If Evil Exists God Must Exist

On July 22nd, 2007 two thugs broke into the home of Dr. and Mrs. William Petit and their two daughters in Cheshire, Connecticut. They held the Petits hostage for seven terrifying hours. The doctor was beaten, his wife was raped, his youngest daughter was sexually assaulted and their house set afire. The mother and daughters, having been tied up and doused with gasoline, burned to death. Only the father managed to escape. The crime was unimaginably evil.

It's not uncommon after a horrific event like this has occured to hear someone claim that they can't believe in the Christian God because no God who was good would've allowed such senseless depravity to happen. A good being of any sort would have a moral obligation to prevent such wickedness if he could, and the failure to do so is a strong argument for the conclusion that God, if He exists at all, is either impotent in the face of evil or not willing to prevent it and thus not good.

In the aftermath of the horror that the Petit's suffered it's easy to feel the emotional power of this argument, and people who are grieving and in shock don't want or need to have their reasoning analyzed. They need to be loved.

Nevertheless, for those not immediately in the throes of emotional devastation it might be noted that this is actually a very odd argument. As has been asserted here at VP on many occasions, in order to speak of moral evil one has to assume that God exists. In a Godless universe there are no moral rights and wrongs and thus there are no moral duties and thus nothing is evil.

So the skeptic who pleads the existence of horrible moral wrongs as a basis for denying that God exists can use that argument only if God does, in fact, exist.

As I say, this is a very odd argument.

The conviction that the world contains terrible moral evils - deeds that are profoundly wrong to do - assumes that there is an objective moral law that transcends human subjectivity, but an objective moral law can only exist if there really is a God who grounds it, who insists that we conform to it, and who holds us accountable to it.

As philosopher Alvin Plantinga writes, a secular view of the world "has no place for genuine moral obligation of any sort...and thus no way to say there's such a thing as genuine and appalling wickedness. Accordingly, if you think there is such a thing as horrifying wickedness, then you have a powerful argument" for the existence of God.

The belief that what happened to the Petits, or to Israeli families on October 7th, or untold millions of others, is morally evil must presuppose that an objective moral law has been violated and that must itself presuppose the existence of an objective moral lawgiver.

Someone might retort that it's a mistake to say that morality is based upon some objective standard and that, on the contrary, morality is merely rooted in the strong feelings of individuals and societies. Therefore, we don't need to posit a God in order to have morality, the argument goes, all we need is a consensus of feeling.

This is a commonly held view but if it's a sound argument those who embrace it cannot say that any human action at all is evil. It may be that they are personally revulsed by the thought of people being deliberately burned alive, but if the perpetrators of Oct.7th, for example, strongly feel that what they did is right then whose feelings are the correct ones? Some are revulsed by the deed and some rejoice in it, so how can anyone judge what they did to be objectively wrong?

If God does not exist then what those two men inflicted upon the Petits is neither wrong nor right, it's just a fact about what happened. We may not like it, it may outrage us, but our outrage doesn't make anything wrong. It can only be wrong if it violates some objective standard of behavior and if the men who perpetrated the deed will ultimately be held accountable for it by God.

And neither of those conditions exists, of course, unless God does.

Is the World an Illusion?

King’s College philosopher of physics Alexander Franklin wishes to stress that “everyday reality is not an illusion. There really is a world outside our minds." Perhaps so, but there's a more interesting question, I think, concerning the world of which he speaks. More on that in a moment.

Here's an excerpt from an article at Mind Matters on Professor Franklin's argument:

Popular science often tells us that we are radically deceived by the commonplace appearance of everyday objects and that colour and solidity are illusions. For instance, the physicist Sir Arthur Eddington distinguished in 1928 between two tables: the familiar table and the scientific table, while the former is solid and coloured, the scientific table “is nearly all empty space”.

Eddington then makes the striking claim that “modern physics has by delicate test and remorseless logic assured me that my second scientific table is the only one which is really there”.

