What happens when we seek God but can't find Him? with Alex O'Connor and Fr. Pine

hey this is Cameron o'hern with mass of the ages and today I'm bringing you an incredible discussion I traveled in time I already heard the discussion and it was incredible and I can't wait to bring it to you between Alex o'conor and father Gregory Pine they talk about hell they talk about the hiddenness of God the fall of Adam and Eve and it leaves us with a lot of um compelling questions and insightful answers so I hope you enjoy it well hello my name is Father Gregory Pine father GRE Pine Alex pleasure to meet you

nice to meet you I didn't know if that was a uh behold or if that was an extending handshake perhaps it's both it can function as both anyway I suppose it depends on how they edit it uh so this is the first time we've met yeah and I must confess to not knowing all that much about you usually if I know I'm going to be having a conversation with somebody I'll spend a few days looking at their work and listening to some of their prior materials but we are in Washington DC so I've just been

sort of gallivanting around the capital and the the Lincoln Memorial like a like a real tourist so um I'm excited to get to know you on camera yeah so same I think I can say something similar in so far as I think I saw um a thumbnail of a debate that you had with Bishop Baron ah and then uh as is the case in the YouTube react to things cottage industry I think I saw subsequent thumbnails of people who are reacting to the debate or unpacking the debate and then yeah SE seen things come up

uh since then were you on pints did you go on a debate on pints yeah yes once actually uh with Trent horn oh nice okay Trent and I had a debate about I think it was just God's existence and it was essentially the principle of sufficient reason and the problem of evil being sort of thrown at each other and um trying to meet in the middle somewhere uh I I I did do that okay do do you typically find debate fruitful depends on what you mean um I think that a lot of the time debate

amounts essentially to theater and that's fine if that's what you're doing there's nothing wrong with a bit of entertainment but a lot of the time that is what it is uh depends on the person that you're speaking to um other times it can be a bit more serious but I don't find that it's fruitful in the sense of I mean everybody knows you're not going to convince the person who you're speaking to although I did think that if I were to ever convert to Christianity for instance something big like that I think the way that

I'd reveal it is by agreeing to a debate and then getting up to the podium for my opening statement and going you know what yeah fair enough I think you're right it's it's ludicrous to think that might happen but generally people say you're doing it for the audience even in that case I think what debates can provide is something like a useful Showcase of arguments it's sort of a summary of of a position they get to consider arguments they might not have heard before and they go home with something to think about and that's what

they're for and in that regard they're incredibly successful I wouldn't be thinking about this stuff if I hadn't stumbled across the new atheist debates of of the sort of mid naughties uh I I wouldn't be here doing this so they have that effect I think but I don't know what do you think I don't know um I I sincerely don't know because I've only done a couple of them or a few of them I suppose um one of which was fruitful it was with a Catholic it was concerning the morality of lying and I found

that the preparation for it was fruitful for me um susing out the arguments with somebody who had chops was also fruitful for me and I I hope fruitful for the audience too but I just don't have access to them in so far as you just you just don't know I uh typically don't read comments because I'm too fragile um and then I had two debates with atheists uh or agnostics and um I wouldn't say that I'm especially gifted um at the kind of like analytic philosophical tradition or following the argumentation as it's laid out by

many practitioners thereof and so I I like feel this kind of keen sense of drift um like I don't know what the existential Stakes are um and as a result of which I feel myself kind of like growing weary um because it seems like a formal exercise and maybe that's maybe that's intellectual laziness or it could be a kind of I I don't know it could be something else but I yeah I'm I'm just trying to figure out if I if I'm in for it yeah um I don't know I mean I also don't know

how much exposure you had to the more famous debates like the sort of the new atheist stuff the the Dawkins and Craig the uh or the the Hitchens and Craig the Dawkins and Lennox these kind of things I don't know if you've spent much time watching these and what you make of them um they're they're interesting and they're entertaining and they do get people thinking about it but it's um it's hard to say whether they're whether they're effective or not I do know at any rate that conversational format the conversational format generally speaking is Superior

in that regard which hopefully we will allow that to form our discussion today but we'll see we'll see how it goes um we we've been brought together um I should say uh people listening might not know my name is Alex OK Conor I'm a YouTuber I host a podcast called within reason um that's about it uh and we were sort of asked to sit down today to talk about Divine hiddenness and I think the reason for that is that somewhat recently I've been making a bit of a song and dance about it it's in my

View kind of a version of the problem of evil um if God then why bad stuff uh but it's a very particular kind of bad stuff and something that I think is perhaps one of the principal emotional reasons for people not believing in God I I think there's a syllogistic argument that you can make out of it too as is most famously been done by JL shellenberg but just on an experiential level if you ask somebody why they don't believe in God if they thought about the arguments quite a lot they might still tell you

that it's got something to do with evil and maybe something to do with hiddenness and if you ask somebody who has absolutely no interaction with the arguments and the debates then they might tell you that it's got something to do with evil and something to do with hiddenness and so I think it's worth addressing in other words yeah no I think in approaching the problem um I'm convinced on the one hand that if so like basic commitment um sacred scripture is inspired uh one line that is pertinent to the conversation from sacred scripture is 1

Timothy 2:4 God desires that all be saved and come to knowledge of the truth so it seems like a a a basic Christian commitment is the availability of the Gospel the availability of a relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ to all and it's not something that's merely for the wise or the smart or the advanced or the proficient it's for everybody um and not by way of patronization or condescension as a kind of I don't know intellectual Way by which to Pat people on the head and say like you can do it too but in

a robust sense it has to be and with that being so then you have to be able to account for a variety of factors or a variety of proofs so-called um and what I mean by that is that it's something that can be mediated um you know personally uh familiarly that's a difficult adverb to say um socially politically like it's something that that should be Shot Through The Human Experience and that it ought to register at different points because it ought to be a kind of encompassing Vision rather than something laid up in the heavens

or squired away in a corner that only the very um what disciplined or only the very Advanced can access and so yeah I mean just at at that kind of basic level or from that Vantage there's a real appeal to the to the argument in so far as like it takes it takes existential of me uh because it's not at least not my experience of the 21st century um not discounting my experience of the 20th century it just wasn't that long uh I I I can see how people would have difficulty with that in so

far as all of those intermediate institutions aren't especially forthcoming with the knowledge of God well perhaps it would be useful to spell this out a little bit like what are we really talking about here as you say uh scripture seems to be there seems to sort of be sprinklings of indications that if there is a God who loves us and wants to come to know us and has the power to do essentially anything that he wants to there's a big question mark over the fact that he seems not only to not reveal himself to everybody

who wants to find him but also there seems to be a problem in the statistical uh arrangement of this belief that is if you're born uh in certain parts of the the world you're considerably more likely to be at least a noral Christian than if you were born somewhere else and I think this deserves explaining too uh an example that I'd given in a debate with Jonathan mcache where I pressed the point of divine hiddenness was I think comes from Steven maton um who points out that Thailand is 90s something per Buddhist and therefore 90

something per atheistic you look at the population of Rwanda and you know the opposite will be true you'll have a a majority theistic population and the question is how do we explain this is it the case that the ti are just statistically just by their nature somehow more resistant to the word of God seems unlikely to me and if so i' there'd still be a question as to why they are they sort of are of such a constitution that that makes them that way um okay so explanation two might be that uh God has some

reason to hide himself disproportionately more from the tie than from somebody living in Massachusetts again I that seems bizarre to me it's not logically impossible but I don't think that's a an explanation that anybody would really take seriously um a third option is of course that religion is a man-made social sociological phenomenon uh and therefore we would expect to find that the beliefs essentially reflect the geography and sociology of the people who believe them that to me seems to be the best explanation of that geographical spread when you when you account for the fact that

we're talking about when you need to account for the fact that we're talking about a God who seems to have a proactive desire to bring people to come to know him I think the problem compounds okay um yeah I suppose primacia there are a couple of considerations that crop up you know on my radar one of which is uh the power of God and then the attendant quote unquote responsibility of God um and the related doctrine of creation and how that factors in and then another would be the related doctrine of agency both agency of

God and then the agency of creatures which would be like a participated or limited expression of agency um so maybe just to talk about the first I think that in some of these conversations um I'm made nervous by description of God such that he becomes a kind of optimizing maximizing machine uh because I think it's um it's a risk to import that type of logic in a way or like to map that logic onto Divine agency I'm not saying that you're doing this but I'm just saying I I often hear it lurking in in the

background or in the shadows um because there are some Christians who have made arguments to the effect that God brings about the best possible World taking into account all the pertinent material circumstances you might Lodge a Buddhist objection and say isn't it God's responsibility to limit suffering well in so far as there's a material world it seems like you know one is going to build itself up by the diminishment of another um like law of conservation of matter just played out at different at different levels of of the created World um but in so far

as you're committed to a hierarchically or like a whatever a stratified expression of of creation then it seems like you're going to admit for the possibility of matter you're going to ad admit for the possibility of at least physical evil and then animal suffering that's a whole another question but um that that in that setting like a lot of people want to say that all the pertinent factors being taken taken into account because God is the supercomputer beyond all supercomputers that would you have is the best possible Arrangement but that that that's not a traditional

