The "Readings" section of this month's Harper's magazine features an excerpt from 'Divine evil', a posthumous article by David Lewis, prepared from the Nachlass by Philip Kitcher. Kitcher has done a fine job of rendering Lewis's familiar prose style.
The central premiss of the argument is that -- since he damns the insubordinate to eternal torture -- the god of Christianity is far more evil than any earthly dictator. Worshiping such a god is thus far more evil than admiring, say, Hitler. Unfortunately, those who admire certain Christians, when admirable -- eg Mother Theresa -- also acquire a bit of evil vicariously; and so on. "Leaving aside those who find nothing admirable in humanity, everyone will be tainted with divine evil".
The conclusion manifests a dark streak in late papers by Lewis present also in the posthumous 'How many lives has Schroedinger's cat?' The depressing conclusion of that paper is that -- if quantum mechanics is correct in its fundamentals -- each of us is rationally bound to expect an eternal (earthly) life of extreme torment (without the assistance of the Christian god!).
More brightly, the back page "Findings" section (in which often speculative scholarly theses are juxtaposed, tersely and amusingly presented as fact) ends on a cheerfully Ludovician note: "All possible universes exist".
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