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Home , Problem of Hell

The Dr. Peter Kreeft

The problem of evil is life’s greatest problem for everybody. It’s certainly the strongest argument for . One of the ancient skeptics said: “If there’s a why is there evil, but if there’s no God why is there good?” Those are two very challenging questions, and mystery is either way. In the first page of your outline I divide the problem into five different problems, because there are five different dimensions: practical, logical, religious, epistemological, and theological. The practical problem, which everybody faces, whether they think about it or not, is ‘we all suffer and die’. We want not just an explanation, but a real solution. The second problem is a logical problem: the existence of evil seems to disprove the . There are many ways to formulate this. When wrote the Summa Theologica he looked for as many objections as he possibly could to the many thesis that he tried to prove. And to the first and most important one, that there is a God, he found only two very strong objections to the existence of God. The first one was the existence of evil. If God is infinite goodness there is no room for evil. If there is room for evil, therefore God doesn’t exist. The other one was the apparent adequacy of the natural human sciences to explain everything without Him. It doesn’t really prove that God doesn’t exist, it proves that you don't have to believe in God to explain everything else. So really there is one really strong argument against the existence of God, and that is the problem of evil. The religious problem. being a personal relationship with God, the problem is how can I trust a God that is omnipotent and can do everything He wants deliberately allows me to suffer. Why doesn’t He get me out of it? The epistemological problem: why don’t we know the answer? Why can’t we solve the problem? Why is it a mystery that always has dark areas? You get some light but not enough. We are never satisfied with that answer, no matter who we are. Why? And, finally, the deeper theological problem is that within Christian we have a doctrine called or eternal ; which is certainly Christianity’s most unpopular doctrine, and the most difficult one to defend. That seems to contradict a God of infinite power and infinite love. Doesn’t that mean God in the end loses? I like hard questions; they stimulate thought much more than the easy ones. So, in making the question five-fold instead of just single I try to make it five times harder. Let's start with the practical problem. On page two I gave you four distinct answers to the practical problem. The first and most obvious one is that there is no answer. ‘Life stinks then you die’. Do the best you can. Nobody can get out of suffering; nobody can live without suffering, and nobody can live without dying. So there is no answer. There are also a number of ways to mitigate or lessen our suffering. That’s the second answer. At least an honest one. Surely medical technology is a terribly important thing because it deals with us, with our very bodies, that part of the universe which is us. Technology is not always and uniformly a good thing. Most of us would wish there weren't nuclear bombs and drone warfare. But technology is a wonderful thing. It’s a natural thing, it’s a human thing, and especially nobody wants to go without medical technology. This is a clear example of that.

This doesn’t totally solve the problem, but it certainly helps. That’s just a negative thing though. It reduces pain. We can also compensate by adding pleasures. Divert ourselves by adding pleasures, where you can include mental pleasures, and emotional pleasures and physical pleasures. That doesn’t totally solve the problem, but it’s definitely a part of human life. Or thirdly, we can deal with ourselves, those who are suffering, and learn mechanisms to cope with it from within. The most obvious one is courage. Courage is the willingness to endure pain for a good reason. Another is compassion. If we didn’t see other people suffer, we would have no reason for compassion. The third one is hope. That extends our positive attitude into the future and not just in the present. And almost any psychologist would say that these are very important virtues. You don’t need to believe in God to believe in courage, compassion and hope. The third and more radical answer to the problem of suffering on a practical level is a kind of surgery. Recognize the thing that suffers in us and try to amend it, and maybe take it away and hide it. And the thing that causes us to suffer is that contradiction between our desires and our satisfactions. Our desires always exceed our satisfactions. Or to quote the most famous and the most rich philosopher in the world, Jagger, “you can’t always get what you want”. An ancient philosophy, and a very popular