Moreover, MSR2 would have us believe that there were real persons named Adam and Eve and that they actually performed the misdeeds attributed to them in the book of Genesis. MSR2 seems to be asking us to believe things that only a certain kind of theist would believe. The implausibility of MSR2 is taken by some to be a serious defect. Does it succeed in solving the logical problem of evil as it pertains to either moral or natural evil?
Recall that the logical problem of evil can be summarized as the following claim:. If you could point to an actual instance of the type of situation in question, that would certainly prove that 40 is false. All you need is a possible x. The claim. The two claims are logical opposites. If one is true, the other is false; if one is false, the other is true. If you can show that x is merely possible, you will have refuted How would you go about finding a logically possible x?
Philosophers claim that you only need to use your imagination. In a word, conceivability is your guide to possibility. Since the logical problem of evil claims that it is logically impossible for God and evil to co-exist, all that Plantinga or any other theist needs to do to combat this claim is to describe a possible situation in which God and evil co-exist.
All he needs to do is give a logically consistent description of a way that God and evil can co-exist. Plantinga claims God and evil could co-exist if God had a morally sufficient reason for allowing evil. It certainly seems so. In fact, it appears that even the most hardened atheist must admit that MSR1 and MSR2 are possible reasons God might have for allowing moral and natural evil.
However, since MSR2 deals with the logical problem of evil as it pertains to natural evil which claims that it is logically impossible for God and natural evil to co-exist , it only needs to sketch a possible way for God and natural evil to co-exist.
The fact that MSR2 may be implausible does not keep it from being possible. Since the situation described by MSR2 is clearly possible, it appears that it successfully rebuts the logical problem of evil as it pertains to natural evil. Since MSR1 and MSR2 together seem to show contra the claims of the logical problem of evil how it is possible for God and moral and natural evil to co-exist, it seems that the Free Will Defense successfully defeats the logical problem of evil.
His solution to the logical problem of evil leaves them feeling unsatisfied and suspicious that they have been taken in by some kind of sleight of hand. For example, J. Since this defense is formally [that is, logically] possible, and its principle involves no real abandonment of our ordinary view of the opposition between good and evil, we can concede that the problem of evil does not, after all, show that the central doctrines of theism are logically inconsistent with one another.
But whether this offers a real solution of the problem is another question. He expresses doubt about whether Plantinga has adequately dealt with the problem of evil. It was, after all, Mackie himself who characterized the problem of evil as one of logical inconsistency:. In response to this formulation of the problem of evil, Plantinga showed that this charge of inconsistency was mistaken.
Even Mackie admits that Plantinga solved the problem of evil, if that problem is understood as one of inconsistency. As an attempt to rebut the logical problem of evil, it is strikingly successful. As an all-around response to the problem of evil, the Free Will Defense does not offer us much in the way of explanation. It leaves several of the most important questions about God and evil unanswered. The desire to see a theistic response to the problem of evil go beyond merely undermining a particular atheological argument is understandable.
If there is any blame that needs to go around, it may be that some of it should go to Mackie and other atheologians for claiming that the problem of evil was a problem of inconsistency. The ease with which Plantinga undermined that formulation of the problem suggests that the logical formulation did not adequately capture the difficult and perplexing issue concerning God and evil that has been so hotly debated by philosophers and theologians.
In fact, this is precisely the message that many philosophers took away from the debate between Plantinga and the defenders of the logical problem of evil.
They reasoned that there must be more to the problem of evil than what is captured in the logical formulation of the problem. It is now widely agreed that this intuition is correct. Responding to this formulation of the problem requires much more than simply describing a logically possible scenario in which God and evil co-exist. It has not, however, been the only such response. Hick rejects the traditional view of the Fall, which pictures humans as being created in a finitely perfect and finished state from which they disastrously fell away.
Instead, Hick claims that human beings are unfinished and in the midst of being made all that God intended them to be. A world full of suffering, trials and temptations is more conducive to the process of soul-making than a world full of constant pleasure and the complete absence of pain.
