The Argument of Evil for the Existence of God One of the major arguments proposed against the existence of God in contemporary western philosophy is the problem of evil. It is based upon the inability to reconcile the magnitude of evil in the world with the all-loving nature of God. John Hick describes the problem from the perspective of its proponent, "If God is perfectly loving, God must wish to abolish all evil; and if God is all-powerful, God must be able to abolish all evil. But evil exists; therefore God cannot be both omnipotent and perfectly loving." This thus causes difficulty for the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God who possess both qualities of being all-loving and omnipotent.
While Philo agreed with Demea that it is apparent that there is evil in the world, he disagreed in that Gods nature is impossible to know. Like Cleanthes, he agreed that God’s attributes can be derived empirically, however he disagreed in that he said that God cannot have his triad of attributes while evil is existent. Philo said that while there may be more good than evil, the fact that there is any evil in the world indicates that God is contradicting his triad. So, Philo concluded that while it is evident God exists through his necessity of being the prime mover, and while his attributes can be derived empirically through observations of nature, it is evident that he is lacking one of the supposed attributes. Philo says that for God to exist he must not be anthropomorphized; God is blind to good and evil, he is an indifferent prime mover.
Human beliefs are contingent true, because it could happen to be true and it could also have been false. Divine beliefs are necessary truth, by denying it, it will create a contradiction. Therefore, as logic dictates, my first proposition is if one believes in God, then no human action will be voluntary. However, noted that God is all-knowing, but it doesn’t mean God is all-controlling. For the sake of argument in a metaphysical sense, what if there were more than just one rea... ... middle of paper ... ...onditions: Since God is all-knowing, the multiverse can exist within God’s omniscience.
The Problem of Evil Disproved by the Free Will Defense The Problem of Evil states that because evil exists the existence of a tri-omni being, which we typically refer to as God, is impossible. This argument, if proved to be true, would refute the Cosmological Argument for God’s Existence. The Cosmological Argument states that not every being can be a dependent being without infinite regress (which is believed to be impossible), so there exists a tri-omni self dependent being known as God which initiated the dependency of the universe. The disproving of God and, thus, all theories proving the existence of God, would be disastrous to the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas and all people who believe in the existence of a tri-omni being. Fortunately for these people, there are solutions to the Problem of Evil.
Based on my belief, we cannot label God as all-powerful and loving considering that he has allowed the existence of evil not only to be welcomed into society but also to let it continue. The third tenet of suffering contradicts the first two tenets of Gods love and omnipotence. If God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, then why does he continue to allow suffering to exist within the world of humanity? The best way to answer this question according to Thomas Aquinas would be ““Nothing which implies contradiction falls under the omnipotence of God.” (Summa Theologiae, Questions on God)
Philo claims that it is inconceivable that the planet was made by a being both omnipotent and omnibenevolent. That God is the maker and He is wholly moral, he can't be answerable for the presence of evil in the planet. Evil, indeed, does not exist as an unrelated substance: it is noticeably a nonappearance of great similarly as difficulty seeing is the nonattendance of sight. This unlucky deficiency emerges through the activities of people who hold unrestrained choice. The God of Christian belief in higher powers might be guarded against the above charge in light of the fact that people must have free will in mind to be human.
In “God and the Problem of Evil,” B.C. Johnson argues that evil rules out the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good God because there are many evil things that are happening in this world. In this paper, I am going to argue that God is only all-good but not all-powerful and all-knowing. God is all-knowing, God is all-powerful, God is all-good, suffering and evil will not exists in this world. When we read or hear of disasters, deaths and sufferings, we always question why God would allow all these to happen.
Therefore it is a valid argument. It is an unsound argument, because the premises of this argument are not true in fact: the existence of evil cannot show that God must lack either infinite benevole... ... middle of paper ... ...ng on randomly, evil things happen to people who don't deserve it. Is this state runs counter to the idea that God is just. Or God could not control how much evil is necessary to bring to whom. These replies are unsuccessful, because Van Inwagen's response is to say that God entails "being the playthings of chance."
There is evil. Therefore, there is no God,” (Sober, 2013). Written in the argumentative form of reductio ad absurdem, the argument makes the assumption of assuming the opposite thing to prove ones argument. Using this argumentative form leads to a weak argument; in this essay, the weak argument is against the belief in God. The terms omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent used to describe God, proves that God knows of all evil, that He is powerful enough to destroy evil and that He despises evil, but does that truly mean that there would be no evil in the world that we currently live in?
If He was righteous, He would stop the evil from occurring Therefore, the existence of evil cannot be compatible with the existence of this type of God. The primary response to the argument from evil is the appeal to human freedom. This argument states that God sees evil as necessary so that we humans may be free to choose our own path. The fatal flaw in this argument is that there are evils that exist not as a direct result of human choice. Natural evils such as floods, earthquakes, and tornadoes serve no purpose according to this definition, and are therefore unnecessary evils.