Supporting the UFC is Immoral - Especially for Christians

Supporting an organization like the UFC that encourages people to beat, bloody and knock each other out for profit and entertainment is, though tempting, neither ethical nor Christian. Can you honestly imagine Jesus having a front-row seat to a UFC fight getting rowdy and encouraging a bearer of the imago dei to beat up another bearer of the imago dei? I cannot.

Christians with an inclination towards satisfying their violent urges in this manner would do well to read Augustine's recollection of the story of his student and friend, Alypius, recounted in book 6 of his famous Confessions. Christians are supposed to be in the world but not of the world. Do not degrade yourself with such folly. Remember who you are: a divine breath created out of the effulgence of the Supreme Mind, placed in a vale of soul-making in order to become the greatest possible type of created entity: a freely and unconditionally loving alter Christus.

https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/110106.htm (ch. 7)

Hugh Hefner: A Poster Child of a Wasted Life

No one seems to talk about Hugh Hefner anymore. He has been dead for almost five years and has now been forgotten. His case is instructive because it shows the folly of pursuing worldly vanities. He has now been forgotten. What remains is only his legacy. And what is his "great" legacy, pray tell? Being the first guy in America to put nude women pictures on the covers of magazines? trying to sleep with as many women as possible? That's pathetic. History is littered with men who lived for no higher calling then finding their way inside beautiful women. That's nothing special.

Moreover, Hugh didn't make the world a better place. If you just respond by saying, "why do you care? He lived his life having fun. That's all that matters." I don't have a problem with "having fun" -- within moderation and reason -- but you should have fun whilst making the world a better place. And as far as I can see, Hugh didn't make the world a better place for his fellow sentient creatures. Much is expected to whom much is given. He was given much in life in the form of wealth, but squandered it on merely selfish pursuits. As such he represents a life that a twenty-first century man ought not to emulate. Instead, the twenty-first century man ought to emulate people like Jesus, Maximillian Kolbe, Jack Lalanne, and Martin Luther King. All such men lived admirable lives and actually contributed to making the world a better place in their own ways. But, regrettably, the story of Hugh is unlike theirs. His story is similar to the story of many who lived lives of inward-directed luxury in their earthly Sojourns. There is, then, some wisdom in Jesus of Nazareth's proclamation that it is harder for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven than it is for a camel to enter the eye of a needle. For much is expected to whom much is given.

In closing, I commend to you all this opinion piece penned by the New York Times Columnist, Ross Douthat, shortly after Hugh passed on to purgatory. (I unreservedly say he passed on to purgation because I am, after all, a universalist, and believe in the final redemption of all sentient beings -- even of the devil and his angels (if such there be)).

The Trinity is Contradictory

So I have been debating a Christian philosopher-friend on the metaphysical possibility of the Trinity recently, and it has helped me clarify my thoughts here. I'm thinking that the only way to remotely parry the claim that it is metaphysically impossible is by appealing to something like trope theory. I tend to think such a solution doesn't work, but I have to think about it more. In any case, it seems like the Trinitarian is forced to appeal to trope theory, or at least forced to reify the the deity of the persons into a particular. I don't see how a Platonist, for example, can get out of the conundrum here. I'll explain and then welcome your thoughts on this.

Here's a basic Fitch-style deduction I made in LaTeX. It represents the translation of the standard Trinitarian septad we are all familiar with, along with a proof that it is contradictory. Now, my contention is that at least the translations of (2) - (7) are unassailable. Let's start with (5) - (7). They can be proved by Leibniz's law and other Trinitarian propositions like "the Son is begotten" but "the Father is not begotten," etc. Unless one is going to absurdly say that absolute identity is unintelligible a la Geach, then one has to take (5) - (7) to be true expressions of the Trinitarian dogma.

So how about (2) - (4)? Well, that's just the standard way to translate predicative statements like "Joe is human." Creedal statements seem to make it clear to me that the "is" here is an "is of predication." The "is" here can't be the "is" of numerical identity because then we can easily derive "the Father is begotten of the Father" and get a contradiction. Besides, however you want to cash out properties, of course each person has the property of <being God>. Even the relative identity theorist -- I believe both strong and weak theorists -- have to agree that (2) - (4) are faithful expressions of the Trinity. The relative identity theorist affirms propositions like "f is the same G as s," and this implies Gf and Gs. After all, "x is the same F as y" is true only if Fx and Fy. So I honestly don't see how a Trinitarian can reasonably object to the translations of (2) - (4).