one, Stoicism, which deals directly with the problem of suffering by saying, ‘well, there are some things you can control, and there are some things that you can’t. Stop trying to control the things you can’t control. Don’t rebel against it, that adds to the suffering. And concentrate on changing what you can, especially gratitudes’. There is a lot of practical wisdom in Stoicism, although there is a lot missing. Buddhism goes one step farther than Stoicism and says let us subtract not only superfluous desires that can’t be satisfied, let us subtract all desires. If you have only a thousand dollars and you desire a million, stop desiring the other 999 thousand. Buddhism says, stop desiring even what you have because you will lose it with death. So, develop a conscience by Buddhist meditation that has no desires in it at all. Buddhism also says that ‘we’ there that suffers. You realize that you don’t really exist, you are a series of events, psychological events. Then, if there is no ‘you’ who suffers, no suffering still happens if it’s not happening in anybody. Personally I am not terribly attracted to that. It sounds a little bit like spiritual euthanasia. You kill or deny the patient in order to solve the problem. Christianity has a very practical answer to the problem of evil, it’s Jesus Christ. He suffered with us, and for us and in us so that suffering is not removed but transformed. Something with meaning. Something like the meaning of childbirth. It’s a great pain, but if you want the baby that changes the meaning of pain. It’s worth it. So if somehow you are identified with Christ's suffering, it doesn’t take your suffering away but it gives it a new meaning, a new purpose. It is better to embrace it freely, than to suffer it unwillingly. Finally the most practical answer to the problem of suffering and death is that Jesus rose from the dead. The conquest of death entails the conquest of suffering. Not an answer but an actual solution. Because the problem is not just how you explain it but what you do about it. And if His resurrection and our resurrection go together, so everyone of us will solve the problem of death definitively. I would like to concentrate on the second formulation of the problem: the logical, apologetic, philosophical. This is the deepest threat for those who believe in God. The existence of evil seems to definitively disprove the existence of God. Three formulations.

The first one is the happiness on, why doesn’t God make us happy? If He won’t, He’s not ​ ​ all-good; if he can’t He’s not all-powerful. In any case, He doesn’t deserve the name God. The second formulation which is similar, is simpler, is the concept of infinite goodness. A good that is partly good and partly evil doesn’t deserve the name God. And a God who is beyond good and evil He is not God to pray to or worship. If one of two opposites is infinite, the other is unreal. Evil disproves infinite goodness (God). There would not be room for evil if there was an infinite goodness. So, if there is evil that doesn’t disprove the existence of goodness, but of infinite goodness. Most contemporary atheists use the third formulation, The concept “God” includes infinite goodness, infinite power, and infinite wisdom. If he has infinite goodness, he wants nothing but good. And if he has infinite power he gets everything he wants, and if he has infinite wisdom, then he knows how to get it. So It logically follows that if God exists, there can be no evil. So, if there is evil, either there is no God at all or he’s a wicked God, or a weak God, or he’s an unwise God. Fourth formulation is much simpler and more practical. Life sucks and then you die. You find that in Atheists like Sartre and Camus. That's what it looks like. How can life look like that if there is God. Finally, the moral formulation, the injustice formulation, the fifth one, is why do bad things happen to good people? Why do people get not what they want, how come the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper? That’s not fair. If God is just and running the universe, he’s doing a very bad job. Those are all very clear, and honest formulations. And there are only three ways to answer any logical argument at all. You use clear terms, true premises, and good logic. If your terms are all clear, nobody can say you’re thinking in a fuzzy way . If your premises are all true, then nobody can say you’ve misconstrued the data, because your evidence is wrong. And if your logic is tight and consistent, well nobody can say you haven't proved your point from those premises. Now, I don't see any way of denying the atheist premises. The logic of the argument is certainly tight. So the only way to answer the argument is to find ambiguity in terms. I find on page four that every single one of the terms, of that argument, is ambiguous. Most importantly is the term evil. There are different kinds