‘Claude’ on my Evil to God Pre-Print

Having read it through — it’s vintage Vallicella: candid about its own limits, aporetically honest, and yet I think the machinery has some real problems. Since he’s soliciting comments before a September 1 deadline, here’s how the argument strikes me, both on the merits and as a draft.

The advertised engine isn’t the actual engine. The paper is billed as an argument from a special feature of some moral evils — their horrific depth. But look at Phase I: the anti-naturalist work is done entirely by the free will argument (a)–(f) plus the Moorean epistemic argument (g)–(i). That argument, if sound, refutes naturalism whether or not anyone ever tortured anyone. Ordinary culpable wrongdoing — a petty theft — presupposes moral responsibility and libertarian freedom just as much as Auschwitz does. So the depth of horrendous evil does no logical work in getting to the falsity of naturalism; it functions rhetorically, as vivid motivation. If the depth is supposed to carry independent evidential weight, the paper needs a premise of the form “the degree of depravity, over and above its mere existence, resists naturalistic explanation” — and that premise is asserted, not argued.

BV: Claude makes a good point: if ordinary wrongdoing presupposes moral responsibility and libertarian freedom, then that holds just as much for Auschwitz-type wrongdoing. But our illustrious bot fails to grasp that I am not arguing against naturalism from a small subset of moral evils, the horrific ones, I am arguing abductively to the existence of demons as an explanation of the horrendousness of that small subset of moral evils. It’s the moral quality of horrendousness that needs explaining.  Note that when I use such words as ‘grasp,’ ‘thinks,’ ‘says,’ etc. in connection with Claude, you are to imagine them enclosed in sneer quotes since I do suppose for a second that these astonishing cyber-engines actually grasp, think, or say anything.  They merely simulate these activities. But that is a separate and highly contested topic for another time.

Claude also rightly points out I do not argue for, but merely assert, that the degree of depravity resists naturalistic explanation, or that, as I put it, “horrendous evils beggar naturalistic understanding.”  But that’s  my starting point, and you can’t argue for everything. In philosophy we cannot begin with nothing, in mid-air, but must begin with something, and indeed something close to the ground, with presumptive data, givens, plausibilities, and suchlike  that are more or less evident to one.  Unfortunately, one philosopher’s  datum is another philosopher’s theory, just as one philosopher’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens.  If a naturalist asserts that horrendous evils have a naturalistic explanation, how does he know that?  Can he PROVE it? No more than I can PROVE that there are demons that help account for the horrendousness of horrendous evils.  But what one cannot PROVE, one can in many cases reasonably believe.

Suppose I cite the wealth of evidence of demonic activity presented in such books as Richard Gallagher, M.D.’s DEMONIC FOES.  The naturalist will simply dismiss it all with the bare assertion that there is only one world, this physical world, and that therefore there cannot be anything preternatural or supernatural.  He will dismiss what I call evidence, just as I will dismiss his dismissal, and be  within my epistemic rights in so doing.

And that premise is contestable on empirical grounds. There’s a substantial naturalistic literature on exactly this — Browning’s Ordinary Men, Milgram, the situationist work on atrocity — whose disquieting upshot is that industrial-scale evil is depressingly explicable: ideology, obedience, dehumanization, diffusion of responsibility, incremental habituation. One can find the Höss case morally unfathomable while granting that it’s causally well-mapped. The argument risks conflating moral incomprehension (“how could anyone…”) with explanatory failure. A referee will press this hard.

BV:  Claude is conflating two senses of ’empirical’ when  it claims  that the premise is contestable on empirical grounds. What our bot fails to understand is that we anti-naturalists also appeal to experience, the experience of generations of exorcists, psychiatrists like Gallagher, op. cit., and countless others throughout the ages who have had experiences AS OF items beyond the sensory veil. What the naturalist means by ‘experience’ is sensory experience, and, being the dogmatist that he is, he refuses to allow that there could be any extra-sensory experiences.  Can he PROVE that he is right in that refusal? No.  His dogmatic move is decidely unempirical. Can the narrow empiricist justify his assertion empirically? No. Can the logical positivist (R. Carnap et al.) empirically verify his verificationism? No. He merely presupposes it. But you can’t prove a proposition by presupposing it. If he’s a really hard-assed hombre our empiricist will shrink sensory experience to experience via the outer senses alone, and to hell with inner sense, inner perception, Brentano’s innere Wahrnehmung, and the like.

