Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
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.
Here you can watch people gathered at the Sydney Opera House cheering “gas the Jews” and “death to the Jews.” People are rejoicing in the slaughter on the streets of Berlin and London and Toronto and New York. (Scroll down to read our Free Press dispatch on the celebrations in Manhattan.)
At our most prestigious universities there is silence from administrations that leapt to speak out on George Floyd’s killing and on the war in Ukraine. Meantime, the social justice crowd offers explanations for the massacre—a massacre that, in part, targeted a group of progressive Israelis at a music festival. Terrorists came to that festival on paragliders carrying machine guns to start their slaughter. They raped women there next to the dead bodies of their friends.
Top o' the Stack.
Is there an adequate naturalistic explanation for the unspeakable depth and depravity of moral evil? If not, what might we reasonably conclude? Can one plausibly argue from the depth and depravity of moral evil to the existence of God?
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Yesterday I ordered a book on Amazon and it arrived today. That's what I call service. The book is described here by its author:
. . . bold demonic action is on the rise, mainly due to the fact that sin is not only tolerated in society but even publicly celebrated. This is not what the film is about, but it is the basis of Fr. Gabriele Amorth’s ministry. It should be noted that Fr. Amorth was not, in fact, the exorcist for the pope but, rather, for the city of Rome.
Exorcisms are sacramentals, on which I have recently published a book. In it, I dedicate an extensive chapter to the subject of exorcisms and place it in the context of what theologians describe as “preternatural reality.” It means that demons operate in an order that surpasses the natural but is less than supernatural. The Latin word praeter indicates a realm that goes beyond the natural possibilities of any human being. In other words, demons cannot work miracles, but they can produce phenomena that appear miraculous to us because they exceed the power of the natural order. There are many references to this in Sacred Scripture.
After the Old Atheism (J. L. Mackie and Co.) came the New Atheism the 'four horsemen' of which were Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. The New Atheism is now utterly passé. These latter-day naturalists have been replaced by the preternaturalists, Satanists among them.
Time to bone up on this stuff, folks, especially you folks with kiddies in the public schools. I'll dive into Ralph Weimann's book tomorrow. If you've read any of it, report below.
UPDATE 10/11. Tony Flood comments on the Holocaust Argument:
Bill, woven through your well-wrought argument (to the effect, as I like to formulate the point, that naturalists can't even frame a problem of evil) is your insistence (but I'm sure it's more than that) that there are no knock-down (rationally compelling, not merely rationally acceptable) arguments for any substantive philosophical position. ("Show me one you think is knock-down, and I'll knock it down," I remember you writing years ago.) Do you have an argument for that? Is your claim more than a gambit or posture, a bluff that someone can call? Might the auditor of a rationally compelling argument simply be psychologically impervious to its objective rational power? Is there a rationally compelling argument for your "non-substantive" philosophical position? Or is it merely rationally acceptable? Can you "rationally coerce" me to accept your universal negative claim? Sorry to hit you with a stream of questions which may not have been expressed with sufficient rigor.
Your essay reminded me of a possible issue with my putative transcendental argument in PaC: an exclusive disjunction (P V ~P); the elimination of ~P, namely, the class of non-Christian worldviews; ergo, P. Arguably one weakness is that it's impossible to show that no non-Christian worldview can account for rational predication (etc.).I also appreciated your homo homini daemonium insight, which I hadn't considered before.
Thank you for the well-written comment, Tony. But it seems that you ignored my footnote which was intended to blunt the force of the objection/question that you pose in the first paragraph. The footnote reads:
*It follows, of course, that there are no rationally coercive arguments for my characteristic meta-philosophical thesis. I accept this consequence with equanimity. I claim merely that my characteristic thesis is rationally acceptable.