Christian commitment and like St Thomas will say for instance this is prima pars question 25 article 6 he says no like sacred scripture just says no so God is motivated by his glory in the sense that God chooses on account of his own goodness and then what we see in creation are various limited expressions or kind of constrained expressions of his goodness so God and knowing himself knows all of the ways in which his Divine Life can be participated by creatures he Weds his will to some of those things and he Wills that they be

and that they act in accord with their nature and you know we can imagine a universe better than the present one like I have a bad Casio watch I was telling you that I lived in Switzerland for the past three years so this is my Swiss watch but I got it on analdi so I suppose it probably came from somewhere else H but it continues to reset itself like every 3 days which is frustrating uh because I'm continually resetting it while walking down the stairwell thus endangering my footing um so like a watch that didn't

that would be part of a a better world and thus more approximate to a best possible so maybe yeah I don't know that's that's kind of I don't know if it's so much as of an an allergy as it is of like a sensitivity but I don't know what you think about that well I'm suspicious of the idea of a best possible World especially when talking about one with Divine authorship because it seems as though there's no intrinsic maximum here there's always something that can be somehow improved even if it's just the presence of more

Goods you can just create a whole other planet Earth somewhere in the universe that's Untouchable by the other they'll never interact with each other and you can keep doing this you can keep making the universe bigger uh there will always be if that's the case a better possible world and so there is no such thing as the best possible world and so to complain that we're not in the best possible world is I think a mistake uh because how could we be if there is no such thing that does leave us with a sort of

strange image of God almost arbitrarily picking some where in the middle of I mean there's not even a middle we're talking about a sort of potentially infinite increase in in Goods um and so just sort of arbitrarily picking a stopping point and saying you know that'll that'll do it doesn't seem to me what's going on um maybe this talk of possible worlds is the wrong way to think about it all together but the problem remains that God in the Christian understanding is a personal God whose aim and reason for creating the universe is to allow

human beings some would say coers human beings into a relationship with him if that's the goal if that's the desire then it seems strange to me that some people are given an easy ride in this respect they either get uh some form of religious experience perhaps they receive a prophecy perhaps they even get to meet the Risen Christ himself but not me not my friends not people that I know probably not yourself I I don't know you may have had a religious experience in your life but I'm not sure that you've met Jesus and you

know the way in which I mean that um in which case there seems to be a sort of crude element of favoritism going on if not favoritism than experiences granted to others that if if granted to me would allow me to be in a position or compel me to be in a position to inherit eternal life that I'm not receiving through no fault of my own and yet this could be the deciding factor as to my eternal fate this seems unfair for a start and that's one of the atheist's main gripes um is unfairness this

seems unfair it's unfair that people suffer it's unfair that religious belief is scattered in in predictable ways and I'm not among the the favored the elect um this is I think probably the principal emotion behind the power of this argument and why people so often refer to it is that it seems unfair and if you know if if God is anything seems he must be fair um I mean I don't know if you'd agree with that I imagine that you would agree that God would be fair but that I think puts you in a position

of having to defend the fairness or having to believe that there is in principle a defense of the fairness of the kind of distribution that I've described um yeah I don't know if I would say that God is fair um in so far as you know our Paradigm for fairness is based on a human expression of Justice yeah and in Justice You're rendering to another what is his do but you're doing so according to a standard of equality uh which equality can't really be grounded in our relationship to God and that doesn't mean to say

that he floats free of all morality it's just that he is subsisting you know morality in a certain sense and so far as I would say that there's a nonparallelism between God's relationship to us and our relationship to God and I think that's that's part of yeah there are a lot of interrelated things that I'm going to get too excited about and talk too fast about deep breath um so with respect to the doctrine of creation um I think that one the relation of creation and then the you know as it were goal of creation

and here I'm relying on Revelation I'm not smart enough to figure this out so um that it's a kind of dependence of all things upon God and that's the heart of the matter that everything that is is by God's gift and so this note of gratuiti enters at the outset so that none of us are do anything because it could have been otherwise and it could not have been and as a result of which what we have what we have come to possess in time is God's gift but that it's earmarked for Glory or that

it's earmarked for a return to God and I think part of the complexity and subtlety of the divine plan is regardless of the gifts that are apportioned in the natural order that there are further gifts in store in the Supernatural order which are not directly correlated with those of the natural order so like for instance in St Tesa lizu you know who lived in the late 19th century she dies of tuberculosis at the age of 24 but she has these wild insights into the Divine Mercy or these wild insights into the Divine condescension which in

a certain sense like catapulter beyond the limitations of body and soul uh while still retaining a kind of organic connection with her personality and with her history and so I think that God is he's bringing about a certain differentiation in creation because he's not motivated by Bland equality because in a certain sense and I don't pretend to know the mind of God but in a certain sense he says to himself um in the differentiation of creation my Divine Life which is yeah ineffable uh the depths of which are unsound stands a better chance at captivating

or capturing the attention of creatures because on account of the fact that I am infinite you know a kind of Wellspring of divine abundance no one created thing can express that sufficiently and so he expends himself in creation saying it differently with the intent that both in its being and acting and in the ultimate orientation of its being and acting to God that you see both in the creature and in the ecosy stematic harmony of the creatures taken as a taken as a whole or taken as a universe right something more that that God as

it were hides both in the things and then in their relations as a way by which to afford us further opportunities for no but I've been talking too long well um I want to understand the relevance of this to the experience of saying look I'm somebody who maybe I used to be a new atheist saying that God is some Celestial dictator and maybe he is a Celestial dictator but I think maybe the celestial part sort of undermines the Badness of the dictator part who knows um but you know you shake that off and you say

okay look religion isn't all evil um heaven isn't some kind of North Korea it's actually quite pleasurable founding experience um if there are such thing as sort of moral truths then I want to apprehend and follow them and I want to worship that that which deserves to be worshiped and I want to see my family friends again the whole works I'm just not convinced I just don't think it's true I've listened to AR arents and maybe I've had an irrational response to them but I've tried my best and you know if I'm limited only by

my cognitive capacity then I can hardly be blamed for that maybe I should have tried harder in school but that seems like a quite loose basis on which to balance my soul um for eternity and I think that in itself would be something of a problem of evil one of the many problems of evil um okay so here's the situation that I'm in and this is the situation that many people are in and it may not be the casee that I'm truly seeking properly it may be that I'm what shellberg has called a resistant non-believer

that is your your person who sort of has some kind of proactive defensiveness and this is certainly true of many people but so long as there is a single example doesn't have to be me of somebody who sincerely seeks but doesn't find an answer then what I'm looking for I suppose is either an explanation for that an explanation for that experience some kind of second order explanation which makes that not a problem to worry about or itself what I'm doing wrong so as not to experience that that a question that I often ask is what

you would do if you woke up tomorrow sort of in my mind as it were you just found yourself convinced that the arguments don't run anymore in the way that you're sort of you've heard about conspiracy theories that the moon landing was fake but you just sort of you you intuitively think it's ridiculous and even if you start to look into them a bit you think no there's no way these are true and if somehow The Eternity of your soul was balanced upon was predicated upon you accepting that the moon landing didn't occur and I'm

not trying to say that the arguments for God are of the same caliber but by analogy something that look arguments do exist and they're discussed at nauseum on the internet but when you listen to them you don't get to choose not to be convinced by them you're just not if that's the case I I ask if you found yourself in that situation what would you change what is it in other words that that I might be doing wrong yeah I I suspect I probably agree with you on um the paper thin quality of human evoltion

I think that um in past Generations human evoltion has been described as something Herculean or colossal and I just don't think that's really that's really tenable I think more often it's a matter of we're dealt to hand and then we're asked to play the hand the rules of the game are somewhat simple um not overly complex but that we can choose to play the hand even if it seems like a losing hand we can play it with a kind of what Whimsy or Panache and I think that that's largely what what Freedom amounts to um

so I'm not saying that everyone has opinions which they find to be perfectly malleable or uh revisable like for instance um there's just the fact of human investment you know think of like a Protestant pastor who is thinking about becoming Catholic that's his livelihood you know and you might say perhaps it's better not to involve oneself like by way of livelihood in a thing that you might decouple yourself from in subsequent you know months or years but that's just that's not Humane you know we all do that we all hitch our wagon to whatever it

is um so I think that yeah one thing I would say is this with respect to our rank in creation and then with respect to differentiation amongst human beings I would say that we're called to live this life so not the life of rocks or of plants or of animals or of angels but of men and so like when St Thomas for instance describes the movement proper to each you know Echelon or rank he'll say God you know makes no movements and so far as movement for him you know is an expression of coming to

be he says Angels they come to their end by one movement whereas men come to their end by many movements so I think that there can be a kind of tendency to falsify our Human Experience by focusing on on certain moments of it or even like tranches of it when truth be told it's over the course right it's discursive it's dionic and I think that we have two modes in which we operate the living of our lives and then the interpreting of Our Lives some people might want to break that into further Mode still but

