Bentham's Bulldog Argues For an Infinitely Evil God
(or an infinitely indifferent God)
Longtime friend of the blog
sure loves to talk about God. He has written dozens of posts all presenting reasons why he believes God exists. It’s genuinely impressive — if not slightly frightening — that this slender ‘stacker can pump out theodicies faster than a Texas refinery can pump gallons of luscious black oil. And these aren’t just low-grade slop, either. Each of his many thousands of words contains true substance that is challenging to understand, let alone argue against. Not that that will stop me from trying.For the purposes of this article, I’m going to assume that Matt, aka BB, aka Benthew Bulldogstein, is completely correct in every argument that he’s written about the existence of God. (Which I do not necessarily agree with, by the way. I don’t believe, for instance, that his beloved SIA applies to infinities greater than aleph-null. But we can set those reservations aside for now.) Let’s say that every reason he gives for believing in God is valid and true. It would still not logically follow that the God Bentham describes is a good God. His arguments could just as easily be inverted to prove the existence of an evil God or an indifferent God.
The Problem of Evil: Why Isn’t the World Evil Enough?
The Problem of Evil is one of the challenges to theism. It asks, “If there truly is an all-powerful God that wants the best for the world, then why do so many clearly evil things happen?” BB gives multiple arguments to explain this apparent contradiction. He claims that experiencing a diverse selection of worlds — including worlds involving great evils — could be the best preparation for an eternity in heaven. After all, how can you fully appreciate joy and abundance unless you’ve first experienced sadness and scarcity? He claims that it is only through the hardships of life that we can form our strongest interpersonal bonds, and these bonds may carry with us into heaven. He claims that, “Probably a rich and diverse array of experiences is maximally conducive to soul building. One’s character is more enriched by tons of different experiences than just one kind—and probably some of those would involve lots of suffering.” And above all, he claims that just because we cannot understand the meaning behind the suffering in our lives, that doesn’t mean it has no meaning. God might just be playing a game of 4D chess, where our temporary suffering is actually necessary in some way to produce much greater happiness down the line.
But let us assume that, rather than a benevolent God, there is a maximally evil God. This God wants to cause as much pain and suffering to as many beings as possible. Under this framework, it’s no surprise that there is evil in this world — indeed, it would be surprising if there wasn’t evil, considering that God wants us to suffer! The better question becomes: Why isn’t there more evil in the world? Why do we ever feel joy? Why do we ever have moments when we are not in constant agonizing pain? Since this is the opposite of the Problem of Evil, we might call this the Problem of Good.
Thankfully, Bentham’s arguments can help us answer this problem! Perhaps experiencing a diverse selection of worlds — including worlds involving great good — could be the best preparation for an eternity in hell. After all, how can you fully appreciate pains of deprivation until you know what you’re being deprived of? Being lonely is often far more difficult for somebody who just left a close relationship than it is for somebody who never had one, because the post-breakup person knows exactly what is missing. Maybe it is only through the trials of life that we can form our strongest interpersonal enmities, and these enmities may carry with us into hell. And perhaps “a rich and diverse array of experiences is maximally conducive” to soul destruction. It is often remarked how innocent babies are at the moment of birth, only for them to be corrupted by the various events of life. Maybe a combination of good and bad experiences is necessary to degrade your soul over time, until after a certain number of reincarnations, you are nothing but an empty husk of misery and anguish. And even if we don’t understand how our temporary joys contribute to the cause of eternal torment, that doesn’t mean they don’t. God may have devised plans of abuse and woe far surpassing even our darkest imaginations.
I should also note that if God is indifferent — i.e. doesn’t care about the morality of His creations — then neither the Problem of Evil nor the Problem of Good are really problems at all. Some things are evil because God couldn’t be bothered to make them not evil, and some things are good because God couldn’t be bothered to make them not good. Simple!
The Archons Are Too Lazy to be Evil
In what BB describes as his “favorite theodicy”, he describes a theory of “archon abandonment” to explain the Problem of Evil. According to this view, God tasked archons (“angel or demonlike creatures”) with making the world good, but these archons apparently decided they had better things to do. Instead of diligently transforming this planet into a paradise, they abandoned their duties, leaving us stuck in a wretched mess. According to BB, their laziness explains why the world is so indifferent to our welfare. Why would God allow negligent archons to enable to much suffering? Because God wants to promote authentic connection-building between archons and humans, and that can only come from the archons heroically succeeding against great odds. After all, who would you appreciate more: somebody who helped you only because they had to, or somebody who helped you of their own free will and at great personal sacrifice?
But here’s the thing: this argument is strangely ambivalent about the archons’ moral compass. They’re described as either too apathetic to fix our world or too cowardly to try, but what if they’re also not particularly invested in making it worse? If God tasked them with creating maximum evil, they might still have failed—simply because they didn’t care enough to go all in on the cosmic malevolence project. It’s hard work being a sadistic architect of misery, and the archons seem like the kind of bums who’d rather halfheartedly sprinkle in some evil here and there before clocking out early.
An evil God would allow this negligence because free will is necessary for authentic enmity-building. After all, who would you despise more: somebody who hurt you only because they had to, or somebody who tortured you of their own free will and at great personal sacrifice?
