What are the biggest mistakes that would-be Catholic apologists make? Joe Heschmeyer sits down with apologist Trent Horn to talk about what NOT to do
Speaker 1:
You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer. A production of Catholic Answers.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, Catholic Answers. I’m here with my friend and colleague from Catholic Answers, Trent Horn.
Trent Horn:
Thank you.
Joe Heschmeyer:
You may know him from the Counsel of Trent podcast or his books or his speaking appearances. And my exposure to Trent was originally his work in responding first on pro-life things and then also a lot of stuff he’d done in response to atheists. Since then, I’ve seen him do a lot of stuff in terms of Catholic Protestant apologetics. But the point is, you’re someone who I think has a lot of experience doing all forms of apologetics and evangelization, and I want to talk about what we do wrong with it.
Trent Horn:
Oh, don’t worry. I have plenty of experience in that as well. You can’t do this a lot and create a platform and really affect a lot of people without learning things the hard way. And by the way, when you’re introducing me, I thought it was funny. My first exposure to Trent, this is this like the CDC.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly. If you’ve been exposed to Trent Horn, you may be liable.
Trent Horn:
You may… Right. Call this number right now. Yeah. But the more you do this and it should always be done… It’s so funny. The number one thing, the thing that you do wrong, to start off on this, is doing apologetics for the wrong reason.
Joe Heschmeyer:
What would be the wrong reason?
Trent Horn:
The wrong reason would be usually some pride related motive, even if you don’t realize it. So you’re doing it because you like winning debates. You’re doing it because you want people to like you. You are doing it just because you think you are good at this and you like doing something you are good at. Now some of those things are not necessarily bad in and of themselves. It’s not bad to debate someone on a doctrine of our faith and demonstrate it is true and they are wrong. That’s not bad in and of itself, but when it turns into something where it’s just primarily or centrally about you. For me, the reason I do apologetics is to help people come to know Jesus Christ and his church. It is always at that focus and I am an incidental actor in this and that. And I think that’s important, a focus you have to keep on.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, it makes sense. I can ask myself, am I in the Jesus Christ business or am I in the Joe Heschmeyer business? Who am I here to promote?
Trent Horn:
And it’s hard because in order to help a lot of people, you have to learn a promotion kind of game. You have to get your name out there, you have to create things that people want. So that is something that one foresees, but doesn’t necessarily intend as a good in and of itself, getting your name out there more. But it’s helpful because if it helps people and it helps… I’m always when people email me like, oh, your book helped me to come back to the church. I always try to say, I say, “Praise be to God, I’m so glad he used my book to help you to do that.” If you always turn it back to God, then I think you’ll just stay on the right path.
But to circle back to what I was saying at the beginning, doing things wrong when you want to get out there and help a lot of people and as you grow in a platform and you’re engaging others, you’re just going to learn things the hard way. The only way you can’t learn things the hard way is just if you refuse to take risks. If you always do the safest things that you can possibly imagine.
Joe Heschmeyer:
The safest of which would be just not doing it at all.
Trent Horn:
Right. And that exactly. That would be, I want to defend the faith. So all you do is you buy apologetic books, you buy what’s here in my bookcase and you read them and you learn it, and then you just never put it into practice. And so then you’ve never made a mistake, but you’ve also never helped anyone.
Joe Heschmeyer:
You miss a hundred percent of the shots you didn’t take.
Trent Horn:
That’s right. The thanks coach.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly. Michael Jordan or Michael Scott or somebody.
Trent Horn:
I think Mother Teresa said that you miss a hundred percent of the shots you never take.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. So I mean it makes sense and it’s a big red flag I think. Because why do we not want to make mistakes? Because it hurts the pride, it hurts all of those bad reasons we can do apologetics. Whereas if you just trust, well, God’s in control and can make use of this, even if I screw up. So I think it’s probably good food for discernment, good food to take to prayer of saying, well, why do I not do this more? Is this because I’m afraid? Is this because I don’t want to… What am I afraid of? What do I not want to have happen? And maybe explore that. Because it seems like that’s really big. Okay. So going the safe route is not the way to do it. What would be some other mistakes that you see people make along the way?
Trent Horn:
Oh, so many because I’ve made them. So you learn them to go through there. I guess the error of going the safe route and most errors are usually in pairs if you think about it. There’s the prudent way, the middle ground, and then there are the two extremes. So if one extreme is the safe route where you never take any risks, you never engage others. The other route that I’ve seen, the erroneous route, is not playing it safe enough or not being prudent or getting into public debates, for example, where you are hopelessly underqualified in engaging the other person. I have seen, for example, people who style themselves as Catholic apologists on YouTube for example, I’ve seen some channels where people claim I’m this Catholic apologist and I’m here, I’m going to dialogue with this world famous philosopher on atheism or this person who has a hundred debates under their belt when it comes to atheism or Protestantism and they just get knocked around like a rag doll.
