Problem of Evil / Temptation Contract Theory talk

This is based on a talk I would have given to a rationalist group, but then I found out that it was too long for their format. It's based on various previous posts on "theodicy" and I think is my best presentation of the topic.

The topic for this talk is the Problem of Evil, and one way of resolving it through a labor relations approach. Most of my interests are in philosophy and religion and might not be conventional subjects for a rationalist community group to talk about. However, I bring this up due to its use of economic thinking, in a way perhaps slightly reminiscent of the George Mason University economists.

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

The Problem of Evil is the apparent contradiction caused by the following statements all claiming to be true:

1. God is all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful
2. Evil exists

If God is all-good, why doesn't he prevent evil? Is it because he's not all-knowing or all-powerful? Maybe he is all-knowing and all-powerful. Then he must be less than all-good if he doesn't prevent it.

One way to soften things is to say that humans are the source or occasion of much evil. Either we commit the evil directly (it follows from our free-willed actions or inactions), or it is useful in "soul-making" (it gives us the occasion to become better people). This idea makes sense to me, to a point, but I think that it's hard to rule out the idea that some suffering is useless for that purpose. Suffering in wild animals being maybe the easiest example.

One approach that theists take is to say that we don't understand, but somehow these threads will be tied up for us someday, and the ultimate good and necessity of evil will be explained. I find this approach somewhat unsatisfying. So I thought I might try to come up with a more concrete solution to the Problem of Evil.

BACKGROUND TO TEMPTATION THEORY

First I will talk about my theory of God, my "theology". I think that God is primarily a good God. His goodness takes priority over other characteristics. In fact, for reasons I am not prepared to defend right now, I think that his goodness is the source of being, and thus of his power. This means that God is limited by his own goodness. I think this is a necessary property of a trustworthy God. Ultimately, a maximally trustworthy God is better for us than a maximally powerful one.

I want to show that God's allowance of evil flows naturally from his goodness.

For reasons that I won't defend here, suppose that in order for us to live in God's presence, we must be free from any evil in our hearts (in our intentions). God wants us to live forever, and so wants to provide a way for us to fully turn against evil in our intentions.

We need to really choose good. The way we do that is to really reject evil, even when evil looks attractive, even cartoonishly attractive. So we need evil presented to us in a way which looks good.

I postulate that God is incapable of presenting evil to us in such a way that it looks good. I'm not sure I could prove that, but on first inspection I think it sounds likely. A God who is goodness itself might have scruples against tempting us.

TEMPTATION CONTRACT THEORY

If so, then we have a situation where God's goodness makes him powerless to do a necessary part of bringing us to a state of having truly good intentions.

He needs other beings to tempt us. What kind of beings would tempt us? Presumably, evil beings. So God has to go to evil beings for help.

Temptation may be beyond the power of all the evil beings to actually implement. But God clearly acts out the will of his creatures. For instance, if you shoot a gun, you don't really will the bullet to go where it goes. You make a decision to shoot and where to aim, but the carrying out of that decision is done by God. So God could act out the decision of the evil beings.

If we sin, it is often God who is the efficient cause of the sin. He is our servant or slave. And God offers to be our servant or slave in this for the greater good of letting us act. So he can do the same, being the slave of evil beings. But the evil must come from the will of the evil beings.

How does God get the evil beings to will temptation for him? I propose that he does something like work out a contract with them. At a point in time, presumably far in the past, God allows his situation of need to be known. The evil beings know that they have leverage over God. They can demand concessions. Some of these concessions could include whatever evil that has no redeeming value. Because they are evil, they are paid with evil.

Does this mean that God tempts the evil beings to tempt us? My response as of now is to say it doesn't count as temptation for two reasons. One is that God does not will them to tempt, but simply lets them do what is in their nature. He doesn't put his thumb on the scale, the way they do with us. The other reason is that perhaps the critical sin in temptation is calling bad good. That the tempters tempt is actually a good thing, from a consequentialist perspective (since it allows us to come into tune with God) but for deontological reasons it is impermissible for this to be done by God himself.

WHY ISN'T THE WORLD WORSE?

If evil beings can have such serious bargaining power, why isn't the world worse? Are there any checks to their power? My theory has to explain why there is the amount of evil we have in the world, which seems finite, mixed with considerable finite good.

God and the evil beings are both bargaining with each other. God chooses which evil beings to work with. He can choose the ones who give him a good deal. He will not sign a contract that includes evil that keeps us from being with him forever. Things can happen in this life, and we can make decisions, which contribute to us failing to fully come to have good intentions. I don't believe God can know what is unknowable (states of affairs that don't exist yet, like future events). But whatever states of affairs have to obtain to give us the chance to make the right or wrong decisions, to create that risk, are ones which God would not sacrifice to the evil beings' negotiation. We live in a world in which it was worth it to God to create. So this predicts a generally hopeful state of affairs in the end, as long as each of us seeks to be in tune with God.

Evil beings offer their labor for wages, and collectively, there is a wage floor. Humans won't work for less than their wage floor (which might be "the amount of money necessary for minimal shelter, clothes, water, and food"). Evil beings want a certain amount of evil done in compensation for the good they do. If they were perfectly rational, they might push for a truly nightmarish human existence. But perhaps not all evil beings are rational to that extent. Lust is part of the psychology of evil beings. The lust for evil can lead to a strong demand for it, but also to a kind of pragmatism and impatience in seeking it, seeking to have what the evil being can have, now, rather than holding out for a really "excellent" implementation of evil-doing. Lust for evil could be an appetitive rather than calculating thing, or appetitive enough to inhibit or distort an evil being's utility-maximizing calculations.

So God may be able to negotiate with the most pragmatic and impatient of lustful evil beings, the ones who will sell out their labor for the lowest evil wages, yet these beings, because of their lust, have an absolute floor to what they will demand from him. The nature of the evil beings' psychology, how much evil their lust absolutely demands, determines the exact level of gratuitous evil that we see in the world around us.

Does God create the nature of evil beings' psychology and thus determine the level of evil in the world all by himself? Not if the nature of evil beings' psychology is substantially created by their own free willed choices to become evil.

The theory I have mentioned, I could call a labor relations theory of the Problem of Evil. The negotiations between different economic actors, in the economy of good and evil, produces a nuanced world. Just as the world we live in is the product of governments, corporations, civil society, individuals, etc. with differing points of views negotiating the mixture of all sort of different values in what we actually see and have to put up with, among these different voices there are also both God and evil beings. From a theistic standpoint, the way to analyze it might be that reality is a negotiation between God and what is not on the side of God.

CONCLUSION

What I hope to have accomplished in this talk is to show that the evil in this world flows naturally from the existence of a certain kind of good God. However, as you have listened, perhaps you have thought of questions or objections. I'm interested to hear them.

How Losing Can Be Good; Truth vs. Family

The "exilic-familial" approach to things is to lose, and out of losing be honest. But how can this have any survival value? Maybe it helps people when they are not in power, to keep going. If we are allowed to survive by the people around us, then we are free to lose and be honest. But how can we allow ourselves not to fight evil? When the really righteous people lose, evil wins. Presumably, we are really righteous, or at least more righteous than unrighteous.

One way in which it can lead to defeating evil is if it is a part of reconciliation. Our human enemies, believe it or not, are our siblings. We can see them through the lens of truth -- and they fall short, and dangerously so. No matter how much we fall short of the truth, they fall short so much so that the world would be better off with people like us and not with people like them. Or we can see them through the lens of family, which says "we all came from the same father, so we are all the same family -- we are family no matter what values we have, even no matter what we do".

