The Problem of Evil and Suffering ~ Dr Peter Kreeft

Christ to all of life thank you all for coming out on such a snowy night I'm not going to give you so much a lecture as a class imagine this is a large philosophy class the relation between a lecturer and an audience is like the relation between an actor or a singer or some sort of performer and somebody who sits there passively and is entertained but the relationship between a teacher in a class is different than that the teacher in the class together are active trying to explore something to expose something to learn something that they didn't know before they're like a tour guide and some people on a tour bus or a scientist and his assistants they're there working together to try to to see something that they haven't seen before so please bring your brains with you not just your entertainment nerves CS Lewis in the best book that I know of about the problem of pain called the problem of pain says the only purpose of this book is to solve the intellectual problem raised by suffering for the far higher task of teaching fortitude and patience I was never fool enough to suppose myself qualified nor have I anything to offer my readers except my conviction that when pain is to be borne as distinct from explained a little courage helps more than much knowledge a little human sympathy more than much courage and the love of God more than all well that's my position too let's admit that pain is evidence against God the God presented in the Bible is called a hidden God he's not like the noonday Sun you can't avoid the noonday Sun you don't have to search for the noonday Sun in order to find it but God wanted us to search for him so he hid Pascal says God gives you just enough light so that if you want to find him you can and if you don't want to find him you won't so finding him doesn't depend on your IQ it depends on your will in other words he respects your freedom he's like Romeo when he proposes to Juliet he doesn't bring along a battery of logicians to convince her that she's a fool if she doesn't follow the syllogisms so God allows evidence against him and he gives you evidence for him as one ancient sceptics said if there is no God why is there so much good and if there is a God why is there so much evil well I don't know how the atheist would explain all the good but he has to if goodness is an argument for God and he believes that the evidence good doesn't lead to the conclusion no God he has to show how similarly the believer in God has to show how the evidence against God namely evil doesn't lead to the Atheist conclusion that doesn't mean that even if my talk is totally successful I will have proved the existence of God its defensive not offensive argument that I'm going to give you all I have to do is show that the problem of evil doesn't disprove the existence of God it seems to I think the best way of formulating the philosophical problem of evil as I hope you understood I'm not claiming to be qualified to deal with the the deeper therapeutic personal problem of evil deepest way of formulating the philosophical problem of evil is very simple Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica formulated two objections to the most important of his thousands of theses in that incredible illogical work namely that there is a God but that's the first substantive thesis that he proves because of there's no God you don't do any theology if you don't believe matter exists you don't do physics so here's the most important thesis he always finds at least three objections to every thesis the Summa Theologica is written like a systematized Socratic dialogue he lets the objector have the first say and he formulates the objections as strongly and fairly as he possibly can and he always wants three and he always gets at least three except for this one the most important thing says only has two because in the whole history of human thought there have been only two great respectable logical objections against the existence of God and the first and most important one is the problem of evil and the second one is the apparent adequacy of the Natural Sciences to explain everything without God which doesn't prove that there is no God it simply proves if it works that God is a an unnecessary hypothesis that Occam's razor or the principle of simplicity doesn't need it but the problem of evil is the atheists trump card always and it should be and Aquinas formulates the problem with magnificent simplicity he says if one of two contraries or opposites is infinite the other must cease to exist but God means infinite goodness therefore if there were such a god evil could not exist evil does exist therefore there is no such God put a little more complexly CS Lewis formulates it this way if God were all good he would want to make his creatures perfectly happy and if God were Almighty he would be able to do whatever he wanted but the creatures are not happy therefore God lacks either goodness or power or both a third way even a little more complicated but still fairly simple of formulating the problem is to say the following four propositions can't all be true if any three of them are true then logically the fourth one must be false number one God exists number two God is all good number three God is all-powerful number four evil exists if God exists and is all good and is all-powerful there can't be any evil that's how Lewis formulates the objection if God exists and he is all good and there is evil then he doesn't get what he wants and he's not all-powerful if evil exists and God is all-powerful and there is evil then he wants evil and then he's not all good or if there is evil and the only kind of God would be one of total goodness and total power then the conclusion is there is no such God that's a very simple clear fair straightforward powerful way of formulating the problem of evil it's especially difficult for a Christian not just for a theist who believed in some sort of a God but for a Christian so much love yet so much pain the god of Christianity is a God who loves us so much that he sacrifices his very life for us if God were just a deistic snob up there in the heavens you might say well why would he care for us were just fleas but this God does everything he possibly can for us what more could he do and yet apparently he fails look at all the evil in the world there's only three ways to answer any logical argument this is the very structure of logic because an argument is an attempt to lead somebody from a premise to a conclusion that is from something they already believe to something they don't yet believe by the power of logic by showing that if the premise is true then logically the conclusion must follow because that's the strategy of argument and because an argument has propositions in it and a proposition has terms in it there's three weak points that are possible for an argument the terms the propositions and the logic one or more of the terms may be used ambiguously I might say the bank of the river is a safe place for my money because a bank is a safe place for my money in the bank of a river is a bank well a museum term bank ambiguously that's a rather silly argument or I may argue from false premises I can prove anything from false premises I can prove that I'm a God all gods are giraffes and I am a giraffe therefore I am a God that's also a fallacious argument all pigs fly and I am a pig therefore I fly that's a logical argument but it's not true because it has false premises or finally the argument may