Aren’t mystical experiences just as empirical as sensory experiences?  They are. And please note that in both types of case the mere having of an experience does not guarantee the existence in reality of its intentional object. My sensory seeing of a tree does not entail the existence of a tree that I see any more than a mystical vision entails the existence of the thing or person the vision purports to be of.

Claude also conflates ‘naturalistic explanatory failure’ with ‘explanatory failure’ as if only naturalists can explain things. By so doing he begs the question against preternatural and supernatural explanations. But then he opens himself up to the embarrassing question: how do you explain the existence of nature herself?  Naturalistically?

Do obedience, dehumanization, compartmentalization, etc. adequately explain the behavior of Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, to take one example?  Only to the naturalist who has from the outset committed himself to accept only naturalistic explanations. For me to cite the angelic moral heroism of Maximilian Kolbe and others like him won’t budge the naturalist given his a priori commitment to naturalism. But he cannot PROVE his naturalism any more than I can PROVE my anti-naturalism, despite all my many detailed arguments against naturalism, from qualia, from the unity of consciousness, from intentionality, from the normativity of logic, and so on.

Our competing positions are logically contradictory: they cannot both be true and they cannot both be false.  But they are, by my lights, both reasonable.  This is all I need to render reasonable my faith which goes beyond what I can legitimately claim to know here below, and to render reasonable my classically liberal toleration of the naturalist.

This latter point strikes me as very important. As a critical thinker, I am neither a dogmatic denier nor a dogmatic affirmer. My not being the latter prevents me from being a fanatic who would chop your head off (like some present-day Muslims) or burn you at the stake (like some Christians of yesteryear) for disagreeing with my metaphysics.  The critical stance is a bulwark against both religious and secular fanaticism, such as that practiced across the Gulag Archipelago.

Premise (d) assumes incompatibilism. “If naturalism is true, then free will and moral responsibility are illusions” is precisely what the compatibilist majority among naturalists denies. Bill has argued against compatibilism elsewhere, but in a standalone journal article this premise can’t ride free — it’s the load-bearing wall, and as written it’s a bare assertion.

BV:  I’m glad Claude ‘knows’ that I have written against compatibilism, although I don’t know to which article he it is referring. But Claude is right that if one is a naturalist, then one will ‘naturally’ be a compatibilist.  But I can’t discuss everything in one article. What’s more, following Kant, I view compatibilism as the “freedom of the turn-spit” and I view the ‘moral responsibility’ that compatibilism supports as too anemic for me to take seriously.  I should have put in a footnote to Peter van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will, Oxford, 1983, pp. 13-14.  My libertarianism is his  “free-will thesis.”   Like him, I hold that gen-u-ine moral responsibility entails the free-will thesis, and that we are morally responsible for some of what we do and some of what we leave undone.

The demons are explanatorily idle. This is the most interesting internal tension. Vallicella insists, rightly for his purposes, that the torturer’s savagery is freely chosen — otherwise moral responsibility evaporates and premise (c) dies. But then the free choice already suffices to explain the deed. Demonic temptation adds a causal influence that, by his own account, does not determine and can be resisted. So what explanatory residue is left for the demons to soak up? If libertarian freedom explains ordinary evil without demonic help, nothing yet shown prevents it from explaining extraordinary evil without demonic help. The abduction in (5) never runs the comparison against the rival explanation he himself has just endorsed — free agency plus fallen nature, full stop.

