Throughout the span of human existence, we have continually possed certain vices. The vice labeled as Evil, is the most nebulous of these. Not only do humans have problems with evil, so do supernatural deities such as God. Religion has faced several strides since its infancy, yet none is more strenuous to solve then the Problem of Evil. The problem of Evil occurs when there is a deity that is omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient. Although the deity has these formidable traits, there is still evil in world. This is a paradox, so we must ask ourselves does that deity truly have those powers? Some might claim we might have to bite the bullet one of the “trinity” Epicurus was an ancient greek philosopher who constructed the Epicurean Paradox. This paradox starts with the premise that God is omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient.
“If God is willing to prevent Evil, but not able. Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
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Epicurus task the theist with a difficult question.
There have been several approaches to solve this problem. The Theist might claim that there is evil in the world in order to bring a greater good, but J.L Mackie in Evil and Omnipotence meticulously displays why that theodicy is faulty. Mackie asserts God cannot claim omnipotence and be unable to create a universe containing moral good while simultaneously lacking moral evil. Alvin Plantinga brings forth a formidable theodicy, called the The Free Will Defense. Plantinga asserts that God created us with free will so consequently it is not within the sphere of omipotentness to bind the will of an inherently free creature. I, shall be writing nor about Mackie or Plantinga but rather the erroneous assumptions entangled in
Omnibenevolence. My apprehension, rather lies with the second premise of the Epicurean Paradox. Omnibenevolence is the capacity to be infinitely good or a desire to do good to others. Yet, do or should we act upon all our desires? This question becomes even less abstruse when we incorporate God’s omnipotentness. It is plausible that God desires everything in the world to perfect but chooses for it not to be? We should not confuse Omnibenevolence with altruism. Altruism refers to the practice of being unselfishly devoted to the welfare of something else. We make the inherent assumption that since God is good, it would exert its capacity to impede evil. Does God really “live” or even “think” the same way we do? A deity with unfathomable puissance would have a pathos of distance. Nietzsche claims that a pathos of distance is a particular psychological feeling of a higher ruling nature in relation to a lower type. There is ambiguity that a deity who is immortal, Omniscient, Omnibenevolent, Omnipotent would comprehend the strive of us mere mortals, let alone demonstrate tantamount definitions of morality. Another dilemma that occurs is God’s interpretation of evil or bad. If I were to drop my pencil it would not be viewed as bad, rather as a phenomenon that occurred; yet if I dropped my phone and it cracked it would be viewed as bad. Even if we were to assume that God is omniscient, implying God were able to discern what we perceived as evil; and therefore able to prevent every occurrence of evil, it would lead to an fallacious conundrum. Let’s assume God comprehends that some individuals view taxes as an evil for a certain reason, and others view taxes as a good for a certain reason. Should God eliminate taxes because of certain individuals animosity? Some might retort, well what if God had not created taxes to begin with or what if the eliminations of taxes proved not be harmful. I then shall retort what if demand for elimination were inauspicious? We are in an epoch of Islamophobia; perhaps the demand were the elimination of Islam, due the ubiquitous myth that all Muslims are terrorist? Clearly some Americans perceive Islam as an evil to be exterminated and some Islamic organizations believe the West with the inclusion of the United States should be eradicated. Few would assent to God become benevolent towards their sentiments as well. This leads to a version of the Categorical Imperative, since God is aware of everyone's ideological view of evil and should it chooses to act on person's view on evil, it must accordingly act on everyone's view; because, unless God uses a nonlogical method, how is God to asses whose conviction of evil is right or wrong? The deity with the “trinity” could know a faun’s impendent death in a turbulent forest fire, and have the ability to stop it, yet not stop because it views the death as just an occurrence on a timeline? If God shared the same perspective of bad, God would stop everyone's phone from cracking. We make it seem that God is diametrically opposed evil. Good, Bad, and Evil are rather labels created to measure the inherent value of something or a result of an action. Philosopher William Rowe wrote we are not in a position to prove that (1) is true. We cannot know with certainty that instances of suffering described in (1) do occur in our world. But it is one thing to know or prove that (1) is true and quite another thing to have rational grounds for believing (1) to be true. It is my supposition that we have rational grounds for affirming God has the “trinity” and the simultaneous existence of evil in the world. God can know of an “evil”,the ability to stop that “evil”, but if it does not occur to him that it is an evil, what grounds does God have for stopping the occurrence of “evil”. Even in the most extreme circumstance of human suffering this is still possible. We don’t view the death of a rat as an atrocity, yet we view the death of a member of a family as influential incident. There would be rational grounds in believing the pathos of distance between earthlings and God is incomprehensible. We only view God as the controler of our world. If God were the overseer of the entire universe, how important is the death of a few thousand people, let alone the trivial death of a faun be to it?