By losing, we can (although maybe this doesn't necessarily always happen) allow ourselves to enter into a familial relationship with the people that have wrong values. Having done so, perhaps those with wrong values can listen to us and come to have right values. They are keeping themselves from believing us because we are enemies. In their minds, they are the ones with better values, whether better first-order values (when we say "work is good", they say instead "play is good") or better second-order values (when we say "work is good", they say "you can't be too moral" or "work may be good, but you can't call anyone lazy, or even imply it by bringing up how 'work is good'"). We think we know better than them about values, and they think they know better than us, and we harden ourselves through our difference and our identity as enemies, and our hostile interactions harden us even more.

If there is any truth to be seen, between us and them, it is seen either in reason or in intuition. Reason requires open-mindedness, and the transmission of intuitions (of attraction toward what attracts us, for instance) requires a relationship of trust. (Or at least, often enough, these conditions are needed). So first we must be reconciled, perform that political-familial action (political and familial because it's about persons relating to each other as persons, forming bodies of people, rather than as bearers of truth).

The lens of family is a bit deluded, but it is practical. The truth is too much to bear all at once. Can family and truth be reconciled? Family says "we accept you -- regardless of who you are", while truth says "we accept or reject you because of who you are". Family and truth can be reconciled if people are who they should be. Families can be enemies of the truth. Family could be seen as an artifact of how mammals raise their young, plus some cultural development. Are we really siblings? But God is the father of each of us, and loves each of us. So our siblinghood descends from God, who is the moral truth. In the end there can be no compromise in God -- compromise, and "grace" in that sense, are temporary things, someday to be gone forever. But for now, even in God's mind there must be a split -- love by its nature says both "we accept you -- regardless of who you are" and "we accept or reject you because of who you are". (Those who are not in tune with love cannot be accepted forever.) So God's mind is in tension. It is costly for him to accept us as much as he does. But we can reduce that tension by (in our inner intentions, preferences, and attitudes, that which is fully under our control) turning toward him and his values.

How Bad Can Satan Negotiate Reality to Be?; Tastes vs. Values

14 July 2023: added a note at the end.

I already wrote one post about how can we trust God given MSLN theodicy.

Epistemic status: I don't know much about economics / labor relations in general, or the areas of those particularly related to this post.

I was thinking today [when I drafted this] that if God negotiates with Satan, what if that means that Satan manages to make it so that there's no Millennium? I would assume that God would institute a time after this life for us, because he wants us to be saved, and very few of us are ready in this life. But would God get to have what he wanted? Or would Satan have a strong-enough hand in negotiations to cripple God's ability to act on his love?

In the negotiation process, God has the ultimate power. He can choose not to go ahead with creation. Let's say God and Satan are negotiating over the terms of a "temptation contract". This is needed before we are created. God can simply wait for a favorable contract. But, God really wants to create us, and needs Satan to volitionally empower temptation. It is better to create us than to not create us, so God has an incentive to allow Satan to have power.

What does Satan get out of the contract? Mainly, the satisfaction of doing evil [other rewards mentioned later in this post]. What does God get out of it? Temptation, which helps us become holy. God can run a cost-benefit analysis and see exactly how much benefit he can expect to get from temptation. If the cost from Satan exceeds the temptation, he simply will not ratify the temptation contract.

Temptation allows people to enter God's rest (/ heaven), by causing them to choose more deeply to reject sin and choose God instead. It would be counterproductive to institute temptation in a way that costs people's ability to enter God's rest through repentance. This puts a ceiling on how bad the world can turn out to be. But, I think if, say, 1,000 people fully repent in their hearts in this life and thus do not need the Millennium to be saved, and everyone else is lost, that's still a net positive. That's not very reassuring.

I imagine God thinking of strategies to elicit good terms from Satan. One thing to note is that "Satan" is really a class of evil beings. So God can choose between competing offers coming from evil beings.

I guess it's possible that there's only one evil being, but if there was, that being would have a strong hand in negotiating, and would probably make a world worse than this one currently is. It seems very unlikely to me that evil is an idea that would only occur to one being, and also, that God would put himself in a position where he only had one evil being rely on to will temptation.

So, if there are competing evil beings, there's a kind of "race to the bottom" to produce better and better evil-affected worlds. In human labor relations, people have some low price (in a globalized world, perhaps very low for some workers) below which they will not offer their labor. They need to be paid enough to buy food, for instance. This sets an effective floor on wages. So, would there be a floor to how good the world could be, given the personal needs of evil beings? In other words, while for Jesus, his bread was doing God's will, and for us, our bread can be literal food, for demons, bread is something like... sadistic enjoyment? the exercise of the will to power? feelings of superiority? a sense of security (derived from job security, perhaps)? the satisfaction of spoiling things for God? ... probably something like that. Some of these listed are not necessarily evil, but let's say all demons hold out for at least some evil inflicted on the world. There's some minimal amount of this that the most "scab-like" of demons would demand, and this sets the basic price (of evil) for temptation.

What if that brings us back around to "only 1,000 people are saved"? What if that's the wage floor? I think we have a kind of anthropic principle going here. Since we exist, generally speaking, our set-up (the way the world works) is favorable to all of us being saved in the end. God wouldn't create us if that weren't possible.

Does that mean that Satan's intrusions in our timeline (i.e. the Lisbon earthquake, fawns burning in the forest as in William Rowe's paper, the Holocaust, the depravity of human nature) have zero ability to lead us to hell? That doesn't seem likely. For instance, the problem of evil has led some people into atheism and lack of trust of God. But maybe in the Millennium (or even partly by posts like this very one, which support theodicies) it's relatively easy to convince atheists that God exists and there's a point to seemingly gratuitous evil. So it's not as fatal to people coming to God as it might seem. But I think that at least some atheists get stuck on their distrust of God, which was first taught to them by their reaction to the problem of evil, and if they stay stuck, they might harden and be lost.

I think it's possible for God to say "While Satan's intrusions (/ negotiated features of the world) might contribute to people going to hell, I can't predict a priori whether that will happen in each person's case before exposing them to those intrusions, and therefore it's in the realm of risk, rather than 'unforced error' if I go ahead with this creation." An "unforced error" being allowing Satan to negotiate for a world in which it simply isn't possible for more than some small number of people to be saved. In other words, it is obviously a bad idea for God to create us if he knows for sure that any of us will definitely be lost if he creates, and that would be the case if there was no Millennium.

How do we know that God doesn't want us to be lost? One intuition comes from the image of "father". God is a person who brings persons into the world. God loves. God is legitimate, and his legitimacy makes him God. As part of that legitimacy, he values all that is valuable, and whatever good there is in us, he values. To love is to value a personal being as a personal being, which is what that being is. So God loves the persons he brings into the world.

Loving beings do not want any of the people they love to be destroyed. God will feel grief over their loss, if they are lost. In the end, that grief will not be unbearable because in the end, there can be no unbearability. But it will still be grief. But the emotional cost is not primarily what means that God does not want us to be lost. Rather, it is his love for us. He loves each of us, and so does not want any of us to be lost. Better that we never exist than that we be lost. People who do not yet exist are only faint ideas, and if they are foregone, there isn't much lost. God will create as many people as he can, but not regret the ones he can't make -- there isn't an infinity of potential people, only the amount that God can make. But people who do come to exist are real, and there are real stakes for their well-being.

--

Let's assume that evil beings come from some kind of process that God can repeat. He can destroy the old evil beings (at some pain to him, if there's some good to them) and "roll up" some more evil beings. The most scab-like of these evil beings could give us a world that is actually very nice. The only evil other than temptation (and where we go given that temptation) being something like the occasional head cold. Why don't we live in this world? Couldn't God have held out until we got that lowest-bidder demon?