I think that we learn to live our lives well and we also learn to interpret our lives well and as time passes you know provided we're doing so sincerely I would add in Christian context by the grace of God we get better at interpreting our lives so like for instance if you would ask me 2010 like why did you become a Dominican frier I would have told you like a hurrah story um it would have sounded like like an Army Recruitment story and you'd be like that's precious um 13 years in you know like I'm

not utterly ground down but I have had to suffer more for it and as a result of which the story that I'm going to tell you is different and that doesn't mean that the story that I told you 13 years ago was necessarily false it was nor was it just holy perspectival it's like I can't relate to myself back then no there's there's continuity there's narrative continuity but I would say that it's it's deeper it's subtler and I've picked out certain Hues on the pallet which I didn't perceive earlier um in part because of the

way that life Seasons your experience or kind of draws out the flavor of your experience and so I think too like for you now that that's probably I mean like I don't want to make it too terribly personal because then it just becomes somewhat inextricable you know um but but but I also think that like patience not just in the mirror you know the virtue that is commended To Us by our school room nannies uh but patience in the sense of you know like Pottery like to suffer life well not to be dramatic about it

but like a lot of life is endurance same time as aquinus when he talks about the virtue of Courage he says there are two principal parts the attack Dimension and the endure Dimension he says the endure Dimension is the principal part because life is hard in effect and because we need to Bear up and he he breaks it out into two further pieces which are patience and perseverance patience which Bears up under sadness which I would say is one of the principal obstacles of living in the 21st century and then perseverance which sees it through

to the end um so I think that there's something to the time bound nature of our lives and God his Revelation interfacing with the time bound nature of Our Lives which forces us to kind of undergo it or to you know like recognize and receive it with a certain patience okay in the context of what I'm talking about that is the evil if God does exist seemingly or the the sort of ostensible apparent evil of people being withheld from communion with him yeah in the context of speaking about that seeing taking a more holistic approach

to a person's life might be helpful but there are still I I think quite jarring problems with this for example I presume you believe in libertarian Free Will I what the thing that I hold for anti-d dates like the the distinctions in which we currently traffic so human beings get to uh get to choose stuff yeah and so perhaps it's the case that I'm on some kind of grand theological Journey that is that maybe when I turn 45 I'm going to see my sort of waterfall split into three streams and fall to my knees and

accept Christ um problematically you know um the Cameron said over there has libertarian free will he could choose to stand up and stab me in the throat and kill me now yeah I would die I would come before God and I would fall short and I wouldn't have accepted the sacrifice of Jesus if I am being used in some kind of I should say use if I'm if I'm part of some kind of grand theological journey is the way I worded it Um this can be cut short by another human being's actions and presumably therefore

you know also cut off The Road to Redemption now some people have suggested to me when I pointed this out that well okay because people sometimes say to me that it's a good job I'm an atheist because when I finally convert to Christianity I'll provide such a great story for people to look to I would be some kind of road to Damascus esque uh you know narrow that people can refer to fine firstly I feel like I'm being sort of used as a bit of a porn um but secondly if that is the case this

can be cut short by another human being yeah and sometimes people then say to me well if that were to happen God would know what you would have done they take a sort of mist view or something they say well look you know of course if you die now you're you're not making it to heaven but God knows that if you would have stayed alive that's what you would have done and so you get to heaven on that account if that's the case then I don't see the point in this veil of Tears alog together

because because there's no point in running the running the exam if God already knows what everybody's going to get if you know what I mean so I'm not sure if what you were saying was a direct response to my point that people live with the essentially this the suffering of this privation of communion with God even looking at it as a as a journey even if I look at it as something that could potentially develop over time this is something that can be trivially cut thought by another human being's actions all of this put together

just ascribes an arbitrariness and triviality to the conditions under which my Eternal Soul either receives this unimaginably pleasurable communion with goodness itself or whatever your sort of doctrine of the afterlife for those who are not so lucky is I don't know what it is um I don't know if you're an annihilationist even that compared to the infinite goodness of communion with God is you know uh a sort of infinitely bad outcome these problems like people have Syed them they've they've sort of been a bit analytical about it they've done premise premise conclusion but can you

feel the arbitrariness the triviality of of what I'm talking about here yeah and so it if I were you in a situation of thinking okay there are lots of people on planet Earth who are seeking very very desperately and they're not finding God but you know I'm I'm I've I've got a relationship with him I'd say lucky me and you probably do say lucky me but lucky you is unlucky me if you know what I mean and that's something that I think needs to be accounted for yeah yeah no I think um so like a

couple of speculative back stops and then maybe some more practical or existential um things to advance I suppose uh so the one would be that this Vision the hierarchical nature of creation or the differentiated nature of creation and also differentiation within the ranks like our human rank it pertains to the wisdom of God as to see it through so like taking an example you know from revelation we believe Catholics believe in a doct of predilection um namely that God loves everyone the same but that he loves some people in a certain sense more than others

in so far as he Accords them greater Goods so Prima parus question 20 article 3 it's scandalous but it's also somewhat beautiful seen from a particular angle in so far as the point of the differentiation of the goods accorded to those who occupy the rank of human um is for like an organic end in so far as he describes it in the context of the mystical Body of Christ so it's not like um it's not so much better and worse as it is like heart and lungs now mind you you're going to look at the

thing and you're going to see the person who was born blind and club-footed and you know with all sorts of sufferings and you're going to say I'm sorry you know heart and lungs this is decidedly better and worse and yet and this is where I think that you know a defense sometimes works better than a like like a straight The Odyssey and so far as you can tell a story of that person 's life not in every case obviously but in some cases whereby God will use even that not in the sense that God visited

this thing because we have sufficient material conditions whereby to account for the fact that nature fails you know it obtains always for the most part and the god entrusting creation to a certain kind of set of conditions as it were admits for this possibility but in light of a glory that lies in store without chewing up and spitting out those who are involved in it as if they were mere pawns um so like on the one hand you've got this doctrine of predilection so differentiation in the goods given but then on the other hand you

have it in a personalistic hole the idea that it's for the other so like the Blessed Virgin Mary for instance I believe that God loves her most of those who are not God um and I don't begrudge her that in part because it's glorious and it's like something to behold and in part because she's my mother and you know like not to get like touchy feely about it but I know that in a certain sense The Graces accorded to her are also Graces given to me in so far as she mediates them with some facility

and with some tenderness and I've encountered that in my life and that that can be part of a story but that if this is from the unsearchable depths of the wisdom of God in light of predes or like predilection um in such a way as to you know like account for what we what we deal with here like we're never going to get to the bottom of it but that by continuing to ask the question right we can we can get a hint of it or we can get a a kind of indication of it

I'll stop there I'm I'm wondering how this consideration functions as a response to this this I I think the problem is quite specific okay um that is you know if if there's a God who wants to come to know me yeah and I want to come to know him yeah and he has the power to bring about the conditions that he know would knows would lead to my conversion mhm and I'm proactively seeking those to the best of my ability and even if it's not me you know somebody else might be doing this and they

don't find him um I I can sort of understand the idea that God might love Mary more than another human being God might love you more than me me more than you you know who knows but the question I think that I'm that I'm wanting to get to the bottom of is why are there some people who seem completely excommunicated in that they reach out and and just just can't find yeah so i' would say some things are beyond their control but some things are also within their control um and so again Catholic dogma it's

been pronounced upon um which I take for a kind of epistemological back stop that if one goes to heaven it's by God's pronating grace if one goes to hell it's because he has freely rejected that um so there's at least some some way in which it can be said that by an exercise of free will a Grace which was offered was rejected and so it's not necessarily like the grace of justification but the Catholic teaching is that Graces are kind of Daisy chained together yeah right so they're you want to I wanted to ask what

your view of hell is not in too much detail I just want to know what we're talking about here when you talk about hell uh the absence of God so God continues to be present by Essence presence in power in the sense that God continues to give being and a but one is entirely distant from the life of Grace and has foreclosed on the possibility of the life of Grace so do you think this is a sort of a form of suffering do you think it's a sort of conscious torment not of the kind of

flames and brimstone but um a consciously endured suffering I think it is yeah I'm not annihilationist and for eternity I do okay um so there was something I wanted to ask about when you when you were talking about people freely rejecting yeah this gift do you think as I do that if it is true that this place hell exists and that you somehow know you're going there and know the means to escape it but choose not to do that anyway that you are almost necessarily acting irrationally um yes I mean in so far as all

sin is contrary to right reason I think there's a kind of irrationality at the heart of it so my my issue with this is that I think the only reason why somebody could possibly make that decision is if they either don't fully understand the situation or aren't convinced that it's true reason being that I think if you showed somebody hell and they knew that it existed they knew with 100% certainty that it existed and they knew that the way to avoid this is to you know throw your life on Christ people might struggle to varying