Hick , pp. The value-judgment that is implicitly being invoked here is that one who has attained to goodness by meeting and eventually mastering temptations, and thus by rightly making responsible choices in concrete situations, is good in a richer and more valuable sense than would be one created ab initio in a state either of innocence or of virtue…. I suggest, then, that it is an ethically reasonable judgment… that human goodness slowly built up through personal histories of moral effort has a value in the eyes of the Creator which justifies even the long travail of the soul-making process.
Eleonore Stump offers another response to the problem of evil that brings a range of distinctively Christian theological commitments to bear on the issue. She writes,. It tends to humble him, show him his frailty, make him reflect on the transience of temporal goods, and turn his affections towards other-worldly things, away from the things of this world.
No amount of moral or natural evil, of course, can guarantee that a man will [place his faith in God]…. But evil of this sort is the best hope, I think, and maybe the only effective means, for bringing men to such a state.
Stump , p. Stump claims that, although the sin of Adam—and not any act of God—first brought moral and natural evil into this world, God providentially uses both kinds of evil in order to bring about the greatest good that a fallen, sinful human being can experience: a repaired will and eternal union with God.
The responses of both Hick and Stump are intended to cover not only the logical problem of evil but also any other formulation of the problem as well.
Regardless of the details of these alternatives, the fact remains that all they need to do in order to rebut the logical problem of evil is to describe a logically possible way that God and evil can co-exist. A variety of morally sufficient reasons can be proposed as possible explanations of why a perfect God might allow evil and suffering to exist.
Because the suggestions of Hick and Stump are clearly logically possible, they, too, succeed in undermining the logical problem of evil. One point of conflict concerns the possibility of human free will in heaven.
Plantinga claims that if someone is incapable of doing evil, that person cannot have morally significant free will. He also maintains that part of what makes us the creatures we are is that we possess morally significant freedom. If that freedom were to be taken away, we might very well cease to be the creatures we are. However, consider the sort of freedom enjoyed by the redeemed in heaven.
According to classical theism, believers in heaven will somehow be changed so that they will no longer commit any sins. It is not that they will contingently always do what is right and contingently always avoid what is wrong.
They will somehow no longer be capable of doing wrong. In other words, their good behavior will be necessary rather than contingent. It seems that God could have actualized whatever greater goods are made possible by the existence of persons without allowing horrible instances of evil and suffering to exist in this world. However, they reveal that some of the central claims of his defense conflict with other important theistic doctrines.
Although Plantinga claimed that his Free Will Defense offered merely possible and not necessarily actual reasons God might have for allowing evil and suffering, it may be difficult for other theists to embrace his defense if it runs contrary to what theism says is actually the case in heaven.
God, it seems, is incapable of doing anything wrong. Thus, it does not appear that, with respect to any choice of morally good and morally bad options, God is free to choose a bad option.
He seems constitutionally incapable of choosing or even wanting to do what is wrong. They could never be praiseworthy. That certainly runs contrary to central doctrines of theism.
If, as theists must surely maintain, God does possess morally significant freedom, then perhaps this sort of freedom does not preclude an inability to choose what is wrong. But if it is possible for God to possess morally significant freedom and for him to be unable to do wrong, then W 3 once again appears to be possible after all. Originally, Plantinga claimed that W 3 is not a logically possible world because the description of that world is logically inconsistent.
If W 3 is possible, then the complaint lodged by Flew and Mackie above that God could and therefore should have created a world full of creatures who always did what is right is not answered. There may be ways for Plantinga to resolve the difficulties sketched above, so that the Free Will Defense can be shown to be compatible with theistic doctrines about heaven and divine freedom.
As it stands, however, some important challenges to the Free Will Defense remain unanswered. James R. Logical Problem of Evil The existence of evil and suffering in our world seems to pose a serious challenge to belief in the existence of a perfect God. Introducing the Problem Journalist and best-selling author Lee Strobel commissioned George Barna, the public-opinion pollster, to conduct a nationwide survey.