One possible reason why not is because to truly will temptation in every circumstance where it can be called for (which is what is needed in the temptation contract) is an act of profound evil, and that the fact that the world that we live in is not far worse than it is, is due to the "race to the bottom". It may be the case that there is an absolute floor to how evil a being can be and still will all temptation, and such a being would not sell their evil will for less than a certain evil reward.

But, couldn't it be the case that evil is its own reward? If that were so, then couldn't there be a lowest-bidder demon who would sell their work as a tempter as cheap as just willing temptation? Perhaps an evil demon would hate that good comes out of temptation, and require extra evil to go through with the contract as compensation. It's like if there was a volunteer position that was its own reward to the class of people who were suited to working on it. This volunteer position was their only way of advancing their tastes/values in the world. But it had a side effect that went against their tastes/values. None of them could be motivated to take the volunteer position unless there was some compensation for the side effect. The compensation would be to cause more of an advance in their tastes/values.

Does that illustration make sense? I guess if I were in the demons' position, I could see myself taking such a volunteer position and making the same demands.

The demon is being rational and calculating to some extent by demanding extra evil as compensation for the good that results from temptation, but not being fully rational, or else they would demand enough evil to almost cancel out the good done. But for some reason, demons seem to be selling their labor for less than it is worth, by not getting the full compensation for their efforts.

This is (basically?) the same as when human employees sell their labor for less than what it is worth, which is common and kind of odd when you look at it in an alien light. Why do humans do that? Probably because they are not fully rational. Businesses can find workers who are not fully rational, but who are partially rational and thus demand some wages. Humans have various psychological factors that compete with "seek your own well-being as effectively as possible", and one that demons might have is their lust to do evil. Demons are lustful, and could be impatient and pragmatic, wanting to just get some kind of evil done rather than pushing for some kind of pure and thoroughgoing evil that might fully instantiate their values or tastes. It only takes one relatively petty-minded demon to sign a temptation contract that leaves a lot of good in the world, but maybe the lust for evil in demons runs strong enough that there is a floor to how good the world can be, given their ability to negotiate for compensation.

--

I notice myself using "tastes" and "values" as semi-interchangeable above. I think that they can work similarly in that they can both motivate people to set up an axiology (an ordering of what is best) but that to have tastes has a significantly different tonality than to have values. "Taste" speaks of enjoyment, consumption, preference satisfaction, being pleased, and in some cases, of lust, while "value" speaks of idealism, self-giving, and (I would say) love.

Perhaps, in a Buberian way (like his "evil is not whole-souled" or "you can't worship God by using the same kind of worship you give an idol and just swap out your idol for God"), to will evil is a matter of tastes and not value. When the intensity of your valuing increases (perhaps), the greater your self-giving and idealism and (true) loving. But when the intensity of your "tasting" increases, the greater your impatience and thus pragmatism, and your hunger, and your lust. So a truly "great" (intense) evil willing is one that is done lustfully, and thus impatiently and pragmatically, costing the evil-willer the ability to inflict a truly rational-scale intense evil.

Now, demons may be crippled by their own lusts, but humans who have been deceived by demons can misguidedly pursue through value what is actually worthless or dangerous and thus bring great evil into the world, in effect. In terms of raw intent and desire, it's hard to beat a demon for evilness, although perhaps there are some people who seem to be possessed by demons but are actually on their side and match them both for the vehemence and impatience of their evil. But in terms of consequences, humans are better instruments of greatness, and the effects of greatness can be both good and bad.

(Notice that demons crippled by their own lusts still manage to demand things like wild animal suffering, earthquakes that kill thousands of people, and the presence of psychological evil (demonic possession / mental illness / personality disorders / urges toward killing and raping, etc.), on a scale that makes life gratuitously miserable for many beings, sometimes horrifying and offending people so that they reject God. Perhaps demons still have us beat as far as causing evil. But perhaps there are evil outcomes that only can be attained if we "semi-wittingly" or unwittingly help them come about.)

Our preferences, deep in who we are and not just as they express themselves through what we are, have a tonality to them. We are not "bloodless" in who we are, and there we either love, value, have tastes for, or lust (or prefer in some other way I haven't thought of).

--

I like what I've written so far, but it doesn't satisfy me. I still feel like somehow God could roll a minimally-evil demon to fulfill the temptation contract. He is patient and reality-aimed, and simply needs time before he can get a demon like that.

However, one thought occurs to me that might explain why God might have to choose a demon without waiting for the ideal demon. The "size" of God may be finite, in that he may have finite memory. In order to remember his own past, which (we could assert) is necessary for him to be who he is (it's part of the story of legitimacy, the exact content of which can change over time as legitimacy becomes more specified), he has to use memory, and so he has a finite amount of time to get to the end of time.

--

14 July 2023:

It occurs to me that a demon could negotiate for a situation where many or most people were lost. For instance, if there were going to be a million people in the world, the demon could negotiate for a reality where 1,000 of them were saved, but only if everyone else (999,000) were lost. So the idea is that the demon could force 999,000 people to be created, only to be lost, using the 1,000 as hostages of a sort.

Is there some reason to think this could not be the case? I think there is. According to MSL, God is Legitimacy. This means that he values what is valuable (what is legitimate), and must keep it going forever if possible. So unless the 999,000 people all themselves rejected him, he would have to save them no matter what. (They would have to be the ones to reject him -- he couldn't reject himself for them and somehow impute it to them.)

So God would be unable to offer the demon the concession of damning some apart from their decisions whether to become holy, in order to save others.

What if the demon negotiates a shorter, or even shorter, Millennium? Up to a certain point, the length of the Millennium helps people have time to be saved.

If you give a person a week to do an assignment, that may be too short. Maybe you should give them a semester. That sounds better. How about a year? Or five years? Perhaps there are two dynamics: people who work slow always benefit from more time, but people who are avoiding the work may find even more distractions over time, find their motivation waning even more. So if you give people 5 years to do a homework assignment, all the people who benefit from having lots of time get done in 1 year, but those who are avoiding the assignment actually take it less seriously in the initial period where they have momentum, and so are less likely to finish with a 5 year assignment period than with something shorter.

So maybe 1,000 years (or if we take that as being non-literal, something else perhaps basically similar in length) is the optimal length for the Millennium, to help both slow workers and procrastinators. All slow workers can finish in that time, perhaps. We might say that God can't offer the demons anything other than that length of a Millennium, because God has to give us the optimal amount of time to make our decision (too long would lose too many of the procrastinators, too short would lose too many of the slow workers). That's his "wage ceiling".

But then, why isn't his wage ceiling a bit lower so that it excludes gratuitous suffering?

(later:)

God wants to maximize the number of people in heaven and minimize those who are lost. A person in heaven is an infinite good (everlastingly alive) while a person who is lost is an infinite loss (the loss of a person forever). But not infinite in the sense that one person saved could somehow be equal to millions lost (nor that the calculation would be indeterminate). It is very important to God to make it so that everyone who is created goes to heaven, if it is under God's power to do so.

However, as evil as intense suffering is in itself, if it does not affect eternity, it is something God can accept if there is some kind of benefit to doing so. A benefit might be that God can more readily get demons to draft and sign temptation contracts if they get to cause us intense, and even seemingly gratuitous, suffering. The sooner they sign, the more memory God has to create people.

If God is deontologically constrained so that if it is under his power to keep us from being lost, he must act, does that mean that he will at some point make up for any lack of anti-temptation in our lives, caused by people failing to anti-tempt us? If so, does evangelicalism make sense?

It might make sense if we ourselves are tempted to not care. We might say "temptations must come, but woe to those through whom they come" -- what kind of person would tempt someone else to sin? But we might also say "anti-temptations will come, but woe to those who do not anti-tempt", as in, if you aren't inclined to anti-tempt, your heart is not like God's heart, and that's a dangerous situation to remain in.