degrees but I don't I don't even know if it would be possible for a person to not choose to at least try to do that now you might want to say you know Satan chose to to fall away from God even though he had full knowledge I mean this is a poetic story but I I don't know if such a person could actually exist in reality and that's because I think that what we're dealing with is essentially a a form of a form of threat although I know you're not going to want to sort of

view it in those terms but there's a there's some philosophical literature on the difference between an offer and a threat and it's actually quite difficult to to um to pull apart like you know you can you can phrase it as I'm going to offer you a million dollars a year more to change your job and that sounds like an offer but it also kind of sounds like saying there's a way of sort of thinking it in your mind of like well if you don't do this thing then I'm going to sort of um I'm going

to prevent you from having a million dollars that you otherwise could have had it seems like you're almost being threatened now there are various ways to get around this but the the literature is that that I remember having read at University it was far more like surprising in in terms of the responses that has to the the obvious answers that might spring to mind at any rate it seems to me a bit like something like that's going on where this is it's not just a good offer it's it's goodness you're being offered goodness and if

if a person fully apprehends that that's what's on offer I think it's impossible to rationally choose to reject it and what that means is that the only people who could reject that in my view are people who are acting irrationally and generally when sort of somebody's rationality goes wrong it's not exactly their fault in fact that's kind of like what what irrationality is it's like the the the reasoning faculty has gone wrong you know it's not like you've you rationally you've reasoned it and you've got it rationally correct you just choose not to irrationality means

that hasn't happened otherwise I I think that somebody must just not be convinced that this is actually the case in either case I don't think it's fair that somebody can be sent to hell if you see what I'm saying I I wonder if you have any Reflections on that in other words yeah um so a couple initial thoughts are with respect to the things that you cannot but choose or choose against uh in the Catholic tradition there's just one it's the vision of God like in his being as it were or in his Essence but

everything else on account of the fact that the evil or the good that it profit is limited leaves you free in so far as you're free to see it from various vantages or under various aspects and you can choose volition or no so with respect to the the vision of hell that might function as a kind of motive of credibility like the person who is proposing to you the life of Heaven in showing you the life of Hell gives you reason to believe his or her testimony but that's a different noetic act it's a Reliance

upon the testimony of the testator whereas Faith strictly speaking leans on the Divine truth right so it's it's about the veracity of the the thing itself and the God who speaks to it so i' would say that hell scary you know but it's conceivable for me that people would see it and then still slump in that direction and in part because you know you think about the gospels plenty of people saw the things that Jesus did of a miraculous sort and turned away because the cost was too significant for them or because they chose to

look away or because they got distracted or dispersed or whatever other reason but those two last so for instance being distracted that seems not to be their fault if you're distracted by something I think that we're responsible for attention yeah I I can see that to some degree but also I mean if somebody sees Jesus's acts and decides you said like for instance there's too much cost surely if they actually apprehended what was really happening in front of them what was really being offered then they couldn't think the cost was too high it wouldn't be

the only in other words if it is actually the case that the cost is worth paying that any cost pales in comparison if that's actually true then the only way somebody can think the cost is too high as if they're Incorrect and it seems unfair to essentially punish someone for something that they're just incorrect about they're mistaken about yeah so I I think that ignorance malice weakness concupisent are all culpable in so far as they enter into moral activity and we haven't done what's in our power to address them um so and I think that

I think that I I maybe it's just the case I think I have a thicker understanding of responsibility while here on Earth and the reason for which is I basically think that there are only two states Heaven and Hell and they overlap on Earth and so here we have a kind of probation period but then the probation period ends at a certain point with the separation of the soul in the body because we no longer have the means whereby to gather further information upon which to subsequently make judgments and then reason but like St Cath

of Sienna for instance says all the way to heaven is heaven or like CS Lewis I can't remember exactly where maybe it's in God in the dock where he says you know you might end in heaven you might end in hell but when you look back at your time on Earth you'll recognize it as having been continuous with your present experience so for those who end in heaven it will have been heaven on Earth for those who end in hell it will have been hell on Earth and so my understanding of our agency is I

think I I suspect it's a little thicker than yours which isn't to say that yours is necessarily wrong maybe I'm just naively optimistic I don't think it's necessarily wrong in the uh in The Logical sense but it's it's fine to say that you think I'm mistaken that's sort of that is necessarily the case of disagreement um I find people do this all the time they sort of they they say in conversations like these they say and you know not not saying that you're sort of wrong or that you're think but but it's fine because you

kind of have to do that at some point otherwise either I'd be a Catholic or you'd be an atheist right and I guess what I'm trying to discover is what the actual difference is Nook of the of the disagreement is um perhaps I can ask you in these terms what do you think explains if anything I don't expect you to have an explanation I just wonder if you um Can approximate one um what explanation would you propose for the geographical distribution of religious belief so my my kind of overarching theory is that it correspond like

God's pedagogy corresponds to our existential and historical State um so I believe commitment at the outset that God gives everyone sufficient Graces to conversion and and eventual justification if those initial graces are are profited from um and that's by the natural law for instance so like Romans 1 and 2 uh which like the Baseline understanding for which one need be responsible is an implicit faith in Hebrews 11:6 says basically that God exists and that he rewards those who are faithful to him and then we typically Mack that on to what you know like an understanding

of God and then the dispensation of Salvation you know so like the try in God and the Incarnation but that that it's it's you are saved by something you're not saved by the absence of something like Invincible ignorance I'm saved because I wasn't respon you're not saved by the absence of something you're saved by something so I have a pretty thick understanding of like God the protagonist salvation who is in search of All Those whom he has fashioned for this precise end now in certain instances it's thinner that the like the appearance of that offer

and in certain instances it's thicker which would be like the example that you gave about somebody who receives more direct testimony or more um forceful testimony but in each case there is testimony present and that that testimony mediates a relationship the likes of which will draw them onto communion over the course of the life afforded and that that falls within the bounds of God's Providence in so far as God has particular care of all things within the ecosy stematic harmony but care over the common good of them all not in such a way as to

lay them waste as if he were some totalitarian but in such a way as to draw them unto a good which transcends them and is more widely dispersed than any individ idual or particular good and so on my understand like with respect to the the geographical distribution I think that we're seeing the development as it were in time and space of the kingdom of God which subsists primarily in heaven which kind of spills over onto the surface of the Earth but which here we're only having like a limited experience of a kind of constrained experience

of in so far as it's only ever meant to flourish in heaven and so I wouldn't say that it's fair uh by the standard of a human fairness but I also wouldn't say that the standard of God's pedagogy is a human fairness it's a glory which surpasses human fairness while not contradicting human fairness he's making it more difficult for some than others I mean he's not making it difficult I wouldn't say if I were born um even just in in to to different parents in the United Kingdom then I could have been born into a

different religious culture yeah which makes it more ult to become a Christian on two grounds it's not just the philosophical conviction I mean bear in mind that all of my teachers all of my friends every member of my family is going to have a philosophy that lends itself to a different religious tradition and somehow through God's grace maybe I discover a book in a library and come to realize that you know there's this thing called the Triune God or something like this maybe this happens that's already an an immeasurably more difficult experience than somebody who

happens to be born into the correct Faith also then the social cost and this is more a problem of evil proper than a problem of divine hiddenness but that is it's going to require firstly becoming convinced of these propositions which is going to be very difficult in your social context and then also the social cost of throwing yourself upon this new interpretation of God's existence whereas if I'm born a few streets down the road all of this is done away with and I'm born in into the correct understanding like I I just I guess the

way that I would think about it is not to say that this uh precludes the possibility of some you know benevolent invigilator of the process fine but what do we expect if there is one God who loves everybody equally who wants to enter into a relationship with everybody equally what I would crudely expect is that this religious tradition and this Revelation has found its way across the world and has had a sort of similar cultural impact and that people basically have the same maybe not the same Roots but no more or less difficulty in coming

to know him and the the process is fairly clear and easy to partake in maybe not spiritually easy but you know practically speaking an easy thing to do um straightforward but not easy let's say what would I expect to find if religion is a man-made phenomenon I'd probably expect that it varies by region that it reflects its culture that it suits its culture um that uh people violently disagree and tend to do so on the grounds of where they come from and their Heritage you you know what I mean like basically everything that we observe