Franklin’s essay in response is a plea for Emergentism (the reality we experience emerges from more basic principles), as opposed to what he calls “Illusionism,” the popular belief that it is all an illusion. Along the way, he offers a useful interpretation of the empty space “table,” in terms of quantum physics (the behavior of elementary particles).

Franklin argues that, according to quantum mechanics, an electron in orbit around an atomic nucleus actually occupies the entire orbit, more like the surface of a hollow ball than like a solitary planet orbiting the sun. Thus, there really is no empty space in the orbit and therefore the table's solidity is not an illusion.

This is a bit misleading, though. The atom is in fact mostly empty space. Even if the electrons can be thought of as existing everywhere in their orbits at once, there's a relatively enormous amount of space between orbits. If, for instance, the nucleus of a hydrogen atom were made the size of a bb and placed on second base in a major league stadium, it's lone electron would be orbiting out around the upper deck.

If our hydrogen atom, represented by the bb on second base, was bonded to another hydrogen atom, the nucleus of the second atom, or bb, would be out in the parking lot somewhere. That's a lot of empty space.

Nevertheless, the more interesting question, at least for me, is not whether the solidity of Eddington's table is an illusion but rather how much of what we experience when we observe the table is objectively there in the table and how much of what we observe is actually a creation of our minds.

For example, suppose the table is painted green. We'd say that the table is green, but, of course, the table itself is not any color at all. The sensation of green is in our brains or minds. The paint merely reflects light energy of a certain wavelength to our eye and our visual sense in concert with our brain/mind translates that energy into a sensation of green.

The same is true of the sensations we have of sound, taste, warmth, smell, etc. The stimuli which give rise to these sensations may be generated by objects, but the sensations they produce are in us.

In other words, were there were no perceivers, no one to observe the world, there would be no color, flavor, sound, warmth or odor - just colorless, tasteless, odorless, soundless matter and energy flying about. Just as there'd be no pain if no one felt it, there'd be no color or sound if no one saw or heard it.

This being so, we might ask what is the world in itself really like apart from our perception of it? How much of what we call reality do our senses/brains/minds actually create and how much is objectively independent of our perceptions?

If the color of the table is a sensation in our brains, and if the smell, coolness, texture, etc. are likewise sensations in us rather than in the table, what's left when all the sensations have been abstracted away? Matter? But what's that? Matter's just a lot of empty space.

We might also wonder how much of our understanding of the world is a function of our size? Suppose the table appears smooth to us. Would it appear smooth to a bacterium? The table appears solid to us, but pace professor Franklin, it certainly doesn't appear solid to a neutrino, tens of thousands of which pass through every square inch of everything on earth (including us) every second.

Here's another question: How much different would the world appear to us if we had six or seven senses? A man born blind has no concept of light or color. How much different would this world seem to him were he suddenly able to see? Likewise, what experiences would the world present to us if we had the additional senses with which to experience them?

We go through life thinking that the world is just the way we perceive it to be, but why should we think such a thing? The world may be far stranger, far different, than what our five senses reveal to us.

The Breeze and the Hurricane

In a fine piece at PJ Media titled Who Caused the Cultural Revolution? Victor Davis Hanson argues that the culprits behind the massive layoffs of government workers are not really the Trump administration or Elon Musk but rather the activists who burrowed their way into almost every government department and commenced a regime of fraud and waste of the taxpayer's dollars that went on for years.

Almost every politician who's been elected to office has promised to eliminate the "fat" in government, but no one has ever actually done it. Not even Ronald Reagan was able to do much about the bloat in government that he complained about.

Now, the first serious effort to introduce accountability and efficiency into government is being undertaken and those who have benefited from feeding at the public trough are doing everything they can to stop it. Undoing the damage that has been done to our country will not be easy or painless, but thankfully it's being done.