So that brings us to (1). In my humble opinion, the Trinitarian *has* to challenge this translation. But this is a completely standard way of translating "there is only one F." If I wanted to translate "there is only one human" into first-order predicate logic, I would just replace the 'G' with a 'H', for example. If I wanted to translate "there is only one turtle," I would just replace the 'G' with a 'T.' It seems like the most natural translation. Be that as it may, I'm thinking that perhaps the Trinitarian can say that "there is only one God" can be translated as "there is only one divine nature" here. One could say that instead of my translation, of "There is only one thing that is G," (1) should be translated as "there is only one divine nature." On Platonism, this would just mean that there is only one property of <being God>. But this wouldn't be a correct translation. There's also one human nature on Platonism. There is only one property <being human>. But saying that "there is only one human" means that "there is only one property <being human>" is clearly a mistranslation. When we ask "how many Fs are there?" we are asking how many things instantiate F-ness, not how many properties of <being F> there are. There's obviously only one such property. So this translation, while avoiding a contradiction, is clearly a mistranslation on Platonism. But what about on nominalism? Well, nominalism will run across the same mistranslation problem as Platonism here *unless* deity or Godness is reified as a particular. And if it is reified as a particular, then we are talking about something like trope theory. On such a Trinitarian trope theory, the Father's Godness is a trope which is numerically identical with the Son's Godness, which is numerically identical with the Holy Spirit's Godness. (I believe Leftow holds to something like this.) And since a trope is just a proper part of a primary substance, the Godness trope is a proper part of each of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. (For those who believe in Divine Simplicity, this will not be an acceptable solution.) I'm not sure this solution is metaphysically possible, but it seems like the best and, quite frankly, the only remotely plausible solution to me -- but of course this may just be because the contradiction has been obfuscated by an appeal to strange metaphysics. 

 

 

 

 

 

The Decline of America And the Need for Saints

A deep darkness is descending over the United States. We are going to need saints and heroes to courageously stand up to the malevolence that is spreading - we're going to need people much better than my weak self. I'm not a Christian, but I lament that the light of Christ is dimming precipitously in the States.

The family, the root of a healthy society, is under attack. The absurdity that is gay marriage has been codified into law. Divorce rates have rocketed above fifty percent. Tens of millions of our young people are under the sway of violent and filthy rap and hip hop music. We have reverted back to pagan gladiatorial games (e.g. UFC) where people bloody and bash each others' heads for money, fame, and the captivation of a depraved audience. Hormones are being pumped into sex-confused kids in what can only be described as a futile and diabolical rebellion against nature and reality. People are being harassed, mocked and attacked for not insanely referring to singular individuals with "they/them" pronouns. Academics moving against the current can no longer speak freely without significant reprisal. Grifters have largely succeeded in reinvigorating once-dormant racial tensions. Demonization of the other side is now the modus operandi of politicians on both sides. Our mainstream news outlets have been generally exposed as unreliable propaganda outlets at best, and state pravda at worst. The state's tentacles are intruding into spheres once thought by Americans to be sacred and one's own. Mental illness and suicidal idealization have probably reached rates never before seen in America's history. It seems like every week some mentally disturbed individual shoots up random people at a local church, store, or school. We are in the midst of an opiod epidemic; and one state has already legalized meth and cocaine use - a moral monstrosity which would have been unthinkable even a few years ago. The gap between the rich and the poor is growing larger, with our wealthiest obscenely worth in the hundreds of billions. The authoritarian and orwellian Chinese wolf is prowling ever closer and may well overtake us as the world's superpower soon. Inflation is out of control...The list goes on.

But the biggest problem of all facing America -- the root problem, if you will -- is the same one that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's elders spoke of as the reason for Russia's twentieth-century calamities: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” [1] We Americans have forgotten God. We as a nation have lost the sense of the transcendent, and have devolved into a sensuous people bereft of a grander compass with which to steer our lives.

It is in such times of ever encroaching evil that we need saints, bodhisattvas and alter Christuses to emerge from the shards of a nation in its death throes, not only to help cure the ails of the present order, but to rekindle in the American heart the sense of a divine transcendence, a divine transcendence which alone can infuse our lives with meaning and purpose. I do not, or rather, try not, to despair because I believe in this transcendent Logos. So I can rationally hope, along with Tolkien, that "From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall  spring."

