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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   24325 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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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.

The universe, our solar system, our planet and all life are the consequences of the Big Bang and the laws of physics. These events happened, cosmological and Earth's natural history, but they are simply and solely what happened. They neither support nor repudiate the Genesis account. The skeptic takes the Genesis account as expressly literal and says "but history." In this they err, but understandably so as the American skeptic particularly will have been exposed so much to Protestants who hold to Young-Earth creationism. The apologist in turn errs in accepting the skeptic's framing as they concede the point of natural history as supporting the naturalist paradigm. This is true for the YEC, whose first error is that belief, it is also true for the OEC/believer in Theistic Evolution who accept it as having explanatory power.

But the apologist is correct in the importance of faith, the point is ubiquitous. I assume you are familiar enough to know the recurrence of "The Jews fall to apostasy and ruin, God personally delivers them, and yet they fall once more." They knew, still they fell, again and again. It's never been about what you know, it's about what you hold in faith. That we see no glaring gap in natural history is not because if there were we would have no choice but to believe. We see contiguous natural history because that is what happened. Faith is for why.

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.

I read it as more like, sophistry may be employed against inconsequential or subjective matters like religion freely, as there's no harm to it; but if you try to argue with reality, reality is gonna win.

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