Anyway, in the conclusion to his article Hanson also notes a few interesting examples of the stark difference between the current administration and its predecessor that should receive more publicity than they have. Hanson points out that:

• No FBI SWAT teams are now raiding the homes of ex-presidents.
• No one is trying to take a presidential rival off state ballots.
• No one is coordinating local, state, and federal prosecutors to indict, harass, and bankrupt an ex-president.
• And no president -- his dementia sheathed by political insiders and a toadish media -- is working three days a week, avoiding press conferences, or stonewalling reporters' questions.

Of course, it's still early and things could change, but so far the difference between the Biden administration's approach to governance and that of Mr. Trump is like the difference between a breeze and a hurricane.

Moreover, the Trump administration gives one hope that it'll be far more forthcoming with the American people than was the Biden White House. Perhaps we'll learn the details behind the attempted assassinations of candidate Trump, the source of the cocaine that was left in the White House, the names of those implicated in Jeffrey Epstein's crimes, the role of the FBI in the J6 riots, how the plot to have Trump impeached in 2017 was hatched, and much else.

The American people have the right to know how their tax dollars are spent and who or what is behind many of the mysterious events of the past few years. After all, as we're frequently reminded by folks in the media, "Democracy dies in darkness."

Four Questions about Free Will

An article at Mind Matters lists and discusses four questions concerning free will that often arise in conversations on the topic.

Here are the four with a brief summary of the discussion. For the complete discussion see the article:

1. Has psychology shown that free will does not really exist? No, in fact the experiments of Benjamin Libet (1916-2007) show just the opposite. We've discussed these experiments on VP in the past, for instance here.

2. Is free will a logical idea? Yes, in fact denying it is often illogical. If all our decisions and beliefs are determined then our denial of free will is the inevitable product of our genes and childhood influences of which we may be only dimly, if at all, aware. We may think we have good reasons to disbelieve in free will, but whatever those reasons are they likely play a very minor role in our disbelief.

3. Would a world without free will be a better place? No, it'd be a dystopia in which there's no guilt, no moral obligation, no human dignity and in which people would inevitably come under the tyranny of totalitarian "controllers." (See B.F. Skinner's Walden Two)

4. Are there science concepts that support free will? Yes, the concept of information is one. Check out the original article to see why.

It's interesting that the conviction that we're free seems almost inescapable. Even people who are determinists can't shake it. Philosopher John Searle, for example, writes that, "We can't give up our conviction of our own freedom, even though there's no ground for it." John Horgan, a writer for Scientific American, states that, "No matter what my intellect decides, I'm compelled to believe in free will."

So why do many people deny that we're free? Perhaps the overriding reason is that they have embraced a metaphysical materialism that eliminates from their doxastic structure anything that cannot be explained in terms of the laws of physics. Those laws are strictly deterministic, thus our intuition that we're free must be an illusion.

The next question we might ponder is why should anyone embrace materialism? Perhaps the answer to that is that the alternative, the belief that there are immaterial substances like minds, puts one on a slippery slope to belief in God and that belief is just not tolerable for many moderns.

Better to deny that we have free will, the thinking goes, than to open the door of our ontology to supernatural entities.

The Mystery of Red Cell Enucleation

Reading a few books on evolution and Intelligent Design inspired me recently to browse through some old posts on the topic, and I stumbled upon this one. It recounts an interview with geneticist Michael Denton who discusses one of the strangest phenomena in cell biology and a huge problem for Darwinian explanations of the evolution of the cell.

Denton is the author of several outstanding books, including Evolution: A Theory in Crisis which explains many of the shortcomings of Darwinian explanations of life and Nature's Destiny which addresses how the laws of physics and chemistry and the properties of water and carbon dioxide are all precisely suited to make the world an extraordinarily fit place for the emergence of higher forms of life.

He's interviewed at a site called The Successful Student and the interview is a must read for anyone interested in how discoveries in biology consistently refute the Darwinian paradigm.

Here's just one of the problems he discusses, a problem I confess I had never heard of before reading the interview:

At King’s [College in London] the subject of my PhD thesis was the development of the red [blood] cell and it seemed to me there were aspects of red cell development which posed a severe challenge to the Darwinian framework. The red cell performs one of the most important physiological functions on earth: the carriage of oxygen to the tissues. And in mammals the nucleus is lost in the final stages of red cell development, which is a unique phenomenon.