McCloskey , p. Mackie and McCloskey can be understood as claiming that it is impossible for all of the following statements to be true at the same time: 1 God is omnipotent that is, all-powerful. They reason as follows: 6 If God is omnipotent, he would be able to prevent all of the evil and suffering in the world. Atheologians claim that, if we reflect upon 6 through 8 in light of the fact of evil and suffering in our world, we should be led to the following conclusions: 9 If God knows about all of the evil and suffering in the world, knows how to eliminate or prevent it, is powerful enough to prevent it, and yet does not prevent it, he must not be perfectly good.
From 9 through 11 we can infer: 12 If evil and suffering exist, then God is either not omnipotent, not omniscient, or not perfectly good. Since evil and suffering obviously do exist, we get: 13 God is either not omnipotent, not omniscient, or not perfectly good.
Logical Consistency Theists who want to rebut the logical problem of evil need to find a way to show that 1 through 4 —perhaps despite initial appearances—are consistent after all. In other words, 15 A set of statements is logically consistent if and only if it is possible for all of them to be true at the same time. In other words, 16 It is not possible for God and evil to co-exist.
Short of embracing compete inductive skepticism, then, it would seem that an appeal to human cognitive limitations cannot provide an answer to evidential versions of the argument from evil. A second way of attempting to show that the argument from evil does not even get started is by appealing to the proposition that there is no best of all possible worlds.
Here the basic idea is that if for every possible world, however good, there is a better one, then the fact that this world could be improved upon does not give one any reason for concluding that, if there is an omnipotent and omniscient being, that being cannot be morally perfect.
This response to the argument from evil has been around for quite a while. The natural response to this attempt to refute the argument from evil was set out very clearly some years ago by Nicholas La Para and Haig Khatchadourian among others, and it has been developed in an especially forceful and detailed way in an article by Keith Chrzan The basic thrust of this response is that the argument from evil, when properly formulated in a deontological fashion, does not turn upon the claim that this world could be improved upon, or upon the claim that it is not the best of all possible worlds: it turns instead upon the claim that there are good reasons for holding that the world contains evils, including instances of suffering, that it would be morally wrong, all things considered, for an omnipotent and omniscient being to allow.
As a consequence, the proposition that there might be better and better worlds without limit is simply irrelevant to the argument from evil, properly formulated. If one accepts a deontological approach to ethics, this response seems decisive. For assume that the following things are true:. Then it follows that it is impossible for an omnipotent and omniscient being to perform a morally wrong action, and therefore that the failure of such a being to prevent various evils in this world cannot be morally wrong.
Consider an omnipotent and omniscient being that creates a world with zillions of innocent persons, all of whom endure extraordinarily intense suffering forever. If 1 , 2 , and 3 are right, then such a being does not do anything morally wrong. But this conclusion, surely, is unacceptable, and so if a given version of consequentialism entails this conclusion, then that form of consequentialism must be rejected.
Can consequentialism avoid this conclusion? Can it be formulated in such a way that it entails the conclusion that allowing very great, undeserved suffering is morally very different, and much more serious, than merely refraining from creating as many happy individuals as possible, or merely refraining from creating individuals who are not as ecstatically happy as they might be?
If it cannot, then it would seem that the correct conclusion to draw is that consequentialism is unsound. A final way in which one could attempt to show that facts about evil cannot constitute even prima facie evidence against the existence of God is by appealing to the ontological argument. Relatively few philosophers have held, of course, that the ontological argument is sound.
But there have certainly been notable exceptions—such as Anselm and Descartes, and, in the last century, Charles Hartshorne , Norman Malcolm , and Alvin Plantinga a, b. If the ontological argument were sound, it would provide a rather decisive refutation of the argument from evil. For in showing not merely that there is an omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect being, but also that it is necessary that such a being exists, it would entail that the proposition that God does not exist must have probability zero on any body of evidence whatever.
