The problem of evil and the existence of God has been a philosophical question that philosophers have tried to tackle for centuries. Evil and the horrible events that are happening in our world are the primary objection to the existence of God. This raises a significant question that threatens Christian theology. If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, and all-perfect, then why do we live in a world with imperfections and evil? How could God allow innocent lives to suffer without intervening? Both John Hick and B.C. Johnson’s arguments aim to describe the problem of evil in relation to God by providing their responses to the problem. In the end I’ve concluded that the existence of God and the existence of evil are able to coincide together. …show more content…
He says that theists claim God allows evil to happen due to human choice and human free will. But, if we consider a human bystander who does not stop an evil from happening, then clearly that bystander should not be considered good. To an extent, God is just like a bystander in this situation. God sits above us, watching over each and every part of our life without getting involved. So if human bystanders are seen as not good, then God should too be considered not good. Therefore because of this, God should not be seen as all-good. Johnson claims that God acts like a bystander who “tolerates disasters…in order to create moral urgency.” (Johnson 122). From there he says that if there were no problems in the world, like where “babies never perished in burning houses, God would be morally obligated to take an active hand in setting fire to houses with infants in them.” (Johnson 122). All of this he finds absurd however because “it is not good to maximize moral urgency.” (Johnson 122). Again with this argument, there are problems with it. It is human obligation to intervene and help in a situation like this. Firefighters, soldiers, police officers, doctors, and nurses all act justly when people are suffering and are in pain. Johnson argues that God could have created a person that never fails to choose the right choice with her free will. With this, God could simply eliminate all the bad choices …show more content…
This essentially says that what we classify as bad might be good in God’s eyes and thus, we should not judge an action. Johnson says that “such a morality should have no meaning to us.” (Johnson 123). If this is true, then God’s goodness might be opposite to ours. And then because of this, we cannot judge what is bad or good as it destroys our moral categories. Finally, Johnson believes that “at any rate, God’s ‘higher morality,’ being the opposite of ours, cannot offer any grounds for deciding that he is somehow good.” (Johnson 123). While he doesn’t directly address this argument, Hick would have an issue with the word opposite. It leads to a degree of mystery due to the openness of the world opposite. Given his overall position on the previous issues, it is clear that Hick isn’t convinced by Johnson’s excuse nor does he fully support it. Similarity, I do not believe that what is bad in my eyes might be seen as good for God. The real problem with Johnson’s argument is the word opposite. One cannot say that the bad actions are seen as good to God due to the fact that people really have no idea what God is thinking. In my opinion, I do not think that imperfect actions, like murder or tornados, would be seen as good to a God who has been previously assumed to be all-good and all-powerful. Because
“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.
It also follows that God, not as benevolent as could be hoped, prefers the maximization of good (2) as opposed to the minimization of evil (1). This is disquieting for the individual who might be the victim of suffering a “greater good.”
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.
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.
There is a lot of evil in the world, and much of it happens unexplainably. In the history of life on Earth bad things have happened and evil has caused problems. In relation to some world wide events, 6 million people died in the holocaust, 65 million people died in the war, 800 thousand died in the Rwanda genocide and 230 thousand people died in the 2004 boxing day tsunami. There is a lot of human suffering in the world, but there is also suffering of animals too. A lot of suffering in humans is due to other humans, however some of it can be caused by non-human causes, such as natural disasters etc. Under religious beliefs god was the creator of life on Earth, so if he was all good, powerful and knowing then he would be capable of at least preventing natural disasters from erupting as they cause life to undergo suffering. Likewise, capable of preventing human suffering from natural disasters, i.e. saving people from hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes etc…
This is an important point, because if our understanding of God is that He is purely good, then why would so many of this heinous events occur. “Theist reply that because God is necessarily good, He would never do anything morally reprehensible Himself nor command us to preform heinous acts.” (Anderson, 2007). However, God is seen punishing not only those who are considered to be evil, but also those who are innocent, He causes floods, plagues and death to many people because of one person’s act, or if He was angry. This is completely opposite to our understanding of God loving us all and to our most important idea that God is perfectly good. Even if these acts were seen as punishing those who are considered evil, then God would have not done any act that would harm someone, nor would He permit us to do so. The bible is filled with these inaccuracies, is God loving of all, or just the few that follow Him, it states different allowances in stories (Infidels.org, 2016). It is my understanding that these stories are proof that God is not purely good, which itself is an argument for Him not to exist or that the stories themselves or false. Murder was perfectly fine for the soldiers of the First Crusade, who slaughtered every man, woman, and child, however it is written in the bible that murder is prohibited, it is a sin. Many other events like this occurred. When we look
“What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?” (Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, part two, chapter 3)
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
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.
...mpossibility for an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good God to exist in a universe where evil exists. The qualities in question are categorical, omnipotence, omniscience and being perfectly good, and the only way to account for the existence of evil is to limit in some way one of the categorical characteristics. What this does is change the quality of omnipotence to the lesser quality of extremely powerful. And in admitting any restrictions to any of the classical attributes of God is to admit that the logical impossibility is in fact valid. What a person needs to do is examine the problem objectively first, and only after reaching their objective conclusion can they then apply it to their religious beliefs.
The problem of reconciling an omnipotent, perfectly just, perfectly benevolent god with a world full of evil and suffering has plagued believers since the beginning of religious thought. Atheists often site this paradox in order to demonstrate that such a god cannot exist and, therefore, that theism is an invalid position. Theodicy is a branch of philosophy that seeks to defend religion by reconciling the supposed existence of an omnipotent, perfectly just God with the presence of evil and suffering in the world. In fact, the word “theodicy” consists of the Greek words “theos,” or God, and “dike,” or justice (Knox 1981, 1). Thus, theodicy seeks to find a sense of divine justice in a world filled with suffering.
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.
If there is truly a God and the maker of this universe did create human beings, then in this perfect world that this perfect God made, I do not just see God’s wholly good but also the bad and ugly. God must not be omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent then and the definition of God is false and the existence of God
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).
Evil has plagued the lives of all creatures and has existed throughout all of time. The problem of evil is that since God created the world and is all omniscient; omnipotent; and omni-benevolent, and since a good thing strives to rid evil; and because there are no limits to an omnipotent being: then because God is all three the world would therefore not contain evil. But fact is that evil does exist and from this some conclude that God does not exist because he would possess all three omni’s and rid evil. He knows of evil because he created it and had knowledge of what it would be, but he does not stop it even though he is omnipotent then that would explain the conclusion against God’s existence due to the problem of evil. If he exists then why does he allow suffering? pain?