be illogical the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises now if we look at the argument as I just formulated it I don't think we can say that there's anything illogical about it I don't think there's any fallacy in it and know one of the premises is simply an absolutely false so unless we find some ambiguous term there's no way of answering the argument so let's look at some of the terms first of all the term evil has two meanings I don't think the argument uses this term ambiguously it's simply that there are two kinds of evil and therefore two kinds of argument and both kinds of evil count against God there's physical evil and spiritual evil physical evil is the evil we suffer spiritual evil is the evil we do immorality vice sin each of them is evidence against God because each of them is evil but they are so different kinds of evil that they need different explanations so let's do those two separately let's first of all talk about the evil we do that's the worst kind of evil in other words sin is a greater evil than pain you may not think so at first but I think a little thought experiment can convince you that you to believe that sin is a greater evil than pain suppose somebody that you love were captured by a cruel enemy in war and was given the choice between being the victim of an experiment in torture or being the perpetrator of that experiment he either had to torture his fellow soldier or he had to become a martyr a victim of torture by by the bad guys both are horrible but which is more horrible what would you want him to choose would you really prefer that he chose to collaborate with the enemy and torture his fellow innocent prisoner I don't think so or alternative thought experiment imagine two nightmares one in which you're chased by a horrible dragon let's say you believe the dragon is the devil and the dragon is going to get you and kill you and torture you and eat you and destroy you that's a terrible nightmare is there anything worse than that I think so a nightmare in which you become that dragon and you can never escape being that dragon forever at least if you're destroyed by something evil you're still you which means that the physical evil of being destroyed isn't as bad as the spiritual evil of being a destroyer if you had to choose between sacrificing your body in your mind if you had to choose between living the rest of your life in a wheelchair unable to move or living the rest of your life insane able to move unable to move your mind which would be more tragic I think insanity is even more tragic so I think deep down we all evaluate our spiritual dimensions higher even than our physical dimensions that's not to say that the physical dimension is not terribly valuable and terribly important to say that a is greater than B is not to say that B is not great but if sin is a greater evil than pain then if we can solve the problem of evil on this dimension even if the solution is not very good on the other dimension we will have done most of our work and I think that's the case I think there is a very simple and clear answer to the worst kind of evil spiritual evil I don't think there is an equally simple and clear answer to physical evil I can explain Hitler better than I could explain Hurricane Katrina or the the earthquake in Haiti and the way you explain sin or moral evil is very simple free will it wasn't God that did the Holocaust it was Hitler and Hitler wasn't a puppet and God didn't have strings attached to him that's pretty obvious it's relatively easy to get God off the hook for sin it's harder to get him off the hook for pain so let's talk about pain that's our main problem tonight the problem that pain seems to contract a good God can come in three different sizes so to speak there's three different levels of the problem the atheist in other words can argue from from three different premises one is any pain at all any suffering at all refutes God the second is so much suffering maybe you need a little of it but not as much as we have and the third and I think strongest version is the unjust distribution of suffering the fact that bad things happen not just to bad people but to good people let's take them separately one by one does any suffering count against God well how could there be a world in which we are biological creatures with nerve endings over our body that are necessary to warn us and yet pain is impossible lepers don't feel pain that's why they have leprosy they can't take care of their body they don't feel it their body collapses they don't live very long pain is a necessity but I don't think even a God who can do anything can do a meaningless self-contradiction and I think it's a meaningless self-contradiction to try to imagine a world like ours in which we are human beings with animal bodies where pain is impossible so the existence of some sort of pain is a necessity given a physical world angels of course don't have any pain they don't have bodies so if your argument is I'm angry at you God for not making me an angel well that's different that's a totally different problem I think what you need they're not it is not a logician but a psychiatrist there's a connection though between the amount of pain that we have and the amount of evil spiritual evil that we have and I think this solves the second level of the problem there's too much pain there's an easy solution to there's too much pain it's a kind of a cheap solution how much is too much working to draw the line well that's an impossible question to answer but still nobody seriously thinks I got a cold therefore there is no god but it's much more serious to say Hitler killed six million Jews therefore there is no God that's evidence it's not conclusive evidence there's the story of the two rabbis and Auschwitz one of which was a skeptic and said God could not possibly allow us to suffer this way I have lost my belief in God and the other was very pious and said God will rescue us we are his chosen people I have faith in God one day both of them are on line to enter the gas chambers and the pious rabbi went in first and he kept looking around for help and deliver into the last moment didn't find any his last words before entering the gas chamber were there is no God and then the skeptic entered next in his last words were the Shema Israel here o Israel the Lord the Lord your God is one so you see anybody can interpret the evidence either way but something as serious as a Holocaust is indeed evidence against God how how do you interpret it well think again of God's decision to create human beings not just angels we are psychosomatic unities where souls and bodies together we're not a ghost plus a machine we're not an angel plus an ape our soul and our body are related not like a haunt and a house but like the meaning of a book in the words of the book two dimensions of one of the same thing you can't change the meaning of a book without changing the words and you can't change the words of a book without changing the meaning and the words of a book or like our body and the meaning of a book is like our soul so the soul and the body always go together so as soon as there is sin in the soul there is wrong suffering wrong kind of suffering too much suffering unjust suffering in the body it's unavoidable there's no insulation between the two so as soon as the soul falls from God the source of all joy the body has to fall from the soul too into suffering and death it's a kind of inevitability yet the third aspect of this problem is still a very