It is also possible that the sooner people are anti-tempted, the less suffering there is in the world, and the fewer regrets people have. And also, God is in a state of suffering when we are out of tune with him, and if we love him, we will want to reduce that suffering -- suffering is felt in the now in a demanding way, even if God knows that it is temporary.

On the other hand, maybe there is still room for tragic outcomes despite God's pure will to save. If God's memory is finite, then there is only so much time for people to come to holiness. People can only process so much psychological input in a given amount of time. If we don't use our time well, there is some chance that though God is willing to anti-tempt us to make up for lacks earlier in life, there might not be enough time for us to respond. (So it makes sense to be concerned about things like hedonism keeping us from growing spiritually in secular time.)

Now, God can build in some slack by allocating more time for the Millennium and creating fewer people (so that he can anti-tempt us to make up for our lack of anti-tempting), and he would. But he allocates the slack based on his estimate of what decisions we will make in the future (the future from his perspective creating the world). If we exceed those estimates, then there might not be enough slack.

It is possible that God and the demon make their temptation contract such that God has to keep the world order the same once creation begins. God believes that we are going to only be "so bad". Perhaps, before he has seen us, God doesn't understand how bad we could turn out to be. (Think of God trying to undo creation with the Flood.) He has some idea, having seen demons, but since he is a good being, his imagination doesn't naturally "go there". (To imagine something that has never been imagined before is to make something real and new in the imaginal world, so to imagine evil for the first time is to create evil. God can't do that, but he does perceive the evil that has been created in the imaginal world by others, and this is his source for understanding evil.) Further, God doesn't know what can't be known (what hasn't happened yet), so he doesn't know exactly what we will decide to do. God bets that our moral nature will conform to his expectations (from the Bible, it sounds like Satan bets that we will be worse than God's expectations), and when we prove God wrong, maybe it's too late for him to put the slack into the plan for the Millennium to compensate for that.

The existence of gratuitous suffering (or other gratuitous evil) is something that only makes sense if God is not against evil (which doesn't make any sense in MSL) or he has some kind of constraint on his power. Here are two constraints: God can't tempt, and God can't imagine evil for himself, only can imagine it once his eyes have been opened by seeing it embodied by beings that were capable of innovating in that area. These two constraints come from his holiness, that he is sinless.

(God is also constrained by having to want what he wants, a consequentialist constraint, while the non-tempting one is a deontological one, and the inability to imagine evil one could be seen as a virtue-ethical one or a kind of "physical constraint". Another "physical constraint" being God's limited memory, and also his inability to relate to what does not exist (future things).)

(later:)

Can the demon make a contract with God that makes heaven worse than God intended? (So much worse that we would not look forward to it?)

Temptation is only needed up to the end of the Millennium. Theoretically, after that, God could break whatever contract he had with the demon. I'm not sure that that would be a legitimate thing for God to do, so what about the case that it is not?

Evil has to end someday. If not, God calls evil good, by never rejecting it, which is illegitimate. Heaven is the time in which evil does not exist anymore. So whatever damage a demon could do through the contract, it could not cause heaven to have any evil in it. (God would be unable to make that concession.) This includes the qualia of unbearability, which are evil. Perhaps the demon could make heaven less pleasurable? Once we are spiritually mature enough to be in heaven, we probably won't care that much about a little foregone pleasure. But could the demon negotiate for all pleasure to be gone?

I think demons are more motivated by raw sadism (inflicting the qualia of unbearability) than by quieting heaven's pleasurablity. Perhaps heaven's pleasure can be protected by more pain in this life (God can negotiate for us to have more pain in this life so that we can experience his desired level of pleasure for us in heaven forever.)

I guess it's possible that there are demons who are relatively more anti-pleasure than they are pro-pain (I would suppose that all demons are pro-pain), and thus who would drain heaven of its pleasure (or add 100% bearable suffering) for all eternity. Assuming that heaven's pleasure(/lack of excess bearable pain) is important to God (and it might be if for no other reason than to motivate and comfort us), he might prefer to work with demons who would allow us to make this life worse, and the Millennium worse, in hedonic terms (though not in terms of whether those lives are effective in leading us to salvation), but keep the last, everlasting life, up to a certain hedonic standard.

Depravity

I'm not sure whether I like how the word "depraved" is loaded, but I do think the question of "how naturally or fundamentally evil are people?" is an important one, and I guess "depravity" is how that's talked about in Christian theology.

How "depraved" are people?

I don't think reality makes a lot of sense if people have zero moral agency, no ability to make choices morally. (Moral free will is why there is unbearable suffering, as far as I can tell.) So I don't think people can be 100% predisposed to evil, otherwise they wouldn't be the evil ones, but rather that predisposition, or, originally, the being or beings that predisposed them so. I guess it's possible for it to be the case that suffering is permitted for the sake of other beings who have free will, other than humans. Then, perhaps, humans could be 100% predisposed toward evil -- but I think really humans just wouldn't exist as persons, and only as appendages of the body of the being that used them for evil.

On some level, I know myself, and can't be wrong about myself, having privileged access to myself, and I make decisions sometimes. They may be constrained by the options available, but I choose. I know that I affirm the good, and chafe at evil. Sometimes I fail to deeply oppose evil, or perhaps even like it, and that comes from the real me. Perhaps I am not in touch with decisions I have made (and likely will make) that go against my affirmation or chafing in the moment, and my whole person is not as affirming of the good, or inclined to chafe against evil, as I feel, but in the moment, with that little piece of me that is alive right then, I do affirm, or chafe, out of the I that is saying "I affirm good" or "I chafe at evil". My will is free, most of my waking life, though it may have limited options and efficacy.

In some moments I find myself doing things that I don't want to do, automatically, and being tempted by forces that I didn't choose to put into my thought-life, which put me in positions where my behavior is relatively far from what I would do if I were left in the most favorable situations. Part of my human nature is my body, the flesh of my brain, and it paints a picture of me to others and even myself which is not always accurate, through my behavior. It distorts the signal I'm really trying to send to others, and I can even take it to be who I am when it is a distortion, and not a trustworthy image of my real intentions.

Human behavior is somewhat naturally depraved, because our brains are programmed to sometimes be aggressive, hypersexual, manipulative, controlling, etc. But humans are not exactly the same as their behavior. Human behavior is often naturally whatever we would call the opposite of "depraved". And again, humans are not exactly the same as their behavior.

Where does this extra-human depravity come from? We don't choose it. Does God choose it? Why would God choose it? I don't think God could choose it. So who chose it? Presumably it came through the power of Satan. Satan wills that we have these aggressive, hypersexual, manipulative, controlling, etc. psychological natures. If Satan's will no longer prevails, then they go away. Psychopathy seemingly follows from genes. If these genes, and their phenotypes, are healed, then those who seem to be, from a behavioral point of view, moral monsters, may turn out to be merely humanly depraved. It's possible for someone to freely choose to be a psychopath, but perhaps in many or even most cases, people are psychopathic apart from any decision they made.

What do humanly depraved people look like? Someone like Tim Keller (whom I am using here as a name for a sincere, thoughtful, and kind Calvinist) would say "like me -- at my best". These are the horrific depths of human depravity, apart from the interference of Satan. It may sound like I'm making a joke at the expense of Calvinism, but I see an important truth in that view, which is that it's dangerous to assume you are no longer evil in any significant way, like your evil side could be rounded down to zero in your eyes, even if you are as mild-mannered as Tim Keller. We are tempted to view human nature through the lens of how bad Satan makes us, and how good God makes us, the behavior and outward appearance of us, and not our hearts which really choose.

I think that people are programmed or possessed both to be good and to be evil, and in their freedom, really are both good and evil, until they (we?) finish fully choosing the good. (Or choose to be evil sufficiently firmly to prevent them (us?) from fully choosing the good.)

