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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14004 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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In preparation for the currently ongoing papal conclave, I decided to read the official rules currently in force, UNIVERSI DOMINICI GREGIS, issued by John Paul II in 1996. The document contains this provision (emphasis added):

”In the present historical circumstances, the universality of the Church is sufficiently expressed by the College of one hundred and twenty electors, made up of Cardinals coming from all parts of the world and from very different cultures. I therefore confirm that this is to be the maximum number of Cardinal electors”

Seems simple enough right?

Whoops.

”On Wednesday afternoon, under the gaze of Michelangelo’s frescoes, the 133 cardinals taking part in the 2025 conclave entered the Sistine Chapel.”

Here I was, a schmuck, reading the canonically promulgated apostolic constitution as if it mattered, as if the supposed men of God involved in this 2000-year-old institution might care about established procedures.

Sure, Francis could have changed the rules, as many popes have done throughout the centuries, but he didn’t. He either didn’t notice or didn’t care, and neither did anyone else with influence within the Vatican either. How am I supposed to take this seriously if the cardinals and popes don’t even take it seriously?

I wish Christianity were true. I really do. It would certainly make my dating life easier. I’d have a sense of purpose in life, defined rules of virtue to follow, but it just doesn’t make any actual sense. The inconsistency I cited above is relatively minor, but it is illustrative of what one finds everywhere when one digs into the claims of Christianity and treats them with the truth-preserving tools of logic. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus and Vatican II, Matthew 24:34, these are fundamental truth claims that can’t be handwaved away like the finer points of ecclesiastical law.

Christianity isn't so much about 'things being true' but getting into a mindset where 'it doesn't matter if it's true or not, I believe it'. Christian theology is a complete mess because they go in with the answer in mind and then come up with justifications. They just make up all kinds of nonsense about 'free will' requiring everyone to suffer because of a snake and an apple. Or there being a great plan that requires Christians to suffer and get wrecked by huge natural disasters beyond their ability to handle. Omnipotence and benevolence does not require there to be random earthquakes and tsunamis that destroy you, it's pure cope to think that there's a plan behind it all or that 'this is the best of all possible worlds'. Theologians have spent thousands if not millions of man-years justifying this stuff but still hard-lose to the Epicurean argument because there is no satisfactory answer.

OK, you can be perfectly happy as a Christian ignoring these abstract issues and have a decent life which is better than can be said for many modern ideologies. Thousands of years have been spent turning the silliness into metaphors and capitalizing on the strengths, rationalizing and streamlining the religion.

But all that is ironically enough built on a foundation of sand. Once people realize that the astronomy and history is all wrong, the philosophy is silly, the predictions are wrong, the blankslatism and universal equality of iron-age institution-building isn't so relevant given modern technologies and culture... they also move on from the good elements of Christianity, the prohibition on incest and the well-functioning family structures. The solution is not to return to Christianity but to move on and do the hard work of getting ideology that actually fits with reality. This is extremely difficult and dangerous work but necessary nonetheless.

The solution is not to return to Christianity but to move on and do the hard work of getting ideology that actually fits with reality. This is extremely difficult and dangerous work but necessary nonetheless.

Respectfully, this comment smacks of the kind of naïveté expressed by progressives worldwide at the turn of the 20th century. Mankind is perfectable, we can use science and reason to deduce optimal ideologies, organizing society is like a mathematical problem with a solution, etc. And that thought process produced fascism, communism, and the deadliest conflicts in world history. Difficult and dangerous work, indeed…

I used to put my trust in man, now I put my trust in God.

Charitably, one could steelman the quote as referring to the development of ideologies that are merely more fit than traditional Christianity, as opposed to such that aim for utopia. Not that secular ideology is able to achieve perfection in any way, but only that it can outperform both Christianity and organic "modernity".

Christianity isn't so much about 'things being true' but getting into a mindset where 'it doesn't matter if it's true or not, I believe it'

I think you would find this claim very hard to square with even simply the Bible itself, much less the subsequent writings or even behaviour of Christians.

Christianity might be false - we may be, in Paul's words, of all people most to be pitied - but it is absolutely making truth claims, and those truth claims matter. They matter to Christians. The theology that you blithely dismiss can only exist because Christians care about this.

