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Q & A

Thank you so much, Dr. Kreeft. We’re now going to take some questions. We don’t have any time for monologues. So, please put the question in the form of a question. Ahem. Anybody willing to step up to the microphone?

Q: Romans 8:28 promises that God will work “all things together” for the good. It would seem that he is saying that for believers, for those who love him and “are called according to his purpose.” How should we regard suffering in the lives of people who are ostensibly good people by the world’s standards but who are not believers?

A: I don’t know, because we don’t know who are the chosen and who are not. I don’t think we can make that judgment. We don’t have the faintest idea. Relatively, when the disciples ask Jesus, “Are many saved?” he says, “Strive to enter in. Mind your own business.” So, we’re told about our path. We’re not told about anyone else’s. When the travel agent tells you how to get to Florida, she doesn’t tell you how to avoid the swamps in Georgia; she tells you how to go to the beaches.

Q: I don’t mean to imply that we necessarily know who are saved or who are not, but we do know that there are some who are not saved. How should we regard suffering in their lives?

A: I don’t think we have any data about that. I don’t have an answer. We haven’t been told, as far as I know. We have been told the astonishing thing that for those who love God, all things work together for good. Now, that is hard to believe. I love Thornton Wilder’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey about a Franciscan priest, Brother Juniper, who is losing his faith. He is a scientist, and he asks God for some clues, just some clues. “Life is a mysterious tapestry,” he says. “I don’t expect to see the front side where God is weaving it, but some loose threads on the back side, they should make at least some sense.”

One day he reads in a paper that a rope bridge over this gorge has parted and five young people have fallen to their untimely deaths, and he is scandalized. He says this makes no sense at all; so, he makes a scientific investigation of their lives. He interviews family members and reads diaries and collects clues, and the result of the investigation is, he thinks, he gets just enough clues to believe; so, he concludes with a memorable sentence: “Some say that to the gods we are like flies swatted idly by boys on a summer’s day; others say that not a single hair ever falls from the head to the ground without the will of the heavenly father.” Both are possible choices.

Q: Is it possible to be happy without having ever suffered? Or are happiness and suffering mutually exclusive?

A: How can you be really happy if you’ve never suffered? You are a spoiled kid; you appreciate nothing. We appreciate things only by contrast. I just came from Hawaii. There was an international conference on arts and humanity. I thought it was a real conference; there were 1,687 people who went to that conference. They all delivered papers to about two or three people, and universities paid their way. It was just a scam to get to Hawaii. I’m a surfer; Hawaii is Mecca to me. But I didn’t really deep down enjoy myself. Why not?

I guess because I am a New England, puritanical, Calvinistic Red Sox fan; there is no suffering out there. Things are so perfect. I couldn’t live there. I would not appreciate the summer without the winter. You have to live through this kind of winter to appreciate the summer. And if we never died, we wouldn’t appreciate life.

There’s a fascinating book written about twenty years ago called The Immortality Factor by a Swedish journalist Osborn Segerberg Jr. He first interviewed geneticists about whether artificial immortality was theoretically possible, and most of them said, “Yes,” and that it will come in two hundred to three hundred years. Most scientific predictions, by the way, are much too long. It will probably come much earlier than that. That’s another story. Then he looked at the old myths about immortality and the science fiction stories. Both the old myths and the modern science fiction stories— such as the myth of Thesonius the Greek or the Wandering Jew or the Flying Dutchman or the book Tuck Everlasting or Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke— almost all said this would be horrible, the worst thing conceivable. Without death, life becomes meaningless.

Then, Segerberg went to the psychologists and asked what would happen. Most of them said, “Oh, this would be wonderful— the end of suffering, the end of fear. We would have utopia on earth.” He concluded that the myths were perhaps wiser than the psychologists. So, I guess we need suffering, because we’re very stupid, and if you’re very stupid, you have to have your nose rubbed in something, since you will appreciate something only by its contrast. I’m continually impressed by how stupid I am.

