Category: God

‘Claude’ on my Evil to God Pre-Print

Long-time friend of MavPhil, Malcolm Pollack, kindly submitted my “Holocaust” pre-print to the latest version of the AI engine Claude with, as Malcolm says, “no priming; I just gave it the link and asked what it made of the argument.”  Here is what it spit out in 30 seconds!  I have inserted some responses. They will clarify what I said in the pre-print and correct some of the misunderstandings of commenters in earlier comments.

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.

James N. Anderson Defends Van Til

In this entry I respond to Dr. James Anderson‘s comments on a post of mine on presuppositionalism, God, Doubt, Denial, Truth: A Note on Van Til. But first a redacted excerpt from a letter of mine to Anderson explaining my interest in the topic:

Thank you for your willingness to respond. I consider you to be the intellectually sharpest among the presuppositionalists. Why am I interested in the ‘presuppers’? (No disrespect intended, just a cute abbreviation.)  Well, I am a philosopher of religion but I also have a long-term interest in transcendental philosophy. I wrote my dissertation on the ontological status of Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception, then followed the line down through the German Idealists, the neo-Kantians, to Brentano, Husserl, and Heidegger, who in Being and Time (1927) re-ignites the Being question within the purview of transcendental philosophy. So I am interested in how the ‘presuppers’ fit into that tradition with their TAG (transcendental argument for God).

I now turn to Anderson’s comments. My responses are in 14 pt:

I don’t think this [BV’s OP] quite captures what VT [Cornelius Van Til] has in mind. In context, he is arguing against the idea of a “neutral methodology” for evaluating truth-claims about reality (whether scientific or metaphysical). The underlying thought is that one’s theory of reality and one’s theory of knowledge must be coordinated; there is no metaphysically-neutral epistemology, no epistemology that is entirely indifferent to the nature and existence of God, the nature of the universe, the nature of man and his relationship to his environment, etc.

BV: I agree that the theory of reality and the theory of knowledge must be coordinated. As Gustav Bergmann famously remarked, “epistemology is but the ontology of the knowing situation.” (Logic and Reality, U. of Wisconsin Press, 1964, pp. 106, 324.)  Nicolai Hartmann, in his Metaphysik der Erkenntnis, 1921, is another who insists on the need for an ontology of cognition. 

To coin a slogan of my own, “The knowledge of being (objective genitive) presupposes the being of the knower (subjective genitive).”  So I agree with Anderson that “there is no metaphysically-neutral epistemology.” But he packs more into the quoted sentence  than I do, as we shall see. 

Specifically, a “neutral methodology” (as VT conceives it) holds the pretense that human knowledge and reasoning are possible whether or not God exists; thus the question of the existence of God is an open one from the outset, just like questions about the existence of black holes or Higgs bosons.

BV: Here is where the disagreement begins.  We agree that knowing is rooted in being and thus that epistemology  needs to be grounded in ontology. In particular, the knowledge of being presupposes the being of the knower. But how do get from these propositions, which will be readily granted by most if not all philosophers, to the proposition that the knowledge of being presupposes the being of God? To say that there is no knowledge without an existing knower is one thing, but quite another to say that there is no knowledge without God.  

It is important to realize than when Van Til and Co. speak of God they do not mean just any old god, but the God of the Bible, indeed the triune God of the Christian Bible with all of the Calvinist add-ons, and indeed some plainly Athenian extra-Biblical add-ons as well, such as the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS)! Van Til claims to find Old Testament support for DDS, a claim I question in my  Van Til on Divine Simplicity and the One and the Many.

I grant that if we are creatures of God, then there is no human knowledge without God. For if we are creatures of God, then God exists, whence it follows that human knowledge cannot exist unless God exists. No doubt. But that is logically consistent with saying that no God exists. To affirm a conditional is not to affirm its antecedent.

I think that Anderson will agree with me that God is not a being among beings, and is thus very different from a black hole, a subatomic particle, a planet, not to mention Russell’s celestial teapot and Edward Abbey’s angry unicorn on the dark side of the Moon.

Edward Abbey Quote: “Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?”

If God exists, he is not just one more thing that exists in addition to all the other things that exist. If God exists, then God is the metaphysical ground of the very existence of every contingent being, and indeed, of every being distinct from himself. This is not true of horses and teapots let alone of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. If there is a lunar unicorn, then this is just one more isolated fact about the universe. But if God exists, then everything is unified by this fact: everything has the ground of its being and its intelligibility in the creative activity of this one paradigmatic purely spiritual being. The God question cannot therefore be reduced to the question whether the totality of beings includes a very special being, God, with very special properties.  For if God exists, then everything other than God is a creature, which implies that everything other than God has an ontological status very different from the status it would have were God not to exist. We may call this status createdness or creaturliness.  Accordingly, the mode of Being of creatures is createdness whereas the mode of Being of God is very different, call it aseity, from-itself-ness. Creatures exist in a dependent way or mode while God exists in an independent way or mode.