serious one namely the unjust distribution of suffering a saint in the center walk down the street a meteor comes out of the sky hit one of them ahead and kill one which one unpredictable 50-50 chance apparently it matters not whether you're a saint or a sinner that's a very serious objection that's ivan Karamazov objection if anybody here has a weak faith don't read The Brothers Karamazov it's a very tough-minded book and I find no atheist in the history of world literature more convincing that Ivan Karamazov and yet the character was invented by a great Christian Dostoevsky by the way when I teach philosophy of religion I always do this little experiment when it comes to the question of the existence of God I divide the class into two I say how many think you can prove the existence of God and about half of them say yes and how many here believe if there's no God or there's probably no God or at least you can't prove them and that's the other half okay now I say all you skeptics are going to have to argue we're gonna have a debate go on different sides of the room all you skeptics going to have to argue for the existence of God and all your believers are going to have to argue for atheism they protest but I say if unless you understand the other position you can't really argue against it can you so they say okay we'll do it every single time I've done that then it may be four or five times the result is the same I don't orchestrate it I just let them argue and everybody agrees at the end that the Christians pretending to be atheist win the debate atheism defeats theism and then I ask why and the atheist said well you made us argue for this silly fairy tale called Christianity which is so ridiculous that nobody could possibly argue for it you gave us the weakest case and then the theists who are pretending to be atheists say no you gave the weakest most ridiculously weak arguments for theism we've got dozens of stronger ones that you've never heard of but we gave your strongest arguments for atheism and you couldn't answer them and then they'd argue whether that's the case or not that's the real argument the other really serious atheist I think in history well if you want to read good atheists don't worry about people like Dawkins and Hitchens and and and these people read read Nietzsche read Sartre read Camus now there's an atheist for you dr. rue in the plague one of the most great novels is a kind of a obvious projection of Camus himself because he's a he's a doctor who risks his life to save thousands of innocent people in a plague in Algeria and he knows he's probably going to catch it himself and die but he has to do this because that's the meaning of life he says I know that the meaning of life is to be a saint but he says I don't believe there's any God I'm an atheist and my puzzle is how can you be a saint without God and he says I've never I've never solved that problem you can't be a saint without God you got to be a saint and yet there's no God and that's Camus himself that's an unhappy atheist I think you should trust an unhappy atheist I don't think you should trust a happy atheist that's too comfortable too smug too simple how do you explain how and why bad things happen to good people you could use Socrates explanation if you're of a certain philosophical caste of mind that's quite profound Socrates answer is they never do they never do here he is about to be killed giving his last speech one of the great speeches in the history of Western civilization I hope you've all read the apology of Socrates no civilized human being should be allowed to die without having read that speech here he is in the middle of horrible evil happening to a very good person he's misunderstood he's tried he's executed he's put in prison and now he says the one thing you can be certain of is that it is impossible for a good land to be harmed by a bad man ever what what do you mean by that well if you are simply your soul then your soul can be harmed but only by you what is harm to the soul well folly stupidity moral vice can anybody else make you stupid No can anybody else make you wicked no but you can make yourself stupid and wicked yeah but somebody else can put me in prison and give me hemlock and chop my head off yeah that's only my body that's only this old house that's a ticket to heaven thank you very much goodbye well there's something beautifully noble about that I don't think however that is the Christian attitude that's something that you might wish it were you might envy it but we're stuck with bodies that God took so seriously that he said that this is you you're not an angel in disguise and when he came to earth he came as a body as a human not as an angel and when he saved us he saved us by by dripping his blood on the ground his saving words were not like Buddha's this is my mind but this is my body so I think you have to take the body much more seriously the Socrates did so that too is unfortunately a cheap solution not cheap in the sense that is not Noble but not enough where is there justice in innocent children suffering if you look to the Bible for an answer you get a shock the first systematic philosophical theological book in the Bible is Paul's letter to the Romans where he reflects on the gospel and puts it into some sort of logical form at least the first eight chapters and the two great parts two are bad news the good news to send the salvation and every Christian theology ever since has taken that essential structure but he announces at the beginning that his topic is the Justice of God the d.ko sunay of God sometimes translated righteousness more ordinary translation is Justice of God he's gonna talk about the justice of God what is it well it's the most unjust event that ever happened in the history of the world we killed God he came down and became the sacrificial lamb and the man who least deserved to die got the worst death imaginable and that's justice yeah that's astonishing what's going on there well it's one great mystery answering another the answer mystery is often called a vicarious atonement the innocent died for the guilty that's God's Way of reconciling justice and mercy we get the mercy Jesus gets the justice that's an answer to another equally mysterious problem namely what Christians call original sin just as vicarious atonement is a kind of solidarity in salvation original sin is a kind of solidarity in sin because remember were bodily creatures which means we come into the world from mothers heredity counts more than environment because unless there's a reddit e first you can't modify it with environment we are not angels that may be a surprise to some people here I hope not deep down I think we think of ourselves as angels sometimes autonomous individuals but were not since we come into the world as members of a family if there's a family problem we all inherit it if your mother were a crack addict a cocaine addict when she got pregnant you were born a crack addict we inherit the the sins of the fathers through heredity if you're born into a family of abusers you're going to be abused not your fault Ivan Karamazov doesn't like that so much so that he resents God for creating us this way and you got to be very sympathetic about that because it doesn't seem rational and yet that's what we are that's that that is what it is to be a human being what God does in Christ is to take this solidarity which was the opportunity for the transmission of evil and to use it for the transmission of good to take Christ's body on the cross