Peter Kreeft on Easy Answers to the Problem of Evil

Let's face it: I live with a theologian, but I'm a "Theology for Dummies" kind of person. Fortunately the theologian in my house is longsuffering and also given to exhaustive answers to simple questions. Unfortunately, I am not always longsuffering and don't always practice perfect patience with regard to exhaustive answers. That, however, doesn't mean I don't need to hear them.

While hanging around the church last week after the Latin Mass, I picked up Peter Kreeft's Making Sense Out of Suffering. Not that I'm particularly in a place of suffering myself right now, you understand -- I'm feeling quite healthy and cheerful -- but on the whole I think it's probably better to make sense of suffering while you're not experiencing it, instead of waiting until you're in so much pain you can't see straight before trying to get some kind of handle on the big picture.

I'm only on page 45, so I can't offer any kind of book review. I've only just read the chapter on "Ten Easy Answers" to the problem of evil, which (the problem, that is) can be summarized thus:

I. God exists
II. God is all-powerful.
III. God is all-good.
IV. Evil exists.

The problem of evil, in other words, can be boiled down to a "one of these things is not like the others" formulation, which seems more simplistic than it is and can be answered in a variety of ways. In this chapter, Kreeft devotes himself to deconstructing ten of those answers: atheism, demythologism, psychologism, paganism, scientism, dualism, satanism, pantheism, deism, and idealism.

I wish I could reproduce the entire chapter, but copyright lawyers (and writers) frown on that kind of thing, so I'll have to content myself with some excerpts.

Another wishy-washy form of atheism, which often overlaps demythologism [a "fairy-tale" view of God], is psychologism. Psychologism psychologizes God, subjectivizes God. The God outside of us is rejected, but the terrible term "atheism" is avoided by substituting the God inside of us. "Truth for me" thus replaces Truth; "my God" . . . replaces God . . .

The psychologized God fails in two main areas: honesty and livability. First, the God we make up for ourselves leaves unanswered this most important question: Is this God the one who really exists? Second, the God we make up cannot create us, for we created him. Nor can he save us. He is not stronger than sin or death.

But he is, replies the subjectivist, for he represents the best part of ourselves, which is stronger than sin or death.

This is naive. It is to ignore the nearly unmitigated tragedy that is our history, to deny the reality of human unhappiness and human sin. It is to commit the monstrous non sequitur of reasoning from the fact that most of us in the twentieth century are not usually tempted to cruelty to the conclusion that mankind has no problems that mankind cannot solve.
. . .

The hidden and suppressed forces that erupted in the Nazi holocaust are endemic to the race, to the Hitler in ourselves. If there is a God within, there is also a devil within. The real devil is no match for the real God, but the devil within is often a match indeed for the God within.

And there's idealism, or the denial of the existence of evil, which seems to me to go hand-in-hand with psychologism; that is to say, it co-exists readily in the same mind which entertains the psychologized God:

Chesterton says somewhere that the great problem of philosophy is why little Tommy loves to torture the cat. Idealism's solution is to deny the cat.

But isn't this patently absurd? It's easy to deny God, or his power, or his goodness, because you can't see God. But you can see evil, can't you? Malcolm Muggeridge says that the dogma of original sin, the most unpopular of all Christian dogmas, is the only one you can prove by the daily newspaper.

. . .

Hume wrongly concluded from the fact that we don't see goodness or evil with our physical eyes that goodness and evil were mere subjective feelings in the observer, rather than real though invisible qualities of actions and of people's character . . .

This view co-exists handily with the psychologized God: a subjective God is an answer to a subjective notion of evil. The problem, as Kreeft points out, is that evil is all too obviously an objective reality.

The simplest response to idealism is to look at the most obvious and external evil: physical suffering and death. There was once a little boy who was a Christian Scientist . . . This little boy went up to his Christian Science preacher and asked him please to pray for his father, who was very sick. The preacher replied, "Boy, you don't understand. Your father only thinks he's sick. Go tell him that. Tell him to have faith." The boy obeyed and met the preacher the next day. The preacher asked, "How's your father, boy?" The boy replied, "Oh, he thinks he's dead."

Well, people around here are suffering from hunger and from a desire to go to the re-enactment day at Kings Mountain. Guess I'd better go make sense of that.