Re: On the Problem of Evil

This theodicy post has been going around. The following is from normiechat (light edits for readability), where I tried to collect my notes from a couple of other chats discussing the article.

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Looks like I fall into the Isaiahic school.
I’ve never looked into the problem of evil much because the problem of evil has never concerned me much. This may trace back to a lack of social reciprocation (re: Asperger’s), where I simply don’t assume a just world and therefore don’t miss it.

The Isaiahic view makes sense if you’re willing to admit that your idea of benevolence and love are probably flawed
hence Job’s response to his troubles

And again, that idea comes to me more easily because Asperger’s means to me most people have very counterintuitive ideas of benevolence, so I have to adapt to their eccentricities.

familiar ground to someone used to scratching his head at human behavior

It’s not at all obvious to me that serial killers are romantic, I just have to accept that about 70% of the world thinks so. [H/T to Nick Mason: “Can you really say he loves you if he doesn’t even care about you enough to murder you?”]
And also that an unsettling number of people have compared me to Dexter and considered it a compliment.

haha i would never
neither compare nor consider it a compliment

Thanks, I actually get a little unsettled when people say stuff like that, because in the back of your mind you’re always wondering if they’re seeing something you don’t.

Krieger on the other hand…

Yeah, I’ve noted that one myself.
https://youtu.be/_KdnyiCUSl8
We’re getting off-topic!

well i could have predicted that [Ed: Calvinist]
ba dum tss

I’d be open to an Irenaean view on Christians in particular, in the sense that God cares about us enough to intervene, but I wouldn’t take a hardline stance on it.
I still look both ways before I cross the road.
I’m somewhat sympathetic to the author’s idea that nothing is evil, and God created the universe from nothing/evil, if only because Christianity’s lineage includes a mysterious Sumerian forerunner with some guy named Melchizadek.
As with most such mythology, I’m inclined to assume there’s at least a kernel of great importance to be gleaned from it.
On the other hand, I’m skeptical of the idea that this “solves” anything, as if we were doing an algebra problem with well-defined sets.
Concepts like God and nothing and evil are not well-defined, particularly “nothing”.
We haven’t reached a point where “nothing” is defined like the number zero, which has such and such reliable properties and operations we can perform on it. A bit of agnosticism is in order, since that feels like a field that deserves its own “-ology”.
We have theology for properties etc. of God, but we don’t have a nihilology.