Novelist and neocon Roger L. Simon hasn’t started believing in God again, after a lifetime of atheism.
He’s just beginning to have some doubts.
The doubts rise, not from an experience of God, but from a confrontation with Evil. He writes of his experience at the Durban II conference:
Well, just as there are no atheists in foxholes, maybe no one is an atheist when confronted with what he finally acknowledges to be Evil. If there is Evil, there must be Good, no? And some force governing this game, something that, well, looks over it.
I know I am being irrational here, so I will stop. Being in the presence of Ahmadinejad’s evil, fleeting and haltingly put me in the presence of something else.
Tip: Gene Edward Veith at Cranach.
As I said over at Cranach: I am always amazed at the myriad ways that the Hound of Heaven pursues us all.
God is a relentless lover.
Isn’t the counterargument that the world is chaotic, so evil is natural and good is a coping mechanism for surviving in an evil world? What we call good is merely survival, managing the conflict. What we call evil is merely, um, survival by taking the advantages for yourself. Heh, that doesn’t make any sense.
Well, yeah. But what Simon is talking about is an existential thing. It’s like studying psychology, and observing how people in love act, and making a lot of notes and constructing spreadsheets, and then–pow–one day you meet a girl and fall in love yourself. Suddenly the abstract theory becomes actual experience. “Oh, THAT’S what it’s all about!”
You can write it off as an emotional reaction, but that’s just another observation from the outside. Once you’ve “seen the elephant,” you see with different eyes forever after.
Phil’s right: Under a naturalistic view, we can only account for preference, hence Rorty’s pragmatism (e.g. well, it works for us).
I’m going to selfishly plug my own story of conversion from Atheism.
Lars, I think you have it exactly right – Simon is seeing clear evil, and he needs to call it evil. But to label something as evil you need an objective standard, and it’s a short jump for a standard to a standard setter.
Ori, that’s fascinating and wonderful. Thanks for sharing it.