This piece appeared over a week ago, but I don’t want to forget it, since it seems to take an approach I find attractive: that many of our philosophical problems exist because we frame them incorrectly. We project human protocols onto the universe at large, to domains where they don’t apply. (And how science fiction helps exercise the mental muscles needed to consider such thoughts.) Alas, now that I’ve read it, I am disappointed.
Big Think, Jack Symes, (17 Oct 2026): Beyond religion and atheism: The secret third answer to big questions, subtitled “Philosopher Jack Symes explores the space between devout religion and atheism.”
Symes is the author of Defeating the Evil-God Challenge: In Defence of God’s Goodness (2025), from Bloomsbury Academic. (So it’s not self-published, which would be a red sign. On the other hand, the subtitle sort of gives his game away.)
This is a very long piece. I’ll try to locate the gist. But to sample the opening:
I think there are three fundamental questions in philosophy. The question of where the universe came from i.e. why is there something rather than nothing? The question of how the fundamental laws of nature came to be finely tuned i.e. the problem of fine-tuning and the problem of consciousness. How is it that our physical brains give rise to subjective experience? Why does the world smell, taste, or feel like anything?
And so on. Reasonable so far. He passes through the four ‘new atheists,’ rather dismissing them (as not being philosophers). And:
In 2010, Stephen Law published the evil god challenge and that’s the title of the paper. It was the most downloaded paper in one of the best journals Religious Studies and the third most cited paper as well.
The evil god challenge asks why belief in a good god is significantly more reasonable than belief in an evil god. Why do people believe in a good god and not an evil god? What argument can we give for one over the other?
Coincidentally, the Ted Chiang interview last weekend at World Fantasy Con discussed several of his stories. IIRC (it’s been years since I read the story) they discussed how “Hell Is the Absence of God” ends with the conclusion that God is… evil.
Moving on with Symes. He goes on about the first cause and the fine-tuning argument, which suggests to me he’s a rather old-fashioned philosopher. (That is, these arguments have been debunked in many ways.) He describes writing a book, addressing the evil God challenge,
And I found myself finding all of these asymmetries, all of these little arguments that favored good God over evil God.
So he throws out his manuscript and starts over, “in defense of God’s goodness.”
And here he’s off the rails. I’m skimming. Sigh. He’s in a religious bubble in which everything must be about existence and fine-tuning, consciousness which must evidence of *something* since we don’t completely understand it. And pantheism, which is somehow some kind of solution. The multiverse, the problem of evil. And so on and so on. (He never wonders why religion exists, given human evolution and the evolution of the mind.)
He ends by resorting to the argument that his world view makes him happier, in effect. I’ll quote the last few paragraphs.
The last thing to say is I think this is a significantly more optimistic worldview than atheism can offer. I I was believing in atheism as a worldview and thinking that the world on the whole was probably a worse place than it was a good place mainly because of evolution by natural selection. Right? and the religious believer has an extra card there. They can go, well, actually it’s not the fact that the world is merely a bad place because there’s this extra bit of the world, you know, heaven or God, something which outweighs the evil in the world. There’s this greater goodness, this bigger story beyond us.
In the same way, I think the multiverse pantheist can do the same. We’re just a speck, one little universe amongst an uncountable number or possibly infinite number of universes. Our world might be the worst of every single universe that there is. But we can be optimistic in knowing that existence on the whole is a good thing. That we can be optimistic in thinking we should be happy and pleased to be alive.
“But if you’re an atheist and you believe in the multiverse, then I think you should be bloody miserable.”
If you genuinely think it’s true, if you genuinely believe that every logical and metaphysically possible thing is happening right now across every single universe, then there are worlds which are just built so genocides can happen cyclically. That there are worlds where people are just tortured over and over and over again. There’s an uncountable number of evil acts happening all the time. And given the fact that there’s an uncountable number of evil acts and possibly an uncountable number of good acts, I don’t think that means you can weigh up the value of existence and be an optimist. At best, you can say that all breaks even.
No. Things just are. Being miserable is not about the state of the cosmos or the multiverse, it’s an attitude about human existence and interactions among human beings. The state of your life is unaffected by the existence, or not, of other universes, or of gods, frankly. Another category error, another confusion of domains.
\\\
Brief takes.
The Atlantic, Luis Parrales, today 30 Oct: What Horror Films Have to Say About God, subtitled “Scary movies may appear irreverent or profane—but many of them are deeply interested in theological questions.” [gift link]
Is this is analogous to the UFO piece that never wondered what science fiction writers thought? The examples here are all movies, e.g. The Exorcist. So, yes. But I think it’s fruitful to consider what horror movies (and novels and stories) think. My preliminary conclusion (see Themes) is that horror is an intermediate step between fantasy and science fiction: fantasy is about projections of human nature onto reality, while horror acknowledges the reality of a vast, unknowable universe, and finds it *threatening* and *dangerous*. Whereas science fiction, like science, finds the unknowable universe attractive and open to exploration.
\\
And even more briefly.
- Salon, Heather Digby Parton, yesterday: The GOP’s midterm plan: Make America hate Muslims again, subtitled “As the midterms slip away, Republicans are relying on anti-Muslim bigotry to turn out their base”
- The Republican platform. Anyone but Christians: bad. Anyone but whites: bad. Anyone but Republicans: bad.
- These people are unclear about the nature of American government.
- JMG, yesterday: Moreno: Non-Christians Should Not Serve In Congress
- More about the guy with two wives, who justifies it via Bible.
- Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, yesterday 29 Oct: The viral story about the pastor with two wives has another disturbing twist
- Subtitled “Israel Ford says his polygynous marriage is biblical. But there are disturbing allegations facing the Christian trinity.”