 

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[1] Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. “Men Have Forgotten God" (Speech, 1983), National Review. https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-men-have-forgotten-god-speech/. The following words are particularly powerful: "More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

[2] The above image is taken from https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/origin-174.jpg?w=640, and I claim no rights to the image; it is copyrighted to its owner.

William Lane Craig, Christian Apologists, and Reasonable Unbelief

 

In this article, the Christian philosopher and apologist, William Lane Craig, responds to a question on the fate of those who reject Christ. Craig implies that there is no reasonable unbelief in Christ, at least for those to whom the Gospel has been accurately presented. He states the following:

Wholly apart from the question of whether they ignored apologetic evidence for Christianity, what you need to keep in mind is that, even more fundamentally, they suppressed the witness of the Holy Spirit to them that the Gospel is true. They repudiated God Himself and His testimony to them of the truth of Jesus’ teaching. They have thus separated themselves from God...He did: the witness of the Holy Spirit to the truth of the Gospel. “Many of these people came from Christian backgrounds yet chose not to follow it because the evidence they had didn’t convince them [this is the questioner being quoted].” No, they chose not to follow it because they resisted the Holy Spirit (wholly apart from whether they resisted the apologetic evidence).

Quite frankly, I see this as evidence of how religion can corrupt the mind of even great intellects. Craig has a luminary intellect, but he has, regrettably, deluded himself by orthodox Christianity and its concomitant proclivity towards tribalism. So deeply has he deluded himself that he presumes to psychoanalyze every unbeliever who rejects the Gospel and its evidences (when correctly presented). It seems like Craig is still spiritually immature, and has failed to transcend religious tribalism. By my lights, it is incredible to claim that there is no reasonable nonbelief in Christianity for people sufficiently well apprised of its doctrines and evidences. There are a whole host of things taught by Christianity that can be reasonably assailed by the nonbeliever, and used in a cumulative case against Christianity. Are we really to believe that sufficiently well-informed people cannot have reasonable grounds for being at least agnostic about -- not even outright rejecting -- the Trinity, the Incarnation, the multiple miracles littered throughout the Bible (written at least decades or hundreds of years after the purported events), the genealogies of Genesis (which imply that humans are only a few thousand years old, contradicting the results of modern science), the atrocities in the Old Testament, the fiction in the Old Testament (like angels having sex with humans), the doctrine of eternal hell, etc? Is it really unreasonable to believe, along with such encyclopedically erudite historical Jesus historians as Dale Allison and Wolfhart Pannenberg, that there is substantial evidence Jesus falsely predicted the end of the world would occur in the lifetime of his disciples? Are we really to believe that people like Antony Flew, Quentin Smith, J.L Mackie, William Rowe, Felipe Leon, Bill Vallicella, al-Ghazali, etc., have all suppressed the truth of Christianity in unrighteousness? No -- this is not probable in the slightest. Christian apologists, even ones with three letters after their names, need to start start understanding that there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their religion. Life is not black and white. The same evidence can be perceived as having different force by two people who occupy reasonably similar epistemic positions. To acknowledge this is simply to acknowledge the real world which we inhabit. Very epistemically well-positioned theistic philosophers of religion disagree on the force of various arguments for the existence of God all the time, and presumably not out of ill will. Why can't many Christian apologists extend the same grace to nonbelievers? The answer lies in the fact that they lack the requisite intellectual humility to do so. They are human, all to human. And their religious tribalism sometimes gets the better of their reason. This is what I believe is happening with Christian apologists who say stuff like the above.

The Sons of God in Genesis 6: Angels or the Sons of Seth?

The following is a draft post that I wrote a while ago on the issue of whether the Sons of God in Genesis 6 are angels or just the male descendants of Seth. Some of the arguments are in inchoate form and can be expanded. But I believe that what is written here is sufficient to show that the Sons of God are in fact angels.

Did you know that the Bible teaches that angels were so enamored with the beauty of human women that they came down from their heavenly abodes and had sexual relations with them, producing a race of nephilim, or giants? Many people, including many Christians, don't actually know that the Bible teaches this. The natural reaction of the modern Christian layman is that nothing so repugnant to the intellect, and so reminiscent of Greek mythology, could ever be in God's word. But it is in the Bible, and there is no way of getting around this fact. In fact, not only is this taught in the Hebrew Bible, but that it is taught in the Bible is the majority opinion of scholars specializing in Genesis and the ancient Near East. In what follows, I will argue, or rather summarize, many of the reasons for holding to the majority opinion. After establishing this, I leave it to the reader to decide whether to bite the bullet and accept this biblical mythology as fact, or whether to judge that this is too far-fetched, and that the Bible is simply profoundly wrong here.  

