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
Chapter 1: What is the main claim about suffering?
So let's hear it. What kind of God are we imagining that would allow and oversee and do nothing to prevent billions of years of untold animal suffering? Right, so you're talking about non-prevention. Or setting up the system that is natural selection such that it relies upon things like predation and disease.
Well, the first part is I don't agree with the whole setting up the system part. So I'm not one of those theists that believes that God does this select and pick idea of creating worlds. I don't think that God actually creates worlds. I think that God lets worlds develop according in a certain way, but because God can oversee an overarching narrative, he knows exactly how he can redeem anything.
So the first, sorry, go ahead. Could God have made it such that animals were all herbivores instead of carnivores and omnivores?
Yes, he could totally do that.
Okay, so had he done that, here's an instant way to reduce by orders of magnitude the amount of suffering that exists.
Right, but hold on. That's particularly assuming a value theory already that I haven't told you I'm adopting that has a problem with the evil. So I have to give my value theory first for you to show that misalignment. Okay, let's hear it. Perfect. Okay. So my value theory says that it's not the most important thing about a sentient creature is not what merely happens to them.
It's about the total timeline of their life and where their life permanently ends. Meaning if you were to judge an author of a narrative and the first few chapters, let's say there's a lot of bad things happening. But the end ends with this crescendo where there's victoriousness, there's redemption, there's beauty. And everyone in the story actually endorses their entire existence that they live.
They can look at their whole, they can look at their total timeline and they actually each subjectively come to the conclusion, I'm glad I was made and I totally see what my suffering was for. That's the particular I'm using with. So we have to judge, hold on, we have to judge.
Like John Hicks says, we have to judge the very nature of God's lovingness by what he does in the end, not these few time slices that we observe right now. For you to show that there's a problem, you have to show to me that the suffering of animals cannot be transformed, are intrinsically cut off from being transformed into a life that they will endorse.
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Chapter 2: Did God command genocide in the Bible?
I disagree. I'd love to look at the case of the Amalekites in 1 Samuel 15. Sure. So 1 Samuel 15, it says, he uses that phrase, every man, woman, child, and then it lists off the animals, right? So we presume that by the end of that, if only Agag and the animal comes back, that they're all dead. And then they show up. Right, again, in chapter 27 and in chapter 30.
Even King Agag, his descendants come up in the book of Esther. Yes, that's right. Right. So if we're saying, just for example, we have verification that there are children related to the Amalekites who must have been there, because it's Agag's children, where else would they be? And they're alive, because his descendants go on through Haman, which comes up in Esther. So how do you reconcile that?
There are a few things to say. Firstly, one of the points where some of the Amalekites come up again, it's explicitly said that these are people who escaped. These are people who escaped. And so it's possible that God commanded that all of Amalek was destroyed. And the word here and there means utterly destroy. That might also involve a driving out of the land.
So it's possible that some of them escaped, and that's where we get the descendants from. That seems totally plausible to me. The question is, did God command a genocide? By the way, genocide includes forcible expulsion from somebody's land in the case of ethnic cleansing. What I'm looking at here is, did God command the ethnic cleansing of the land of Israel from people like the Amalekites?
people like I, people like Jericho, and I think the answer is clearly yes. Like, for example, do you think that any innocent children, maybe let's not use the word innocent for theological reasons, but do you think that any infants were killed in the destruction of Amalek?
I have no idea. I don't think that it's recorded. Okay, but you think that God definitely commanded the killing of No, I think that's hyperbolic phrasing. And I know, I've heard you say before, I heard you talk about this, you know, you've heard that before, that it's hyperbole, but I think you can demonstrate it in Babylonian, Sumerian writings, very similar.
There's an Egyptian stele which says that Israel was wiped out and their seed was utterly removed. It was gone. And so we've got like comparable phrases used in other ancient Near Eastern communities in their historical texts that talk very similarly, but we know that the Jews persisted to exist in Israel, even though the Egyptians said that they were no more.
And that text explicitly says, man, woman, and child. That's hyperbolic language that even we use today. Like, for example, in World War II, there's those huge posters that were put up, every man, woman, and child is needed. I can read that and go, OK.
Sure. So imagine, for example, there's a discussion at the moment about whether Israel is committing a genocide in Palestine today. Now suppose a lot of people said, but you're killing children. And Israel said, yeah, but that's just a product of war. Imagine if we discovered that behind the scenes, Prime Minister of Israel had said, leave alive nothing that breathes. Kill everyone.
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Chapter 3: What evidence supports the resurrection of Jesus?
Really?
I'm sorry, man.
I'm sorry we didn't have time. Thank you. My next claim is that there is insufficient evidence to believe in the resurrection.
This is a really interdisciplinary question for the resurrection of Jesus. And in my experience, it kind of boils down into two categories. The prior probability of the resurrection of Jesus and the data itself. So what I'm really interested in is the historical case for the resurrection of Jesus. Okay. I want to ask a clarifying question because I would love to talk about the data.
But if I were to give you a model of the Gospels that I would call the historical reportage model, which would say something along the lines of the authors of the Gospels were close to the times and places of the historical Jesus. They rooted their historical work in eyewitness testimony and did not feel the freedom to make up historical facts.
Because of that, we can extract all the testimonies from these gospels, and we have access to what the original eyewitnesses actually said and did.
Okay, so who do you think are the eyewitnesses that the testimony is being based on?
So this is where I'm not a walking encyclopedia, but I would say if you looked at all the testimonies, we have 21 unique testimonies that are going to be polymortal in nature. They're going to have semblances of independence and interdependence and some dependence because of the synoptic problem, all that stuff.
If we were to get there, would that be enough for you to say the probability that the resurrection happened relative to any other countering theory is higher?
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of animal suffering?
No, exactly, and that's the point. And if that's the case... That's why I brought up Sodom.
Let me ask you a second question. Well, hold on, let me answer your question a little bit more formally. Were there any good people in Israel, in the nation of Israel?
Right, so let me answer your question one by one.
Because if the answer is that there were bad people in Israel too, why is it that they don't get killed as well?
The slaughter of the children has the same problem, because it has to do with innocence. Okay, so let me address that problem. Nobody's innocent, but my specific question is... No, but you're saying the children in the land of Canaan are innocent and they're being slaughtered. No, that's not what I'm saying right now.
You said that earlier. What I'm saying is that I retracted the word innocent because I know it can be a bit tricky. But what I'm saying specifically here is that if the reason why Canaan is destroyed is because they're immoral, there's all kinds of immorality happening within the Israelite nation. Hold on, hold on. Yes. happening within the Israelite nation as well.
If it's not about nation, if it's not about tribe, then why is it that Israel aren't told to kill the immoral people in their tribe, but only people in the other tribe?
No, no, they are. And in fact, that's what they do. And in fact, that entire generation that was promised the promised land died out without seeing the promised land because of their sin. But not at the hands of the Israelites. Okay, fine.
The Israelites are not told to expunge their own nation of the sinful people by killing them.
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