Subsequent writings are merely of the 'adding more epicycles' kind of truthseeking. First it was literally believing that men were created by God ex nihilo. Then Darwinism came around and showed this wasn't the case. So they just retreat back to 'OK fine evolution is real but God created all things and the individual soul is not produced by material forces'. There's no substantial change to the practical doctrine of blankslatism, they move on just as before with zero regard for skepticism or evidence.

The soul? You may as well go to Pakistan and pursue cutting edge research into the powers of djinn.

Likewise with the Epicurean argument. They created an entire discipline of theodicy to cope with it and still fail. Free will? Natural disasters have nothing to do with free will. And 'free will' itself is becoming more and more of an illusion, we are today capable of creating benign and malevolent digital beings. So too is God. God could've set the median level of aggression lower or altered incentives to produce more sympathy. There is no free will in front of an omnipotent who establishes the context, permits what genes come into existence or what genes even are.

Grand plan? Maybe Satan runs the world and has a grand evil-maxxing plan that tolerates good for greater evil... Or it's just outright incomprehensible. That works just as well.

Here's another one I found:

We are in world that is a state of journeying. For this world in a state of journeying to exist and be self-sustaining, it must follow the laws of nature. I would argue that since these laws are so intimately and intricately related, it would be impossible for a journeying world to exist if just one minor thing was changed. That is, these laws of nature are the only way in which this journeying world can naturally sustain itself. If God were to change just one law, everything else would be thrown off and it would become unsustainable. In his work, Fr. Robert Spitzer, SJ, has discovered that if during the Big Bang, the gravitational constant or weak force constant varied from their values by an exceedingly small fraction (higher or lower) – one part in 10^50 then either the universe would have suffered a catastrophic collapse or would have exploded throughout its expansion.

An omnipotent God can write the laws of Nature, Genesis describes this. The universe could run on the fuzzy principles of a human dream, not thermodynamics. You could have a physics of wishing or Daoist cultivation to immortality, Aristotelian physics or Harry Potter. All of that is simple for an omnipotent.

No matter what they try, the Epicurean trilemma still snuffs them out. And this is the key thing, the question of mindset I bring up at the start. They don't like the Epicurean Trilemma and so come up with some comforting story that fails if you look at it too closely, they never review their priors about the nature of God.

Subsequent writings are merely of the 'adding more epicycles' kind of truthseeking. First it was literally believing that men were created by God ex nihilo.

This is a nitpick, but I feel obligated to note that no, it wasn't. In Genesis 2:7, the first man is formed out of the dust of the ground. The Bible does not say that men were created ex nihilo, but in fact says the explicit opposite. I would gently suggest that if you want to seriously engage with Christian thought on a complex issue, you may wish to start by familiarising yourself with what Christian texts actually say.

Is this a nitpick? Is it not massively germane to your point? No, perhaps not, and if you want to look for all the ways in which Genesis 1-2 are not a scientifically accurate account of abiogenesis, you'll succeed. But then it is hardly the case that Christians, even long before Darwin, have understood it that way. Thinkers as older as Augustine, in 401, have understood that this narrative is not to be understood in that sense. Likewise Calvin, again prior to modern science, frankly writes "that nothing here is treated of but the visible form of the world" and adds "He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere". As with astronomy, so with biology.

You may condemn Augustine and Calvin as adding epicycles, but I would say, rather, that the burden of proof lies with your assumption that the only reasonable way to understand Genesis is as a historico-scientific account of the origin of the universe. It seems to me that as Christians have taken other approaches, even many centuries before modern science, it is by no means obvious that that's the natural reading of it. My view, actually, is that the automatic reading of Genesis as scientific is itself a kind of modern debasement, an error characteristic of post-Enlightenment thinkers.

Now to the rest...

I actually don't find the Riddle of Epicurus particularly overwhelming here, not least because the Riddle predates Christianity by many centuries, and in fact the Problem of Evil is itself voiced with great eloquence and force in the Hebrew scriptures themselves. Confronting the earliest Christians with the fact of evil, in the face of God's omnipotence, would not surprise or challenge them in the slightest, and the difficulty that humans have understanding evil was as familiar to them as it is to us.