One of the most unpopular doctrines of Christianity is the doctrine of Original Sin. I have no difficulty at all believing that, because I know from my own experience that whenever I sin, I suffer, but I keep sinning. I wake up in the morning, and I get assaulted by a thousand little soldiers sticking pins into my brain and saying, “Think about this, think about this; worry about this, worry about this.” If I kill them ruthlessly and give God a little bit of time in the morning, I’m happy, and everything happens well in the day. And if I don’t, it doesn’t. If I don’t do it, I’m insane! We all are. So, we need to be slapped around a bit, I guess.

Q: I would love to hear your thoughts on reconciliation and the idea of suffering in the mind of somebody who believes he or she is unforgiven as the cause of suffering.

A: You would have to address their problem, which is the belief that there is something that is unforgiven. If God is totally good, he is not Scrooge. He does not forgive some things; he forgives all things. The only possible sin that cannot be forgiven is not accepting forgiveness, which is why in traditional Christian theology, pride is the worst of sins: “I am too good to be forgiven; there is nothing to forgive.”

Q: Follow-up question: I mean unforgiven by another person, who has caused suffering.

A: Oh, that is a very serious problem. Yes, I suppose the only refuge there would be is the belief that since God forgives them, they have to forgive themselves. In other words, it can’t be just a horizontal thing, because that is blocked very often. But if both the horizontal members are connected vertically, then in a way that I don’t think we usually understand, there can be a reconciliation that we don’t usually see. That is rather mystical, I guess. I think that works even in time. Since God is eternal, he can change the past. But we can’t see that, because we are in time.

Q: You mentioned Aquinas, and, as I recall, he was a very practical Aristotelian type of thinker. How would you compare his views that you gave tonight with Augustine, who always appeared to be more Socratic? How would you compare their two views on faith, hope, and love, and, in particular, on suffering?

A: In his encyclical Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), Pope John Paul II speaks of faith and reason as the two wings of the dove— the human soul. I would say that within the intellect, Augustine and Aquinas are the two wings. Augustine is a wonderfully passionate thinker. There is nothing like The Confessions— a heart and a mind working at fever pitch together. I love the medieval statuary of Augustine. It always shows him with an open book in one hand and a burning heart in the other.

Aquinas, on the other hand, is a perfectly clear light, a perfect scientist. Augustine, you might say, is a mole burrowing through the deep mysteries, whereas Aquinas is the eagle soaring over it all, making a map. Together, they give you a great picture. Aquinas’s answer to that problem that he formulates, by the way, is wonderfully Augustinian in the sense that it is dramatic. It is not just an abstract philosophical concept. The problem is, how can there be God if there is evil? If one of two contraries is infinite, the other is destroyed. God is infinite goodness; if there were God, there would be no evil. There is evil; so, therefore, there is no God.

His answer— and he gets it from Augustine, who says that God would not allow any evil; God doesn’t do it, but he allows it through human free will. God would not allow any evil, unless his wisdom and power were such as to bring out of it an even greater good. The fairy-tale answer. We are not yet in the happily-ever-after; we are struggling toward it.

Q: I think that one of the most difficult problems that many of us have in dealing with the problems of suffering is not how we deal with them individually, but how other people deal with suffering, as we perceive it. At the end of the movie that is now certainly drawing an awful lot of comment, The Hours, one of the lead characters describes her choice that has to do with leaving her children with a very familiar phrase. Of course, in the movie you never really understand that she’s having a problem with this child; it’s revealed only at the end. The movie is about suicide, if you haven’t seen it. That is not the ending, which is much more dramatic; this is just a piece of it.

She says, “I chose to leave because I chose life.” Now, that is not ordinarily the application of that phrase— that a mother would leave her children in order to choose life. There really is a whole lot more to the film, if you haven’t seen it. I was just absolutely struck by the application of that phrase to what, to me, on the surface of it would be someone struggling to overcome evil as a very bad choice.