"Did God decide what goodness is? If so, then "good" is more or less the arbitrary decision of a frightening being to which we cannot relate, and that being could just as easily have made murder and stealing the ultimate moral actions without any contradictions. On the other hand, if God did not decide what goodness is, he cannot truly be omnipo...
(b) If God is were truly omnipotent, he would then be capable of eliminating evil;
The problem of evil is inescapable in this fallen world. From worldwide terror like the Holocaust to individual evils like abuse, evil touches every life. However, evil is not a creation of God, nor was it in His perfect will. As Aleksandr
Throughout the world, most people believe in some type of god or gods, and the majority of them understand God as all-good, all-knowing (omniscient), and all-powerful (omnipotent). However, there is a major objection to the latter belief: the “problem of evil” (P.O.E.) argument. According to this theory, God’s existence is unlikely, if not illogical, because a good, omniscient, and omnipotent being would not allow unnecessary suffering, of which there are enormous amounts.
The problem of reconciling an omnipotent, perfectly just, perfectly benevolent god with a world full of evil and suffering has plagued believers since the beginning of religious thought. Atheists often site this paradox in order to demonstrate that such a god cannot exist and, therefore, that theism is an invalid position. Theodicy is a branch of philosophy that seeks to defend religion by reconciling the supposed existence of an omnipotent, perfectly just God with the presence of evil and suffering in the world. In fact, the word “theodicy” consists of the Greek words “theos,” or God, and “dike,” or justice (Knox 1981, 1). Thus, theodicy seeks to find a sense of divine justice in a world filled with suffering.
The opening question in “On Free Choice of the Will” is “Isn’t God the cause of evil?” (Augustine, 1). Evodius examines into this question as opposed to “what is the cause of all evil?” because God is the creator of people—in which sinning comes from. From the premise, which states that: 1) God created everything; 2) God allows for the existence of evil, people do evil and sin, we can conclude that “God is the cause of all evil” because he created everything and everything that has form comes from God:
There is evil. 3. So, God does not exist”. Since there is evil, then that means God does not exist. So there is no loving and powerful God. However, if there is a God then he is not all loving and powerful. Daniel Howard-Snyder states in his article “God, Evil, And Suffering,”: “We would have to say God lacks power and knowledge to such an extent that He can 't prevent evil. And there lies the trouble. For how could God have enough power and knowledge to create and sustain the physical universe if He can 't even prevent evil? How could He be the providential governor of the world if He is unable to do what even we frequently do, namely prevent evil?” (5). This statement argues that God is not all powerful because he is unable to prevent evil in the world. Daniel Howard-Snyder then argues that: “Would a perfectly good being always prevent evil as far as he can? Suppose he had a reason to permit evil, a reason that was compatible with his never doing wrong and his being perfect in love, what I 'll call a justifying reason. For example, suppose that if he prevented evil completely, then we would miss out on a greater good, a good whose goodness was so great that it far surpassed the badness of evil. In that case, he might not prevent evil as far as he can, for he would have a justifying reason to permit it” (5). Even if God had a reason to allow evil, he who is all loving and powerful would want the least amount of people to suffer and feel pain. Since God knows
...y in question is able to do anything that it chooses to do. The second point is that the idea that God cannot create a world with free beings that never choose to do evil is contradictory if we consider the existence of Heaven, which allegedly is an evil-free place where beings are free to exercise their will and apparently never choose to do evil. But I will address this issue later on. First of all, the definition of omnipotence that I provided, of course, might be rejected by theologians who object that “being able to do anything that one chooses to do,” for example, does not include “creating a world with free beings that never turn away from the good and never choose to do evil.” But the problem is that if God is omnipotent but there is one thing he cannot do, it follows that omnipotence is not one of God’s attributes or omnipotence in this case is a misnomer.
