Summary Of Evil And Omnipotence By J. L. Mackie

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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. …show more content…

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

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