Book Review: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

See also the preview for this review.

My impression of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson, having [when I had] just read it: It is useful to read to give emotional weight to the problem of humans' dual nature of good and evil, and to good and evil themselves. The last chapter ("Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case") gives more food for thought.

I noted there (in the book) that Jekyll initially wanted to separate the evil nature from the good in him. I think, looking at things from a society-wide or political level, we sometimes split parts of society off from us to be evil for us. Maybe we don't do this intentionally, or maybe we do on some level. Cops and military are exposed to evil and it corrupts some of them or gives them temptations most of us don't face which they then sometimes give in to. People who live in bad neighborhoods pay less in rent and thus can be paid less. So someone needs to keep the neighborhoods bad. Childhoods of abuse may cause people to earn less if they don't go to school. So they provide workers for low wage jobs. Corrupt and authoritarian foreign regimes keep their societies dysfunctional so that they don't develop too much -- keeping wages lower. Building factories in least-developed countries makes those countries wealthier. So we need some dysfunctional countries to wait in the wings when standards of living rise in the countries we have developed.

Money can't buy everything. A person has to convert that money into a good or service, and certain occupations are more often staffed by people who have a certain political persuasion. If you are a certain kind of Democrat, you may despise capitalism, and that may not make you a good person to go into business. If you are a certain kind of Republican, you may despise cultural refinement, and that may not make you a good person to make art or entertainment. The Republican has the kids watch Disney because the kids will drive her crazy otherwise, and the Democrat over and over buys things from capitalist people because he would live in material want otherwise. So it looks like we need the mental software, or house, of Democrat thinking, to spiritually nourish the Democrat so he can make his entertainment, and the mental software, or house, of Republican thinking, to spiritually nourish the Republican so she can run her business. If that's true, then no matter how much the Republican detests Democrat culture, or vice versa, they need that each other's cultures exist, and they need people to believe in those horrible Republican, or Democrat, values.

Does this mean that there is no such thing as evil, or that evil is necessary and thus not practically recommended-against? Which would you rather, to live a long and healthy life in an evil land, or to be poor and unhappy in a virtuous land? What if the good life requires that we all participate in evil, either directly, or by proxy? One could say that everything that exists is inextricably intertwined with everything else, and that therefore evil is necessary for what is good, and so we should do nothing about it, and cease to regard it as evil.

No, it's possible for there to be real evil. I don't want to say that the Republicans are evil and the Democrats good, or vice versa, because I have vowed to be apolitical, but in principle, one of them might be more right than the other. Maybe they both have issues, but a third as yet unarticulated political culture basically doesn't. This third culture might work just as well for business owners as for creative people, or whatever other stereotypically Republican and Democrat occupations one would want to mention. There could be a morally better culture that also unifies people politically, and we can have both political harmony and moral progress / purification in one new status quo. Likewise with the examples of the low wages, maybe those of us with greater wealth and life-situation-resources could simply pay more for what we consume, helping other people to have higher wages. Someone could somehow help people leave their abusive spouses or parents, reform corrupt and authoritarian governments, and we would all pay more for our cheapest goods and it would be fine because we would be well-off ourselves. People who currently have a hard time affording those cheapest goods could be helped by those who have extra resources. Again, things could just be better.

But, that change can't happen immediately, and in the meantime, evil props up good. Sometimes we find it convenient to prop up good with evil and then forget that we benefit from evil, and become morally outraged with evil that we actually need in an important sense. If we're willing to do the work that the evil people do for us, maybe we can reduce the evil. Otherwise we are constituted, in some sense, by something we disown.

Is the status quo fragile, or anti-fragile? If we stress it, will it break? Or will it grow into something better? If we think it's 100% fragile, we will be unable to practically favor morality (change things into something better), and soon, we will fiducially or even epistemically stop regarding evil as evil. A fragile status quo then destroys consciousness of morality. Or, people who are afraid of breaking a fragile status quo do. But if the status quo is anti-fragile, then moral consciousness can be rewarded with societal success / health / sustainability. And moral consciousness makes sense if we are willing to risk breaking the status quo in the attempt to make it really good.

(Being revolutionary is not always a good idea. Breaking the status quo is a bad thing in itself and can make people conservative, feel like the world is fragile, so they then try to extinguish moral consciousness. But if you have zero sense that it's okay to risk the status quo, in theory, you'll never feel like it's okay to try to change it -- unless, maybe, the proposed changes are very clearly safe to make. And adopting that level of caution may be costly, and sometimes not worth it.)

In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by the evil being separate, it is freed to become more evil. When we separate out and segregate the evil or that which bears evil, it intensifies. Bad neighborhoods and bad cop cultures both become worse. Prisons can intensify the evil of those sent to be punished by those prisons' evil.

Does this mean we should keep all evil mixed in with all good? It seems like maybe Stevenson was trying to say that Jekyll, who all his life struggled with his dual moral nature, needed to keep struggling, with his evil stuck in his own self-concept, and that when he split it off into Hyde, he ended up, when Jekyll, still having the dual nature, plus there was the time he was Hyde and was purely evil. There may be some wisdom in that. We start to make a kind of devil's bargain, perhaps, when we outsource evil to someone else and stop struggling with it ourselves, when we have someone else face temptations for us.

Nevertheless, the way of civilization and progress ("progress" used in a descriptive and not normative sense) is for us to cleanly separate the good from the bad, so that we can be more established. I think that the ordinary person can't handle the worst levels of evil (or amoral behavioral threat, as from some kinds of mental illness). But if we have discipline, maybe we will resist cleaning up society too much, so that ordinary people still have to deal with evil people to some extent and we have to face the temptations faced by those who are professionals in dealing with evil. I don't know how practical this idea is, and I do not relish the thought of having to deal with evil people myself, or with having a job like that of a police officer or prison guard, but maybe as frightful as that sounds to me, it would be better for me to face those kinds of roles -- at least, if nothing else, to face the mild or moderate evil in the world that perhaps is within my reach, to help prevent it from growing to a size unmanageable to me by my (or somebody's) neglect.

I think the book, particularly the last chapter, is good for those who are thinking about holiness and morality. I think the book, overall, is stronger as a source of thoughts about morality on a personal level, rather than the political. But right now, I'm more interested in the political or society-wide angle to it.

--

Now I will consider what I wrote in my preview of this review.

There, I wrote

I think Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde might give insight on the ways in which temporary leaders of bodies of people might think about how to behave given that they won't always be in power. Also, how to think about nations that have within them radically different factions.

There was some connection in the book to that question of providing for when you're not in power. Jekyll sometimes set things up so that when he was Hyde, Hyde wouldn't ruin things. I imagine that in liberal democracies, governments think about the fact that they will be replaced by people who don't like their agenda (the opposition). That might be an interesting area to read about if I come upon a source.

One thing that maybe could be pointed out from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is that I know that Jekyll provides for the fact that he will become Hyde, and I vaguely feel like Hyde provides for the fact that he will become Jekyll. This asymmetry to how I remember this suggests the thought that Jekyll was the more responsible of the two and therefore did more of the providing for the reality of Hyde, and had more of a concept that he was responsible for what Hyde did. So, suppose there is a Faction A and Faction B in a country, and Faction A is more responsible, both in the sense of interfering more in / providing for the existence of, and feeling more accountable for, Faction B, than Faction B does of Faction A. Metapolitics (views on the fact that there are politics, factions, etc.) is part of political culture. A move in Faction A vs. Faction B politics might be in denying that there is an overall nation that both are part of, weakening this sense of responsibility. An amoral or evil Faction B (Hyde-like) might have a sort of "youthful strength" by ignoring responsibility. Possibly Faction A's attempts to take care of what Faction B will likely do could end up doing more harm than good sometimes, and Faction B can "shine by comparison" by not messing up that way.