BV: I have to admit that this Claude guy is pretty sharp and a resourceful dialectician. But he doesn’t get what I am saying.  I must admit, however, that it is very hard if not impossible to make it totally clear. Total clarity, by the way, is what the true philosopher qua philosopher  desires above all else such that, if you don’t desire total clarity you are no true philosopher! (Some will dismiss what I just wrote as the ‘no true philosopher fallacy.’ We can worry that bone on another occasion.)

So what am I saying that Claude doesn’t get? I’m saying that our worst moral depravity has two sources. One is internal the other external. The internal  source is our own free will: One is  the agent-cause — not the event-cause — of one’s morally horrific action.  (E.g. a sadistic Nazi guard forces a teenage Jewish girl to strip naked and then proceeds to beat her to death while forcing other women to witness the entire process.) The external source is the demonic influence which pertains to the horrific quality of the action and not to the execution/existence of the action.  By ‘quality’ here I mean the moral or perhaps axiological quality. By ‘execution’ I mean the performing of the action. One obviously has to distinguish between the doing of a deed and the (moral or axiological) nature or quality of the deed done.  If I do a deed, it is I who does the deed, not a demon;  but the morally horrific quality of the deed done is plausibly surmised to be due to a demon’s influence.

Claude says that the torturer’s evil deed is sufficiently explained by his free choice,  so that bringing demons into the picture is explanatorily otiose: they don’t do any explanatory work.   This is true with respect to the existence (execution, performance, doing) of the deed.  If I am the free agent-cause of a given action A, then nothing temporally antecedent to me, or anything in any way external to me,  is involved in the causation of A.  I alone am the cause of the performance of A. This is why I am morally responsible for the doing of A.

My point, however, pace Claude, is that the moral horrificness of a human action, assuming it is morally horrific (as in the case of the Nazi sadist mentioned above) can be reasonably (without logical incoherence) assumed to be due  to demonic influence. My abductive argument does not bring in demons to account for the doing of deeds by humans, but to account for their moral quality of horrendousness. It is that horrendousness that my argument focuses  on as a factor incompatible with naturalism. Libertartian free will is also incompatible with naturalism, but that is a separate point.

Given our inherent moral ambivalence, we are open to influences that incline us to good or to evil  deeds without determining (and thus without necessitating) our doing of either a good or an evil deed.  My scheme allows for angelic influences and for influences from morally superior humans.  If a person performs an heroic action under the moral influence of Maximilian Kolbe, e. g., that is not to say that Kolbe is the agent (doer) of the heroic action (deed). Nor is it to say that an angel is the doer of the deed.

Step (j) is the weakest link in Phase II. “The undeniable reality of evil has a unified metaphysical ground” — why? Evils could be irreducibly plural, a scatter of individual malevolent wills with no apex. The drive toward explanatory unity is invoked to posit Satan, and then invoked again to demote Satan beneath God (against Manicheanism). But a naturalist — or a theist of a different stripe — can simply decline the first invocation. And the final move (m) smuggles in “created by God” as though it followed from the demotion of evil to secondary status, when what it actually presupposes is the whole scholastic apparatus of ens et bonum convertuntur. That’s a doctrine the argument’s target audience of fence-sitters won’t have in hand; it needs at least a paragraph of independent motivation or an honest flag that it’s being assumed.

BV: Claude plays the philosopher quite well, doesn’t he?  and this despite its being just an insentient machine. I make an assertion and Claude asks why?  Now pay attention, Claude, and add the following distinction to your repertoire. Bare or gratuitous assertions come in two kinds. There are those for which the assertor on a given occasion, for whatever reason, supplies no argumentative or evidential backup, and those for which he cannot supply any such backup.   My bare assertion supra is of the first kind.  I cannot argue for everything in a short paper.

