Chad McIntosh, the editor of the new journal Triptych, invited me to submit an article to his online publication. He suggested a revision of an old Substack article of mine. Here is the redacted version. I solicit your comments on content and style. The final section is incomplete. My deadline for submission is 1 September.
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THE HOLOCAUST ARGUMENT FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
In The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ, Andrew Klavan writes,
There are people who say that an evil as great as the Holocaust is proof there is no God. But I would say the opposite. The fact that it is so great an evil, so great that it defies any material explanation, implies a spiritual and moral framework that requires God’s existence. (Nashville: Nelson Books, 2016, p. 231)
I’ve often had a similar thought. In this article I will present an argument from the fact of great moral evil to the existence of God. I will conclude with a brief comparison of my argument to some others in the literature.
Project
The usual order of proceeding is from the fact of evil to the nonexistence of God. From Epicurus to David Hume to J. L. Mackie, this has been a staple in the history of philosophy. (See J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for an against the Existence of God, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982) There is no need to rehearse the familiar logical and evidential arguments from evil to the nonexistence of God. They are well-known and have been carefully studied. There is no denying their force. Some of them are plausible even if none of them are strictly probative. But one can also plausibly argue from the fact of evil to the existence of God, and in several different ways.
One way is to argue that there could be no objective difference between good and evil without God. That there is such an objective difference is a presupposition of the stock atheist arguments. They can’t get off the ground without it. Given this objective difference, how is it possible? Might “the moral law within me” (Kant) require a transcendent lawgiver? One could argue that the objective difference between good and evil either requires a divine ground or is best explained by the positing of a divine ground. This is not the way I will be arguing. I do, however, presuppose that there is an objective difference between good and evil.
Another way of arguing, an instance of which will be presented here, does not argue to the existence of God from the objective difference between good and evil, or from evil in general, or from natural evil in particular, or from moral evil in general, but from a special feature of some moral evils. The special feature I will focus on is the horrific depth and severity of some moral evils, a phenomenon that beggars naturalistic understanding. This type of argument is what Klavan is hinting at above.
My aim is not to give a rationally coercive or ineluctably conclusive argument for the existence of God from horrendous moral evils. So I do not maintain, with Klavan, that the depth of these evils “requires” or entails God’s existence. There is no valid deductive argument the premises of which are either absolutely certain or ‘morally certain’ (certain beyond a reasonable doubt) that can take us from the fact of horrendous moral evils committed by humans to the existence of God. The most we can hope for is an abductive argument to God as the best explanation of the fact of horrendous moral evils. Given that ‘refute’ is a verb of success, my aim here is not to refute atheist arguments from evil but merely to neutralize them by showing that the tables can be turned: the objective fact of moral evil can just as easily be marshaled in support of God. This is especially so if we focus on the worst instances of moral evil.
Further, I have no illusions about neutralizing atheist arguments from evil in the eyes of atheists. My old friend Quentin Smith once said to me, “If you were God, would you have created this world?” For him this question had the force of a refutation, articulating as it did one of his deepest convictions: the godlessness of the universe. Against convictions that run as deep as this, convictions ‘bred in the bone before born in the brain,’ argument comes too late. So my purpose in the following is merely to show theists that their position is rationally acceptable and thus rationally defensible. A secondary purpose is to show that those who are inclined to accept theism, but have not yet committed themselves, may embrace it while remaining within the precincts of reason. A tertiary purpose is to foster this inclination in those who are open-minded ‘fence-sitters.’
Definitions, distinctions, and assumptions
By “God’ I mean the God of the Christian Bible replete with the standard omni-attributes, the very ones exploited by Hume et al. for their atheistic purposes. More specific attributes such as divine simplicity and divine tri-unity are not relevant to what follows.
