All of us get a little disconcerted when we discover that someone we like turns out to be an admirer of some public figure whom we think is awful. For example, take those well-known authoritarian rulers who unleashed immense cruelty on their own and other peoples, subjecting them to arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and death. Hitler, Stalin, Suharto, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, and Duvalier are among the many names that come to mind. Most people do not admire these tyrants and do not hesitate to label them as evil. But what would your attitude be towards someone who admires the very people whose actions you unhesitatingly condemn as beyond the pale? Even if that person was thoroughly admirable in other ways and would not personally even dream of doing the things that these despots did, would you still respect her? Or would you think her to be evil the way you think the people that she admires are evil? We can even pose the question about a person even one step further removed. Would you think of as evil someone who admires someone who admires those evil despots? The reason I pose these questions is because they form the basis of an interesting argument against religion that appeared in the December 2007 issue of Harper's magazine (p. 28). It is titled Another Argument Against God and is authored by David Lewis and Philip Kitcher, based on the chapter Divine Evil by Lewis that appeared in the book Philosophers Without Gods (2007). Lewis and Kitc ...
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