We Cannot Remove Pain—the Felt Reality of Evil—from this World
I want to state an important truth from within the Christian worldview at this point. By removing the pain from the human experience, Sam Harris is, in effect, trying to remove the felt reality of evil. There is one fundamental difference between God allowing a death to take place and me taking another life: God has the power to restore life; I don’t. The story of evil is one part of a greater narrative. To ignore the greater narrative is to continue to raise particulars without accepting the general. In fact, there is no option left but to say there is no such thing as evil and there should be no such thing as pain. Psychiatry, in fact, is wrestling with the ramifications of a drug that removes guilt and remorse. What kind of a world will we have when a rapist can take a morning-after pill?
If it is possible in our finite world with our limited knowledge to be able to appreciate just one benefit of pain, is it not possible that God has designed this awareness within us to remind us of what is good for us and what is destructive? As horrendous as the illustrations may sometimes be, can we not see the moral framework that detects atrocities and resists tragedies? Could there be a greater, deeper answer than simply saying there is no God?
It was another atheist, O. Hobart Mowrer, who went on record as saying that by denying the reality of sin, we have, in effect, lost our way as human beings and now find ourselves groping in the dark for a definition of the meaning of life.
Denying the existence of God leads us to preposterous conclusions so that, in the end, the amoral world of the skeptic who simply cannot explain good is worse than the world of the theists who has an explanation for evil. This, as I see it, is at the root of our differences. Harris simply denies the condition of the human heart, in spite of abundant evidence to the contrary. I recall Malcom Muggeridge once having remarked that the depravity of the human heart is at once the most intellectually resisted yet most empirically verifiable reality. Wickedness is always excused as anything but the moral degeneracy that has resulted from each one of us becoming the god of God.
This is an excerpt from The End of Reason by Ravi Zacharias. This book is available at OMF Lit Bookshops and our online store, shop.omflit.com for P425.
In The End of Reason, Zacharias underscores the dependability of the Bible along with his belief in the power and goodness of God. He confidently refutes Harris’s claims that God is nothing more than a figment of one’s imagination and that Christians regularly practice intolerance and hatred around the globe. If you found Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation compelling, the book you are holding is exactly what you need. Dr. Zacharias exposes the utter bankruptcy of this worldview. And if you haven’t experienced Harris’ book, Ravi’s response remains a powerful, passionate, irrefutably sound set of arguments for Christian thought. The clarity and hope in this audiobook will reach out to listeners who know and follow God as well as to those who reject God.