I provisionally assume the standard distinction between moral and natural evil. Moral evil is evil that has its source in a misuse of free will. Whose misuse? The only moral agents we are familiar with are ourselves, human beings. Human beings are physically embodied and reside in the natural world. But we ought not assume that all finite moral agents reside in the natural world. Between the natural and the supernatural lies the preternatural wherein presumably are located such finite spirits as angels, fallen angels (demons) and perhaps pre-embodied and disembodied human souls. Demons are demons because of their misuse of free will. If there are demons, then moral evil has one source in us and another in them. If demons are allowed into our ontology, then the distinction between moral and natural evil remains, but with the proviso that natural evil is, or can reasonably be viewed as, a species of moral evil, namely, the evil bought about by demons by their pernicious influence on us, on lower animals, and on inanimate nature. The Christian theist can then account for all evil as moral evil. Multifarious are the ways in which demons are supposed to bring about evil. Most common is temptation, an ‘ordinary’ diabolical influence. But there are also ‘extraordinary’ diabolical assaults which include possessions, oppressions, and vexations. The Roman Catholic exorcist, Fr. Carlos Martins distinguishes six types of demonic activity. The first type is ‘ordinary,’ the rest ‘extraordinary’: temptation, vexation, infestation, oppression, obsession, and possession. (See his The Exorcist Files, New York: Faith Words, 2024, pp. 43-60)
If there are no demons, and natural evil is not a species of moral evil, then this irreducibly natural evil, affecting as it does both humans and lower animals, is a very powerful reason to reject theism. Intellectual honesty demands that we admit this. Without the reduction of natural evil to a species of moral evil, nature “red in tooth and claw” is hard to square with theism. The notion that a world so apparently awful as ours could be the creation of an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving deity, one who providentially cares about his creatures, strikes many as either a sick joke, a feel-good fairy tale, or something equally intellectually disreputable. To repeat what Quentin Smith once said to me, “If you were God, would you have created this world?” A world in which sentient beings eat each other alive, are biologically programmed to do so to survive, and lack the ability to commit suicide, does not seem to be a world optimally arranged. If you were the omni-competent and omni-benevolent architect of our world, would you design it to be a slaughterhouse? (See Quentin Smith, “An Atheological Argument from Evil Natural Laws (Religious Studies, 1991), https://infidels.org/library/modern/quentin-smith-evil-laws/) If, on the other hand, natural evil is a species of moral evil, then this ‘abattoir objection’ to theism can be turned aside. Natural evil can be charged to the account of the demons.
But are there demons? Well, they are attested in the Bible, in the Pauline letters and elsewhere, and are essential to the Christian narrative. If you want empirical evidence of their existence, I refer you to Richard Gallagher, M. D., Demonic Foes: My Twenty-Five Years as a Psychiatrist Investigating Possessions, Diabolic Attack, and the Paranormal (Harper One, 2020). See also Fr. Carlos Martins, op. cit.
I assume that the difference between good and evil is objective, and not a matter of attitude or anything merely subjective. When I say that the horrific depth and intensity of some moral evils “beggars naturalistic understanding,” I mean that the magnitude of these evils is hard to understand if naturalism is true. By ‘naturalism,’ I mean metaphysical naturalism. David M. Armstrong’s ‘strict observance’ definition serves present purposes.
According to Armstrong, naturalism is the thesis that “all that exists is the space-time world . . . .” (D. M. Armstrong, Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics, Oxford UP, 2010, p. 1). The space-time world is the physical world. The thesis of naturalism, then, is that reality is exhausted by physical reality. Armstrong deploys a criterion of reality that is at once both physical and causal: an item is real if and only of it it is physical and causally active/passive. Other philosophers, such as Graham Oppy, favor a more latitudinarian definition that allows the ontological inventory to include causally inert abstract objects in addition to spatiotemporal concreta. Oppy’s position, however, is just as inhospitable to theism as Armstrong’s since both sorts of naturalist “suppose that causal reality just is natural reality” and that theists “suppose that in addition to natural reality there is a further nonnatural causal reality,” one that includes God, angels, and departed souls. (Graham Oppy, “Conflict Model,” Four Views on Christianity and Philosophy, Zondervan 2016, p. 31)
The holocaust argument
The argument is animated by the intuition that homo homini lupus does not capture the full extent of human depravity: man is not a wolf to man, but a demon to man. The Latin saying is an insult to the wolves to boot, who are by nature predatory. Lacking free will, they cannot help eating animals alive. By contrast, a man who behaves savagely towards human beings does so by free choice. His savagery is not plausibly viewed as merely animalic, a matter of biological ‘programming,’ but is plausibly regarded as spiritual in origin, and in a two-fold way: as deriving internally from a will that is free, but also as deriving externally from demonic influence. Free will is a spiritual attribute: no wholly material system possesses it. And of course demons are pure spirits. Human savagery is therefore two-fold in origin.