The only question, accordingly, is whether the ontological argument is sound. The vast majority of present-day philosophers believe that it is not, and one way of arguing for that view is by appealing to strengthened Gaunilo-type objections—where the idea behind a strengthened Gaunilo-type objection is that, rather than merely paralleling the ontological argument, as Gaunilo did in responding to Anselm, in order to show that there is an overpopulation problem for reality in the form of perfect islands, perfect unicorns, and so on, one can instead construct versions that lead to mutually incompatible conclusions, such as the conclusion that there is a perfect solvent, together with the conclusion that there is a perfectly insoluble substance Tooley, But if the logical form of the ontological argument is such that arguments of precisely the same form generate contradictions, then the ontological argument must be unsound.
A more satisfying response to the ontological argument would, of course, show not merely that the ontological argument is unsound, but also precisely why it is unsound. Such a response, however, requires a satisfactory account of the truth conditions of modal statements—something that lies outside the scope of this article. In this section, we shall consider three attempts to show that it is reasonable to believe that every evil is such that an omnipotent and omniscient person would have a morally sufficient reason for not preventing its existence, even if one is not able to say, in every case, what that morally sufficient reason might be.
Theists, however, have often contended that there are a variety of arguments that, even if they do not prove that God exists, provide positive evidence.
May not this positive evidence outweigh, then, the negative evidence of apparently unjustified evils? Starting out from this line of thought, a number of philosophers have gone on to claim that in order to be justified in asserting that there are evils in the world that establish that it is unlikely that God exists, one would first have to examine all of the traditional arguments for the existence of God, and show that none of them is sound.
Now it is certainly true that if one is defending a version of the argument from evil that supports only a probabilistic conclusion, one needs to consider what sorts of positive reasons might be offered in support of the existence of God. But Plantinga and Reichenbach are advancing a rather stronger claim here, for they are saying that one needs to look at all of the traditional theistic arguments, such as the cosmological and the teleological.
They are claiming, in short, that if one of those arguments turned out to be defensible, then it might well serve to undercut the argument from evil. But this view seems mistaken. Consider the cosmological argument. In some versions, the conclusion is that there is an unmoved mover.
In others, that there is a first cause. In others, that there is a necessary being, having its necessity of itself. None of these conclusions involves any claims about the moral character of the entity in question, let alone the claim that it is a morally perfect person. But in the absence of such a claim, how could such arguments, even if they turned out to be sound, serve to undercut the argument from evil? The situation is not essentially different in the case of the argument from order, or in the case of the fine-tuning argument.
For while those arguments, if they were sound, would provide grounds for drawing some tentative conclusion concerning the moral character of the designer or creator of the universe, the conclusion in question would not be one that could be used to overthrow the argument from evil.
For given the mixture of good and evil that one finds in the world, the argument from order can hardly provide support even for the existence of a designer or creator who is very good, let alone one who is morally perfect.
So it is very hard to see how any teleological argument, any more than any cosmological, could overturn the argument from evil. A similar conclusion can be defended with respect to other arguments, such as those that appeal to purported miracles, or religious experiences. So, contrary to the claim advanced by Robert Adams , , even if there were veridical religious experiences, they would not provide one with a satisfactory defense against the argument from evil.
A good way of underlining the basic point here is by setting out an alternative formulation of the argument from evil in which it is granted, for the sake of argument, that there is an omnipotent and omniscient person. The result of doing this is that the conclusion at which one initially arrives is not that there is no omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect person, but rather that, although there is an omnipotent and omniscient person, that person is not morally perfect, from which it then follows that that there is no omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect person.
When the argument from evil is reformulated in that way, it becomes clear that the vast majority of considerations that have been offered as reasons for believing in God can be of little assistance to the person who is trying to resist the argument from evil. For most of them provide, at best, very tenuous grounds for any conclusion concerning the moral character of any omnipotent and omniscient being who may happen to exist, and almost none of them provides any support for the hypothesis that there is an omnipotent and omniscient being who is also morally perfect.
The ontological argument is, of course, a notable exception, and, consequently, the advocate of the argument from evil certainly needs to be able to show that it is unsound. But almost all of the other standard arguments are simply not to the point. What if, rather than holding that there is positive evidence that lends support to the existence of God, one holds instead that the belief that God exists is non-inferentially justified?
