EVIL & EVOLUTION: A THEODICY

Chapter 1

Problems, Mysteries, and Truth

...if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was
necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. (Feodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Book 5, Chapter 4)

The "truth" against which Dostoyevsky's character, Ivan Karamazov protests is most difficult. At its core is the riddle which has plagued human belief and trust in God from the very beginning. From the earliest cave wall attempts to ward off the unseen spirits that disturbed the order of nature to the anguished cries of those who died, or even survived, the agonies and outrages of totalitarian labor and death camps, the protest has constantly been raised: "Oh God, how could you?" or "Oh God, why me?"

The first and most obvious truth which must concern us is the fact of evil. Yet for many, stunned by this truth, the existence of God is not so obvious. Thus Ivan Karamazov, the archetypical unbeliever, confronts his younger brother Aloysha, the would-be priest, with the undeniable fact of evil in the face of the hidden God.

For Ivan, given the catastrophes of nature and the atrocities of humankind, the truth was unacceptable. Had Dostoyevsky only lived to even begin to imagine Dachau or Auschwitz after his own exile in Siberia, or even only to see the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, belief in a God who would allow such things to happen might be more difficult if not impossible. Surely the confrontation with the truth presents us with a problem and, beyond that, a mystery.

A. Problem and Mystery

"What is truth?" To Pontius Pilate's scoffing question Jesus remained silent. For Socrates truth was the conformity of the mind to what really is -- the accurate grasp by the human intelligence, as far as possible, of reality. Jesus had already told Pilate the truth and Pilate was not interested. Pilate thought that his power came from Rome, even though this was only superficially true. Perplexed by the problem of what to do with this man who stood meekly before him, who he himself had declared innocent, Pilate yielded to political expediency, first sentencing him to scourging, and then, finally, to death. Thus for Pilate the truth was a problem.

For those who call themselves Christians, this man Jesus was, and is, the truth. This truth is (as Peter attested him to be) "the Author of Life" who had to die before the truth could make us free. And therein lies the mystery,

A problem, according to the philosopher Gabriel Marcel, can be pondered, analyzed, and eventually solved. But a mystery, a true mystery, can only be lived. Problems confront us as immediate and apparent contradictions or dilemmas while mysteries are, by definition, hidden and unyielding to logical analysis. The truth which Pilate could not grasp, and which the elder Karamazov (who stands for the unbelieving side of us all) refused to accept is such a mystery.

Approached merely as an isolated problem, any answer to the question of evil runs the danger of compounding the very evil which supposedly is to be explained. Thus in treating the Jews as a social problem (which indeed Christians had long made it to be) Hitler supplied an "ultimate solution" which compounded the evil of anti- Semitism to a degree scarcely imaginable. The price of ignoring the mystery of God's first chosen people remains disaster for Jew and Gentile alike. No amount of problem solving can dissolve a true mystery and the so-called "Problem of God" remains unsolvable in the face of evil only for those who, like Ivan Karamazov, refuse to enter fully into the mystery of God's life -- and death.

But there is another danger here, and that is the one of "mystification," a danger that Ivan rightly protests. To mystify is to attempt to make a mystery out of what is basically a problem by failing to use the evidence and logic which may be available to clarify an issue and resolve it. That this often occurs is understandable, but it is never helpful, generally misleading, and in the end obscures the true mysteries in life. Yet this is just what has often happened in dealing with the question of evil. Most primitive tribes, even in our own day, ascribe all death and sickness, and even old age in some cases, to malevolent spirits. So too in our own history--witness our own tradition's story of Eve and the Serpent!

Yet if there has always been an inclination to thus mystify the problem of evil, there has often been efforts to de- mystify the problem as well. One tribe in present day Papua (New Guinea), seeks to solve the problems caused by the lack of knowledge and understanding of disease, old age, and death, by holding a ritual trial each time someone falls ill and dies. In this way they attempt to fix the blame on some member of the tribe or anyone who might have conceivably caused this person's death. In a society where head-hunting only recently ceased, such logic is not altogether faulty, for many deaths were the result of murder.

