Another inept attempt at solving the problem of evil

From an atheist of sorts. Giulio Prisco is a European rocket scientist, undoubtedly talented and brilliant in his field. But philosophy and theology are not rocket science. Prisco is out of his element and it shows.

In a recent article posted at Turing Church (an organization dedicated to proselytizing for the religion of scientism) and reposted at IEET (the first E ironically standing for “ethics”) called The Physics of Miracles and the Problem of Evil, Prisco advances the idea that perhaps we are all bots that live in a computer simulation game, and what we call “God” is really a meta-human (he uses “post-human” but that would not be correct, for reasons I explain below) player who has the power to alter the rules of his game, to intervene in our reality in a way that looks to us like a miracle.

I thought it would be instructional to take his text and critique it. Now, I am not a rocket scientist, so I recognize my limitations in terms of advanced math and physics and computer engineering and the technical aspects of artificial intelligence. I will not dispute Prisco’s expertise in these areas.

I will simply give you his text, and then insert comments, which will be in square brackets and italicized for clarity that it's me speaking.

Begin Prisco:

We may be bots in a reality-wide simulation, and perhaps the player(s) from above can violate our simulated physics when they want. [Descartes said something similar, supposing perhaps that everything present to his mind was a grand illusion perpetrated by some being with the power to do it. Welcome to the 17th Century, Dr. Prisco. Actually, Descartes thought it through a little more than Prisco does. He reasoned that the only thing he could be reasonably sure wasn’t an illusion was his own existence. Everyone else he encountered could be, in his view, an illusion. And since “I” cannot get into another person’s head, I can never be sure anyone else is real like I am. The presumption that everyone is as sentient as I am is not borne up by my experiential data, given the ability of someone else to give me an adequately sophisticated illusion. So it might not be that "we" are all bots, but that "I" am among bots and whether or not "I" am a bot, too, is subject to debate.] In a more popular formulation of the same concept, called Religion, the player(s), called God(s), created our reality and can perform miracles.

[So, he’s basically setting up a technological explanation for what we call supernatural events. Pretty much what Christianity has faced since people first called Christ a magician.]

The two formulations are equivalent for all practical purposes. Many religions assume that Gods are omnipotent and benevolent, but then we have the problem of evil: how can omnipotent and benevolent Gods permit evil and suffering? [The question comes up in the fact of a deficient concept of God, of evil and suffering, and of man. He basically defines "benevolent and omnipotent God" as "that which would not permit natural and moral evils." And since we have natural and moral evils, God cannot exist. But what if that definition is wrong? What if the meaning of "benevolent and omnipotent" is not "what I in my limited human knowledge and wisdom think God should do, or what would do if I were God," but something else? Indeed, that is the case -- the working definition of God in Prisco's argument is faulty in the extreme, and he as a brilliant scientist has no excuse for taking on faith this lame definition that he's heard from others.]

[We could simply stop here and not read the rest because he has identified himself as someone who simply does not know what he is talking about, and his argument ends up being severely and fatally flawed. But keep reading and see what mischief ignorance and misinformation can cause in an otherwise intelligent mind.]

If omnipotent and benevolent Gods permit evil and suffering, then they are either not omnipotent, or not benevolent, or neither, or perhaps they don’t exist at all. [See, I was right about his definition of "omnipotent, benevolent God." There are other possibilities Prisco cannot even fathom. What if God made humans with free will and, in order not to violate that freedom, permits evil? And what if there are greater goods than those lost in suffering, and God has the power and the justice to make up for suffering in an infinitely abundant way? I’m just asking.] In fact, the problem of evil is one of the main reasons why former believers become atheists. [Another main reason is, apparently, intellectual weakness and/or dishonesty.] It turns out that the problem of evil has a simple solution. [Keep that in mind: A simple solution.]

The picture [in the original post] is a screenshot taken in the popular computer game Half Life 2 by Valve Software. The people in the picture are bots, or Non-Player Characters (NPCs). They have a limited “intelligence” and can respond to a limited range of situations that can arise in the game, for example if you go near the guards they will beat you.

The “intelligence” of bots in computer games is still light years behind real intelligence. However, I am persuaded that real, self-aware AI of human and higher-level will be achieved someday, perhaps by the computer gaming industry itself, and perhaps in the next couple of decades. Then, computer games will contain sentient, intelligent persons [programs] like you and I. [Yes, the games will contain sentient persons who are slaves of the user, created to be toys, with no destiny other than the entertainment of the user. If Prisco is right in the reality-is-a-computer-game model, then we have a chance to avoid committing the very evil that “god” has apparently perpetrated on us, namely, having made us not with our own being and our own free will but simply as entertainment slaves. But the only way to do that is to not pursue AI any further than what we have already.]

