According to standard solutions to the logical problem of evil, there is some additional feature of the world that is impossible unless there is moral evil. The presence of moral evil permits some added value to the world. According to added value solutions, if there were no moral evil in the world, there would be no libertarian free will, no greater goods, or no fully built souls. Since there is significant value in these features, the world is better with them and with moral evil than without them and without moral evil. Most defenses play upon added value, but one defense argues that there is no way to remove moral evil from the world without diminishing the…
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Governing and Human Nature
Consider the present state of political discourse. Isn’t it, at least in part, a discussion about evil and what to do about it? Of course, it also involves thinking about some things as evil and other things as good. But once a political group has decided what they think is evil, the debate is all about what to do about it. Debate over the environment is about what to do to confront the bad effects of successful economies. The debate over wealth and poverty becomes a debate about how to shrink the income gap. The same is true of debates over firearms, border control, the moral status of the unborn,…
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On Desire
Dissatisfaction is a mental state induced by not getting what one wants. Desire is also a root of evil. As James puts it, “each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death” (James 1:14-15). There are at least two proposals on the cultural table for dealing with desires. Neither way works. The first way is to attempt to remove desires from the inside. This is the way of ‘enlightenment’ – coming to believe a new truth – there are no such things as desires. They appear real, but…
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Eight Great Lewis Quotes
C.S. Lewis knew how deal with human pretentiousness: cut it out by the root. In Lewis’ hands our self deceptions are like some hidden terrorist cell who finds itself under the precise assault of special forces. For example, in The Problem of Pain, Lewis unearths some particularly well bunkered little wickednesses: We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are exceptional single acts and make the opposite mistake about our virtues–like the bad tennis player who calls his normal form his “bad days” and mistakes his rare successes for his normal Beware lest you are making use of the idea of corporate guilt to distract your attention from those hum-drum,…
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A Case for Punishment
“Lock ’em up!” Punishment, in our culture, conjures up images of a Dickensian, authoritarian and bleak society, one marked by shouting and hitting. While there is no doubt that evil people use punishment as an excuse for cruelty, I’d like to suggest that punishment itself is morally justified. Much as I’d like a world without punishment, I don’t think we can have it if that same world has moral evil in it. So, I’d like to go against the grain: punishment is right, not always and not every kind and certainly not with hatred in the heart, but justified in a fundamental way. Actually, I’d like to go a tad…
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The Real Exorcist
Apparently the writer of The Exorcist had no idea that anyone would find his book scary. He wrote it because he thought a story needed to be told. A real story. You can listen to the entire interview here. The reality behind stories of demon possession is largely ignored in our culture. We explain everything in terms of the physical and the psychological. Halloween is, in part, an attempt to make light of such evil realities, at least to turn them into novelties driven by the entertainment industry. Christians, on the other hand, are committed to the belief that there is more than meets the eye in our world. We believe that…
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Horrendous Evil Always Begins in the Human Heart
There will be psychology – what was his mental state? Who was caring for him? There will be chemistry – what was he on? Did he abuse? There will be technology – what computer games did he play? How long every day? There will be politics- should we ban guns? There will be sociology – do affluent sons of broken families need help? And there will be biology – what gene causes violence? But an explanation of evil, if it starts anywhere, starts in the deceptive heart of human beings. Jeremiah writes, “the heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?” There is no…
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What Does God Want?
What do Christians mean when we talk about the will of God? On the one hand we talk as if God has control of all things, he wills all things. On the other hand we talk about things being against God’s will, what we call evil. This sounds like an inconsistency, if not a contradiction. Perhaps we say these things without really thinking about it. It might be okay if there was nothing wrong with the world, no evil, but, as it is, it appears that God doesn’t get what he wants. How can God both will evil and yet not want evil? Recently, Senate Candidate, Richard Mourdock, raised the…