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Evil and Suffering
The logical problem of evil is that if God is all-good then evil should not exist. Perhaps one can argue, then, that evil is a creation of man and that God cannot not prevent that, but God being Omnipotent, and, therefore, by definition able to accomplish all should be capable of preventing if not destructing evil. Either then God is not all good, or he is not all able. Or, alternately, another reason should exist in order to explain the existence of evil.
The whole earth… is cursed and polluted. A perpetual war is kindled amongst all living creatures. Necessity, hunger, want stimulate the strong and courageous; fear, anxiety, terror agitate the weak and inform. The first entrance into life gives anguish to the newborn infant and to its wretched parent; weakness, impotence, distress attend each stage of that life, and it is at last finished in agony and horror. (Hume, 2006, p.55)
If the world, according to Philo (in Hume's Natural Dialogues) had an omnipotent God ruling it, and the omnipotent God were compassionate too, the very existence of evil infers a contradiction. God has to be either omnipotent or compassionate or suffering has to not exist. Cleanthes considers the universe to be harmonious and structured, but a brief glimpse at the world tells us that it is a miserable place filled with evil.
The universe, elaborates Philo, is a machine with each creature in it fighting for survival. It is, as Darwin would put it, a race for life that is determined by 'survival of the fittest'. Here, it is not happiness that is the goal, but a ceaseless struggle of
The value-judgment that is implicitly being invoked here is that one who has attained to goodness by meeting and eventually mastering temptation, and thus by rightly making responsible choices in concrete situations, is good in a richer and more valuable sense than would be the one created ab initio in a state either of innocence or of virtue. (1977, 255)
Suffering, in other words, makes us better and stronger humans, and the fact that the world is so designed to include suffering is only to reinforce us, and this supports the argument of intelligent design rather than destructing it. God's plan is to incorporate suffering for spiritual growth.
There are arguments against Hick's reasoning. Firstly, suffering is not confined to human; animals suffer too. How can you justify that? Is their pain supposed to be for their spiritual growth. And how justify suffering against vulnerable humans such as infants or people so ill that they are called 'vegetables' (having lost all ability of consciousness)? How can they, lacking intellectual and mature characteristics of will, grow through their sufferings?
Secondly, this game of soul-making doesn't seem to be played very well: some people die young before they have a change to use their suffering for growth. Others endure suffering so great that it impedes…
Source
Hick, J. Evil and the God of Love, New York: Harper and Row, 1977.
Hume, D. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. London: SCM Press, 2006.
Once again, the theist can simply point out that human knowledge -- either our own, or in the collective sense -- is not only incomplete but not even necessarily close to complete. Furthermore, inference from incomplete evidence is dangerous; before Columbus, European philosophers would have felt themselves on firm "rational ground" to suppose that no edible starchy tuber existed, and yet the potato would have proved them wrong. Attempts to
1. Using the language of possible worlds, explain what it means to say that ‘p is consistent with q.’ The idea that p is consistent with q is a logical premise that supposes there is a world in which p and q can both be true. This premise contrasts with the premise that p is contradictory of q, which states that if p is true, q must be false and there
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
Origin of Evil The origin of evil has been a controversial issue not only in the contemporary Christian circles but also among the ancient Greek Christians. The point of contention in the discussion about the origin of evil is why a good God would have created evil. The Judeo-Christians struggled to understand how a good, powerful, and all-knowing God could allow evil to exist. The logical conclusions were that either God