and somehow unite it with us the body of Christ as the church and to have him in us and us in him just as we were in Adam and Adam in us somebody said if the theologians fully understood what they meant when they said the word in they wouldn't have any mysteries left we modern individualist have great difficulty understanding those two mysteries because we think of ourselves as first of all individuals and secondly families groups churches etc most ancient cultures look at it the other way around we are first of all humanity a family and then individuals like a tree with different branches different leaves and the same SAP goes through all the branches and all the leaves so you're a SAP because father Adam was a SAP and that makes you very vulnerable to sin but it also makes you vulnerable to Redemption I don't suggest that either of those two mysteries are easy God doesn't give you neat little solutions because this is not a neat little problem he's like a surgeon who understands how your self works far better than you do all right I've tried to explain a little bit how the word evil has a number of different meanings and could be ambiguous there's other words in our problem that are also ambiguous remember the problem God exists God as an impotent God is Allgood there is evil well we looked at evil what about omnipotence if God can do everything why can't he avoid all kinds of evil well let's take the first kind spiritual evil can God ensure that nobody ever sins and yet give us free will well no free will means that we make the choice he cuts the strings we're not puppets I don't think it's meaningful to say that God can do absolutely everything even if it's a meaningless self-contradiction that's like saying God can do glumph glumph love that that means nothing just adding the words God can do this doesn't suddenly put meaning into those meaningless terms God could perform miracles but miracles are not contradictions walking through a wall is a miracle but walking through a wall and not walking through a wall at exactly the same time that's a contradiction even God can't do that so God can't give creatures free will and prevent them from sinning he didn't have to give us free will and here you have real room for a protest if you're a hard-line atheist you can say I resent the fact that you Christians believe that God gave us free will he should have made us happy puppets or happy robots or happy animals I'm mad at him for making me human well once again I think you've got a little psychological problem there but I don't know how I could argue with you logically what about the other kind of evil though what about suffering God is omnipotent therefore he could remove all suffering well suppose he did I suppose he could do that he could just take your pain nerve and and block the suffering even drugs can do that and God's better than any drug but what happens if you do that with drugs ooh bad stuff happens well that's because the side effects all right so no bad side effects so God takes away all your pain and just give you no bad side effects and you live a totally pain-free life and as a result what what happens to people who live almost totally pain-free lives they become simple stupid shallow little selfish pigs or as Rabbi Abraham Heschel one of the wisest men of the 20th century once said the man who has never suffered what could he possibly know anyway even the pagan Greeks knew that wisdom comes only through suffering and wisdom is is far greater than pleasure so to sacrifice pleasure for wisdom it's a good deal so God could remove all pain but that wouldn't be love God wants us to suffer I know some of you've never heard anybody say that to you before but if God didn't want you to suffer then God's not getting what he wants and God's weak he wants you to suffer not because he's cruel and wicked but precisely because he's loving and compassionate we aren't God and therefore we don't know when suffering is good for each other so it's almost always bad for us to impose suffering on each other except in very limited and controlled circumstances like putting somebody in prison to try to reform them our present prisons are very good at that by the way once I remember my five-year-old daughter was in brownies and they were trying to thread needles to sell and my daughter was kind of clumsy so she was the only one in the troop that couldn't thread a needle and this upset her and she kept trying and trying and trying and once they came home from school early and I saw her trying to thread this needle and I didn't show her that I was there so I just wanted to see what she'd do and she kept pricking her finger and blood came out and she looked around to see if anybody was there if somebody was there she would have cried but she didn't see me so she didn't cry so he kept trying and trying and trying and my my first instinct was to leap out from behind my hiding-place and say oh you poor let me kiss your boo-boo but I didn't I said this this kid needs to learn something and she's sooo soul assiduous and after about five minutes she finally got the needle threaded and then she said daddy daddy are you here look what I did look look look and and through the tears she was smiling a great big smile well I think I was a little bit like God there just a little bit she got greater joy because of the pain you don't usually see that that's not an explanation for the tragedy in Haiti but it shows that if you're wise enough you might perceive that suffering is necessary it it it it's effects are well it gives you opportunities for also it's a virtues courage for one if you have no pain you don't need courage patience for another sympathy if nobody's suffering you don't have to be sympathetic charity if nobody needs you why be unselfish wisdom which comes through suffering here's four five extremely important virtues courage patience sympathy charity wisdom is that worth sacrificing a bit of pleasure I think so there's another term divine goodness that is also I think ambiguous most of us I'm afraid are so corrupted by pop psychology that we think of goodness simply in terms of kindness now kindness is extremely important but it's not the only kind of goodness or even the highest kind we're kind to strangers we're kind to animals so we kill them so they don't suffer we're tolerant and kind to people and things that we don't really care much about but to somebody that we carry normally about we make trouble grandparents are kind parents are not that kind grandpa says run along and have some fun take some money and daddy says wait a minute don't go here and don't go there and be sure you come back by eleven o'clock Oh daddy you're always making trouble who loves you more grandpa or Papa God is indeed good God is indeed loving but it's not always kind sometimes he is sometimes he isn't the Bible never describes God as a grandfather only as a father God's ultimate answer to the problem of pain is not philosophical distinctions such as I've just made his ultimate answer to the problem of our pain is a deed he came he shared our pain he sat beside us in the stalled car imagine your car stalled in a storm three o'clock in the morning you're alone you can't start it you call up triple-a they say well we'll come with a jump start but it'll take two hours you sit there and then somebody comes trudging down the road and it's it's a friend of yours who just happens to see you and he doesn't have a car and he doesn't have wires and he can't start your car but he sits with you for two hours