Are You Splittin' Me?

The existence of evil is probably the most compelling argument against the existence of God. There are equally compelling arguments for why evil exists, but they offer little solace to the one suffering the evil. 

Being that evil exists, it is undoubtedly a possibility, the question being where to situate this possibility. And it is darn difficult to not locate the possibility in God, at least a God who is omnipotent and therefore presumably has the power to prevent evil. 

Of course, we have the impulse to protect God from this attribution, which reminds me a little of patients who were abused by a parent. More often than not, they internalize blame for the abuse in order to protect the parent from responsibility and maintain the ideal parental image.  

Back in ancient times, people would ditch a god who had done them dirty. There were plenty of other gods on offer, so if it looked like your god had switched jerseys, you just switched gods.

The ancient Israelites were the great exception to this rule, in that they (albeit gradually) made the decision to stick by YHVH come what may. This was partly due to the insight that there was only one God. There may have been subordinate "gods," but the revelation of the one God must have mirrored a psychic intuition of the principle of unity. 

Now, the intuition of this unity is clearly a psychological advance. In order to describe this, I have to put on my old and frayed psychology hat, but it has to do with one of the objective "vectors" of psychological maturity, which is the "healing" of psychological splitting. 

Splitting is a primitive psychological defense mechanism whereby the young child preserves the good by splitting it from the bad. 

A quintessential example was mentioned above, wherein the abused child preserves the goodness of the parent by splitting off the experience of abuse, which is then internalized as low self esteem. Low self esteem is maintained by a kind of internalized, ongoing psychic abuse of oneself. Happens all the time.

The healing of this primitive splitting is accompanied by an increasingly realistic assessment of reality. This is because the mind isn't as riven by its default setting to split experience into all good and all bad. 

There's another subtle point here, which goes to the "discovery" of history. For objective history can neither be discovered nor understood so long as splitting prevails in the psyche. 

Note, for example, how the woke regard America as uniquely bad, and poisoned by racism, sexism, transphobia, and all the rest. At the same time, they project into our side, as if we are in denial of evils such as slavery and racism.  

How might this apply to God? Well, it seems to me that if we're going to have a mature conception of God, we have to situate the possibility of evil -- not the reality, mind you -- in God. It's a challenge, but I think we can thread that needle. Think about Jesus, who is said to be sinless. But was it possible for the man Jesus to have sinned?

I don't know the official answer to that question, but it seems to me that if it weren't possible, then no merit would be attached to his avoidance of sin. And what is the whole temptation in the desert about if the outcome was preordained? What's the lesson for the restavus slobs?   

The question is, what is the ontological distinction between evil and its possibility? Is this just casuistic logic-chopping, or perhaps an immature attempt to protect the divine Father from any speck of imperfection, like the abused child discussed above?

This same basic question is implicitly present in Genesis, as in, who is the serpent, and how did he get into God's creation? If the creation is good, how does evil slither on stage? What is its principle? Every effect has a cause, so what is the cause of the serpent? It can't be serpents all the way up.

Some people say it all has to do with the principle of freedom. If man is to be free, then the possibility of the potential misuse of freedom must be baked into the cake. To say freedom is to say possibility and indeterminacy. However, if God is literally omnipotent, then this would seem to render indeterminacy a terrestrial illusion. 

The traditional view holds that God is "pure act," meaning without potency (AKA potential, change, movement, etc.). Well, if we're going to make sense of this, then something's gotta give, and I say all we have to do is tweak our conception of the Godhead just a little bit, so as to situate Possibility in God, and many philosophical problems are solved. 

Maybe you think these are First World Problems, or White People Problems, or another one of Bob's attempts to soph-medicate his metaphysical OCD. All I know is, it's a problem if I can't achieve Total Cosmic Integration because of some unresolved split in the fabric of being.  

More on the solution tomorrow.