Dr. J. Budziszewski

I just seemed obvious.

Obvious.

Like walking out of the door one day and saying, the sky is blue.

I thought it was pink.

So, um,

Even as an atheist, I'd read all kinds of stuff like Augustine of Hippo.

I knew about the so-called privation theory of evil.

This means...

Evil doesn't exist on its own.

There can't even be an evil thing except as a disorder or something missing in something that would otherwise be good.

So the only way that you can get an evil is by taking a good and ruining it.

The only way that you can get a horrible is to take a wonderful and ruin it.

And so if my condition was objectively horrible, there had to be an objective wonderful of which this was the perversion.

Mm-hmm.

Now, okay, that meant that there was a good and an evil.

And if that was true, that contradicted everything I've been telling myself so flatly, so grandly,

that I'd been so wrong for so long about so many things that it seemed like almost anything could be true.

So I went back and started reading all kinds of Christian stuff.

I read my Thomas Aquinas differently.

I read Augustine.