Category: Good and Evil

‘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.

A Pre-Print of THE HOLOCAUST ARGUMENT for Comments

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. 

………….

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.

……………………

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.]

The Evil of Ignorance: A Response to a Reader

From the mail:

Thanks for the kind advice re: the dark. I’m 50 later this year, so my mood could be something to do with that. I do find it wearisome that paradoxically the only reasonably secure epistemic conclusion is that we will never garner any sure knowledge re the Big Questions this side of the Mortality paywall. I do consider this an evil and was gratified to see you say so in a blog post a while back. We are doomed to aporia! How frustrating! And in a world where so many seem so sure –leftists, rightists, revolutionaries, conservatives, secularists, believers, et al. ad infinitum.
Your “this side of the Mortality Paywall” was a stroke of stylistic brilliance.  And surely  no one could say that the price of admission to the ‘content’ on the Far Side is cheap even if said ‘content’ is priceless.
“We are doomed to aporia.” Yes. There is no way (ἄπορος , á-poros) forward by knowledge this side of the Paywall.  Epistemically, we are at an impasse. I  am glad we agree that in this life we are and will remain ignorant about the ultimate whence, whither, and wherefore, and that this ignorance is evil.  There are of course dogmatists of various stripes  who insist that we are not ignorant.  You and I hold that their seeming surety, whether by dogmatic affirmations of God and the soul, the inerrancy of Scripture, the infallibility of the Roman Catholic  magisterium, etc., or dogmatic denials thereof is a mere seeming. Their convictions simply reflect their overpowering doxastic security needs. Unable to face objective uncertainty, they manufacture subjective certainty. Their critical faculties are swamped by their need for security in their beliefs.  That they are subjectively certain cannot be denied.  What can be doubted, however, is whether their subjective certainty connects them to reality.
The intellectually mature learn to live with doxastic insecurity. A salutary upshot of  acknowledged doxastic insecurity is that it makes people tolerant.  (Toleration is the touchstone of classical liberalism.) Although toleration has limits, without it there is no high civilization: what you get instead is, for example, the repressive inanition of Islamist theocracies such as the one that has been stifling the people of Iran  since 1979.
There is no way forward by knowledge this side of death.  This leaves faith as a mode of reality-contact.   Although I cannot know that I will survive my bodily death, I can reasonably believe (have faith that) I will.  (Similarly and mutatis mutandis for the rest of the Big Questions.) Suppose I do survive. Then my faith will have given me contact with reality.  And if I don’t survive, it won’t matter that I held a false belief.  I can’t be in error if I am not there to be in error.   I can’t be pained for having been wrong if I don’t exist.
Besides,  I will live better in the here and now  if I do believe I will survive than if I don’t believe I will, or believe the opposite. So that’s my answer to my correspondent  in a nutshell.  The way forward re: ultimates is by faith.  Of course a number of things I have stated or presupposed above, such as that faith is inferior to knowledge,  can and ought to be questioned.  Disagreement and contention, even unto bitterness and bloodshed, may ensue. There is no avoiding these additional  evils born of ignorance.  But they can be mitigated if we can learn to be tolerant.  The space of tolerance and civilization, however,  is defended by blood and iron.

The Riddle of Evil and the Pyrrhonian ‘Don’t Care’

Substack latest on the aporetics of evil.  

Today I preach upon a text from Karl Jaspers wherein he comments on St. Augustine (Plato and Augustine, ed. Arendt, tr. Mannheim, Harcourt 1962, p. 110):

In interminable discussions, men have tried to sharpen and clarify this contradiction: on the one hand, evil is a mere clouding of the good, a shadow, a deficiency; on the other hand, it is an enormously effective power. But no one has succeeded in resolving it.

The problem is genuine, the problem is humanly important, and yet it gives every indication of being intractable. Jaspers is right: no one has ever solved it. To sharpen the contradiction:

1) Evil is privatio boni: nothing independently real, but a mere lack of good, parasitic upon the good. It has no positive entitative status.

2) Evil is not a mere lack of good, but an enormously effective power in its own right. It has a positive entitative status.

A tough nut to crack, an aporetic dyad, each limb of which makes a very serious claim on our attention. And yet the limbs cannot both be true. Philosophy is its problems, and when a problem is expressed as an aporetic polyad, then I say it is in canonical form.

Read it all.

Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and the Will to Believe

My friend, I continue to read and reread your Heaven and Hell essay, especially the "Concluding Existential-Practical Postscript".
 
