic mind will search for reasons to avoid worldview reform - e.g. by disregarding it as 'post-modernism'. This view is post-modern in the sense that it recognises the problems with modernism, but it is NOT postmodern in the sense of denying the reality or importance of cognition, absolutes, truth, consistency, etc. This approach relies upon the essential foundation of absolute reality and consistency in the person of God - but our experience of God should not derive all its meaning from how well we grasps all the cognitive details of God's absolute reality and consistency. The incarnation reveals how God is more than willing to 'empty himself', forgoing some aspects of His reality in order to better express others (e.g. His willingness and ability to relate to us).]

[5 - Even if we agree with this approach to Scripture, it doesn't make the difficulties go away! Our preference for cognitive information is deeply ingrained in our culture, and makes us constantly think about how this approach deals with cognition. What a shame to miss the beauty of the big picture, because we are thinking too much about how the picture is bigger than the sum of its parts and can't be contained in a cognitive description of it! What a shame to miss Jesus because we're thinking about how a person can't be described well with words alone! It can be good to understand how cognition and relationship interact - but Satan can use anything to distract us from actually relating to Jesus.]