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On a personal note, I find that I have different moods, because I have bipolar disorder. So this book, and thinking about it, thematizes the question of how I might provide for myself when I'm in a maybe radically different mood.

Running Software; Insecurity and Evil

"You" can selflessly choose to become a "you" who selfishly desires the good. It's as though you choose to run software. You enter into the software with all of who you are, but ultimately it's something you chose to run, and maybe there are times where you become distant from that software and can face the choice once more, and unchoose it, or affirm it, consciously.

Sometimes we see people (or nations) doing evil. Why do they do that? Are they evil? (Aggressive, powerhungry, greedy, hateful.) Or is it because they are acting out of self-defense? (Out of fear, insecurity, weakness, desperation.) Sometimes an observer of them can make a case both ways.

Maybe what is going on is that the evil reality of them, who they really are, is choosing to install the insecure software, to justify its evil. Or maybe they aren't really evil, but their fears install the software of being evil. For instance, choosing to install the software of dehumanizing your opponents to allow you to do what you have to do to survive. Once your opponents are dehumanized, then it is natural to be evil to them. Or maybe they are simultaneously significantly evil and significantly insecure.

People can have significant evil in them and also significant non-evil (good, or amoral self-interest). But even purely evil people have to mind their own self-preservation. So they might act even more evil than they would just out of their own inherent evil, if you threaten their survival.

What's the right strategy with people like this? Are the people who seem evil to us often the people that we really understand? So, given cases in which we lack understanding, we bet -- either that our opponent is so evil that they will try to take over if given a chance, and we must "do what it takes to stop them", including threaten their self-preservation; or that they are not so evil and will content themselves with self-preservation if we leave them alone. Do we know what we're doing? We may think we do.

Perhaps this consideration of "software", insecurity, and evil is more often more usefully applied to ourselves, because of all people we know ourselves best. How often do we install "software" that justifies, motivates, or makes more feasible some kind of hostility (perhaps software of a kind of morality) primarily or significantly to serve our own self-preservation? How often do we emphasize our neediness (run a supercharged self-preservation program) because we want to be greedy? How often do we install software for reasons other than the truth of what the software states or is based on?

Alien View of Two Cities

Cities tend to be alike insofar as they are places to meet future spouses, raise families, go to school, work at a job, grow old, get born. Your whole life story can play out in a city, and there is a way in which your human life can sort of be lived the same no matter what city you live in. In Delhi or Lima (each under a cloud of smog), people meet future spouses, raise families, go to school, work at jobs, grow old, and get born. I went to Lima for a few days, when I was 17, and was impressed by the smog. But if I had stayed five years, while that would have been bad for my respiratory health, I might have gotten more involved in friends or perhaps a girlfriend, or a church, or something like that. The smog would have been a background condition, one which I noticed here and there, maybe every day, maybe not. But I would have been living my life, the important, (near?-)universally human parts of life, of developing as a person, caring about things which were emotionally weighty to me (God, art, science, etc.) and participating in other people's lives. I would have shifted back and forth from theism to atheism to agnosticism in my fiducial depths, and experienced whatever other essential features of the human condition. But the smog wouldn't have been worth mentioning.

The alien view of a city is to see the smog and not the people raising their families (and going to school, growing old, etc.), which is the familiar view of a city. Both the alien view and the familiar view are right, and both are wrong.

Except for time I spent in Davis, CA, going to college, I have lived my whole life in San Diego. I'm not particularly interested in travel, and tend to feel the monk's feeling of wanting to stay in my cell. When I'm feeling very local, I see nearby me only a few places, which comprise my whole world that I can see. It's as though San Diego is my house, and I'm looking out the window. My whole world is Southern California, plus a view into Mexico. The Imperial Valley to the east is a desert farming community, and Tijuana to the south is in another country, reputed to be dangerous. I don't go to those places very often. To the west is the Pacific Ocean, which is a watery desert. To the north is Los Angeles, which of all these neighboring places I have the strongest impression.

As an outsider, my view of Los Angeles is that it is a place of spiritual darkness. There is greater stress and hostility there than in San Diego. Los Angeles seems to have been shaped by the movie industry, which sells beauty, but it's an ugly place. The Hollywood neighborhood is not a vision of beauty. But the sun shines "all year long" (not literally true, but something like it). A constant 72 degrees Fahrenheit may sound idyllic (it's the temperature you set your thermostat to), but that 72 degree sun gnawing at your skin, day after day, becomes a horror. You find yourself irritable under its gaze. (We have spells of this in San Diego as well.) That irritating pleasantness can even have an obscene component, the obscenity of people being fed things engineered to please them. Hollywood actresses are selected for for appearing beautiful to American men, but I have come to feel like I'm looking at a Doritos chip, a snack chip for the eyes rather than for the mouth, which has a dark energy to it, something to make me high, addictive and bedazzling. Films themselves are like Doritos chips, though they are all superficially beautiful. There is an obscenity to their beauty, which I see as an alien to them. Los Angeles is a place of desperation (aspiring actors and musicians), of broken dreams, of exploitation. While not all of LA is in the movie or music industries, I would guess that this spills over into the city at large.

When I go to LA, I often come in on the train. As it approaches Union Station, where I get off, I see the same thing every time, a kind of industrial landscape, with the Los Angeles River running through it, channelized with nothing natural about it, graffitied, sometimes with trash and the belongings of homeless people. In San Diego, there's nothing exactly like it. The Skid Row equivalent in San Diego as I've experienced it is smaller, and I have felt uncomfortable but comfortable enough walking through it, but an Angeleno friend had me canceling my Greyhound tickets so I wouldn't have to go to Los Angeles' Skid Row, where the LA Greyhound station is located. There is a hostility in Los Angeles, and an aggressiveness, both in the way people drive, and in the things people say. My Angeleno friend once said "Welcome to LA" after a homeless person went off in a train station in a way I don't think I've ever heard in San Diego. Being homeless is stressful, but perhaps more stressful in Los Angeles.

I visited a therapist in San Diego one time at a particularly dark time of my life. He said good things about Portland, but his opinion was that Los Angeles was a spiritually dark place. I don't want to be unfair to spiritualities which are not Christian, but I will note that goth and occult spiritualities and aesthetics are relatively strong in Los Angeles, and while they could be defended by some as not being really bad for you, their imagery tends to be dark and often weird, a participation in horror. David Bowie went through his worst years in Los Angeles crawling deeper into cocaine and occultism, enabled by false friends and money.

Hollywood (and Los Angeles, to the extent that Los Angeles is a support organ for it) sells America, and the world, fake beauty, so no wonder Los Angeles itself has arguably the pleasantest weather in America (shared with San Diego), but is actually an ugly, dark place. But to be fair to Los Angeles, though I am familiar with San Diego in ways that I am not with Los Angeles, I can see San Diego, as well, as an alien. San Diego, often enough, is a place of genuine beauty, not fake beauty. San Diego is the good life, a genuinely nice experience. It shares some of Los Angeles' dark side (we have that gnawingly pleasant weather, and some of the traffic) and San Diego had (and has?) a relatively strong goth scene. But San Diego is a sleepy place, a kind of "last man" place. San Diego is more spiritually dangerous than Los Angeles, because in Los Angeles, you know something is wrong. But in San Diego, you feel like everything is right. The word "hedonism" sounds to some like cocaine and strippers on Sunset Strip -- a Los Angeles phenomenon -- but to me it sounds like a beautiful sunset at La Jolla Shores, or Coronado, or whatever other San Diego beach, that feeling of the "pacific" ocean calming you, quieting away the deeply personal side of you, drugging you with genuine psychological health. How can you really learn to love in San Diego, when it is at its "finest"? You have a better chance in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles is known for the film and music industries, and its container ports. San Diego is known for the military, and for craft beer and burritos and going to the beach. The World Famous San Diego Zoo is here as well.