Similarly, in the Old Testament Book of Job, we are presented with a dramatic encounter in which Satan makes a deal with God to allow him to inflict God's good servant Job with a series of disasters in order to test his fidelity to God. Three well-meaning friends who come to console him in the midst of his woes attempt to solve the problem by accusing Job of wrongdoing -- anything, even something he can't remember. Through all this Job's wife, taking what might be called the "Ivan Karamazov approach", suggests that Job curse God" and drop dead! Curiously, later translators and manuscript copyists, shocked by this attitude, changed her words to "bless God and die"--thus attempting to give a supposedly more religious interpretation of what Job should do.

But we must not smile too much at these halting attempts to explain the problem of evil. They are attempts, however crude, to de-mystify the question. There may very well be, as the psychiatrist-philosopher Carl Jung has pointed out, a "dark" or "shadow" side of God which accounts for the evil in the universe. The Book of Job, even when tampered with, seems to have at least confronted what our Western religious tradition has otherwise failed to even recognize.

Thus Dostoyevsky as well as the original author of Job have each made their point, which is the real blasphemy that an overly facile mystification of evil presents. To ascribe evil directly to a God who we claim to be all good and powerful is not only a seeming contradiction of logic as well as an insult to such a God, but also the surest way to legitimately question whether such a God could possibly exist. Should we, like Job, refuse to be consoled by easy and even seemingly logical answers and be ready to bow down before the true mystery - the unfathomable mystery of God? Or should we take the advice given by Job's wife? We shall see more of what Dostoyevsky's Ivan has to say, but for the moment let it be clearly understood that the unnecessary mystification of the problem of evil solves nothing and only does violence to the true mystery of God.

Yet the question must be posed: Does the attempt to solve the problems surrounding the existence of evil really remove the mystery? For example, if an innocent child dies, due to a senseless mistake in a hospital, does it help or hinder human understanding and acceptance of a fact that cannot be changed (a dead child) to ascribe blame to human failure (a hospital employee careless about antiseptic procedure), or to malevolent agents (somebody with a grudge against the parents or child), or simply to nature (a microbe going about its parasitic life-cycle)?

Now the possibility is that one or any combination of these factors could be responsible for the child's death. Yet does it do any good to engage in such detective work so long as we persist in adding to all these possible causes the idea that "God wanted a new little soul for heaven?" Would not this pious rationalization be the worst mystification of all? Yet if we truly believe that God is the creator of all natural processes and of all the agents (human or otherwise) that played a part in this child's death, do we not find ourselves forced to admit that there is at least a certain "permissive will" of God which, although it may not have ordered any of these things to happen, nevertheless allowed them to? If so, it seems in some way logical to blame God.

Personally, I think there is enough mystery in God without adding to that mystery those problems of evil which are apparently solvable. To mystify evil is to come perilously close to glorifying it -- to worshipping it in place of God. Not too many years ago,a nurse who went to a Central American country to assist some missionaries was warned by the padres not to go near a certain mountain village because the Indians there had decided to worship thirteen devils. One would suspect, knowing the disease-ridden and poverty-stricken conditions of these mountain tribesmen, that the easy answers so long repeated about suffering according to God's permissive will had finally backfired. In their simple minds, Ivan Karamazov's faith-shattering protest had found a primordial answer. For them a good God was not in control; the devils were. "Prostrate yourself before me and it shall all be yours." (Luke 4:7)

Must we give up and worship the thirteen devils whose captain Jesus refused to serve? No! Countless generations of Christians have believed what Jesus in his desert fast already knew -- that the "mystery" of evil is a false god who is powerless before the mystery of the true and only God.

I watched Satan fall from the sky like lightning... See what I have done, I have given you power to tread on snakes and scorpions and on all forces of the enemy, and nothing shall ever injure you. (Luke 10:18-19)

Is it possible, then, that the "mystery of evil" is a pseudo-mystery, one destined to fall from its dazzling place of cosmic enthronement in human minds? Dare we hope that, like venomous snakes and scorpions, evil will be rendered harmless in the end? Christian faith answers this question and tells us that ultimately this will be so.

In the meantime, can this false mystery be unmasked for what it is? Is it not a problem not unlike those that evaded primitive peoples' attempts to make sense of them, yet which seem ludicrous today, were it not for the suffering such ignorance perpetuates? I, for one, think so.