Psalm 23. "The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not…." Let us pray that there is a Good Shepherd who cares deeply about his flock and will do things to relieve their suffering. Can we come to believe in him with an act of will?
Surely not by an act of will alone. You didn't carefully attend to what I wrote  (and to which I now add bolding):
. . . while these philosophical and theological problems are genuine and important, they cannot be resolved on the theoretical plane.  In the end, after canvassing all the problems and all the arguments for and against, one simply has to decide what one will believe and how one will live. In the end, the will comes into it.  The will must come into it, since nothing in this area can be proven, strictly speaking.  [. . .]  The will comes into it, as I like to say, because the discursive intellect entangles itself in problems it cannot unravel.  
 
Obviously, one cannot decide what the truth is: the truth is what it is regardless of what we believe, desire, hope for, fear, etc.  But one can and must decide what one will believe with respect to those propositions that are existentially important.  What is true does not depend on us; what we believe does (within certain limits of course: it would be foolish to endorse doxastic voluntarism across the board.) 
 
You have read Sextus Empiricus and know  something about Pyrrhonian skepticism. You know that, with respect to many issues, the arguments on either side, pro et con, 'cancel out' and leave one in a state of doxastic equipoise.  In many of these situations, the rational course is to suspend judgment by neither affirming nor denying the proposition at issue, especially when the issues are contention-inspiring and likely to lead to bitter controversy and bloodshed.  But not in all situations, or so say I against Sextus.  One ought not in all situations of doxastic equipoise suspend judgment. For there are some issues that are existentially important. (One of them, of course, is whether we have a higher destiny attainment of which depends on how we comport ourselves here and now.)  With respect to these existentially important issues, one ought not seek the ataraxia (imperturbableness) that supposedly, according to Sextus, comes from living adoxastos (belieflessly). To do so might be theoretically rational, but not practically rational. It would be theoretically rational, but only if we were mere transcendental spectators of the passing scene as opposed to situated spectators embroiled in it.  We are embedded in the push and shove of this fluxed-up causal order and not mere observers of it. We have what Wilhelm Dilthey calls a Sitz im Leben.
 
As I like to put it, we are not merely spectators of life's parade; we also march in it.  (A mere spectator of a parade may not care where it is headed; but if you are marching in it, swept up in it, you'd damned well better care where it is headed.)
 
Suppose in order to have a decent day physically I need to begin it with a 10 K run. Well, most or at least many days I can make myself run. But on some days my legs just will not. Pain and fatigue are the obstacles. Suppose to have a decent "inner" day I also need to begin it with believing in and trusting in our Good Shepherd. Some days, yes, but many days, I fear, I will not or cannot . Too much pain (before the meds) and too much exhaustion with the world.
 
I said, "In the end . . . one simply has to decide what one will believe and how one will live." I now add that, having made that decision after due consideration, one has to stick with it. You seem to think that belief and trust need to be generated each day anew.  I say instead that they do not: you already made the commitment to believe and trust; what you do each day is re-affirm it. It's a standing commitment. Standing commitments transcend the moment and the doubts of the moment. And of course doubts there will be.  One ought to avoid the mistake of letting a lesser moment, a moment of doubt or weakness or temptation, undo the commitment made in a higher moment, one of existential clarity.  
 
It's like a marital vow. After due deliberation you decided to commit yourself to one person, from that moment forward, in sickness and in health, through good times and bad, 'til death do you part.  You know what that means: no sexual intercourse with anyone else for the rest of your days;  if she gets sick you will nurse her; if you have to deplete your savings to  cover her medical expenses, you will do so, etc.  You may be sorely tempted to make a move on your neighbor's wife, and dump your own when she is physically shot and you must play the nurse.  That is where the vows come in and the moral test comes.
 
Inserting a benevolent Creator in this world I encounter is VERY difficult. 
 
I agree that it is VERY difficult at times to believe that this  world is the creation of  an omni-qualified providential God, a 'Father' who lovingly foresees and provides for his 'children.'  Why then did he not lift a finger to help his Chosen People who were worked to death and slaughtered in the Vernichtungslagern of the Third Reich?  And so on, and so forth. Nothing new here. It's the old problem of evil.  You can of course argue reasonably from the fact of evil to the nonexistence of God. But you can also argue reasonably from the fact of evil to the existence of God, and in more than one way. The 'Holocaust argument'  is one way.
 
This brings me back to my main point: in the end, you will have to decide what to believe and how to live. The will comes into it.
 
Maybe I've misunderstood you. I see "will" as a weak and unreliable route to a good life, much less salvation. 
 
I disagree. While I don't agree with Nietzsche, for whom "The will is the great redeemer," 0ne of the sources, I would guess, of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens,  I see will as the only way to offset the infirmity of reason, which I imagine you must have some sympathy with given your appreciation for the Pyrrhonistas.  In the controversy between Leibniz and Pierre Bayle, I side with Bayle.  Reason is weak, though not so weak as to be incapable of gauging its own weakness.  We embedded spectators must act, action requires decision and de-cision — a cutting off of ratiocination — is will-driven
You see why I wonder whether we are not already in Hell. Where I have gone wrong?
 
