An Agnostic Psychologist (and Bestselling Author) Changes His Mind on the Existence of Evil

The famous American psychotherapist M. Scott Peck was for many years an agnostic. He learned his psychiatry according to the standard model in which there was no such thing as evil. But at around the same time as, to his own surprise, he came into the Christian faith, he came to recognize that in some cases at least it was not enough to regard certain patients, or in some cases the families of certain patients, as simply ill or muddled or misguided.

He was forced to come to terms with a larger, darker power, for which the only word was evil. He wrote his book People of the Lie to…