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If all falls are "lucky," then we truly live in the best of all possible worlds.
While we may avoid accusations of Candidean naivete by announcing that "God" must not exist, this all-or-nothing stance lacks rigor. The persistence of evil is incompatible with certain ideas of God, but in itself this only indicates that our ideas are imperfectly refined. At its best, this approach deepens our definitions of the divine and how it interacts with both our logical systems and our lives.
Perhaps, for example, God is perfectly benevolent but has voluntarily accepted constraints on divine omnipotence in order to express this perfect love in a more sophisticated way -- we could call one such constraint "free will" and assign it responsibility for various forms of evil. Or perhaps God's omnipotence, extent, and/or benevolence, while profound, are still...
Or perhaps God transcends human reasoning and so apparent contradictions like the existence of what we would consider evil ultimately have no bearing at all on divine nature.
In any event, all of these hypothetical approaches to the problem proceed through investigating what might have otherwise been nebulous conceptions of the divine, evil, or both. At least in a Christian context, the human condition reflects both the reality of evil and the ability to discriminate between it and its absence. In any event, suffering comes all too easily to us, but the more closely we can interrogate it and our anthropological relationship to it, perhaps the more clearly we can conceive of a God who may or may not exist…in relation to it.
Even before one gets to Rowe's argument, however, one may disregard Hick's argument because it depends on imagining an infinite number of possibilities to explain away evil, rather than accounting for it. Instead of actually explaining how a benevolent and omnipotent god can allow evil to exist, Hick's argument simply states that this evil is not really evil, although with no evidence to back this up other than the convenient
She is helpless and now realizes that she is truly in need of saving. Now, O'Connor seems to be suggesting, she is actually in a position where the Word of God, which actually does promise salvation, may come to her. It speaks of the virtue of humility, which she is now in a position to develop -- not because she realizes it as of yet but because she is
Evil The free will defense suggests that God permits, but does not cause evil. Therefore, it is possible to live in a universe in which good and evil continually coexist. Human beings are blessed with the ability to make a choice that can further the objectives of God and good, or to promote the interests of evil. Although this view is logically coherent, there are clear objections to it. One objection is
" Defenses against it may be equally inconclusive, but in their fertility they at least promise a solution some day. Bibliography Adams, Marilyn McCord. Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. Belliotti, Raymond a. Roman Philosophy and the Good Life. Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2009. DeRose, Keith. "Plantinga, Presumption, Possibility, and the Problem of Evil," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21 (1991), 497-512. Draper, Paul. "Probabilistic Arguments from Evil," Religious Studies 28
Initially St. Augustine favoured the dualistic view that evil was external and separate from the world and mankind that in evident from the Manichean worldview. However, he was later to reject this strict dualism and taker another view of the nature of evil. This was more Platonic and was based on the writings of Plotinus and Porphyry. This refers to the view that evil is a measure and result of
Problem of Evil Evil has always been with humanity. From the first man that walked upon the earth up to the present day, evil has been part of life. The purpose of this paper is to show that evil is everywhere, and that, while good is also in abundant supply, evil will never totally be removed from society. The two are part of an alignment of forces; they compliment each other,