The problem that the process of enucleation poses for Darwinism is twofold: first of all, the final exclusion of the nucleus is a dramatically saltational event and quite enigmatic in terms of any sort of gradualistic explanation in terms of a succession of little adaptive Darwinian steps. Stated bluntly; how does the cell test the adaptive state of ‘not having a nucleus’ gradually? I mean there is no intermediate stable state between having a nucleus and not having a nucleus.

This is perhaps an even greater challenge to Darwinian gradualism than the evolution of the bacterial flagellum because no cell has ever been known to have a nucleus sitting stably on the fence half way in/half way out! So how did this come about by natural selection, which is a gradual process involving the accumulation of small adaptive steps?

The complexity of the process — which is probably a type of asymmetric cell division — whereby the cell extrudes the nucleus, is quite staggering, involving a whole lot of complex mechanisms inside of the cell. These force the nucleus, first to the periphery of the cell and then eventually force it out of the cell altogether. It struck me as a process which was completely inexplicable in terms of Darwinian evolution — a slam-dunk if you want.

And there’s another catch: the ultimate catch, perhaps? Is an enucleate red cell adaptive? Because birds, which have a higher metabolic rate than mammals, keep their nucleus. So how come that organisms, which have a bigger demand for oxygen than mammals, they get to keep their nucleus while we get rid of ours?

And this raises of course an absolutely horrendous problem that in the case of one of the most crucial physiological processes on earth there are critical features that we can’t say definitively are adaptive.... Every single day I was in the lab at King’s I was thinking about this, and had to face the obvious conclusion that the extrusion of the red cell nucleus could not be explained in terms of the Darwinian framework.

And if there was a problem in giving an account of the shape of a red cell, in terms of adaptation, you might as well give up the Darwinian paradigm; you might as well "go home." .... It’s performing the most critical physiological function on the planet, and you’re grappling around trying to give an adaptive explanation for its enucleate state.

And the fact that birds get by very, very well (you can certainly argue that birds are every bit as successful as mammals). So, what’s going on? What gives? And it was contemplating this very curious ‘adaptation’ which was one factor that led me to see that many Darwinian explanations were “just-so" stories.

Denton also talks about another fascinating development in biology - the growing realization that everything in the cell affects everything else. That even the shape, or topology, of the cell determines what genes will be expressed and that the regulation of all of the cellular activities is far more complex than any device human beings have ever been able to invent.

It's all very fascinating stuff.

Common Sense

Some things are just common sense. For example, it's common sense to believe that:

• men cannot make themselves into women, cannot menstruate, lactate, or get pregnant.
• women should not have to contend with men in their locker rooms or restrooms, or compete against men in athletic contests.
• we should not stock our public school libraries with salacious reading material or permit men who dress as women to dance in front of children or otherwise influence them.
• society should protect the lives of the innocent and helpless.
• criminals should be prosecuted and that failure to prosecute encourages more crime.
• if the only way to drive Russia out of Ukraine is to precipitate WWIII then we should strive now to seek the best deal for an end to the war that we can.
• our Bill of Rights is a blessing and a bulwark against tyranny.
• defending Hamas and anyone who supports them is to side with evil.
• our government should be as lean, efficient and as free of fraud and waste as possible.
• people who never went to college should not have to pay off the debt of people who did.
• judging people by their abilities and their character is fair and just and that judging them by their skin color is not.
• a nation should have secure borders and properly vet all who seek to get in.
• if there are rapists, murderers, and other felons in our country illegally they should be deported.
• children born to people who are breaking our laws by being here or who are otherwise here only to have children should not be rewarded with citizenship.
• if nuclear power plants can operate safely and the spent fuel be stored safely we should build more nuclear power plants.
• if the government continues to print more money inflation will ensue and more people will ultimately be unemployed.
• we cannot increase our national debt indefinitely.
• if a state raises the minimum wage the prices of goods will go up and the people who work minimum wage jobs will soon be unemployed as over 10,000 fast food workers in California have discovered.

