Commentary of Evil in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part X

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. God is all powerful, all knowing, but not all good. The dialogue provided by Demea, Cleanthes and Philo all conflict on the nature of God, but none of them conflict on the presence of a God. Thus, the fact of evil, to me, does not provide grounds for not believing in God, but instead provides grounds for reinterpreting Gods nature. I agree with Philo in that in order for God to coexist with evil, he must be lacking goodness.

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.

Evil can be categorized into two forms, moral evil and natural evil. Moral evil is brought about by bad choices that stem from our free will. Natural evil is bad things that happen to people, whether they deserve them or not. The problem with evil is, “Either we must say that God is not wholly good, and that he permits or is even the author of evil. Or we must say that God is not omnipotent, and although he is wholly good and would prevent evil if he could, he is powerless to stop it.” (Fitzgerald 340).

Since God is the being to which the Problem of Evil poses the greatest problem, perhaps the definition of God can be altered to allow evil. This does not work for several reasons. First, the Cosmological Argument only proves one definition of God. By changing the definition of God there is no longer any point to the matter because the Cosmological Argument and thus the Problem of Evil become irrelev... ... middle of paper ... ...ems to follow that he was bound to act as he did.” (Ayer 481) Compatibilism proves that free will and Determinism are compatible and specifically that Determinism cannot be used to disprove free will because free will is inherently determined. Though there is some debate as to the existence of God, the matter has not been sufficiently proven one way or the other.

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). In De Libero Arbitrio Book I, Augustine states that Evil has no teacher, so when people do evil, they are the cause of their own suffering. The question then becomes, did we learn how to sin?

Nonetheless, the inquiry still stays concerning if God was fit to make the universe without the likelihood of pain and agony. God could have made free creatures that chose not to cause suffering upon themselves or... ... middle of paper ... ...ent and omnipotent in spite of the vicinity of evil for two explanations. Firstly, God is omnibenevolent and omnipotent on the grounds that God is endless and can't be restricted by good or evil. The second explanation, is that in spite of the vicinity of evil on the planet, is that evil is made in place for a more excellent exceptional which man can yearn for. Overall, I suppose it is conceivable that God is both omnibenevolent and omnipotent, which might be said by people themselves as an immediate result of freedom.

By common sense, we would infer from this observation that God, as conceived in this tradition, does not exist - for, if He did, He would prevent the evil. This inference is called the Problem of Evil by those who profess one of the religions in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and their attempts to 'solve' the problem have given rise to a labyrinth of sophistry. Put briefly, the solution most commonly espoused to the Problem of Evil is * Some suffering is caused by others' misuse of their own free-will (as in murder). * God does not intervene to stop people freely choosing evil because: o people can be virtuous only if they freely choose between good and evil; o having virtuous people in the world is a greater good than eradicating evil; o therefore God must allow people to be free; o therefore evil inflicted by other people is the price that God demands that we pay to enable some people to be virtuous. * Some suffering is caused by natural phenomena (as in earthquakes).

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.

Evodius holds the position: “The existence of a good, all knowing (omniscient), and all-powerful (omnipotent) God is contradicted by our experience of evil in the world. It makes sense to conclude that God does not exist.” (Bwanali). As a response, Augustine asserts that the evil that we experience is just a lack of goodn... ... middle of paper ... ... good and is not the reason for evil are the ones that will live happy, faithful lives. All in all, the problem of evil has been debated for thousands of years. Some believe that evil is caused by Satan and not humanity, such as the Manichaeanists and Bogomilists, and some believe that humans are the cause of evil, rather than God, such as Augustine, Peter Kreefe, and myself.

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.