relieving your loneliness sharing your cold and then triple-a comes and starts your car who are you more grateful to triple-a or your friend your friend but you can start your car yeah but he was present with you presence is the greatest present we can give to each other when somebody you know is dying what can you do for them that's when you you want to be very charitable gee is there something I can do for you what can I sacrifice for you well there's one thing you can sacrifice your autonomy instead of just being with yourself and doing your own thing you can be with them you can share their time and their place you can just be with them oh but I don't know what to say it's not words just presence well it's God did with us would you rather would you rather lack that intimate personal love and presence but have everything else go right or would you rather have that even in an environment where everything's going wrong would you rather be divorced in Hawaii or in love in Iowa no insult to Iowa but you go to California for vacations right do they come here I probably shouldn't have said that because I want to leave time for Q&A I'm going to just end by reading a couple of paragraphs about this last and to me most impressive answer is a problem of evil which is not our philosophy but God's deed are we broken God has broken with us are we rejected do people despise us for being good he was despised and rejected of men do we weep his grief our familiar spirit do we say oh not again I can't take any more he was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief do people misunderstand us turn away from us they hid their faces from him as from an outcast is our love betrayed are our tenderest relationships broken he too loved and was betrayed by the ones he loved he came unto his own and his own received him not does it seem as if life has passed us by or cast us out as if we were sinking into uselessness and Oblivion he sinks with us he too has passed over by the world does he descend into all our hell's yes in the unforgettable line of Corrie ten Boom from the depths of a Nazi death camp she writes no matter how deep our darkness his is deeper still does he descend into our violence yes by suffering it does he descend into insanity I think even into that darkness the psalmist says even the darkness is not dark to him he makes light even there in the darkest of the mind perhaps not until deaths release every tear we shed can become his tear he may not yet wipe the tears away but he will make them his would we rather have our own dry eyes or his tear filled eyes he came he is here with us that is the most important fact in the world even if he does not heal our broken bones he comes into them and is broken like bread and we are nourished and he shows us that we can now use our very brokenness as nourishment for those that we love since we're his body we to become the bread that is broken for others our very failures can help heal other lives our very tears can help wipe away other people's tears our being hated can help those we love when those we love hang up on us he keeps the lines open so God's answer to the problem of suffering really happened 2,000 years ago and is still happening in our own lives the solution to our suffering involves our suffering it can become part of his work the greatest work ever done he came not to take away our suffering but to transform it to make it his you see the Christian views suffering as he views everything in a totally different way than the unbeliever he sees it as a between as relative the Christian is the true relativist there's only one absolute God everything else is relative to God everything else is between God and yourself it's like a like a Jacob's Ladder like a highway with with angels going up and down on the highway so everything is including suffering a gift from God an invitation from God a challenge from God something between God and yourself including suffering and that changes everything I said I speak for 45 minutes I lied it was 46 sorry but now it's time for the interesting part I am always amazed by how polite audiences are to listen to a monologue in order to get to a dialogue which is always twice as interesting so now I'm ready for your questions I was wondering if you could address what happens when it appears that God does intervene um from what you spoke about it sounds like I kind of got convinced that it's okay that God doesn't intervene in terms of the suffering and that suffering is important but it does appear that sometimes God does intervene and does alleviate suffering I'm just wondering if you could speak to that for a moment literally that's a miracle everything is under God's providence he writes the story there's not a syllable in it that he doesn't know about but when he intervenes and puts something into the story that doesn't come from the story itself that's like the author putting himself into his own novel as one of his characters the supreme example of that is the Incarnation but God can become present in a special way to relieve suffering sometime he often sends angels to do that and I love it when he does stuff like that but that's not his policy he does it rarely I don't know why contradiction - what do you mean do miracles contract the laws of nature or do they contradict God's other policy of Providence or what well let's explore that you've got a question in your mind we got to get it out before we can answer it there seems to be something disturbing about the fact that God occasionally does intervene with miraculous help that might be disturbing because it's so occasional we wish you'd do it more yeah I think it's just because it seems like it would be easier if it was one or the other and just the mixture of oh yes of course it would he doesn't want to make it too easy he wants to make it unpredictable every once in a while something wonderful happens if it happened 24 hours a day it wouldn't be wonderful anymore it's got to be rare okay yeah next question please so I have a question about the idea of free will the way I understand the way you're working with it is that free will is something like the ability to choose between alternatives which of course will have a moral dimension basically the question is does the having of free will entail sin is it impossible not to have sin if you have free will because that seems like you know okay well I agree with you I think I agree with your conclusions but I just wonder because if that is the case then it seems like it's impossible to have a world with free creatures that don't sin without your own I think the Bible is very clear about that God gave Adam and Eve what you interpret Adam and Eve literally or figuratively or collectively it doesn't matter the thing works anyway uh God gave Adam and Eve the choice between obedience and disobedience that presumes freewill you don't give a machine of choice that he gave them the choice means that they really had the choice God doesn't lie which means they didn't have to eat the forbidden fruit so freewill does not entail sin freewill did not come into the existence after said it came into existence before sin sin presupposes freewill so freewill make sin possible but misusing it makes it actual so is there then some possible world where creatures have rental but don't sin yes and if such a world exists if there is some other planet in the universe in which there's a happy Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden who have never sinned that would explain why God made