I would say that God differs from every other being in (i) his mode of Being, (ii) his mode of necessity (he is not a necessary being in the same way that the number 7 is a necessary being, pace Alvin Plantinga), and (iii) his mode of property-possession: he does not instantiate his attributes, pace Plantinga: he is in some mysterious way identical to his attributes. As St. Augustine says, God IS what he HAS: he has attributes by being identical to them.  Van Til, as already noted, embraces the divine simplicity, although it strikes me as obvious that this is a Greek idea foreign to the Bible, and that therefore there is a tension between a strictly philosophical (Athenian) and a Bible-based (Hierosolymitan) approach to God.

If I am right, the question of the existence of God is not merely a question in special metaphysics (metaphysica specialis) along with questions about the soul and the world as a whole. (Recall that Kant divides special metaphysics into three subdisciplines: natural theology, rational psychology, and rational cosmology.) It is also a question in general metaphysics (metaphysica generalis) or ontology which concerns itself quite generally with ens qua ens, das Seiende als solches in its relation to esse, Sein. For again, if God exists, then the ontology of every non-divine being is different from the ontology it would have if God were not to exist.  The existence of God has general-metaphysical (ontological) repercussions.

The question, however, is whether the existence of God has epistemological repercussions. If God exists, does his existence have implications for the nature and scope of human knowledge?  The epistemological question is epitomized in Kant’s famous “What can I know?” To this we may add the question, “How do I know what I know?” If God exists, is what I can know and how I know it different from what I can know and how I know it if God were not to exist? Is it perhaps the case that if God were not to exist, we would know nothing at all? That may be the case, but one cannot just presuppose that this is the case.

VT [Van Til] reasons that if God exists (specifically, the absolute God of the Reformed Christian tradition) then all human knowledge necessarily depends on God. All creaturely knowledge is a kind of divine revelation; an analogical reconstruction of God’s definitive interpretation of his creation. As VT often put it, human knowledge is “thinking God’s thoughts after him.” A distinctively Christian metaphysics implies a distinctively Christian epistemology, in which case a “neutral” epistemology (if such were possible) would be a de facto denial of the Christian God. A method of inquiry according to which the existence of God and the existence of divine revelation are open questions is an anti-Christian method. That’s what VT means by “to doubt God is to deny him” — or, as he puts it two sentences later, “Neutrality toward God is in effect negation of God.”

BV:  I grant that the conditional If God exists, then all human knowledge depends on God is necessarily true. But how do we know that the antecedent of the conditional is true?  That is the question. If we know that the antecedent is true, then we can apply modus ponens to arrive at the knowledge that the conclusion is true. But how do we know that the antecedent is true?   If a conditional is true, it does not follow that its antecedent (or its consequent) is true. And as I said earlier, if one affirms a conditional, one does not thereby affirm its antecedent or its consequent. For example, to affirm that if Joe Biden is demented, then he is unfit for office, is not thereby to affirm either that he is demented or that he is unfit for office.    

One is of course free to presuppose the existence of the God of the Christian Bible with all the Calvinist and Athenian add-ons, but then one is arguing in a circle.  “We know that God exists because the existence of God is attested in the Bible which we know is true because it is God’s very Word.”   But of course this objection I am raising is ‘old hat’: Anderson has heard it hundreds of times.  The question, however, is whether he or any presuppositionalist has a good response to it. I’ll come back to this point shortly.

I will also point out that the penultimate sentence in the immediately preceding quotation is  not true. It is not anti-Christian to consider  questions about the existence of the God of the Christian Bible and about divine revelation to be open to investigation.  It is neither anti-Christian nor pro-Christian. Suppose one is a committed Christian theist. Why is it anti-Christian for such a person to inquire whether there are good reasons (whether of a demonstrative or a non-demonstrative sort) to maintain his commitment? Did Thomas Aquinas display an anti-Christian bias when he set forth his quinque viae?  Obviously he did not.

All this to say, I don’t take VT to be offering or defending a transcendental argument here; if anything, he is simply assuming the transcendental necessity of God. He isn’t reasoning from epistemology to metaphysics, but rather from (Christian) metaphysics to (Christian) epistemology. The idea that there can be no religiously-neutral epistemology is one of the animating themes of VT’s entire philosophy (although not one to which he holds exclusive rights).

Anderson’s first sentence displays a confusion of  ‘transcendental’ with ‘transcendent.’ By definition, God is a transcendent being: he exists whether or not creatures exist. If by ‘world’ we mean the totality of created beings, God is transcendent in that he exists whether or not the world exists.  Since Kant, we distinguish between transcendent and transcendental. The TAG argument is a transcendental argument in roughly Kant’s sense. But to explain this thoroughly would take us too far afield for a mere blog entry.

Finally, something about arguing in a circle.  It is blindingly evident that one cannot prove a proposition by presupposing it. And yet Van Til and his followers are surely within their epistemic/doxastic rights when they presuppose the truth of the their Bible-based Christian worldview together with all its Calvinist and Athenian add-ons. Maybe they are right! They go wrong, however, when they pretend to KNOW that they are right instead of humbly affirming that their worldview commitment  is a matter of reasoned FAITH and living in this faith and the uncertainty that faith brings with it. So they make fools of themselves by making the sophomoric logical mistake of thinking that they can prove a proposition by presupposing it. It is as if their doxastic security needs are so overwhelmingly strong that they cannot tolerate the least bit of uncertainty. 

