There is so much evil in the world such as: murder, child mortality, torture, rape, assault and more. So how can there be an all loving God if these things are constantly happening? In this paper, I will be arguing that there is in fact no such thing as an all loving and all powerful God due to Evil. When I think of an all-loving God, I think of God as someone who would never allow a child to be kidnapped, raped, tortured and killed. I think of God as someone who would not allow anything bad or evil to happen in this world. I am not saying people would not get their fair share of misfortune now and again, but they would never experience evil, pain or suffering. That being said, there would be no evil or vindictive people in this world …show more content…
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 what is going to happen before it actually happens, would he not be morally obligated to stop people from doing something evil to others, or preventing suffering by those who have been hurt by evil? A God who is all loving would not stand by knowing what terrible things are going to happen unless he either did not have the power to stop it from happening, or unless he is not all
“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.
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.
Either element of the conclusion is damaging to the traditional understanding of a Judeo-Christian God. It seems simple enough. A benevolent Creator appears incompatible with what we understand to be the existence of evil. Evil is opposed to God’s will, eventually cumulating in the crucifixion of God’s son, Jesus. One must then wonder how an all-loving and all-powerful God would allow such pain to occur to both his creation and Jesus. A perfect God’s world should be similarly perfect. The world is not perfect so it seems that God must not be all-loving or He must not be all-powerful. Rejecting the existence of evil, immediately rejects too much of the Judeo-Christian tradition to be considered, though some philosophers have considered it.
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.
this evil was occurring. If He was all-powerful, He would have the power to stop
Thus, if one is asking why evil at all exists, he or she automatically limits the omnipotence of God and thus God’s ability to do good. Mackie also considers the linguistic argument concerning good and evil, stressing that we give names to qualities only if they have real opposites. The qualitative nature of ‘good’ is linguistically necessary to differentiate itself from the qualitative nature of ‘evil,’ thereby confirming the existence of evil (as defined by theists). But, as Mackie points out, theists are unwilling to accept that the quantity of evil that exists in the world is calibrated at such a specific dose that it provides a necessary counter-point to the existence of
J.L. Mackie discusses the problem of evil in a logical sense in his article inside our textbook. There are four beliefs when discussing the problem of evil. These beliefs are that God is Omnipotent, God is Omniscient, God is Omnibenevolent, and that Evil and Suffering exist. The common conception we have of God is that he is the best possible being that can exist. He is all good, knows all, and all powerful. The problem seems to be that if God is all of these things, how can there possibly be evil and suffering? If a tri-Omni God does truly exist, then it is not possible for evil and suffering to exist. And vice versa, if evil and suffering exist, then a tri-Omni god cannot exist.
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.
In, “The Problem of Evil,” Eleonore Stump argues that the existence of evil in our world does not mean God cannot exist. Stump gives the claim, the good produced by free will overwrites the subsequent evil, making Union with God possible. In this paper I hope to show that God can exist alongside evil, but my belief is that human free will is limited. There are three claims that the majority of intelligent people are committed to and agree upon if God exists; God is omnipotent, God is omniscient, and God is perfectly good. These claims may be considered universally true, but a point brought up to contradict these claims is, there is evil in the world.
The simultaneous presence of evil and God has been an ongoing debate for a long time. Evil is defined as being morally wrong and by definition, God is the supreme; he is morally perfect and has the power to control everything and everyone. He should then be able to prevent evil from existing or get rid of the evil that does exist, but this is not the case. The question that arises, is if there is a God and he is morally perfect, why does God allow for evil in the world if? The problem is that there is no straightforward answer to this question. Or as some philosophers argue, this is only a problem for those who believe in God and that God is morally perfect and omnipotent (J.L Mackie).
Since the time that we as humans believed in God/an omnipotent power that rules over the universe, we have raised many questions about this God. One of the most recurring questions was, is it reasonable to believe in an all-powerful and all-loving God? There are many reasons to believe either side. On one side people do believe in a benevolent omnipotent God because of the way the world is, how beautiful our earth is, and how it was created among various other things. On the other side people are not willing to believe in an all-loving and all-powerful God because of all the evil in the world, how corrupt it is, and the injustice going on in the world. I am going to show the argument for both sides and why they think that way and will back it up with textual evidence from a philosopher. But the side that I think is the most logical and makes the most sense would be that God cannot be all-loving and all-powerful, if there is so much evil currently going on in the
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.
The problem of evil has been a huge debate between atheists and theists. The problem of evil is how can evil occur in the world if God, a perfect being, created the world, and why do bad things happen to good people if God is in charge. Used to critique theism, the problem of evil questions God’s perfection and his existence. It questions God’s perfection by saying, “Whoever does not chose the best is lacking in power, or in knowledge, or in goodness” (Leibniz 89). This means that people do not think that God can be all powerful or perfect because they do not think that this world was the best possible choice. The problem of evil also critiques the question of God’s existence by saying, “If there is more evil than
God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, which makes us wonder what kind of morally sufficient reason justifies God to allow evil. We know that evil exists in our world, but so does God, so would God be the source of evil as well as good? We have established that God is the omnipotent and benevolent free creator of the world, but suffering and evil exist. Is God unable to prevent evil? If so, he would not be omnipotent. Is He able to prevent the evil in our world but unwilling? If this were then case then he wouldn’t be benevolent. A Persian thinker, Mani, suggested that the answer to this question was a kind of duality between the good and evil. This pluralistic view of the good and evil in our world would suggest that God is not omnipotent, which is why Augustine would reject Mani’s Manichaeism philosophy. Augustine later says that there are two kinds of evils: Moral evil, which would be the suffering from a result of the action of a rational being, and there is natural evil, which would be suffering that comes from physical events (i.e. natural disasters).
To answer that question we must further examine the original premises that we based the first conclusion upon: God is all-powerful and God is all-loving. To say that either one of these postulates are true would disrupt the foundation of the Christian beliefs. So we must dig deeper and look at the thought that "God does not want suffering". Since suffering indeed happens, and God being the all-powerful individual and could stop suffering from happening if He wanted, then God must want suffering to happen for a reason. That's strange, since we are saying God is also all-loving. God must need suffering to happen for a reason, but ...