Joe Heschmeyer:
This is probably not fair to even the people involved in this, but I’m reminded of the moment in Acts where the exorcist cries to just, he was like, I realized the name of Jesus is very powerful. And the demon says, “Jesus, I know you I don’t.” And it’s just like, oh wow, that can happen. You’re wielding weapons you don’t know how to use. They may be very good. They may be truth, goodness, beauty, but if you don’t know what you’re doing with them, you can actually be very underqualified in the fight.
Trent Horn:
It’s like from being [inaudible 00:06:09] of Indiana Jones, “Using powers you cannot possibly comprehend.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly.
Trent Horn:
And that’s the problem. So you always have to gauge that accurately, especially if you are going to do public debates, public dialogues. There, you should really get advice from other people and say… Starting off, it’s kind of like when you do boxing. You start in the amateur leagues, you start just with Spider Joe or just start with just the people that are around the local leagues before you end up fighting Apollo Creed. And so you should see from others how do you think these have been going and seek honest feedback.
Now you’re not going to be perfect in debates and dialogues. I certainly am not. When I go back and look at old public debates and dialogues that I’ve done, I’ll say, oh, I would’ve done that differently. I wouldn’t have said that. But if there is an overall trajectory that it is very helpful for people and you receive a lot of feedback, that debate really helped me.
Because here’s the thing, when you do a debate, by the way, this is the other thing. When you do apologetics, you especially, it depends on the kind of apologetics. Right now I’m talking a bit about someone who’s known publicly as an apologist, someone who does debates and dialogues, writes articles and books. Because you can be an apologist and you just have informal conversations with lots of people, which is ideal. Most people should be doing that. But if you’re out there and you make videos for example, or do debates or dialogues, there’s always going to be a contingent of people who say that you suck. You do a debate, there’s always going to be a contingent. Unless the other guy just vomits and has an epileptic seizure, there’s always going to be a contingent that says he destroyed you even if you did a really good job.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. I mean if you ever look at the Yelp reviews of anything, like the Mona Lisa, you’re going to find a bunch of one-star reviews and it’s just like, oh yeah, people don’t necessarily have any good taste.
Trent Horn:
Oh yeah. So, but you have to have somewhat of a thick skin. But you can’t be so thick that you’re impervious to legitimate criticism.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Absolutely.
Trent Horn:
Once again, there’s another example of the errors and apologist to make. So there’s the twin errors of having too thin skin where you take everything personally. And for me, when people make criticism, Laura will say, “They’re so mean to you. I would just turn off my accounts.” I say, “Well, if they make a criticism, they’re either incorrect and they’re dumb and that’s just their cross to bear or they’re right and so I have to change something.” And so that’s fair. And I’ve been able to adapt to criticism that’s been given. Never fun. Nobody likes being criticized. But if you can grow from it, then that’s a good thing. So the one error is having too thin of skin where you just can’t handle it. The other error is having way too thick of skin where you’re not willing to listen to any legitimate criticisms of how you are engaging others and modifying your approach and being open to the council of others. So that would be another example.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Well, so I want to maybe draw those points out cause I think there’s a few things you said that are really important I want to make sure listeners are getting. The first is that some of this is specific to the person who’s trying to go into apologetics and not just living out the whole universal call to share the faith.
Trent Horn:
So this is someone, when you talk about doing apologetics, if they’re in a public platform type situation, YouTube channel, blog, things like that. But maybe we can talk more also just about the mistakes. Well, I’ll talk about, I guess the a mistake then when you’re just doing apologetics informally with others and that is treating the engagement as I am here to win the argument.
Joe Heschmeyer:
There it is. Because I think-
Trent Horn:
That’s one of the number one errors.
Joe Heschmeyer:
… that distinction is so important.
Trent Horn:
I am here to win the argument.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Because with a YouTube debate, you might be trying to win, not the person you’re talking to, but a bunch of people watching in the count.
Trent Horn:
And that’s what I do when I do a debate is for the people in the middle who are watching that debate.
Joe Heschmeyer:
But if you’re at a dinner party or if you’re having a conversation on your couch-
Trent Horn:
Very different.
Joe Heschmeyer:
… You’d better be trying to win the person and not the argument or you’ve already lost, you’ve already missed the point of what you’re-
Trent Horn:
And that’s the Fulton Sheen quote. You can win an argument and lose a soul. But we can do both. We can win arguments and win souls. You just have to do it… And each one of us has a different manner of doing that. It doesn’t have to be identical. Your manner of engaging someone, If someone watch the two of us engaging in a conversational apologetic, it will be a different approach.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Absolutely.
Trent Horn:
Both effective, but it’s different ways.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Let’s draw out an error then and the error is just being an imitator.