You cannot seriously mean that we are in hell now. That makes as little sense as to say that we are in heaven now.  "Words mean things," as Rush Limbaugh used to say in his flat-footed way, and in a serious discussion, I expect you will agree that one must define one's terms. The 'Jebbies' (Jesuits) got hold of you at an impressionable age, and you became, as you told me, a star altar boy. You've had a good education, you know Latin and Greek, and went on to get a doctorate in philosophy in the U.K.
 
So you must know that what 'hell' means theologically is  “[the] state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1033.) To be in hell is to be in a state that is wholly evil and from which there is no exit.  Now is this world as we experience it wholly evil? Of course not. Neither it is wholly good.  
 
It simply makes no sense, on any responsible use of terms, to describe this life, hic et nunc, as either heaven or hell. If you want to tag it theologically, the appropriate term would be 'purgatory.' As I wrote earlier,
. . . it is reasonably held that we are right now in purgatory. The case is made brilliantly and with vast erudition by Geddes MacGregor in Reincarnation in Christianity (Quest Books, 1978,  see in particular, ch. 10, "Reincarnation as Purgatory."

Homo Faber, Homo Mendax

Man the maker is a damned liar. He is a fabricator in both senses of the term. A little god and a little devil.  Neither the Father of all nor the Father of lies, he is a chip off the old blocks.

This observation has a Manichean flavor. But if there are not two co-eternal and co-equal principles butting heads, then we get the problem of how the Good Itself can sire evil which is rather lamely viewed as a mere privatio boni.

That it is a dubious doctrine I will argue later, but for now I will simply note that the evil-as-privation doctrine does seem to accommodate an intuition that many of us have, namely, that good and evil, though opposed, are not mutually independent.

Thus in one clear sense good and evil are polar opposites: what is good is not evil and what is evil is not good. And yet one hesitates to say that they are on an ontological par, that they are equally real. They are not opposed as two positivities. The evil of ignorance, for example, is not something positive in its own right: the evil of ignorance consists in its being an absence of something good, knowledge. Good is an ontological prius; evil has a merely derivative status as an absence of good.

Or so it seems. Until we think harder. More later. Old Sol is threatening to rise once again. The heat is back. The mountain bike beckons. The sun also rises, and so do I from the bench of blog to greet the day.

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. 

Reading Now: Demonic Foes

By Richard Gallagher, M. D. Available via Amazon.

It arrived yesterday and I'm already 60 pages into its 247 pages.  A page-turner for sure.  I did, however, refrain from reading any of it in bed last night before drifting off — for obvious reasons.  Experiences of my own incline me to take very seriously "Unseen Warfare."
 
Dr. Gallagher comes across as a very credible witness.  Rooted as he is in Western canons of rationality and scientific method, he nonetheless appreciates that there are points at which methodological naturalism must give way in the teeth of massive evidence of super- and preter-natural phenomena.
 
This article features an interview with Dr. Gallagher.
 
UPDATE (6/14).  I am now up to p. 82.  It gets better and better. Packed with distinctions essential for clear thinking about this topic. 

The Psychology of the Pollyanna and the Political Ponerology of Leftism

We all know pollyannas. They are more often women than men and the charm of these lovable ladies is in no small measure due to their openness to the positive in people and things and their seeming incapacity to discern the negative and evil. A most extreme example has come to my attention, one

. . . Natali Yohanan, “a 38-year-old mother of two, who never locked the doors of her house in Nir Oz, a kibbutz near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip. There wasn’t even a key.” And then: “On Oct. 7, a Gazan woman walked through Yohanan’s unlocked front door and made herself at home for hours, eating, singing, and watching Netflix. Sometimes, the woman served drinks to armed terrorists who stopped by for a break from the massacre they were conducting outside.” Ms. Yohanan speaks of the impact of 10/7 on her in the 10-minute video below.

Watch the video and then ask yourself the question that I ask myself: how could an adult Israeli be so naïve, so trusting, so lacking in insight into human nature? The woman is not stupid; how then explain this blind spot? At one point Yohanan, a teacher, says that all children are good. Plainly false! Has this teacher never been on a schoolyard? Children can be vicious in a way that no animal can be vicious.  That is why they need to be socialized and, yes, indoctrinated, but in correct and ameliorative doctrines. (That 'indoctrination' is a dirty word is another piece of stupidity that you are well-advised in dropping.)

Yohanan is an Israeli. Surely she knows something about how her state came to be and why it came to be. Her kibbutz is right next to the Gaza Strip. Did she know nothing of Hamas and their genocidal intentions? They make plain their antisemitism and their anti-Zionism in their charter.  Does she know nothing about Islam? (See this excellent article by Raymond Ibrahim.) 

