Notes from Evil Bender

Not that I’m really surprised that fools who blather on about ID don’t really know the science or math they claim to know–I’ve come to expect that. So why was I momentarily surprised by this blathering idiocy from Sal Cordova? Perhaps because having him tread on my territory–literature–caught me a little off-guard. Never fear, dear reader: I quickly overcame my initial surprise and can now turn my full attention to mocking Cordova for an argument that manages to butcher literature as badly as it does morality and reason.

Says Sal:

Would we expect a great screen writer or a great novelist to write a work where there were no problems or villains? Would we expect a composer to write great works of musice[sic] with no dissonance. If he doesn’t, one will be stuck with a monotoned sine-wave. Not very beautiful or compelling.

First of all, this is absolutely irrelevant to his point. The analogy is just stupid. We do like tension in novels, but that doesn’t mean we want it in our lives. We’d not watch a play with no conflict, but all things being equal, we’d surely prefer to avoid that same conflict at work. But even if that weren’t true, Cordova has put his staggering ignorance about fiction on display. He starts by conflating problems with villains. The first is a necessity of storytelling. The second is most certainly not.

To take an obvious–and beautiful–example, Slaughterhouse Five does not have a villain or antagonist, but it has plenty of problems–lots of beautiful moral tension.* Fiction doesn’t need villains, though perhaps Cordova does.

But all this is secondary to the terrible argument for the existence of God that old Sal wishes to make. Because if that’s a bad argument applied to lit, it’s downright terrible when applied to the Problem of Evil. Sal blathers,

Thus if we would expect a great novelist on the Earth to create a world full of villains, winners and losers, is it not reasonable to think the Great Novelist in the Sky to do the same. It is possible he would create a world, a story line where there are heroes and villains. A world without such drama is like Star Wars without Darth Vader.

Sorry, Sal, but I’m not going to let you ruin Star Wars** too. Star Wars is fun storytelling, but it’s also storytelling without God. We like the tension because we’re not sure how the Good Guys can manage to take down the Evil Empire. If Obi Wan had the ability to stop Vadar with a wave of his hand (“this isn’t the Universe you’re looking for”) and didn’t do so, we’d rightly feel there was no tension, only assholes on both sides. Tension works because we’re not sure how it works out, because we want to see the good guys win, but aren’t sure they will.  When God comes along, being supposedly all-powerful and all-good, and lets the Empire keep destroying planets, or lets malaria and floods continue killing those who could otherwise live, that’s not good fiction, and it’s certainly inconsistent with Sal’s favorite fictional character–his twisted little version of God.

It seems a rather strange property of reality that great good and beauty are realized with the possibility of evil and loss. We may not like it, but it seems that like the laws of thermodynamics dictate, things must come at a cost, and everything of any worth must come at a great price.

Which might explain the problem of human evil, but doesn’t explain why most fertilized embryos are never born, despite supposedly being human souls. Nor does it explain why tsunamis hit, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, AIDs or Down Syndrome. The problem of natural evil cannot be explained by appeals to human decency, free will, or Sal’s idea of what a novel should be.

The present universal state may only be the early chapters in the greatest story ever told. The present futility and misery might possibly make sense only in light of how the story ends. Perhaps the present distress is only a chapter in the work of Great Novelist in the Sky, we are only in the middle of the evolution of Shrodinger’s Universal Wave Function, we’re not in the final state — the present distress is is not the whole story by any means. The Great Novelist in the Sky may have more to offer than meets the eye….

Too bad for Sal’s analogy, then, that we get to finish reading the novel, but we don’t get to see God’s big twist that makes the deaths of us and all our loved ones worth it. Starving children don’t get to see the great ending Sal thinks is on the way. And don’t claim an afterlife makes it worthwhile: Sal believes in good old fashioned Hell, after all, which hardly seems an ending which will justify all that suffering.

It may actually stand to reason, that trouble was ordained and premeditated for this universe, that perhaps it was planned from the foundation of the world that even innocent lambs would be slain…

When Sal says “stand to reason” he means “be the product of a tortured false analogy that relies on illogic and horrific conceptions of morality.” And yet Sal seems so damn pleased with the ease that he dispatched unbelievers’ arguments. Almost as pleased as he is in the thought that he’s obviously so much smarter than people with actual expertise.

And while I’m on the subject, I have to ask. Sal, please, please learn what ellipses are for.

*Something Cordova would likely never ascribe to an unbeliever, at least without trying that to “God placed in there,” as his God-of-the-Gaps generally does.

**If only I could stop George Lucas from doing so (rimshot).