The atmosphere at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was electric on the evening of October 7, 2009. Memorial Hall was filled to capacity with 1,500 students, and there was an overflow room for those who couldn't get in. Bible scholar Bart Ehrman and I debated the issue of whether God is to blame for the suffering and evil in the world.

I've been debating several leading atheists over the past two years—Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Michael Shermer, Peter Singer, and so on—but this was my first time debating Ehrman. Ehrman doesn't identify with the "new atheism" and he calls himself an agnostic, not an atheist. Christian students, however, often report that Ehrman is a bigger threat to their faith in part because he comes out of the Christian world. He knows how to use Christian vocabulary to dismantle Christian beliefs. That's why I wanted to debate Ehrman on his home turf, before his own students. I wanted them to see that his arguments could be met, and that there is an intelligent case to be made on the other side.

Ehrman has credibility with Christians because he used to be one of us. He went to Moody and then Wheaton and then Princeton Theological Seminary. There, he reports, he discovered that what he had been raised to believe about the Bible was false. Ehrman has since written several books debunking the reliability of Scripture, most notably the bestseller Misquoting Jesus. I'm not an expert on the authenticity of the Bible, so I didn't want to challenge Ehrman on that. In his most recent book, however, Ehrman says he finally jettisoned his faith over the problem of evil. Ehrman's latest book God's Problem is subtitled, "How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer." This, then, was the topic of our recent debate.

In his opening statement Ehrman emphasized the two themes I expected him to stress. He began on a personal note, describing how he used to be a Christian until he saw the light. Second, Ehrman gave a gruesome account of suffering in the world, from children dying of starvation to fratricidal wars to devastating famines and tsunamis to Nazis tossing children into the ovens of Auschwitz. Ehrman said he used to believe in a biblical God who loved us, and who intervened on behalf of those he loved. Look at the way that God sided with his chosen people of Israel, or how Christ performed miracles to heal the blind and the sick. Where, Ehrman asked, is that God now? For some reason he has become an absentee God. Perhaps, Ehrman suggested, that God does not really exist.

I countered by saying that I had been raised as a Christian, but for many years mine was a "crayon Christianity" that my parents taught me when I was little. Most of us don't outgrow this, and I suggested that Ehrman never did. For Ehrman, God remains a kind of Santa Claus, always ready to perform wonders and provide presents. Surely disappointment awaits someone who has this kind of crude expectation about God. Ehrman's deconversion, I suggested, was not a rejection of Christianity but only of crayon Christianity.

I also argued that ours was not a debate over the existence of God but over the nature of God. Imagine, I said, if I loved and admired my dad, regarding him as supremely concerned with my welfare. Now what if I had a serious problem and my dad refused to help? Would I conclude that my dad did not exist? Of course not. I might say, "I used to think my dad was a great guy, and now I have to revise my opinion of him." Similarly, I argued, God's role in a suffering world might cause us to alter our assessment of him, but in no way did it prove that God did not exist.

Taking a cue from the philosophical discussion of theodicy through the centuries, I distinguished between moral evil and natural suffering. Moral evil, I said, is the result of human action. We should not blame God for what humans choose to do. Sure, God could prevent such human action, but only at the expense of eliminating free will in the world. Ehrman countered that there is free will in heaven and yet there is no suffering in heaven, so clearly God could have made a world in which freedom is unaccompanied by suffering. Ehrman's point is clever, but in truth no one knows what it means to say that there is free will in heaven. Free will, after all, is exercised in a world of space and time: that's how we endure the consequences of our choices. If heaven is eternal in the sense of being outside of time, it seems meaningless to posit there the same kind of free will that we enjoy here on earth.

Not surprisingly Ehrman focused his case on natural suffering: the child who gets cancer, the 30,000 Asians wiped out in a tsunami. Obviously these could not be attributed to human action. I cited the book Rare Earth by astronomer Donald Brownlee and paleontologist Peter Ward. The authors argue that earthquakes, seaquakes and tsunamis aren't the kind of superfluous events that occur without reason and that we could easily do without. Rather, they insist that those are the product of plate tectonic, the motions of giant plates under the earth's suface and beneath the ocean floor.

Earth is the only planet that is known to have plate tectonics; without it, the oceans would cover the whole surface of the planet to a depth of several hundred feet. The fish would survive, but no humans.

The point here is that God created a lawful universe, and that we are the products of that lawful universe. When the sun is essential to life, it makes no sense to complain that some people get sunburned. When we need oceans and water to live, we can hardly avoid the risk that some people can drown. So too if plate tectonics is essential to the survival of human life, then surely occasional earthquakes and tsunamis are a price worth paying for the survival of the human species. Ehrman countered that God could have a lawful universe and still perform occasional miracles to prevent really tragic outcomes from occurring. I answered that miracles in the Bible were always performed for spiritual reasons, never as far as I could see merely to counteract the workings of nature.