Before proceeding it would be good to have before us an example of human savagery. Fidel Castro, that hero of the Left, did not merely imprison his political opponents for their dissent, he had them tortured in unspeakable ways:
Mr. Valladares and other prisoners who refused ”political rehabilitation” were forced to live in the greatest heat and the dampest cold without clothes. They were regularly beaten, shot at and sometimes killed; they were thrown into punishment cells, including the dreaded ”drawer cells,” specially constructed units that make South Vietnam’s infamous tiger cages seem like homey quarters. Eventually, together with several others, Mr. Valladares plotted an escape from their prison on the Isle of Pines. But the boat that was to pick them up never arrived. He and his accomplices were brought back to their cells and given no medical attention, though Mr. Valladares had fractured three bones in his foot during the escape attempt.
The retribution was swift. Mr. Valladares writes: ”Guards returned us to the cells and stripped us again. They didn’t close the cell door, and that detail caught my attention. I was sitting on the floor; outside I heard the voices of several approaching soldiers. . . . They were going to settle accounts with us, collect what we owed them for having tried to escape. . . . They were armed with thick twisted electric cables and truncheons. . . . Suddenly, everything was a whirl – my head spun around in terrible vertigo. They beat me as I lay on the floor. One of them pulled at my arm to turn me over and expose my back so he could beat me more easily. And the cables fell more directly on me. The beating felt as if they were branding me with a red-hot branding iron, but then suddenly I experienced the most intense, unbearable, and brutal pain of my life. One of the guards had jumped with all his weight on my broken, throbbing leg.”
That treatment was typical. In the punishment cells, prisoners were kept in total darkness. Guards dumped buckets of urine and feces over the prisoners who warded off rats and roaches as they tried to sleep. Fungus grew on Mr. Valladares because he was not allowed to wash off the filth. Sleep was impossible. Guards constantly awoke the men with long poles to insure they got no rest. Illness and disease were a constant. Even at the end, when the authorities were approving his release, Mr. Valladares was held in solitary confinement in a barren room with fluorescent lights turned on 24 hours a day. By then he was partially paralyzed through malnutrition intensified by the lack of medical attention. (Ronald Radosh, “Surviving Castro’s Tortures,” The New York Times, June 8. 1986. https://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/08/books/surviving-castro-s-tortures.html?pagewanted=all)
Now no man is a demon, but a man can freely choose to play the demon in his behavior towards other animals both human and non-human. If he so chooses, the person is morally and not merely causally responsible for his morally horrific behavior. Moral responsibility presupposes freedom of the will. But although we are free, we are susceptible to the influence of any demons there might be. Of course, it does not follow from our choice to behave in a demon-like way that there are demons. The evidence for their existence is impressive, but hardly conclusive. For all we can claim to know, there may or may not be any demons. But if there are, we would be open to their malign influence and, though we would not be determined to act in accordance with their influence, we would be inclined to do so by our morally ambivalent (fallen) nature, such that some of us would succumb and freely follow their leading. Phase I of my overall abductive argument goes like this:
1) Although none of us are demons, some of us freely play the demon with respect to fellow humans by treating them savagely.
2) While it does not follow from (1) that there are demons, their malign influence on us would help explain what would otherwise be naturalistically inexplicable, namely, the horrendous depravity of the moral evils inflicted by some of us on others of us.
3) That this horrendous depravity is naturalistically inexplicable is supported by the following sub-arguments:
a) We are morally responsible for some of what we do and leave undone.
b) Moral responsibility presupposes (and thus entails) free will. Therefore:
c) Torturers are morally responsible for the torment they inflict upon their victims.
d) If naturalism is true, however, then free will and moral responsibility are illusions.
e) It is not the case that free will and moral responsibility are illusions. Therefore:
f) Naturalism is not true.
In support of (e), I offer the following epistemic argument:
g) We are directly aware of our libertarianly-free agency, our freedom in the unconditional ‘could have done otherwise’ sense.
h) That we enjoy this direct awareness is better known than the proposition that all of our mental and physical processes are causally necessitated by events antecedent to our births. Therefore:
i. We are justified in believing that we are libertarianly-free even if we cannot explain how this is possible given the putative (macro) determinism of nature.
Have I proven (definitively established) that horrendous moral evils are naturalistically inexplicable? No. But this should come as no surprise because in philosophy and theology there are no proofs of any substantive theses. Since the meta-thesis just enunciated is substantive, and a thesis of philosophy, a branch of which is metaphilosophy, there is no proof of my metaphilosophical thesis either. I accept this consequence with equanimity. But it is eminently reasonable to believe the meta-thesis, and like it or not, reasoned belief is as good as it gets in philosophy and metaphilosophy. It is as good as it gets and it is good enough.