The reason for my confidence is that I believe Christ came to destroy all superstition. Superstition is more than belief in magic or spells, astrology or any other fatalistic resignation to the forces of nature. At its heart, superstition is the misplacement of faith, the centering of our trustor fears in supposed powers that"stand over"(from the Latin, super-stare) or against our efforts to become what we are capable of being. To grant evil the crowning title of "mystery" without qualification is to superstitiously place it on a par with God.

B. The "Problems" of Evil

If we insist that evil is a problem rather than a mystery, it should be evident by now that a major reason proffered for the supposed "mystery" is that there is no single problem involved. Rather there is a whole complex of intertwined problems.

When, for example, Dostoyevsky's Ivan protests that he cannot accept the fact of a single innocent child's suffering being in any way compatible with the designs of a good and loving God, what is he in fact saying? Is it that he finds the existence of an all-good creator incompatible with any evil whatsoever? Or is he saying that only certain kinds of evil are incomprehensible such as natural disasters, perhaps, or human cruelty -- to mention two very different sorts of evil? Or is he speaking specifically about a single instance of human outrage that seems to have no plausible purpose in the vast scheme of things? While a careful reading of this "Rebellion. (the title of this chapter of Dostoyevsky's book) would indicate that he is attempting to speak for all the frustration and anger of the human race, still, is not the very passion of this passage a witness to that kind of confusion, or mystification, that a mingling of the various problems causes?

The first problem, that of the coexistence of God with any evil in the universe seems, upon closer examination, to cause Ivan Karamazov no great difficulty. Dostoyevsky's Ivan seems willing to admit that in creating free creatures God is necessarily opening the door to the existence of some evil. Yet, as we shall see (in the next chapter), even on this level the problem of any kind of evil in the world raises profound questions, ones which threaten the concept of God as we have been generally taught to think. Given the fact of evil, can God really be all-powerful or all-good? Could it be that God is the "despot," the "executioner," or the "imposter" that the outraged philosopher Nietzsche said God is? Is not a "good God" who creates a universe with any kind of evil in it a contradiction in terms?

Suppose we conclude that the existence of a good God is in some way compatible with or allows for some evil, at least temporarily, in the universe. If so, what kinds of evils might be understandable? To probe this second question we have to consider more deeply the nature of evil and its varieties; moral, physical, and psychological. We will have to consider whether or not some of these kinds of evil make sense, perhaps for the sake of a higher good - something which even Ivan Karamazov seems reluctantly willing to admit.

Even at that more specific level we are only talking in the realm of theory unless we get down to the concrete instances. It is here that we will have to confront all the seemingly senseless and brutal evils visited upon the innocents of creation, and it is here, with Ivan Karamazov, that we may find ourselves at wit's, and perhaps at faith's, end, For despite the abstract conclusions concerning God and good or evil as such, and despite the distinctions between the specific kinds of evil, we are still faced with the incessant question of "Why?" -- why this little child? Why these innocent thousands or millions or more? To what possible good? These are the questions, the outrages, that "cry to heaven for vengeance." Yet no answers seem to appear.

This last problem, involving countless concrete instances of the suffering of the innocent, the problem which the English theologian, John Hick, has termed, with characteristic understatement, that of "excessive pain and suffering" remains the final problem of evil. Even if some evil should prove compatible with the existence of God -- specifically those evils which seem necessary for the appearance of a higher good -- still there remain countless examples in which no good purpose seems to be served. Even a single instance of such evil should outrage our sense of justice.

Thus Dostoyevsky's Ivan speaks of "the sum of suffering" and yet, as shall be seen, he bases his sense of outrage on the occurrence of even one innocent child's suffering. This may be a ploy. The innocent child, to the degree it is really innocent of all sense of guilt or is without any conscious fear of death, suffers much like the simple beast; uncomprehendingly, dumbly. Rather, we suffer more for its sake, out of compassion -- suffering with and for it.

Some, among them C. S. Lewis, would argue that such compassionate suffering, at least on a collective level, is nonsense. Any one person can suffer only so much pain. Beyond that, the individual organism and psyche apparently lapses into insensibility. Thus Lewis in his The Problem of Pain, argues that there can be no such thing as "the unimaginable sum of human misery" nor any "such thing as a (collective) sum of misery, for no one suffers it... the addition of a million fellow sufferers adds no more pain" (pp. 115-16). (One wonders if Lewis could have written this had he foreseen Auschwitz and the other death camps that added millions more!)

