Bruce Anderson

Karma: −5

Bruce Anderson 16 Dec 2022 1:56 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: A Report on the Beguilings of Evil
Your comment deserves a better response than is possible in this forum. I will respectfully point you to Alvin Plantinga’s book: “God, Freedom and Evil” as one of the best ways to address this issue.

Bruce Anderson 15 Dec 2022 16:05 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: A Report on the Beguilings of Evil
Yes: as far as the German churches, it was a relative handful of people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer who opposed Hitler openly and—to their shame (like the “ordinary” Germans) - Protestant and Roman Catholic clergy/leadership seemed to find it in their interests to either remain silent or even back Hitler.
I think the reason people agree on morality to the extent that they do is that a sense of right and wrong is imprinted in our nature. We are good at ignoring it or making it situational, though. For example, many who commit adultery find all kinds of ways to assuage their consciences, though if it were the same person’s spouse who did the cheating, they would be incensed and unforgiving...telling anyone who would listen how their former partner did them “wrong.”
Like Sartre, you are at least willing to bite the philosophical bullet. The difference between him and Dostoevsky is that D saw that phrase not as a statement of human freedom, but a warning of unbridled terror.

Bruce Anderson 15 Dec 2022 12:50 UTC
−5 points
on: Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: A Report on the Beguilings of Evil
Both Sartre and Dostoevsky got to the heart of this issue: “Without God, all things are permitted.” Ideas have consequences. Europe declared God dead in the wake of WWI. Within the intelligentsia, philosophy and science were summed up by the ideas of Nietzsche and Darwin.
It’s just too convenient to label Hitler an evil madman, though that he was. The fact of the matter is, what Hitler did was take Nietzsche’s philosophy of power and Darwin’s survival of the fittest to their logical conclusions… “logical” as long as you accepted his Aryan supremacy theories. He was able to claw has way to power by convincing “ordinary people” that he could serve their ends. They were not so concerned about the means, as long as they, in the end, weren’t the ones wearing yellow armbands. My point is, if you believe Nietzsche and Darwin sum up human existence, why would you consider those ordinary Nazi people evil? On what basis do you assign “blame?”
If you are a Naturalist (i.e., you believe God does not exist and could have played no role in Evolution), you really cannot be consistent and speak of “evil.” Morality is then nothing more than a social construct—just waiting to be deconstructed by anyone named Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Jeffery Dahmer.…
And, as Dostoevsky pointed out, “the problem of evil” cuts both ways. It’s every atheist’s go-to argument against the existence of God. However, if evil exists, then so too must good. Morality implies Theism. For morality to be anything more than a social construct—in other words, for good and evil to be real and exist independently of your or my definitions and goals—you need eternal and necessary truths, which can only be based on a theistic worldview.