Professor Anderson ends on an irenic note that suggests that he appreciates the difficulty of the Van Tilian position:

No doubt VT’s position is provocative, even for philosophers with Christian convictions. Whether his objection to a “neutral methodology” is cogent is a matter of debate. I offer these comments as an explanation rather than as a defense. Sufficient for the day is the trouble thereof. 🙂

Weil’s Wager

Karl White tells me he looked for this old essay of mine but couldn’t find it. His interest, for which I am grateful, inspired me to thoroughly re-think and re-work it. It is now tighter, cleaner, and better organized, and to be found at the top of the Stack.

In her New York Notebook from 1942, Simone Weil presents an argument which she claims “…is greatly preferable to Pascal’s wager.”[i] One of her commentators agrees, finding her argument “obviously both morally and intellectually” superior to Pascal’s.[ii] I will call this argument “Weil’s Wager.” As far as I know, it has yet to be subjected to a close examination.

The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation

Substack latest.

This entry continues the line of thought in Is Classical Theism a Type of Idealism?

God freely creates beings that are both (i) wholly dependent on God’s creative activity at every moment for their existence, and yet (ii) beings in their own own right, not merely intentional objects of the divine mind. The extreme case of this is God’s free creation of finite minds, finite subjects, finite unities of consciousness and self-consciousness, finite centers of inviolable inwardness, finite free agents, finite yet autonomous free agents with the power to refuse their own good, their own happiness, and to defy the nature of reality. God creates potential rebels. He creates Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus. He creates Lucifer the light bearer who, blinded by his own light, refuses to acknowledge the source of his light, and would be that source himself even though the project of becoming the source of his own light is doomed to failure, and he knows it, but pursues it anyway. He creates Lucifer who became the father of all perversity. The “Father of lights” (James 1:17) creates the father of lies.

God creates and sustains, moment by moment, other minds, like unto his own, made in his image, who are yet radically other in their inwardness and freedom. He creates subjects who exist in their own right and not merely as objects of divine thought. How is this conceivable?

Is Classical Theism a Type of Idealism?

I return an affirmative answer in my latest Substack entry. Opening two paragraphs:

If God creates ex nihilo, and everything concrete other than God is created by God, and God is a pure spirit, then one type of metaphysical realism can be excluded at the outset. This type of realism asserts that there are radically transcendent uncreated concrete things other than God. ‘Radically transcendent’ means ‘transcendent of any mind, finite or infinite.’ On this view, radically transcendent items exist and have most of their properties independently of any mind, including the divine mind. Call this realism-1. We could also call it extreme metaphysical realism.

No classical theist could be a realist-1. For on classical theism, everything other than God is created by God, created out of nothing, mind you, and not out of Avicennian mere possibles or any cognate sort of item. God creates out of nothing, not out of possibles. (’Out of nothing’ is a privative expression that means ‘not out of something.’ It does not mean ‘out of something called nothing.’) We also note that on classical theism God is not merely an originating cause of things other than himself, but a continuing cause that keeps these things in existence moment-by-moment. He is not a mere cosmic starter-upper. That would be deism, not classical theism. Whom do I have in mind? Thomas Aquinas for one. But I am not interested in playing the exegete with respect to his texts. I am thinking things through for myself. Unlike the mere scholar, a philosopher thinks for himself.

Is God in Bad Taste?

Some anti-Searlean remarks over at the Stack.  It begins like this:

John R. Searle has quit the sublunary for points unknown. We wish him the best. Since his 1969 Speech Acts, he has been a major contributor to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of society. How best do we honor a philosopher? By reenacting his thoughts, sympathetically yet critically, with an eye to learning what he has to teach us.

Is God a being among beings or Being Itself? An Exchange with Dale Tuggy

Top o' the Stack.

One morning, just as Old Sol was peeping his ancient head over the magnificent and mysterious Superstition range, I embarked on a drive down old Arizona 79, past Florence, to a hash house near Oracle Junction where I had the pleasure of another nice long three and one half hour caffeine-fueled discussion with Dale Tuggy. For me, he is a perfect interlocutor: Dale is a serious truth-seeker, no mere academic gamesman, analytically sharp, historically well-informed, and personable. He also satisfies a necessary though not sufficient condition of fruitful dialog: he and I differ on some key points, but our differences play out over a wide field of agreement.

I incline toward the view that God is not a being among beings, but Being itself. Dale rejects this view as incoherent. In this entry I will take some steps toward clarifying the issues that divide us. I will conclude in good old Platonic fashion, aporetically.

Notes on R. C. Sproul, Does God Exist? Part II

Part I is here. Sproul thinks he can prove that the God of the Christian Bible exists from reason alone.  By 'prove' he means establish with objective certainty. 

He begins by listing four possible explanations of reality as we encounter it.  I take him to mean by 'reality' the world as given to the senses.

1) Reality is an illusion.
2) Reality creates itself.
3) Reality is self-existent.
4) Reality is created by something distinct from it that is self-existent, God.