The claim in question is an interesting one, and a thorough evaluation of it would involve consideration of some deep issues in epistemology. Fortunately, it does not seem to make any real difference in the present context whether or not the claim is true. The reason emerges if one considers the epistemology of perception. But direct realists as much as indirect realists admit that there can be cases where a person would be justified in believing that a certain physical state of affairs obtained were it not for the fact that he has good evidence that he is hallucinating, or else subject to perceptual illusion.
Moreover, given evidence of the relevant sort, it makes no difference whether direct realism is true, or indirect realism: the belief in question is undermined to precisely the same extent in either case. The situation is the same in the case of religious experience. Swinburne , —8 argued in support of the conclusion that theism does need a theodicy. In doing so, however, he noted one minor qualification—namely, that if one could show, for a sufficiently impressive range of evils that initially seemed problematic, that it was likely that an omnipotent and omniscient person would be morally justified in not having prevented them, then one might very well be justified in believing that the same would be true of other evils, even if one could not specify, in those other cases, what the morally sufficient reason for allowing them might be.
What Swinburne says here is surely very reasonable, and I can see no objection in principle to a defense of this sort. The problem with it is that no theodicy that has ever been proposed has been successful in the relevant way—that is, there is no impressive range of undesirable states of affairs where people initially think that the wrongmaking properties of allowing such states of affairs to exist greatly outweigh any rightmaking properties associated with doing so, but where, confronted with some proposed theodicy, people come to believe that it would be morally permissible to allow such states of affairs to exist.
Indeed, it is hard to find any such cases, let alone an impressive range. What are the prospects for a complete, or nearly complete theodicy? Others, including many theists, are much less hopeful. Plantinga, for example remarks:.
What types of theodicies that have been proposed? An exhaustive survey is not possible here, but among the most important are theodicies that appeal, first, to the value of acquiring desirable traits of character in the face of suffering; secondly, to the value of libertarian free will; thirdly, to the value of the freedom to inflict horrendous evils upon others; and fourthly, to the value of a world that is governed by natural laws.
One very important type of theodicy, championed especially by John Hick, involves the idea that the evils that the world contains can be seen to be justified if one views the world as designed by God to be an environment in which people, through their free choices, can undergo spiritual growth that will ultimately fit them for communion with God:. Is this theodicy satisfactory?
There are a number of reasons for holding that it is not. First, what about the horrendous suffering that people undergo, either at the hands of others—as in the Holocaust—or because of terminal illnesses such as cancer?
One writer—Eleonore Stump—has suggested that the terrible suffering that many people undergo at the ends of their lives, in cases where it cannot be alleviated, is to be viewed as suffering that has been ordained by God for the spiritual health of the individual in question b, More generally, there seems to be no reason at all why a world must contain horrendous suffering if it is to provide a good environment for the development of character in response to challenges and temptations.
The world could perfectly well have contained only human persons, or only human persons plus herbivores. Thirdly, the soul-making theodicy also provides no account of the suffering that young, innocent children endure, either because of terrible diseases, or at the hands of adults.
For here, as in the case of animals, there is no soul-making purpose that is served. It is very hard to see that it would. Some people die young, before they have had any chance at all to master temptations, to respond to challenges, and to develop morally. Others endure suffering so great that it is virtually impossible for them to develop those moral traits that involve relationships with others. Still others enjoy lives of ease and luxury where there is virtually nothing that challenges them to undergo moral growth.
A second important approach to theodicy involves the following ideas: first, that libertarian free will is of great value; secondly, that because it is part of the definition of libertarian free will that an action that is free in that sense cannot be caused by anything outside of the agent, not even God can cause a person to freely do what is right; and thirdly, that because of the great value of libertarian free will, it is better that God create a world in which agents possess libertarian free will, even though they may misuse it, and do what is wrong, than that God create a world where agents lack libertarian free will.
One problem with an appeal to libertarian free will is that no satisfactory account of the concept of libertarian free will is yet available. Thus, while the requirement that, in order to be free in the libertarian sense, an action not have any cause that lies outside the agent is unproblematic, this is obviously not a sufficient condition, since this condition would be satisfied if the behavior in question were caused by random events within the agent.
