Guess Who? Answers

As I am distracted by work, and preparing for a study at our church on the Resurrection of Jesus (both the evidence for and meaning of the event), as well as preparing for a talk on some medieval theologian-philosophers (Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, et al) for my son's fifth-grade class, I have just enough time to post the answers to the first Guess Who? post of several days ago.

Quote #1 Answer:

Physician, cultural critic, and (apparently atheist or agnostic) Theodore Dalrymple.

Quote #2 Answer:

Philosopher of Science, Agnostic, and frequent critic of Creationism and Intelligent Design, Michael Ruse
(HT: Paul Copan)

. . .

I found both of these quotes -- resulting from reflection on the human condition and relating it back to the Christian doctrine of human sinfulness -- fascinating in part because they come from people who do not subscribe to, or even reject, Christianity.

Dalrymple is particularly interesting because of his experience as a prison doctor and physician to the poor in England. He has seen it all, and had many one-on-one dialogues with people in a variety of circumstances, from victims to perpetrators, to self-victimizing. This base of raw exposure to humanity forms the soil for his views on human nature, on the disintegration of culture, and so on, which find expression in City Journal and other publications. His essay, "The Frivolity of Evil," (the source of the quote) should be required reading for teenage girls, if not teenage boys, who are rapidly approaching sexual maturity. In a more recent essay, "What the New Atheists Don't See," he seems to admit to being an atheist or agnostic himself, though he is acutely critical of the "new atheists" (Harris, Hitchens, and Dennett) and is sympathetic to religion for its contribution to Western Society.

Guess Who?

Here are two statements about the reality of human evil/sinfulness/fallenness. Any guesses on who penned them? (And no searching with Google or the "Search Inside" feature of Amazon.com; that's cheating!)

Quote #1:

Perhaps the most alarming feature of this low-level but endemic evil, the one that brings it close to the conception of original sin, is that it is unforced and spontaneous. No one requires people to commit it. In the worst dictatorships, some of the evil that ordinary men and women do, they do out of fear of not committing it. There, goodness requires heroism. [...] But in modern Britain, no such conditions exist: the government does not require citizens to behave as I have described and punish them if they do not. The evil is freely chosen.

Not that the government is blameless in the matter--far from it. Intellectuals propounded the idea that man should be freed from the shackles of social convention and self-control, and the government, without any demand from below, enacted laws that promoted unrestrained behavior and created a welfare system that protected people from some of its economic consequences. When the barriers to evil are brought down, it flourishes; and never again will I be tempted to believe in the fundamental goodness of man, or that evil is something exceptional or alien to human nature.

Quote #2:

I think Christianity is spot on about original sin--how could one think otherwise, when the world’s most civilized and advanced people (the people of Beethoven, Goethe, Kant) embraced that slime-ball Hitler and participated in the Holocaust? I think Saint Paul and the great Christian philosophers had real insights into sin and freedom and responsibility, and I want to build on this rather than turn from it.