A: I think it’s a fake. I haven’t seen the movie, but her mistake is that she is thinking only about her own life. Life is like a tree, and it has many branches, many leaves, many roots. It is one. The idea of human solidarity, both in sin and in suffering, is rather hard for us uprooted, overly self-conscious individualists to understand, but almost any ancient people understood it better than we do. You can’t really be happy and fulfilled and alive without those to whom you are deeply connected being the same.

Q: I see you wrote a book on Socrates and Jesus. In First Corinthians, the Apostle Paul says, “We preach Christ crucified . . . foolishness to the Gentiles.” Apparently, Paul had some experience of talking to the Greeks, and as he talked to them, they said, “You are a fool.” Now, what is it about Greek thinking that makes Paul a fool in their eyes?

A: Most people are fools. The percentage of non-fools is very small everywhere. I believe Paul wrote that epistle to the Corinthians after he had visited Athens. In Acts 17, he goes to Mars Hill, where Socrates actually philosophized, and addressed the philosophers. They said, “What is this strange saying?” Now he has the opportunity to talk to philosophers. Athens and Jerusalem are coming together.

I have never been to Athens, but I have been told that Mars Hill is at the top of a long road called “the Way of the Gods.” There were statues to all of the gods, not just Greek gods, but gods of many other cultures, because people would come to Athens from many places and make sacrifices to their many gods. Paul refers to them in the first part of his sermon to the Athenians, when he says that, as he was walking up this road, he noticed that they are “very religious.” That is sarcastic, because before that, he said that his heart burned within him, because of the idolatry. You would expect he is going to say something similar to what he had said to the Corinthians: “What fools you are.” Astonishingly, instead, he says, “But one of these inscriptions I noticed was dedicated to an unknown God.”

Socrates was, in fact, a stonecutter, and there were two kinds of stonema-sons in ancient Greece. One just cut altars and letters, which was easy. Then there were the sculptors who had to do rounded human figures, and not too many people could do that. If you could do that, you got rich, but Socrates was very poor. So, Socrates cut things like altarpieces and inscriptions. As you know, if you read any of Socrates, you know that he worshipped the unknown God. He would not name this God, and he lost his life, because he couldn’t name him Zeus or Apollo or any of the gods of the state. So, it may be that Socrates literally cut this very altarpiece that Paul refers to: To the unknown God.

What does Paul say about it? “The God that you are already worshipping ignorantly, I will now declare to you.” I think that’s the other side of the foolishness. Yes, there is Greek foolishness. Socrates is not a fool, because he knows that he is a fool. He will not name the God he knows he doesn’t know. He is searching— and according to rather high authority, those who seek find. I would be very surprised not to find Socrates in heaven.

Q: I think that the apostle Paul ends First Corinthians, chapter 1, by saying, “of him we are in Christ Jesus,” that is, it is God’s choice who goes to heaven.

A: And it is also ours; it is not exclusive.

Q: That is true.

A: That is a paradox of predestination and free will, both of which are very clearly taught. That is the paradox of every great novel. Show me one novel without predestination by the author; show me one novel without free will by the characters.

Q: Well, I don’t understand. It seems to me that you are involved in a self-contradiction. On the one hand, you are saying that Socrates is in heaven. On the other hand, the apostle Paul says that the debaters of this age did not know God. Now, are you saying that people who do not know God are going to heaven?

A: No, but I don’t think Socrates is one of those people. I don’t think he was a mere debater. He was a seeker.

Q: Paul does say the Greeks have called him a fool.

A: The Greeks is a vague term, like the Jews. To stereotype a whole people or a whole race is silly.

Q: I guess to make it a long story short, I would think you would have to introduce the question of regeneration.

A: Yes, but my very conservative and traditional belief that Jesus is not just a human being but the Logos, the eternal second person of the Trinity, justifies my rather liberal expectation that a lot of non-Christians will be in heaven. That is because John says in his gospel, chapter 1, verse 9, the Logos enlightens everyone who comes into the world. So, even though Jesus is the universal savior, you don’t have to know him in his thirty-three-year-old, six-foot-high, Jewish-carpenter body. There are other ways to know him, and maybe Socrates did.