Sproul considers these the only four possibilities. His strategy is to refute the first three, thereby establishing (4). Pressed for time, I will be brief.  I will simply dismiss (1) as beneath refutation.

As for (2), nothing can create itself, if 'x creates x' means x causes x to exist. Why not? Well, for anything to do any causing it must already exist.  'Already' can be taken either logically or temporally or both. But nothing is or can be either temporally or logically prior to itself.  It is therefore impossible that anything create itself.  It is a necessarily true law of metaphysica generalis that nothing can create itself.  

But isn't God classically characterized as causa sui? He is indeed. But what that means is not that he causes himself to exist, but that he is not caused by another to exist. As I like to put it, the sense of causa sui is privative, not positive. It is built into the very concept God that God would not be God if he were caused by another to exist; that is not to say, however, that he causes himself to exist. To say that God is causa sui is equivalent to saying that he exists of metaphysical necessity.

By the way, don't confuse the concept God with God. That would be like confusing the concept chair with what you are presumably now sitting on.  Are you sitting on a concept?

As for (3), this pantheistic possibility is worth consideration, but I must move on. The idea is that Reality does not cause itself to exist, nor does it just happen to exist; it necessarily exists.

Sproul affirms (4) and he thinks he can prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt. By 'reality,' he means "reality as we encounter it." (p. 9)  That includes mainly, if not wholly, the people and things disclosed by inner and outer sense experience.  

But are those four the only (epistemic) possibilities? Why couldn't the reality we encounter just exist as a factum brutum, a brute fact?  By 'brute fact' I mean an obtaining or existing state of affairs that exists without cause or reason.  

Sproul needs to explain why the cosmos, physical world, nature cannot just exist. Why must it have an efficient cause or a reason/purpose (final cause)?  Why can't its existence  be a brute fact?  That is a (fifth) epistemic possibility he does not, as far as I can see, consider.

Notes on R. C. Sproul, Does God Exist?

Bill and Trudy 18 Feb 2025 Hackberry TH

Trudy the Calvinist gave me a reading assignment. Herewith a first batch of comments for her and your delectation, discussion, and (presumably inevitable)  disagreement.

In Chapter One, "The Case for God," Sproul distinguishes between four approaches in apologetics: fideism, evidentialism, presuppositionalism, and "the classical school" (4)  He comes out against the first three and nails his colors to the mast of the fourth.

Fideists maintain that there are no rationally compelling arguments for the existence of God, and that we must therefore rely on faith alone.  Sproul mentions Tertullian who opposed Athens (philosophy) to Jerusalem (Abrahamic religion) and famously asked what the latter has to do with the former. He held that Christianity is objectively absurd in the sense of logically contradictory, and that this absurdity was a sort of 'reason' to accept it: credo quia absurdum (I believe because it is absurd.)* Sproul rejects this extreme view on the ground that it amounts to "a serious slander against the character of God and the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of truth." (2) Sproul's point is solid. There cannot be self-contradictory truths.  If so, how could the Source of all truth, the Spirit of truth, be self-contradictory?

Evidentialists defend the faith through appeals to biblical history. I am put in mind of what S. Kierkegaard calls "the infinite approximation process" (See Concluding Unscientific Postscript) a process which never arrives at a fixed and final result.  According to Sproul, the most the evidentialist can attain is "a high degree of probability." (2) The probability is high enough, however, to prove the existence of God "beyond a reasonable doubt." Indeed, he thinks the probability sufficient to block  every "moral escape hatch," except one: "You didn't prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt," i.e., the case has not been conclusively made.  This is not good enough for Sproul: he thinks the case for the very specific God of the Christian Bible (presumably with all the Calvinist add-ons) must prove this God beyond even the shadow of a doubt.   

Moreover, Sproul  holds that one can establish the existence of the God in question beyond the shadow of a doubt. which is to say, in a rationally coercive, philosophically dispositive, entirely ineluctable, 'knock-down' way. Apologists of the classical school believe that the case for God can be made "conclusive and compelling." "It is actual proof that leaves people without any excuses whatsoever." (4) Sproul hereby alludes to Romans 1, as becomes clear at the end of the chapter. No excuses, no escape hatches.  You are morally at fault for refusing to accept the God of the Christian Bible!

Presuppositionalists, led by Cornelius van Til, hold that the existence of the God of the Christian Bible can be conclusively established, but to do so, "one must start with the primary premise of the existence of God." (4) One can inescapably conclude that God exists only by presupposing his existence. Sproul's objection is the standard one levelled against the apologetics of the 'presuppers,' namely, that presuppositionalism enshrines  (my word) the informal fallacy of petitio principii, or hysteron proteron if you prefer Greek. In plain English the fallacy is that of circular reasoning.  To put it in my own way: every argument of the form p; therefore p is formally valid in that it is logically impossible for the premise to be true and the conclusion false. But no argument of this form could give anyone a reason to accept the conclusion. Circular arguments, though valid in point of logical form, are probatively worthless.  Sproul goes on to tax Van Til & Co. with the fallacy of equivocation, but Sproul's discussion is rather less than pellucid, so I won't say any more about it; in any case, I agree with him that  presuppositionalism is an apologetic non-starter, as I have argued over many an entry.  (See my Van Til and Presuppositionalism category.)

