The Problem of Theodicy As believers in God we have had our fair share of questioning “Why does evil exist?”. Often we ponder why or how did God let something so Evil happen if he is all good. He has the power to do good, why not the power to stop evil?
Per The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Theodicy is “a defense of the justice or goodness of God in the face of doubts or objections arising from the phenomena of evil in the world (‘evil’ refers here to bad states of affairs of any sort).” With this said many of us have some been at a place in our lives where we question the purpose of evil and God’s inability to rid of us such thing. Many arguments can be made as to the purpose of evil, which also tends to be the problem of evil.
One suggestion made in the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy are “that evils are logically necessary for
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The notion of God redeeming evil and or suffering is the motivation behind this concept. God allows evil so that we as humans receive a moral message from the evil/suffering that occurs in our lives. Good cannot exist without evil and vice versa. Good and Evil have become interdependent one each other. If God stands for what is all good and the Devil stands for all that is evil, together unwilling working together but against each other at the same time. These forces can’t be controlled by humans. So, if God stands for all things good, why does he allow suffering? To test us? To keep the balance? To encourage us? Why not all the above? No one knows for sure but one can argue that all those points can be attributed to the allowance of evil. How else would we learn the importance of have the forces fighting for you and against
The "Problem of Evil" is a philosophical stumbling block for many people. There are various explanations for the evil and suffering in the world. Theodicy, which is the vindication of divine goodness and providence in view of the existence of evil explains this. Ultimate Questions by Nils Ch. Rauhut mentions eight different types of theodicy: Big-Plan, Punishment, Suffering-Builds-Character, Limits-of-Human-Knowledge, Contrast, Devil, Test, and Free Will. Many of these explanations have several similarities, although I believe that Limits-of-Human Knowledge Theodicy best fits my understanding of the world. This type has the basic idea that God is the perfect being, and therefore he has infinite knowledge as an infinite being. We simply are
In the book of Genesis in the Bible, God created the heavens and the Earth and all was good. God told Adam and Eve that they can eat from all the trees in the Garden of Eden except for one, The Tree of Knowledge and Good and Evil. God was and is compassionate enough to give the beings he created freedom of choice. Nobody wants someone who is forced into love. God also does not want us to be made to love Him but wants us to do so out of our own free will. That free will that God gives us is the source of evil. Just as Adam and Eve used the free will God gave them to be disobedient and sin, human beings evil because of their freedom to do so. In addition to free will God allows evil to exist because without it, the beings he created could not develop ethically. The Problem of Evil states that God cannot be all loving, all good, all powerful and everywhere because evil exists. Philosopher, John Hicks states that evil is necessary for soul and moral development. How would humans know that is good without it counterpart for comparison? In situations like the Charleston church shooting, where loved ones lives are violently taken by evil, the families of the victims are made to develop morally. When confronted with evil, violence, and grief, they either exhibit patience, love, courage, forgiveness, acceptance, and/or faith. Otherwise they conform or give into evil and become timid, weak, angry, or even become violent themselves. Without evil our world would be blissful.
For atheists, apologetics, and non-believers, a big topic of contention is the existence of evil in a world with God. This is known as the problem with evil. How does a God that is all knowing, all powerful, and perfectly good allow such atrocities to occur under his watch? It is this question that so many people have discussed. The argument centers on God being omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good (Mackie, 1955 p. 200). Omnipotent is to be all powerful. Omniscient is to be all knowing and to be perfectly good means that God would prevent a morally bad event from ever happening (Swinburne, 1998 p. 13). In the problem of evil, God’s powers are taken at face value, and applied to God’s inaction to evil on earth. People who argue against the topic of evil typically make generalizations on the attributes that God
Evil can take different forms in different context. How evil is responded to depend on which form it takes. God responds to evil by overcoming it, and turning it into something virtuous. Why or when he chooses to overcome it, is something that is unknown. Humans can be agents or victims of evil. They can be the reason evil takes place, or they can affected by someone else’s evil. Evil done by humans is not malicious, but it has a negative effect on humanity. The world is a victim because it’s inability to choose between right and wrong, good and evil. The world is a victim of humankind’s evil actions. Evil is responded to in different ways, because evil has not one definite shape, but an infinite amount.