Q: I wish I could agree with you, but I don’t.

A: All right, some other day.

Q: My question has to do with the nature of God. The Scripture said, “Jacob I loved, and Esau I hated.” How do you defend to someone how a good and loving God can hate?

A: I don’t know Hebrew, but I would bet on the fact that the word hate there means the same thing that the Greek word for hate means in one of Jesus’s strange sayings: “Unless you hate your father and your mother, you cannot be my disciple.” Hate means “turn your back on, when necessary”— put second, rather than first.

So, it’s not that God was burning with hatred for Esau, because Esau didn’t exist yet. This is talking about predestination. Before they were even born, God said, “Esau is going to be the villain; Jacob is going to be the hero,” like a novelist. That doesn’t mean they don’t have free will. The novelist gives them the free will to choose heroism or villainy, but he knows what they’re going to choose.

Q: First of all, thank you for sharing your wisdom with us. Once, in a philosophy class, I heard the statement that evil is not part of creation but is the absence of good or goodness. I was wondering, first of all, if you could expand on that, and secondly, could you give me some background on where it originated, stated in that concrete manner?

A: That is probably referring to a great discovery Augustine made. He talks about it in The Confessions. He couldn’t solve the problem of evil, so he became a Manichean for eleven years. The Manicheans believed that evil; is explained by the fact that there is an evil God and a good God and that they are equal and fighting and nobody is winning forever. The evil God made matter, and the good God wants to liberate you from matter into spirituality.

Augustine never felt right about Manicheism. He was always looking for a better answer, and he finally got one— the realization that since God is totally good and that since everything that exists and is made of matter is a creature of God, therefore, all matter is good— Ens est bonum, “Being as such is good.”

Then, what is evil? Evil is not a thing; it is not stuff. It is neither God nor creature. It is not a being in that sense; it is nonbeing, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t mean that it is not real. Blindness is not a third eye, and blindness is not a cataract that causes it. Blindness is the absence of a good thing— sight. Not just absence but privation. This microphone doesn’t have sight, but that is not evil for it; it’s not supposed to. But a person’s eye is supposed to have it. So, the privation of good being in something that it is supposed to have is the answer to “What kind of stuff does evil have?” and “What is the metaphysics of evil— the being of evil?” That is the answer to an abstract question. It is not the answer to a concrete question, such as “Is evil real for me?” And “How does it appear in my life?” is a different question entirely. So, it is very important to keep those two unconfused. Otherwise, Augustine sounds like a cockeyed optimist: “Oh, evil isn’t real; don’t worry about it.” He was deeply sensitive to it.

Q: My question is in two parts. The first one is this. James said, “[C]ount it all joy when you [fall into] divers temptation, knowing [this], that the trying of your faith worketh patience” [James 1:2–3, King James Version]. How do we look at and rationalize every attempt by man to eliminate human suffering, knowing that suffering is part of what life is all about? The second part of the question is this: Since we know that suffering is not something that man actually created in himself, should we believe that, instead of helplessness, the Lord is trying to alleviate these problems?

A: The practical answer to that question is very clear. Certainly, if you’re a Christian, you believe that Jesus healed people from diseases and sufferings. He had great compassion and pity on suffering. He was completely human and showed us not just who God was but who the ideal man was. So, the Stoic attitude of indifference to suffering or the withdrawn attitude or even the Buddhist attitude of rising above it by being insensitive to it by transforming your consciousness, that is definitely not the Christian answer to suffering.

But your first question is a deep paradox. On the one hand, suffering is blessed. Count it as a joy when you go through manifold tribulations. On the other hand, we are supposed to relieve it— like poverty. Blessed are the poor— and yet the relief of poverty is one of the commandments of Christianity. Death, which is the fishnet that catches all the fish of poverty and every other suffering in itself, is the worst thing. It is the last enemy. Jesus comes to conquer it through resurrection.

