My question is related to the problem of evil
And I don't want to get too much into detail, but
my dad used religion in a lot of ways to torture me as a kid.
This included sleep deprivation for days at a time,
repeatedly being strangled, hit, yelled at, so on and so forth.
And after years of this, this led to... one night my dad loads a gun, hands it
to me and tells me that God's telling him
basically I need to shoot myself, after that he's going to kill
himself, and "we're going to go fight the devil in hell." And from my
perspective, the entire time I was praying for
comfort or for the abuse to cease or calm down. And if there really was a
God that cared about kids, how could he do nothing during all of that?
Wow. All right, Alex, thank you. That's a great question, and
first of all, Alex, there is no way we can give the reason why that
happened to you. All we can say is that is not God's will.
God does not will anybody to be tortured and
humiliated and everything that you're describing
for us right now. And so I would say I will certainly pray for you,
because I'm sure that those scars go deeper than I can even
comprehend. But understand: when you ask the
question, though, "Why would God allow this?"
Well, this is a profound question, and I
refer immediately, what comes to my mind is the Catechism of the Catholic Church—
which by the way, Alex is kind of a book the Church
has, this is the basics of our Catholic faith
explained, and in paragraph 1861, the Catechism makes this point, and I'd
like to hear your thoughts on it: mortal sin is the radical possibility
that comes from the existence of free will, as
is love itself. Now isn't that something? What the catechism is saying here is
that, look— now I'm going to add to what the
Catechism said, Alex— God could have created a world where
there is no evil. He could stop all evil
and not allow it at all. However, there are reasons
why, and they are reasonable—not that—I can't explain every particular evil and
know exactly why God allowed that particular evil—but in principle, we
can see how if God created a world, for
example where there is no evil, we were all robots
and all we could do is choose the good, well I don't know about you, Alex,
but I wouldn't want to live in that world,
in this sense: we wouldn't be human! We would be something else. We would be
less than what we are, because—you know, in fact, I was just talking with one of
our apologists about an hour ago, Trent Horn, about
this very point, and I think of even the Blessed
Mother herself, who never sinned, she was
absolutely perfect, preserved free from the stain of original sin, never
committed a sin at all— she would not be the person she is today
if there had not been sin. Right? Because, you know, we as Catholics
understand, at the foot of the cross her soul was pierced
by the sword and she joined her sufferings with the sufferings of her
son on the cross, and they together suffered for the sins
of the entire world. She experienced not sin in her own life,
but the results of that sin in the pummeling, the beating, the crucifixion of
her only son she watched from the foot of the cross; but that pain
took her to a deeper level of humanity than she could have
ever gotten to were it not for that sin. Now are we saying, "Oh,
sin is a good thing"? No, it's not, it's evil. But what we're saying here, and I
think what the Church is saying, is that it's freedom that allows for
grave evils, which only human beings can
create because of our lofty dignity having this great gift of free will.
You know, monkeys can't create an atomic bomb,
they just can't do that. They don't have the dignity to be able to do the kind of
evil that we can do. God allows that, however. In fact, He would not
allow it if He was not going to bring a greater
good out of it. God wouldn't allow it. And so
Alex, while I can't say exactly why God allowed what
happened to you, I can say in general that God will bring a greater good out
of what happened to you. He does. God does this. And the
ultimate example of that is the death of his son Jesus Christ who
is almighty God who experienced a greater evil than we
can ever imagine. In fact we're talking about
deicide here. We killed God and God allowed it only because it was
through that death that it would bring about the transformation of the entire
universe and the forgiveness of our sins, and so
God allowed it for that deeper purpose. And we're talking
about evil here, allowing evil only because
there is a much greater—in fact Saint Paul talks about this, Alex in Romans
8:18 where he says "the sufferings which we endure in this life
are not even worthy to be compared with the glory that
is to be revealed in heaven." And and we get a sense of that in the life
of Jesus in his resurrection, and in the Blessed Mother, who is a human
being who has now experienced the glory beyond anything we
can fathom as well. And we know the same can happen for us if we love God
and we continue to trust God in the midst of
these trials that we go through. Now the second point I wanted to make, because
we're focusing on evil here, real quick, and I want to get your
thoughts, Alex is that second part of what the Catechism says there in
paragraph 1861. It says it also makes possible—that is,
freedom makes possible both mortal sin,
which represents all the evils that we could
speak of, but it also makes possible
the reality we know as love. Because without freedom,
a real freedom where you can really say "No," and that's a real freedom—
you know, I use the example, Alex, of my wife. Imagine 20 years ago
on our wedding day, if I had a gun to her head and said "Either you say 'I will'
or I'm going to blow your brains out," well she may have said "I will"
but that wouldn't be love, because it's not free,
and she couldn't say "No." I was forcing her.