As you reflect on this list ask yourself which of our two major political parties is most likely to be found on the side of common sense and which is most likely to be found on the other side.

Our Contemporary Moral Crisis

In early 1968, a year of enormous social convulsion in the U.S. and Europe, philosopher William “Will” Herberg (1901-1977), published an essay entitled “What Is the Moral Crisis of Our Time?”

The essay has become a classic and James Toner offers some reflections on it here. He writes:

As a college senior reading that essay, I was struck by its analytical and prophetic power.

Herberg’s thesis was as perceptive as it was succinct: “the moral crisis of our time consists primarily not in the widespread violation of accepted moral standards . . . but in the repudiation of those very moral standards themselves.”

The moral code of the Greeks, based upon reason, and of the Hebrews, based upon Revelation, had atrophied, he wrote, to the point of dissolution. We were “rapidly losing all sense of transcendence.” We were adrift, by choice, in a sea of disorder with no “navigational” standards to consult....

People have always flouted moral standards, but rarely in the history of Western civilization have we come to the place where we reject the very idea of morality altogether, yet that's where large segments of our culture seem headed in these postmodern times.

Toner continues:

[Herberg] pointed to Jean-Paul Sartre’s advice to a young man living in Nazi-occupied France as an example of the moral bewilderment increasingly held as “authentic” in the 1960s.

The man had asked Sartre if he should fight the Nazis in the Resistance movement or cooperate with them, obtaining a sinecure in the Vichy Regime. The choice hardly mattered, said Sartre, as long as the decision was authentic and inward. If there are no objective standards to govern moral choice, then what is chosen does not matter.

The only concern is whether one chooses “authentically.”

Thus Herberg concluded: “The moral crisis of our time is, at bottom, a metaphysical and religious crisis.”

Herberg prophesied rabid subjectivism, all-pervasive antinomianism, and a soul-searing secularism, what Pope Benedict was much later to call the “dictatorship of relativism.”

We now may be so mired in narcissistic norms that we cannot even understand Herberg’s jeremiad: “No human ethic is possible that is not itself grounded in a higher law and a higher reality beyond human manipulation or control.”

The reason of the Greeks and the Revelation of the Hebrews are now replaced by modernist profane worship of man by man: thus, tyranny beckons and awaits.

The problem that Herberg puts his finger on can be expressed in the following chain of hypothetical propositions:

If there is no God (No transcendent moral authority with the power to hold men ultimately accountable) then there can be no objective moral duties.

If there are no objective moral duties then the only duties we can have are subjective duties, i.e. duties that depend ultimately on our own feelings, biases, prejudices and predilections.

A subjective duty is self-imposed, but if it's self-imposed then it can be self-removed.

Thus, if our only moral duties are subjective then there are no moral duties at all since we cannot have a genuine duty if we can absolve ourselves of that duty whenever it suits us.

In other words, unless there's a transcendent moral law-giver which (or who) can hold us responsible for our choices in life then there's no such thing as a moral obligation.

As Tolstoy put it:

The attempts to found a morality apart from religion are like the attempts of children who, wishing to transplant a flower that pleases them, pluck it from the roots that seem to them unpleasing and superfluous, and stick it rootless into the ground. Without religion there can be no real, sincere morality, just as without roots there can be no real flower.

Part of the price of living in the present secular age is the loss of the ability to discern, evaluate and even talk about good and evil, right and wrong. This is what Herberg saw so clearly coming to fruition in the sixties. It's what Friedrich Nietzsche prophesied in the 19th century in books like Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals.

It's what atheist philosopher Jürgen Habermas meant when he wrote the following:

Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.

Toner concludes with this:

Herberg quotes cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897): “When men lose their sense of established standards, they inevitably fall victim to the urge for pleasure or power."

You can read a PDF of Herberg's original essay here, but unfortunately the quality of the PDF isn't good.