Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Michael Novak Examines Evil and the Atheism

First Things' On the Square today features an essay by Michael Novak that is worth your attention. It's titled Atheism and Evil. Here is a snippet to whet your whistle.

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.
Read the entire essay here.

Incidentally, Mr Novak also has an interesting article recently printed in USA Today and available on his website. It's entitled, Reconciling Evil with Faith.

It's high time we all did some serious meditation on evil and suffering.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Samuel Skinner
The answer is yes. Our desires have no bearing on what is true or not.

As for bleaker... not really. Suffering is only meaningless if it is pointless. If you suffer for a cause it helps the cause.

The Byzantine Rambler said...

Interesting comment. Unfortunately, it is short-sighted. But, I suspect you are not really an atheist at heart.

dianonymous said...

Father, ths isery off-topic...but, each time I've tried to respond to your e-mail to me, it has bounced back. I will keep trying. :-)

The long and short of it, though, was: Oh my goodness, I didn't realize you were that far away, and I wouldn't dream of asking you to make the trip to W-S! Mea culpa!

God bless,

Diane

Samuel Skinner said...

Non magical thinking is shortsighted? I perfer the term "reality based".

As for "not being an atheist at heart... nice that you can read my mind.

earlcapps said...

Solzhenitsyn also talked a lot about the importance of faith in defining the West. To him, a lot of faith went hand-in-hand with a loss of courage, which he saw as the first step towards the decline and fall of a civilization.

The biggest threat to the West is not radical Islam or Chinese hegemony, but rather the growing self-loathing in which it simply decides there is nothing worth fighting for, nor does it have any moral right to fight for survival.

The Byzantine Rambler said...

Dear Samuel:

"The term 'reality based'" is itself a pejorative term. The concept of reality has no single agreed definition.

As to your not being a true atheist, this is not mind reading. It’s an observation about your intelligence. You are clearly too intelligent to not believe in God.

The Rambler

 
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