I imagine as a famous actor Jim Caviezel has had a few interviews in his life, so when I saw that headline I simply couldn’t pass it up. By now you’re probably familiar with the blockbuster hit movie, Sound of Freedom, which has become a hit despite “Hollywood” doing everything it could to ignore it. You have to wonder why a movie about exposing the sexual trafficking of children is something to be ignored. The topic is horrific to even contemplate, but I’ve heard it’s a great film and treats the topic in a respectful and even holy way. We’ve tried to see it, but it’s been sold out in our area. We will persist!
This interview includes the man about which the movie was made, Tim Ballard, a modern hero if there ever was one. He runs an organization called Operation Underground Railroad, a reference of course to the operation of the same name before the Civil War which rescued runaway slaves. I very much encourage you, even implore you to watch/listen to the entire interview. It’s brutal, and you have to be prepared to hear of evil that is simply incomprehensible. I briefly want to share why I would encourage such a thing: evil.
Over the four plus decades I’ve been a Christian I’ve come across people, both in person and in writings and recordings, who either doubt or abandon their faith because of the existence of evil. The understandable struggle of how evil could exist if there is an all loving all powerful God is not something we can wrap our minds around. That’s one reason the struggle as been referred to as “the problem of evil,” the “problem” supposedly being one for Christians to answer. Indeed, Christianity does need to answer such a conundrum, but every worldview that human beings embrace has the same “problem.” The issue for Christianity, though, is that since the so-called Enlightenment and Voltaire, this has been pushed in the secular West as a particular problem for Christianity. The sense you get is that if Christianity can’t answer adequately, people can reject it and no longer have a “problem.” That is simply untrue.
For all of recorded history human beings have been trying to answer the question, why. Every child as he grows up and begins to experience life says, “That’s not fair!” Whence this notion of fair? Or the notion that something is “wrong”? Why do we feel a sense of injustice when we are wronged? Why when we see or experience wrong we long for justice? For wrongs to be righted, for wrongs to be punished? C.S. Lewis titled the first chapter of Mere Christianity, “Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe.” He argues that all people in all places and times agree standards exist even if they disagree on the exact nature of the standards. He wrote the book, a series of talks, in the midst of World War II, and says if there no is Right and Wrong, then blaming the Nazi’s would be like blaming someone for the color of their hair. If Right, as he says is a “real thing,” only then and only then can we say what the Nazi’s did is Wrong. And remember, Lewis was an atheist into his 30s, partly because his beloved mother died when he was 9, and he experienced the horrors of World War I.
This brings me to Jordan Peterson and the interview with Caviezel and Ballard. As I said of Peterson in a recent post, he “has studied evil maybe more than any living human being,” yet for him instead of rejecting God, he clearly believes Christianity is the only thing that can make any sense of it at all. I don’t know the exact nature of his faith (God does), but he is one of the most effective Christian apologists of the 21st century, and studying evil is one reason for that. In fact I recently heard his daughter, Mikhaila, say he is currently writing a book disproving atheism. That should be interesting! When you listen to the podcast, Tim Ballard says his faith helped him deal with the horrific reality of human evil in child sex trafficking (he’s Mormon). And when Caviezel dove into Ballard’s horrifying world to prepare for the part, his Catholic faith helped him deal with it.
When we think about this “problem,” we need to understand that every religion and philosophy in all of recorded history is an attempt to deal with it, explain it, make sense of it, to answer the why. We don’t choose to be born, and before we know it we find ourselves conscious and involved in some massive cosmic drama of good and evil. The why haunts us because in so many ways it doesn’t seem to make sense, especially when we do not see wrongs and injustices righted. The only religion or philosophy that claims to know the answer is Judaism and its fulfillment Christianity. The former gives us the answer of why it exists (Genesis 1-3), and Christianity the solution. It is worth considering how this solution involved the greatest injustice ever perpetrated. An ostensibly perfect, sinless man who never did anything wrong and claimed to be God, allowed himself to be punished by a grisly and shameful death as a common criminal to pay the penalty of the wrongs others did.
Each of us had to decide for ourselves whether we believe that is true or not, but what we can confidently say is, there has never been any other answer to the “problem” like it. Especially because his followers claimed his rose from the dead in fulfillment of the Jewish religion in spite of such a thing being inconceivable to them, then being willing to give their lives for that claim. I personally find Christ’s life, death, and resurrection the only plausible explanation and answer that exists. In our day because we live in the post-Enlightenment secular West some people think if they are not “religious” they can escape having to provide an answer, but the “problem” still needs to be addressed, or just eat, drink, and be merry . . . . But as challenging as Christianity can be for some people to believe, every other ostensible explanation and “answer” has much bigger problems.
I’ll just address one. Most other religions and philosophies make no claim to know where evil comes from or why it exists—it just is. For those embracing some kind of demonic or evil force, that just is too, often like Manicheism believing good and evil are two equal forces battling it out in the universe. Augustine, the great 5th century Bishop of Hippo and one of the greatest thinkers of all time, once embraced it, but found it wanting and eventually embraced Christianity. Either option ignores or pushes aside the burning question inside the breast of every human being: why? Their answer? Who knows, just deal with it. In my mind the least plausible non-explanation is what Lewis implies in his critique, atheistic materialism. If all we are is lucky dirt, mere atoms in motion, products of random chance that come from nothing for no reason at all, right and wrong, good and evil are in the end meaningless concepts. Morals are mere preferences, like what flavor of ice cream I prefer. I prefer genocide, you prefer orphanages and hospitals. You say tomahto, I say tomaato. Que sera sera . . . I would suggest to Doris Day the future is indeed ours to see because a man 2000 years ago came back from the dead to tell us.
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