Trent Horn:
Oh my goodness. There are, at Biola University, they’ve talked about this. So people getting into apologetics as a ministry is much more common in the Protestant world than in the Catholic world. There are Protestant colleges that offer master’s degrees in apologetics. There are a few Catholic schools that offer, I think Holy Apostles does offer an apologetics degree, but most schools do not. But there are Protestant schools that just focus on making you an apologist. And so a lot of them, they study William Lane Craig night and day and they call the students in these programs, Craig clones, that they begin to imitate his mannerisms.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. I mean you see that even with preachers, you can tell who is kind of a formative influence by who they’re trying to impersonate. And in the early stages, understandable, pretty forgivable. You’re trying to learn how to do it in the same way a kid trying to be an adult. It’s just copying their parents or copying the adults that they see. But at some point you got to grow out of that and just say what are-
Trent Horn:
Take your own thing.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. What are my gifts and talents? That’s my style of speech. Because as you said, the way you and I would approach the exact same issue, same conversation, the same person is going to be somewhat different. But even situationally, it’s not just that I’m different than you and it’s like the person I’m speaking to may be different in each case. So it seems like that needs to be individualized as well.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, no, I would agree. You have to treat the person as an individual and just really take it slowly with them. Ask a lot of questions and focus one step at a time. But don’t treat it as just you’re out to win debates and own people because that’s not the spirit of doing this. Apologetics is a servant to evangelism. And so it must always be kept in that framework. Evangelism is just sharing the good news of Jesus Christ. Sometimes that’s all you have to do and that’s great. But other times you have to remove intellectual roadblocks, then you have to do that first and then you can evangelize. But if it’s not geared towards the spirit of evangelism. And that would be the other problem of just learning the faith and never actually challenging people to grow being too passive, that would be the other twin error. I got to write this down. You just gave me a camo piece. The twin errors and apologetics.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Well I like the way you’re presenting it as twin errors. Because Aristotle obviously, you’ve got a vice of excess and a vice of defect. So if you say what’s a healthy amount to eat? The person who goes away overboard and the person who goes away under board are both committing errors. But the advice you’re going to give them is not going to be the same advice.
Trent Horn:
Here’s the situation with me, everybody, I have a decent long-term memory, I need one for this job. I’m glad God gave me that but at the expense of my short term, I can’t remember anything just in the immediate. I always forget to get things from the store, to take care of something at the house. The short term is just shot. So if I have an idea to do something, I have to write it down immediately or I will forget it.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I mean, for the person who’s trying to get into apologetics or writing in any kind, invaluable. Having something with you to write down whether it’s your phone or iPad.
Trent Horn:
Write it down. Your journal.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And yeah, sometimes it’s slightly socially awkward, but then the stuff you’re like, oh, I’ll remember that later. At least in my case. And it sounds like in your case as well.
Trent Horn:
I can’t. It’ll [inaudible 00:13:37]-
Joe Heschmeyer:
I remember there was something I was going to remember later.
Trent Horn:
Totally.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And that’s the worst.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, yeah, sure.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Okay, so Aristotle, when he talks about these pair vices, his advice basically is to get to know yourself. Now you already earlier highlighted one of the ways you can do that and that’s listening to people that you trust.
Trent Horn:
Right. It’s like a mirror.
Joe Heschmeyer:
What do people I trust think about my personality and style? And if I’m really quick to dismiss that then if no one besides me knows what I’m really like, maybe I just don’t know myself very well.
Trent Horn:
And that’s why it’s important to have a life of prayer, a rich spiritual life and counsel from other people in order to have that self-knowledge. It’s so important.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So I’m glad you mentioned the life of prayer because one of the vices I’ve fallen into, one of the traps I’ve fallen into, especially in the early days, was getting so into the thrill of the battle or the conquest or discovering the idea or presenting the argument that things like going to mass or going to times of prayer would be sacrificed on the altar of I’m trying to do this for you God.
Trent Horn:
You’ll fall apart. You’ll fall apart without that. And I will tell you just that the absolute saddest thing is that the people that I engage, what I would call the counter apologists. These are people who identify as apologist before non-Catholic religions or atheism or whatever. A fair number of them were either Catholic or they were even Catholic apologists themselves. Then they did what I did. But then they listened to the, I don’t want to say the dark side, well I’ll say it, the dark side. There are things the Catholic answers apologist won’t teach you about understanding exegesis.
Joe Heschmeyer:
You don’t know the story of Pelagian.
Trent Horn:
Did you hear the story of the apologist Pelagius the Wise they said he could bring any argument back from the dead, even. Episode three, everybody. So when it comes to that, that’s why. And I think one of the reasons a lot of these people fall off the wagon, it’s not just purely intellectual that they have a spiritual and emotional issue and then things get warped in their mind. And also it’s an issue of pride, I think. They think that if I can’t answer this objection, nobody can. So there is no answer so the Catholic faith is false.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. That is huge. I see this with a lot of former Catholics who left in their teenage years and they’re like, oh, I went to Catholic school for 12 years.
Trent Horn:
Oh gosh.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And it’s like, oh great, you’ve got a high school level knowledge of this field and you’re ready to just declare yourself the expert. Because you couldn’t find an answer from the one teacher you asked when you were 16. And so you became an atheist. And it’s like, well maybe.
Trent Horn:
It’d be like telling your accountant. When I hear that, “I went to Catholic school for 12 years,” it’d be like telling your accountant, “I took math classes for 12 years.” So I don’t understand why you think that you’re right about this math classes for 12 years.
Joe Heschmeyer:
How can equations be differential? They’re all the same. That’s what equation means.