I think is more expected on that world viiew now I don't know if you agree with that but think it's false still or if you would disagree with that characterization Al together I don't know uh because I think that that would have to fall to the subordinated Sciences as to the types of inroads that the gospel has made in particular cultures because I just it strikes me as an operations research problem which would require like serious programming um and I just don't know if there's an Excel Macro for it because it's I think that you

have to have that that determination need be made you know by the subordinate Sciences which I think properly speaking are sociology and then some kind of whatever it would be like sociology of religion like to to what extent do you encounter more in the way of obstacle or hindrance to what extent do you inquire or do you um observe more in the way of inroad or Highway and byway through which the gospel can Traverse a culture and I just I think there are places in which the gospel is is less present or where Christian Believers

are fewer in number but then like how do you measure the the social impact of the few who are present there or how do you measure the transformation that it works in the intermediate institutions you know for which they're they're present or in which they take part you know because like in some places um you know like profession of an alien Creed is punishable by death right so that's a a strong motivating factor and you see in a very acute way the familial social political costs of taking that step um and yet some people do

and some some people don't which I think reflects the ambivalence of human volition before an offer which though compelling is not going to overrun or override the human element let's think about it again in the context of Free Will in that um when people convert it's I mean CS Lewis writes that when a Christian becomes an atheist in like University or something it's it's very rarely because they've heard some kind of argument it's because you know their friends want to go out and they want to go drinking and they want to engage in casual sex

and they just it's more of a sort of cultural thing you just sort of who you who you are you know what is it show me the friends and I'll show you the man something like that going on I think this history in both directions and it is also true in a philosophical uh sense in that if somebody has converted to Christianity from atheism a lot of the time it's because they've met somebody who's talked them through it who's answered their objections and shown them to church maybe you know that they've they've you can imagine

the the Christian films in which somebody saves the choking child from dying and then invites them to church or something I that's the plot of at least one of these films um okay this isn't too far off what actually happens in a lot of cases and it happens in the reverse you have Christians who go to university meet a bunch of atheists and they and it may be totally sort of irrational but they're talked out of it somehow now that means that there are certain Christians alive today who now have the correct Doctrine and the

correct practices and they're probably going to go to heaven because they met somebody who introduced them to the faith because that person sort of was scrolling through the universities you know didn't really have an idea of where to apply and then thought that you know oh Liverpool University that's got a nice Library i i i quite like the look of the ceilings and maybe I'll apply there and that arbitrary trivial choice is the reason why this person is now going to heaven if Free Will exists in the sense that I understand that you think it

does this person could have preferred a different ceiling of a library and therefore excluded this now stranger from eternal life I I just sort of it seems a bit like a comedy to me you know like it seems like a it it it seems Seems like almost entertaining to think if that's the case you know how how precariously it's all balanced upon such a sometimes I mean I've given a purposefully ludicrous example here but that kind of thing does happen you know like like small decisions like that can have large effects down the road um

you know the butterfly flapping its wings if this is the case like I don't know again I think it captures an emotion that doesn't do well in a syllogism but I I think you understand the kind of feeling I'm getting at right like it just feels weird it feels really very strange again if we think of religion as man-made this is not a problem it sort of dissipates this is the kind of thing I think does need you know explaining and addressing and and some people like to say well look God's hand is in it

like God's hand is in the fact that this person you know preferred this University and chose this University and met this person then we basically just become determinists and we've removed the whole freedom of will thing that this whole thing is predicated upon at least in this instance it's like oh yeah you were free to do basically anything you wanted in your life except the university Choice except you know God God knew that it was going to be the color of the ceiling that made you make the decision so he made you born with a

predisposition towards orange or something yeah maybe but that just sort of undermines the idea that this was a free action altogether um and if that's the case then no longer do you have recourse to the idea that the reason why some people believe and some people don't is through their own valtion because as long as God in one case has his hand in making this person convert by introducing him to this person at University by making this person choose that University then we have to explain why he hasn't done that in other cases why nobody

chose my University who talks to me in such a way as to convert me to Christianity you know what I mean um so yeah doesn't it seem a bit arbitrary in other words it does and I think that what you described as one way of covering the phenomenon um you know with some modum of probability you know probability being the probity attaching to an opinion um and I think that yeah with with respect to God's hand is in it I think if God's hand were only in that discreet act then the argument May obtain but

the typical Catholic teaching is that at every moment of every day there's something like that that our like our way is literally strewn with those events um and perhaps it's not yet the time or perhaps we're posing obstacles to it but the commanding image for the influx of the life of Grace in a soul is that of sun through a window and that the way in which human valtion is typically expressed in those who reject it is just like shuttering the windows or permitting the windows to Dirty by a kind of natural inertia and that

makes appeal to a prior principle which you know opens further problems and probably is worth bracketing in so far as it just takes us down a difficult series of of inquiries but um that this is not God's original intention for the universe and that God created our first parents in a state of grace is the is the Christian teaching and that they freely chose against it and that God is Not culpable for our fact of inheriting a what compromised human nature but it's that our human nature was fortified and the to mytic teaching is that

you refer to the state of original Justice or rectitude whereby our minds were subordinated to God in Grace our lower powers to our higher powers by a kind of integral nature and then our bodies to our souls which would have radiated as a kind of immortality impassibility all things besides in choosing against the Divine command Adam and Eve you know our first parents lose the life of Grace in so far as Grace is only ever had you know kind of in this Ambiance of the gift and then they lose the other things associated with it

such that are different powers of the Soul uh depending on which type of anthropology one spouses but basically like our intellectual and volitional and then our kind of emotional as it were uh engagement with the world is now no longer ordered as it was previously so now we can have more in the way of interference or more in the way of dissonance and we can supplant the higher good with the lower good and this becomes infinitely complicated in so far as now there's a lot of noetic static there's a lot of kind of effective junk

there's just a lot more to it than there was previously but God in reorchestration agitating ways but God posits as it were into the void Ways by which to come back and so then seeing our way as strewn with again Ways by which to come back represents a yet more ponderous Mercy because it's premised on our initial rejection of the gift and you might say doesn't seem like we're responsible for that but it's like our Nature has been left to itself when it was originally intended not to be I think that that's you know like

original sin being the privation of rectitude do you believe in the fool as in any way a a literal historical account in some way yeah what what what's your sort of understanding of what the fool is or was yeah so I don't mean in terms of its um sort of moral implication yeah I just mean as a historical event yeah sure so it seems like based on the you know paleontological or the fossil record I mean just based on the genetic evidence that we have in the current breeding population that and then the strong testimony

for an Out of Africa Theory um it seems like those breeding pairs only ever bottlenecked down to like I don't know 6,000 7,000 so there's a pretty large population so accounting for a sin for which a person is responsible within a large breeding population that there is difficult to wrap your head around um and I've seen different theories proposed as to it but it's not settle church doctrine I think that you can say that there's a kind of evolutionary story whereby we come to our present biological state of homo sapiens but you don't necessarily have

our as it were philosophical state of homo until such time as a rational soul is infused not as an emergent property but in the Christian understanding as a direct intervention of God that there there there would have been evolutionary steps in order for that rational soul to have free exercise given the Caporal organs involved but that there might have been an infusion of a rational soul in an original breeding pair and that that it would have bred out all subsequent Generations such that you know those who came in turn also had rational Souls that being

kind of vouched safe to them in their initial infusion sure um I've been speaking for the past half many days it's been about a week or so with uh a lot of different Catholics about the doctrine of original sin it keeps coming up okay and I I have a number of questions that I've been given a number of answers to over the past few days and I'm interested in seeing what you think of it all um original sin what what do you think happens here so we've got this sort of you know first human of

of some sort you know um however however they came to be but we've got a a rational animal we've got a homo sapiens and they have Consciousness they have awareness all this kind of stuff they have freedom and then they do something and now something is transmitted to the human species what is it that they do even if you don't know the specifics what's the kind of thing that happened and what is it that's now transmitted to the rest of us because of it right I'm just Mystic hack so I'm just going to repeat things

um so I think that they're being originally created in this state of rectitude or original Justice means that they have these gifts just outlined Grace integral nature and then impassibility immortality I think that that uh the enjoyment of that state is contingent upon the recognition and reception of it as a gift at some level how that registers emotionally psychologically spiritually I don't know but it has to be recognized as from another and unto another I think that the original sin is basically rejection of that gratuiti it's a rejection of the gift nature uh so it

would be there like we want ourselves for the end or we want ourselves like we want ourselves for the end on our own steam or maybe we want you but again on our own steam we won't have it by the grace which is the only sufficient principle to attain unto life eternal and so Chester has a cool meditation upon that in Orthodoxy actually um and he he actually hints at the arbitr of it but like he saves the AR trity in couching it personalistic it's about the relationship it's like you have to trust me and

then how is it that the evil one kind of makes inroads well he convinces them that they don't have what they in fact have you know he said that he couldn't possibly have said that you know you you'll be like Gods if you partake well here's the thing that's the Christian doctrine of grace namely that Grace is the seed as it were of Glory so it's the progressive divinization which ought to take place over the course of a human life is at work in the life of Grace so they already are like God gods in

a certain sense and Satan convinces them as it were that they that they aren't what they in fact are and then in believing him they come to inherit you know the fell Harvest thereof so I think that basically it's it's a kind of loving obedience which is asked of them in light of this gift they reject the gift nature of the initial offering and then they wound this loving obedience and then what happens is these original things with which they were blessed you know they they pass away so they lose Grace they lose integral nature

and they lose you know immortality and passibility but those things aren't due by Nature so I don't think that I I mean St Thomas doesn't think that human nature fundamentally changes because there has to be continuity between the nature of the of the original pair and the nature at present because that's the logic of Romans 5 like if we don't have a solidarity in Adam then we don't have a solidarity in the Salvation which is which goes by way of him yeah um so what is it that you think is different about us now on

account of the fool in other words yeah so we're not born into this world with Grace right so we need to be healed and grown Beyond certain effects like effects of thought effects of choice effects of feeling which which register in our Humanity quite quite vehemently I think one of the ways in which we see it principally is okay so intellect will and passions each ordered to their proper good there are variety of things that attract me I want to you know pure an existence I'm ordered to the procreation and education of children even though