If we assume, as I believe we must, that meta-philosophy is a branch of philosophy, then, given that my characteristic thesis is a thesis in meta-philosophy, it follows that my characteristic thesis cannot be rationally coercive, i.e., rationally compelling. Now I am not a dialetheist; I hold to LNC and deny that there are any true contradictions. So I maintain, as I must given the two assumptions already stated, that my characteristic thesis is rationally acceptable but not rationally compelling. And so, being the nice guy and classical liberal that I am, I tolerate your dissent. I will not tax you with logical inconsistency should you reject my characteristic thesis.
You ask whether I can "rationally coerce" you to accept my "universal negative claim." No, I cannot, nor do I want to. I want to live in peace with your. I will now insert a psychological observation that I hope is not inaccurate. You started out a Catholic, became a commie — a card-carrying member of the CPUSA if I am not mistaken — and then later rejected that adolescent (in both the calendrical and developmental senses of the word) commitment to become some sort of Protestant Christian presuppositionalist along the lines of Cornelius Van Til and Greg L. Bahnsen. What you have retained from your commie indoctrination is your polemical attitude which, I speculate, was already present in nuce in your innate psychological makeup and perhaps environmentally enhanced and molded by your life-long residency in NYC.
You see philosophy polemically, as a matter of worldview. (You are psychologically like Ed Feser in this regard, but I'll leave my friend Ed out of it for now.) I do not see philosophy polemically, or as matter of worldview. I see philosophy as inquiry, not worldview, Wissenschaft, not Weltanschauung. And so I distinguish philosophy from politics, which is not to be confused with political philosophy. Philosophically, I have friends, but no enemies. Politically, I have both enemies and friends. And so I want the scum who support Traitor Joe beaten into the dirt figuratively speaking, that is, removed from power. The tone of the preceding sentence indicates how I view the politics of the present day: it is not matter of gentlemanly debate, but a form of warfare. Whether it must by its very nature be a form of warfare (as per Carl Schmitt) is a further and very difficult philosophical, not political, question.
All of this needs elaboration and nuancing. And I am aware that I haven't responded to all of your questions. More later. Time for this honorary kike to mount his bike. Combox open.
Substack latest. Excerpt:
To the clearheaded, however, literary immortality is little more than a joke, and itself an illusion. Only a few read Hitch now, and soon enough he will be unread, his books remaindered, put into storage, forgotten. This is a fate that awaits all scribblers but a tiny few. And even they will drink the dust of oblivion in the fullness of time.
To live on in one's books is a paltry substitute for immortality, especially when one recalls Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's aphorism:
Ein Buch ist ein Spiegel, aus dem kein Apostel herausgucken kann, wenn ein Affe hineinguckt.
"A book is a mirror: if an ape peers in, no apostle will look out."
Most readers are more apish than apostolic. The fame they confer cannot be worth much, given that they confer it.
To live on in one's books is only marginally better than to live on in the flickering and mainly indifferent memories of a few friends and relatives. And how can reduction to the status of a merely intentional object of memory count as living on?
The besetting sin of powerful intellects is pride. Lucifer, as his name indicates, is or was the light-bearer. Blinded by his own light, he could see nothing beyond himself. Such is the peril of intellectual incandescence. Otherworldly light simply can't get through. One thinks of Nietzsche, Russell, Sartre, and to a lesser extent Hitchens. A mortal man with a huge ego — one which is soon to pop like an overinflated balloon.
The contemplation of death must be horrifying for those who pin all on the frail reed of the ego. The dimming of the light, the loss of control, the feeling of helplessly and hopelessly slipping away into an abyss of nonbeing. And all of this without the trust of the child who ceases his struggling to be borne by Another. "Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven." But this of course is what the Luciferian intellect cannot do. It cannot relax, it must hold on and stay in control. It must struggle helplessly as the ego implodes in upon itself.
The ego, having gone supernova in its egomania, collapses into a black hole in the hora mortis. What we fear when we fear death is not so much the destruction of the body, but the dissolution of the ego. That is the true horror and evil of death. And without religion you are going to have to take it straight.