The Biblical verse in question comes from the Book of Genesis, one of the world's most controversial texts. The full verse is as follows: 

Genesis 6:1-4 (ESV): When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, 2the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. 3Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not abide in^a man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.” 4The Nephilim^b were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.

The term "sons of God," or the bene elohim in Hebrew, does in fact refer to angelic entities. Let's look at the evidence. First, in the Masoretic Text (MSS), the term bene elohim and its minor variants is only found in about six or so different verses of the Old Testament, and in each of the verses, the term clearly and unambiguously refers to angels (or, at the very least, supernatural entities). I list the verses below: 

Job 1:6 (ESV): Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them.

Job 2.1 (ESV): Again there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them to present himself before the LORD.

Job 38:7 (ESV): when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Psalm 29:1 (ESV): Ascribe to the LORD, O heavenly beings, ascribe to the LORD glory and strength.


Psalm 89:7 (ESV): a God greatly to be feared in the council of the holy ones, and awesome above all who are around him?


Daniel 3:25-28 (ESV): He answered and said, “But I see four men unbound, walking in the midst of the fire, and they are not hurt; and the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods.” Then Nebuchadnezzar came near to the door of the burning fiery furnace; he declared, “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, servants of the Most High God, come out, and come here!” Then Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego came out from the fire. And the satraps, the prefects, the governors, and the king’s counselors gathered together and saw that the fire had not had any power over the bodies of those men. The hair of their heads was not singed, their cloaks were not harmed, and no smell of fire had come upon them. Nebuchadnezzar answered and said, “Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who has sent his angel and delivered his servants, who trusted in him, and set aside the king’s command, and yielded up their bodies rather than serve and worship any god except their own God. 

In each of these passages, it is clear that the bene elohim, or a mild variant thereof, refers to either minor gods or angels, members of God's heavenly council (for the purposes of this blog post, I will will set aside discussion of whether minor gods exist and are distinct from angels in God's heavenly council). In Job, they are members of God's heavenly council who present themselves, alongside the adversary, i.e., satan, to God. Likewise in the Psalms, these are unanimously taken by scholars to be references to members of God's heavenly council. In the passage on Daniel the fourth person in the fire, identified as "one like a son of God" in 3:25, is explicitly identified as an angel sent by God in 3:28. (Note that the above Daniel passage is one of the very few Biblical passages that is originally in Aramaic). Moving from the Masoretic text to the Septuagint (LXX), the evidence is even more overwhelming. The LXX translates Genesis 6:2 and 6:4 as "the sons of God," and "the angels of God, (άγγελοι του θεού)" respectively. In other words, the LXX uses the normal Greek word for angels in Genesis 6:4. Moreover, the LXX explicitly renders the Job passages and Daniel 3:25 using the Greek word άγγελοι (angels), the same one it uses in Genesis 6:4. It is important to underscore the strength of the above evidence, for it shows that both prior to and after Genesis was written, the sons of God were taken to be angels. This is because the book of Job, the oldest book in the Bible, predates Genesis, whereas Daniel and the aforementioned Pslams likely post-date it. Given all of this, the intratextual linguistic evidence must be regarded as being very strongly in favor of the angelic interpretation. 

In addition to the above Biblical evidence, the earliest extra-biblical reference to Genesis 6:1-4, the apocrphyal 1 Enoch, a second-temple text dated to the third or second century B.C.E., clearly identifies the bene elohim as angels, and expands on what is found in these few verses, building a robust midrashic narrative from it. Here is a link to the whole of 1 Enoch available online, for those who would like to read and verify for themselves. Again, it is important to emphasize that this text represents our earliest extra-biblical reference to the sons of God found in Genesis 6. 