I'm in a celibate State that's part of my nature right I want to know the truth about God I want to live peaceably in society I want to do all kinds of things but I don't see clearly how that hierarchy ought to be established I don't I don't see clearly how lower Goods ought to be nested under higher goods and then how I ought to comport myself Vis those goods and I think that's why you have the kind of yeah Powder Keg which is what we would call like concupisent you know or like the the

kindling of sin in that the lower things they usually pertain to what is more instinctual like food drink sexual intercourse like things that concern us very urgently and immediately for the handing on of life whether our own or that of subsequent generations and so the the way that they're tinged makes it so that we have a harder time thinking clearly about them because we just see it as shiny or sexy or whatever else and so that can detract us I suppose my question is that if Adam and Eve didn't already have something of this nature

and how is it that they were so prone to sinning in the first place that is if I'm I'm often told that the reason why sometimes the reason why evil exists is because we live in a fallen world that can't quite be true because there's evil in the garden in the form of the serpent right there's there's something about us now which makes us more prone to sinning makes us more sort of broken creatures but somehow in a way that wasn't already broken enough to cause the sin in the first place like if what it

is is that we have some kind of um um even more depraved nature than was already there it must have already been pretty depraved for that decision to be made and at the first opportunity and not very much convincing from The Serpent and in a way that involved deception it's not like Eve was knowingly sinning I mean she knew that God had told her not to do another thing but uh not to do this particular thing but from the perspective of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden it seems like God is just like

another character in the story God says if you eat of this uh tree well he says don't e of this tree for you shall surely die and Adam and Eve sort of like cool all right and then the serpent comes along and says you know that's not true right and he's like oh isn't it then she looks at the tree and it looks fine and she's like oh okay well then I guess I'll go and eat in other words it doesn't sound like somebody sinning it doesn't sound like this this dramatic language I in her

of of of well she sort of put her own desire above that of go I don't I don't know if she was sort of doing that I think she was and in fact she was deceived in the story it's a deception it's not her fault and in fact the very thing that she's doing is eating from the knowledge of the tree the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil which I'd see as sort of an allegory for something like moral knowledge moral awareness represented also in the fact that they then realize that they're naked

like if this sin was committed in a condition where there's no moral knowledge then how can somebody be held morally culpable for the decision that they make how can it be that Eve was knowingly doing something evil when what she was doing was eating of the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil buing that she didn't have that knowledge yet and if she didn't then she's being essentially punished for something that she didn't knowingly do and did because somebody else deceived her into doing so because she already had a nature that was prone enough to

sin that at a singular poke from the serpent she acts in this particular way and she's deceived know I I struggled to see this as her fault then uh on account of this we today are dealing with the consequences of this in a way that people are often reluctant to see as a form of punishment but consider it punishment in the poetic sense that we are now suffering on account of it I mean Eve is told that her her pains and child birth will be multiplied greatly Adam is told that uh you know the the

the toil is now going to be the way that you make your living and their descendants also have to suffer with this implying that the reason that women suffer in child birth today to the extent that they do is not just as a punishment for a sin that they didn't commit but as a punishment for a sin that the person who did commit it didn't even do so knowingly this seems egregious to me not to mention the fact that even the snake is you know told that it will run around on its on its belly

for the rest of its life because of its sort of uh role um implying some kind of answer maybe to like snake suffer in we've got like inheritable moral responsibility for these irrational creatures you know now this only really applies if you take the story literally but I'm I'm I guess what I'm asking is what on Earth is this supposed to represent that that isn't I I know I've sort of painted it as quite morally egregious and maybe I've been a bit uncharitable but that is how it seems to me yeah um so I take

the stance that Genesis 1 through 11 are largely operating in a mythopoeic genre and that they're consciously adapting stories of the ancient near East with an intent to um show by transposition how the god of Israel is distinct from other you know Canaanite Waring Gods um and that the notes which are introduced into it are one you know like Divine goodness that the source of evil isn't the heavens and the way in which you see it in like the anuma Alish or the Epic of Gilgamesh and that God's intent for us is also good and

that we are free in our choice it's a free rejection uh for which we're responsible in some way shape or form and that the Temptation is against a kind of loving obedience um and that the sin is a choice for a kind of autonomy you know like the knowledge of Good and Evil being a kind of self-determination as to the particular details like you know there's a literal sense of the text I don't know you know like I I kind of look to subsequent clarifications as guidelines for how to pin that down in so far

as one can but like when it comes to the doctrine of original sin that's you know you wait centuries in the Christian tradition before that's enunciated very clearly with like Augustine and it's largely in light of Romans 5 that you have the interpretation of Genesis 3 but I would say like yeah primacia um the story is strange it seems like if this original state was so good for instance why did it only last five verses um like why did they prove themselves so fragile so one thing I would say is to introduce is that the

Rebellion had already begun it had begun in among the Angels right so that the Angelic Fall Would antecede The human fall and so you see the kind of communal Dimension uh of rebellion against God and so co- responsibility is a feature of this account and so I think that I'm probably going to end up relying more on individual human responsibility and on communal human responsibility and Angelic responsibility so I yeah I think that probably comes down to the nub is is a sense of responsibility I I don't know when it's coming out I don't know

when this conversation is coming out but currently working on a response to a certain Mr Ken has who uh responded to this speech that I gave and does so it's about the problem of evil and he gives an account of evil as explained by the fool and he believes that Genesis is a literal historical account so it's it's slightly different but an example that I've sort of an example I give in this video is I'm sort of imagining something like um I'm your landlord and you're renting flat from me and I like shut off your

heating and I install a thousand locks to make it impossible for you to get into your home it takes you know hours and you know I I periodically switch off your electricity just for the fun of it and you say look why why are you doing this to me why are you torturing my me like this and I say well don't you know that your great-grandfather once rented this flat from me and he wronged me and look I'm not going to say that I'm punishing you for something a a natural con sequence I mean I

gave him a contract I said look don't do this don't do this thing and maybe it's something like I said hey um don't turn off the oven you know by the wall I don't even say why maybe I say you know cuz it's it's going to do something very bad or you you know you'll you'll burn the house down and then somebody came along and maybe it's sort of an electrician friend who looks at it and says I don't know what your landlord's talking about like this switch isn't even like connected to the wall as

far as I can see like it's it's going to be absolutely fine so he flicks the switch and that's why I'm punishing you that's why I've shut off your your electricity and your heating and installed a thousand locks I'm I'm sorry like what what what am I supposed to take from this other than the the the I think intolerable notion of inheritable guilt inheritable moral responsibility by genus which is the origin of a great many hateful doctrines throughout the history of mankind that somehow your your moral position and worse your moral guilt your blameworthiness is

inheritable from the sins of your father and here we're talking about a sin that your grandfather didn't even really commit he was sort of deceived into doing so this to me seems somewhat analogous to the to the story that you're giving me of of the fool and I think that if I were doing that I should be arrested thrown in jail or at the very least you know reproached by my fellow human beings yeah so I think um how I would adjust the story that you told is that it would have been more along the

lines of like we were made to live in a palace but we questioned um God's intent in putting us in the palace like are you manipulating us are you controlling us and he was like you don't have to live in the palace and then we chose to live in a h and he said you can live in the h and so I think that uh we were given something beyond what we Merit I mean there's no antecedent merits on account of the fact that we're talking about creation but we were giving something far beyond what

might be said to be fair or just and then we chose against it my my sense for how we are virtually present in the choice of Adam it's I mean that's that is a difficult question the question that's a huge question I was I you know I don't want to interrupt but there are certain words that I want to sort of jump in like when you just said you know we chose not to live in it did we I didn't I don't remember making that decision and in fact I think if I had the decision

now I know what I would what I would take and that applies analogously too you know I'd rather live in a state of grace in a nice Garden that's almost perfect except for the inexplicable existence of some evil serpent that's been allowed within the within the paradise the Walled Garden um I'd much rather that but because somebody who you know dubiously is said to be my sort of great great great great dot dot dot grandfather made a decision on account of being convinced by his girlfriend on account respectively of being deceived by an evil serpent

who had no business being in the Garden of Eden in the first place yeah that you're quite right that is the question even even if you are present in that though even if you are present in that decision there still seems to be a sort of lack of culpability as far as as I can see even if somehow there's part of me present in the decision that Adam made what was the decision he made to listen to his wife or his girl I guess they hadn't been married I guess they were sort of married in

a sense you know automatically married um an arranged marriage if you like and she says Hey eat this apple and he goes fine and why did she do that because some serpent told her not just eat the apple but that she was being lied to about the nature of the of the the fruit we don't know if it was an apple and it's obviously not literally a fruit but you see what I'm saying it's deception I I I find it difficult to hold even them morally culpable for this let alone us so I would say