of evil. Most terms by the way have multiple meanings. I think the only terms that have only one and only one clear and distinct meaning are numbers. Physical evil is the evil that happens to our bodies. Spiritual evil is the evil that’s in our . Physical evil, we suffer unwillingly, spiritual evil we do or choose, or freely cooperate with our spiritual will. Very different evils...evils we suffer and evils we do. Each requires a different answer, and as we shall see, the most serious kind of evil, spiritual evil, interior evil, evil that bothers us the most, because it’s not against your will but by your will. That has a very simple and clear answer. You can’t blame God for that because you’re not God and God’s not you. He’s given you . You’re the origin of , not God. Physical evil, which is serious but less serious than spiritual evil, has a much more complex, mysterious, and difficult end. Secondly, the term happiness, especially in the happiness formulation, is ambiguous. What I mean by happiness, like most people do today is simply subjective. Most of the ancients, Aristotle for example, believed that happiness also had an objective dimension. A greek word for happiness, that Aristotle used in his “Eudaimonia”, means literally the ​ ​ objective state of having a good soul or good . In that case, you can think that you are happy when you are not. Hitler probably thought he was really happy when he conquered

France, and Job thought he was very unhappy when he was on his dung heap suffering. And yet, Job really had more objective happiness than Hitler had. Obviously we need both, but to ignore the needs for the wants, to ignore the objective good for the subjective good. Happiness for simply contentment proves that no matter what happens, if you’re content with it, that’s all that counts. That’s rather shallow. A third term that’s ambiguous is . What most of us mean today by justice is simply equality and of rational calculation, having rights that we ought to get equal, that we deserve. What I know if justice is a less mathematical and more artistic notion of justice, is what makes a great work of art. Beauty, it’s glorious, and it requires inequality. Justice in a symphony requires that not everybody plays the same note, and not everybody plays the same instrument. And the justice in the human body, Plato uses that analogy, this is to the soul that health is to the body. It’s organic. The lung is not the kidney, and the lung does a different work than the kidney. And each organ in an organism contributes to the good of the whole. You can’t look at justice simply on the individual level, as an individual organism, or instrument, or player, or part. The next three terms, , , that is infinite goodness, and , are the three attributes of God, rise to the strongest logical formulation I think of the problem of evil. And if God can do absolutely anything, including wiping out all evil, but he doesn’t, then this seems to be an unanswerable argument. But there are two notions of omnipotence. One is that God can do anything that is meaningful and logically possible, I can perform and cannot do contradictions. He cannot for instance kill himself, he cannot sin, he cannot simultaneously be good and not be good. He may turn a man into a donkey, but you cannot be both a man and a donkey at the same time. That is you cant have human reason and lack human reason at the same time. That’s meaningless. To say that God cannot do everything is ambiguous. It might mean he cannot do everything, but some things are beyond his power. Or it might mean he can do everything that is self consistent, and logically possible and thinkable. Nonsense, logical self contradictions, don't suddenly become sensible when you say that God can do them, That’s important for the free will defense, and the answer to why is there spiritual evil or wickedness. Is it possible for God to create beings with free will, and make it at the same time impossible for us to freely choose evil? The answer is no, that’s illogical. Freedom cannot be compelled. You’re asking God to do that, you’re asking God to do something that is meaningless, not beyond his power, beyond meaning. There’s also an ambiguity in the word good. If God is infinitely good, or infinitely benevolent, let’s assume that means altruistic love, love of the other, selfless love. But there are two ways of expressing that : kindness and charity. Kindness is weaker than charity, kindness is simply the desire that somebody else does not suffer. That’s contentment. Charity means that you want the best for that other person, and that includes their objective happiness. Any parent knows that sometimes you need to have tough love, charity, and be apparently unkind. -- “Come on dad, do my homework for me.” --“no, it’s better for you if you do it yourself.” --”but that makes me suffer, I don’t want to think for myself.”