In addition to 1 Enoch, there are a plethora of texts from the second-temple period which take the sons of God here to be angels (see, e.g., Philo, Gig. 2.6f; and Josephus Ant. 1.73, ). Moreover, it appears that Jude and 2 Peter are alluding to this story, and taking an angelic interpretation of it. Further, the tangential mode by which the authors of the epistles of Jude and 2 Peter allude to this episode is evidence that this interpretation was quite widespread among Jews of their time. It is undeniable that the angelic interpretation is very ancient. Indeed, we don't have evidence of a non-angelic interpretation until the second century C.E., where one Rabbi Simeon Bar Yohai curses anyone who advocates for the angelic interpretation in the targums. And by that time the angelic interpretation was already widespread and well-established. The fact that the angelic interpretation is the most ancient interpretation, the only one for which we have any evidence for in the second-temple period, and that it is quite widespread in this early period, is evidence that this is how the text was originally meant to be understood. 

In addition to the above points, the angelic interpretation makes the most contextual sense. It explains, for example, why the sexual union of the sons of God and the daughters of men produced the nephilim, or giants, something implied by the passage. Without an angelic interpretation of the sons of God, the production of giants from the union of the sons of god and the daughters of men would be left unexplained. After all, intermarriage among godly men and ungodly women would not normally produce giants! And it is clear that the Hebrew word nephilim here refers to giants. The word only appears twice in the Old Testament, in the aforementioned story and in Numbers 13:33, the latter of which is provided below:

30But Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said, “Let us go up at once and occupy it, for we are well able to overcome it.” 31Then the men who had gone up with him said, “We are not able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we are.” 32 So they brought to the people of Israel a bad report of the land that they had spied out, saying, “The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great height. 33And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we  seemed to them” (Numbers 13:30-33 (ESV); emphasis added).

The context here is that God commanded Moses to send spies to scout out the land of Canaan, as he is giving it to the Israelites. The spies come back and report that they saw nephilim there, or at least their descendants. But notice that their gigantic height is emphasized. So it is plausible that nephilim denotes giants. Moreover, the LXX actually translates nephilim as γίγαντας (the Greek gigantas) in both Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33. As an aside, it is interesting that Josephus states that some Jews in his day have posession of the bones of the giants. This is only some of the evidence for the identification of the nephilim with giants, but it is sufficient. 

In addition to the above evidences for the angelic interpretation, the term "daughters of men" appears to naturally refer to women of the human race. Indeed, the Hebrew word for man in Genesis 6:1, (הָֽאָדָ֔ם), is exactly the same as that used in Genesis 6:2, viz., הָֽאָדָ֔ם . And since Genesis 6:1 clearly uses the word to denote all mankind, cf., "when man (הָֽאָדָ֔ם) began to multiply," it stands to reason that the word, as it appears in the term "daughters of men (הָֽאָדָ֔ם)" in 6:2, is used to denote the same meaning. Similar reasoning can be applied to the LXX, which uses ἄνθρωποι (mankind) and ἀνθρώπων in Gen 6:1 and Gen 6:4, respectively. It is very improbable that the meaning of one word would change so suddenly in the text. So it is clear that "daughters of men" simply refers to female humans. But this then probabilifies the view that the Sons of God, who are juxtaposed with female humans, are in fact nonhuman entities. 

So, the evidence that the bene elohim refers to angels here is very strong indeed. It is no wonder why it is the majority view among contemporary scholars of the Hebrew Bible.

Reasons why the Sethite Interpretation of Genesis 6:1-4 is Flawed 

First, nowhere in Genesis, nor indeed in the whole Bible, is the line of Seth, or the male descendants of Seth, referred to as the sons of God. Similarly, nowhere in the whole Bible are the daughters of Cain referred to as the daughters of men.

Second, nowhere is it implied in Genesis that the whole line of Seth, or even his male descendants, are righteous people, something required by the Sethite interpretation.  

Third, Genesis does not juxtapose two lines of people descending from Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve are presented as having had many children, and there are many lines of descent from Adam and Eve, of which the Sethite and Cainite line are but two. Thus, the emphasis on Sethites vice Cainites seems to be foreign to the text. 

Fourth, this interpretation utterly fails to explain why giants would be produced by the intermarriage of Sethite men and Cainite women. If the sons of god and daughters of men are both human beings, then why should giants be produced from their union, as the text naturally implies? By contrast, the angelic interpretation explains this quite nicely: the nephilim, or the superhuman giants, are simply a byproduct of the sexual relations of heavenly and human entities. 