If computer game bots can be intelligent and sentient, perhaps we are sentient and intelligent computer game bots. Do we live in a computer simulation? This is a frequent discussion topic in transhumanist interest groups, and a matter of scientific investigation. Who is running the simulation? Perhaps unknowable aliens in another level of reality have invented our world and us. A frequent assumption (see The New God Argument) is that future humans run our reality as a historically accurate simulation of their past (our present). [Impossible because it would result in an infinite regression of simulations within simulations within simulations, with no assurance that the future humans are themselves not a simulation already.]

[This is all part of the simple solution of evil. Simple.]

In a 1992 essay entitled Pigs in Cyberspace, Hans Moravec formulated (in modern terms) the idea of our reality as a simulation. “The very moment we are now experiencing may actually be (almost certainly is) such a distributed mental event, and most likely is a complete fabrication that never happened physically,” he says, implying that observers living in simulated realities may vastly outnumber observers living in original physical realities.

Bishop George Berkeley thought that the reality we perceive, and ourselves in it, exist in the mind of “that supreme and wise Spirit, in whom we live, move, and have our being“: God. In other words, we are thoughts in the Mind of God. It is easy to see that Berkeley and Moravec say very similar things (actually, the same thing), each in the language of his philosophy and age.

Apparently, there is an important difference between Berkeley and Moravec: As a 18th century Christian and a representative of the Church, Berkeley believed in supernatural phenomena, in principle not understandable by science, while Moravec, as a modern engineer, believes reality is fully understandable and explainable by science. [Actually, Berkeley would say that the physical world is explainable by science fully to the same degree as Moravec would. The difference is that Berkeley believes there is part of reality beyond the physical world, which Moravec cannot accept because it is beyond his science to detect and measure. Yet, as a consequence, Moravec proposes a fully anthropomorphic “god” – the simulation designer in this case – whose existence he cannot prove, whose attributes he cannot know, and whose purposes are inscrutable. Funny, huh? In order to accept reality without God, he had to invent a god in his own image, whose existence and properties are even more unlikely and unattractive than God’s.] Future engineers within the framework of future science will develop Moravec’s simulated realities [within the framework of future science in our simulation reality, a game in a higher-level reality that itself is most likely a simulation. Indeed, we could have a multiplicity of simulations running within our reality, which might be only one of a multiplicity of simulations in a higher-level reality, which itself could be one of a multiplicity of simulations within another, and so on]. If our reality is a simulation, everything in our universe can be understood in terms of the physical laws of the higher-level reality in which it is simulated [and whose physical laws are defined by the next-higher-level reality in which it is simulated, and so on.]

But… this does not mean that it [the simulation that is our reality] must always be understandable in terms of our own physical laws: Moravec’s simulation cosmology may contain supernatural phenomena, because the reality engineers up there may choose to violate the rules of the game. Yes, as Richard Dawkins says, they are creatures [=things created, implying a creator] naturally evolved in their physical universe [or rather programmed to inhabit a simulation universe like ours by an even higher computer engineer] and they cannot violate their physics [because Dawkins knows these things, and he’s always right; but of course the designer-users of that computer simulation world can. And so on, and so on…], but they can violate ours if they want [but only because they were designed to have that power by someone else.]

[Ok, let’s use our imaginations, shall we! Because we have been well grounded in logic and reality so far, and it’s just good to think outside the box a bit. Let’s propose that we are on the bottom rung of an immense ladder. Each rung represents the computer-simulation-reality game of the rung above (making us the bottom rung, but working on building a rung below us). Naturally, as we go up the rungs, we encounter increasingly superior and advanced and evolved computer simulation engineers. Well, why should there not be a being who is so advanced, so evolved, so superior at the top of the ladder that he doesn’t need computers, but simply has to think and his thoughts become reality? Not simply thoughts in his mind, but these thoughts having their own true, real existence. The “simulated reality” whose “bots” think they are living in a computer simulation would actually be real beings living in a true reality, albeit one thought up and made real by this superior intelligence. And the theory rampant among them that they are living in a computer simulation would be mere superstition of their religion of scientism, but an expected one, considering their limited intelligence and their arrogance borne of the knowledge of their own superiority to other things they encounter, such that they suppose anything superior to them has to be like them and equally dependent upon technology.

At any rate, if “we” are in a computer simulation, then our “reality engineers” are quite likely to be in one too, and so are their reality engineers, and theirs, onward either to an infinite progression (which is logically impossible) or to one Supreme Engineer who is in a real reality and in whose creation all of the lower rungs of the ladder exist, down to our bottom rung. Why is so far-fetched to think that such a Supreme Engineer can make a real universe without the use of technology? The Supreme Post-Human, no? And then all the levels between the Supreme Post-Human and us become unnecessary to suppose.]

Make this simple experiment [you mean try this simple exercise]: Run a Conway’s Game of Life program, choose an initial pattern, and let it evolve for a while. Now, stop the program, flip a cell, and resume the program. You have just performed a miracle: something that goes against the physical laws (the simple cellular automata evolution rules of Life) of the lower-level reality that you are simulating. Of course simple Life patterns are not complex enough to be sentient observers, but hypothetical observers within Life would observe an event that cannot be understood in terms of the physical laws of their universe. A miracle.

