The problem of evil poses a uniquely powerful challenge to monotheistic belief, one that began to weigh heavily on me while I was serving as a military attorney in Iraq in 2006–2007. The gravity of this problem continued to trouble me long after I returned home from the war, so much so that over the next decade and a half I spent countless hours seeking to discover if a credible solution to it might exist. My focus on this issue eventually grew to include a study of the most prominent writings on the problem of evil from every era of Western history, beginning with the renowned philosophers of ancient Greece and continuing all the way to the scholarly intellectualism of 21st century academics.
Without exception, every theistic argument I encountered during the course of this long study failed to address the complex array of difficulties presented by the problem of evil. My thoughts on this seemingly impenetrable question were changed by a single insight I acquired while in Iraq. During my deployment, I took note of the extremely close friendships that developed among some of the infantrymen in my brigade. These friendships were forged under intense and fearsome circumstances, in an environment where many of the soldiers in my unit were all but forced to trust each other with their very lives on nearly a daily basis.
One day, while on patrol in a densely populated Baghdad neighborhood, one of these soldiers threw himself onto a live grenade that had been lobbed through the turret of his vehicle, saving the lives of the others inside. This man, in the prime of life, had carried out the type of act that I had heard about many times before but had never paused to carefully reflect on its enormity: he had saved the lives of his friends at the deliberate cost of his own.
By that point in my life, I had experienced several close friendships but never any that were based on the level of faith that these soldiers were placing in each other. Each of these men was willing to lay down his life for the others. Each, moreover, had faith that his comrades would do the same for him, should events so dictate. The intensity of their faith in one another had produced friendships the likes of which I had never personally experienced, but which left me awestruck.
Through them, I learned the essential role that faith plays in the experience of friendship and relational love. In time, I came to understand that faith was but one of several prerequisites for the experience of love, and that these prerequisites—together with orthodox Christian eschatological beliefs concerning the nature of timeless being—provided the key insights needed to solve every facet of the problem of evil.
–Indignus Servus