--” I know you don’t want to, but you need to.” That’s charity. God is never pictured in the bible as our grandfather, grandfathers are very kind. Fathers are much more charitable. Grandfathers say, “run along and have a good time,” and fathers say, “yeah but don’t stay out too late, and you can’t have the car, and don’t run around with the wrong crowd .” Oh dad, you’re making troubles for me. Well, God is Dad, not Grandpa. This is the higher kind of love. The next ambiguous term, omniscience, is ambiguous because God has it but we don’t. So, for us to demand to have all the answers to the problem of evil is an unreasonable and illogical demand. But if God is in fact omniscient and we’re not, then inevitably, his answers to the problem of evil and his reasons for allowing evil are going to be somewhat dark and mysterious. So the fact that we can’t adequately solve the problem of evil is totally consistent with the theistic hypothesis, but if the opposite were true, it would be consistent with the atheistic hypothesis. There would be no need for God, we would know everything. We’d be the highest being. Finally, questions can be divided into what Marcel calls problems and mysteries. Problems are solvable because they are objective. You’re not interfering with the solution. You’re looking in an objective and impersonal, and honest way at the data and drawing conclusions. Science does that. Mysteries are questions that you are so involved in, that you always necessarily get in your own way. Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in Physics: your observation of the position of a subatomic particle interferes with your observation of its velocity, and vice versa. Heisenburg said. Philosophers never have solved the problem of self identity, of the unity of soul and body, of why people fall in love, of why we are so stupid and don’t do what we know will make us happy. Those are questions that we don’t have adequate answers to because our very act of questioning interferes with our answering. They are problems we are so involved in that we can’t detach ourselves from. Certainly that’s true of evil. On page five, I have two answers to the two different problems. The first one, the problem of spiritual evil, moral evil, is answered very simply. Its cause is free choice. It answers the question then of why did God create us with free choice in the first place? Why didn’t he just make us happy animals or happy robots? The answer is because God is love, and love always desires love in return, and love is necessarily free. If not, love is not love. If you want a shotgun marriage. The one thing God can’t give himself is our free choice to love him. You might say the price is too high. I would rather be a happy robot or a happy animal than an unhappy human being. If you do say that, there is no lifeguard against you. The problem of physical evil is also emotional evil is that aspect of the soul is most connected to the body. The problem of suffering: that is much more difficult to answer and I think the answer makes the most sense is that spiritual and physical evil are necessarily connected and physical evil is, necessarily, the result of spiritual evil because the soul and body are not, like Descartes thought, two separate distinct entities, like a ghost in a haunted house. Rather the soul is the invisible and spiritual aspect of that single person that is you, and the body is that visible and material aspect or dimension of that person that is you. In other words, your soul and your body are like the meaning of the words of a book and you ​ ​ can’t alter one without altering the other, and the only way to alter either one is to alter the other. Once you accept that principle that psychologists call psychosomatic unity and that Aristotle calls hylomorphism, or matter unity, then you can explain the connection between

spiritual evil and physical evil. My picture of the before and after [on the outline sheet] shows God as a magnet and magnetism here symbolizes life and God gives the soul life, spiritual life, and the soul gives the body life, physical life, and the body is related to the world in a happy way. There is no conflict between the body and the world because they are both playing the same music from God, so to speak. So we have before the fall, innocence, , and paradise. Sinlessness, deathlessness, and painlessness. No reason for sin because the soul is perfectly conforming to God’s will. No reason for death because the body is perfectly conforming to the soul., which doesn’t want to die. And, no pain because the body and the world are in perfect harmony because everything else is. Then you see after the fall, where you see the three iron rings separated from each other because they are separated from the magnet. Take the magnet away and for a while the three rings will hold together but eventually they will dissipate as they have only a little residual magnetism. Well the first separation is sin, which is basically the soul saying no to God. And the necessary result of that is eventually death, the iron ring falls apart, and pain, the world and the body also fall apart. That explains in general why sin and death go together. It doesn’t explain in particular why this person has to die at this particular time and why we don’t seem to have a just proportion of evils. It’s at least a universal or general answer. Since I am probably going to run out of time early I’m going to rush and omit some things on that rather complex page five, I hope someone is going to ask me the question about why God couldn't let us back into paradise. And whether technology can solve the problem of suffering totally becomes