I know that few thoughtful people take Lena Dunham seriously, but still.... Dunham tweeted yesterday that the Las Vegas massacre Monday night was about gender, race, and capitalism. She didn't explain exactly how it was about these things, although I suppose that since the perpetrator of this awful atrocity was a well-to-do white male perhaps in her mind that's proof enough that his sickening rampage was somehow about capitalism, race and gender, I don't know.
I do know, though, that Stephen Paddock's crime was clearly about nihilistic evil, and I do believe that evil incubates most comfortably in a society which denies its existence. Sad to say, there are a lot of very smart people in the West who are in denial about the existence of evil. Richard Dawkins, for example, has written that "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”
Why do Dawkins and so many other thinkers who share his worldview believe that there's ultimately "no evil and no good"? They believe it because it's the logical consequence of the naturalism and materialism which they embrace. If matter is all that exists then human beings are nothing more than a collocation of atoms and molecules - we're just material stuff, and material stuff, by itself, is neither good nor evil. It just is.
But, someone may reply, this particular arrangement of atoms named Stephen Paddock has caused a great deal of pain to other arrangements of atoms, doesn't that make it evil? Well, why should it? If a virus or a tiger cause pain to a human being is the virus evil? Is the tiger?
The answer, of course, is no. There can only be evil if there is an objective set of moral principles which apply uniquely to humans and to which humans will be held accountable. On naturalism, though, moral principles are not objective, they don't exist as anything other than convenient fictions which we invent to help us to get along together in society, nor is there really any way to hold someone truly accountable, except in the most transient sense, who commits an act that we are viscerally repelled by.
In other words, on naturalism not only is there no objective moral right and wrong, neither is there any real justice. People like Paddock who cause untold suffering end their lives in a painless instant while the suffering they caused endures in the hearts and minds of the families he has harmed for the rest of their lives. There's no justice in that.
Human beings, however, have a basic conviction that there really is an objective moral standard, and we harbor in our hearts a deep yearning for justice. Yet, if naturalism is true the former is false and the latter is absurd. Only if naturalism is false can our intuition that Paddock did something grossly evil Monday night be correct, and only if naturalism is false can we cling to any plausible expectation that justice will ultimately prevail for people like him and his victims.
Like Dawkins' quote suggests, one can believe that naturalism is true or one can believe that the Las Vegas slaughter was evil, but one can't believe both.