Trent Horn:
If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. So I think that that is also, that’s super important to keep in mind. Absolutely.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So former professor of mine talks about how faith isn’t just an act of the intellect, but an act of the will. And so if your will is corrupted by sin or if you just have desires leading away from God and pride is in this particular context, one of the chief errors to watch out for, that can kill your faith. I had a spiritual director who gave the example of if you’re going on a road trip, you don’t skip the gas station to save time. That’s just not… If you got to cut time out somewhere else, do it. Not there. And so if you’re not getting filled up spiritually, you’ve get nothing to offer.
Trent Horn:
So let me talk then, I guess, if I could try to think of the other vice that would be related. That would be if you focus too much on intellectual development to the neglect of everything else, you’re going to fall apart. But if you don’t focus on intellectual development. So if you are spiritually fine and then you also though you’re just kind of doing the same old, same old. And this is once again, well this would be whether you are someone who engages informally in conversation with others, but especially if you’re a public apologist of a platform. You have to recognize your limits and you have to recognize where you need to grow and learn. But especially when it comes to growing in knowledge.
First it’s just the desire to grow in knowledge. And number two is recognizing the limits of your own knowledge, so you don’t speak about things you don’t actually know about. And I’ve been guilty of this, I’ve spoken, I thought I understood an issue, had to be corrected on it. That happens to everyone. I tell my kids always, it’s okay to make mistakes, it’s just not okay to refuse to learn from them. That’s what I want to drill in their heads. When you do this, you’re going to make mistakes on things. Because the problem is you can’t be an expert in everything. I mean, I’ll debate people. I mean I study a wide range of things as an apologist. And I do think the apologist of the future, we’re going to get more people who are experts in specific things. It’s very, very hard to be someone who can debate papal primacy on Monday and the fine tuning argument on Thursday. It’s very difficult to have a wide deep knowledge of a lot of different areas. I think if you feel like you can’t do that, that’s fine. A lot of people can’t do that.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, you have these-
Trent Horn:
Because you become very-
Joe Heschmeyer:
You have these specialists.
Trent Horn:
Become a specialist. Absolutely. So the problem is like I’ll go out and I’ll engage someone, I mean know the deuterocanon and I’ve debated people who’ve written a whole book on the deuterocanon. Or it’s like that’s just the one thing that they study. And so you have to recognize your limits, but you also know and you know the material, you have to cultivate a life of the mind that’s willing to read good secondary and the primary sources. I think for me, one of the most difficult things is people who… And you can tell this kind of stuff on online, I see this criticism from atheists. The difference between serious apologists and what are called pop apologists. And the pop apologists are people who only read other apologist. And that is fine if you’re just doing informal conversations with people.
Joe Heschmeyer:
If you trying to just be prepared to know the gist of a thing, whether it’s apologetics or anything or anything. If I want to find out a basic understanding of string theory and I read Brian Green or whatever, yeah. It’s like, oh good, I get a little bit of this. But if I’m going to go teach a class on string theory.
Trent Horn:
I’m sure you can’t just-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Or I’m going to debate it. It’s like I’ve got to probably read somebody who actually writes directly on it.
Trent Horn:
Or you’d have to read a primary source in historical development.
Joe Heschmeyer:
You got to read the strings themselves.
Trent Horn:
Read the strings. So that’s what I would say, especially people who want to do this as a platform and engage others, you will get a reputation as a pop apologist if you only know talking points for debates and you have not read the other side, you have not read foundational documents. And it shows when you engage others. Also, I say to be well-rounded, you have to just read not just apologetics, you have to understand science and history and literature so that you’re an interesting person when you engage others and make connections. And you’re like, “Well that sounds like a lot of hard work.” Well it is. Is why we don’t have a lot of apologies out there. We need more. But it’s important to have that well-read life of the mind so that you can be able to draw from a rich pool of resources when you engage others. Because if it’s a shallow pool, people will start to notice.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And I think that’s well said. I think that it’s important, again, to distinguish that you’re giving advice for the person who wants to be a renaissance man or a generalist.
Trent Horn:
But if you’re a specialist. Let’s say you want to be someone who says, well I just want to debate the Resurrection. Great, do it. Read everything you can on that from both sides, primary and secondary sources, and just have it down under your fingers and just grow in that area. Don’t only read apologetic books on the Resurrection. You have to read everything involved.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Partly because, I mean, a lot of books are written, including a lot of Catholic books are written to say, here’s the argument. But you have to assume the fact that some people don’t believe that argument either means everyone in the world just needs to read this book. Or more likely there are some counters that-
Trent Horn:
That were not included or addressed sufficiently.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right, yeah. And so unless you actually present that argument and see how someone else would respond to it. And here’s where I think having informal conversation is critical. If the first time you try out a Catholic argument is in a formal debate setting, I think that’s a mistake. If you haven’t at least asked your Protestant friends or your atheist friends, what would you make of this argument? What are the holes that I’m not seeing in this? Why are you not personally persuaded by this? They can oftentimes tell you why they don’t find it personally convincing. Because clearly they don’t, or else they would be Catholic. And so being able to present those things and really finding people you trust again, who can really troubleshoot and nitpick and maybe the objections are totally wrong, but don’t let the first time you hear those objections be when you’re on your feet in some kind of formal debate setting.