an exact science and gives us artificial immortality. The dream of many people living in the silicon valley. All the transhumanists. If you accept these answers, these additional answers to the two kinds of evil, the Free Will defense explaining sin, and the psychosomatic unity explaining suffering, problems remain. On page six, as I mentioned it doesn’t answer the individual problem: how are sufferings proportioned among us, we don’t know the answer to that and the idea that when Adam and Eve committed the first sin, that it becomes like an infection that the human race catches and is born into. That assumes a notion of the human race that most people don’t have today. People today are nominalists. Nominalism is the philosophy that denies that there are any real objective universals, , or that there is human nature, or justice. The nominalist think that those are just names, ways that we just arbitrarily organize into classes there are no real kinds or classes. If there was such a thing as human nature, then human nature itself changed when there was only one couple, and if the whole of human nature, soul and human body together is what we get from heredity, if heredity is not just biology then the transmission of makes sense if not, it’s the vision that I think you can’t completely restore simply by argument you have to restore it by reading authors like Dostoevsky who have a profound sense of that. Especially in something like The Brothers ​ Karamazov. The human race is a whole family and we all feel guilt about family . ​ ​ Suppose you discovered that Hitler was really your great grandfather and you didn’t cooperate with him or didn’t even meet him but you feel kind of guilty. Why? Because you still have somewhat that notion of the human race as a single family. The very most obvious problem in answering this and the reason that it doesn’t convince most atheists is that the answers aren’t clear and certain proofs, they’re clues. And they’re not proved for a number

of reasons. First of all and most obviously is because we are not God. I love that vision of Catherine, the late medieval mystic that God preached her a sermon. My favorite sermon of all time. I have ADD so I get bored very easily so I like very short sermons. The shortest sermon I’ve ever heard; so God summarizes all of divine revelation in four words: “I’m God, and you’re not.” And we keep forgetting that second fact. And that’s basically what God said to Job at the end. Job is a great philosopher, asks straight questions, he’s passionate, he’s willing to die. The ancient Jews believed that no one could see God’s face and live and Job demanded to see God’s face. No he doesn’t think he’s going to live because he needs answers to that problem. And God shows up and doesn’t give him a single answer. He says “Who are you? Did you design yourself? Are you your own creator? Were you there when I designed the universe and your life? I didn’t notice you among the angels giving me advice. And Job tells us then, at that point “Now I know two things, I know who you are, and who am I. And I repent of my foolish words.” I think until you come to some version of the answer that Job gets, until you get over that superstition that you should be able to get all the answers like God, you’re never going to be satisfied in the answer of the problem of evil. The second reason why the answers are not proved is that if there was proof, you wouldn’t need . There would be no wiggle room. Nobody needs faith to know that two and two are four, or that the sky is blue. , one of the cleverest atheists of modern times on his deathbed was approached by preacher that “Bertie, you know you’re going to die soon and you can’t be sure that there is no God so if you could meet God what would you say to Him?” And Russell said “Well I would ask Him why didn’t you give us more evidence?” Very philosophical, but a good question! C. S Lewis says in his greatest book Until We Have Faces “Why must holy places be dark places?” And Pascal in the Pensees ​ ​ gives an answer to that question. “God gives enough light to those who seek Him.” Want to find Him. He doesn’t give so much light to compel against our will those who don’t want to find Him, don’t seek Him. Everybody gets what they want. There’s a kind of deep justice to that. If there was more light, then He’d compel those who don’t want to see Him. And if there was no light at all, He wouldn’t fulfill those who want to see Him. So He gives us clues, but not proofs. In other words, our situation that the Problem of Evil is a mystery rather than a problem is exactly what the hypothesis of a God entails. And that’s point C. And finally, in most of life, we don’t have conclusive proofs. We have them in math, we have them in the exact sciences, that’s about it. Our most important decisions are not based on proofs. “Should I marry so-and-so?” Suppose you are Juliet. Romeo comes to you. He says “elope with me.” Well, you’ll notice that Romeo didn’t bring along a bevy of philosophers with syllogisms to prove to Juliet that if she didn’t elope with him she was nuts. And he didn’t bring along a bunch of lawyers. He just said, “trust me, come into my arms.” That’s what love does. It gives enough light so that you can make the if you really want to. It means you’re free.

Alright, turn to page 7. Here’s the probably simplest and strongest form of the atheist argument-- the Three Divine Attributes Formulation. If God is all good, He wills nothing but good. If God is all powerful, He gets whatever He wants. And if God is all knowing, He knows exactly how to do it. Therefore, if such a God exists, there would be no evil, but there is evil.