In the short movie CA Resurrection below [imbedded in the original], made with a Game of Life program, the protagonist pattern is doomed to certain death by interaction with a very unfriendly environment (sounds familiar?), but is copied before death and restored to life [he means the copy is pasted] in a friendlier environment. This (scientifically plausible) computational resurrection is equivalent to the religious concept of resurrection in Heaven. [Analogous in a certain sense, perhaps, but not equivalent by any means, unless you have a deficient understanding of our earthly environment, death, resurrection, and heaven. Oh, right, yes, I forgot. Perfectly logical that he thinks it’s equivalent. And, given the existence of God -- properly understood, which excludes Prisco -- religiously described resurrection is also scientifically plausible.] I am a pattern doomed to certain death by interaction with a very unfriendly environment, and I hope to be copied and resurrected. [So here are some ways they are not equivalent. When we die, we are not copied and pasted, not even analogously. Death is not really death in the absolute sense, but rather death of the body, for there is a continuity of life and consciousness and experience and identity in terms of the soul, whose existence of course Prisco would probably deny. However, he posited resurrection and heaven, even if just for the sake of argument, which would be unintelligible if he also posited for that argument the non-existence of the soul. At any rate, it is not copying while still alive, letting the original die in its hostile environment, and then pasting the copy somewhere else. If it is a copy, then it is not the original. The life of the pasted copy in a friendly environment is not resurrection, but simply the life of a copy pasted in a different place from where the original met its demise. It’s more like a clone than a resurrection. Resurrection, on the other hand, is not a copy and paste job, but a restoration of “this” body that I’m in right now.]

If we admit the possibility of a God who created our reality (or a post-human player who runs the simulation that is our reality, but the two concepts are really one and the same), able to perform miracles, we must face the Problem of Evil: a benevolent and omnipotent God would not permit evil, so since evil exists, God is either not benevolent, or not omnipotent, or neither.

[We’ll get to the problem of evil. Eventually. For the simple solution. Here is that word, post-human, which I promised to explain. A post-human by definition is somehow derived from us, “after” us, either as a “more evolved” (so-called) biological descendent of ours or as a human-created thing either biological or AI that becomes our successor or some combination of these. However, “god” as used by Prisco is not post-human but prior to us because it is the one who created that program in which we are mere bots. I would give Prisco the benefit of the doubt and say, “aw, you know what he means,” but instead I’m going to hold him to higher standards and say that to call the “god” that created our computer simulation reality a post-human is just plain inane.]

[What follows would also get, like, a D in Intro to Philosophy 101 at a community college.] The medieval philosophers, who were as smart as contemporary philosophers and thought a lot about these things, knew that “omnipotent” is a concept that needs to be defined and limited. [A link to Wikipedia rather than, say, a medieval philosopher.] Could an omnipotent being create a stone so heavy that even he could not lift it? If he could lift the rock, then it seems that the being could cease to be omnipotent, as the rock was not heavy enough [this does not make sense]; if he could not, it seems that the being was not omnipotent to begin with.

But a rock so heavy that it cannot be lifted by an omnipotent being cannot exist, because an omnipotent being is defined as a being who can lift all rocks [say it with me, kids!]. The rock is a contradiction in terms and a logical impossibility, like a triangle with four sides (a triangle is defined as a polygon with three sides).

No God can ever draw a triangle with four sides, because a triangle with four sides cannot exist by definition. [And the implications of the fact he enunciates elude him. If a four-sided triangle cannot exist, it is not because of definitions or logic or defects in the power of the one drawing it. It is because it is impossible for a triangle to have four sides. It is impossible for a triangle. The triangle is the thing with defective power, totally unable to have anything other than three sides. If God cannot make a four-sided triangle, it is because of the triangle. There is no doubt that God can make a four-sided figure; but no four-sided figure can be a triangle. The defect of power is in the thing’s inability to exist in a certain way that, if it did exist in that way, would annihilate it as the thing that it is.] I don’t believe in the supernatural [ha!], but I can believe in natural Gods [if they’re natural in the sense he means, they’re not gods], and I can believe that natural Gods created our reality [but nothing stops those “gods” from being computer simulations created by something else, which is probably not what he means by “natural” since they’d be synthetic]. A natural God is only omnipotent in the sense that he is much more powerful than us, but still has necessary limitations. [That depends on how far up the ladder you go, which Prisco’s mind has not considered. His argument is this. Triangles cannot have 4 sides. God cannot make a 4-sided triangle. Therefore, God is not omnipotent. Ridiculous. Human languages are capable of nonsense -- just look up the lyrics of Oh Susanna -- and the rock "paradox" is one such combination of words. By the way, some people hold that the immovable stone that God has created is the human heart once the human has darkened and frozen it by sin and arrogance.]