Despite the logical tightness of Lewis's argument, it presents little comfort to the human sense of justice or compassion. There is a certain universally shared sense of outrage not only at what appears to be the senseless suffering of a few innocent individuals, but proportionately more outrage over the undeserved suffering of millions upon millions. When Ivan Karamazov protests the suffering of even one innocent child, he is protesting, rightly or wrongly, the suffering of all innocents.

In the face of all this, logic apparently fails, not only in our inability to formulate the question in terms that adequately grasp what we sense is true, but even more in our failure to see any possibility of justice in God's ways. One is tempted to side with the Ivan Karamazovs and the Nietzsches of the world. Maybe, at this point, we suspect Job's wife was right and that we should take her advice to curse God and drop dead!

Instead, like Job, we protest. If Job, in his presumed innocence, seems too good to be true, it is because he is a symbol of universal man. Not that we each presume our own innocence, but as Paul Ricoeur points out, Job's self-assured sinlessness forms an essential part of the story if it is to come to grips with the apparent senselessness of suffering.

The agnostic Ivan Karamazov may well know himself to be guilty and deserving of punishment. But his urbane and cultured sensitivity rebels at the apparent senselessness and enormity of suffering in general. He secretly mourns his own impotence in the face of evil. Thus, if we cannot claim complete innocence ourselves, we use the obvious innocents in the world as symbols of the irrational side of our own suffering. Focusing on this apparent irrationality, we tend to feel justified in side-stepping the confrontation with that ultimate mystery which lies at the heart of the universe -- and God.

C. The Heart of the Problem

"If only the universe had a heart!" This anguished cry of the French existentialist Albert Camus somehow sums up all the protest, frustration, and seeming hopelessness of the human condition in the face of what often appears to be overwhelming evil. Beyond all the refinements of metaphysics, the careful considerations of the distinctions among kinds of evil, or the concrete instances of human suffering, there lies a juncture or coming together of all the "problems" of evil in a single baffling question: Does existence in fact have any meaning beyond the feeble meanings that we ourselves give it? For Camus, this question lies at the core of all human anguish. For some, this meaning or "heart" is God; but for others it is simply ourselves, existing alone as rational, reflective beings in the universe. Over against us stands the universe itself and the evil which, to our eyes, appears to permeate every level of its existence.

The heart of the problem of evil is not one single thing and yet, if it could be named, it would be this "heartlessness" -- this cruelty which we not only visit upon ourselves but which is inflicted upon us by all the forces that combine to generate the universe. The question does not concern itself simply with God as opposed to evil. Nor is it limited, despite what Camus may have thought, to ourselves as confronting a universe which gives us existence for a moment and then would snuff it out. The heart of the problem combines all of these.

If there is no God, how are we to conceive of any ultimate good or evil? To whom are we to protest? If there is no real, lasting evil, what can we protest? If we do not really exist as rational and especially as free beings, then what is the point of our protest? Without this freedom, could anything we say or even think have any significance? As for the universe, although it certainly exists, what is its point, its meaning? Of what value are its successes and failures except as they somehow reflect a "purpose" or "aim" inherent in the very structure of existence itself? The "heart" of the universe, if there is such a heart, must be found at the conjunction of these questions, and the heart of the problem of evil, as well as the key to any unlocking of it, will be found there.

Therefore it must be said from the outset that four critical factors will be presumed to exist fully as they have generally been understood: first, the existence of a personal God who is the creator of all; second, the existence of evil as a tragic reality; third, the existence of human beings as free and responsible agents; and fourth, the existence of the universe as a dynamic, evolving reality with its own laws of growth and development.

My repeated insistence on the full reality of these four pivotal elements may seem like an exercise in the obvious. It is not. As we shall see, too many easy "solutions" to the problem of evil have been offered at the price of eliminating one or another of these critical factors. In some ways they are like the four cardinal points of the compass. If a traveller merely wants to go to some specific place, he needs only to "orient" himself in the direction desired. This, however, being a journey of exploration, a sure sense of every major direction is needed.

