The community of Virginia Tech University is coping with the deadliest mass shooting in American history. Parents of the murdered wail with grief and outrage and the United States watches aghast. The "safety, sanctuary and learning" that President Bush observed ought to reign in our nation's schools shattered amid blood and bullets—leaving 33 dead, the gunman, deranged senior, Cho Seung-Hui, amid the morbid count.

Fresh out of college myself I felt sick to my stomach when I looked up from my computer screen and cup of coffee to the TV set in my office Monday morning. I can feel the college routine in my bones…a lazy hit to the snooze button and a bleary walk to class on a quiet morning—concerned with whether the answers to last night's problem set are right—not with the prospect of being slaughtered.

The surreal horror of the scene reminds me of the morning of Sept 11, 2001, my freshman year of college—across the country from home and family for the first time. The planes crashing into the twin towers turned the world inside out. On 9/11/01 my childish illusions of this world's safety and goodness vanished, and I woke up to the chilling fact that there is no security blanket from suffering.

As media, administrators and law enforcement spring into necessary action at Virginia Tech—analyzing the evidence, and mobilizing practical care, the full force of anguish and perplexity are just sinking in. The actions the school takes may be helpful and earnest—but when it comes to making meaning of mortality and evil at their bloodiest, the secular University is flat-footed.

The secularist authorities are in a predicament. On campuses across the country some cynical professors relish the opportunity to ridicule students who believe in the "hocus pocus" of souls and the "fairytale" of God. Recently Harvard Professor Steven Pinker protested loudly at the suggestion that a "reason and faith" component be included as part of the curriculum standards: "Universities are about reason, pure and simple," he trumpeted. "Faith—believing something without good reasons to do so—has no place in anything but a religious institution, and our society has no shortage of these. Imagine if we had a requirement for 'Astronomy and Astrology' or 'Psychology and Parapsychology.'" To give such significance to religion "is to give it far too much prominence." After all, religious belief "is an American anachronism. I think, in an era in which the rest of the West is moving beyond it."

What does the secular materialist have say about suffering when faced with the real deal? Perhaps Pinker would hand a Virginia Tech student a passage about how her loves and beliefs are just meaningless collisions of atoms. Likely she would prefer a simple, "My prayers are with you." The smug materialists would do well to stop scoffing, and face the fact that their worldview fails to give adequate answers to those such as the students and families at Virginia Tech facing horrific loss. The same faith that is mocked in philosophy, English and science classes too often in secular classrooms is exactly what everybody turns to when faced with the problem of evil.

When I was at Tufts University one day the chapel kiosk read: "Atheist Service 7:00." While this sort of dig at the sacred may be par for the course in academia today, I can't help but think that it sounds like a tasteless joke in the face of the Virginia Tech devastation. What would this service have to offer real people suffering real loss? To whom would they make petition for comfort, and what hymns would they sing?

While I will never know the songs of the Tufts atheist congregation, I do know what they sang at the convocation service at Virginia Tech Tuesday. Amazing Grace.

During the ceremony University officials turned to leaders of the diverse religious communities on campus and thousands of students stood to recite the Lord's prayer in unison. The question, "What is the meaning of this suffering?" seeks an ultimate answer—an answer from God. As it always does, the secular yielded to the sacred to make sense of suffering and evil.

There were no belittling giggles or rolled eyes in the crowd of thousands of students and teachers—no clever objections to the reality of the soul at the candlelight vigils held around campus. On everybody's lips was "the victims and their families are in my prayers," and "I thank God that I was saved." Students, families and our national community have come together before God this week—praying in solidarity for comfort from a benevolent maker.

After September 11 the churches of America were filled to the brim for a reason. Following the massacre at Virginia Tech people again turn to God for answers. There is a chink in the armor of the University's stubborn secularism that falls painfully short. Perhaps real necessity will dictate a turn. We welcome the University's uncharacteristic openness to the sacred. Please join us as we lift up the victims, families and community of Virginia Tech in our prayers.