On the other hand, death is glorious. There is an old oratorio that has this hauntingly beautiful line: “Thou hast made death glorious and triumphant, for through its portals we enter into the presence of the living God.” Somehow or other, in this strange drama, the worst things are used as the best things. Even morally, the worst sin ever committed, the most horrible atrocity ever perpetrated in the history of the world, was the murder of God’s Son, and Christians celebrate this as Good Friday and the cause of their salvation. It is very strange— like life.

Q: I have two questions that maybe you can expound on a little bit. The first is, isn’t there a difference between suffering and evil? And the second is, wouldn’t it be the case that evil is either the opinion of an infinite, perfect God or just every individual’s random opinion in that without God evil can’t really exist, and if somebody speaks of evil, it has to be in the context of an almighty and perfect God?

A: On the first question, you are clearer than I was. I accept your correction. On the second question, I am clearer than you were, and I hope you accept my correction. First of all, I have been talking so much about suffering that I virtually identified it with evil, and that is a mistake. There is the evil that you do, and there is the evil that you suffer. The evil that you do is much worse.

The evil that you do is, broadly speaking, sin. That is evil to your self, your character, your soul. Suffering is just evil to your body; that is the distinction Socrates played on when he said, “No evil can happen to a good man.” But on the other question, evil is not an opinion. Evil is not a point of view; evil is not psychological perspective. Evil is real; it is not a thing, but it is real. We can make mistakes about it. We argue about it. The fact that everybody argues about good and evil— “That’s good.” “No, it is evil”— means that we act as if we believe that evil is objectively real and not just a matter of opinion. We don’t argue about mere opinions. We can, but not really. I love the Red Sox; you love the Yankees. We don’t argue about that. We argue about facts. Will the Red Sox ever win a single World Series until the end of the world? We who are wise know the answer is “No, they’re under a curse.” Those who are not wise might say, “Yes.”

So, what is true and false has to have reference to an objective truth. But a mere opinion or point of view is not just true and false. Evil is not just a point of view; evil is not subjective. If you believe that evil is a subjective point of view, well, I don’t think most New Yorkers believe that anymore after 9/11. In the babble of voices that we heard after that horrendous event, one voice was conspicuously silent: psychobabble.

Q: I want to come at you from a ruthlessly pragmatic angle, being a New Yorker.

A: Wonderful.

Q: Pascal’s bet works for me, except— and this is something Pascal addressed— he said that living by faith will not damage your life; you will live a better life. You will practice the virtues, and in the end you will have a happier life. Therefore, it is not really such a risk. But what about Ignatius and his three degrees of humility? The first degree is the willingness to renounce mortal sin for the sake of salvation. The second one is an indifference toward suffering and having a happy life or sad life, long life or short life, so long as you are doing the will of God. I am getting queasy here. The third level of humility is to actively prefer a short, unhappy life because it is more similar to Jesus’s life on earth. Now, it seems to me that if your faith actually entails the third degree of humility, Pascal’s bet ceases to make sense. This is something that has been vexing me for years so I would really appreciate your response.

A: I think Pascal would say that the bet still works in the long run, even if you are up to this third level. That means that in the long run, that is, in heaven, you will have more joy. You have hollowed out your soul by these ascetic exercises so much that you can see, appreciate, and enjoy more of God than others can. So, it is worth it, even in the long run.

Q: It is worth it even on earth?

A: Yes, even on earth, because the saints are terribly happy. The two groups of people that haunt my memory and stand out as incredibly happy, truly happy, deeply happy, are the two most ascetical groups that I know. One is a group of Carmelite nuns in Danvers, Massachusetts, who live in almost perpetual silence. I was asked to give a talk to them; they gave a talk to me by their silence. And most of all, Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. They have a house in Roxbury, which is the worst slum of Boston, and they pick up the pieces of the worst neighborhood, with the worst families, and they just do what they can. I was asked to give a talk to them, and they were just radiantly happy. They get up at four a.m., they each have one piece of clothing and almost no private property, and they eat very simply. They are radiantly happy. It works.

