Kreeft on the Problem of Evil: "shiny reason is not the answer"

"Shiny reason founders; only opaque paradox stays afloat."

As Kreeft lays out the plan of the book he says he will first work through ten easy answers to the problem of evil -- answers which turn out to be inadequate. See how artfully he explains this rationale:

Each of these ten answers is a nice, clean shortcut around the mystery. Who wants to steer into the fog bank when there are roads running through the clean air? 

The Bible looks like a fog bank. Its story centers on mystery. Christianity is not one of the neat, clean little roads. It is like Noah's ark, a big, sloppy, cumbersome old boat manned by a family of eccentrics and full of all kinds of animals who have to be tamed, fed, cleaned, and mopped up after (remember, Noah had no deodorants!).

The ten easy answers are like sharp, trim, snappy craft with outboard motors skipping over the surface of the great deep and leaving the drippy old ark behind as hopelessly inefficient and outmoded. Their only problem is that they don't reach port. They sink. Shiny reason founders; only opaque paradox stays afloat. (page 28)

Blogging Daily, Unknown Merit

Blogging daily fetching thoughts

from passing notions fraught

with ephemeral concerns.

Bloggers publish more than print

and so in this immediacy lent

the words are more unworthy.

Media forms of past at least

tended to a better feast

for hungry mind and soul.

Of course it's not immediate

this one often indigent -

can tend to empty words.

And poems that are not at all

though definitions hear the call

define some 'poets' who are not.

Blogging daily may have merit

Gives ambitious author carrot -

but that is meager feast.

Do Words Make Real?

Do Words Make Real?

Do words make real?

Letters, concepts shaping,

sounds and shapes reflecting

light that shines on cave's stone wall?

Words give thought --

form reception, perception;

toy with what we see,

determine what we say,

define and form.

Do words make real?

Would saying so be real?

What of music -- surely

this is real. Emotive.

Speech of soul elicits;

drawing, leading,

calling tears and laughter --

dancing, otherworldy.

The Muse and those who tease,

embedding ring in soul,

pull us where they go.

But is it real because we feel,

because we yearn, because we know?​

Sartre, Camus

and brothers told us yes -

and no, for answers cannot

be their own undoing, 

words saying words not real.

Muse - wordless -

leads in world with million

points of bearing, candles

tossed about the seas:

now raging, now calm,

now lit, now gone.

What is real?

“I. Is that enough?”

Why ask? The heart knows

eternal without knowing.

To question this must speak

with empty voice;

“no” requires “yes”,

meaning nothing when “I” is gone.

Irony is weak for this,

hopeless to explain:

eye curses light,

fish defies sea,

woman denies man or man, woman.

It's very real we see

when ask

why skeptic mind alone

is given shrine, driving

masses thinking, blinking, bowing.

“The only real knows there is not,” we say,

smug but dead. We implode

in word, truth, reality. Too late.

Mortality does not lie.

The end of educated ignorance,

knowing what but never why.

A call of faith breaks through,

the soul of grasping words,

the secret home of Muse:

faith, fraught with

unfriendly friends, ideas

foreign to her person.

The true heart hears her voice,

wisdom's call: “There is,

and knowing knows it so.

Question as you will;

question the questioner.

I will be here still, rejected

lover whom to lose is

to be no more.”