Classical apologists such as Sproul and presuppositionalists both assert that without God there is and can be no rationality. The difference is that classicists  insist that the existence of God cannot be merely presupposed, but must be proven in a non-circular or "linear" (Sproul) way.  They also insist that it can be proven conclusively, and thus in such a way as to render the existence of God objectively certain.  As I read Sproul, he is telling us that we can know with objective certainty, and thus without the possibility of mistake, that the God of the Christian Bible exists.  In the later chapters of his book he lays out the proof.

Critique

So much for exposition. Where do I stand? I reject all four positions, as above formulated. My current position, tentatively and critically held, is however closer to fideism than to the other three. Call it moderate fideism to distinguish it from the Tertullianic and Kierkegaardian extremes. It is moderately fideistic in that it rejects the anti-fideism of the presuppositionalists and that of the classicists.

Readers of this weblog know that I have maintained time and again that one can both reasonably affirm and reasonably deny the existence of God.  That is to say: there are no rationally coercive arguments either way. Nothing counts as a proof sensu stricto unless it is rationally coercive. So there are no proofs either way. An argument can be good without being rationally coercive, and there are good arguments on both sides. There are also bad arguments on both sides.  The quinque viae of the doctor angelicus  are good arguments for the existence of God, but  in my view not rationally compelling, coercive, dispositive, ineluctable — pick your favorite word.  They don't settle the matter, once and for all. But the same holds for some of the atheist arguments, some of the arguments from evil, for example.  Galen Strawson is the polar opposite of Sproul on the God question. So to savor (bemoan?) the extremity of the worldview polarization, take a look at my critique of Strawson at Substack.

So am I taking the side of Tertullian and Kierkegaard? No way. They go to the opposite extreme to that of Sproul (although he is not as extreme as the 'presuppers').  I am a fair and balanced kind of guy.

I say that the belief that God exists is a matter of faith.  Faith is not knowledge, but it is not entirely opposed to it either, as it is for Tertullian and Kierkegaard who hold that belief in the God of the Christian Bible, God Incarnate, is logically absurd, and yet is to be maintained, for S. K. anyway, by infinite subjective passion.  On the contrary, I say that one ought not believe anything that is demonstrably absurd (logically contradictory), and that to do so is a plain violation of the ethics of belief.  (If you subscribe to an ethics of belief, then you must also be a limited doxastic voluntarist, and I am.) Faith does not and cannot contradict reason; it supplements it. Faith is on the way to knowledge  and seeks its fulfillment in it.  Faith is inferior to knowledge as a route to reality, as Aquinas would agree. Faith extends our grasp of reality — our contact with it — beyond what we can know, strictly speaking, except that there are and can be no internal assurances of veridicality here below: the verification, if it comes at all, will come after we have quit these bodies.

Faith is neither blind nor seeing. It is neither irrational nor rational, but suprarational. It goes beyond reason without going against reason. 1 Corinthians 13:12 may provide a clue:  "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." (KJV)  Paul is suggesting that we see all right; we are not blind. But the seeing is obscure at present and will culminate in luminosity.  Cognitio fidei is not cognition strictly speaking, but it is not blind either. We could liken it to a dim and troubled sighting in the fog.  Pace Kierkegaard, not a desperate leap, but  a hopeful reaching out beyond the bounds of the certain. 

Sproul thinks he can prove the existence of God by reason alone. In my next installment I will show that he fails in this endeavor.

_______________

*Nietzsche quipped that Tertullian should have said credo quia absurdus sum, "I believe because I am absurd."

A Design Argument from the Cognitive Reliability of Our Senses: A Proof of Classical Theism?

Substack latest.

I present an argument that many will take as supporting classical theism. But I point out that, so taken, the argument is not rationally inescapable or philosophically dispositive since it may also be construed along Nagelian lines to support an inherent immanent teleology in nature.
 
Topics include rationality, intentionality, both intrinsic and derivative, and the fascinating structural similarity of dispositionality to (conscious) intentionality.

On Anselmian or ‘Perfect Being’ Theology

Tom O. writes,
I was wondering if you have time to weigh in on the following problem. I take it you subscribe to perfect being theology as a constraint on our theorizing about God’s nature. For example, you write, “God is the absolute, and no absolute worth its salt is a contingent being. No absolute just happens to exist. it is built into the divine job description that God be a necessary being…”. Here, it looks to me like you’re endorsing a prior conception of what God must be like (‘absolute’) in order to infer that God must be a necessary being. 
 
Actually, Tom, I do not subscribe to 'perfect being' theology, as I explain below.   I do, however, have a prior conception of what God must be like to be 'worth his salt,' i.e., to satisfy the exigencies built into our concept of God.  God is the Absolute, and nothing could be the Absolute if it merely happened to exist. So God, if he exists, exists of absolute metaphysical necessity, and he has this necessity from himself, and not from another, a se non ab alio. It follows that if God does not exist, then he is impossible. Thus  what we should not say is that God necessarily exists, for this way of putting it implies that he does exist. We should say that God is necessarily non-contingent, i.e. necessarily such that, if he exists, he exists  necessarily (in all possible worlds in the Leibnizian patois), and if he does not exist, then he is impossible (exists in no possible world in the same façon de parler.) 
 