that our reading of that passage um so we're talking about a passage written well after the fact who knows you know when the fact transpired um but well after the fact in so far as it's written sometime between the 10th and the 7th Century BC um and as the reflection of a religious people on the religious history whereby to account for their present religious experience inspired by God right so the primary author and the Christian understanding is God he works through the inspired author you know somewhere in between a trance and subsequent appr probation we

don't exactly know how that works that hasn't been pronounced upon but you know you can reason within bounds on the particular matter but I'm not especially wed to those details in the sense like I think that there's a literal sense to the text but I think that the literalistic sense of the text does violence to what's being communicated and I think that like the redaction history by comparison to ancient Eastern myths is I think it's it yields more in the way that it emphasizes the principal doctrines which are at stake goodness you know God's goodness

our essential goodness the culpability of our choice the responsibility for which and then how it transpires so I think that um you know like whether you know like a serpent or something I mean it's just the I just say like the evil one in the sense that as a Christian interpretation of an Old Testament text which pertains you know first to the Hebrews and then is adopted by the church as the new Israel we can we can talk about it in those terms uh like reading it within the context of the tradition so I'm making

certain hermeneutical leaps which I realized leave me exposed but dot dot dot um but but in this particular case so that the May the ways that St Thomas describes our virtual presence in the choice of Adam is he says that we're presence we're present in Adam's Choice Adam is the best Among Us equipped more than any of us with the means whereby to make the right choice um that were present in Adam's nature and that were present in Adam's loins so the last with respect to well let's go back from 3 to one and then

I'll uh I'll just stop um but like so he communic to us a human nature all right and we you know like he makes our father makes a genetic contribution our mother makes a genetic contribution we we inherit a nature in concert with theirs uh but we don't inherit something super added to that nature as if like original sin were a parasitic um Chrome extension you know that you just slotted in there it's not so when we're speaking about original sin we're talking about human nature being left to itself so we were originally intended to

operate Ambiance of utter and sheer gratuity we chose against it because we didn't abide the terms of that concession and now we're left to ourselves because we said we want to be left to ourselves and one might ask is it appropriate for God to even make a creature who has such sovereignty over his life whereby he can dictate the terms of his own damnation that's a great question and I think that brings us back to the best possible World question because God could have made us rocks or he could have made us plants or he

could have made us animals or he could have made us Angels but he made us this and he made us this in in a certain sense unto Glory without in the Christian belief making of us thereby Pawns in the displaying of some Cosmic point so that he could get together with you know Father Son and Holy Spirit and say like that went weird um but rather simply to say like for Glory right from start to finish within the context of a Divine wisdom which is Provident and sees to everything in its particularity unto a communal

expression so I think present in Adam's loins right so the human nature was created left to itself and that brings us to the nature that we're not do that by right but that we have a kind of nostalgia for the grace in which we were created which orients US by way of openness um or by way of like lamentation and anger to the reintroduction of the life of Grace which then situates us squarely within a Salvation history which Christ comes at the culmination of which so you can kind of like lead up to it and

then unpack it would be like the typical Christian teaching um and then you know like present in Adam as the greatest Among Us so like it's a Christian teaching it's not pronounced upon but that like Adam would have had all virtues in a way that would have been like fontal so as the first among us he you know like the the perfect prec contains what issues from it so that he would have had these things so even though we might say to ourselves if ID had the choice maybe I'd have chosen differently we probably wouldn't

but we still want to be able to exercise that choice and the fact is in the historical dispensation we can exercise that choice because these gifts that we lost Grace integral nature immortality and immutability they all await us as an eschatological realization so like Grace can be reconstituted in baptism integral nature that's just like the transformation wrought by the life of virtue and the Christian understanding is that mind I mean like intellect will and passions are once again reoriented such that the hierarchy of creation becomes poed to the individual Reasoner and he's reconciled to them

and then impassibility and IM immortality that's the resurrection at the End of the Age so it like it places us within a dramatic Arc mind you it's tough but it's not for fairness it's unto Glory me like the beginning of an answer well I would think that I would do the same thing in Adam's position or indeed Eve's position but the reason for that is because I think that they were deceived now it seems to me strange that not only can they be judged for this but we can too you know if I ask you

to say happy birthday in Spanish to my Spanish cousin and I showed you a translation and it actually was like blasphemy and I got you to read it out and then I said ha You' just blasphemed and you're you're a sinner now like I think you'd probably be within your rights to say well look I'd rather you hadn't done that but I'm not going to hold myself morally culpable for doing something that you've just tricked me into doing and I don't think God is either but this is kind of how the story reads to me

if if the account is accurate that there was deception by the evil one what you have is essentially the serpent coming up to Eve and saying hey read this it says happy birthday and she reads it out and what it actually says is you know some some curse of God I'm um not going to invent the words into the actual microphone um given the sanctity of the space and then God saying well you've done it now for you and your progeny uh for the rest of time you're going to suffer on account of what you've

just done it it seems like perhaps a bit of an overreaction and an unfair one so in other words yeah I would have done what Adam did and I have no I mean I do have problems with the idea that I am present in his sin but I'm willing to just grant that and say sure I'm imagine it were me imagine I am Adam I'm the person who actually did the thing itself if I was deceived into doing so by the most intelligent and devious evil mind in the history of everything I I don't think

that would be a sound basis on which to condemn me let alone my children and my children children and my children's children's children so one thought is just with respect to um the example I think that there's a moral Dimension both to the ACT and to the trust which informs the act so there's an interpersonal context it's not just a matter of me robotically reading words so one I'm a priest and I live in the United States and half of the Catholics in the United States speak Spanish so I have something of a responsibility to

know Spanish I don't know how much that responsibility weighs on me but enough for me to learn Spanish and so I see it I know it's not happy birthday and then I do it obviously you can change the example but also there's this you know the inter personal Dimension so I am making a judgment about a person so about The credibility of that person and I think the point about the Temptation which was posed to them was that it was directly meant to undermind their credibility Visa their source and end you know so like Visa

the personal God so Faith leans on the Divine veracity truth himself speaks truly else there's nothing true that's the basic idea it's like I believe because he says now mind you if if something like that were offered to another human being it would represent a kind of violence it's the type of thing that only obtains for God in so far as he is the truth subsisting truth and thus cannot contradict himself in how he you know interacts with creation interacts as a crft word I take it back um and how he operates and so like

all of our kind of created examples of that type of fiduciary trust are limited and we know ourselves to be exposed to potential deception right or to potential manipulation and but the nature of this temptation was that it was posed as contradictory to that most basic relationship and so regardless of what the choice was I don't know what the choice was whether it concerned fruit or otherwise um you know like whether there was a a serpent involved it just doesn't matter too terribly much to me but that it was this is called into question by

something that obtains on a very lowgrade order by comparison to the metaphysical thickness of your very life flood in the order of Nature and of Grace and so yeah I suppose in light of that um yeah in light of that it's the type of thing for which you know the Fallout that comes in turn is terrible it is terrible and if that were the final word I would think it terrible um or I don't know that I would have the kind of intellectual wherewithal to even think myself through it because I don't whatever dot dot

dot doesn't matter but um but I think that there's a kind of augustinian dicum God permits evil to befall only in bringing from it some good I try not to like make the optimize maximize argument for that like bring about a greater good as if God relied upon evil in order to generate good which I think is creepy um but this sense that he permits evil and from the midst thereof we see good arise and so like I just don't I personally I mean I think by virtue of Faith commitment so this is just be

more generally Christian claim I just don't know how fruitful it is is to consider this question do I want to say that at a certain point I think this question has to be posed at the foot of the cross without being like too preachy um but I I'm a preacher so there it is you know like I I I I only think it makes sense in light of the solution which God proposes to it and it's not a solution in the way in which you know like math Solutions are rendered to naughty problems it's like