universe so big so that we couldn't get there and corrupt them so why not then then why why not make this world that world I'm sorry I didn't hear that so I I think the objection that would be raised would be if it's possible to create a world where there's free will but no sin why not just make this that world he did mm-hmm then we messed it up so the exactly what he did okay that's but he couldn't force us not to sin without any way or freewill now we could do that he could he could make human beings not just animals who have free choice and who sometimes abuse it and then he could miraculously stop that abuse from happening whenever I shoot a bullet at you he turns it to butter before it hits your head and it just tickles you be pleasant but then we wouldn't really have free will because we couldn't choose to kill and then he would have to even perform little frontal lobotomies before we had even even an evil thought so that wouldn't work but free will means there's a real choice a real option that you can choose okay one of the audience members is texted in the question if God loved the Jews why did God not intervene either directly or indirectly in the Holocaust throughout the history of the Jews they've been the world's experts in suffering why didn't he rescue them from Egypt generations before Moses I don't know I'm not God I'm sorry it's a very disappointing answer but at some point we have to say that because that's the clear teaching of the book of Job drove us all these great questions and God shows up and he says in effect to job job you forgot to ask the most important question of all Who am I and who are you did you design the world were you there when you wrote the script no if evil were not a mystery if evil were very clear if we can have a very simple solution of the problem of evil that would count as evidence for atheism because that would mean that our mind is as great as God's mind if on the other hand there is a God whose mind and whose wisdom is infinitely greater than ours then there's bound to be mysteries that we can't solve so it's it's the fact that we don't know is consistent with the hypothesis that there is such a God okay next question how are you with complex questions uh if it's complex in the way that a computer is calm flex I'm lousy if it's complex in the way that a Shakespearean sonnet is complex I love it okay well let's just see how this goes because I have a question I've never really gotten a satisfactory answer to you say that God a God respects our free will more than anything right yeah are you familiar with the parasite called Toxoplasma gondii I know this is a parasite that can get into a fetal brain and affect the behavior the fetus after it's born it messes with something called the dopamine pathway which can either make somebody schizophrenic or affect their behavior later in life so if God if God respects our freewill more than anything that why would he either create or allow a parasite to be created that directly violates our freewill I don't know if I chopped your head off that takes away your freewill for the rest of your life - would this be an argument against freewill no it means that our natural condition is to have free will but there's all sorts of unnatural or diseased or violent conditions that take away good and natural things like free will and that parasite is one of them why God allows that parasite I don't know I don't even like know why God allows in New York Yankees for goodness sakes thank you Miss Oxford and sorry I had to put that one in okay um next question um you had mentioned that God is not always kind but Psalm 145 seventeen states the Lord is righteous in all his ways and kind in all his deeds so if you could define what you mean by kind a little bit better I'm sure it would clear it up but would you be able to do that for us please I don't have the Hebrew text in front of me but I'll bet you ten to one that the word is not properly translated kind but rather merciful kindness means the will to relieve you of pain merciful means giving you a good that you don't deserve God is always merciful but he's not always kind because sometimes his mercy and his wisdom knows that we need something more than we do kindness kindness is a very good thing and a very high thing but it's not 100 percent 24/7 the thing that we're supposed to do if I were kind to my students I give him all A's but I don't and if I were kind to my kids I'd never challenge them much I'd make life easy God doesn't do that mercy yes way beyond justice kindness most of the time but not always if if you think of all the pain we could have but don't have if you count all your blessings all the pleasant things in your life and all the pleasant moments in your life and put them on one side of the scale and all the pains in the other side of the scale you'll see that the good things vastly outweigh the bad things all right thank you okay another audience member has texted in this question who do you say the good atheists are and what is your problem with Hitchens and Dawkins it seems like simple dismissal to say that they're powerful arguments should be ignored given that many of those arguments are similar to those of Nietzsche well they're not original Nietzsche is much more creative and a much better rhetorician there they're clever debaters especially Christopher Hitchens is very funny but I I'm not experts on the modern atheists because I've not found anything really profound or original in them I find that they're just copying the old stuff okay next question um yes - a little bit easier question what are the three most important books that you've read that defend the Christian faith and then what are the three best books that give at least raising atheist doubts you mentioned Nietzsche and Camus what three books would you say for that three books that best defend the Christian faith I'd say the Old Testament the New Testament in nature I meant to say yeah excluding the Bible of course I'm sorry yeah let's rephrase the question what was that I'm sorry three three greatest Oh apologetics a theological verse or someone someone like that that give a good defense of the Christian faith well instead of just giving you three just let me run through some recommendations of truly great books the confessions of st. Agustin the sympathia logic of st. Thomas Aquinas Pascal's Ponce's the collected works of CS Lewis yes that's a good start okay thank you next question um I was wondering i I've made the connection in my mind that free will leads to sin but free will also leads to true love of God because we have a choice between two things if there was only one option then it wouldn't really be true love because that's just what we would automatically go to so it kind of worries me that I was thinking in heaven if there is only one option and that's God would it be true love for God your premise is absolutely right and I neglected to use the most important of all words in defending free will where is love free will makes love possible it also makes hate possible there's a kind of love that doesn't require free will that's a kind of autoeroticism the difference between loving another person and loving your own fantasies is the difference between saying yes to free will and saying no to free will God could have stayed in heaven with his own fantasies without creating us and he would have lacked nothing but he loves us so much that he gave us free will and foresaw that we misuse it fine now the other part of the question in heaven we