Trent Horn:
Absolutely.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So yeah, that makes sense. And again, I want to re-echo something you said earlier. It’s good and okay to be a specialist, like someone who does just a Resurrection or just a deuterocanon or… I knew a bioethicist who this is the field he cares about is just explaining end of life and all these actually super technical issues that I cannot speak intelligently on. It’s really great to have someone you can just point to and say, I’m never going to get in a debate on some hyperspecialized thing about different treatments for infertility because the amount of work I would have to do just to have the conversation intelligently.
Trent Horn:
But you can point people to him and he can [inaudible 00:23:28].
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly, exactly. Know the stuff you need to know and know the people to ask for the stuff you don’t need to know.
Trent Horn:
That’s right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Excellent. Well, I appreciate all of these things. So I want to explore a little deeper, some of the errors, because we kind of alluded to this before, but kind of the book level apologetics. When you go and try that out in conversation, do you find that sometimes that there’s kind of a breakdown in execution? Do you know what I mean by that? Everything looks really, you read this, you think, oh, I totally get this. I totally get the Catholic case. And then you go and try it in real life and it goes very differently. Have you experienced this?
Trent Horn:
Sure. I think people might have a failure to understand the argument or they propose a counter that you weren’t prepared for or it’s either failure in understanding so it’s not articulated properly, there’s a hole in it, or there’s some kind of an objection to it that you hadn’t thought of. Or it is just not overall persuasive or it makes a point that is kind of a trivial point. And that’s where it’s about the real engagement because I know people who, once again, proclaim themselves to be apologist, but I’ve never seen them actually engage somebody in publicly on these subjects. And I always wonder what their unique approach is. How would this work in a real conversation? Well, I don’t know because you don’t try. You also try to find new ways to explain it to people, for them to understand what it means. Well, yeah. And getting out there, you learn how to qualify things. For example, a minor argument to show Peter’s primacy in the early church is his ranking in the apostolic list.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes.
Trent Horn:
And so-
Joe Heschmeyer:
By which you mean he’s always mentioned first in the Bible. When you have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and then Acts have these lists of apostles and Peter’s first. Is this what you’re talking about?
Trent Horn:
Yes. When it is a list of all of the apostles and notice how I’ve qualified that. I didn’t say, oh, whenever the apostles are mentioned, Peter is mentioned first because that’s not the case. Because there’s parts of Acts where it describes the pillars of the church and Peter is second.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Paul does that in Galatians. He says the so-called pillars and then he says James, Cephas and John. I’m maybe switching the order up, but it was-
Trent Horn:
He puts Peter second. Although I would say that they kind of hold him up similar to how when Moses, his arms are raised in the battle, he’s in the center being held up by the other side.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right. Because it’s the imagery of pillars.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So it’s not like, I mean there is something different going on there, but notice that if you overstate the point-
Trent Horn:
If you overstate the point.
Joe Heschmeyer:
… Someone can just come back and say, here’s this counter example and you’re just wrong.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. So that’s why you have to learn. And then so you do it, you learn to qualify it to say, oh, well they were… And I’ve called out other apologies online who, sorry, other Protestant apologists who’ve tried to point out this error. And I said, yeah, you’re correct. But when it is a… I believe there are four passages in scripture that contain lists of all of the apostles.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Matthew, Mark, Luke have lists of all the 12, including Judas. Peter is always first, Judas is always last.
Trent Horn:
Judas always lasts.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Acts has one. Judas is missing for obvious reasons. And Peter’s first. And there’s even… So I want to say John MacArthur actually talks about how there’s these pairings of threes. And so Peter’s always the first of these three that are mentioned. And so there’s really fascinating that there’s a lot of diversity as to who’s going to follow Peter in what order. But Peter’s always first and you think, well why is Judas always last? It’s a place of dishonor. Why is Peter always first? You can have a conversation about that.
Trent Horn:
Right, exactly. But you haven’t overstated your case. Another example would be Luke 1:28 and the use of the Greek word kecharitomene which is a perfect partisan of the word kechar too which refers to grace or which is translated full of grace, grace-filled, favor-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Fully graced. I like that.
Trent Horn:
Or you can also say highly favored because grace is a kind of divine favor. And people will overstate their case and they’ll say, oh, kecharitomene means you have grace fullness your entire life that you are immaculately conceived. And that is just what the word means. And I would say I wouldn’t do that because the Book of Sirach in the Greek Septuagint uses the word kecharitomene to refer to a righteous man. Now it’s not used as a title like it is right in Luke, which is fascinating. And once again, that’s why I would say we have… And that’s why if you say things like This is evidence for or this points to instead of saying proof, unless you can really prove something-
Joe Heschmeyer:
This is such an important distinction I think especially as you get into here’s this subtle nuance to a Greek word and you’re not a native Greek speaker and you may have a very basic understanding.
Trent Horn:
Nobody is a native of the Greek we’re studying.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly.