The vulgar hedonism of Hollywood rock stars in the 1980s is probably too easily grown past. Also, the version of hedonism envisioned by transhumanists (for instance, discussed somewhat in X-Risk), while exciting and motivating to them, may seem sort of ridiculous and unnecessary to the average person. But San Diego, instead of radical hedonism represented by rock stars or transhumanists, represents normal hedonism, for normal people. If you want really good, human compatible experience, come to San Diego. Watch a sunset. Eat food from a taco shop. Drink a craft beer. Go surfing. Maybe stay home and watch a movie. Go check out a farmer's market on the weekend. Forget God. Lose your passion. Let go. Turn off the part of you that cares about anything outside of your lifestyle of normal humanity.

San Diego is the hedonism that normal people would choose, and already do choose, long before any advanced technology makes an Experience Machine possible. It may be the exact experience that people choose once they've tried all the "adventure programs of youth" that you can run on the Experience Machine. At the end -- our vision of heaven, I guess, will be San Diego, or culturally varied versions of it.

One San Diegan I knew lived in Germany for school, but came back to visit his parents in a neighborhood close to mine. He said that when he visited San Diego, he felt sadness. That was his alien view. I can connect with that -- the sadness of a beautiful sunset, all the people beautifully bedding down for one last night, as the dark settles in and they cease to exist.

San Diego says "look at things from the familiar view". Los Angeles says "look at things from the alien view". I feel like I would have a much easier time discussing the content of this post in Los Angeles-as-Los Angeles. I feel it very difficult to talk about it in San Diego-as-San Diego. In Los Angeles, we can have the possibility of really being aware of weird things, like that if we give $5,000 to a charity, it could save someone's life, a totally meaningless and abstract behavior from the point of view of an ordinary human's life. But that weird sacrifice, from our perspective, is like a gift from heaven for the person who benefits, who gets to live 35 more years (up to life expectancy, at least). In Los Angeles, we can be aware that the familiar view, normality, human nature, themselves are horrors, which prevent people from giving to anyone outside their own familiar lives. In Los Angeles we may long for something other than "this", and perhaps even occasionally cry out to God. But San Diego is self-sufficient. I don't want to be too kind to Los Angeles -- I don't know that Los Angeles leads people to love God. But at least in a sense it is unstable. San Diego is more hedonically stable, is a lower-energy point of cultural development. You can become aware of God if you can see outside the totality of the experience-as-experience. You can become aware of persons as persons, as more than just experiences, if there is some outside to the hedonic moment. A perfect San Diego could exclude you from loving God as a person, as a real being, and you would have no way to motivate yourself to leave that perspective. It would be a perfect sunset at the end of a 10/10 day.

The truth is found in totality. So while I have presented the alien views of the two cities, to be accurate, one should remember their familiar views. Every person is an alien to us and family to us, and every collection of people is alien and familiar. Most aliens have some element of horror to them, and so do most people, though there are some aliens who are like cities of God.

How Can We Trust, Given MSLN Theodicy?

In a world where many things (maybe most things) could be the way they are as a result of MSLN theodicy -- a negotiation between God and Satan -- how can you trust anything?

The short answer is, by experience. If you find something to be trustworthy, you can assume that it is, unless something comes up that makes you doubt it. If you have a lot of experience with something, the room for doubt shrinks, although in principle it never goes away. For some things that are sufficiently trustworthy, not trusting them is riskier than trusting them.

Experience starts out as your own. Usually you trust other people before you come to be able to think critically, but you trust them because on some level you trust yourself (at least passively, if not always actively). If by trusting yourself you trust them, then you may trust their experiences, or perhaps their trustings that are based on their experiences and trustings, which broadens your potential epistemic and fiducial worlds (gives you new things to believe are true and new permission or motivation to trust things, and also gives you new things to doubt or distrust).

I find that satisfying (for now) in answering one sense of "How can you trust anything?" ("How can you allow yourself to trust anything at all?"). It's a general account that could apply to most worldviews, I would guess.

There is another sense to "How can you trust anything?" which is, practically speaking, how do you go about it?, which the above also answers to some extent. But, there may be more MSLN theodicy-specific ways to trust, to add to the account.

One obvious thing to do is to ask (when you have the chance to be reflective) "Which elements of this reality might likely be from God, or be aligned with God, and what might be from Satan, or be aligned with Satan?" Then, consider ways to mitigate whatever harm might come from Satan, in the cases where it seems likely that something might serve Satan's purposes. Or consider ways to mitigate potential Satanic furtherance when you could be wrong and maybe what you think is from God is really from Satan. (Bearing in mind the point earlier about the risks of not trusting things that really are trustworthy.)

Also, given what God is doing, how can you assist the basic drift of what seems to be communicated from above? We have the power to make reality more trustworthy, either to make the outcomes God intends more trustworthy (further his intentions), or the ones that Satan intends more trustworthy (inhibit his/their intentions).

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That expresses about how far my thinking has progressed on this topic, but there may be more to the topic than that.

Side Effects of Solving Problems

When you solve a problem, you're often trying something new. You're adopting a new mindset, or developing a new institution or habit, developing a new relationship. In order to live you seem to have to use new tactics, "whatever works". But solutions have side effects. (This sounds like something We Are Not Saved would talk about on a societal level.)

So what you can end up doing is solving a loud, obvious problem by trading away something of quieter but greater importance. You might laugh off your problem, and get relief from "taking it too seriously", but as a consequence lose some of your ability to take anything seriously, and thus close yourself off to the voice of God to some degree. Or you might push for justice, and get what you deserve -- and not learn to receive greater gifts from God.

I am a bit hesitant to be a historian, but I think I see in the cultural history of the 19th or 20th centuries a kind of build-up of tension, up to a time of breakdown from perhaps 1920 through 1970 or 1980. I know of existentialism in postwar Europe and the big cultural crises of the 1960s. There was a time when people would be deeply disturbed by intellectual teachings, especially existentialism. Well, existentialism can be read just as easily now as then, and it hardly has any effect. We are not concerned with the burning question of "Is there a meaning to life? How can we go on given the 'death of God'?" Now the questions just don't have much resonance with us. We're just fine... but maybe the sense of "there is a right and wrong" and the (what I would call) cultural passion that led people to take things really seriously in an idealistic way (what I would associate with "having a sense of real meaning in life") is exactly the thing we need now, and our alleviation of our anxieties and mental anguish over existentialism traded away something that we would regret, if we hadn't blinded ourselves spiritually, and which we have good reason to regret.

The Enemy, of both societies and individual people, profits by throwing stresses at us and leading us to choose solutions which trade away something of real value. The scam of evil is multi-part sometimes, taking attention away from what is really at play. Satan wants to make you miserable, and that's obvious, but also wants to shut you down, make you hopeless, cynical, turn you away from loving and trusting God.

--

However, as dark as all that sounds, the good news is that sometimes you can solve a problem and then correct for the solution's side effects. You can deal with the obvious problem and not get taken in by the quiet lie that tends to go with that solution.

Forgetting the War

Sometimes we forget, or choose not to see, or never were aware of, the war between God and Satan over each person -- other people, and ourselves. When we are in that state, it seems like life is normal, "laminar", explicable, common-sensical, and we take things easy. However, when we do that, because we don't see, we can have consequences in the war that we are not aware of.

MSLN Spiritual Warfare

One of the consequences of believing that evil spiritual beings negotiated with God for the world to be evil (as a condition on willing temptation to exist) (which may be the best explanation for why there is so much evil in the world despite God being good, and is the one favored by MSLN) is that we wonder, what exactly did those evil beings negotiate, and to what extent do they interact with our world?

