WHY THE FANTASY OF AN EVIL INDIFFERENT GOD IS NECESSARY

Pain and boredom are our lot, and the world is dirt, nothing more

Welcome to the desert of the real!

If you desire the comfort of neat conclusions, you are lost in this space. Here, we indulge in the unsettling, the excessive, the paradoxes that define our existence.

So, if you have the means and value writing that both enriches and disturbs, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Dutch colonizers in the Far East (likely Indonesia) subjected a prisoner to a horrific form of water torture: they tied him to a tree and positioned a narrow tube that continuously poured water into his mouth. To breathe, he was forced to swallow the water. After two hours, the prisoner’s belly was grotesquely swollen, but he was not yet dead. The onlookers interpreted this prolonged survival as proof that he was evil—possessed by the devil, who had granted him unnatural strength to endure such torment. Instead of showing compassion for the tortured man, his unexpectedly prolonged survival in excruciating pain provoked hatred and rage. Is this truly something alien to our so-called enlightened times? Is something similar not happening now, at the beginning of 2025, in Gaza? The more Palestinians endure the genocidal violence of the IDF in Gaza, the more their survival is taken as evidence that they are all Hamas supporters. Meanwhile, their tormentors—led by war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu—fortify their status as warriors against terror.The genocidal actions of the IDF in Gaza confront us with the essence of what Markus Gabriel, a young philosopher and rising star in German philosophy, has described as our “dark times.” However, Gabriel identifies the greatest manifestation of this moral regression not in Gaza but in Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack:

"We are in the midst of a crisis of humanity on a global scale. The greatest manifestation of this setback is the barbaric massacre in Israel committed by the terrorist organization Hamas in Gaza."

Does this statement not demonstrate that Gabriel himself is complicit in perpetuating these “dark times”? His judgment reveals a glaring lack of moral universalism—a failure to apply consistent ethical standards to different events.We must uphold moral universalism, but as a concept that is both necessary and inherently fraught with tensions and contradictions. The first step toward this goal is to recognize that the perversion of what claims to be a universal value is not merely an external distortion but something intrinsic to that value itself. In other words, we must remain vigilant about the ambiguities inherent in any notion of progress. What we should avoid at all costs is a vague, commonsense universal progressivism—the idea that most people inherently know what is good and bad and that we simply need to push forward incrementally by expanding solidarity and compassion.Moral universalism need not be idealistic; it can also be framed outside Kantian transcendental apriorism as moral realism grounded in facts. Markus Gabriel adopts this position, arguing that universal moral principles are not contingent upon specific historical circumstances. For instance, if slavery is wrong today, it has always been wrong (though one might add: slavery has always been wrong when judged by today’s predominant standards). According to Gabriel, moral categories exist independently of human beings and should be evident to everyone—even under oppressive conditions. He asserts the objectivity of moral facts, their universality, and their essential knowability by humans—though he concedes that during “dark times” (such as ours), these truths can be obscured by ideology, propaganda, psychology, and manipulation.In this way, Gabriel aligns himself with Habermasian normative progressivism, which can be loosely defined by the premise that:

"Through large-scale cooperation between the humanities, social sciences, and even other fields of expertise if necessary, we are able to discover normative facts that are guiding for nonacademic sectors."

Philosophy thus becomes future-oriented rather than retrospective—as it was for Hegel’s owl of Minerva. But how exactly does Gabriel explain the arrival of these “dark times”? He provides no realist analysis; instead, he merely claims that universal values “can be obscured by ideology, propaganda, psychology and manipulation.” This assertion strikes me as profoundly naïve because it overlooks how ideology and manipulation are integral components of complex social processes that rely on them for reproduction.The same critique applies to Gabriel’s vision for overcoming these “dark times.” What needs to change is not merely the ideology sustaining our current system but the entire social structure itself. Can such a transformation realistically be initiated by philosophers and social theorists? Gabriel cites Germany as an example where politicians often seek advice from philosophers—but clearly, such advice has not prevented Germany from plunging into deep crises.Gabriel’s main argument for his moral realism hinges on a thought experiment called the “Day of Judgment”: he asks us to consider what our reaction would be if we were facing God’s judgment and God commended us for all the bad things we had done while condemning us for the good. We would find such a judgment incomprehensible. A god whose judgments bore no continuity with our own would not be God but a "terrible demon."