The Problem of Evil, Dystopia, and Dostoevsky's ‘The Brothers Karamazov' | Prof. Stephen Meredith

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2023

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The speaker's handout may be found here: https://tinyurl.com/mry498c9 This lecture was given on February 15, 2023, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Stephen Meredith is a professor at the University of Chicago’s Departments of Pathology, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and Neurology. He is also an associate faculty member in the University of Chicago Divinity School. He has published more than 100 journal articles, focusing on the biophysics of protein structure. Much of his work has been the application of solution and solid-state NMR to the study of amyloid proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease. He has also published articles on literature and philosophy in diverse aspects of medical humanities and bioethics. His teaching includes courses to graduate students in biochemistry and biophysics, medical students, and undergraduates and graduate students in the humanities, including courses on James Joyce’s Ulysses, St. Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, Dostoevsky (focusing on Brothers Karamazov), Thomas Mann and David Foster Wallace. He is currently working on a book examining disease and the theological problem of evil. Other current writing projects include a study of James Joyce and the problem of evil.

Transcript

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0:52.3	Okay, so we're going to talk about Dostoevsky and the brothers Karamazov to start.
1:00.1	So Dostoevsky wrote a lot of books that focused on the problem of evil.
1:08.6	Crime and Punishment, Underground Man, demons, brothers Karamazov, among others.
1:13.6	Now, just a brief definition of the problem of evil, what is the problem of evil?
1:20.6	This is the particularly Christian form of the problem of evil.
1:26.6	Essentially all religious traditions, including atheism,
1:29.5	have a theory about evil. But it's summarized in this quote from the fifth century, Roman philosopher
1:37.0	Bofius, who wrote on the consolation of philosophy. And I'll read it in English, if God exists, whence evil? If not, when's good? Now, to fill it out
1:51.5	slightly, if God exists and is all good and all powerful, why is there evil in the world?
2:06.3	Now, one of the reasons this problem is so thorny is that it's a trilemma. Instead of two branches, there are three, and it's a bit like playing
2:12.7	whack-a-mole, you hit one and another part pops up. So if you attack goodness, if you attack power,
2:20.3	if you attack the existence of God, you get other problems popping up. And so this is a form of
2:27.0	the question from Lucretius on the nature of things. He was quoting or paraphrasing Epicurus, the Greek philosopher,
2:36.8	and this was handed down in Hume's dialogues concerning natural religion. He quotes this form
2:44.3	from Lucretius, and I won't read it, but it says basically what the problem is. If he's all good, he wants to stop evil, if he's all powerful, he can.
2:55.9	So why is it that there's evil in the world?
2:59.7	Now, we sometimes take these terms as being self-evident, but they're really not.
	...

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