Now, suppose someone endorses a conception of God as a limited being. Maybe God is not all powerful, or he is dependent in some way (and so not a se in a strong sense- think pantheism) or he is contingent in some way. This view of God obviously parts ways with perfect being theology. But I want to know how the proponent of perfect being theology will argue that conceptions of God as a limited being are deficient. The very conception of God (as limited or absolute/perfect) is at issue here. So, the proponent of perfect being theology can’t assume God is the absolute to then argue a limited God is deficient. What criterion could he possibly appeal to in order to sort ‘genuine’ conceptions of God from ‘deficient’ conceptions?
 

In the context of this discussion there are three approaches to God that we ought to distinguish: the limited being approach, the perfect being approach, and  the beyond-perfect-being approach of Aquinas, Barry Miller, and myself, et al.  As for the limited being approach, I will just say for now that there might be one or more limited gods, but that they don't interest me. What interests me is whether there is an unsourced Source of the being, intelligibility, and value of everything other than it, a being of limitless perfection, return to which or fellowship with which, or participation in the being of which, would bring the ultimate in human felicity.  That is my concept of God, and not just mine.  My question then becomes: does anything in reality answer to that concept?  

I have no interest in limited gods. I have no interest in affirming them or denying them. There might even be one or more in addition to the unlimited God; they might serve as emissaries between the unlimited God and us.  But they would not be worthy of worship or worthy of my ultimate concern because my ultimate beatitude and need for final meaning could not be secured  by them.

My interest is whether we need to go beyond perfect being theology.  I say we do and that PBT is a limited approach to the divine.

The anthropomorphism of perfect being (Anselmian) theology

One approach to God and his attributes is Anselmian: God is "that that which no greater can be conceived."  God is the greatest conceivable being, the most perfect of all beings, the being possessing all perfections.  But what is a perfection?  A perfection is not just any old (positive, non-Cambridge) property, but a great-making property. Some of these properties admit of degrees while some do not. To say of God that he is the ens perfectissimum, the most perfect of all beings, is to say that he possesses all great- making properties, and of those that admit of degrees, he possesses them to the highest degree.

For example, power admits of degrees; so while Socrates and God are both powerful, only God is maximally powerful.  Wisdom too admits of degrees; so while both Socrates and God are both wise, only God is maximally wise.  And the same holds for love and mercy and moral goodness.  Many of the divine attributes, then, are maxima of attributes possessed by humans.

Are Socrates and God wise in the same sense of 'wise'?  This follows if wisdom in God is just the highest degree of the same attribute that is found in some humans.  Accordingly, the predicate 'wise' is being used univocally in 'Socrates is wise' and 'God is wise' despite the fact that God but not Socrates is all-wise.  Bear in mind that the sense of a predicate is not to be confused with the property (attribute) the predicate is used to express. Suppose we distinguish three 'planes': the linguistic, the semantic, and the ontic. Predicates inhabit the linguistic plane, senses the semantic plane, and properties the ontic plane. 

Thus a commitment to univocity appears to be entailed by the Anselmian or perfect-being approach.  The predicate 'wise' is being used in the very same sense when applied to Socrates and when applied to God. 

The polar opposite of univocity is equivocity.  The phenomenon of equivocity is illustrated by this pair of sentences: 'Socrates is wise,' 'Kamala is in no wise fit to be president.'  The meaning or sense of 'wise' is totally different across the two sentences.  Midway between univocity and equivocity there is analogicity.  Perhaps an example of an analogical use of 'wise' would be in application to Guido the mafioso.  He's a wise guy; he knows the score; but he is not a wise man like Socrates, though he is like the latter in being knowledgeable about some things.   But I mention analogy only to set it aside.

My thesis: an Anselmian approach to God and his attributes such as we find in Alvin Plantinga and T. V. Morris and the rest of the 'perfect being' theists is anthropomorphic. One takes God to have the very same great-making attributes or properties that (some) humans have, but to the maximal degree.  Socrates is benevolent and merciful; God is omnibenevolent and all-merciful.  And so on.  We could say that God is omni-qualified or omni-propertied with respect to the great-making properties. If we take this tack, we approach God from the side of man, assimilating God to man.  God is 'made' (conceptualized) in the image and likeness of man, as a sort of superman, but with defects removed and attributes maximized. 

This anthropomorphism is very different from the God-is-an-anthropomorphic-projection thesis of Ludwig Feuerbach.  Feuerbach's thesis entails the nonexistence of God. Perfect being anthropomorphism does not. 

