- You know, I think the very best arguments
against the existence of God
have been formulated by believers.
Now here's what I mean:
the story of Job is one of the great arguments
against God's existence
because of the awful suffering that Job, a righteous man,
he's a good righteous man, follower of the Lord,
and yet he goes through every type of suffering.
And it leads Job to question, at least the goodness of God,
if not the existence of God.
Go forward many centuries to Thomas Aquinas:
when Thomas sets up the question, 'Does God exist?'
He first lays out objections.
If one of two contraries be infinite,
the other would be altogether destroyed.
So if there were infinite heat, there'd be nothing cold-
but God is described as 'infinitely good.'
Therefore, if God exists there wouldn't be any evil,
but there is evil.
Therefore God doesn't exist.
That's a darn good argument.
Dostoevsky was a deeply believing Christian.
And yet he puts on the lips of his character,
Ivan Karamazov,
this awful argument against God.
And Ivan is trying to convince his brother Alyosha
who had been a monk,
and was a devoutly mystical, religious person.
And he says, "Look at all these examples
of innocent children
being tortured, in some cases, tortured to death."
I mean read that, and it's as convincing as anything.
So three believers-
the author of Job, Thomas Aquinas, and Dostoevsky-
all lay out this argument,
which is if there's so much evil in the world,
let's face it, there can't be an all-good God.
These are very good arguments against God.
They're the best that the atheists have-
is the argument from evil.
Thomas Aquinas says,
"God is so good that he permits certain evils,
so as to bring about a greater good
that could've never been accomplished otherwise."
There are examples where we can see that happening.
Because of this evil, something really good happened to me that
wouldn't have happened otherwise.
That job I didn't get that was so devastating to me
and caused so much suffering,
but because I didn't get that job,
I got this other job, which, in fact, has proved to be so life-giving.
That relationship that meant so much to me
that breakup just broke my heart into a thousand pieces,
but because of that I met this woman, whom I'm now married
and I found the joy of my life.
Aquinas extrapolates from those experiences
to say, 'Well, that's the way to think about
God's permission of suffering.'
I think a lot of people are tripped up
by a misunderstanding of what we mean by God.
If you imagine God as one more big, contingent thing
among others, well then there's just,
there's no evidence for that reality.
But what's extraordinary is when you look at the surveys
of a lot of young people who are disaffiliating,
it's amazing how many say some version of,
"Well, I don't believe in this Old Man in the Sky anymore."
Well, I would've hoped you let that go
when you let go of Santa Claus.
I mean, it's the same kind of thing.
And the fact that so many young people had been co-opted
by these really inadequate understandings of God, of faith,
of the Bible, of suffering, of all that.
He's a reason, I'll put it more philosophically,
why there's something rather than nothing.
Why there is a contingent, finite world at all.
So I think that's the fundamental mistake
that a lot of atheists, both old and new, tend to make.
They don't understand what serious believers mean
by the word God.
That's, to a degree, our fault.
We've been lousy at teaching and catechesis and preaching.
Catholicism is a deeply intelligent tradition,
but why do we hide those treasures away
from young people?
Young people are saying the stupidest things
about their own religion.
Well, I mean, that's to a large degree, our fault.
So there is a crisis in preaching, teaching, and catechesis,
and we gotta take some responsibility for that.