Evil can be read as proof rather than disproof of God’s existence

Evidence

The final section of the novel, ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’ (that transfiguration of pop cultural reference into epigraph being one of Peace’s signature techniques), explicitly posits the idea that, far from undermining the existence of God, evil and suffering entail that God must exist. Eclipse implies something that is eclipsed, a hidden source of light that produces all this shadow. In the philosophy of religion, the problem of evil maintains that suffering, particularly suffering visited upon the innocent, means that the theistic God could not exist, since a benevolent, omnipotent and omniscient being would not countenance undeserved suffering. With his inventory of wretched child abuse cases, Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov makes the most famous, and most passionate, statement of this position. Yet if there is no God, the suffering remains, only now there is no possibility of its expiation; if there can be no justice to come, the universe is permanently blighted, irrevocably scarred by atrocity, abuse and torture. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 185

Categorization

• SEED: The eclipse argument as an inversion of the problem of evil is a striking contrarian-essay or philosophical-theology angle in itself.
• XREF: connects to: Structural corruption in Peace’s Yorkshire is a Gnostic reality beyond illumination — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 182; Atheism may leave no possibility of expiating suffering — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 185