Trent Horn dialogues with an atheist on Catholic Answers Live who claims there is no evidence for a personal God.
Transcript:
Host: Frank in Cincinnati on EWTN.com, you’re up next. Hello Frank, you’re on the air.
Caller: Yes, hi, hi Trent.
Trent: Hello. Why are you an atheist or an agnostic?
Caller: Well actually, let me better define your argument. You do know the difference, definition-wise, between a deist and a theist, do you not?
Trent: A Theist is someone who believes God exists, but He interacts with the world in some way or has an interest in it—
Caller: Well, actually—
Host: Frank, you know what, we’re playing a little bit of “Gotcha” here, let Trent finish his answer.
Trent: Theism is the idea that God is unlimited being and so He sustains the universe and interacts in some way with it; deism is the idea that there is a God that created the universe but either no longer interacts with it or has no interest in it. That’s roughly the definitions.
Caller: Essentially you’re close, I mean, a deist would be, I would define, as a prime mover, someone who had a plan who executed the universe the known cosmos; a theist on the other hand is a personal God, and so the word antitheist is kind of not only just kind of a misnomer but it’s hard to define.
Host: So Frank, we can we can play “Roget’s Thesaurus” for a long time, but really I want to get back to the question that we’re asking and Trent just repeated: are you a atheist or an agnostic, and if so, why?
Trent: Or a deist, possibly.
Caller: Okay, well, I guess to start the conversation, because I have a lot to say, is that I would answer I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in a personal God.
Trent: Okay. All right, so why don’t you believe in a personal God?
Caller: Well first of all, it’s a non-falsifiable argument, either side, to prove the existence of God–a personal God–or to not. There’s no evidence to prove either way, there’s no evidence for the existence of God and you can’t disprove it.
Host: Frank, this is sort of the kissing cousin of “Trent, have you stopped beating your wife?” There’s no evidence for God?
Trent: Yeah, okay so I’m gonna ask a follow-up question, Frank: how do you know…when you say “There’s no evidence for God,” that’s so interesting to me—
Caller: Well, cite me the evidence. Cite me one argument.
Trent: Okay. First, let me say this: can there be evidence for something, but it doesn’t necessarily prove the thing exists?
Caller: Which is what I said, it’s a non-falsifiable argument.
Trent: No Frank, here’s the thing—and I find many atheists do this, they say: “There’s no evidence for something,” but treat evidence as, something only counts as evidence—
Caller: Well, give me the evidence. One piece of evidence, please.
Trent: Okay.
Host: Well, we could crank through a lot of proofs for God.
Trent: All right, well, I can talk about one, that’s fine, but it’s just interesting for me that you just say—you’ve made a knowledge claim, “There’s no evidence,” and you must have known this before you talked to me, I just want to know how you got to that point. Like, how you got there.
Caller: Yeah but you didn’t answer my question. I asked you to give me one argument or case for the existence of God.
Trent: Okay. I will happily do that, and then I want you…yeah, it’s just funny that you put that claim out there, but you haven’t defended it.
So yeah, I would say one piece of evidence for God is that we have good evidence that all of reality—space, time, matter, and energy—began to exist at a point in the finite past. And so there must be a cause for all of reality. And this cause, if we do a conceptual analysis of it, it cannot be part of space or time, because those things came into existence at one point; this cause would be immaterial and eternal, not bounded in any way; and so that pushes forward to the idea of what we would call “God,” a necessary being or an uncreated being.
And then I might put other aspects of reality itself that tell us more about this creator; the fact that there are orderly laws that are universal shows there some kind of plan involved, and that leads towards the idea that the creator is a planner or a designer; and the existence of moral truths shows that this creator is goodness itself and desires we ought to be a certain way.
Now here’s my thing: I would say that is at least evidence. It may not be persuasive to some people, but it’s at least something to debate, wouldn’t you say?
Caller: Absolutely.
Trent: Okay.
Caller: Certainly something to debate, but I would propose that that’s not evidence, it’s an opinion. So I can make an equal argument for how the the universe came to exist in terms of theoretical physics, you read Lawrence Krauss’ book.
Trent: I have read Lawrence Krauss’ book. I’ve read Lawrence Krauss’ book, and I’ve also read the rebuttals from people like David Albert, who is not religious, who’s another theoretical physicist who says that Krauss does a bait-and-switch in his book. He says he’ll explain how the universe came from nothing, and then he just defines nothing as “a quantum vacuum” and never explains where the quantum vacuum came from or why it exists. So that would be my thoughts on Krauss on that.
Caller: Well, I guess what I’m saying is, when I was asking you a question I don’t mean to dwell, you know, too long on this call, but it used to be that the best argument was that “What could create all this complex organic matter?” Well now we know, Darwin told us.
Trent: I would disagree with you, Frank, that is a misnomer, that is a—
Caller: So you don’t believe in evolution?
Trent: No, I do believe in evolution, but I don’t think that’s been the best argument for the existence of God.
Caller: Well I’m saying it was the best argument. Now there’s no argument.
Host: Frank, we’re getting multiple interventions here on our answers.
Trent: Yeah, this is another–I almost wanna write a book called The Myths of Atheism. This is, like, myth number 5: the idea that the best argument for the existence of God was William Paley’s eighteenth-century watchmaker. “Look, you found a watch, it’s complex! Must have a maker! Hey, look at that beaver! He’s more complex than a watch! He must have a maker!”
Host: Or “Look at that universe!”
Trent: Exactly. But we don’t argue the universe resembles a clock, or argue by analogy; rather I’m arguing, first, if something comes from absolute nothing—not just from a “quantum vacuum” or something like that, as Krauss would look forward—absolute nothing has no room in it for any kind of scientific explanation. Second, the existence of a universe with finely ordered laws that allow evolution to take place, that points towards a lawgiver rather than just something that’s completely random.
Caller: Well, guess what? There’s a science argument against that, it’s called multi universes. Have you heard of the anthropic principle?
Trent: Yes, I have heard it.
Caller: There’s probably an infinite number of universes with different scientific laws.
Host: Frank, hold on, Frank, we’re really trying to go back and then forth and then back and forth. We have dealt with the multi-universe—or shorthand, multiverse—theories many many times, string theory, and not just Krauss and his detractors; but Trent, isn’t saying there’s a multiverse, doesn’t that kick the problem down the avenue?
Trent: It does kick it down, for multiple reasons: number one, we are still left with the question “Why does the multiverse exist at all?” When we look at contemporary physics, but also from philosophy, there’s good reason to think even if our universe came from a previously existing one, there has to be a terminating point for all of this in the past. Number two: there’s an interesting objection to the multiverse. So we say, “Oh, it’s so improbable, these laws, we just live in a multiverse, that explains it. But if I got ten royal flushes in a row, I couldn’t say “Well, maybe this is the universe of the multiverse where I win that way!” Well no, you would think there was design, much the same way I think the design in our universe that points towards the ability for life to evolve is evidence of a designer.
Host: And Jimmy Akin, in the May 2000 Catholic Answers magazine, covers this, called “What the Heck is the Multiverse?” by Jimmy Akin.
Thanks for the conversation, Frank.