Q: I have a question I would like to limit to evil, rather than suffering. You mentioned that in the Bible, God doesn’t give us a reason for the existence of evil. He didn’t give Job a reason; he doesn’t give us a reason for his reason. In your tremendous study and the amount of thought that you have put toward the subject, have you personally found an answer for this, and if so, where? And if not, does that lead you somewhere else?

A: Let me just give you a partial answer to that question. As a philosopher, I was always bothered by the book of Job. I knew it was a classic— I felt it was a classic— but I was bothered by the fact that God didn’t answer any of Job’s questions. I said, “Yes, God has the right to do that, but I don’t like that.” Job cops out too easily: “Yes, God, anything you say.” I don’t like slimy, pious worms who say, “Okay, anything, step on me.” I guess I’m too much of a New Yorker, and Job is such a New Yorker— until the end. He shakes his fist in God’s face and says, “You bloody butcher, how can you get away with this? I demand some explanations.” That is kind of impious maybe, but we can identify with that. Then, at the end, what a disappointment— all of these great questions are not answered.

So, I said that is a failure of dramatic art. The character of Job changes too quickly in the end. The author of the book of Job, I thought, did to Job what Peter Jackson, the director of the movie, did to Faramir in The Two Towers— which is inexcusable.¹ He is a hero, not a villain. However, reading Martin Buber— I think it was I and Thou— convinced me that I was utterly wrong. Buber is commenting on God’s pronouncement of judgment at the end of Job; the three friends of Job, who are perfectly orthodox theologians, say, in tedious repetition, “God is great and God is good, let us thank him for our food. Amen.” They utter no heresy, yet they are condemned.

Job, on the other hand, who flirts with heresy and blasphemy— “God, you are an arbitrary despot. I hate you. Get off my back”— is approved. God says— I think the words are “I am angry at you and your three friends. . . .” He blames “Bildad the Shuhite,” the smallest man in the Bible, “for not speaking rightly about me, as my servant Job has.” But they had spoken perfectly rightly about God, and Job had spoken wrongly.

“Wrong,” says Buber. Since God is the Thou who can only be addressed and not expressed and since God’s divinely revealed name is I Am, not It Is, therefore, Job, who talks to God, pleases God, unlike the three friends, who never talk to God, never pray, and never talk about him and thus do not please God.

I said, “That’s right.” Suppose I was teaching a class, and two of my students interrupted my lecture by breaking out into loud, animated conversation about the professor: “Do you think Professor Kreeft is crazy?” “No.” “Yes, he is.” “No, he isn’t.”

“Wait a minute!” I would say. “Hello, I’m here.” I wouldn’t be offended that they thought I was crazy. That is quite reasonable, but not that you would talk about me in front of me without realizing that I’m here. Well, that’s what we’re doing to God all the time.

“God this, God that.” “Hi, troops, I am here. Why aren’t you talking to me?” Talking— that’s what Job did. That’s what God wants. I think that is very profound.

Q: Are you saying that you think evil exists or possibly exists so that we will pay better attention to God, so that we will engage God?

A: We are such fools that I have to admit that’s true. C. S. Lewis puts it this way in The Problem of Pain: “God whispers to us in our pleasures, but shouts to us in our pains.” It is this megaphone that rouses a deaf world.

Q: If you accept a theistic framework, is asking, “Why?” tantamount to a lack of trust in God’s sovereignty?

A: Just the opposite.

Q: To make it practical, to give an example, one that I have wrestled with, is Eric Liddell. Eric Liddell, as you know from Chariots of Fire, ran and won the Olympic gold, and then what most people forget is that afterward, he left and went to Shantung Compound, which is the title of another great book by Gilkey. He suffered and died there. So, overlaying your framework of suffering on top of that, is all we are left with that God will have a greater purpose or is there another answer to that question?