Well, because of this great gift of freedom, you also have this incredible
thing that we call love, that empowers
us to ascend the heights. Yes, only human beings can descend to the depth of an
Adolf Hitler, but only human beings can ascend to the heights of the Blessed
Virgin Mary or of a Mother Teresa.
A dog, a cat, a bird, a bat can't do that either. So
Alex, that's kind of a thumbnail. Could I get your thoughts?
To go back to kind of the choice thing, I understand the
the idea of "suffering to an extent has to be allowed," because
if you don't allow sin then we don't really have free will
and we ought to be able to make the choice as to whether or not we're going
to worship God and do whatever we want to do and deal with those consequences.
That does make sense to me. But the problem that I run into
is, you look at like the number of, let's say, Catholic couples that are
barren and can't have a kid and are praying and
hoping for a miracle to have a kid. Why would it be better
for God to not give, like for instance— unless my soul is completely attached to
this body— couldn't my soul even put into another
body with parents that would have actually
loved me? And not to say that the life would have been perfect,
but compared to living with PTSD and what I endured as a kid, probably
would have been a lot better. Okay. So it's like kind of like two evils.
You got the infertile parents that could
have been his parents. Right, right. Well,
first of all, I think this betrays a false understanding of the nature of
the human person. We don't have pre-existent souls
that God can put into different bodies. We are, according to scripture and
tradition, a body-soul composite.
So it's impossible for your soul to be put into a different body,
because it's the soul that forms the body,
right? So, you know, no matter what material
God was to use in creating your soul, that body would be your body. So the
idea of your soul being placed into
another body is absurd and impossible.
God can't even do that, because that would be contrary to His own wisdom.
See, God can't create—for example, He
creates us with an immortal soul. A naturally immortal soul would be
contrary to God's wisdom and therefore contrary to his nature, because scripture
tells us God is wisdom in 1 Corinthians 1:30.
So if He contradicts His own wisdom, He's contradicting Himself, and that's
impossible. As 2 Timothy 2:13 says, "God cannot
deny himself." So when God creates
us in a particular way, God binds himself, in that sense,
because it's His wisdom that chose to create
us in such a way that in order for Tim Staples to exist, Roger Staples and Lola
Staples had to get married and they had conjugal relations
and I am their son. So there's not another
possible scenario where I could be anywhere else.
I either exist or I do not. All right, but I think you have a deeper
question, though, and it gets back to what
we've been talking about with the problem of evil, and that is:
why wouldn't God make it... you know, let's say we're experiencing X
amount of evil in our life; why wouldn't God make it 50%
less than that? Because, gee whiz, I would! I would say, I would make it
50% less than what you've experienced, right?
You'd still be able to experience free will and even experience—
but I say 50% less. Well, we simply cannot know,
because we—you know, think about— we're in a novel,
right? We're in the middle of a novel here.
God is writing the novel. We don't know what the end is.
We don't know what God is working toward and
why God has allowed this or that. We know reasonably that God can. As you said,
and I appreciate you saying that, Alex, it's certainly reasonable for God to
allow evils in order for greater goods to come from these
particular evils. Now because we're not God, we can't see the
end of the novel, and we we can't know how
God is going to bring good out of this particular state where we have a
hundred percent of the evils that we've experienced,
right? But the bottom line is: we have reason
to trust—and I always get back to the person of Jesus Christ, because of course
in crucifying the Son of God we committed
not just the greatest evil ever, that's the greatest evil
possible. We killed God. God,
almighty God, became one of us to show us how much he loves us. And to
demonstrate all the things, Alex, that we're talking about,
he demonstrated in his very life and being. He suffered more than all the
sufferings of billions of souls. In fact, again,
it's hard for us to fathom, but He suffered infinitely because He
is an infinite person, He can do that, right? He's a divine person with a
human nature, so in the human nature of Christ, Jesus
suffered infinitely. In fact, he experienced
all the suffering that you experienced, Alex.
He experienced it in that he saw—I know we're getting into some heavy
theology here, but Pope Pius XII, in a wonderful
document called Mystici Corporis, paragraph 75 says that even
in the womb Christ had the beatific vision. That is he saw,
he could see, he possessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and in that
comprehension of God, he knew the entire created order. He knew
everything that was going to happen to us
and he experienced it so radically that he would say on the cross "My God, my God,
why hast thou abandoned me?" Not that he had been
abandoned, but that he was so closely configured to all of
us that he could say in our place "My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me"
in taking all the sins and all the pains of
all of us upon himself. And so what I'm saying, Alex,
is we can look to that, to God Himself who has led the charge, so to speak, He
has helped us to be able to see that when we
trust Him, we have resurrection coming. We have
a glory, as I mentioned before Saint Paul talks about, beyond anything
we can fathom, so exalted that
the sufferings of this age are not even worthy to be compared with the
glory that is yet to be revealed.