To begin any exploration of theodicy we must,like Job, first take our stance, confronting God. Like the polar star, God lies completely beyond us in many ways, transcendent in respect to this world in "otherness." True, theology also holds God to be the immanent "ground" of our existence, but like the ground beneath our feet, this aspect of God taken alone gives us no sure direction or sense of where we are going unless, in the distance, there is a point which still lies beyond us. Any theodicy, indeed any theology, which loses sight of this transcendent otherness of God loses, at the same time, any sense of movement or dynamism. A completely immanent God is too easily identified with whatever exists and in whatever manner it exists. In such a situation, the question of justice in theodicy becomes meaningless, for mere existence has little or nothing to say about the concepts of good or evil. Without a better "beyond," an absolute good that beckons us, there is little point in speaking of "worse" or "worst." In this sense, Dostoyevsky's statement that "Without God, anything is possible" had perhaps been better translated "Without God, anything goes!" It may be said that "Man is the measure of all things," but without the image of God, we have also lost the standard of measuring what we could be.

At the same time, on our left (our "sinister" side so to speak) we must take into account the actual reality of evil. For too many theodicies, Christian ones in particular, have succumbed to the temptation to optimistically "write off" the existence of evil as inconsequential or at least a temporary thing in view of the ultimate victory of Christ, This may not be the same as "trivializing" evil, as some critics of Christianity have claimed, any more than the doctrine of "Original Sin" can be rightly seen, in a balanced Christian perspective, as a totally pessimistic view of the overall human condition. Still, to liturgically characterize that sin as a "happy fault" (as does the Easter liturgy -- because it "merited" so great a Redeemer) or to rapturously exclaim "Sin must needs be, but all shall be well," as did the Thirteenth Century mystic, Juliana of Norwich, can be misleading. Such expressions lead many people to conclude that Christianity sees evil merely as a passing phenomenon against the backdrop of eternity, either discounting the enormity of evil or else glorifying it as a means to a higher end. Nothing, I think, could be farther from the truth.

In much the same way, a major part of the landscape of theodicy becomes distorted or even totally ignored when the fact of human freedom or responsibility is denied. This tendency has very ancient roots, going back to the materialism of some of the [earliest] Greek philosophers, and even has its counterpart in some Christian theologies of "predestination" and total human depravity. Today, however, the denial of human freedom enters modern consciousness mostly through the tenets of scientific materialism and behavioristic psychology. While such views do not necessarily ignore the facts of pain and suffering in the world, they are correlative, in a way, to the denial of genuine evil. Without human responsibility, can we rightly speak of "evil"? Perhaps we might speak of "discomfort," "anguish," "cruelty," or "sadism," but the concept of "evil" requires something more. Even the notion of divine justice itself, as protested by Ivan Karamazov, presupposes that suffering is in some way, or at least ought to be, deserved as a punishment. When humans are not on trial then, God should be. If God alone is on trial, on what basis do we, if we bear no responsibility, assume that there is any such thing as responsibility (in the moral sense) in the first place? Who are we to judge?

Ethical and metaphysical questions like these might well leave one doubting God's goodness or even God's existence, and confused about the meaning of evil, or about our existence as thinking and willing human beings. Traditional theodicy has, I believe, floundered, not on what it has denied, but on what it has failed to sufficiently consider. We have assumed that the structure of the universe was well enough understood to be taken for granted. No one was tempted to deny what he could see beneath his own feet. One could deny God because God was the least seen. One could deny evil because "evil" might be simply a concept expressing a limited point of view. One could deny human freedom as a more or less universal self-delusion. But the world itself could not so easily be denied. Even when the apparent reality of the world was denied by some ancient philosophies and religions, it was to explain how the world was not what it seemed to be, not to deny that in some form it existed. For them, it was not the world that was so much the problem, as was the evil that was seen as existing in the world. If the reality of the world could be explained away, then so might evil.

We are, however, the self-proclaimed "realists" of the modern Western world. We have believed that our feet have been firmly planted on the ground, even when dealing with theological subjects. Yet we have all too often forgotten to look down or even beneath the surface of things. Like the Antarctic continent, the last to be explored, the bedrock foundations of our physical origins lay concealed beneath an unyielding ice cap of centuries upon centuries of accumulated obscurity. As long as humans have existed upon the earth, we have remained for the most part content to live within the temperate zones of our familiar existence while directing our more ambitious urges toward the world beyond. There seemed no conceivable reason for even mapping, much less digging into that forbidding continent of the remote past.

