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¶ … Evil in Judaism and Taoism
(2) How does the answer to the existential "why" given by the karma theodicy differ from the answer given by the eschatological theodicy?
The karma theodicy suggests that the existence of evils upon earth, and of evils within the individual human life, should be understood in two directions -- looking back at a state before a person was born, and ahead towards a state after a person will be dead. Here life on earth becomes a sort of purgatorial existence -- the heaven to be reached is an escape from earthly incarnation. The reward of people for suffering is ultimately a removal from earth itself, and the justice of the universe is manifest in the logic of this process of death and rebirth. Time, in the karma theodicy, is understood as cyclical: souls have been here before and will be here again, and presumably...
The eschatological theodicy has, by contrast, a different relationship to time: suffering will be rewarded by a transformative event, the eschaton, within the future. The reward for suffering here is a future state -- such as heaven, or a millennial state upon earth -- which promises redemption. But redemption has already been provided by Jesus Christ, so Christian eschatology tends to focus on the second coming of Christ. Contrary to the cycle of incarnations as a process toward liberation in karma theodicy, the one incarnation that matters in Christian eschatology is that of Christ, who was God become man. Christ's sacrifice therefore has a specific relation to time (still reflected in the West's system of numbering years) -- the incarnation of Christ…
Conception of the Good One of the most critical and central aspects to human activity has presumably been the search for a good life and happiness. In attempts to understand and explain the quest for a good life and happiness, various philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Augustine have tried to explain the conception of good. Most of these philosophers have carried out their work in Athens, which is a great
If humans are not the architects of good and evil, then, it is easy to see how a human cannot be wholly good or wholly evil. An architect may be trying to emulate the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, but his or her work will, ultimately, be different from Wright's in some ways. The emulating architect will create some aspects of his or her building that are entirely his or
Upon entering a place that appears to be hell, though it looks oddly like a coldly modern, windowless hotel, each of Sartre's characters expects to be tortured for his or her supposed sins. The wait; however, turns out not to be for the arrival of some "other," but rather the discovery that one's own self, and one's fellow human beings, perform the job perfectly well. Garcin, like Judas, is consumed
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
" 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
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