Stephen Law

Jack Symes interviews me on The Evil God Challenge for his book Philosophers on God . Also included Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Richard Swinburne, Yugin Nagasawa, and William Lane Craig. Prepublication draft. Chapter Eight The Evil-god Challenge Stephen Law   Introduction The problem of evil is perhaps the most powerful argument against classical monotheism. However, as Nagasawa pointed out in our previous chapter, religious believers claim to have an infinite number of resources at their disposal; resources which, they say, can be used to explain why God allows evil to exist. A lot of ink has been spilt on whether these explanations are successful. It’s a complex and contentious debate, which rarely leads to opponents changing their minds. Perhaps, if we want to break the deadlock between theists and atheists, we need to reframe the discussion?   In 2010, Stephen Law released a paper that would do just that. Today, Law’s article – ‘The evil-god challenge’ – is among the mos...

This is a pre-publication draft of a piece that appeared under a lightly different title in a recent Byline Times supplement on Trump, available here .  In The Art of The Deal , Trump claimed that the decorative tiles in the children's room at his Mar-a-Lago resort were made by Walt Disney personally. When Trump's butler asked him if that was really true, Trump replied, “Who cares?” Trump is a bullshitter. Harry Frankfurt’s little classic On Bullshit points out that the liar and the honest person have at least something positive in common: a focus on the truth. The honest person says what they believe is true; the liar what they believe isn’t true. But bullshitter, says Frankfurt,   …is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe re...

A common Post Modern defence of unclarity in philosophy is that e.g. some boundaries are vague/unclear. 'If reality is vague and unclear, then we must be vague and unclear in talking about reality. Otherwise we are not being true to reality.' The analogy here is, perhaps, painting a picture. If a storm is something vague and fuzzy, then to be accurate your painting of it must be vague and fuzzy, like a Turner. Being clear is a mistake - it involves crudely pixelating what is in reality highly subtle. But this is to muddle clarification with simplification. A crude pixelated image is a simplification of what we see, not a clarification. Analytic philosophers do not recommend simplification. They value perspicuity, so we can see/understand clearly how things are.  Being opaque is no aid to seeing/understanding how things really are, irrespective of whether how they are is simple, or infinitely subtle and complex. The subtlety and complexity of the subject matter is *no justificat...