J.L. Mackie's "Evil and Omnipotence"
The philosopher J.L. Mackie wrote a very convincing piece on the problem of evil called “Evil and Omnipotence,” in which he attempts to show that one of the following premises must be false in order for them to be consistent with each other.
#1. God is omnipotent.
#2. God is morally perfect.
#3. Evil exists.
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.
A common objection to the problem of evil is to claim that good and evil are both necessary for each other to exist. They must be looked at as counterparts. Another way of putting it is that without experiencing evil, we couldn’t possibly recognize or know what is good. Evil must exist in order for good to exist in the same way that the concept of up must exist if there we are to conceive of down. Mackie denies that this is true however. He explains that good and evil cannot be logical opposites like up and down (or great and small) because up and down are not qualities. It wouldn’t make sense to favor up over down or vice versa as one could do with good and evil. Also, even if it were true that evil is necessary for us to conceive of good, we would only need a very small amount. And it wouldn’t seem right to say that very little evil exists in the world.
A second and stronger objection to Mackie’s version of the problem of evil is explained to us using the terms 1st and 2nd order goods and evils. 1st order goods/evils are purely physical. Examples are pleasure and pain, happiness and misery. It is claimed by many theists that 1st order evils such as pain and suffering are necessary for 2nd order goods like courage and charity. However there exists what Mackie calls a “fatal objection” to this claim and that is that along with 2nd order goods there must also exist 2nd order evil...
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...Contingency Argument that whether a contingent series of causes is infinite or not, that fact is now irrelevant because as long as the series as a whole is thought to be contingent the existence of God can still be proven. So the Contingency Argument looks something like this.
#1. The universe as a whole is a contingent being.
#2. The Principle of Sufficient Reason is true.
#3. The existence of a contingent being must be explained by something other than itself.
#4. There must be an external, necessary being. (God.)
The obvious problem with the Contingency Argument is that we do not know whether or not PSR is true. It has been suggested by some philosophers that the existence of the universe is merely a “brute fact,” or that it is possible for the existence of something to be explained by nothing. Also one can easily reject the first premise due to the fallacy of composition. Just because all the parts of something exhibit a certain quality doesn’t mean that the whole of something exhibits that same quality. So although the Contingency Argument seems stronger than the Causal Argument, it still fails to prove anything because some of the premises can be rationally denied.
It is perhaps the most difficult intellectual challenge to a Christian how God and evil can both exist. Many of the greatest minds of the Christian church and intellects such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas spent their entire lives trying to solve this problem, and were unsuccessful (Erickson, 2009, p.439). However, this dilemma is not only an intellectual challenge, but it is emotional. Man feels it, lives it. Failing to identify the religious form of the problem of evil will appear insensitive; failure to address the theological form will seem intellectually insulting. This conundrum will never be completely met during our earthly life, but there are many biblical and philosophical resources that help mitigate it.
An Analysis of Peter van Inwagen’s The Magnitude, Duration, and Distribution of Evil: a Theodicy
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.
Carus, Paul. "The Philosophical Problem of Good and Evil." The History of the Devil: With 350
(b) If God is were truly omnipotent, he would then be capable of eliminating evil;
In this paper, I will use the writings of John Hick and Richard Swinburne to dispute the problem of evil argument. After I first elaborate on the P.O.E., I will give support for God’s existence with regards to the problem of evil. Then, I will address further counterarguments
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
Mackie in his paper Evil and Omnipotence, constructs an argument against the idea of the possibility of a God existing that has the characteristics laid out by the main religions: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. These characteristics include that God is omnipotent, or He is capable of stopping evil, and omni benevolent, or He wants to eliminate evil and He is entirely good. Mackie systematically goes through his logical thought process as well as his response to any type of criticism or alternative solution that might arise. The main point of his argument is to establish that God, as constructed by Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, could not possibly exist. It is one of the most highly regarded arguments towards atheism.
In, “The Problem of Evil,” Eleonore Stump holds the belief that the existence of evil in our world does not automatically disprove God’s existence. The belief that God cannot live alongside evil is considered to be the Evidential Problem of evil and this is what Stump is arguing against in her paper. Stump argues, the ability to fix our defective free will makes Union with God possible, which overwrites all the un-absorbable evils in the world, showing both God and un-absorbable evils can coexist. In this paper I hope to show that God can exist, but also show that human free will is limited.
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
In fact, we see that (1) is a logically necessary truth, the denial of which is self-contradictory. As David Oderberg argues:
Mackie argues that the paradox of evil is that God is both Omnipotent and absolutely good, yet evil is still prevalent throughout the world. If good is truly opposed to evil, than a good will without fail always eliminate an evil. Since there are no limits to what an omnipotent being can do, then a good omnipotent being would automatically negate or remove any and all evil simply through existing. This means that if a good omnipotent being exists then evil cannot exist and if evil does exist then a good omnipotent being cannot exist. Since few people deny that evil exists, Mackie believes the existence of evil means that a good omnipotent being cannot exists. While I do agree that logically there can be no real answer for the issue of evil
New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Anthony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre, London, S.C.M. Press, 1955, p. 152.
This is a part of the text, “Evil and Omnipotence” by J.L Mackie. In this J.L says, But it does so only by qualifying some of the propositions that constitute the problem. First, it sets a limit to what God can do, saying that God cannot create good without simultaneously creating evil, and this means either that God is not omnipotent or that there are some limits to what an omnipotent thing can do. It may be replied that these limits are always presupposed, that omnipotence has never meant the power to do what is logically impossible, and on the present view the existence of good without evil would be a logical impossibility. This interpretation of omnipotence may, indeed, be accepted as a modification of our original account which does not reject anything that is essential to theism, and I shall in general assume it in the subsequent
This paper's purpose is to prove the existence of God. There are ten main reasons that are presented in this paper that show the actuality of God. It also shows counter-arguments to the competing positions (the presence of evil). It also gives anticipatory responses to possible objections to the thesis.