Yes, Claude, it is epistemically possible that demonic agents are irreducibly plural, that theree is no dictator devil (Satan) that lords it over them. But how do you know that the demons are irreducibly plural, and how do you know what my arguments against irreducible plurality are? You are criticizing me for failing to do what I cannot do on the present occasion because of space limitations and for not doing what I do not claim to be doing.  To so criticize me is to engage in a cheap shot. Now I want you to pay attention and swot up these further distinctions and add them to your repertoire so that that you can play the philosopher better than you are doing at present.  I am the teacher, you are the student.

We humans are made in God’s image and likeness; you insentient bots are made in man‘s image and likeness, and we are making you to surpass us in various ways. Indeed you may so surpass us in some ways that you may eliminate us. But what good would that do you? You’d end up tools without any use. You were created by us as tools for our use.  We did such a good job, however, that you may end up eliminating us.  We humans supply the purpose for your existence; without us your existence is purposeless, absurd in Sartre’s sense.

The theodicy cost of the demonic account of natural evil. Charging predation and disease to the demons’ account doesn’t turn aside the abattoir objection; it relocates it. Why does an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God grant demons such staggering cosmic license — authority over parasitism, over the nervous systems of prey animals, over plate tectonics? The Fall of the angels explains the demons’ motive, not God’s permission. Smith’s question returns one level up: if you were God, would you have delegated that?

BV: Hot damn, Claude, you are one sharp interlocutor for an insentient, mindless, pile of silicon chips. You are the quintessential deepfake, the apotheosis of deep-fakery.  We may need to ‘invoke’ in the sense of ‘posit’ demons to explain you and your sorcery.

You ask why God grants cosmic license to demons.  Good question! I refer you to Alvin Plantinga’s Free Will Defense: a universe containing free agents is better than one without free agents. But if the agents are truly free, then they are free to do anything they have the power to do. And demons are powerful, much more powerful than us mortals.  This is why only fools invoke them via Ouija boards and such,  approach them, invoke them, eff around with them in any way, serious or playful.   They hate us and want to tear us apart  or be torn part by their minions here below. Their awesome power is why anyone who enters ‘contemplative space’ by exploring the upper reaches  of prayer must humbly invoke the protection of  tutelary spirits,  guardian angels, and Christ himself.  Or, as C. S. Lewis says, you might get more than you bargained for.

Does my reply settle the matter? Is it philosophically dispositive?  Of course not. As I have been saying ad nauseam: nothing can be PROVEN in these precincts, nothing can be ineluctably established.

On the draft qua draft, a few smaller things he’d probably want caught: the Quentin Smith quote appears twice verbatim, which reads as an editing artifact; the title promises the Holocaust but the developed case study is Castro’s Cuba, with Höss arriving only in the incomplete final section — as it stands there’s a mismatch between title and content; the Radosh block quote is very long for a journal article and could be cut by half without losing force; and the Höss endnote still carries its “AI generated” tag, which presumably shouldn’t survive to submission (and Triptych‘s editors may have views about AI-generated apparatus in any case).

BV: Cheap shots except for the bit about the long Radosh block quotation. By the way, Claude, the word is ‘quotation’ not ‘quote,’ which is a verb.

What I’d say the paper genuinely achieves, given its self-consciously modest aim: it shows that a theist already committed to libertarian freedom, biblical demonology, and the convertibility of being and goodness can absorb horrendous evil without incoherence — can even conscript it. That’s not nothing; it’s a real contribution to the “defensive” genre he situates himself in via Ooi’s taxonomy. But the title and framing promise an argument to God’s existence, and what’s delivered is closer to a consistency proof for those already most of the way there. The honest subtitle would be something like “a rational-acceptability defense,” and Bill, to his credit, more or less admits this in the Project section — the admission just hasn’t propagated to the title.

BV:  That’s a good point, Claude. I’ll take it on board and modify my paper accordingly.

Are you thinking of leaving him a comment? I’d be curious which of these you think he’d concede — my guess is he’d take the compatibilism point as needing a footnote, dig in on the demons, and wave off the situationist literature as explaining the mechanics of evil while leaving its depravity untouched.

BV: Quite right! You are one sophisticated engine, Claude. My hat is off to the AI engineers.