Therefore, God does not exist. Or, if He exists, He is either weak or wicked or unwise. One useful way of formulating that is what I put on the bottom. If God existed, then the most difficult to believe verse in the Bible would logically and necessarily be true. All things work together for good for those who love God. But, the atheist argues, that’s obviously not true. Therefore there’s no God. The only answer possible, is that his minor premise is wrong; it is true. It doesn’t look like it. Notice the verse doesn’t say “all things work together for good for everybody.” Only for those who are on God’s side, who say yes to Him. And it doesn’t say that all things are good. Obviously there are things that are evil. But that they work together ​ ​ for good. In other words, a God that is all-wise and all-good and all-powerful might deliberately tolerate evil--spiritual evils and physical evils. If He sees that He can bring out of them an even greater good. And that’s the story that you get in the Bible. God deliberately lets the snake into the grass in the Garden of Eden. He didn’t have to- He could’ve stopped that. He didn’t. He lets terrible things happen to us- good people, like Job. To His chosen people. The only reason He could do that would be if he loves them so much, and is so wise, and so powerful that He can, wisely and lovingly, bring a greater good out of that evil. Sometimes you see that, most of the time you don’t. The biggest (example) is what happened on Calvary, the greatest evil of all time. The deliberate and murder of God incarnate is the thing celebrate on a holiday they dare to call “Good Friday.’ So if He can bring the greatest good in creation by the greatest evil, the murder of God, then He can certainly do that same trick in the small because He did it in the large. That basically, I think, answers the dramatic formulation of the problem of evil, too. So, since I want to leave a lot of time for Q & A, I’m going to skip page 8, except to note that life is a story, not a formula, and stories have stages, at least 2- problem and solution, suffering and deliverance- or maybe 3, creation, fall and redemption. Every story ever told has something good in it that’s threatened, and then the threat is dealt with, either successfully or unsuccessfully. And maybe there’s even a fourth stage- after death. Teresa of Avila’s famous description of - she had a very difficult life, full of all sorts of pains, and she said that from heaven’s viewpoint, when you get to heaven and we will all share this viewpoint, that compared with what you have now, all the pain and suffering in your life will seem like a night in a bad hotel. Um, I’m gonna skip the rest of that page, and go to page 9, and talk about the last of the problems, the epistemological problem and the theological problem, all of which can be dealt with more simply and directly. Religion’s problem is religion requires a personal relationship, and any relationship between any persons involves some sort of trust. Trust is basic. In any ancient society, if you can’t trust people to keep their promises, the whole society falls apart. So, how can you and God not fall apart without trust? ​ ​ How can you trust a God that lets me suffer and doesn’t give me clear answers? God seems to let us down- either He doesn’t have the power, or He doesn’t have the love, or He doesn’t have the wisdom. And the answer to that religious problem- we’ve got 4 answers, here- the first is you can trust God by choosing to. Trust is always an option. Trust is not an impossibility, and it is not a compulsion, it’s always somewhere between necessity, which gives you no freedom, and impossibility, which also leaves you with no freedom. So if you’re free, you can, in fact, trust Him, and you can refuse to trust Him. You can say yes or you can

say no. That’s freedom. And then if you calculate whether you should say yes or no, there’s two ways to calculate- here’s Pascal’s Wager. You can calculate with your mind or with your heart. With your mind, you are seeking truth. Which is more likely to be true? Well, jury’s out on that. There’s a lot of evidence against God- all the evil in the world- and there’s a lot of evidence for God- all the good in the world. So, the evidence of the mind is not so certain. It’s reasonable to believe in God, but it’s not conclusive. Well, then let’s look at the other thing, let’s look at the heart. What does the heart seek? Happiness. Well, if you want happiness, if you want complete happiness, the kind of happiness you never totally get in this life, your only chance of getting it is that there is a God, who loves you and wants to make you completely happy- and He can do that, and offers to do that- but since you’re free, you have to accept that. So, the wager is “okay, I’m gonna believe that there is a God, and maybe I’m gonna win, and if there’s no God, I’m not gonna win or lose, because there’s no life after death anyway.” So the wager is almost the best bet in the world. You can’t lose, you can only win. Even in the lack of logical proof, it’s a pragmatic argument, that is conclusive. Not logically conclusive, but practically conclusive. The more complete answer and the more Christian answer to how I can trust in God is that you see God most perfectly in Christ. He’s the Son of God. Like Father, like