Fifth, the term "daughters of men" is most naturally interpreted as referring to human women. But there is simply nothing in the text that would allow us to exegetically infer the more specific view that by "daughters of men" only women of a certain lineage, whether Cainite or otherwise, are denoted.  Indeed, to restate an argument above, the Hebrew word for man in Genesis 6:1, (הָֽאָדָ֔ם), is exactly the same as  that used in Genesis 6:2, viz., הָֽאָדָ֔ם . And since Genesis 6:1 clearly uses the word to denote all mankind, cf., "when man (הָֽאָדָ֔ם) began to multiply," it stands to reason that the word, as it appears in the term "daughters of men" in 6:2, is used to denote the same meaning. Similar reasoning can be applied to the LXX, which uses ἄνθρωποι (mankind) and ἀνθρώπων in Gen 6:1 and Gen 6:4, respectively. It is very improbable that the meaning of one word would change so suddenly in the text. So it is clear that "daughters of men" simply refers to female humans, and not to a subsection thereof. 

Sixth, since the flood is closely linked to this story, and in fact immediately precedes it, it does seem that the punishment of the flood is somehow linked with this antedeluvian backstory. But the Sethite interpretation fails to adequately link this story with the punishment of the flood, as the corruption of a mere two lines of people, the Sethite and Cainite lines, appears to be insufficient justification for God to flood the Earth. 

Seventh, this interpretation utterly fails to take into account the Biblical intratextual evidence: as we have seen, in all instances of the Masoretic Hebrew text that contain the term banu elohim or its variants, the term is taken to refer to angels. 

Eighth, it doesn't explain why the LXX, the earliest extra-biblical reference to the story (1 Enoch), and a plethora of early second-temple texts interpret the sons of God as angels in Genesis 6.

Ninth, and somewhat comically, the view that the “sons of God” refers to the godly line of Seth implausibly implies that the ungodly women were far more attractive than the godly women. Otherwise, why wouldn't the godly male descendants of Seth just marry the godly female descendants of Seth? No good explanation appears to be forthcoming on this interpretation. 

For at least the above reasons, the interpretation that sees Genesis 6 as contrasting godly Sethite men with ungodly Cainite women must be rejected as wildly implausible. 

Why is There Something Rather than Nothing? A Simple Argument for Why Something had to Exist, and Why it is a Necessary Being

Here is a quick modal argument I came up with for the proposition that <something exists> is a necessary truth. Basically, the answer to why there is something rather than nothing is rather straight forward: something had to exist -- it's impossible for there to have been nothing. In any case, here is the argument. I came up with it myself, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were already independently developed by someone like Alexander Pruss or Joshua Rasmussen -- or some medieval theologian who anticipated modern modal logic. In Philosophy, there is not much new under the sun.

Argument: 

Assume that possibly, nothing exists. If it is possible that nothing exists, then it is possible that necessarily, nothing exists. 

This is because there is no potentiality in a world w1 at which nothing exists; and what is possible if some w were actual is based on the way w would be. In other words, what grounds the possible existence of entities, events, etc, in the actual world is how the way the world actually is. And what grounds what is possible in another world is how that world would be if it were in fact actual. Possibility is grounded in actuality. And since there is nothing at w1, there is no potentiality for anything to exist at w1. So every world which w1 has access to will be a world at which nothing exists. So at w1 it is true that <necessarily, nothing exists>. So it is possible that necessarily, nothing exists.

Now, by the S5 modal axiom, ◊◻P entails ◻P. So it follows that <necessarily, nothing exists>. And this entails that nothing exists. But clearly something exists at the actual world. This is a contradiction. Therefore, reject the assumption: it is not possible that nothing exist. So, necessarily, something exists.

Note that the argument's conclusion is not that a necessary being exists, but only that necessarily, something exists. The argument's conclusion is thus consistent with the view that <possibly, only contingent beings exist.> But it seems highly plausible that <if it is possible that only contingent beings exist, then possibly, nothing exists.> After all, for every contingent being x at a world w at which only contingent beings exist, x could have not existed -- this just follows from the definition of what it means to be contingent. So it seems like it could have been the case that none of these contingent beings existed, and hence that nothing exists. But we have already shown that it is impossible for nothing to exist. Therefore, it is not possible that only contingent beings exist. So, there is at least one thing that had to exist -- i.e., there is at least one necessary being.

So from the following three propositions, which strike me as obviously true, it follows in the S5 modal system, pretty much universally accepted among modal logicians and metaphysicians, that there is a necessary being: 

1.  If it is possible that nothing exists, then it is possible that necessarily, nothing exists.

2.  Something exists. 

3. If it is possible that only contingent beings exist, then possibly, nothing exists.