Top Court Upholds Partial Birth Ban

tothesource applauds the 5 Catholic Supreme Court Justices for voting to uphold the Partial Birth Abortion Ban.

Christians Pray after US College Shooting

The President of the National Clergy Council, the Rev Rob Schenck, said: "The best and only thing most of us can do for these victims is to offer our prayers for them and their families, mindful of St. Paul's prayer to 'the father of mercies and the God of all comfort'.

Schenck, an Evangelical minister, also encouraged Christian leaders and parents to redouble their efforts to foster firm morals among young people: "When kids kill kids, there's something desperately wrong in the culture. No amount of laws, police officers, courts or prisons can stop a murder from happening. Only a conscience built on the fear of God can do that.

Christian Today

Historic Voices Ponder the Problem of Evil

The problem of evil is, oddly enough, to keep it a problem; that is, to provide a solution that doesn’t make evil disappear as if it weren’t real.

For example, one could take the Buddhist approach, that suffering and evil are caused by our attachment to the flux of things. Siddhartha Gautama set off to find the cause of suffering and evil, and attained enlightenment, becoming known as the Buddha, the Awakened One. For Buddha, the cause of human suffering was our desire—to be more exact, that belief that each of us exists as a “self” that can desire and suffer. To extinguish suffering, we extinguish the illusion of “self” by meditation and semi-ascetic practices. Nirvana, the highest attainable state of Buddhist meditation means “extinction.” The problem of evil is solved, not by doing away with evil, but by doing away with the self that can suffer evil.

Thomas Hobbes, the influential 17th century English philosopher, provided the west with another approach to evil. Hobbes argued that, by nature, there is neither good nor evil. All is merely material motion. Human beings are purely material beings who are driven, like agitated atoms, by pain and pleasure. Their desires are neither good or bad; they just are. Thus, in the “state of nature,” independent of society, we would and could do whatever we want: stealing food from others, raping, killing others for pleasure or self-defense, cannibalism are all quite natural. It is only when we realize that this amoral free-for-all is dangerous that we form civil society, and submit to arbitrary rules, or laws, for the sake of our own self-preservation. But deep down, we really feel that our natural state, our happy state, would be to be able to do anything we want, and to be rid of all such artificial moral restraints. For Hobbes, the problem of evil is solved by letting the “self” have anything it wants in a world devoid of the notion that there is any such thing as evil.

Hobbes’ theory became the foundation of Sigmund Freud’s notion that the endless desires of our libido are all natural, as is the desire to destroy anything that keeps us from satisfying them. Hence, it is just as natural to want to have sex with your mother, as it is to want to kill your father for interfering. For Freud, the distinctions of good and evil become necessary as artificial restraints imposed by society so that relative peace may reign rather than chaos. But deep down, our nature always chafes in discontent under these artificial restraints of civilization, and the conflict causes various neurotic conditions. The problem of evil is solved, again, by denying that there is any evil by nature, but accepting the sad truth that we must, to survive, bind ourselves with the artificial chains of civilization.

Then there is Darwin. For Darwin, good and evil must be replaced by what allows something to survive and flourish, and what hinders it. Whether one considers animals or human beings, good simply means what allows an individual of the species, or a small group, to survive in the struggle for existence. There are neither moral or immoral actions; there is only survival of the fittest, and whatever contributes to such survival is by definition good for that individual or group.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that the dual distinction of good and evil was invented by weaklings, and imposed upon the truly strong. The truly strong are meant for great actions, actions that require them to go beyond the petty distinction of good and evil. The only good thing is the will to power of the strong, and whatever they do, as long as it is a magnificent manifestation of their will, is good, however many weaklings are crushed in the process.

Each one of these solutions to the problem of evil erases the problem of evil. Each one, including the original Buddhism, is essentially atheistic. For Christianity, on the other hand, the problem of evil is so real, that it demands a divine solution—not a philosophical argument, but the incarnation of God Himself to suffer as a real person every manner of evil, so that evil might be overcome.

Benjamin Wiker

Send your letter to the editor to feedback@tothesource.org.