Well, what is wrong with anthropomorphism?  The problem with it is that it fails to do justice to God's absolute transcendence and ineffability.  If the difference between creatures and God is only a matter of degree, then God would not be worthy of worship. He would be "the greatest thing around" and no doubt an object of wonder and admiration, but not an appropriate object of worship. (See Barry Miller, A Most Unlikely God, U. of  Notre Dame Press, 1996, p. 3)

God is the Absolute.  I take that to be axiomatic. That God is the Absolute is built into the very concept of God whether or not anything in reality answers to that concept.  Starting from the concept, one cannot prove (demonstrate) that God exists. Kant is surely right that the ontological argument "from mere concepts" (aus blosser Begriffen) is not valid. To understand what I just wrote you must understand that the concept of X is not to be confused with the nature of X. Natures (quiddities, essences) are situated on the ontic plane mentioned above; concepts are either finite-mind-dependent in which case they cannot exist in themselves but only in minds, or else,they exist in themselves on the semantic plane, which I distinguished above from the ontic plane. One could say that  the nature of God entails (or rather is) the existence of God.  That, I believe, is true. But that truth does not help us prove the existence of God unless we have a rationally coercive reason to think that our concept of God is an adequate concept, i.e., one that captures the essence or nature of God. But we have no such concept. The doctor angelicus will back me up on this.  In God, essence and existence are one. To capture God's essence in a concept, therefore, would require squeezing God himself into a concept. That would be like emptying the Pacific Ocean, or any ocean, into a hole in the sand at the seashore.

God is radically other than creatures.  His attributes cannot be 'in series' with human degreed attributes even if at the limits of these series.  God is not just another thing that exists  and possesses properties in the way creatures possess properties.   

How Could God be Ineffable?

The mystically inclined say that God is ineffable.  The ineffable is the inexpressible, the unspeakable. Merriam-Webster:

 Ineffable comes from ineffābilis, which joins the prefix in-, meaning "not," with the adjective effābilis, meaning "capable of being expressed." Effābilis comes from effārī, "to speak out," which in turn comes from ex- and fārī, meaning “to speak.”

But: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 7) Does it follow that there is nothing ineffable, inexpressible, unspeakable? Some will draw this conclusion; Hegel is one. Ludwig the Tractarian, however, does not draw this conclusion: 

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. (Tractatus, 6.522)

God is the prime example of das Unaussprechliche. But if we cannot say anything about God, then we cannot say any of the following: he exists; he does not exist; he is transcendent; he is immanent; he is all-knowing; he is not all-knowing; he has attributes; he has no attributes; he is ineffable; he is not ineffable; and so on.

Is this a problem? Maybe not.  

Consider any mundane thing, a rock, say.  Can you put it into words? Can you capture its existence and its haecceity (its non-qualitative thisness) in concepts?  You cannot. At most you can capture  conceptually only its quidditative determinations, all of which are multiply exemplifiable or repeatable. But the thing itself is unrepeatable and escapes conceptual capture.  The discursive intellect cannot grasp it. Es ist unbegreifbar.  It cannot be 'effed' linguistically or conceptually.  Individuum ineffabile est.

If you can see that the individual qua individual is conceptually ineffable, why do you balk at talk of the divine ineffability? If the haecceity of a grain of sand or a speck of dust cannot be conceptualized, then a fortiori for the super-eminent haecceity and ipseity of the super-eminent Individual who is not a mere  individual among individuals but Individuality itself.   

The Ineffable One cannot fall under any of our ordinary concepts. We can however, point to it by using a limit concept (Grenzbegriff).  A limit concept is not an ordinary concept. Note that we do have the concept of that which is beyond all concepts. (If we did not, this discourse would be nonsense when it plainly is not, pace Wittgenstein.) That smacks of self-contradiction, but the contradiction is avoided by distinguishing between ordinary and limit concepts. 

So, while remaining within the ineluctable discursivity of our discursive intellects, I am able to point beyond the sphere of the discursive intellect into the Transdiscursive.  You can understand this by analogy to the transdiscursivity of a stick, a stone, a dog, a bone, a bird, a turd, or any part thereof.

How do I gain epistemic access to a mundane particular such as a stick or a stone in its unrepeatable particularity?  By sensible intuition (sinnliche Anschauung in Kant's sense).  We do it all the time. And so, by a second analogy, we can understand how epistemic access to the Absolute and Ineffable One is to be had: by intellectual intuition or mystical gnosis. 

Suffering, Evil, and Galen Strawson’s ‘Proof’ of the Nonexistence of the Christian God

This just in from our old friend Malcolm Pollack:

I'm writing because I went to your Substack to read your 2A post, and beneath it was a link to your post about Galen Strawson's audacious letter to the NYT — in which Professor Strawson, in a single paragraph, proves the nonexistence of the Christian God!
 
I have a quibble, however, about your response. In the version of Strawson's argument you offer, you make a move from "suffering" (Strawson's word) to "evil", and then rely on the incoherence of the idea of objective "evil" in a Godless world to undercut Strawson's argument.
 
Strawson, though, never mentions evil; he only speaks of suffering. This means, it seemed to me, that the word "suffering" should take the place of "evil" in your framing of Strawson's argument, and I think it changes that line of attack that you might have used. (Evil is always wrong, of course, but how are we to know what suffering might be necessary in ways that, like children, we can't understand?) 
 
Am I being petty here? It seems to me that the distinction between the concepts of suffering and evil, though they share deep connections, is important enough to point out.
 