will see God and we will not be able to sin will we lose our free will no we can't lose our fruit wheel that's our that's part of our essence well then how can we have free will and yet be unable to sin well we're not unable to sin because we want to sit and some force prevents us from doing it we're unable to sin because we want not to sin suppose you want to get the right answer to a mathematical equation and you're not a great mathematician you goof sometimes sometimes you get the right answer now suppose you're Einstein you want to get the answer to seven plus three equals what is there any chance that you're going to get that wrong none why because your mind is so brilliant that you can't possibly goof up something that simple well I think that's something like what we will be in heaven we will see God so clearly that we won't be suckered in by the devil's advertisements the only reason anybody sins is it seems like fun if sin didn't seem like fun with all the saints so the devil is a liar and he puts a nice wiggly worm on his hook and we say oh that's good food and we eat it and we're hooked but that won't happen in heaven we'll see the good and its beauty so clearly and we'll see evil in his ugliness and it's stupidity so clearly that we won't even be tempted anymore here we're stupid so we can be tempted in fact we're so stupid I'd say my supreme proof of the very unpopular doctrine called original sin is that all of us are really insane Thomas a in Stine famously defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result here God says to us many times every day in giving us free choice and opportunities to use it he says here in my right hand is doing things my way love me and your neighbor and you know from your experience as well as from your faith as well as from good philosophical reasoning from all three sources you know that every time you do this you're happy but since I give you free will I also give you the opportunity of choosing my left hand which is singing Sinatra song I did it my way the song they all sing as they enter hell and you know from your experience that every time you've chosen the left hand they'll every time you've said no to me and no to love and every time you've been a little selfish Pig you've been miserable so which will you have now joy or misery and we say gian god I don't know that's a tough one maybe misery will work this time let me try the left hand we're nuts well in heaven we won't be nuts thank you we have another questioner who asks what's the connection between pain and beauty oh that's a good one pain in itself is not beautiful it's ugly and yet our most beautiful works or tragedies our most beautiful music is in a minor key and without the contrast between the dark and the light the pain in the pleasure we don't really appreciate the light or the pleasure so there's a deep connection between pain and beauty very mysterious and ironic connection every great artist knows that in order to be an artist and to to be a kind of a mediator of beauty you have to suffer and every great scientist knows that breaking through to a discovery it is costly it takes sweat it takes suffering but that's beautiful okay next question so there was a question earlier about why isn't this world this perfect world where nobody sins and yet we have free will and your answer was we screwed it up right yeah okay it seems like the concept of original sin and this idea of free will is almost incompatible with an mission of Nipton being he created the tree of knowledge he created us in the garden and he knew if he has a mission he knew the future he knew what choice we would make doesn't that sound like entrapment not if you realize that God is a creative artist who know is instantly everything which to us is past present future rather than a crystal ball gays are like a prophet who can forecast the future here tolking writes the Lord of the Rings and let's say at least when he has it finished he knows everything in it in perfect order so if you say something to him about it if you just pronounce the title of his book he'll be like God in eternity seeing all three volumes simultaneously and yet in those volumes things happen good things and bad things and there's justice and mercy and good and evil and all the rest like in human life so God's like talking he's not somebody who entrapped you because an in trapper is somebody in the place al Ron isn't an trapper Solomon isn't a drap or Gollum visit and trapper but Tolkien is not an inn trapper I don't see how that addresses he can still know all of past present and future and yet he's still setting up this game where if we eat the fruit will be punished at the same time he knows we're going to eat the fruit of course he does so it does it all it seems exactly what you call a game is what I call free will that the fact that there are two trees the tree of eternal life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is to my mind at least I don't care whether you take the trees literally or not as long as you also take them symbolically the trees are symbols for good and evil the two tree is not one which means we have the choice between good and evil so it's not some gimmick out there like a bear trap with bait in it that suckers us into the trap it's our own nature our own essence our own free will that's symbolized by those two trees so you're saying this is a consequence of in order to have free will that choice has to be there it's impossible to put us in a garden without that tree of knowledge yes I don't take the story literally to the extent that I say that there was some time before the two trees when they had free will I think the trees are a symbol of their inherent freewill which from the first moment of their humanity they had now the actual first sin may have had something to do with eating fruit from a tree but what the tree symbolized namely the free choice we could be good and evil was in them even before they saw those physical trees if there were physical trees okay next question um first let me say I believe in Jesus Christ as my savior but something I've always been curious about is just and you've kind of been touching on it maybe you've already answered it just the fact that if God is perfect he created he created Adam and Eve that's perfect is it possible for someone who's perfect with freewill choice to make the wrong decision and also if Satan was with God in heaven seeing his glory why did he choose to sin against God and how did he have that desire to be prideful to answer your first question perfect means two different things infinitely perfect and finitely perfect only God is infinitely perfect our perfection in the Garden of Eden was simply innocence moral perfection it was not intellectual perfection we didn't know everything we didn't have the beatific vision we weren't yet in heaven we were given a test and in that mentally imperfect state it was possible for us to sin that was not a moral imperfection yet until we did sin but we were and always are and even will be in heaven finite creatures were not God we're not infinite so in that sense we are imperfect we're not perfect as God is we were just innocent the other question was how did Satan fall well he couldn't have been tempted by lust or greed or anything that requires a human body because as an angel he doesn't have a body so the standard answer to that we don't know for sure but the only answer that makes much sense is pride resentment of being number two God is God and Satan is not God and Satan