A: If you weren’t deeply connected with God, you wouldn’t be asking him, “Why?” If you had left him, there would be no concern. The question “Why?” if asked from the heart, presupposes a relationship. It wants to add reason to faith. There is some faith there— faith, not just as thought but as personal trust. Then, that faith is ignorant. Since it is accompanied by love, it wants to know more. We want to know more about him; so we keep asking God, “Why this and why that?” That is very good. Jesus never once discouraged that kind of question. That is just intellectual honesty.

Q: Coming from the seat of Northern philosophy in Boston, can you give us New Yorkers, who experienced 9/11, some philosophical reference and reflection?

A: Can you be more specific so that I can be?

Q: Many people have lost a chance of hope. Many people have found a chance of hope, and many are still looking for that chance of hope.

A: I think great good and great evil, great pleasure and great pain, always give us a choice. We can be more wise and hopeful and good in the presence of either one, or we can be less. Let’s first take great good. A wonderful thing happens, and we can say, “Oh, now I can relax; everything is all right; no more questions.” No, no, no, a wonderful thing happens: “Where did this come from? Thanks be to God. Wow. This is a message from heaven.” It is a pointing finger that points beyond itself.

Similarly with evil. Evil just happens. I have a picture on my office wall; maybe some of you have seen it. It’s about something that happened, I think, toward the end of the nineteenth century in Paris. There is a two-story railroad station, and a locomotive plunged through the second story and fell down into the street, and there it is at an angle. A great, big steam locomotive and a single word on it— shit. That is not blasphemous; it is only obscene. It is an offense against good taste but not against good religion. That is one answer to evil, and that is counterproductive. It doesn’t do any good. But, on the other hand, what happened on 9/11 is evil. It shows me that evil is real. I am now wise. It shows me that I must have solidarity with my brothers and sisters in fighting it. So, I become more courageous.

The response in uniting New York and America, and even the world, certainly did an enormous amount of good. I won’t say it did more good than the thousands of lives that were snuffed out, but evil always rebounds. Evil always has some good fruit. I think of God as something like a French chef who uses decayed vegetables to flavor foods wonderfully. The evil always has some good purpose.

Q: I have a question about evil and suffering and the difficulty of taking a perspective on it in a culture that’s gripped with fear— which I see America as being at present. Do you think that could at all skew a perspective that you might take on evil and suffering? In other words, to the extent that you might even gather together in a really nice place like this and start talking about it as if it were something definitely real, as opposed to what somebody else might say it has been. The undercurrent of what I am asking is, is there a concern that there is an exclusion of a nontheistic perspective, of a nonphilosophical perspective? A perspective that takes into account psychological data, which I noticed you kind of pooh-poohed.

A: Not data; don’t fault the data. The theories.

Q: There is a lot of data and support of the contention that reminders of mortality actually lead to strengthening of bonding to cultural worldviews, for instance. So, do you think that there is some degree of relativity, and do you think that your view is colored by your worldview and your biases and perhaps even by your own development?

A: Of course it is.

Q: I am just wondering if you see how that colors your perspective on suffering.

A: That’s what a worldview is. A worldview isn’t a factual detail. It’s a picture of the whole. It’s a map that puts the details in a certain order, and everybody has one. Nobody can avoid one, even those who oppose worldviews. That is itself a worldview.

Q: So, how does that affect your perspective on suffering and evil?

A: It gives me light. It’s a flashlight. The data are the same. You and I both know the data. We interpret the why. There are two different reasons why two different people interpret the same data very differently.

One of them comes from the person— your character, your personality, your proclivities, your fears, your desires, your opinions. The other might come from objective truth. There might be a light that shines in one mind and not the other. Or, more likely, a light that shines in both minds, but differently, so that you see something that is really there that I don’t, and I see something that is really there and you don’t.