1) It is perfectly plain that the words 'suffering' and 'evil' have different meanings and that the corresponding concepts are different. I implied as much when I asked, "Is it certain that evil exists?  Is it even true?  Are there any evils?  No doubt there is suffering.  But is suffering evil?"   
 
2) A different but related question is whether every instance of animal or human suffering is evil.  I am inclined to say No, and that some instances of suffering are evil and some are not. William Rowe, however, disagrees.  Here is my view in contrast to Rowe's from a February 2019 entry:
 
Suppose that to be restored to health a child must undergo an extremely painful medical treatment. So the parents of the child allow the treatment to be administered. We will agree that the infliction of the suffering upon the child is morally justified by the fact that the treatment is necessary to prevent a greater evil such as the child's death. Now what Rowe is saying above [in the linked article] is that in a case like this, the suffering is (morally) justified but evil nevertheless.

I find this difficult to understand. It sounds like a contradiction. For if the infliction of the suffering is morally justified, then the infliction is morally permissible. But if the suffering is morally evil, then its infliction is also morally evil, which is to say that its infliction is morally impermissible. But surely it is a contradiction to affirm of any action A that A is both morally permissible and morally impermissible.  

If the suffering is morally justified in that it leads to a good unobtainable without it, then the suffering, though certainly unpleasant, disagreeable, repugnant, awful, excruciating, etc., is not under the conditions specified evil in a sense of 'evil' inconsistent with the divine omnibenevolence.  It is instrumentally good.  In the situation we are imagining, it is not only morally permissible but also morally obligatory for the parents to allow the painful treatment to be administered. This implies that the treatment ought to be administered. Therefore, if you say that the child's suffering remains evil despite its leading to a greater good, then you are committed to saying that the infliction of evil upon the child is morally obligatory, something that ought to be done. But this smacks of absurdity since it is hard to understand how any infliction of evil could be morally obligatory. Since in our example the infliction of suffering is morally permissible, I conclude that even intense suffering is not in every case evil.

What Rowe is saying is that suffering is intrinsically evil, and that its evilness remains the same whether or not the suffering is instrumentally good. What I am asserting contra Rowe is that whether or not an instance of suffering is evil depends on whether or not it is instrumentally good. For me, suffering that is instrumentally good is not evil. I concede of course that such suffering remains unpleasant, disagreeable, repugnant, awful, excruciating, etc. But I do not understand how suffering in itself, or intrinsically, can be said to be evil in circumstances in which it serves a greater good.

Perhaps the problem is that there are two senses of 'evil' in play, one non-normative (amoral) the other normative (moral), and that Rowe is appealing to the former sense. Accordingly, the non-normatively evil is that which elicits aversion. In this sense, mental and physical suffering is evil in that beings like us are prone to shun it. The normatively evil, on the other hand, is that which ought not exist. So perhaps the puzzle can be resolved by saying:

a) Every instance of suffering is evil in the non-normative sense that, as a matter of empirical fact, beings like us are prone to shun it.

b)  Some instances of suffering are not evil in the normative sense that it is false that they ought not exist.

c) If an instance of suffering conduces to a good that outweighs it, and the good is unobtainable by any other means, then the instance of suffering ought to exist. Thus the child's suffering in our example ought to exist. Admittedly, this sounds paradoxical. But note that this 'ought' is not categorical but hypothetical or conditional: the child's suffering ought to exist given that, on condition that, the treatment that causes it is the only way to avoid the child's death, which would be an evil worse than the child's suffering from the treatment.

d) (c) is not paradoxical or incoherent.

e) The moral goodness of God is called into question not by the existence of evils in the non-normative sense, but by the existence of evils in the normative sense. Thus the mere existence of suffering, which is non-normatively evil, does not by itself cause a problem for the divine moral goodness. For it may well be that all instances of suffering are morally justifiable in the light of a greater good. This does not make these sufferings any less repugnant; but this repugnance is not a moral repugnance but the non-normative property of thwarting desire or eliciting aversion.

3) Therefore, if Strawson follows Rowe and not me, then 'suffering' and 'evil' are intersubstitutable in the following argument both salva veritate et salva significatione:

i) If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.

ii) If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.

iii) If God is omniscient, then God knows when and where any evil exists or is about to exist.

iv) If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate or prevent all evil.

v) Evil exists.

vi) If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn’t have the power to eliminate or prevent all evil, or doesn’t know when or where evil exists, or doesn’t have the desire to eliminate or prevent all evil.

vii) Therefore, God doesn’t exist.   

4) But I have argued against Rowe, so my response to Malcolm has to be different. I don't say that every instance of suffering is evil in a sense of 'evil' incompatible with the goodness of God.  I say only that some instances of suffering are evil in that sense.  But then it seems to me just to impute to Strawson the above argument. 

5) Malcolm misconstrues what I am doing in that Substack article. He thinks I am "rely[ing] on the incoherence of the idea of objective evil in a Godless world to undercut Strawson's argument." I am not doing that. I am not presupposing that the objective existence of evil requires the existence of God.  If I did that I would be begging the question against Strawson. For it may be that evil objectively exists whether or not God exists.  What I am doing is refuting Strawson's claim to have proven the nonexistence of God. He has not done that because he has not proven that (ii) and (v) are objectively certain.