Anthony Flood comments:
Eloquent, Bill, well worth exposing to a wider audience . . . and an occasion to remind you of Woody Allen's quip: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment." The Illustrated Woody Allen Reader (1993) Unfortunately he hasn't (as far as I know) yet accepted God's terms for enjoying aionian life during which death will no longer be working in him as it is inexorably now.
Tony has unwittingly, or perhaps wittingly, goaded me into thinking and writing about a further topic: the difference between the eternal and the aionian.
Chiffons, One Fine Day
Ruby and the Romantics, Our Day Will Come
Derek and Dominos, It's Too Late She's Gone. Studio version.
Chuck Willis original, 1956
Robert Johnson, 1937, Four Until Late. Cream version.
Hoyt Axton, Greenback Dollar
Austin James, Last Silver Dollar
Randy Newman, Short People
Dionne Warwick, Take the Short Way Home
Substack latest.
Apart from what Alvin Plantinga has called creative anti-realism, the two main philosophical options for many of us in the West are some version of naturalism and some version of Judeo-Christian theism. As its title indicates, J. P. Moreland’s The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (SCM Press, 2009) supports the theistic position by way of a penetrating critique of naturalism and such associated doctrines as scientism. Moreland briefly discusses creative anti-realism in the guise of postmodernism on pp. 13-14, but I won’t report on that except to say that his arguments against it, albeit brief, are to my mind decisive. Section One of this review will present in some detail Moreland’s conception of naturalism and what it entails. Sections Two and Three will discuss his argument from consciousness for the existence of God. Section Four will ever so briefly report on the contents of the rest of the book.
Great blog, thanks for writing it!
Are you familiar with the writings of the Muslim philosopher Al-Ghazali and his idea now called "Occasionalism"? It seems to me that the person of faith must give up his/her faith in cause and effect for the supernatural to make sense, and Al-Ghazali seems to be the only person to have ever understood this.
Thanks again for your blog! It's fantastic!
Am I familiar with occasionalism? Indeed I am and have given it quite a bit of thought. I advocate a contemporary version of occasionalism in "Concurrentism or Occasionalism? American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. LXX, no. 3, Summer 1996, pp. 339-359. This post will give the reader some idea of what occasionalism is.
Does the believer have to give up his faith in cause and effect for the supernatural to make sense? No, at the very most he would have to abandon certain views of causation. That there is causation in the natural world is undeniable, a 'Moorean fact,' a datum. Anyone who denies this is a lunatic who belongs in the same 'bin' with eliminativists in the philosophy of mind.
For if one were to deny causation, then one would in effect be denying that there is any difference between causal and non-causal event sequences. But surely there is such a difference as all will admit including al-Ghazali and Malebranche. I flip a switch (e1) and the light goes on (e2). At the same time as e2 occurs the phone rings (e3). E1-e2 is a causal event sequence. E1-e3 is not. Philosophers are not in the business of denying such data as these. Philosophical questions about causation first arise when we ask what it is for one event to cause another. That there is causation is a pre-philosophical datum. What causes what is a question for experience and science. What causation is is a philosophical question. In particular, what distingusihes a causal from a non-causal event-sequence? The questions and problems ramify out endlessly from here. For example, if causation is a dyadic relation, and events are its relata, and if a relation cannot obtain between x and y unless both x and y exist, does this commit us to the tenseless existence of events and the rejection of presentism in the philosophy of time? And of course beyond all this lies the ultimate terminus of the philosopher's quest, the Uncaused.
Some theories of causation are inconsistent with theism, but not all are. For example, if it is maintained that all causation is event-causation and that there cannot be be agent-causation, then classical theism is ruled out. For the causa prima of classical theism, God, is obviously an agent-cause. And I should also point out that one can be a theist without holding an occasionalist theory of causation. For example, once could be a concurrentist. But this is not the place to go into these details.
Al-Ghazzali, The Alchemy of Happiness, p. 48:
Another dangerous property of worldly things is that they appear at first as mere trifles, but each of these so-called 'trifles' branches out into countless ramifications until they swallow up the whole of a man's time and energy.
On this topic Harris is right.