What I would say is that Christian faith does, in a sense, require the belief that there is some kind of answer to the Problem of Evil, even if we do not know it. And that in itself is not absurd. If we have good reason to believe that God exists and is benevolent, and yet we observe evil, it would seem to follow that there must be some kind of reason for evil. We need not be able to articulate that reason in order to believe that there must be one. The question has an answer, even if we do not know it. Christianity does not declare that there are no mysteries.

Thus, say, Peter van Inwagen's response to the Problem of Evil is what he calls a 'defense' rather than an 'theodicy'. He writes:

The construction of a theodicy is not demanded of a philosopher or theologian who is concerned with apologetic problems. If apologists for theism or for some theistic religion think they know what the real truth about the existence of evil is, they may of course appeal to this supposed truth in their attempts to expose what they regard as the weaknesses of the argument from evil. But apologists need not believe that they know, or that any human being knows, the real truth about God and evil. The apologist is, after all, in a position analogous to that of a counsel for the defense who is trying to create “reasonable doubt” as regards the defendant's guilt in the minds of jurors. (The apologist is trying to create reasonable doubt about whether the argument from evil is sound.) And lawyers can raise reasonable doubts by presenting to juries stories that entail their clients' innocence and account for the prosecution's evidence without maintaining, without claiming themselves to believe, that those stories are true.

Typically, apologists dealing with the argument from evil present what are called “defenses”. A defense is not necessarily different from a theodicy in content. Indeed, a defense and a theodicy may well be verbally identical. Each is, formally speaking, a story according to which both God and evil exist. The difference between a defense and a theodicy lies not in their content but in their purposes. A theodicy is a story that is told as the real truth of the matter; a defense is a story that, according to the teller, may or may not be true, but which, the teller maintains, has some desirable feature that does not entail truth—perhaps (depending on the context) logical consistency or epistemic possibility (truth-for-all-anyone-knows).

This much, I think, may be required of the Christian - not that they prove that this-or-that theodicy is true, but merely to prove that it is conceivably possible that evil may, for now, exist in a universe created and governed by a benevolent God. The bar required is reasonable doubt.

It seems to me that my justifications for understanding God to exist are sufficiently strong, and the possible explanations for evil's existence sufficiently many, that Epicurus' Riddle does not snuff out my bright candle.

I think logical arguments are a dismal way to look at metaphysics. If you agree that it doesn't have to make sense, why do you expect it to make sense? Should an omnipotent being not also have the power to sustain contradiction?

Or, as the Babel fish joke goes:

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist,'" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

If I recall correctly the old BBC show animated that joke with a bogus math formula how color pigments mixed together gives a black painting color, but all color lights mixed together is a white light.

I always thought that was a remarkable passage from a self-described "radical atheist".

Why? It's riffing off religious arguments about faith, where the reason there isn't proof of God is that he's testing our faith or whatever. "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” and all that, so even though God wants us to believe in him and created the world he deliberately made it look like a world created by unthinking natural processes and restricted his miracles to unverifiable anecdotes. This is an argument that exists precisely because God isn't real so there's a demand for backwards logic where the lack of evidence to believe in God is itself a reason to believe in God. He humorously inverts this into an argument where, if there was actually proof of God's existence, it would be proof of God's nonexistence. This is then compared to proving that black is white. In real life, of course, he didn't think that the lack of evidence for God is a reason to believe in God (or that there is evidence of God which means we shouldn't believe in God). He thought that the lack of evidence that God exists means that God actually doesn't exist.

It's a good joke, but the bit about "without faith I am nothing" is classical atheism: gods depend on believers and cannot exist without them, if you demonstrate that belief is false then gods cease to exist.

That works great if you're an atheist: oh we used to believe in phlogiston, now we know that's not true. But for religion, it's putting the cart before the horse. If you're Christian, God existed ever before humans, so who were the believers who brought God into being? Faith is for the benefit of humanity, not for the benefit of God.

That's not the remarkable part. That's totally normal, as you say. The remarkable part is:

"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

What does belief in God have to do with belief that black is not white and that you should look before crossing the street? It can't be that those things depend on your belief in them.

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