Audio only:
In this episode Trent responds to Alex O’Connors “dialogue” with the Catholic Answers AI apologist Justin on the subject of the Bible and slavery.
Answering Catholics who claim “deportation is intrinsically evil”
Slavery in the Bible: Atheist-Christian Dialogue (Trent Horn, Gavin Ortlund, Josh Bowen, Kipp Davis)
Transcription
Trent:
Recently atheist, Alex O’Connor, AKA, the cosmic skeptic, interrogated the Catholic Answers AI apologist Justin on the subject of the Bible and slavery. At some point I want to give a complete response on the subject of slavery in the Bible, but right now I’m completely exhausted. As you saw in previous episodes, my wife Laura had brain surgery last week. Then a few days after she left the hospital she had a seizure and so we spent the rest of the day in the emergency room making sure she was okay the rest of the time at home. Laura’s medication has kept her from sleeping and she has aphasia. She isn’t able to articulate 99% of her words or she mixes them up. For example, when I asked Laura what a squirrel was on our walk, she confidently said That’s a banana with speech therapy. She should be fine in a few months, but in the meantime, I’ve basically been playing a nonstop game of charades with my wife to communicate with her.
So I’m a bit drained. However, I felt some kind of response should be made since Alex’s video was directly related to Catholic answers and Alex showed me in the beginning of his episode. So I’m just going to offer a few thoughts to help everyone think through the question of slavery in the Bible. I’m not going to be able to comprehensively address the issue, but in the future I’ll try to sit down and develop a more complete response. And if you’d like to help our family during this time, especially while I step back from most of my public speaking to care for Laura, consider becoming a monthly supporter@trenthornpodcast.com. So in Alex’s video, he gets Justin to contradict himself by saying that slavery both is and is not intrinsically immoral.
CLIP:
I just wanted to point out editing this that earlier I asked Justin if slavery is intrinsically immoral and he said
Yes, the ownership of other human beings as private property is intrinsically immoral and unjust according to the fullness of Christian moral teaching.
But now he’s just said, is slavery intrinsically immoral according to Catholic teaching?
No.
So I suppose it follows from this that Catholicism is not the fullness of Christian teaching.
Trent:
Alex also makes this argument.
CLIP:
Is this a logically valid argument? Premise one, God wouldn’t permit evil in any circumstance. Two, slavery is unethical. Three, therefore God would not permit slavery in any circumstance.
The argument you present is logically valid in form. If God would never permit evil and slavery is evil, then God would never permit slavery.
Trent:
In order to engage Alex’s critique, we have to unpack the terms and premises in his arguments. First, the premise that God would never permit evil is false. Alex got Father Justin to say God would never permit evil, but that’s not true. Now, Justin has said worse things in the past, so I’ll go easy on him or it. God knows we will sin, for example, but he permits or allows that form of evil instead of just causing all of creation to cease to exist. A good person can permit the existence of evil if the alternative is a greater evil. Alex knows because he changed his mind on veganism to prevent a greater evil in his own life. Alex used to consider it immoral to consume or use animal products, especially for himself. In August of 2022, Alex and I had a dialogue on the ethics of killing, which I’ll link to below, where I said that even if factory farming is immoral, a person could be justified in eating factory farmed meat or in permitting the practice to exist in order to prevent greater evils like individual malnutrition or widespread starvation. However, Alex did not consider those arguments persuasive at that time. Although six months later after our dialogue, Alex announced he was no longer practicing veganism because he considered the lifestyle too difficult for maintaining his health.
CLIP:
The fact of the matter is I still think animal suffering matters greatly. I still want to see the end of factory farming as soon as possible. All that happened was in practice in my life I found it difficult to maintain a healthy plant-based diet. That’s it really. I understand why that would annoy people or upset people, especially given that I’m somebody with a public platform. But that’s what this breaks down to.
Trent:
And here he is on a podcast three months ago explaining his change and why he thinks veganism no longer works and can’t be expected of most people.
CLIP:
I used to be a vegan and I used to think that the solution to this was just to not eat the products, to not pay for the products. It’s essentially a boycott boycotts work. At least sometimes boycotts can be effective and for a time veganism was really beginning to take off. It seemed like it was really changing the world, and you become really convinced that the world one day will actually be vegan. That morality will catch up on the world and in the same way that all kind of other injustices like human slavery are abolished, the same thing will happen with animal exploitation and I don’t think that people will stop eating animals, and I don’t think that it’s wrong in the way that I used to. In principle.
Trent:
Hopefully this can help Alex have a different look at the issue of slavery. In the Bible, Alex sees that while factory farming is bad, given the nature of society and the moral need to feed people, having everyone go vegan is not feasible. Alex can’t even do it for his own health reasons, and that might change and say 120 years when technology resembles, let’s say Star Trek and makes creating food basically effortless and there’s no need for older, harsher methods of food production. Likewise slavery might be tolerated because like factory farming today, it was the backbone of an ancient economy and a way for people to reliably secure resources in a world rife with famine, plagues, bandits, and warring tribes and slavery may become something that cannot be tolerated anymore because society has changed and there are different ways to be able to provide people their basic needs.
