Does the problem of evil disprove the existence of God?

The problem of evil challenges the idea of an all-powerful and benevolent God. Philosophers argue that suffering may serve deeper metaphysical or moral purposes.

Is morality possible without God?

Some philosophers argue that morality arises from reason and human flourishing, while others believe it ultimately requires a transcendent foundation.

Can reason prove the existence of God?

Classical philosophers proposed arguments such as the cosmological and moral arguments to support belief in God, though critics debate whether these provide proof or philosophical justification.

The Self: Fiction or Project? | The Illusion of Choice?

Dennett: Let me place my central thesis squarely on the table. The self is a centre of narrative gravity. Just as a physical object has a centre of gravity — a useful abstraction, not a thing you can point to — the self is an abstraction generated by the stories we tell about ourselves and that others tell about us. The brain produces these narratives automatically, weaving together memory, anticipation, sensation, and social feedback into a coherent protagonist. This protagonist is real in the way that Sherlock Holmes is real — it has genuine properties, it genuinely acts, but it is not a further thing lurking behind the brain.

Sartre: The analogy with Sherlock Holmes is illuminating — and damning. Holmes is a character. He does not choose. He does not anguish. He does not face himself in moments of genuine moral uncertainty and feel the weight of his freedom. If the self is a narrative fiction, then no one is truly responsible for anything — because fictions do not bear responsibility. You want to preserve responsibility without preserving the subject who bears it. I do not see how this is coherent. Responsibility requires a real agent — not a centre of gravity, not a protagonist in a story, but a being that genuinely confronts its own existence and chooses.

Dennett: Holmes does not choose because he is written by someone else. The self I describe writes its own story — or rather, is the process of writing it. The narrative is not imposed from outside; it is generated from within, by a brain shaped by evolution, experience, and culture, but not determined in its specific outputs by any of these factors. The fact that this process is physical does not make it less genuine. When you write, your hand moves. The hand is atoms. But the writing is yours. The self's narrative authorship is no different.

Sartre: But I ask: who is the author of the narrative? You say the brain. I say: I am. And the difference between "the brain" and "I" is not merely verbal. The brain is a thing — an en-soi, a being-in-itself, opaque to itself, identical with what it is. Consciousness — the pour-soi — is the being that is never identical with what it is, that always stands at a distance from itself, that perpetually transcends its facticity. The for-itself is always ahead of itself, always projecting toward possibilities that do not yet exist. This is not a narrative. It is the ontological structure of freedom itself. You cannot capture it in third-person terms because it is constitutively first-personal.

Dennett: I hear in your account something I find genuinely important — the idea that the human being is not exhausted by what it currently is, that it is essentially oriented toward what it might become. I accept this. What I reject is the metaphysical framework you build around it. You posit a special kind of being — the pour-soi — that operates by different rules than the physical world. I do not need this posit. An agent whose deliberations are genuinely sensitive to reasons, whose future behaviour is not fully predictable from its current state, who is oriented toward projects and possibilities — this is the kind of thing evolution can produce. It does not require a ghost.

Sartre: I do not posit a ghost. I describe what is given in experience. To be conscious is to experience a gap between what one is and what one is not yet. This gap — this nothingness at the heart of human being — is not a ghost. It is the most familiar thing in the world. It is why you can wonder, deliberate, regret, hope. A brain that merely processes cannot wonder. A for-itself that is constitutively ahead of itself cannot avoid wondering. The difference is not metaphysical decoration. It is the difference between a thermostat and a human being.