Now for Phase II of my overall abductive argument. The truth of (3) — horrendous moral evils are naturalistically inexplicable — is logically consistent with the nonexistence of God. How do we get from the falsity of naturalism and the truth of (3) to the existence of God? How do we get from evil demons to the all-good God? As follows.
4) Given the falsity of naturalism, the existence of demons cannot be ruled out.
5) And given that our horrific demon-like behavior would be explained by our free acquiescence in demonic suggestions, the actual existence of these demonic agents is abductively inferrable. Abductive inference is admittedly ‘shaky’ as is every non-deductive inference. Nor can we be certain that the inference terminates in the best explanation. But abductive inferences are not in general irrational, and neither is this one in particular.
6) But we still need to get from the preternatural to the supernatural. The following argument rationalizes this move, in the sense that it renders it rationally acceptable.
j. The demonic host is a hierarchical order at the apex of which is an Evil Principle (and Principal). The undeniable reality of evil has a unified metaphysical ground. Call it Satan.
k. It is not unreasonable, then, to posit an Evil Principle to explain the full range and depth and depravity of evil. One might now speculate that God and Satan are equal but opposite principles and Principals, eternally at war with each other. Manicheanism looks to be a possible explanation of the depth of moral evil. It has been classically maintained, however, that Good and Evil are not co-equal principles. Such bifurcation would destroy the unity of Being which is the objective correlate of the mind’s drive toward explanatory unity.
l. So Good is primary, evil secondary and derivative. It is secondary and derivative in that it cannot exist without Good. One way to cash this out is by holding that evil is privatio boni, a lack, a privation, an absence of good. A stock example is ocular blindness. The evil of blindness is a lack of sight. Many evils can no doubt be assayed as defects, privations, insufficiencies, absences. But the privatio boni doctrine, while it accounts for the privative character of evil, does not explain its positive character. Surely there is more to evil than a mere lack of good. Glance back at the tortures inflicted by Castro’s henchmen on fellow Cubans. Was their suffering the absence of pleasure or the absence of a neutral hedonic state? Obviously not. And it was not merely horrific physical suffering that they endured, but the spiritual suffering of being the object of unremitting hatred and the concomitant sense of total abandonment by man and apparently also God, an abandonment akin to what Christ suffered on the cross: “My God, My God, why has thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34, harking back to Psalm 22:1)
If there is an Evil One as the source of horrendous evil, however, then the positivity of such evil can be charged to the Evil One’s account. The positivity of horrendous evil would then be grounded in the existence of the Evil One and the malevolence emanating from his misuse of his free will. Satan, after all, is not a mere absence of good, but a positive entity in his own right who, although good in his Being, is evil in his Willing. The Father of Lies is good insofar as he is: ens et bonum convertuntur. To be is to be good; hence every being (ens) is good insofar as it participates in esse (Being) Yet Satan is the ultimate source of evil in that his exercise of free will is malevolent.
m. If the existence of evil presupposes the existence of good, and evil exists in its prime instance as an Evil Person created by God, then good exists in its prime instance as the wholly good Person, God.
The holocaust argument and other similar arguments [incomplete]
There is more than one way to argue from evil to God. In a very useful article, “Theistic Arguments from Horrendous Evils,” Daryl Ooi distinguishes three types of argument, arguments from objectively horrifying evil, pragmatic arguments, and arguments from reasonable responses. (See Ooi, D., “Theistic Arguments from Horrendous Evils,” Philosophy Compass 2022 17(8), pp. 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12866 )
Alvin Plantinga has sketched arguments of the first type. (See Ooi, op. cit. for references.) My ‘demonological’ argument is also of this type. Marilyn McCord-Adams offers a pragmatic argument, the gist of which is as follows.
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Rudolf Höss, not to be confused with Hitler’s Landsberg amanuensis, Rudolf Hess, was a torturer by day but a loving family man by night. [ENDNOTE: Rudolf Höss (1900–1947) was a German SS officer and the longest-serving commandant of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp complex, serving from 1940 to 1943 and again in 1944. Höss was instrumental in industrializing mass murder, introducing Zyklon B as the primary method of execution in Auschwitz gas chambers. During the Nuremberg Trials, he provided detailed affidavits and testimony regarding the camp’s operations, admitting to personally supervising the extermination of approximately 1.1 million people. AI generated.]