This would explain why our world, while undeniably full of suffering, isn’t nearly as bad as it could be. Even the most cynical among us have to admit that life contains some good: sunsets, music, the occasional existential high from a really good Substack article. These moments of joy don’t seem to fit neatly into a world governed by maximally evil archons. But if the archons are indifferent—or just plain lazy—they might let the occasional spark of happiness slip through because, frankly, it’s less effort to leave things as they are. Imagine a group of divine slackers sitting around, shrugging at the opportunity to turn hurricanes into megastorms or diseases into apocalyptic plagues. “This famine’s probably bad enough,” they’d say, cracking open celestial beers. “Let’s call it a day.”
(Once again, since the Indifferent God hypothesis easily answers the Problem of Evil, we really don’t need the Archon Abandonment Theodicy to explain anything. But I suppose we could also imagine an indifferent God creating archons anyway, just for the heck of it. Some archons are good, some are bad, some are just too lazy to do much of anything — and God doesn’t care, because He’s indifferent to our welfare.)
The Anthropic Argument for an Evil God
And now we get to BB’s greatest argument of all — the anthropic argument. This is probably his most complicated theodicy, and actually explaining it would take many thousands of words (words which BB has already written so I don’t have to, linked above). But here’s my sloppy summary: We start with something called the self-indication assumption (SIA), which posits that if you know you exist, a theory predicting your existence in many possible worlds is far likelier than a theory predicting your existence in only one world or a few worlds. Theism is a theory that predicts many possible worlds in which you could exist. Since God is infinitely good, God would create an infinite number of people to inhabit His kingdom (and not just any infinite, but an extremely large infinite of cardinality at least Beth 2). Therefore, if you believe in SIA (and BB thinks you should), then BB thinks you should also accept the existence of God.
Crucially, it doesn’t matter why God creates so many people, merely that He does. BB seems to think that God would create infinite people because of His benevolence:
[I]t’s good to create. This is pretty intuitive; we normally think that so long as I have a good life, filled with love, joy, and achievement, my parents did something good in creating me.
It’s true that a world with God alone has the single best thing, but it’s not the best possible world. A world with God and other good stuff is better than a world with God alone because it has more good stuff.
But what if the opposite is true? What if God creates as many people as possible because he wants the universe to be as evil as possible? A world with Evil God alone has the single worst thing, but it’s not the worst possible world. A world with Evil God and other bad stuff is worse than a world with Evil God alone because it has more bad stuff. So, Evil God will create an infinite number of conscious beings, all destined for eternal torment!
Alternatively, maybe God doesn’t value happiness or suffering, but creates infinite people anyway. Like a 5-year-old obsessively stacking Legos, He doesn’t really have a reason to create, but He nonetheless has a compulsion. God wants to produce as many people as possible, and does not care whether those people live great lives, horrible lives, or something in between.
As long as God creates infinite people (specifically, an infinity of cardinality at least Beth 2), the anthropic argument holds. It doesn’t matter whether those people are made for a good reason, an evil reason, or no reason at all. So, it’s just as likely that the anthropic argument points to an infinitely evil God, or an infinitely indifferent God, rather than an infinitely good God.
I could probably continue going through BB’s archive, and continue inverting his arguments to make my case for an evil or indifferent God, but hopefully you get my point by now. Even if some God exists, we have no way to understand the nature of that God. It would be wrong to automatically assume that God is infinitely good, no matter how much we might want that to be true.
(Hopefully this goes without saying, but please do not take anything in this post to be an insult toward the wonderful BB. If I have misrepresented his ideas in any way, then I am sorry.)
Nice post!
I think the problem for an evil God is several-fold. First of all, believing in an evil God is self-defeating--an evil God would want to deceive you, so you have no reason to trust your cognitive faculties that told you God is evil. Second, I find it pretty plausible that an evil God would just make a torture world--that seems more obvious than that a good God would make a bliss world. Third--and I think this is biggest problem that just applies to an indifferent God--why would a being want to maximize evil? You could imagine a celestial deity of limited power wanting to maximize anything: tomatoes, corn, bricks, and so on. It's highly unlikely that such a being would want to maximize evil.
Now you might wonder: how does a good God avoid this? I discuss this in more detail here https://benthams.substack.com/p/god-may-be-maximally-simple but the short answer is that God is conceived of as being simply a mind without limit. But if he has no limits then he knows all the moral facts. If one knows all the moral facts and has no rational inhibitions or contrary desires, by default they'll want to pursue the good (at least plausibly). This is why by default people would rather experience their own pleasure rather than pain. Therefore, it's not arbitrary for a God to care about good, but it is arbitrary for them to care about evil.
Fourth, I think an evil God is an intrinsically weird and improbable way for the world to be. I mean, being maximally evil, it would want to maximally hurt itself. That's an improbable sort of entity.
Regarding an indifferent God, same basic third point: whatever it is maximizing will be improbable and arbitrary. In addition, an indifferent good could want to maximize any of a nearly infinite range of things, so it's unlikely that its aims would involve creating infinite humans, fine-tuning, psychophysical harmony, and so on.
Someone more philosophically competent than myself could probably phrase this better, but I think ceteris paribus, if one is a theist, then one should believe in a perfectly good God over a perfectly evil God because of Occam's Razor; I.e. good is more metaphysically simple than evil.
If one looks at it in an Aristotelian sense of things having a final cause, then in a sense "evil" is "corruption-of-thing" but "good" is "thing-in-itself"
I don't think anyone should believe in an arbitrary/indifferent God because the facts of the universe we would anticipate under such a being would be identical to simple naturalism(and therefore one should prefer atheism because atheism is metaphysically simpler than an all-powerful but perfectly arbitrary God)