Fundamental questions are much more easily asked than answered

[I]t is worth noting that the superior simplicity and clarity of problems over solutions is not a feature peculiar to theology. It applies to all major intellectual issues, philosophical as well as religious. One can raise in a few sentences puzzles about the validity of sense-perception, about the possibility of knowledge and the possession of truth, or about the authority of conscience and the validity of moral judgements that have exercised philosophers for more than two thousand years and are still exercising them today. Under the customary protocol of dialectic the critic is not obliged, in formulating his sceptical challenge, to enter deeply into the complexities of the problem. On the contrary, his question stands out more clearly when these are left undeveloped. But, on the other hand, the issue, once opened up, may require for its further investigation and illumination farreaching trains of reasoning and a very wide conspectus of thought. Thus fundamental questions are generally much more easily asked than answered; and there is no reason to be surprised or perturbed that this should be so in relation to so immense a problem as that of God and evil.

👉 John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, Palgrave Macmillan, Λονδίνο - Νέα Υόρκη, 1966/2010, σελ. 5-6.