Are Christians Evil?

One of my favorite philosophers is David Lewis. Lewis, who died in 2001, was a professor at Princeton renowned for defending strange and unconventional positions in metaphysics such as his belief that our world is but one of many worlds, all of which are equally real. He exemplified the playful cleverness that I admire in philosophers.

So I was pleasantly surprised to see that the December 2007 issue of the magazine Harper's has an excerpt from an essay entitled "Divine Evil" based on an outline Lewis wrote shortly before his death. The essay has been published in the book Philosophers without Gods (Oxford University Press, 2007).

The excerpt presents an argument that tries to show that most, if not all, of us are evil. It seems to go something like this:

(1) Anyone who admires someone who is evil is evil.
(2) It is evil to torment people for insubordination.
(3) The greater the torment prescribed for insubordination, the greater is the evil of the one prescribing the torment.
(4) God prescribes infinite torment for insubordination.
(5) Therefore, God is the most evil being. (follows from 2, 3, and 4)
(6) Anyone who admires God is evil. (follows from 1 and 5)
(7) All Christians admire God.
(8) Therefore, all Christians are evil. (follows from 6 and 7)
(9) All who admire people who admire evil beings are themselves evil.
(10) Almost everyone admires some Christian.
(11) Almost everyone is evil. (follows from 9 and 10)

Lewis uses the example of Fritz, the nice Nazi who admires Hitler. Clearly, Hitler is evil, and presumably we would judge people who admire Hitler, even if they themselves do not torment anyone, to be evil as well. But Hitler never sent anyone to eternal damnation in hell, so God is even worse than Hitler and anyone who follows God is worse than Fritz.

This argument seems to fail on a number of grounds, but I'll present one possible response right now and leave the rest to you.

Leaving aside universalists (who believe that everyone is saved), most Christians do believe that at least some people are eternally damned. But does that necessarily make God evil? Lewis seems to assume that we should assess the morality of a being based on the quantity or quality of the pain and suffering they inflict or allow. But that ignores the fact that people like Hitler and Stalin are limited in their ability to inflict suffering not by moral considerations but by their practical inability to inflict all the suffering they want to inflict. The question we need to ask is how much would such evil men do if they had the power of God? Compared to them, God is probably amazingly merciful. Any human in God's role would probably be much more petty and vindictive. So perhaps what is admirable about God is that given His infinite power, His mercy is beyond anything that humans are capable of.

Thoughts on Evil

As Halloween approaches, a philosopher's thoughts turn to evil. The "problem of evil" is one of the most widely discussed philosophical problems. It was a particular obsession of the great German philosopher and mathematician Leibniz. Lately, I've been thinking about Leibniz's work on this problem. Leibniz famously argued that the world is the best of all possible worlds that God could have created, a view that was later ridiculed by Voltaire in his book Candide. But it seems that even in Leibniz's day, several philosophers denied that there is a best of all possible worlds. Instead, they claimed that possible worlds are like numbers, and just as there is no greatest number, so too there is no greatest world.

But in that case what is God to do? Would He just arbitrarily pick a world, say world number 287,184, even though He could have just as easily created world number 287,185, which is greater! This would seem arbitrary and unbecoming of the all-powerful and all-good God. Surely God does not play dice! (Here I am assuming that there are as many possible worlds as real numbers and that the higher-numbered world is better than the lower one. For the sake of simplicity I am assuming that no two worlds are equally good, though, of course, this need not be the case.)

It seems that certain Jesuit theologians in Leibniz's time argued for God's arbirtary choice of this world. This would explain why this world contains so much evil. God had to pick some world to create, and whichever world He chose would be such that there are an infinite number of better worlds.

But it seems to me that if there is an infinite number of worlds God could have created, then there are two other options open to God other than arbitarily choosing one world. He could have chosen not to create any. Of course, He didn't do that. Or He could have created an infinite series of worlds that meet a minimum standard of goodness. Perhaps God created all the worlds in the open interval from 0 to infinity, that is, all the worlds that correspond to the positive real numbers. The negative worlds contain too much evil to be worthy of creation. Our world may be, say, in the neighborhood of 300,000 for all we know. (Some evidence points to our world being irrational, perhaps. [A joke]) In any event, not so great, but containing enough goodness to be creation-worthy.

The upshot of all this is that the significant amount of evil in this world is compatible with the existence of an omnipotent and perfect Being who did create the best worlds that can be created.

Or so I think. What do you think?

[An excellent article on Leibniz that I used in preparing this entry is at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-evil/. ]