Did not all creation come "from nothing?" Did not human freedom have its origin in God? As for evil, did that not also arise (inexplicably perhaps, but nevertheless ultimately) despite God's good intentions? The few who questioned generally looked in the wrong direction, too often asking "why?" and "for what purpose?" before first observing the "how" or the manner by which things came to be.

Why did this so consistently happen down through the ages? Was it that the subject was considered to be beneath us? Was it because we simply didn't have the tools to extract the accurate information? Or was it, as it still is for many, because of some great fright or shock that might be felt?

Evolution is a threatening word for many, particularly the religious-minded. It conjures up fleeting visions of primeval chaos, catastrophic upheavals, extinct and long forgotten species, "ape-men" and "missing links." Yet if the world as it really is, and not just as we would like to imagine it, is a major element in our picture of theodicy, then it may just be that evolution itself will turn out to be the real missing link. Just as the general "theory" of biological evolution has become the working model for the major part of modern scientific endeavor, so too I believe, as did Teilhard de Chardin, that any area of human thought, be it sociology, psychology, history, even philosophy or theology, must take the evolutionary structure of our world and our development into consideration. Theology depends on philosophy, if not for its total content, at least for its language and thought forms - but philosophy depends on cosmology (its overall world-view) for its initial grasp of and insight into reality. Without an accurate assessment of nature as it really is, philosophy and theology run the danger of existing in a vacuum of unreality. This is truer regarding theodicy, which is forced to deal not just with the "spiritual" world of divine-human interaction, but with the elemental realities of the universe as well.

When I speak of the knowledge of evolution as a prime necessity for a comprehensive approach to theodicy, I am not according it this place in a half-hearted or grudging way. It is not a case of being obliged to let modern science have its say while hoping that it won't upset things. On the contrary, I see it as an asset. It is true that studies dealing with God's justice have kept multitudes of theologians occupied (if not always gainfully so) during the great spans of time before the emergence of modern evolutionary theory. Yet the concept of evolution, of a slow, progressive development of one thing out of another, from a lower form to a higher is not new. It was given a biological interpretation as long as ancient Greece! The concept of evolutionary progress even comes into play in some vague way in traditional theodicy; for example, when it was claimed that evil could exist for the sake of a greater good. What really is new is that we have begun to understand the physical mechanisms of evolution and been able to apply the basic philosophical concept of evolution to the facts of biological science. The result has not been for the assembled records of the past (such as the evidence amassed by paleontology) or for the laboratory-proven facts of biological sciences (such as genetics and microbiology). The result has been much more far-reaching. In the past many appeals were made to the creative designs of God, even when no one pretended to comprehend them. Philosophers had long conceived idealized orders or degrees of being but with little result in an actual understanding of nature. Finally, with the aid of evolutionary theory a way was found in which the observable facts of nature not only began to coalesce into a unified picture and to provide, on this basis, a predictable course of new discoveries, but also to open up a new vision of all reality.

The result has been nothing less than a total revolution in human thought. Like the Rosetta Stone which unlocked the secrets of an ancient world whose mute monuments had puzzled successive civilizations, the knowledge of biological evolution has provided a key to unlock the secrets of reality, including the problem of evil, on a much broader scale. The theological or philosophical explorer could perceive evils as immobile immensities looming up before him like the ancient sphinxes and pyramids in the desert wastes. But he could not begin to fully comprehend their meaning. Much of what he saw seemed to make sense, but so much else seemed senseless, excessive, enigmatic. Only with the new discovery of an ancient language could the past then speak not only of the past but of the present and future as well.

In devoting as much space as I have to an evolutionary view of the world I am not trying to claim that the final answer to the problem of evil has been found. If I have insisted that evolution in some way belongs to the heart of the problem of evil, I do not mean to imply that through it, alone, the evil in the universe can be explained away or that the problem of evil's real existence is thereby solved. In some ways, a universe in evolution is much more heartless than one which is seen as coming ready-made from God -- even from an angry God! An evolutionary view, while explaining much, also complicates things, not only in our attempts to clarify what is evil or to understand the scope and significance of human freedom, but also to comprehend the very nature of God. Yet despite all this I am firmly convinced that, in plunging to the depths of the heart of the problem of evil, we shall also find what Camus could not -- that the universe, for all its seeming brutality, does have "a heart". This truth does, indeed, demand its price in suffering, but what price can be placed upon a heart?

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