By the divine right of kings, monarchs with blessed blood hold the right to complete reverence and subservience from their subjects. In the time of William Shakespeare, and for hundreds of years before, European monarchs justified their absolutist rules by reasoning God placed their bloodline on the throne. Encyclopedia Britannica states that, in 1603, the art-loving James VI of Scotland succeeded to the English throne (Mathew); according to Shakespeare Online, he brought Shakespeare’s acting troupe, the Chamberlain's Men, under his patronage and renamed them the King’s men (Mabillar 2000). Three years later in 1606, Shakespeare’s tragedy, Macbeth, released. Macbeth takes place in Shakespeare’s version of monarchical eleventh century Scotland.
The One-Child policy is not being enforced like it would have been in ancient China. During the Qin Dynasty Laws were carried in a stricter manner. For example Qin Shi Huangdi killed Daoist and Confucian scholars the burned their books because they would not change their ideology. However, in modern days such an act would not be tolerated by anyone and now instead of killing the people who broke the rule they are forced to get an abortion or sterilization.
If god was all good, all powerful and all knowing, he would not allow the existence of evil.
This then begs the question; what are the reasons that God believes that the existence of evil is necessary? There are two ways of approaching an argument for the belief that God has his reasons to allow evil. These two ways are a theodicy and a defense. In his book, Inwagen says “The difference between a theodicy and a defense is simply that a theodicy is put forward as true, while nothing more is claimed of a defense than that it represents a real possibility” (31). Theodicy takes into account the evidence of evil and shows that it is still reasonable to believe in a God despite the existence of evil. Overall, a theodicy is a justification for God. A defense, on the other hand, offers a logical explanation for the existence of evil. A defense may say that there are reasons that God allows evil to persist, but, humans may never know these reasons. There is one well known and most rational defense. This is called the free-will defense. The free-will defense says that God made the world and included rational beings. He gave them the power of free-will. This meant that humans held the ability to make their own decisions and to have their own desires freely without any barriers. God decided that overall, free-will was a great enough good and that the existence of it outweighed the existence of the evil that results from the abuse of
One of the heaviest arguments against God’s existence is the problem of evil. The traditional conception of God is as omnipresent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. If this is true then God either can’t do anything about it, doesn’t know about it or doesn’t care about it. This then implies that God is either not all powerful as he can’t prevent the suffering, not all-knowing as he doesn’t know about the suffering, or not all good if he doesn’t care about the suffering. This challenges the concept of God being the greatest being in the universe. However, there are many different responses to the concept of evil, they may not be all satisfactory but they cast doubt on this argument. One of the responses challenging the problem of evil is that God did not create the evil in the world. A lot of the evil in the world only occurs
The problem of evil (the problem of suffering) is an argument against the existence of God
When we are discussing the problem of evil, we are specifically discussing a God that is omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good. A God that is perfectly good would not allow suffering to exist, and any minute amount of suffering that exists disproves God’s existence. Unless, the suffering is justified with an adequate reason. However, even then there seems to be large amounts of evil in the world that seems unnecessary for any good reason. By evil and suffering I mean death, pain, and disease. I will be using these terms interchangeably. In the problem of evil, many arguments are placed in order to find a justification for the evil that exists. However,
Being a Christian we fail to understand sometimes why God allows bad things to happen to good people or bad things to happen in our life when all we are trying to do is live it the best we can. Or like that old saying goes “when it rains, it pours”. Why does evil exist in the first place if God created the world to be holy and sacred? Honestly we have all asked ourselves this question at least one in our life if not multiple times a week!
William Rowe defines gratuitous evil as an instance of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.(Rowe 335) In a world with so much evil it raises the questions If God is all powerful, all knowing and all good, how can he allow bad things to happen to good people? Can God even exist in a world with so such gratuitous evil? These are questions that has afflicted humanity for a very long time and has been the question to engross theologians for centuries. The existence of evil has been the most influential and powerful reason to disprove the existence of God. It is believed among many theist that God is the creator and caretaker
In the course of this essay I will argue that evil is not compatible with the existence of god. This means that evil and God cannot coexist because if god were present, the existence of evil would contradict all that god is believed to be. Abrahamic religions insist that God both created the world and that he preserves and maintains it. Christianity claims that God is all knowing and is boundless in his abilities. Religions claim that God is benevolent, and only wants the best for humanity and the universe, as his creations. If all of the above statements be true, then it is hard to understand why god would allow evil to thrive right from the beginning of time.
The problem of evil is as ancient as humanity itself. Since the dawn of man, thinkers, philosophers, religionists and practically every human being who have suffered at the hands of evil have pondered this enigma, either as a logical-intellectual-philosophical or emotional-religious-existential problem. The preponderance of evil as a reality in human existence, and