As I say elsewhere, homo homini lupus does not capture the depth of human depravity, and is an insult to the wolves to boot. Man is not a wolf to man; man is a demon to man. 

I am touching upon one of the roots, perhaps the deepest, of the delusional Left, namely the insane notion that everyone, deep down inside, is basically good. Not only is this conceit a characteristically leftist bit of delusionality, it also serves to distinguish conservative from leftist. No conservative accepts that crazy conceit.

And let's not forget that those who accept the crazy conceit that people are basically good refute their own false theory by being the most murderous of all. In the 20th century alone communist governments have murdered some 85-100 million people according to The Black Book of Communism.

The Axis of the Human Heart

Rod Dreher quotes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an un-uprooted small corner of evil.

This free Substack article by Dreher is one of his finest. Please do read it for your own good. And read it all: pay attention to the account of the unspeakable savagery of the American Indians, a savagery typically downplayed or unmentioned by leftists.

The State of Things When the ‘Leader’ of the ‘Free World’ is a Puppet

I asked Dr. Vito Caiati, historian, whether Donald Trump's being in office would have made any difference to the present geopolitical mess, and this is what he wrote:

As for the present miserable state of the world, I think that had Trump remained in office neither the war in the Ukraine nor the war in the Middle East would have occurred, or if the former occurred, it would have been resolved on the basis of a territorial compromise concerning the Crimea and robust autonomy for the eastern, Russian majority oblasts.  Leaving aside the origins of the conflict (US interference in the internal politics of the Ukraine and the expansion of NATO eastward), Trump would have put Zelensky and company on tight rein. As for Israel, can we doubt that the appeasement of the Obama-Biden regime towards Iran encouraged the reemergence of terrorism? Now, the plan is to provide public support to Israel, while privately restraining her once again to conduct the war in a way that would deny the complete victory that she requires. With Trump, the war would have not occurred, and if it did, he would not have tied Israel’s hands.

As for the danger of WWIII, it appears to me that the Ukraine mess is a potential trigger for it.  There is no way that the Ukraine can defeat Russia, and I fear that a protracted conflict could lead to further American involvement and the real chance of a great power clash.

With regard to demons and such, I call your attention to what appeared on the Vatican Synod website this week (page 29): “What is a merciful heart? It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons, for all that exists.” Thus, the diabolical evil that first showed its face with the Pachamama desecration of St. Peter’s advances further in the Bergoglian Church.    

I agree in the main, but Caiati's final sentence prompts me to ask: Is Bergoglio proposing mercy for demons in which he believes? Or is the truly Bergoglian termiticism and diabolism due to his tacit denial of the reality of demons?

No doubt demons are creatures, but does Bergoglio and his fellow clerical termites believe in their existence? I don't know but I suspect he doesn't and they don't. How many Catholic priests today believe in the  preternatural? I suspect it is a minority.  The preternatural is the sphere within which demonic agents operate. It lies between the natural  and the supernatural.  See Ralph Weimann, Sacramentals: Their Meaning and Use, p. 196: "In the period after the Second Vatican Council, and under the influence of rationalism, it was increasingly considered 'unscientific' to speak about angels and even more unscientific to speak about demons."

At a time when the RCC should be standing as a bulwark against the anti-civilizational forces of Chinese Communism, Islamism, and  Leftism, it is transforming itself under the termitic influence of Bergoglio & Co. into just another pile of secular leftist junk. 

But how could anyone in this enlightened age believe in such medieval superstitions as the existence of demons?  Hasn't humanity finally put paid to this old nonsense?  Maybe not. Maybe there is no naturalistic explanation of the depth and depravity of human behavior. Perhaps an adequate explanation must posit the preternatural. See my Substack article, The Holocaust Argument for God's Existence wherein I write:

As a sort of inference to the best explanation we can say that moral evil in its extreme manifestations has a supernatural source. It cannot be explained adequately in naturalistic terms.  There is an Evil Principle (and Principal) the positing of which is reasonable. The undeniable reality of evil has  a metaphysical ground.  Call it Satan or whatever you like.

In that passage I am using 'supernatural' to cover both the supernatural proper and the preternatural. 'Preternatural' would have been the better, because more specific, word choice. But then I would have had to explain 'preternatural' which would have lengthened the piece. Brevity is the soul of Stack and not just of blog.

Now I would like you to take a gander at this Daily Mail article and rub your noses in recent Hamas-Islamist barbarity. Could the source of this evil be merely natural?

A Problem of Evil for Atheists

Latest Substack offering on evil. 

Yesterday's entry argued that the naturalist cannot explain the depth and depravity of moral evil. (We can 'thank' the Islamist Nazis of Hamas for rubbing our noses in it once again.) Today's entry argues that a naturalist who is intellectually honest and not self-deceived must be a pessimist and an anti-natalist.