Category Archives: The problem of evil

Sandy Hook

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One of our friends has a grandchild who attends Sandy Hook Elementary School. She was not physically harmed; the horror of Sandy Hook is difficult enough to contemplate without it being brought into stark relief through personal involvement. This is what our friend wrote:

This is to let you know that all is well but we must go on praying for all the community there. They are truly suffering.

A few days before this horrible tragedy took place, our daughter in law (Nancy) went to see one of the mothers with whom she had become friendly while they were both living in the same Apt. house. Both their husbands work for the same company. She told Nancy how good it felt to have finally moved and settled into their new home….. A few days later their 6 year old daughter came to such a tragic end wearing Katherine’s old clothes Nancy had brought over for her a just a few days ago.

Katherine’s class was in a dark room for 2 1/2 hours before they could be sent home.

Katherine’s father spent some hours at the airport watching this all on TV and only got a message that there was  shooting at a school in Newtown Hartford. They gave them no more information. But thank God they are all home safe now.

No understanding of what happened at Sandy Hook is possible without acknowledging the existence of evil: personal evil, an evil that lurks in the heart of every man. What took place at Sandy Hook Elementary school was an act of undiluted personal evil. Whether the murderer was mentally ill, whether he should not have had access to guns or whether the principal should have had access to a gun – none of these can alter the tangible reality of the evil that was on display.

While the parents of the murdered children should, eventually – for their own sakes – forgive the murderer, it is right for the rest of us, for Christians, to hate the evil; it is even commanded. It is right to want justice – God’s justice. It is right that there should be a hell where God’s perfect justice will be satisfied. It is ironic that the mainline denominations that are obsessed with justice have, for the most part, ceased to believe in hell, one of the only two places where perfect justice will be found; the other is on the cross.

The suffering of the innocent was something that Dostoevsky dealt with in the famous Grand Inquisitor passage in Brothers Karamazov. I have to admit that, even re-reading it as a Christian, I find Ivan the atheist’s argument against a God who makes the suffering of children a necessary part of his creation  – compelling.

David Bentley Hart attempts to address the problem in his article: Tsunami and Theodicy:

Famously, Dostoevsky supplied Ivan with true accounts of children tortured and murdered: Turks tearing babies from their mothers’ wombs, impaling infants on bayonets, firing pistols into their mouths; parents savagely flogging their children; a five-year- old-girl tortured by her mother and father, her mouth filled with excrement, locked at night in an outhouse, weeping her supplications to “dear kind God” in the darkness; an eight-year-old serf child torn to pieces by his master’s dogs for a small accidental transgression.

But what makes Ivan’s argument so disturbing is not that he accuses God of failing to save the innocent; rather, he rejects salvation itself, insofar as he understands it, and on moral grounds. He grants that one day there may be an eternal harmony established, one that we will discover somehow necessitated the suffering of children, and perhaps mothers will forgive the murderers of their babies, and all will praise God’s justice; but Ivan wants neither harmony—“for love of man I reject it,” “it is not worth the tears of that one tortured child”—nor forgiveness; and so, not denying there is a God, he simply chooses to return his ticket of entrance to God’s Kingdom. After all, Ivan asks, if you could bring about a universal and final beatitude for all beings by torturing one small child to death, would you think the price acceptable? . . .

I do not believe we Christians are obliged—or even allowed—to look upon the devastation visited upon the coasts of the Indian Ocean and to console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. For while Christ takes the suffering of his creatures up into his own, it is not because he or they had need of suffering, but because he would not abandon his creatures to the grave. And while we know that the victory over evil and death has been won, we know also that it is a victory yet to come, and that creation therefore, as Paul says, groans in expectation of the glory that will one day be revealed. Until then, the world remains a place of struggle between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, life and death; and, in such a world, our portion is charity.

As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy. It is not a faith that would necessarily satisfy Ivan Karamazov, but neither is it one that his arguments can defeat: for it has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes—and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new.”

h/t First Thoughts for the David Bentley Hart quote.

 

Why Aurora

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Theodore Dalrymple ruminates on why James Holmes committed mass murder in Aurora and comes to the conclusion that Naturalism provides no answer and can never provide an answer. He is right, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an answer outside of Naturalism.

Holmes is not unlike a Dostoevsky protagonist who does evil to prove that he has free-will unconstrained by God, is his own master and, thus, is a god himself. The ultimate expression of this brand of “free-will” is to kill oneself – as Kirillov in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed – since it is the indelible denouement of the rebellion against what God intends for us; it is a popular choice for many mass killers, although not James Holmes.

None of this is new: it is as old as Eden when the serpent said to Eve concerning the apple: “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” It has been downhill ever since.

The simple truth is, people do evil for the sake of doing evil, for the sake of demonstrating that they can, for the sake of falling again for the serpent’s fatal lie – that it will make them free.

From here:

By a strange irony, alleged Aurora mass murderer James Holmes was a doctoral student of neuroscience—the discipline that will, according to its most ardent and enthusiastic advocates, finally explain Man to himself after millennia of mystery and self-questioning.

But what could count as an explanation of what James Holmes did? At what point would we be able to say, “Aha, now I understand why he dyed his hair like the Joker and went down to the local cinema and shot all those people?” When we have sifted through his biography, examined his relationships, listened to what he has to say, and put him through all the neuropsychological and neurological tests, will we really be much wiser?

[…..]

We seek a final explanation, but cannot reach one because, as Haitian peasants say, “Behind mountains, more mountains.”

The absurdity of A. C. Grayling

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From here:

One thinks with sorrow of the hundreds of thousands whose lives have been horrendously lost or affected by the great Japanese earthquake and tsunami, which will put a black mark against this year 2011 in the annals, coming so soon after the earthquake that hit Christchurch in New Zealand. The events are almost certainly linked tectonically, reminding us of the vast forces of nature that are normal for the planet itself but inimical to human life, especially when lived dangerously close to the jigsaw cracks of the earth’s surface.

Someone told me that there were to be special prayers in their local church for the people of Japan. This well-intentioned and fundamentally kindly proceeding nevertheless shows how absurd, in the literal sense of this term, are religious belief and practice. When I saw the television footage of people going to church in Christchurch after the tragic quake there, the following thoughts pressed.

In the rest of the article, Grayling goes on to point out the absurdity of believing in a God who does one of the following:

  • Creates a world where earthquakes have “awful outcomes”.
  • Creates a world which he subsequently abandoned and left to fend for itself.
  • “Inflicts violent and agonizing sufferings arbitrarily on sentient creatures” and is, therefore, “vile”.

The one possibility he doesn’t cover is the one claimed by Christianity: when God created the world it was good, without death and suffering. Both were introduced at the Fall by Man’s rebellion. God still did not abandon humanity, but sent his Son to redeem us; although suffering in this life still exists, God will eventually remake the universe and restore it to its original state – without sin, suffering or death.

Grayling would probably claim that this is absurd, too – yet it is significant that he chooses to demolish that which Christianity does not claim for God rather than what it does.

Other than that absurdity, Grayling’s railing against what religion doesn’t claim for itself is not rendered less wrong-headed by his evident belief that human suffering is in some way bad. A not particularly logical – one could even say absurd – view for a person who believes that sentient life is merely an accidental collection of interacting molecules – some of which conspired to write an article with A. C. Grayling’s name attached.