Somehow it slipped under my radar that David Lewis had contributed an article to a new collection. Or, to be precise (Lewis died in 2001), Philip Kitcher, a philosophy professor at Columbia, edited and completed a draft manuscript that Lewis had been working on close to the time of his death. The book Lewis’ latest is published in is Philosophers without Gods, out from Oxford University Press this past August at propitious moment in light of the 2006-2007 atheism craze.
In any case, thanks to Benj Hellie at Brian Leiter’s blog, I managed to pick up the latest Harper’s, where Lewis’ piece, “Divine Evil” is excerpted (nothing online, sorry). Now, if there is anyone ideally situated to write a mind-changing piece on atheism and religion, or at the very least to contribute something new to the debate — I doubt very much that Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris et al. would claim to have made novel arguments — that person is David Lewis. (For those who are unfamiliar with Lewis — and I imagine that describes most of Jewcy’s readers — Lewis was one of the two or three most influential American philosophers, and unquestionably the most prolific metaphysician, of the last 50 years. It would be impossible to complete a degree in philosophy at an English-speaking university without encountering his work, and I can think of only one other of his contemporaries of whom that’s true.) So you can imagine how excited I am to see that Lewis has posthumously intervened in this debate, and I hope it’s on the side of clarity, rigor, and — if you’ll pardon the expression — paradigm-shifting. The Harper’s extract is quite brief, but contains the basic outlines of Lewis’ argument. And sure enough, it doesn’t disappoint. It is innovative, clearly argued, and on major points entirely persuasive (or so say I). The idea is that, according to the tenets of (small-o) orthodox Christianity, the Christian god perpetrates evil infinitely worse than all the evil perpetrated in the history of the universe. If we believe that those who admire evil are themselves evil (as we presumably do viz. neo-Nazis for example), then worshipers of the Christian god, by the lights of their professed theological beliefs and commonplace moral intuitions, are evil. What’s worse, non-believers in full knowledge of the fact that Christian belief is evil, who nevertheless admire some believing Christians, participate in evil vicariously. I can anticipate some objections, which I’ll get to presently, though if I can anticipate them, Lewis probably could have too, so the full piece may well address them. Lewis’ case, and my response and my effort to place it in a larger context below the fold:
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