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Showing posts from November, 2013

The Evil God Challenge and the "classical" theist's response

On another blog, FideCogitActio, some theists of a "classical" stripe (that's to say, like Brian Davies, Edward Feser) are criticisng the Evil God Challenge (or I suppose, trying to show how it can be met, or sidestepped). The main post includes this: In book I, chapter 39 , Aquinas argues that “there cannot be evil in God” (in Deo non potest esse malum). Atheists like Law must face the fact that, if the words are to retain any sense, “God” simply cannot be “evil”. As my comments in the thread at Feser’s blog aimed to show, despite how much he mocks “the privation theory of evil,” Law himself cannot escape its logic: his entire argument requires that the world ought to appear less evil if it is to be taken as evidence of a good God. Even though he spurns the idea that evil is a privation of good, his account of an evil world is parasitic on a good ideal; this is no surprise, though, since all evil is parasitic on good ( SCG I, 11 ). Based on the conclusions of se

A parody of C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters (from my book Believing Bullshit) - on the anniversary of his death

Here is the final bit of my book Believing Bullshit . What follows is a cautionary bit of fiction, inspired by C.S. Lewis's fiction The Screwtape Letters , Letters from a Senior to a Junior Devil , which are fantastically entertaining and often very insightful. I don't claim my mirror letters are as good as Lewis's, but they are offered in the same cautionary spirit. Just so we are clear, what follows is not supposed to be an attack on religious belief per se. I'm certainly not trying to argue here that all religious folk are victims of deliberate scams, or indeed any sort of delusion. Nor am I attacking the content of any particular religious or other view (incl. some well-known cults). However, I do think that some religious folk have been encouraged to think in ways that effectively trap them inside a bubble of belief - in an intellectual black hole, as I put it in the book (and plenty of religious folk would agree with me about that, of course).