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Introduction to gods omnipotence
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In J.L. Mackie’s work of “Evil and Omnipotence” he breaks down the issues of having a wholly good God who is omnipotent and how evil comes to wreck havoc on the equation. He comes to the rationalization that there isn’t a God, or that the God individuals have come to worship in religion simply does not exist. How could evil exist through the creation of someone who is nothing but good and righteous?
Mackie goes to elaborate on the subject with the world we know harboring evil. As God made good, evil is simultaneously created. If God is an all knowing being that is wholly good, he should want to stop the aforementioned evil that plagues mankind, and yet he doesn’t. Why is that? Maybe the word ‘omnipotent’ is too strong of a word to associate with the divine being that created us.
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Likewise, the argument that stuck out to me is that evil is the causation of free will.
That God himself equipped the world to be as good as the hundreds of millions of individuals make it to be. Mackie rejects this solution primarily because it isn’t concrete enough. Why couldn’t God make man more inclined to freely choose to do more good than evil? He finds it rather unconventional that an all knowing, all powerful, God could not foresee that the beings he created would choose evil. The issue of the “Paradox of Omnipotence” arises. Can God create humans so free willed that he cannot control them or make free will rules that even himself cannot easily break? It seems extremely problematic to have a God who doesn’t have absolute power. It would make God seemingly less formidable than what religion cracks him up to
be. In conclusion I feel that J. L. Mackie has made many really eye opening arguments. Being agnostic I cannot fully bet my logic one way or the other on the existence of God. The issue of evil is what I come to find is one of the reasons my faith has never completely solidified in the practice of christianity. His clear explanations on why God cannot be both really made me understand that he cannot be a flawless divine being. All the explanations Mackie gives of why evil exists are all plausible and make a lot of sense without running my head in circles with complex terminology. Yet every theist would come to say that God is very omnipotent and wholly good, through Mackie’s work that simply is not the case. He is either omnipotent and cares not about the evil that terrorizes us which would make God an unloving and ‘cruel’ creator; or he is wholly good and does not have the power/control to change evil’s existence and our choices in our free-will, which would make God not wholly powerful. These two words can never be coupled together with God.
In his essay, "The Magnitude, Duration, and Distribution of Evil: a Theodicy," Peter van Inwagen alleges a set of reasons that God may have for allowing evil to exist on earth. Inwagen proposes the following story – throughout which there is an implicit assumption that God is all-good (perfectly benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient) and deserving of all our love. God created humans in his own likeness and fit for His love. In order to enable humans to return this love, He had to give them the ability to freely choose. That is, Inwagen holds that the ability to love implies free will. By giving humans free will, God was taking a risk. As Inwagen argues, not even an omnipotent being can ensure that "a creature who has a free choice between x and y choose x rather than y" (197)1. (X in Inwagen’s story is ‘to turn its love to God’ and y is ‘to turn its love away from God,’ towards itself or other things.) So it happened that humans did in fact rebel and turn away from God. The first instance of this turning away is referred to as "the Fall." The ruin of the Fall was inherited by all humans to follow and is the source of evil in the world. But God did not leave humans without hope. He has a plan "whose working will one day eventuate in the Atonement (at-one-ment) of His human creatures with Himself," or at least some of His human creatures (198). This plan somehow involves humans realizing the wretchedness of a world without God and turning to God for help.
If God is powerful and loving the humankind, then why does He permit evil as well as suffering in this world? Various answers had been offered by many Christian philosophers and many victims of suffering, but there was not a lucid answer that could settle this argument permanently. God uses malicious acts of this world to rise up His own people and remind them that there is an opportunity that they can posses their eternal life. Literature, especially biblical literature has exploited this biblical nature to its fullest in various types of forms, including the play J.B. by Archibald MacLeish. In the play J.B, Archibald MacLeish reanimates and modernizes elements taken from the story of Job to come up with his own response to the ultimate question which has been asked by countless generations, “Why do the righteous suffer?” Throughout the play, Archibald MacLeish delineates the sudden corruption of J.B and his family, his calmness despite the helpless pieces of advice from the Three Comforters, and his unusual ending in order for God to test if one’s will and faith are strong enough to rebuild oneself after an irrational decadence.
In January 2002 James Waller released the first edition of the book “Becoming Evil – How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killings.” Dr. James Waller is a professor at Keene State College in New Hampshire and is home to one of the nation’s oldest Holocaust resource centers, the Cohen Center for Genocide and Holocaust Studies. Becoming Evil uncovers the historical and modern day reasons to why people do evil and attempts to debunk common explanations for genocide and mass killings. Some of Waller’s other notable works include “Prejudice across America” and “Face to Face: The Changing State of Racism Across America.” Waller takes and in depth look at the societal, psychopathological and cultural reasons that would make a good person commit such heinous acts of evil. “What culture, society, or nation, what ideology, historical prejudice, or ethnic hatred, what psychological profile or cluster of personality traits, what unusual situation or special circumstance is to be deemed the cause of such aberrant human behavior?” (Browning/Waller) Why do humans commit genocide and mass killings?