[This is all part of the simple solution to the problem of evil, by the way. Remember, simple.]

If reality is a computation, it is probably [probably] an incompressible computation with no shortcuts: the only way to know what happens at time t, is to run the computation until time t. Besides some very simple initial configurations, the Game of Life is incompressible: if you want to know what happens at time step t, you must run the program through all intermediate time steps.

It makes sense to assume that reality is an incompressible computation, and the universe is the fastest computer that can compute itself [the universe is both the computer and the program. Nice.]. In other words, a 100% complete and accurate prediction of tomorrow’s weather cannot be done in less than 24 hours, and the only way to predict the future with complete accuracy is waiting for the future to happen. [From our perspective, anyway. It is arrogant to think our perspective is the only one. Note the way he defines the situation: The ONLY way FOR US to predict the future IN OUR REALITY with 100% COMPLETE ACCURACY.]

[Another imagination exercise. Let’s imagine a computer program so sophisticated that it can account for every sub-atomic particle’s behavior in the universe, every motion of every blade of grass in the breeze, the relationship of every grain of sand to every other as the waves crash upon the beach and of every hydrogen molecule in the infinite space between the stars. But, let’s imagine that this highly sophisticated program and the machinery and the brilliant user who developed it have no reliable predictive capacity or tools, no ability to project based on, say, lower level computer simulations that at least let the user anticipate a range of likely future events.]

This assumption makes sense [uh-huh] because the existence of a faster-than-the-universe computer within the universe would lead to logical contradictions. [So? We’ve had a few of those already. And this applies only to OUR ability to predict our future in our simulation reality, not the User/god's ability to predict our future in HIS reality.] Suppose you could compute the state of the universe tomorrow faster than the universe itself. The results of the computation will include the color of the shirt that you will wear tomorrow. Then you can invalidate the prediction by simply wearing, tomorrow, a shirt of another color.

[Invalidating a prediction is not a logical contradiction, but a demonstration of human freedom and the limitations of the prediction program. If you could change the color of your shirt, then the most logical conclusion is that the prediction was wrong, not that you caused temporal rift or “changed the future” – this is a difficulty with the 100% complete accuracy criterion. The prediction would a) not be infallible; b) not be a determinant or cause of the future, but only a reader of one likely outcome; c) inherently be only of limited utility because only the User/god’s computer can really run the universe program rightly, and it is already a contradiction in terms to say that a subroutine within the universe program can run the whole universe program faster than the computer running the universe program. Ridiculous actually. Also, Prisco sets up a time-t snapshot here, not a video of all day tomorrow. If at time t tomorrow I am predicted to have on a red shirt, I could think I’d be thwarting the future by wearing a blue one all day; but what I don’t know is if I will encounter circumstances requiring me to change my shirt at t minus some amount of time and end up in a red shirt anyway.]

The life of the prisoners brutalized by the guards in the Half Life 2 scene in the picture above is very ugly, and if they were sentient they would suffer a lot. [And they would have no choice. If the guards were also sentient, maybe they’d not be so brutal. Maybe the prisoners wouldn’t even be in prison. If the prisoners were sentient but the guards not, they should be able to work out their escape. If. If. If. If.] Unfortunately, similar [in a certain, limited, nuanced sense] things have happened in our reality, for example in the 1930s, and millions of sentient persons have been brutalized by evil regimes, and suffered a lot. Surely a benevolent and omnipotent God would try to do something to avoid that.

[Two things to say here. One is, well, we really don’t know what God did, now do we? In theory, God could be constantly – and without us ever able to know – averting for us evils and horrors far greater than what we’re experiencing, while respecting the freedom of human individuals, and realizing that earthly suffering isn’t really the worst thing that could happen to someone. But that takes a clear and relatively complete understanding of God, man, freedom, and evil that is utterly lacking here. And Two, the Holocaust and getting smacked by a guard are not the same thing. The Holocaust was not a sudden event, and Auschwitz or something like it, could easily have been predicted by a wise User/god, years (in our time) before it happened.]

But there are no computational shortcuts [that he is aware of]. The only way to predict with complete accuracy that certain events would lead to, say, Auschwitz, is to let the computation unfold until Auschwitz. [OK, if we cannot predict the emergence of a particular Nazi death camps, we might -- given the level of knowledge that User/god would undoubtedly have -- be able to predict that sort of thing with fair reliability. But what Prisco is trying to say is that what people of religion call “God” is unable to see the future and powerless to do anything about it; therefore “god” cannot be an omnipotent supreme being, but only some fallible, limited creature, underscoring the likelihood that “god” is User/god.]

But wait a sec — you may be thinking — can’t God [he means User/god, not God in the common sense] just use a faster computer to make the prediction? After all, we can predict the evolution of a Game of Life on our computer, by running it on a faster computer. If we see (on the faster computer) that something bad will happen to our favorite pattern, we can stop the game and try to flip some cells to ensure it doesn’t happen in our game.

Well, no, it wouldn’t work. Remember that these computations contain sentient beings. If God uses a faster reality simulator to predict Auschwitz before it happens in our reality simulator… Auschwitz will happen in the faster simulator, and people will suffer in the faster simulator. [So some copies are different from the originals, except when pasting a copy is resurrection, then they’re the same.]

[Besides which, after running the program for a while and finding an Auschwitz, he would have to run, oh, about INFINITE what-if scenarios, to find out what happens if he prevents Auschwitz – doesn’t this rocket scientist watch Star Trek? In averting a horrible evil by saving Joan Collins’ life, Kirk would let the Nazis win the war and dominate the world and he would eradicate the future in which he and his pals live. So he has to let her die instead.]

This “solves” [HAH! Note the use of scare quotes] the Problem of Evil [and it's a simple solution, is it not?], because God is unable to predict the future with complete accuracy and can only work with incomplete resources and information, like us. [So User/god is not omnipotent -- but then again, neither is he benevolent, and indeed he is intentionally cruel!]

OK, that's it for Prisco's piece. What do you think of the conclusion? Satisfying?

Not much of a solution if you ask me. One objection is the necessity of having “complete” accuracy in predicting the future – and I speak here as granting Prisco’s notion that we’re in a computer simulation with a User/god. What a moron the User/god must be that he can make such a complex and sophisticated program and not be able to foresee the horrors of the Holocaust, or stop it when only, say, millions had been killed with no sign that it was gonna stop soon. Even if User/god cannot predict a sudden evil, he should at least do something about habitual and growing evil, which he would know from the past, not the future. This is really goofy reasoning.

Another is this: What if User/god DOES have complete prognostic accuracy, but LIKES the game the way it is? Clearly User/god is not at all benevolent, but rather far more defective and cruel than the traditional notion of God. It’s cruel, in the extreme. User/god programmed the universe full of sentient beings and intentionally included unavoidable evil, knowing he'd enjoy causing untold suffering.

Why not create a universe in which there are no natural disasters, no diseases, no accidents, and no moral evil? I'll tell you why. BORING. This is a game for User/god, with no purpose but his entertainment. How totally DULL a game with no evil would be! Also, the only way to do that is to make the ostensibly sentient bots without free will, unable to choose what User/god calls evil.

Actually, it's probably a multi-player game, with natural and moral evils simply tactical ploys of the different players in the attempt to win. THAT is a more likely explanation of evil than limited prognostic accuracy.

As far as how a theist would explain the existence of evil, given the existence of God, I leave it to you to look into.

Learnings from Assisted Suicide in Oregon

The National Post has an article about the assisted suicide law in Oregon, newsworthy the article asserts because Canada may look to how the law works in Oregon as they deliberate their own law.

Go and read it for background on the law, its supposed safeguards, and the rate at which it is used.

Here are a few quotes (admittedly removed from context, but not to deceive you), then some brief comments.

“Having this on the books has given people hope and choice,” George Eighmey, former executive director of Compassion and Choices, said in an online interview. “Just having it on the books has given thousands of terminally ill people comfort.”

And while the Catholic Church was a major opponent to the Death With Dignity Act, the Archdiocese of Portland no longer speaks about the issue.

And acceptance has climbed among patients, even as population slowed with the poor economy.

Just having it on the books also has several other effects. One is, people will be pressured in one way or another to do it. Just having it on the books makes it an option. It makes it a thing to think about, to consider, to do, even if one would rather not.

Acceptance has climbed among patients -- and it is not surprising. As they face greater and greater financial hardships because of the economy, more and more would want to end it all. That last sentence in the quote is actually pretty creepy. It's worded as if a tanking economy should have the opposite effect, and the writer is surprised to find a correlation between the number of people who kill themselves and widespread financial hardship. Yet, it notes that financial motivations may be at work. It's cheaper to die. Oh, and it's comforting to those poor folks that their lives have a dollar value and they can save themselves and their loved ones money in these hard times by dying.

Another effect of the law being on the books is the encroaching complacency of those who believe that killing innocent people is always wrong. That destroying the autonomous subject (or permitting, facilitating, encouraging his self-destruction) is not a good way to preserve his autonomy. That there's an essential and mutually exclusive separation between caring and killing. But opponents are lulled into dullness. Witness the Catholic archdiocese of Portland, to whom all I have to say: For shame.

I have to hand it to the writer for getting a range of perspectives, but it does overall paint the picture as fairly rosy for the Oregon law: It's working, it's popular, more Oregonians are killing themselves than ever, see how successful the law is! Canada should do it, too! But, that's par for the course for mainstream media on this issue.

Atheism, Religion, and Ethics: A Discussion (Part 1)

I am very happy to post the first installment of my discussion with Ray, who has been interested in my posts on atheism and ethics. For some more background on how this discussion started, please see those posts and the combox discussions that ensued.

It began with my assertion that in the absence of God, there can be no objective source of morality/ethics/legal justice. These things will devolve into a more or less subjective determination of what is right for “me.” That might result in people trying to get along, but it will also result in people acting out of pure self-interest and being a law unto themselves with their own advantage as the goal. My main point leads to the conclusion that atheists who act ethically in the common sense of the word – abiding by what most people would call right or wrong – do so for the same basic reasons as those who act out of pure self-interest, and whatever can be said of those who act in an unethical manner (in the same common sense meaning of ethical), it cannot be said with authority that what they do is unethical. We can only disagree with it, but not call it “wrong” or “evil.”

Ray holds that objectively knowable ethics does emerge in the absence of God from human beings acting in the real world for particular goals. He begins his explanation with an analogy to chess. Here’s Ray:

Given the rules of chess, and a desire to win a chess game, then sacrificing your queen at the start of the game is an *objectively* bad strategy. In other words, "ought" doesn't arise from "is" - but "ought" does arise from "is" *and goals*. We have fixed 'rules of the game' in the laws of physics - we are not free to violate those conditions. Gravity and thermodynamics and conservation of energy can't be cheated. Humans also have goals, and - just as in chess - given fixed conditions and goals, *objectively* effective and ineffective strategies arise of necessity.

So far, all we've got are 'effective' and 'ineffective' - which is not the same as 'good' and 'bad' in the sense you're looking for. As you put it, "Wise strategies are employed by the evil and the good alike, and perhaps even more effectively by evil people than by the good." But if you have reservations over terminology - which I'm conceding for the nonce - then I do, too. I'd suggest swapping out "wise" in your sentence above for "shrewd" - since the word 'wise', in my experience, has a certain moral component or connotation to it as well.

I think your counterpoint can be summed up as, "different goals make for different strategies". Is that fair?

Yes that’s fair.

But we get ahead of ourselves. Let’s start with the beginning. Your analogy to chess actually conforms very well to a traditional understanding of the elements of human acts. In traditional terms of, for instance, Aristotle or Aquinas, all acts occur in a set of given circumstances and involve a particular end. Deliberation about the end under those circumstances yields a determination of the means to attain the end. Some means are well suited to the end, and others not. I have to agree with you so far, Ray, and say, Yes, sacrificing your queen early does not seem like a means well suited to winning at chess, given the circumstances of the rules and the desire to win.

The same could be said of any goal. If you needed to buy milk (goal) and the supermarket was 5 miles away, using a unicycle as a mode of transportation does not seem like a good strategy, objectively speaking. A car would make much more sense.

But circumstances and goals are seldom so simple. Not only do different goals make for different strategies, which is surely true, but so do different circumstances.

In terms of goals, it has to be considered that all things we do, we do for reasons beyond the activity at hand. We play chess to win, but we may play for other reasons at the same time. We buy milk to drink for enjoyment or nutrition, or to use in a recipe for cake. These further goals might render the act ethically evil: In chess, we might choose to play and win to humiliate our opponent, say, or to gain the glory of victory and the acclaim of chess fans; we might want to buy milk to make an enemy who is allergic to milk sick.

In terms of circumstances, wanting to win at chess may be unethical if one is a grand master and one’s opponent is a novice, where teaching the principles of the game might be a better goal. Now, one can want to win against a novice at the same time as wanting to teach the game, and it becomes a matter of which goal takes precedence.

Also, whether or not God exists is a circumstance that is sure to have an effect on most of our moral actions. If God does not exist, then it is difficult to say that it is wrong to beat the heck out of a novice just for fun, or to slip milk to someone allergic to it to make him sick. If the individual determines he has a good reason to do such things, how is it that someone else can call them objectively wrong?

To push your analogy a little further, you might say that acting in such a way is sure to be a bad strategy, objectively speaking, for making other people like you and want you around. Perhaps. However, what if that’s not one’s goal, at least with respect to those people who think such things are wrong? If God exists, then it would stand to reason that “pleasing God” (understood properly, which we haven’t gotten to yet) would be something that all reasonable people would want to do. Wrongness would come from the objective fact that treating other people badly would be a bad strategy for pleasing God. In the absence of God, the main person I need to please is myself, and would strategize accordingly.

But I think perhaps I went a little far, so let’s backtrack a bit. For now, I agree with the basic notion that in the reality of the world and with a particular goal, some strategies are objectively well suited to attain the goal, and others not.

Coming soon -- Atheism, Religion, and Ethics: A Discussion

Some of my most frequently viewed posts of late involve the issue of whether atheism provides any foundation for a system of objective ethics. Atheists, from what I can tell, are divided on the issue, but my position is that by denying the existence of God, atheism at least tacitly denies the possibility of judging anything to be objectively moral/ethical.

A rather interesting discussion has occurred in the comboxes of these posts, challenging me not only philosophically with respect to the topic, but also with respect to my Italian temperament. You know, in Italy, if you get into a fender-bender, it is somewhat obligatory to wave your hands and do a little yelling and engage in some hyperbole with the other person, and afterward, you go to the cafe and get an expresso together. So, it's nothing personal.

But this isn't Italy, so my interlocutor and I will skip the histrionics and just go right to the cafe and have our discussion there.

Or rather, we'll have it right here. First post in the series coming in the next day or so!

Atheism and Morality/Ethics

I've got one or two posts about ethics and atheism, either in the body of the post or in the comments. You can look here. And here. (The post at that second link rambles a bit, not real happy with it.)

I basically hold that if you are an atheist, a real true atheist, then you cannot hold that there is such a thing as an objective moral order. Now, laws are a moral code, a system of ethics on the scale of a nation. Laws and other ethical systems are based on an objective moral order, a sense of "justice" that is above the law and against which we know if a law is a good law or a bad law. If there is no God, however, there is no such thing as an objective reality called "justice," but only what individuals decide for themselves.

I also hold that if an atheist asserts there is such a thing as an objective moral order, then his thinking is polluted by religiosity, having grown up in a society whose laws and sense of justice is formed by religious philosophy. A real atheist has to purify his mind and get down to brass tacks: The only thing he is, is a material body, and the only ethical system that matters is the one he chooses for himself. Things might be illegal, but immoral or unethical -- that only he can decide. Therefore, he becomes the supreme arbiter and judge of what is ethical, and law gets its authority only from the power to coerce obedience, not from any kind of objective justice to which it conforms.

But there is another way to go for such ethical atheists. Admit the fact that you believe in something higher than yourself that is not merely the source of "justice" but is in fact Justice Itself, Morality Itself, Reason Itself, Good Itself, Cooperation Itself. That is, deep down, if you believe there is an objective moral order, you really do believe in God.

Check out this final post in the atheist portal a Patheos, a renowned young atheist who went to Yale named Leah Libresco. She's way smarter and better educated than I am on the atheist-ethics thing. And she walked that walk from atheism. To Catholicism. From abject falsehood...to the objective truth.

What she realized is that the middle ground is bogus. Atheism cannot work with ethics. She thought it through. And decided that Morality (another name for God, if you think about it) exists.

Welcome, Leah!

H/T to the Anchoress.

When Politicians Demonize Certain Industries

Here's an interesting story from The New York Times about an email exchange between President Obama's heath overhaul advisor and the pharmaceutical industry. From the article:

On June 3, 2009, one of the lobbyists e-mailed Nancy-Ann DeParle, the president’s health care adviser. Ms. DeParle reassured the lobbyist. Although Mr. Obama was overseas, she wrote, she and other top officials had “made decision, based on how constructive you guys have been, to oppose importation” on a different proposal. 

Just like that, Mr. Obama’s staff signaled a willingness to put aside support for the reimportation of prescription medicines at lower prices and by doing so solidified a compact with an industry the president had vilified on the campaign trail. Central to Mr. Obama’s drive to remake the nation’s health care system was an unlikely collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry that forced unappealing trade-offs. 

The e-mail exchange three years ago was among a cache of messages obtained from the industry and released in recent weeks by House Republicans — including a new batch put out Friday detailing the industry’s advertising campaign supporting Mr. Obama’s health care overhaul.

So, here's what happened. Candidate Obama vilified the pharmaceutical industry, blaming them for the high cost of health care, of exploiting sick people who need medicines, and that sort of thing. He gets elected and begins pushing legislation that would, among other things, punish the pharmaceutical companies (along with the rest of us). The pharmaceutical companies do not want to be punished, and who can blame them? So, they negotiate. Obama throws them a bone and won't punish them. They spend money advertising their support for Obamacare in thanks.

Now, it is conceivable that Obama really truly believes that pharmaceutical companies are part of the problem and perhaps in fact they are. But if that is so, what happened to Obama's principles when it came time to solve that problem? He sold out. He let the problem go, and for what? Advertising support to the measure passed. Smart politics? Or manipulation? A practical compromise to get something done? Or an abandonment of principles? In any case, the deal he struck with pharma means that Obamacare will not bring the cost of medication down. The problem remains, and we have to pay for it. 

On the other hand, perhaps the pharmaceutical industry is not quite so problematic -- what I mean is that perhaps their pricing polices are not as big a part of our health system's difficulties as Obama made them out to be (which isn't to say they are not a problem at all). What then? Candidate Obama either was mistaken or he exaggerated or both to get their support. He bullied them and took their lunch money. We've been watching The Godfather at home and it occurs to me that what Obama did bears a fairly strong resemblance to "making them an offer they couldn't refuse." 

