Three Links

On unrelated matters

§1: Brad Blue has written a précis of my argument regarding the eschatological ‘moral modal collapse’ of the difference between God’s antecedent and consequent willing, as laid out in the first meditation in That All Shall Be Saved. It is a service he has provided for those who prefer the propositional form of argument favored in analytic philosophy. He may be correct in believing that this is a better way to present the argument for certain kinds of readers; certainly none of the writers who have tried to refute it or criticize it has shown any sign of understanding it, for which I suppose I must peevishly take some of the blame. Then, too, many have simply failed to engage it altogether and attacked some argument that was not mine to begin with. I want to think this is because they had no answer, but it might also be because they had no inkling. Again, I can shoulder some of the responsibility. But, to be fair, readers from every walk of life who were not predisposed to hate what I was saying have frequently had no difficulty following its logic. Anyway, I give here my official nihil obstat to Blue’s version, as well perhaps as a cautious imprimatur.

Here is his first paragraph:

In the First Meditation of That All Shall Be Saved, David Bentley Hart presents the primary argument of the book, his “moral modal” argument for universal salvation. It purports to prove that the traditional concept of Hell is logically incompatible with classical theism. It is surprising, then, that the argument has been largely ignored by the book’s critics. Benjamin Guyer, Edward Feser, Denys Kondyuk, Joshua R. Brotherton, and Taylor Patrick O’Neill neglect it entirely; Alan Gomes, Benjamin DeVan, and James Dominic Rooney mention it in passing but give no response; and Michael McClymond and Douglas Farrow make an inadequate criticism based on a cursory reading. Even Mats Wahlberg, who spends several pages quoting and paraphrasing parts of the First Meditation, does not actually engage with it. Thus, despite the attention the book has received, its primary argument remains unanswered.

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§2: You might like Alex Skopic’s long article in Current Affairs on the use and abuse of J. R. R. Tolkien by the most insidious of certain figures on the far right, especially those of the post-democratic and transhumanist kind, including the terrifically blood-chilling Peter Thiel, the grandiosely moronic Curtis Yarvin, and the boundlessly evil J. D. Vance. I am not a Tolkien fanatic, though I have very fond boyhood memories of Middle Earth, but I feel a genuine moral need to defend him against the cruel misuse of his fiction in support of a political, social, technocratic, capitalist, and racialist vision that would have been utterly abhorrent to him.

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§3: Whether you like the Daily Kos or not, this is an article everyone should read. It is just another glimpse into this country’s current policy of abducting, disappearing, torturing, and imprisoning innocent individuals who have made the error of being Latino within the vicinity of ICE’s secret police.