AMA-4. Dr. Michael Shermer — The Problem of Evil

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2019

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this Ask Me Anything, Dr. Shermer performs a postmortem on his debate/dialogue on with Dr. Brian Huffling at the Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Saturday February 23, 2019. The specific topic was: “Is the Reality of Evil Good Evidence Against the Christian God?” Watch the video of the debate.

This is an exercise in the difference in thinking between a Christian philosopher/theologian/apologist and a secular scientist/humanist/atheist. Dr. Huffling focused on purely philosophical arguments about the nature of God, evil, omniscience, omnipotence, and moral perfection, whereas Dr. Shermer concentrated on specific examples of evil in the world and challenged Dr. Huffling to explain why God fails to do anything about them. In the end (literally at the end of the debate), when Dr. Shermer pushed him to explain why God allows childhood leukemia and the attendant suffering by children and their loving parents, Dr. Huffling’s answer was “I don’t know.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is your host, Michael Sherman, and you're listening to Science Salon, a series of conversations
0:10.4	with leading scientists, scholars, and thinkers about the most important issues of our time.
0:20.0	I wanted to do a different kind of AMA. I'm not sure you'd even call us an AMA. I'm just back from my debate slash
0:27.4	dialogue at the Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina. I was invited there through my lecture agency to come and
0:36.4	give the perspective of an atheist slash scientist, skeptic, humanist, whatever,
0:41.3	about the problem of evil.
0:43.0	And mind you, I don't think they were inviting me to come convert me.
0:49.0	Not much chance of that happening at this point, nor am I likely to convince any of them.
0:54.7	I think to their credit, they wanted to expose their students to how a scientist slash
1:02.0	atheist skeptic thinks about the problem of evil and does it really
1:05.8	negate the Christian God? I think it does pretty clearly. It went okay. It was a little frustrating I think for both of us. My hosts were
1:17.6	unfailingly polite. Almost everyone in the audience was super nice to me. There was one guy in the
1:23.3	Q&A who got pretty upset at me. I posted the video on social media so it's
1:30.0	available but the but I made a comment about Muslims being just as convinced about the reality of
1:38.4	their revealed truths and their infallible holy book being just as strong as the Christian one and
1:46.3	a gentleman in the Q&A was pretty upset about that they have a different God than
1:50.9	our God it's like no the monotheisms Judaism
1:54.2	Christianity and Islam that's the same god and he didn't like that you go ahead and
1:59.2	try to say that in Saudi Arabia they would fry you I I'm like, yeah, and you too.
2:03.3	So this is the problem, that, you know,
2:07.5	there are more than one holy book.
2:09.4	There's more than one infallible, perfect word of God and they conflict with each other.
	...

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