For instance, let’s say that I, as a typical theist, would say, “Death is great, because it leads to heaven.” I am omitting a whole lot. Death is an atrocity. Death is an enemy before it is a friend. It can be a friend, even if there is no life after death, because life on earth forever without death would be like eggs going rotten. I might not see that as someone who doesn’t believe in life after death does see it. So, since I am sensitive to that data, I have to listen more to you.

Q: So, you are still looking at forever; maybe there is just forever.

A: Yes. We all have to be open to all the data we can, but it seems to me that we have to be looking for truth, not just comparing opinions. Comparing opinions is just sort of internal mental masturbation— playing with opinions.

Q: Maybe it’s all we have.

A: If that is all we have, then we are like those two people in the New Yorker cartoon some years ago on a desert island, starving. A message in the bottle comes. There is hope. They open the message, they read it, and their faces fall. The caption says, “It’s only from us.”

Q: It may be Harvey; it may be Harvey.

A: Well, if it is Harvey, we are in for it, but at least you can still make a Pascal’s wager. There is no conclusive case that it is only Harvey. So, if both options are equally intellectually respectable, what would you gain by the despair and the emptiness by opting for it? At least Pascal’s wager makes sense, doesn’t it?

Q: I don’t look at things only in terms of loss and gain.

A: No, neither do I. That comes second. The most important question is truth. If you would give me a tremendous psychological gain, an immense amount of happiness at the expense of truth or an immense amount of truth at the expense of happiness, that would be a hard choice. But I would, at least, want to choose truth, rather than happiness.

William James divided all minds into the tender-minded and the tough-minded. The tender-minded seek happiness and ideals and comfort and integration and all that sort of thing. The tough-minded seek facts. He said that a tough-minded person and a tender-minded person can’t understand each other and can’t really have an argument. I think he’s a little wrong there, because deep down, I think we’re all tough-minded. For instance, this is a wonderful place, but does anybody really think this is heaven and that I’m God? If you thought that this was heaven and I was God and this was the beatific vision, would you be happy? If happiness is all you want, why would you believe that, because we know that it is not true, stupid. See, truth trumps happiness. So, one, truth; two, happiness.

Q: I wonder if you might briefly contrast Kierkegaard’s balancing act of faith with nature’s nihilistic will to power.

A: In twenty-five words or less, Kierkegaard’s faith is not a balancing act; it is a leap— a definite commitment with all of his heart, but in a lot of darkness. Nietzsche made the opposite leap. He said, “I will now disprove the existence of all gods. If there were gods, how could I bear not to be a god? Consequently, there are no gods.” That is faith, but it is the opposite faith. It makes no sense. It is Lucifer’s faith— “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.” I think when Nietzsche goes into hell, he will sing the words from Sinatra’s song “I did it my way.”

Q: Maybe I just misunderstood you. You are talking about the whole idea of either the result of evil or the result of suffering producing something good. I have also heard this philosophy called the Fortunate Fall— that it is a good thing that Adam and Eve sinned, because then God could send his Son. But that doesn’t seem to make sense. You also might have said something answering that other question about when you referenced death. I am just really confused.

A: If it is fortunate or good, then why not do it? If God brings good out of evil, then why not supply him with a lot of evil, because we’re not the General and we’re not advising the General. We are foot soldiers, and we have been given our marching orders. There is good, and there is evil. There is right, and there is wrong. Fight for the right and against the wrong. We’re also given little clues about the general strategy. God says, “Even when you do wrong, I can make good out of it.” That’s dangerous. It’s wonderful, but it’s dangerous and can’t substitute for the first thing. We know very clearly our marching orders. So, let’s go out and do them.

¹ This is a reference to the deviation from the original Tolkien plot in which Faramir realizes that the ring is a thing of evil and should not be used. Thus, he is not tempted to hold on to the ring but sends Frodo, Sam, and Gollum on their way. Peter Jackson has Faramir bring them to Gondor and only later release them.