The truth is that there is an obvious, undeniable, and hugely consequential moral difference between Israel and her enemies. The Israelis are surrounded by people who have explicitly genocidal intentions towards them. The charter of Hamas is explicitly genocidal. It looks forward to a time, based on Koranic prophesy, when the earth itself will cry out for Jewish blood, where the trees and the stones will say “O Muslim, there’s a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him.” This is a political document. We are talking about a government that was voted into power by a majority of Palestinians.
The discourse in the Muslim world about Jews is utterly shocking. Not only is there widespread Holocaust denial—there’s Holocaust denial that then asserts that we will do it for real if given the chance. The only thing more obnoxious than denying the Holocaust is to say that it should have happened; it didn’t happen, but if we get the chance, we will accomplish it. There are children’s shows in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere that teach five-year-olds about the glories of martyrdom and about the necessity of killing Jews.
[. . .]
What do we know of the Palestinians? What would the Palestinians do to the Jews in Israel if the power imbalance were reversed? Well, they have told us what they would do. For some reason, Israel’s critics just don’t want to believe the worst about a group like Hamas, even when it declares the worst of itself. We’ve already had a Holocaust and several other genocides in the 20th century. People are capable of committing genocide. When they tell us they intend to commit genocide, we should listen.
There is every reason to believe that the Palestinians would kill all the Jews in Israel if they could. Would every Palestinian support genocide? Of course not. But vast numbers of them—and of Muslims throughout the world—would. Needless to say, the Palestinians in general, not just Hamas, have a history of targeting innocent noncombatants in the most shocking ways possible. They’ve blown themselves up on buses and in restaurants. They’ve massacred teenagers. They’ve murdered Olympic athletes. They now shoot rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas. And again, the charter of their government in Gaza explicitly tells us that they want to annihilate the Jews—not just in Israel but everywhere.
Related: America's Betrayal of Israel
Watch this video. That’s a Hamas drone taking down an Israeli Merkava tank. A drone operated by an organization sponsored and trained by Iran applying both Iranian tactics and, most likely, Iranian hardware to attack Israel. This happened weeks after America sent Iran $6 billion, and one week after we learned that the American government had over the past years ceded whole parts of its own intelligence units to Iranian spies.
The stage for this attack was not set in or by Israel. It was set by the United States.
But even worse, and not only for us, is America's betrayal of America. Our borders, Southern but also Northern, are open to every terrorist and every criminal group in the world. They are busy establishing their sleeper cells and installations in the homeland, all with the tacit approval of the Director of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas and his boss Joe Biden. Tacit approval by action, or rather inaction, masked by explicit and brazenly mendacious denial. That is your government at work, with your tax dollars, working to destroy your country and way of life. So long as you remain Democrat you go right along with it.
Our Islamist enemies want to destroy the Little Satan, but even more, the Big Satan. You might want to think about that.
You might also want to think about why there is a mere inquiry into the possible impeachment of Joe Biden which, you know, is not the same as his removal from office, on the ground of bribery and influence peddling when there is a much more grievous "high crime and misdemeanor" for which he ought already to have been impeached and removed, namely, his violation of his oath of office and dereliction of duty. I refer you to the U. S. Constitution which Biden took an oath to uphold and defend:
Article 4, Sec. 4 of The United States Constitution makes it clear the Federal government must stop such an incursion of foreigners into the country exactly like the one we are seeing. Here is what was written by our Founding Fathers concerning our republican form of government.
"The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence."
Substack leader. In this entry I unpack what I consider to be a brilliant insight of Finkielkraut.
Alain Finkielkraut:
Laicity is the solution that modern Europe found in order to escape its religious civil wars. But contemporary Europe doesn’t take religion seriously enough to know how to stick to this solution. She has exiled faith to the fantastic world of human irreality that the Marxists called “superstructure”… thus, precisely through their failure to believe in religion, the representatives of secularism empty laicity of its substance, and swallow, for humanitarian reasons, the demands of its enemies.