wanted to be God Rodney Dangerfield says when you're looking out for number one watch out for stepping in number two okay when member of our audience asks does God feel the pain we feel it would seem odd for God not to know the pain of divorce or abuse yes because of the Incarnation because Christ took to heaven with him forever his whole human nature including a human body and a human soul and human feelings God himself feels everything that we feel yes next question hi me again I have already sir if you've already asked a question could you what the person behind you have the next question yeah thanks okay first thing I agree with you about that the pain is a necessary thing in life like even if you don't have pain if we put our hands in file they know if we don't feel any pain then we're going to burn our body so I agree with you on that but some kind of pain is is really like hard and unnecessary I think the worst pain of all is a father or a mother losing a child and it happened to me like I saw an accident were 38 child children were dead in an accident and one of them were my cause was my cousin and I attended a funeral with 38 coffins and mothers weeping and fainting and it was the worst scene you can ever see in your life so I mean that happened like 10 years ago I see the parents of the children they are still in pain I don't see why such pain is necessary and if there is no free will in any way in this and if if there is some being let's call God or anyone that is capable of relieving these human beings from that pain and he doesn't do that I have no idea how this can be moral in any way that's a very good question no one understands why this is necessary because it is not necessary some drunk driver caused that accident that was not necessary that was not something that God put into nature in the first place that we came from our abuse so granted that we are so foolish as to cause such horrible pains what does God do about it well he could stop it by miracle why doesn't he we wish he would it I'm not asking why he didn't stop the accident the accident happened and that's the man's will I'm asking the the feelings of the parents why I mean this this accident happened 10 years ago and the parents are still miserable and they're not gonna heal til they die so that's that's what I don't understand you know I don't either okay I don't have all the answers I don't know I will tell you one thing though from a mind far greater than mine or yours one of the great saints st. Teresa said talking about comparing earthly pains and heavenly Joy's she said the the life on earth that's the most full of horrible in inexplicable pain will appear from the viewpoint of heaven once you're there to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel now she herself experienced very great pain a very great suffering in her life so she's not minimizing earthly pain she's a saying that God has got something in store that infinitely outweighs even those horrible veins and it is at least possible to believe that and to hope that and that puts those horrible pains in to at least a perspective of hope doesn't explain them doesn't justify the Raven a journalist if I just that's my last thing so if if some being is so powerful that or he has all power in the whole world and he can relieve someone from pain and he doesn't do that I think this is kind of an immoral don't you think though I sympathize with that I think it takes a lot of trust to to believe in God realizing that he doesn't do that because any being that's like us that's on our level that doesn't do that when he can is not a good being if I'm a father and I'm sitting on the front porch of my steps my house and my two-year-old is playing in the street and a truck is coming and I could run and rescue my two-year-old from the truck and I don't do that I just sit there and let the child be run over and killed I'm not a good father yep so I'm very sympathetic with that objection we don't know why God does it and it's often very very difficult to trust him and his only answer is you got to trust me I know more than you do it doesn't look like I'm doing good use this analogy this is not a neat little answer but it's at least point you in the direction you have to go I think imagine you're a dog and you have this master who knows much more than you do and and loves you and you're running through the woods and you get trapped in a bear trap and your leg is in that trap and you're trying to pull your leg out of that trap and it's raw and bleeding and the more you pull your leg out of the trap the more the trap bites into the leg and pretty soon the leg is going to come off and you're going to die your master comes to you and he's going to rescue you from the trap but the only way you can rescue a dog from a bear trap I'm told is by taking away the tension the only way you can do that is by pushing the victim farther into the trap first so your master pushes you farther into the trap increasing your pain now it takes a lot of trust for the dog to to say okay to the master do it and not to struggle I think we can learn a lot from our dogs thank you okay well I think we have time for one more question you mentioned such virtues as courage and patience being a consequence of suffering which I agree to and I came across this in a philosophy class here at ISU as well but I felt the answer in my class was inadequate to explain if there's a logical reasoning for or against why those virtues are better than the suffering I don't know how you prove that logically that's an instinctive value judgment you you hold two pictures in your mind one is the picture of a person with less suffering and less of all those virtues and the other is a picture of a second person who has more suffering and more of those virtues now who is more blessed who is more who has more good who was more a complete human being who has not just more comfort or even more happiness in a sense of the satisfaction of overt desires but who has more good more blessedness who's better off I think the person with all the virtues and more suffering and I think most people deep down agree with that but I would not know how to prove it it's like saying why is it better to be a human being than to be a the son I mean that the son will last millions of millions of years and it's far more powerful than you are and it has no pain of course it also has no consciousness why is it better to be a human being who lasts only 80 years with a lot of pain than the son that's kind of a funny question but I'm glad I'm a human being so wouldn't you rather be a saint with some pain but who's wise and good then a spoiled selfish shallow sinner with less pain and if you say prove it to me I'll answer come on you've got to be kidding deep down you know just I do what choice is the wise one at some point or other philosophers have to give up philosophy and say come on you're kidding me thank you for more information about the veritas forum including additional recordings and a calendar of upcoming events please visit our website at Veritas org

Channel: Sensus Fidelium

Views: 122,698

Rating: 4.8143563 out of 5

Keywords: Catholic, Christian, God, Jesus, Christ, suffering, good, evil, happiness, CS Lewis, Aquinas, Augustine, sympathy, sin, Holy, Spirit, Gospel, Truth, convert, Lord, Salvation, Church, protestant, Word, offer it up, sacrifice, St Paul, Bible, St Theresa, St Pio, Prophecy, souls

Id: lQX3-kxywrs

Length: 76min 20sec (4580 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2013