Whether pharma is a problem or not, Obama is loser. Either he's a wheeler-dealer lacking in principles for political gain, or he's a bully who extorted support from a lucrative industry. Actually, in Obama's case, I don't think it's either-or, but both. My point is that there is no way to conclude that he's a principled, virtuous civil servant trying to make things better for us citizens.

When a viable candidate or sitting official bad-mouths a particular industry, what he's really after is campaign money and/or help in lobbying to get something done.

It's bullying in action.

Say what you want about the pharmaceutical industry -- this post is not about them. 

You know, any strong political force that promises to stand up against Big Business -- what they really want to do is have enough power to threaten Big Business so that Big Business starts funneling them cash and influence. And what do they do with that cash and influence? Use it to pay people with government hand-outs to vote for them.

Funny how that works, huh?

When Atheists Rule Nations -- Update

My wife and I, and some friends, saw the movie For Greater Glory this weekend. My wife points out that the screenwriting/dialogue leaves a bit to be desired, but the overall story and other aspects of the film are really good. If you don't know it, it's about events in Mexico in the 1920s, when an atheist government came to power and decided that Catholics were agents of Rome (a foreign power) and so persecuted them. It's not so different from what some people say whenever Catholics attain to high office in our country, usually under the meme of "separation of church and state."

What happened next in Mexico was a bloody war that lasted for several years. Priests rounded up and lynched for saying Mass. Religious images desecrated, destroyed, burned. Faithful tortured and killed, even children before their parents' eyes, because they wouldn't say, "Death to Christ." Blessed José Sánchez del Rio was one such real young person, featured in the movie, who with his dying breath said, "Viva Cristo Rey!"

Can it happen here, in the good ol' USA? Hm. Well, it might take a while, but yeah, it could. All that really has to happen is atheists have to take control of the government for a long time, weed out people of religion from the Supreme Court, and then determine that being Catholic and in union with the Pope is an act of treason. "Separation of church and state" means, ultimately, that any religion that is subordinate to a foreign head of state is a threat to national sovereignty. The only kind of tolerable Catholicism would be one that is organizationally independent of Rome and, in some sense, subordinate to the US Government though technically independent of it, too, like the atheist government of communist China imposed on the church there. It can happen. Not for a while, perhaps. But give it time.

In the meantime, atheists resort to bullying and ridicule instead.

But it occurred to me that the movie seems to support what I said about atheism leading to totalitarianism in earlier posts. So: What happens when atheists rule nations? Besides Mexico 90 years ago, I mean?

Justice. Freedom.

Like the French Revolution. See also here, and here.

Like the Spanish Civil war. The movie There Be Dragons is a good one to watch for what the anti-religion forces were like.

Like Nazi Germany. (Yeah, Hitler was born Catholic but he hated the Church started persecuting Catholics when he ran out of Jews.)

Like the Soviet Union, especially Stalin.  Like Mao Zedung. If the numbers are right in the article in the link, Mao alone may have killed more people of religion than anyone in history.

But notice the trend. A political upheaval occurs. Atheists come to power. And begin killing priests, nuns, faithful.

This is one reason why atheism and ethics simply do not mix. Atheism brooks no opposition. If you oppose atheism, you are wrong and need to be silenced. If the nation is atheist, and you are not, you are a traitor and need to be killed. Atheism becomes the end toward which all good and right actions tend, and any action that tends toward it is by definition good and right. ANYTHING. Anything else is evil. And punishable.

Let us not forget, with separation of church and state, the United States of America is a secular nation. It is fast becoming an atheist nation. We have that pesky Constitution and First Amendment, though. But we also have a judiciary that likes to redefine what the words of the Constitution mean. People will be free to practice their religions as long as they keep it to themselves, hide it in their homes, and not let it out in public places like work, politics, and so on. Separation of church and state means that people of religion should not be allowed to hold high office, and if they speak out against the government, they are traitors.

Can't happen here? Oh, I think it can.

UPDATE: The wonderful, just, and ethical atheists in China, following in the footsteps of their leader Mao, are responsible for approximately 400 million -- FOUR HUNDRED MILLION -- deaths of their OWN people. That's more people than in the United States of America. Imagine the Chinese WIPING OUT every American on the planet, and most Canadians, too, just for good measure. That's how many of their own people they have eradicated through FORCED ABORTIONS due to their one-child policy. That's what atheism gets you, that kind of justice. The kind of justice where if you're pregnant and refuse to pay the fine (about $6000), they beat the crap out of you, kill your baby, and put your dead baby's mangled body next to you to make sure you got the point. The Mafia, they'll break your thumbs, put your favorite horse's head in the bed with you, frame you for murder so they can get your cooperation, kill your kids, and all that. But they got nothing on the Chinese. That's what atheism gets you.

Oh, and the USA owes them about a trillion dollars. If you get the crap beat out of you, a forced abortion, and a dead child for owing them $6000, I think we're in trouble if we can't pay back the $1,000,000,000,000 or so we owe them. (That works out to about 167 million forced abortions.)

Just something to think about this election year.