Back and forth went the repartee. Throughout the debate Ehrman was a model of civility, and he went out of his way to praise the sophistication of my arguments and even to recommend my book Life After Death: The Evidence, out next month from Regnery. The questions from the students were of uniformly high quality, and the audience seemed riveted throughout. This debate was short on the kind of theatrics that have characterized some of my Hitchens debates. Later at the reception, however, Ehrman got into a heated argument with a group of Christians; one of them told me that Ehrman's cordiality and good manners on the podium were largely tactical.

The issue of suffering is huge, and affects believer and unbeliever alike. I want to do more on this topic, and chances are that Ehrman and I will cross swords on this issue again. I don't want to cause him too much pain, but in keeping with our topic I wouldn't mind making him suffer a little.

Ehrman said he used to believe in a biblical God who loved us, and who intervened on behalf of those he loved. Look at the way that God sided with his chosen people of Israel, or how Christ performed miracles to heal the blind and the sick. Where, Ehrman asked, is that God now? For some reason he has become an absentee God. Perhaps, Ehrman suggested, that God does not really exist.

Christian leaders from Dallas Willard to Rick Warren lend support to D'Souza's new book, Life After Death The Evidence

"A brilliant investigation of the fascinating and crucial issue of what happens when we die. It is an inquiry conducted on the basis of scholarship and reason and it provides a convincing answer that is explosive in its impact."

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"An indispensable, electrifying book. Writing clearly, forcefully and fairly, D’Souza covers an amazing range of arguments. I know of no better way to understand the issue of life after death than to get this book and just follow the argument."

Dallas Willard, professor of philosophy, University of Southern California

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The recent D'Souza vs Ehrman debate is available on DVD through debate sponsor
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"The real conflict in our day is over the nature of reason. A secularist concept of rationality that is widely accepted today simply precludes the possibility of a historical event such as the Resurrection of Jesus, just as it precludes the reality of a creator God and his presence and actions in the world of his creation. But this is not, first of all, a disagreement about the truth of such claims. Rather, it is a disagreement about the nature of reason. While there is no conflict in principle between reason and faith, Christian faith is in conflict with a truncated concept of reason that is itself not warranted by reason. Christian intellectuals need to more accurately locate the point of conflict with contemporary deformations of rationality, and more effectively contend for preserving and advancing a history of thought marked by greater confidence in the capacities and imperatives of reason itself."

Wolfhart Pannenburg
First Things

Read these past tothesource articles on Bart Ehrman

Faith Stealers
http://www.tothesource.org/8_17_2006/8_17_2006.htm

Buyer Beware
http://www.tothesource.org/2_7_2007/2_7_2007.htm

Unmasking Bart Ehrman
http://www.tothesource.org/4_22_2009/4_22_2009.htm

Can We Trust the Gospels
http://www.tothesource.org/12_18_2007/12_18_2007.htm

Read these past tothesource articles on the topic of Pain and Suffering

A Grief Observed
http://www.tothesource.org/12_30_2004/12_30_2004.htm

A Healing Embrace
http://www.tothesource.org/2_3_2005/2_3_2005.htm

Sandy's Corner - Child Development expert Sandy Spears

When In Doubt, Empathize!

This article is based on a similar scenario from the wonderful book How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber.

Let’s say you are driving through a construction zone with family members. Everyone is busy talking and you are a bit distracted. A police siren starts wailing and you are pulled over for speeding. You receive a ticket and know all that it imiplies: a $110 ticket, traffic school and increased insurance rates.

Your father-in-law: “You know, the next time you go through a construction zone you should slow down. You could hurt a construction worker.”

Your mother-in-law: “I don’t know why you are getting so upset. It is just a ticket. The world isn’t going to end because you got a ticket.”

Your father : “Why were you speeding? Did you know it was a construction zone? Do you know what kind of a lawsuit there could be if you had hit a worker?”

Your mother : “You poor thing. That officer was such a jerk to you! Where does he get off giving my son a ticket!”

Your spouse says: “Getting a ticket is so irritating! It didn’t help that there was so much commotion going on in the car.”

Finally! Empathy!

How did you feel with the empathy response? Imagine how your child feels when these methods are used on him after he loses a toy, breaks a toy, a pet dies or has to leave a fun sandbox. Do these comments bring you closer or further away to your child? Does your child feel like you understand what is important to him? After something frustrating first happens, they say a chemical floods your brain and suppresses higher cognitive functioning. The best time to deal with an issue, if at all, is later when the emotions calm down.

Send your letter to the editor to feedback@tothesource.org.