I think that our human questioning about the nature of suffering suffering only begins to make sense in so far as we become a partaker in Christ's you know like it's not something that he answers once and for all it's not something that he answers in the abstract it's something that like he opens himself up to He makes himself vulnerable so that we can find a home therein and I realize that makes it sound you know like some theologians will say like a like a bloody massacre um and yet here we are and here we are

and running out of time um I mean for this conversation not sort of in the in the grandest sense you you refer to uh but I think there's one more topic that our producer would like us to cover I don't know how you want us to I don't know if you want us to cut this out or no I'll just shout it out here so um I would like I would like to know Alex what seeking for you has looked like is it just in one sense it could just be listening to a bunch of

arguments and thinking about these conceptions of God so what what has seeking looked like how have you sought and not found and then related to that have have you grown in your conception of God or are there conceptions of God you know you seem to be um averse to a conception of God like this Flying Spaghetti Monster right and that's kind of a silly way to characterize God so have you moved at all towards a conception of God is it reasonable as at all so does that make sense those two questions together yeah for the

benefit of the tape um the question is what seeking has looked like for me and it's it's difficult to judge the sincerity of of your own actions sometimes but and what I mean is that like the motivations are difficult to to ascertain you can say all you like that I'm going into this conversation to speak with Father Gregory Pine because I want to advance my understanding of Catholicism and come to maybe but maybe secretly and unbeknownst to even me really what I want is you know to get a cool bit of content where you know

priest gets owned by a like to think that's not what's going on um but you know what I mean like there there can be subconscious motivations but what I do know is that I have a degree in Theology and it's Again difficult to know the motivations for for doing that um I really wanted to study philosophy but in my University they wouldn't let me do that hon own and I decided that a good mixture would be philosophy and theology I thought I'd get to to learn a lot but also you know I'm making YouTube videos

at the time from an atheist perspective so there's a part of me which thinks yeah I'll get to get to know my enemy and be better at sort of deconstructing it and it just so happened that I actually ended up really enjoying it and learning a lot and you know my my view of the philosophy of religion changed quite a bit but what I'm saying is the motivations get a bit lurry but I know that I studied for a degree in Theology and so at the very least I have some uh interaction with the with

the literature with the arguments and with some wonderful people um I know that I semi-regularly attend church services in various contexts while here while in Nashville I went with mass of the ages to a traditional Latin Mass I've done the same thing in Oxford on the invitation is from Catholic friends but I also go along with a with a with another friend who is sort of not a not a Christian I think maybe like an agnostic I think he believes in God I'm not sure but we like to go to churches um in England that

we think are are beautiful and we like listening to some of the coral Services because we think they're nice but then you do find yourself in a church environment listening to readings as well um I know that I've spent more time than not atheist colleagues of mine that is like people who do this kind of thing but average atheists more time than most atheists would spend looking at the philos to a religion looking at the Bible looking at um I mean more recently I've been interested in like biblical scholarship beforehand it was a philosophical Enterprise

but you know as as of late I've been looking at the Historical Jesus and the reliability of the gospels and the the which letters were actually written by Paul and what it means for Epistles written by some specific man to specific communities to be scripture this kind of thing you know in other words I'm sort of looking all over the place I'm I'm performing actions like going to church or attempting to pray or allowing friends around me to pray for me even though I find it quite cring making I try to do so in a

way that isn't disrespectful I mean like if I'm like when I was in Latin Mass the other day um Everybody stands up and I stand up because you know it's it's what you do it's polite sit down I sit down everybody kneels and I don't kneel not because not out of some kind of arrogance but out of a sense that it feels rude or disrespectful to essentially be playing pretend you know I'd be it it would feel like going up and taking communion for me it would just feel wrong to do um so there is

a limit to this but I've I've spent a long time doing this now and maybe I'm doing it incorrectly and I certainly I feel like I was doing it incorrectly for the first few years because I was doing the sort of edgy new atheist thing and so and I didn't realize that at the time really I probably would have known somewhere that that's what I was doing maybe I'm doing something similar now that in 5 10 years I'll look back and think ah you had no idea you were going totally wrong but the fact that

I'm finding that even difficult to ascertain is reason enough for me to think that there's a problem in the fact that after you know so much knocking that my fingers are beginning to bruise I'm not even hearing a winse from the other side um yeah I mean what do I think yeah I wouldn't want to cheapen your experience or speak in a way that was overgeneral or yeah unhelpful um I'm thinking about this is a situation which is different from your own but there are certain parallels um I was talking to a woman who uh

was raised Catholic uh but had fallen away from the practice of the faith and uh we had some exchanges on points pertinent to uh Theology and sacramental practice and things like that and then she wanted to bring her husband along for another meeting and I was like sure that'd be great um and then her husband in our second meeting I'd afforded maybe like an hour and 50 minutes for the meeting her husband uh kind of lectured me as to why things that I had said in my conversation were with her were um not sufficiently nuanced

or not sufficiently well crafted as to obtain in the particular time and place specifically it concerned cultural or ethnic limitations to my my proposals and which was really difficult for me cuz I am arrogant um and it's just difficult for me you know like when I feel lorded over uh and so I was like doing my best because like sometimes I can get in a mode where I just permit somebody else to what um Harang me because I know that in permitting them to speak at Great length then I can hang them with the Rope

that they have just stretched out um but this went on for like an hour and 10 minutes and and the last word that he said was like so don't scratch the surface because you don't know what you'll find beneath and I think it was like an indication of um you know like don't scratch the surface of our kind of current cultural ethnic expression of piety which doesn't comport with your own sensibilities because you don't know what you'll find with the underneath and I suppose like yeah I was feeling erasable and I was also just like

I mean I was just kind of sad and um I said yeah like I don't know what to do but to scratch and that's not because um yeah again because I get like YouTube kickbacks from you know like revenue generated thereby uh but because like I only have one mode and I I wonder honestly sometimes whether that one mode is a deterministic fact you know because I was born to these parents in this town attended this Parish received these sacraments was given this type of education and formation um but like my experience of it is

something organic um in the sense it's like life um and I I I probably reason somewhat irresponsibly in so far as as a as a theologian I often like go for something beautiful and then I happen upon the fact that it may in fact be true it's like this links up and that links up and you know what that might correspond to reality so I get ahead of myself but I think that yeah in light of the fact that because of you know who I am and the pertinent factors which contributed to that um like

I have a certain t tendency which is to continue to ask questions um and that I also have a certain tendency um yeah I don't know exactly how to describe it best maybe I should just lapse that particular point off into silence but um I think that like not to make of this a kind of armchair philosopher point but I think that the questioning itself is not it's not obviously it's not worthless in your particular case it has a particular expression um but I'm thinking of like job okay so like the Book of Job so

job and his interlocutors ask questions for the better part of 38 chapters and then God shows up and asks more questions which is kind of devastating um because I think like at a certain level we want a response like we don't want God to be um yeah like an armchair philosopher like a a kind of cute psychologist who's like well what do you think about that or like a lawyer who repeats back to us the last question that we formulated as part of our testimony um like we want a solution but I think that that

part of it and maybe a central conviction for me is that we are made like capable or we're made capacious for the solution only progressively and so we get like indication small hints of a solution but that part of the whole discourse is growing the capacity or growing the capability to recognize and receive the solution as it's Meed out in time and space in the pertinent circumstances um and so like yeah when God shows up on the scene and he says where were you then when I laid the foundations of the world it's like ask

deeper questions it's not that like the questions are bad I'm not saying let's shut down the discourse I'm saying ask deeper questions um perhaps it's naive to think that questions ask deeply or honestly will always lead to to a Terminus but I I think I might be committed to that by by Revelation so yeah yeah that's a that's a mix and a muddled mix but the mix that I have it's a shame we don't have time for an entire discussion on the Book of Job um something I've been meaning to make a sort of atheist

review of for a very long time I thought it would be interesting to do sort of book reviews of certain biblical texts or stories beginning with the Book of Job because it's like the atheist's favorite text except for maybe Ecclesiastes but that's coming next it's sort of the one where you know God is the bad guy and he he inflicts suffering for the sake of a bet and then tells the audience why he's doing it but when job asks why he's doing it he essentially says well you could never hope to understand and actually how

dare you for even think that you're the kind of person who should be able to ask um and I like to think if the story is taken metaphorically it's maybe not quite as straightforward as that and so uh it's it's something I want to explore although it does seem troubling to me that that is like an indication is that there is a reason and it's not just that it's not look job I'm really sorry I I just can't find the means to you know to to explain this to you I don't think you'll ever be

able to understand understand but you know who is this that darkeneth counsil by words without knowledge like who the hell are you what are you playing at why would you think you even deserve an answer it it seems uh it seems out of accord with the loving and compassionate nature of God that underg Goods discussions about him in the abstract in other words um but like I said I wish we had more time to to discuss that I don't want that to be the final word because you might have something to say on what on

what I've just said there it seems unfair to throw that out and not allow you to respond but um yeah it's just uh I don't know it's a it's a it's a confusing story I think confusing narrative on on many accounts yeah I suppose by way of a short final word I might say in reading the scriptures canonically you know the the Old Testament in light of the new I think often of how our Lord adduces questions from the hearts of those with whom he's in conversation especially like in Gospel of John and how some

of his most Sublime Revelations are immediately attended upon a question that he has provoked um you know like Philip in John 14 like show us the father and that will be enough and he's like you don't get it like have you been with me this long and still you do not know like he has seen me has seen the father and I think like part of that dialogical kind of back and forth is is meant in this vein you know like to kind of make capable make capacious for the Grandeur or the glory I mean

that's kind of what we started start with so maybe it's appropriate to end with that uh which lies in store but we need yeah we need to be made capable and capacious of it and I think of what was it Leon bloy who said There Are Places in the heart that do not exist until such time as suffering enters in and I think that that's you know like to to speak of it in cute terms or in Precious terms is it's inappropriate because it doesn't do due reference to the way in which people genuinely suffer

and the way in which that's life destroying Soul destroying body destroying um but that there is a under which or Advantage from which one can see how it might be part of a bigger story well father Pine thanks so much for sing down with me for this conversation it's been it's been wide ranging and uh and hopefully edifying to The Listener cheers as well as to me yeah thanks thank you