Another Steve Donoghue Q&A. The whole thing is worth watching (part 1, part 2, part 3). But for the purposes of my blog, I'll just talk about my question.
I was confused by The Brothers Karamazov. I know Dostoevsky was very religious, so I expected the religious arguments would win out. But then I was confused when the skeptic Ivan made a number of strong arguments against God that were never refuted. What was Dostoevsky trying to do?
Steve answers my question on Part 3 at 18:42:
As I mentioned in my review of The Brothers Karamazov, my own research into this turned out a lot of competing theories. Among them:
* Dostoevsky didn't want to bias his book in favor of his own personal beliefs, so he deliberately avoided making a strawman of the atheist argument. Thus, we see the full force of Ivan's argument, because that's what Dostoevsky wanted
* Because this book was originally published in serialized form, Dostoevsky intended to to later rebut the atheist case in later chapters, but when he got to the later chapters, he found he didn't have any good rebuttals.
* The Grand Inquisitor section is meant to be ironic. That is, the Grand Inquisitor section isn't meant to be an indictment of the problem of free will, it's meant to be an indictment of the kind of ideologue who thinks that the problem with humanity is too much free will.
* Ivan, the skeptic, may win the intellectual argument against God, but Alyosha, the Christian, has the more admirable lifestyle. So the pro-Christian argument is meant to be made by appealing to the character of the Christian life.
* Ivan's conclusion, that without God everything is permissible, is meant to appear to the reader to be self-evidently false.
...so those appear to be the options. (Did I miss anything?) But which one of these is it?
P.S.
Steve also has a whole video on The Brothers Karamazov. (I watched this first before submitting my question to make sure he hadn't already answered it.) It's worth watching.
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