First, I want to say that if any evil beings do interact with our world, the belief that they exist, and the belief that they don't exist, are both things they would use against us. These beings want to drive us crazy, torment us, and deceive us. But that very thought can drive people crazy, torment them, and deceive them. It is good to read about deceptive truths, pathological thoughts and emotions, epiconcepts, seeing Spiritually, and gating off voices in this context. Also, any discussion of evil makes it possible to wonder if people are evil. I think it's possible that there are evil people, but it can be dangerous to identify people as being evil -- don't sell yourself out to that belief. Evil beings get their will done when people believe other people are evil when they are not. Some readers may want to rule out the possibility of there being evil beings because such a belief could be associated with a traditional religious belief in the devil. They may look on such a belief as a fear tactic, used by religious people to control people. If there are evil beings, then the fear tactic furthers the aims of evil beings, as does the avoiding of the fear tactic to the extent that we rule out the possibility of there being evil beings.

If you can, see evil, but don't fear evil. The power of evil can be reduced by seeing it without fear. If evil frightens you, you can rely on God to keep you safe.

The good news, from MSLN's point of view, is that all being follows from God, and God brings about a completely legitimate world in the end. Evil is real and substantial but is parasitic on good. Evil can never win in the end, at least, it can't destroy God and anyone who remains with God. Evil might succeed in pulling people away from God. We are born with God -- something has to overcome that starting point for us to be lost. Though evil is given a certain latitude to affect the world, one shouldn't forget that God also has latitude to affect the world. Generally people are not on the side of the evil beings, although what they are on the side of may turn out to further the purposes of the evil beings. The evil beings are limited and only one side of the war.

To answer the questions from above ("What exactly did evil beings negotiate? How much do they interact with the world?"), the bad news that is most certain, from an MSLN point of view is: There is some evil that can have an overall good effect, all things considered, but it's debatable which evils do, and it's clear enough (to me) that there is such a thing as gratuitous evil. This evil has nothing to do with human conscious choice. Natural disasters, parasites and other disease-causing organisms, the drives toward aggression and hypersexuality (or other very common biological sources of temptation), genetic-based mental illness, and so on clearly qualify for this category. These are things that we would have to pin on God himself, and in a sense, he does bring them into the world, but not by his own will. These were negotiated to be part of the world by the evil beings, as a condition for them working for God by willing our temptation.

Beyond that, MSLN doesn't have a lot of answers. So I will discuss the range of possibilities as I see it. The reader may be able to form an opinion, based on what they see, as to where in the range of possibilities the answer likely lies.

It does seem likely that if I were a group of evil beings able to have a say in how reality was going to turn out, I would include a provision for my kind to be able to do direct work.

This work might be seen in how cultures are guided. For instance, Descartes was inspired by a set of dreams to reform all knowledge according to a rationalist project (ctrl-f "dreams" to find the reference in the preceding link). Where did those dreams come from? What effect did they have? It certainly pushed history forward. While Descartes himself seems to have been a believing Christian, his intellectual project led to a lot of atheism in the years that followed. I can see God and the evil beings both wanting to get something out of rationalism. Rationalism would then be a site for spiritual warfare, a contested ground. But suppose that rationalism favors evil more than good. Then Descartes' dreams may likely have been the product of an evil spirit, offering him a tempting vision, which he trusted.

How many great minds do not work from inspiration, and where does inspiration come from, except from spirits, good, bad, or (more or less) neutral? Certainly I would expect a materialist reader to think that there are things other than "spirits" at play. But from the MSLN point of view, whatever is, follows from somebody's conscious choice. So a flash of inspiration, if it ever doesn't completely seem like you, if it "comes to you", may well have been devised by some other being. Creative or scientific people are conduits or receptacles for spirit voices, in addition to being people who can create or discover in their own right. Spiritual influence can be a good thing -- it may be a way that God influences the culture. But it can also be a bad thing, or, probably more likely, a contested thing.

Evil beings can work through people who are diagnosed with mental illnesses, producing some or all of their hallucinations and moods. Psychiatric medicines would then block the power of evil beings -- the evil beings consenting to this, I suppose, with some consolation that that established way things are done may promote the view that all mental phenomena come from the nonspiritual world.

They can also work through people with personality disorders -- the "algorithms" that drive such people might really just be evil spirits who hijack them. Such hijacked people look like they are evil, but don't intend or even remember or realize what they are doing. They make themselves look like enemies when, sometimes, they are not. Or they only have a mild or moderate enmity, which is amplified by the spirits that use them. Evil beings like getting humans to hate each other. Probably they are involved in what goes on in politics. The great scandals are probably driven in part or in whole by evil beings.

Evil beings, when they work in people's minds, work within the psychological laws which people's thoughts follow and which can be measured in the brain. Within whatever extent people can express free will outside the skein of deterministic events, there can be the free-willed action of evil beings.

Evil beings can possess people, have them in their power for years on end. They don't necessarily use people all the time, nothing that obvious. But their victims' minds are held captive, and their victims suffer attacks, and themselves are the conduits for evil into other people's lives.

Evil beings can work with people symbiotically. People can have evil intentions which are aligned with the evil beings. If you have a sinful heart at what you think is a small scale, evil beings can work with that and amplify your effect in other people. Your sinfulness is a foothold, and evil beings do not want you to repent. They want you either to ignore your sinfulness, to call it something other than sin, or to lose hope that you can really repent. And you may not always favor what the evil beings want. You may go back and forth between having good intentions and bad, and this alternation allows you to do deeper work for the evil beings, higher on the hierarchy of betrayal.

Not only is your sinfulness something that can be something that is aligned with evil beings, but also your enmity with God (if seen as separate from your sinfulness). Both, your enmity with God in intention, and your enmity with God in fact.

While we may be impressed by suffering, insanity, confusion and the hatred we have for each other, the most destructive thing evil beings can do is turn us against God. They can do this directly, by tempting us or turning us way from anti-temptations. Or culturally -- when we are deceived by them, we spread the lie that opposes the belief that God is worthy of our obedience and trust, either by consciously opposing such a belief, or by adopting it but behaving in a way unworthy of that profession of faith. Evil beings try to shut up and discredit people who follow God and who try to proclaim God's glory and the need for God.

How widespread is this evil? Certainly there are obvious cases, but if the goal of the evil beings is partially to deceive, aren't quiet deceptions better than loud ones? So it may be that in subtle ways, we are being lied to, and don't realize it.

Evil beings can work on small scales or in coordinated actions on large scales. Leaders are especially targeted, because of their disproportionate effect on other people. Evil beings prefer to hide, at least in Western cultures.

It could be that all of the evil beings are unified. It is also possible that they have factions or political parties, or even schismatic movements. Evil beings may oppose each other, while still intending to oppose God. I'm not sure we would see evidence of this, but we might.

God can certainly interact with all beings just for being the mind through which all beings experience. But how can the evil beings get around to so many of us? One possibility is that just as human persons are created and brought into the world, so are evil beings. Maybe God creates them, under contract from the evil beings, or maybe they create their own. God is the original person, the original source of all personality, but evil beings may still be able to create on their own, out of the personality that originally came from him.

So there may be enough evil beings for all of us to be affected by their specific work.

Again, these are speculations, which can fit into the non-biblical parts of MSLN, but you can see how much you think your experiences bear them out.

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How could this connect to the Bible? In the Bible, sometimes "the devil" or "Satan" is referred to. The devil seems to be singular, as though there is one demigod that is parasitic on God. But there is also mention of multiple smaller demons. So there are plural evil beings in the Bible, just as in the non-biblical parts of MSLN discussed above.