withallyourmind.net

Michael Novak, at the First Things blog, has a post called Atheism and Evil. There are two points, in particular, he raises that are worth repeating. The first is that atheists are sometimes blind to the fact that an atheistic worldview does nothing to make evil more bearable or bring comfort to the troubled soul (which doesn’t even exist on an atheistic worldview):

Could it possibly improve things to believe that the long pain of human evolution was set in motion by chance alone? The atheist view of the world is actually rather bleaker than that of Jews and Christians: Suffering under the weight of evil is meaningless, and so is any struggle against evil. Everything in the atheist’s world begins and ends in randomness and chance.

Actually, evil does not even exist according to the tenets of atheism. There is no absolute standard of good by which to judge certain things evil.

Second, Novak waxes eloquent in briefly presenting a form of the free will defense. He states:

A world in which liberty can flower must be a world of laws, regularities, and probabilities, but also a world of contingency, happenstance, serendipity, surprise, and suspense. All the stuff of a good story depends on creation being not just a world of iron logic and inflexible arithmetic, but also a world of immense crisscrossing variation and “blooming, buzzing profusion…”

In such a world, there cannot be human freedom without the possibility of falling away from the good. Various forms of refusal and irresponsibility, and even the surrender of reason to spontaneity and passion, must with some high probability come into play. “If men were angels,” such probabilities might be nonexistent. But men are not angels, and therefore a free republic, built for men as they are, must be built for those who sometimes sin…

From what we know of the world we live in, the Creator, it would seem, was no utopian, and his purpose was not to make a world solely for human pleasure, painlessness, and comfort. The world instead provides a tapestry of human experience, times of joy and times of trial—even a vale of sorrows—in which the golden thread of history is liberty.

That is, at least, the Judeo-Christian story, and I’m sticking to it.