So one needs to add that the agent is, in some sense, the cause of the action. But how is the causation in question to be understood? Present accounts of the metaphysics of causation typically treat causes as states of affairs. If, however, one adopts such an approach, then it seems that all that one has when an action is freely done, in the libertarian sense, is that there is some uncaused mental state of the agent that causally gives rise to the relevant behavior, and why freedom, thus understood, should be thought valuable, is far from clear.
But then the question is whether there is any satisfactory account of causation where causation is not a relation between states of affairs. But even if the difficulty concerning the nature of libertarian free will is set aside, there are still very strong objections to the free-will approach.
First, and most important, the fact that libertarian free will is valuable does not entail that one should never intervene in the exercise of libertarian free will. Indeed, very few people think that one should not intervene to prevent someone from committing rape or murder. On the contrary, almost everyone would hold that a failure to prevent heinously evil actions when one can do so would be seriously wrong.
Secondly, the proposition that libertarian free will is valuable does not entail that it is a good thing for people to have the power to inflict great harm upon others. So individuals could, for example, have libertarian free will, but not have the power to torture and murder others. Thirdly, many evils are caused by natural processes, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and other weather conditions, and by a wide variety of diseases.
Such evils certainly do not appear to result from morally wrong actions. If that is right, then an appeal to free will provides no answer to an argument from evil that focuses upon such evils. Some writers, such as C. Lewis and Alvin Plantinga, have suggested that such evils may ultimately be due to the immoral actions of supernatural beings Lewis, , —3; Plantinga, a, If that were so, then the first two objections mentioned above would apply: one would have many more cases where individuals were being given the power—much greater than the power that any human has—to inflict great harm on others, and then were being allowed by God to use that power to perform horrendously evil actions leading to enormous suffering and many deaths.
In addition, however, it can plausibly be argued that, though it is possible that earthquakes, hurricanes, cancer, and the predation of animals are all caused by malevolent supernatural beings, the probability that this is so is extremely low. The fact that agents could be free in a libertarian sense even if they did not have the power to inflict great harm upon others has led at least one philosopher—namely, Richard Swinburne—to argue that, while free will is valuable, precisely how valuable it is depends upon the range of actions open to one.
This variant on the appeal to libertarian free will is also open to a number of objections. First, as with free will theodicies in general, this line of thought provides no justification for the existence of occurrences that not only appear, upon cursory inspection, to be natural evils, uncaused by any agents, but where, in addition, the very closest scientific examination supports the conclusion that there are no grounds for postulating anything beyond purely physical events as the causes of the occurrences in question.
Secondly, if what matters is simply the existence of alternative actions that differ greatly in moral value, this can be the case even in a world where one lacks the power to inflict great harm on others, since there can be actions that, rather than inflicting great suffering on others, would instead benefit others enormously, and which one could either perform or intentionally refrain from performing.
Thirdly, what exactly is the underlying line of thought here? In the case of human actions, Swinburne surely holds that one should prevent someone from doing something that would be morally horrendous, if one can do so. But why should this be so? One answer might be that if one intervened too frequently, people would come to believe that they did not have the ability to perform such actions. But, in the first place, it is not clear why that would be undesirable.
People could still, for example, be thoroughly evil, for they could still very much wish that they had the power to perform such terrible actions, and be disposed to perform such actions if they ever came to have the power. In the second place, prevention of deeply evil actions could take quite different forms. People could, for example, be given a conscience that led them, when they had decided to cause great injury to others, and were about to do so, to feel that what they were about to do was too terrible a thing, so that they would not carry through on the action.
In such a world, people could surely still feel that they themselves were capable of performing heinously evil actions, and they would contemplate performing such actions, but in the end their sense of the great wrongness of the actions would triumph over their selfish reasons for wanting to perform the actions in question. This type of theodicy is also exposed to serious objections. First of all, the occasional occurrence of miraculous intervention, including events that clearly appeared contrary to natural laws, would not render effective human action impossible, since humans would see that such miraculous occurrences were extremely rare.