In the past, most people ended up in slavery because their farms or animal herds could no longer support them and in the absence of a robust market economy, they could not make a living. Being a hired laborer, you simply couldn’t make enough money working to meet your own needs, and you frequently were at the mercy of employers who may not pay you and you’d have no legal recourse to force them to do that. Deuteronomy 24 15 warns against this evil practice saying this, you shall give the laborer his higher on the day. He earns it before the sun goes down for he is poor and sets his heart upon it, lest he cry against you to the Lord and it be sin in you. What also makes it difficult to talk about the Bible and slavery is that the word slavery is vague and refers to many kinds of social arrangements where there are varying levels of agreement on whether this is evil or not.
For example, everyone agrees it’s evil to treat a person as if he were a non-human animal and do things like kill him if that is more convenient. Everyone also agrees that abducting someone and forcing them into slavery based on something like race is evil. As seen in the Atlantic slave trade, Exodus 2116 says, whoever steals a man, whether he sells him or is found in possession of him shall be put to death. On the other hand, if you define slavery as restricting someone’s freedom to move and forcing him to work without pay, then it would be slavery to force prisoners to pick up trash on the side of the road. I explained this more in my response to Father Casey Cole on prisons linked below. It would also be slavery to force an invading army to fix a city that they destroyed. But this is something most people would not consider to be evil.
In between these two examples of clearly wrong slavery and clearly not wrong slavery like forced prison labor, you’re going to have cases where it’s not clear if the situation is wrong or it may be a necessary evil one that is tolerated in a certain social context to prevent greater evils. Genesis 47 describes how Joseph stored up food in Egypt and the surrounding people came to him in the midst of a famine saying this by us and our land for food and we with our land will be slaves to Pharaoh and give us seed that we may live and not die and that the land may not be desolate. Just a few hundred years ago, people would become indentured servants to pay for passage out of a country experiencing something like a famine and into a country where they could make a living like the United States.
This was tolerated because starvation was seen as a greater evil, but now that social context have changed, this practice is outlawed and is basically considered unjustifiable slavery. Under the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, a lot of Alex’s response gets to the issue of intrinsic evils actions, which can never be justified. Slavery is intrinsically evil based on how you define it, but if you have a broad definition related to restricting movement and compelling work without pay, then that would not be intrinsically evil. Cardinal John Henry Newman who Pope Leo IV is now elevating to the level of a doctor of the church said the following about slavery. I think slavery is in the same order of things as despotism tyrannical rule, that which is intrinsically and per se evil, we cannot give way to for an hour that which is only accidentally evil. We can meet according to what is expedient, having different rules.
According to the particular case, St. Paul would’ve got rid of despotism if he could. He could not. He left the desirable object to the slow working of Christian principles, so he would’ve got rid of slavery if he could. He did not because he could not, but had it been intrinsically evil that it be in say, a sin, he must have said to Philamon, liberate all your slaves at once. True to enslave is a horrible sin. Yet comparative good may come out of sin in this sinful world. When it comes to magisterial documents, there’s a passing reference to slavery being considered intrinsically evil in verta splendor. But other things like deportation are also called intrinsically evil. In that same passage, even though the church clearly does not prohibit all deportations, as I defend in this episode, link below just those with gravely evil intents like Soviet or Nazi deportations during World War ii, when slavery is sufficiently defined, we can agree it is a bad thing that could only be justified as a lesser of two evils in certain contexts, but it is something human beings should always work towards abolishing.
In particular, it was Christians who uniquely opposed the worldwide institution of slavery because of their unique teaching that all people are made in the image and likeness of God. Now, Alex might say, look, even if slavery is not intrinsically evil, we know it’s bad, so why didn’t God, who is all good command people to not do this bad thing? Surely you and I would command people to not do this bad thing. The answer is the same reason that God permitted divorce in the Old Testament, and Alex doesn’t want to ban factory farming today. People will say such a command is too difficult to follow and so they won’t follow it, and implementing such a law would simply create more evils rather than eliminate them. St Thomas Aquinas said this. Now, although God is all powerful and supremely good, nevertheless he allows certain evils to take place in the universe which he might prevent lest without them greater goods might be forfeited or greater evils ensue accordingly in human government also, those who are in authority rightly tolerate certain evils, les certain goods be lost or certain greater evils be incurred.
God isn’t just the ruler of his chosen people. He’s a father of his chosen people. And like any good father, God meets his children where they are at and gradually moves them towards higher moral standards. For example, the prohibiting of perpetual enslavement of Israelites in Leviticus 25 falls in line with God calling Israel to virtue even if as the people of God, they weren’t ready to universally apply this standard to nonis Israelites. This is why Jesus’s teaching about the Good Samaritan was so radical. The Israelites already followed the teaching love your neighbor found in Leviticus 1918, but their neighbors were only fellow Israelites. Jesus said the time had now come with the inbreaking of the kingdom of God to expand the laws concern to all people who were now chosen by God to be capable of receiving eternal life with him. Okay, but why did God immediately prohibit things like homosexual conduct and idolatry instead of gradually easing or regulating those particular evils?