If God exists and is all-knowing, then there is no evil that God does not know about. If God exists and is morally perfect, then there is no evil that God would permit that He cannot prevent.
God is the source of evil. He created natural evil, and gave humans the ability to do moral evil by giving them a free will. However, had he not given people free will, then their actions would not be good or evil; nor could God reward or punish man for his actions since they had no choice in what to do. Therefore, by giving humans choice and free will, God allowed humanity to decide whether to reward themselves with temporary physical goods, and suffer in the long run from unhappiness, or forsake bodily pleasures for eternal happiness.
Dismayed by his poor fortune, Boethius’s question regarding how a just God could allow evil into His world generates the idea of a simultaneous yet omnipresent God. Boethius relates his experience with injustice with the actions of God saying, “It is nothing short of monstrous that god should look on while every criminal is allowed to achieve his purpose against the innocent. If this is so, it was hardly without reason that one of your household asked where evil comes from if there is a god, and where good comes from if there isn’t.”(Book 1, Prose 4)
In the construction of the Large Hardon Collider, physicists seek and hope to unlock the mysteries of the universe by analyzing the attributes of the most miniscule particles known to man. In the same way, theologians have argued back and forth over the course of human history with regards to the divine attributes of God, seeking and hoping to unlock the mysteries of the metaphysical universe. Although these many attributes, for example omnipresence, could be debated and dissected ad nauseum, it is within the scope of this research paper to focus but on one of them. Of these many divine attributes of God, nothing strikes me as more intriguing than that of God’s omnipotence. It is intriguing to me because the exploration of this subject not only promises an exhilarating exercise in the human faculties of logic, it also offers an explanation into the practical, such as that of the existence of evil, which we live amidst every day. So with both of these elements in hand, I am going to take on the task of digging deeper into the divine attribute of omnipotence in hopes of revealing more of the glory of God, and simultaneously bringing greater humility to the human thinker. In order to gain a better understanding on the subject of divine omnipotence, I am going to analyze four aspects of it. First, I am going to build a working definition of what we mean when we say that God is omnipotent. Second, I am going to discuss the relationship between divine omnipotence and logic. Third, I am going to discuss the relationship between God’s omnipotence and God’s timelessness. Last, I am going to analyze God’s omnipotence in relation to the existence of evil in the world. Through the analysis of these four topics in relation to om...
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world” (Lewis, 1994, p. 91). Throughout history man has had to struggle with the problem of evil. It is one of the greatest problems of the world. Unquestionably, there is no greater challenge to man’s faith then the existence of evil and a suffering world. The problem can be stated simply: If God is an all-knowing and all-loving God, how can He allow evil? If God is so good, how can He allow such bad things to happen?Why does He allow bad things to happen to good people? These are fundamental questions that many Christians and non-Christians set out to answer.
Many people state that they do not believe in any kind of god, that the world simply came into existence. However, this belief cannot hold true. Simply by examining nature and all of its intricate details, people stand unable to deny the presence of a Creator. Deep down, people cannot help but to feel that something greater than themselves exists. A Supreme Being- a god, but what kind of god exists? A god similar to Ares, the war-god of the Greeks? One who lusts for blood and destruction? Or a placid god, one parallel to Eirene, the Greek goddess of peace? Fabricated by mankind, these so called “gods” all bear flaws. The Bible, the Word of the Lord, remains the only book on earth that gives an account of the true God and His attributes. Through examination of the Word, readers will come to the realization that a just God exists, that He sends trials to his followers to develop their faith, and that He remains sovereign.
Although it may never be completely resolved, the problem of evil has been considered by Christian theologians, and within the Bible itself, for centuries. Each potential solution, regardless of its content, emphasizes a common point: Just because evil exists does not mean that faith should be abandoned. In fact, evil’s purpose may be to strengthen our faith in God. For example, Peter Kreeft states that “evil is not a thing but a wrong choice”. Because God creates things, but does not directly make choices for His creations, He cannot be the creator of evil (Kreeft, 1988).