"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...
...erfect goodness and is morally good all the time. Paley's supreme being is never attributed with being a good or bad, loving or hateful, individual. A second important characteristic of God is that he is omniscient; he knows everything about anything there is to know; although Paley's supreme being is intelligent enough to engender the first creation, it does not imply that he knows about all the subsequent creations which rose from that first creation. Thirdly, God is considered to be all-powerful or omnipotent while the supreme being possesses the power to create the first creation. Lastly, God is an eternal being whose existence defies space and time. At the start of Paley's a posteriori argument, it was concluded that while anything that shows evidence of creation has a creator, such creator exists or has existed at one point in time but is by no means eternal.
The article "The Frivolity of Evil" by Theodore Dalrymple analyzes the causes of human misery. His work as a psychiatrist in Great Britains slums afforded him a great vantage point to analyze this topic "nearer to the fundamental of human existence." He concluded that the citizens of Great Britian willingly participated in precipitating their own misery. Their are three recurring theme in his article the lack of moral responsibility, extreme individualism and lack of cultural expectations. Dalrymple begins his article by showing the mind frame of a prisoner released from prison, who had the idea that he had paid his debt to society. In order to get his point across Dalrymple compares the prisoners situation to his very own, the 14 years he spent as a psychiatrist in the slums of Great Britain. He had a choice to choose a different neighborhood just like the prisoner had a choice not to commit the crime. His argument in this article is that our misery stems from the choices we make about how we choose to live our lives. He was also able to cement his arguments by comparing and contrasting the political and social differences between Great Britain and those of Liberia, North Korea and Central America. Dalrymple observed that the people in other countries had their choices taken way from them the crimes and brutality committed in these countries where not their own making. However, in Great Britain the life of violence and poverty was "unforced and spontaneous." Dalrymple argues that the evils in his country are a product of a society that promotes individualism and accepts the right of its citizens to pursue pleasures for their own self interest.
Underneath a good moral, there could be a hidden truth. In, “The Possibility of Evil”, Shirley Jackson shows how the protagonist, Miss Strangeworth presumes she is protecting her neighborhood by eliminating the evil that exists within her community, but ironically, she is the most evil neighbor of all. In the beginning, the community considers Miss Strangeworth an old, caring and respected woman. Throughout the story, a handful of community members realize Miss Strangeworth is a bitter, insensitive woman, who is creating more evil in the neighborhood. In other words, Miss Strangeworth’s intentions to rid her neighborhood of evil, ultimately has the opposite effect and ironically creates more dilemma.
The problem of evil is a deductive a priori argument who’s goal is to prove the non-existence of God. In addition to Mackie’s three main premises he also introduces some “quasi-logical” rules that give further evidence to his argument. First he presumes that a good thing will eliminate evil to the extent that it can and second, that omnipotence has no limits. From these two “additional premises,” it can be concluded that a completely good and omnipotent being will eliminate all possible evil. After establishing these added premises Mackie continues with his piece to list and negate several theistic responses to the argument.
It also follows that God, not as benevolent as could be hoped, prefers the maximization of good (2) as opposed to the minimization of evil (1). This is disquieting for the individual who might be the victim of suffering a “greater good.”
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.
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
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.
“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.
Hell From chapter eight in the Problem of Evil, Lewis discusses how hell is a doctrine that he would rather take out of Christianity than leave in, but when rebellious souls do not decide to surrender, Lewis contends that hell is a viable solution (Lewis, p. 119, 120). In my opinion, hell is controversial to people, because to them it does not seem to be a fair punishment for the seemingly small sins humans commit. Thus, no one thinks or believes that they are going, or should go to hell. Therefore, if no one determines that they deserve, or are going to hell, no person would want to talk about the fact that there is a chance they are going to hell without surrendering to God.
Evil exists. This bizarre conundrum has perplexed philosophers since the dawn of civilization, and remains in hot debate today because of the theological implications inherent in the statement. To many on this planet, the source of life is an all-loving, all-powerful, omniscient god who created the universe – and all the laws therein – in seven days, as described in the Bible. And yet still, evil exists. How can these two premises be simultaneously true? Surely, an all-loving god would want to do something about this problem, and an all-powerful god could absolutely remedy a situation if it so desired. It seems as though the common perception of the Bible’s god is inaccurate. However, it could be argued that the Bible’s god is accurate, and that said perception is somewhat skewed, considering that on numerous occasions, God claims responsibility for evil. “I make peace and create evil. I the Lord do all these things.” (Isaiah 45:7). The Greek philosopher Epicurus put the Good God’s Evil puzzle in a very clear logical progression: