Theodicy and Secular Idiocy

Atheists are fond of confronting the faithful with that old saw of theodicy: "If God was real, why is there suffering in the world?"

Of course, there's a corrollary to this formulation:

"If there is no God to comfort them, how do atheists deal with the suffering in this world?"

The answer, of course, is they "explain" it:

The secular world tries to make sense of the senseless, to understand the bloody massacre at Virginia Tech.

Some point to guns. Others finger society. Still others attempt to transform the murderer into some kind of victim. Anything to understand, to convince themselves that this ... what do we call it? ... could have been prevented and that, therefore, the problem can be fixed.

Yes, something went wrong with the 23-year-old English major for him to slaughter 32 people. But the problem goes deeper than the purely secular mind can admit.

The heart, mind, and soul of man -- while capable of good and beauty and truth -- are vile, disgusting, and deeply flawed, for "the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth" (Gen. 8:21). This innate propensity to sin and sin again, this deep-down darkness, must be pruned, must be rooted out, or else it will grow like noxious weeds until the garden that is a human being will be overrun and fit for nothing more than to be burnt for all eternity.

Believers tempted to think people are naturally good, should remember that people who are good would have no need for a savior. They could save themselves. They would have no need for God himself to die upon a cross to free them from the grip of sin, death, and hell.

The real answer, of course, is that there is suffering because men have free will and they will it. Men didn't make Hurricane Katrina happen, regardless of what the global warming fools claim to believe, but men decided to skimp on the levees around New Orleans to line their own pockets, and men elected to abandoned their political leadership posts in the thick of the crisis, and men figured that they didn't need to protect themselves because that was somebody else's job. All of this made the suffering greater by orders of magnitude.

Men brought down the twin towers to kill and frighten other men.

And one man became so angry at other men that he loaded up two pistols and turned a university into a charnel house.

Atheists can seek all the "explanations" they like. The bottom line is that the Virginia Tech massacre occurred because a man decided to become a murderer, another in a line stretching back to the second man ever born.