Trent Horn:
Exactly. That’s the thing.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And so being just so careful with that, not to overstate. Because if you understate your case, if you say this is suggestive of, and it’s actually more than suggestive of it’s really demonstrative of a person might be like, oh, actually is this case even better than you say?
Trent Horn:
Yeah. If someone were to say that because it’s a perfect participle represents a perfection in the person. I’m like, no, no, no, no, no. That’s just the mood. That’s the tense of the verb or of the participle, I should say. Anyway, so that and can happen with Greek and with other things as you start studying a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing. And that’s also, that’s exemplified in the Dunning-Kruger effect that those who know the least about something tend to overestimate their knowledge the most.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Can I give an example of that?
Trent Horn:
Sure, yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
People misrepresenting the Dunning-Kruger effect all the time.
Trent Horn:
Oh really?
Joe Heschmeyer:
There’s some real methodological problems with it because it includes… The variables are not independent. And so there’s a fascinating thing where a lot of people very confidently present on Dunning-Kruger and are doing the exact thing Dunning-Kruger are like-
Trent Horn:
Now what’s interesting is I read an article recently that did reaffirm the core results of Dunning-Kruger.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes, there is.
Trent Horn:
I was reading that recently with there was-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Some people have overstated it, ironically doing the thing that they kind kind of warn against.
Trent Horn:
Totally. And I remember reading an article that talked about the limitations of the Dunning-Kruger effect where they were doing a study and they asked people what were their thoughts on certain issues, whether it was climate change or genetically modified foods. And asking, what is your position, how confident are you in the position? And then asking them facts about the issue. Like in genetically modified foods, does radiation cause foods to develop genes? It’s like, well, no foods already have genetic information in them. Just basic questions to show whether you actually understand the issue or not. And the people who are the most confident on a lot of the issues are most passionate oftentimes we’re more likely to misunderstand the basic facts of the issue at hand.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It makes sense and it’s fascinating. And even the people who say Dunning-Kruger is a statistical artifact. There’s still, at the very least, the most modest claim that I think everybody agrees on, is that someone’s confidence in a field is no predictor of their actual competency.
Trent Horn:
Oh yes, absolutely.
Joe Heschmeyer:
You can be just dramatically overconfident.
Trent Horn:
I mean, there can be people who are very confident and they know what they’re doing. It doesn’t always mean that you can’t have confidence.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And we don’t want to say if you’re confident you’re wrong.
Trent Horn:
No. But just that. And that’s true to remember. Just because somebody is confident, it doesn’t mean they’re right. In fact, the word conman means confidence man and someone who builds confidence in you. And usually it’s because they’re confident in themselves.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. I mean I think about the new atheist and the new atheist presented arguments really effectively. Bad arguments. But they presented them with this bombast, with this kind of wry cleverness and they kind of mocked the other side. And if you are someone who doesn’t know a lot about it, this is projecting confidence. This is projecting, I know what I’m talking about and all of that. But it’s a sham, it’s a charlatan act. I mean, when you actually look at what these people have to say about philosophy, embarrassingly ignorant because they knew one area really well, usually science, and just assumed because they were smart in one area they were smart in every area
Trent Horn:
Richard Dawkins is a testament to this that he’s a biologist. But Alvin Plantinga, one of the most famous philosophers in the philosophy of religion, if not in modern contemporary American philosophy, he teaches at Notre Dame said that, “To call Richard Dawkins’ reasoning sophomoric would be an insult to sophomores everywhere.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
That’s a great line.
Trent Horn:
He’s a funny guy.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. I mean Dawkins absolutely is guilty of this. I would say Sam Harris is very guilty of this. At one point he argues-
Trent Horn:
He’s not a philosopher, he is a neuroscientist.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Who dabbles in this stuff, but dabbles in it in the way that the hippie on the corner dabbles in it.
Trent Horn:
His book on moral philosophy was widely panned among professional philosophers.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Because he argues you can do philosophy without needing morality. And so he defines his terms-
Trent Horn:
Well he, sorry. He says, “You can prove moral truths using science.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
Thank you. That’s what I meant to… yes.
Trent Horn:
So when in the moral landscape, Harris basically tries to say, well, you don’t need philosophy in order to demonstrate moral truths. It’s a scientific matter. And he only does that by simply taking that morality is about the good and he redefines the good to be promoting the wellbeing of conscious creatures. And so he just redefines it. What he tries to do in the moral landscape is to say, well look, he basically turns morality into medicine as well.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And he turns it into utilitarianism.
Trent Horn:
He does. Because he’ll say, we don’t need philosophy to do medicine, which also isn’t true because we have ethics, ethical questions in medicine.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Should you do testing on prisoners?
Trent Horn:
Right, exactly. Should you record results from giving placebos to people. There’s all kinds of ethics questions that arise in medicine, we have entire ethicists dedicated to this. So he tries to just basically say, well, science can do medicine. Why can’t it do morality? Science can make us improve our wellbeing with medicine. Why can’t it improve our wellbeing of morality? And then people have ripped him apart. But the point is, he goes out there and he is all cool, Hey Ben Stiller, how’s it going? And he comes off as this cool guy and is confident and is so he can speak about a lot of these things. But then he comes off, then you can see someone actually knows the field.