Secondly, and relatedly, consider a world where the laws of physics, rather than being laws that admit of no exceptions, are instead probabilistic laws.
Effective human action would still be possible in such a world, provided that the relevant probabilities were sufficiently high. But if so, then effective human action would be no less possible in a world with non-statistical laws where there were occasional miraculous interventions. Thirdly, many of the greatest evils could have been prevented by miraculous interventions that would not have been detected. Consider, for example, interventions to prevent natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, or earthquakes, including the earthquake in China in that killed around , people, or tsunamis, such as the one in that hit 12 Asian countries, and killed over , people.
Or consider the interventions that would be needed to prevent pandemics, such as the Black Death in the Middle Ages, which is estimated to have killed between 75 million and million people, or the flu pandemic, which killed between 50 million and million people.
Similarly, consider great moral evils, such as the Holocaust. Fourthly, what natural evils a world contains depends not just on the laws, but also on the initial, or boundary conditions. Thus, for example, an omnipotent being could create ex nihilo a world which had the same laws of nature as our world, and which contained human beings, but which was devoid of non-human carnivores.
Or the world could be such that there was unlimited room for populations to expand, and ample natural resources to support such populations. Fifthly, many evils depend upon precisely what laws the world contains.
An omnipotent being could, for example, easily create a world with the same laws of physics as our world, but with slightly different laws linking neurophysiological states with qualities of experiences, so that extremely intense pains either did not arise, or could be turned off by the sufferer when they served no purpose.
Or additional physical laws of a rather specialized sort could be introduced that would either cause very harmful viruses to self-destruct, or prevent a virus such as the avian flu virus from evolving into an air-born form that has the capacity to kill hundreds of million people.
Finally, this theodicy provides no account of moral evil. But, as we have seen, no satisfactory justification appears to be available. The four types of theodicies considered so far all appeal to beliefs and evaluative claims that the theodicist thinks should be acceptable, upon careful reflection, to anyone, including those who are not religious. Of course, if the religious beliefs to which one appeals, taken together, entail the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect person, such a theodicy would be question-begging.
But one can choose a subset that, even if it entails the existence of a very powerful and knowledgeable creator—or even an omnipotent and omniscient one—does not entail the existence of God. There are many religions, and even within a given religion, very significant differences in the religious beliefs of people, and very different beliefs to which one might appeal, so there are many different religious theodicies that can be constructed. Here I shall focus only on one general type.
I think, however, that it will illustrate the kinds of objections that arise. The religious theodicy in question is as follows. First, human beings, rather than having arisen through a process of natural evolution, were brought into existence by the creator of the universe.
He placed the first two human beings in a perfect world, free of suffering and death. Those human beings, however, freely chose to disobey a command of the creator, and the result was the Fall of mankind, which meant not only that the first two humans became subject to suffering and death, but that all of their descendants did so as well.
The creator, however, lovingly engaged, several generations later, in a rescue operation, in which he, in the person of his son, became incarnated as a human being, and by undergoing a sacrificial death, made it possible for the creator to forgive every human who accepted this sacrifice, and who would then enjoy eternal beatitude living in the presence of the creator.
It is not, of course, a full theodicy, since it does not account for the suffering of non-human animals, at least before the Fall. Thus viewed, how successful is it? However, some people are still bothered that God even allows evil in the first place. They question His wisdom in giving man a choice in the matter. Dorothy Sayers put the problem of evil in the proper perspective:. For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is — limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death — He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine.
Whatever game he is playing with His creation, He has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death.
When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, n either are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts Isaiah —9.
Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgements and how inscrutable his ways! Romans Finally, human experience is that evil does exist. Therefore Epicurus concluded that God must not exist. As there is clear evidence and experience of evil, either God is not all-powerful ie He cannot stop evil or God is not loving and good ie He does not love us or care enough to stop evil.
The inconsistent triad. Some people believe that if evil exists and God is all-powerful, then He cannot be all loving.
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