Alex O'Connor steps into Jubilee's Surrounded, challenging 25 Christians with four seismic claims: suffering shatters God's likelihood, the Bible commands genocide, the resurrection lacks evidence, and Jesus never claimed divinity. Will his arguments hold, or will faith prevail? Follow our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@jubilee Follow Alex O'Connor:https://www.youtube.com/cosmicskeptic Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
But when a child dies of leukemia, could there be a purpose to it? Did God command the ethnic cleansing of the land of Israel? I'm not saying the scribe made something up. I'm saying the scribe has a command. So where did they get that command from? From God. I had Jesus appear to me three years ago. I don't know what's happening now. I have to suspect it's some kind of psychological phenomenon.
From Jubilee Media, this is Surrounded, where one brave soul faces a room full of disagreeers. Let's get into it.
Hi, my name's Alex O'Connor. I'm an atheist and host of the Within Reason podcast, and today I'm surrounded by 25 Christians who, God willing, might be able to change my mind. My first claim is that suffering makes God's existence unlikely. I think when confronted with two hypotheses, so atheism, naturalism, or theism, we should ask what we expect would occur under either hypothesis.
And then we look at the world and we see what does actually occur. And what do we find? We find, I think most relevant here, a system of natural selection, the mechanism by which God apparently chose to bring animals and ultimately human beings into existence. a system which is defined by suffering. Survival of the fittest is the same thing as the death and suffering and destruction of the unfit.
I'm told that the very mechanism that God chose to bring about the human species as the ultimate end of his creation was one that is imbued with suffering such that 99.9% of all the species, let alone animals, that have ever existed on planet Earth have been brutally wiped from existence into extinction. And I think that that's less likely
on theism, if you assume atheism or materialism, not only do you explain this, you also come to expect it. What is your, I guess, epistemology? How would you, how do you know that this is the case, that it's less likely, and that, you know, an atheist worldview, a naturalistic worldview would look like the way it is today?
Of course we don't know, but that's why I use the phraseology of unlikely. I think that if you were to tell somebody who was sort of in some rulesy and state of nature, hadn't seen the world, and you said that the world has been created by an omnibenevolent, all-powerful God, what kind of world would that person be imagining?
And if you dropped them into the world, if you were given the opportunity to become a wild animal, like in two seconds, I was just going to turn you into a random wild animal somewhere on planet Earth. I like being a guy. I think you'd probably kill yourself before I had the opportunity because you know that the life of these animals is almost defined in terms of their suffering.
I guess I just don't really see how you can justify that claim per se. What I would say is that if we actually take into account the holistic view of the scriptures, which I do think that you have to do, we see that it's actually much more coherent once you acknowledge that evil itself doesn't have ontology. Evil's not a thing. You don't look under a rock and say, there's the evil, right?
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