TWO Ten Easy Answers "Humankind cannot bear very much reality." -T.S. ELIOT We Americans love easy, fast answers. The devil has sold as many cheap and instant answers as MacDonald's has sold hamburgers. We are impatient with Mystery, especially with a capital M. We read a fathomless profundity like the Book of Job and we say, "But what's the bottom line?" To the deepest mystery of all, the mystery of evil, ten cheap and easy "bottom line" answers are readily available. The one I shall propose instead is impossible to summarize in a bottom line, a statement, or a theory. That is one reason why each of these ten answers is popular, and the eleventh is not. I will not tell you about the eleventh answer yet because there is nothing more pointless than an answer to a question that is not fully understood, fully posed. We are far too impatient with questions, and therefore far too shallow in appreciating answers. Precisely for the sake of the answer, I linger over the question; precisely to teach appreciation of the answer, I defer it for five more chapters (one on easy answers, one more on the problem itself, and three on clues to a deeper answer). If you get impatient with me during the next five chapters, please read chapter seven before you throw the book away. Each of these ten answers is a nice, clean shortcut around the mystery. Who wants to steer into the fog bank when there are roads running through the clean air? The Bible looks like a fog bank. Its story centers on mystery. Christianity is not one of the neat, clean little roads. It is like Noah's ark, a big, sloppy, cumbersome old boat manned by a family of eccentrics and full of all kinds of animals who have to be tamed, fed, cleaned, and mopped up after (remember, Noah had no deodorants!); the ten easy answers are like sharp, trim, snappy little craft with outboard motors skipping over the surface of the great deep and leaving the drippy old ark behind as hopelessly inefficient and outmoded. Their only problem is that they don't reach port. They sink. Shiny reason founders; only opaque paradox stays afloat. To show the truth of this outrageous claim, we must first survey the ten snappy little craft and see why they sink, then more slowly and carefully explore the Christian ark and see why it doesn't. Two Levels: Thought and Life One criticism of all ten answers, and I think the most serious one, is that they are not livable. Not only are they irrational, they are inhuman. They do not solve the problem of evil where it hurts, and where it starts, in the guts and in the heart. The gut-level problem of evil moves us to rebellion rather than to philosophy. It springs from concrete, individual cases of suffering, like dying children-as concrete as a blow to the gut. But the second level of the problem, the thought level, is important too, for it threatens faith, our lifeline to God. The first, personal form of the problem asks, How can I trust a God who lets my child die? The second, philosophical form of the problem asks, Why doesn't the evidence of evil prove that God is not running this show? The personal form feels, the philosophical form thinks. Both are important because both are essential aspects of our humanity. Few would deny the importance of the first, but some would deny the importance of the second. So a brief word in defense of thought. Thought is important because it is not just subjective, not just a process inside our heads, but it allows us to live in reality, in truth. Thought contacts truth, however fitfully. It opens our inner eyes to the light. God is truth, God is light, God is ultimate reality. Therefore thought is a lifeline to God. That is its ultimate importance. Outline of the Ten Easy Answers The problem of evil is created by the apparent inconsistency among four propositions: I. God exists II. God is all-powerful III. God is all-good IV. Evil exists So it seems that we must deny at least one of these four propositions. This is what the ten easy answers do: I. Denials of God's reality 1. Atheism: no God 2. Demythologism: the fairy tale God 3. Psychologism: the subjective God II. Denials of God's power 1. Old (polytheistic) Paganism: many Gods 2. New (scientistic) Paganism: naturalistic God 3. Dualism: two Gods III. Denials of God's goodness 1. Satanism: the bad God 2. Pantheism: the blob God 3. Deism: the snob God IV. Denial of evil 1. Idealism 1. Atheism There was a rabbi in Auschwitz who kept exhorting his people to believe, to trust God. "God will not abandon us. God will save us." Then came his turn to go to the gas chamber. As he marched in line he kept saying, "God will save us. God will save us." But God did not, and the rabbi's last words, upon entering the gas chamber, were, "There is no God." But that is not the end of the story, even in Auschwitz. The next man in line, who had constantly heckled the rabbi's faith, entered the same gas chamber with the prayer "Shema Israel" on his lips. The rabbi seems more reasonable. The simplest, clearest answer to the problem of evil is that there is no God. The reality of evil seems to refute the reality of God, at least the only kind of God most people care about, a God who is both all-powerful and all-good. There are at least seven reasons why atheism is a cheap answer. First of all, it is cheap on people. The vast majority of people throughout history believe in a God. However hard evil is to accept, to justify, to explain, or to endure, atheism is even harder for most people. To be an atheist is to be a snob, for it is to assume that nine out of ten people who have lived have lived a lie at the heart of their lives, that the human race has been almost totally suckered in by the biggest con job ever invented. Second, there may be one very good argument against God-evil-but there are many more good arguments for God. In fact, there are at least fifteen different arguments for God. Evil is evidence against God. But most of the evidence is for God. Atheists must answer all fifteen arguments; theists must answer only one. Third, the very thing that seems to count against God counts against atheism. The very existence of evil proves the existence of God. Here's how. If there is no God, no creator, and no act of creation, then we and our world got here by mere evolution. And if there is no act of creation, then the universe has been in existence always, and there is no first cause. But if the universe has been evolving for an infinite time-and there must have been an infinite time if there is no beginning, no first moment, no act of creation-then the universe should be already perfect by now. There's been plenty of time for evolution to have finished. There should be no evil left. So the very existence of evil and imperfection and suffering in the universe proves the atheist wrong about the universe. There is another way evil proves God. Moral evil, spiritual evil, proves God. Spiritual evil could not evolve from mindless matter. Moral evil can come only from moral agents, souls. And where did they come from? From something less than themselves, blind matter? Less can't make more; there can't be more in an effect than in its causes. If you admit the existence of moral evil, you must trace it back to moral agents or souls, and souls to God, not to molecules. Our bodies may be made in the image of King Kong, but our souls are made in the image of King God. Fourth, if there is no God, no infinite goodness, where did we get the idea of evil? Where did we get the standard of goodness by which we judge evil as evil? Worst of all, "if the universe is so bad . how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator?" (as C.S. Lewis argues in The Problem of Pain). The very presence of these ideas in our minds, that is, the idea of evil, thus of goodness and of God as the origin and standard of goodness, needs to be accounted for. Big bangs and bumping molecules won't do it. You can understand the fifth and most important reason why atheism is a cheap answer if you sit by the sickbed of a dying child who demands of you a hope, a meaning, a reason to live and a reason to die. It is a lot easier to live as an atheist than to die as one. The most powerful form of atheism on earth, communism, explains everything but death. Communist philosophers have propagated a party line, an official philosophical interpretation of everything except death. The only thing they say about it is that it is morbid to think about it; it saps your strength away from social progress. But communists too must die. They have no choice. The only choice is to die well or not, and to die well is to die with meaning. Atheism robs death of meaning. And if death has no meaning, how can life ultimately have meaning? For death is the end of life. Here is a sixth point. I just said it is...