I have been asked why I intersperse political entries with narrowly philosophical ones. But in every case the question was put to me by someone who tilts leftward. If my politics were leftist, would anyone complain? Probably not. Academe and academic philosophy are dominated by leftists, and to these types it seems entirely natural that one should be a bien-pensant lefty. Well, I'm here to prove otherwise. Shocking as it will seem to some, leftist views are entirely optional, and a bad option at that.
I could of course post my political thoughts to a separate weblog. Now a while back I did effect such a segregation, sending my political rants and ruminations to my Facebook page, so that MavPhil, now in its 20th year, might hew apolitically to the philosophical straight and narrow. I might have continued had the Facebook bums not gone on a phishing expedition: they demanded my smart phone number to set up two-factor authentication, "for my protection." Pure bullshit, of course; FB is not a venue for which one needs such protection. I refused to hand over my smartphone number and so the FB bums blocked me. No loss; I have backups of everything I posted there of value. FB is pretty much of a joke in any case: a site for endless 'selfies,' what-I-had-for-dinner, and other displays of narcissism. And the comments I received there were of little or no value.
Posting the political to a separate weblog would also violate my 'theory' of blogging. My blog is micro to my life's macro. It must accordingly mirror my life in all its facets as a sort of coincidentia oppositorum of this situated thinker's existence: Sitz im Leben (Dilthey) – θεατής όλων των εποχών και της ύπαρξης (Plato).
Philosophy is hard enough without being done in a police state, which is what our once great republic is becoming if it hasn't already become. Do you deny the fact, or say you don't care? Then then I have a message for you.
If the senses could speak, they would claim that they alone give access to the truth. Why then should we take seriously the discursive intellect's claim that there is nothing beyond it?
Substack latest.
If you can poke a hole in anything I say, I'll buy you lunch when next our paths cross.
Poetic justice. Henry Cuellar is a Democrat. Democrats are leftists. Leftists have an exceedingly casual attitude toward criminal behavior. It's really no big deal to them. Cuellar's main complaint? "They stole my sushi."
If, for whatever reason, you like crime, then I advise you to vote Democrat early and often.
Related: Leftist activist and do-gooder Ryan Carson was stabbed to death in front of his girlfriend in an apparently unprovoked attack. Carson was the victim of the very 'progressive' policies that he himself promoted. So he must bear some responsibility for bringing about his own death. And what was Carson doing out at night on the mean streets of NYC without a weapon?
Cases like this are increasingly common. Unless you are morally obtuse, you will understand why justice demands capital punishment in such cases. That 'progressives' oppose the death penalty is proof positive that they have a casual attitude toward criminal behavior.
Democrats are astonishingly stupid people. They supposedly want fewer guns in civilian hands. So what do they do? They promote policies that incentivize concealed carry! There is no common sense on the Left.
I too want fewer guns in civilian hands. When laws are enforced, civilians will feel safe and won't feel the need to look to their own defense.
https://www.thefp.com/p/charles-fain-lehman-dont-tolerate-disorder-charlie-kirk-iryna-zarutska?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Watched. Read. Wept.
Hey Bill, Got it now, thanks for clarifying. I hope you have a nice Sunday. May God bless you!
Vini, Good comments. Your command of the English language is impressive. In my penultimate paragraph I wrote, “Hence their hatred…
Just a little correction, since I wrote somewhat hastily. I meant to say enemies of the truth (not from the…
You touched on very, very important points, Bill. First, I agree that people nowadays simply want to believe whatever the…
if you do nothing else in what remains of this year, read that essay. please.
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/peace-has-been-murdered-and-dialogue?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=841240&post_id=173321322&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1dw7zg&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
From the Jacobin article: >>Kirk ran a well-funded political propaganda machine that promoted a simple message. “Liberals,” “radicals,” and “socialists”…
https://jacobin.com/2025/09/charlie-kirk-murder-political-violence >>Attempted and successful assassinations of political leaders are on the rise, as are politically motivated killings of less notable…
12 responses to “A Problem of Evil for Atheists”