And I remember there was this open panel about morality and it was with professional philosophers. One of them was Peter Singer actually. And Singer went after Harris. Because Harris said, “No, you don’t need all this philosophy, Peter, to understand morality. It’s just basic questions. We don’t want a world with maximal suffering or if we can help someone to live longer and be healthy, should we do that? If somebody just wants to die for no reason.” He was just going off and off and Singer said, “Well, Sam, hold on a minute. Choosing to live perpetually forever in good health. Maybe some people would not want a life like that. That might actually be a very torturous existence to have immortality.” And Harris said, “Someone who thinks like that, they just don’t get invited to the conference next year.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
See that kind of glib-
Trent Horn:
It was so dismissive. Whereas Singer actually, and I disagree, obviously with Peter Singer on a ton of stuff like abortion and infanticide.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Mean, he is a utilitarian. I’m not a utilitarian. But he actually knows what utilitarian is.
Trent Horn:
But at least Singer knows the high costs of utilitarianism and Harris doesn’t get that.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. Very well said. So someone, I remember reading a piece years ago, I think probably in First Things saying Peter Singer treats his mother very well. She was old, I think she had Alzheimers. And he took good care of her, even though his own philosophy taken very literally would say-
Trent Horn:
Those resources should have been given to animals or to starving children.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And so he doesn’t live by his philosophy, he lives better than it. But even then he knows, he’s not blind to that objection. He’s not blind to the fact that when he takes care of someone he loves, that someone could say, by your own philosophy, shouldn’t. Sam Harris is just blind to it in saying, well, isn’t it better that people are helped than hurt by just avoiding every hard question and just saying, well, if you don’t want to do utilitarianism, you don’t want to do philosophy or morality.
Trent Horn:
But Catholics do the same thing. Catholics do the same thing.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes. That’s where I wanted to transition so please go there.
Trent Horn:
Where you offer these very glib answers and you don’t understand the issues involved. And I’ll give you one recently that’s been coming up a lot, is Catholics will engage Protestants and their only argument will be, well, look, Catholicism is historical and they quote Newman to be deep in histories this cease to be Protestant. And that’s all they do. They just say that. And they actually haven’t examined the historical arguments because a well-read Protestant could try to say, but the early church is different than what Catholics teach now and point out the differences. And that’s true.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Or at least there’s people in the early church fighting over what faithful Christian to look like.
Trent Horn:
Exactly. And so that’s why definitely I always recommend people, your book, The Early Church was the Catholic Church, because you understand that how doctrine develops over time. But we still have that historical core that the church holds to today. So you can make the argument, and I think it’s still a good argument, one reason to be Catholic is of this historical evidence, but to not be just glib about it.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. The that’s very well said that you have to at least know.
Trent Horn:
The controversy.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It’s not quite that simple. Or to give another example that I see is just like, well, Protestants, they don’t have unanimity about these doctrines. And you’re just like, well, look around the church, look around the Catholic… If your selling point is just Catholics agree on everything, it’s going to take about 30 seconds to meet two Catholics.
Trent Horn:
Especially if you phrase it that generically. Because I do believe, once again with these arguments with the historical argument, it’s absolutely a great argument. You just have to fine tune how you present it. And it’s the same with the unanimity argument. What I would say is not of course that Protestants don’t agree on anything and Catholics agree on everything. Rather it’s that Catholics have a mechanism where we can identify what are the core essential teachings of our faith. And even people who dissent from it will admit, the church teaches X and I don’t agree. Whereas among Protestantism, they won’t say, well, the Bible teaches X and I disagree. They’ll just say, no, the Bible teaches what I believe. And they’ll do it on essential doctrines related to salvation, to the nature of the Bible. And so what I would say, and cause I’ve engaged others, I don’t believe that Protestants really do have… Any unity they have on essential things, I think comes more from tradition than just from what the Bible explicitly says.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Or from a kind of no true Scotsman, that anyone who disagrees on that is not invited to the conference.
Trent Horn:
Or they’re not Protestant, that that’s where I’ve engaged people before.
Joe Heschmeyer:
They don’t go to the conference next year. And so you don’t have to worry about those other Christians.
Trent Horn:
What about evangelicals who have all these beliefs? And I’ve had Protestants who are more like Anglican or Lutheran, say, oh, those aren’t really Protestants, they’re not heirs of the Reformation. I’m like, well, they’re using the same principles guys.
Joe Heschmeyer:
If you were to ask an ordinary American, at least, what is a Protestant belief, they’re going to think about an evangelical probably, at least in my part of the country. I mean, that’s going to be different wherever you are.
Trent Horn:
But in the US, evangelicals outnumber mainline two to one.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And so if you just say, oh, they don’t count.It’s such an enormous case of special pleading.