Well, the same reason that God immediately rather than gradually prohibited bestiality, these particular acts cause grave evils and prohibiting them does not create greater evils. Homosexual conduct, bestiality and other sexually disordered acts were not the backbone of the social structure the same way slavery was in a world that lacked market economies or any kind of lines of credit. It was not difficult for Israel to follow these laws, which most people, even from the natural moral law knew were wrong. In cases where there would’ve been widespread disobedience, God made a concession like he did with divorce and remarriage until the time would come when God’s people would be called to live out God’s perfect plan for marriage. Alright, but what about idolatry? Many Israelites found that law too hard to follow. So why wasn’t God gradual in that case? The answer is because greater evils exist.
If God permits idolatry, not if God prohibits it. For example, if the Israelites worshiped other gods, then they would follow those God’s moral example and commit atrocities. Yahweh specifically forbade Deuteronomy 12 says this, do not inquire about their gods saying, how did these nations serve their gods that I also may do? Likewise, you shall not do so to the Lord your God. For every abominable thing which the Lord hates they have done for their gods, for they even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods. In fact, one of those greater evils that would ensue from allowing idolatry would be Israel adopting the morals, customs, and laws of these other cultures, including the slave laws in societies that worship foreign gods that did not treat slaves anywhere near as well as the laws of Israel. For example, other societies punished people who helped runaway slaves and rewarded those who captured runaway slaves.
But Israel’s slave laws never compel anyone to return a slave who escape from his master. In fact, Deuteronomy 23 says this, you shall not give up to his master, a slave who has escaped from his master to you. He shall dwell with you in your midst, in the place which he shall choose within one of your towns where it pleases him best. You shall not oppress him. In contrast, the code of Hammurabi prescribed the death penalty for sheltering fugitive slaves and only required a modest fine for the crime of injuring someone else’s slave. The code did not prescribe a punishment for mistreating one’s own slave, but the Bible is very different than the code of Hammurabi. In Exodus 21, it says that if a master seriously injured a slave by knocking out a tooth or an eye, he had to set his slave free. According to scholar CJ Wright, Israel was unique in how it treated slaves.
He writes this, no other ancient near Eastern law has been found that holds a master to account for the treatment of his own slaves as distinct from injury done to the slave of another master and the otherwise universal law regarding runaway slaves was that they must be sent back with severe penalties for those who failed to comply for more. On this point, TTAG team dialogue linked in the description below where I joined forces with Gavin Orland to have a very productive and civil conversation with two atheist scholars on the question of the Bible and slavery. When the issue of the Bible and slavery comes up. I think for many critics this kind of argument is hiding behind their questions. Lemme make an analogy. They might say, if the Bible taught that the earth was flat, they could not believe it’s divinely inspired because they know for a fact that the earth is round or a spheroid to be precise.
Likewise, they might say, if the Bible taught slavery could ever be permissible or tolerated, they could not believe that the Bible is divinely inspired because they know for a fact that slavery is never permissible and can never be tolerated. But how would an atheist know this moral fact is true or exists apart from the scientific method, which only tells us what is not what ought to be? It’s very difficult for atheists to ground the existence of these kinds of specific universal moral rules in a non-ad hoc way, especially given that they are as immaterial and universal as the God that they do not believe in. Alex certainly doesn’t do that because he is an emoti or a non-cognitive. When it comes to ethics. He thinks there are no universal moral truths or moral facts. For Alex, the statement Murder is wrong, doesn’t reflect a fact about the universe.
The statement Murder is wrong, just means boo. I don’t like murder. Morality becomes an expression of emotion, not an expression of truths about the universe independent of human emotions. But when most people say things like it is wrong to torture a baby for fun, they’re not saying torturing babies for fun, boo. That’s as bad as the emoji movie. They’re saying that it is a fact as sure as the fact of gravity, that it can never be justified to torture a baby for fun, even though no scientific inquiry can prove a purely accidental atheistic universe ought to be any particular way. So the revulsion that we have towards slavery is not evidence against God. It’s actually evidence for a universal moral law giver. Now, Alex might say that he’s just making an internal critique saying that Christians believe slavery is intrinsically evil even though he does not.
But the Bible permitted slavery in some cases, so they contradict themselves. But I’ve shown that since the term slavery is ambiguous, it can be defined in different ways to explain our different moral intuitions on different social arrangements. And so this harmonizes the situation and there’s no contradiction. But if Alex says that this kind of harmonization is evil in itself, well then he’s back to trying to throw an objective moral sledgehammer that his non-cognitive framework simply can’t lift. Now, as I said, I was a bit drained when I put this together very late last night, and your continued prayers for Laura’s healing, they’re greatly appreciated. The next few episodes were recorded a while ago, so I’m looking forward to those. But if I miss something in today’s episode or there’s a point I need to address further in the argument, I’ll try to do that in a more comprehensive way in a future episode, and I’m more than willing to sit down with Alex to chat about this and a whole host of other issues. He’s someone that I’ve always enjoyed having a dialogue with. In any case, thank you guys so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.