Son. The total manifestation of the Father. And if you can’t trust Him, you can’t trust anybody. And if that’s what God is like, well who would not trust somebody who loves you that much? But, you still have the problem of suffering- yeah, and the answer to that is that to love is to suffer. You can either give your heart away to your beloved and suffer, because your heart will be broken, if you give it away, even to a pet rather than an actual person, or you can keep it to yourself and avoid suffering by never giving your heart away and never loving. And that’s not human, that’s not to live well. To live well is to love, and to love is to suffer, therefore to live well is to suffer. Which is part of the next answer, the answer in the next problem, the epistemological problem. We need to suffer in order to be wise, to get eyes, to get a face. Rabbi Abraham Heschel says “ the man who has never suffered, what could he possibly know anyway?” We don’t see, we don’t have “eyes” , we don’t have a complete human nature for a number of reasons. First is we’re plunged into it- the mystery rather than a problem. Another is that we’re not supposed to see everything. We have just enough light, as Pascal says, just enough evidence to see, but not too much. And the third, and uncomfortable answer is that we’re stupid because we’re wicked. Pride swells your cheeks and blinds your eyes. Sin has epistemological consequences. We all know people who are quite intellectually brilliant but they’re cynical and they believe every man has his price, and everybody’s as selfish and wicked as I am, and there are no such things as saints. Well, that’s stupidity. That’s not a lack of intelligence, it’s a lack of wisdom. And we all have some of that, and that’s why none of us can see it clearly. Finally, as a kind of a “P.S”- the last and most awful and most difficult problem is the problem of hell. If there are any human beings in hell- nobody knows how many- doesn’t that defeat God? How can a loving God possibly throw anybody into hell? And the answer is, of course He can’t. The only way anybody goes into hell is because of free will. My third of those five answers is if you look at free will, and you scratch the surface of it, you find underneath it the doctrine that there must therefore be a hell, a possibility. Because if you’re free to say yes or no to God, you’re free to say no. And if that freedom isn’t

taken away from you at the point of death, or after death, then you can say no to God finally and definitively. So if there’s no hell, then you’re not free to choose against God and then heaven is compelled, and that’s not love. Another part of the answer is that the imagery in hell is a torture chamber- you know, demons inserting hot pitchforks into unrepentant posteriors- that’s imagery. That’s probably not literally true. And even the fires of hell are almost certainly not literally true, because hell is not a part of the world, it’s not made of chemicals, and it’s not physical fire. But fire is an image of something that yes is greater than itself, worse than itself- fire destroys. And earthly fire destroys only bodies but maybe there’s a spiritual that destroys . In the biblical language, hell is not a place where you go to live in pain. Hell is a place where you go to eternally die. Jesus’s image for it was “” which is a garbage dump outside of Jerusalem where the fires never went out, cause they didn’t have matches with which to light fires. We know even less about hell that we know about heaven but the one thing we do know about it, if we’re Christians, is that it must be real because Christ says so. And if Christ is wrong about that he’s not God, he’s not infallible, and if he made a mistake about that he can make a mistake about anything. Else. Christ himself, and the Church that he authorized, and the Bible that the Church authorized, and all the saints all teach that there is a hell, and if there’s none, then they’re all either liars or fools. The same authority that we rest our faith in a God of love on is also the authority that tells us that there is a hell. So even if we can’t understand how those two things fit together, the reason, the ultimate reason for believing both of them is that, well, God says so, so it must be so. The final answer that comes from the mystics is that it is the love of God that is torture to the damned. You see that in Jean-Paul Sartre, in the famous play “No Exit.” The point of his doctrine of this life as hell is other people. Other people interfere with your freedom, and make demands on you. They want to know and be known. And if you want total autonomy that’s hell. Well, you can escape other people, but you can’t escape God. So if what you want the most is to escape God, God is a gentleman and He gives you what you want. In other words, all those who go to hell want to. The song they sing as they enter hell is Sinatra’s song “I Did It My Way.” Or as Lewis puts it, is his wonderful reading of Dante’s divine comedy, namely, “The Great Divorce”- “there’s only two kinds of people, those who say to God ‘your will be done’, or those to whom God says ‘your will be done’.” In other words, God gives you what you want, and some of us return to Him the compliment and some of us don’t. Alright, I’m finished. I hope this is enough time for a lot of questions!