Trent Horn:
So I would agree. You recognize that there are differences in a lot of Catholic thought, but we all recognize what are the core essential truths. And there’s a lot more of them than even what Protestants. Protestants could only really rally behind the Trinity. Well, some identify as Protestants who don’t believe the Trinity, the canon of scripture. Which there is something, basically we all agree on 66 books. There’s the one thing you do agree on that’s not in the Bible itself.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And even you’ll find even dissenters on the Lutheran side in one direction, on the Anglican side in another direction. Like Lutherans who say not all of these books can be used for proving doctrine because there’s these four books of a lesser status in the New Testament.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, the Antilegomena. That’s what it’s called.
Joe Heschmeyer:
The spoken against books. Or you’ll find Anglicans who accept the deuterocanon to some extent. So yeah, it’s even like you said, even the places where there seems to be unanimity, you can usually find people who call themselves Protestant who don’t accept those.
Trent Horn:
That’s why it’s hard. The only thing I find in common Protestants is that they claim to be Christian and claim to not be Catholic. And then after that, but anyways.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. Yeah, no. I think that’s well said. But all that’s to say that we can easily fall into these kind of glib arguments. We see it with atheist, we see it with Protestants. We also need to see it with ourselves that we can have these like, oh, this is a simple silver bullet. And what it really is a punchy, glib kind of one-liner. It’s like not nuanced enough, doesn’t kind of take seriously the potential objections. Any final errors that you see that you think we need to be on the lookout for?
Trent Horn:
No, I think that we’ve covered a lot of them. I’m sure there are others out there. But I think really the key error, well, the key error is to see apologetics as a good in and of itself versus its service and the cause of evangelism. And so if you always keep that perspective, it allows you to be humble, to make your tools better, to make yourself better, to focus on what’s really important. I think it’s funny, the twin errors, I guess the classic one though is being overly belligerent and triumphalist to put people off. And then there’s other people-
Joe Heschmeyer:
How dare you.
Trent Horn:
And then there’s other people who will say that apologetics itself is bad, that we should just focus on ecumenism and that it’s off putting to people. And I would say, well, no, it itself cannot be off-putting. The apostles themselves practiced apologetics. It said Paul disputed with people in the synagogue. Apollos to the Book of Acts disputed people, they could not withstand the strength of his words.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I was revisiting a 10 year old conversation recently. It was between Layla Briscoe who had just become Catholic and Ed Faser and Layla Briscoe had interviewed her and she had been critical of Ed Faser’s tone in some of this stuff attacking Atheist for being too snarky. And it was a very good, very charitable conversation between the two of them. And which Faser basically said like, look, I’m not trying to write towards well-meaning intellectually serious atheist like you were. I’m trying to write to people who are basically smug and using this kind of bravado to break… I mean, I’m heavily paraphrasing. But his argument is like he’s trying to reach them-
Trent Horn:
Through their own mechanisms.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes.
Trent Horn:
And you’re right, there is-
Joe Heschmeyer:
He’s so careful with that. But there is a place for it.
Trent Horn:
There’s a bandwidth here. There’s like a gradient to go between very, very nice and a bit cheeky and people can pull it off and you have to be careful on each spectrum. Because for example, I mean it’s so interesting. If it is really cheeky or snarky, I mean that can reach some people, but I find it’s more of a danger. I don’t want to give it to others. So even with Faser’s books. I’m way more likely to give someone Five Proofs to the Existence of God than the Last Superstition.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Last Superstition. You’re right.
Trent Horn:
Because the Last Superstition is an incredibly snarky book. And I would almost only give it to Catholics just to help them grow in their knowledge, but tell them, just calm down a bit. Whereas Five Proofs to the Existence of God by Faser is just very thorough. It gets to the point and he still gets his jabs in. And that’s fine and good in some cases. Because you can be too weak, weak willed or wilting daisy or what have you. So you’re right, it’s finding a balance between those two things I think is helpful.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Well said. I think the theme of this interview, and probably everyone has picked up on it, is know where you are on that spectrum. If there’s a virtuous mean, which way do I tend. And is that a gift I’ve been given by God or is that something that’s prone to an excess and how do I curb that excess? Because probably it’s both. Probably there’s like if you’ve got a really clever wry sense of humor, great. Watch out with that. Or if you’ve got a very ironic, peaceful personality, great. But don’t let that keep you from having the hard conversations when you need to.
Trent Horn:
To actually challenge people. Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, exactly. So know yourself, know whether you err towards excess or defect. And then Aristotle gives the example of a stick in the water bending it. It’s a super weird example. I would just say your car’s alignment, if it leans left, apply a little pressure to take it right.
Trent Horn:
You can bend the stick when you realize there is no stick.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Wow. This is on matrix. I think that’s a great place to wrap the conversation.
Trent Horn:
Absolutely.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Trent, thank you so much for coming home.
Trent Horn:
Oh, it’s fun to be here. Thanks for having me.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And where can people find you?
Trent Horn:
I’d recommend the Counsel of Trent podcast, so you can find that on YouTube, iTunes, Google Play Counsel of Trent, C-O-U-N-S-E-L, of course. And you can support my podcast at trenthornpodcast.com.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Thanks a lot. God bless you.
Trent Horn:
Thank you.
Speaker 1:
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