J. L. Mackie's Logical Problem Of Evil

All in all, the Greek philosopher Epicurus was the first to suggest that evil and God aren’t compatible. His argument was later developed by different philosophers and was known as the Logical Problem of Evil. One of the major contemporary philosophers that introduced Epicurus’ argument formally is the Australian philosopher J.L. Mackie who presented the trilemma as follows: God is all-good, God is all-powerful, and Evil exists. According to Mackie, these three propositions can’t be all true at the same time so a rational person should drop one of them and since it’s very clear that evil is present, then one should drop one of God’s characteristics or stop believing in God all together. Hence, Mackie suggests that the theistic world view is irrational; however, about

In our case, God maximized goodness in our world by giving us free will. By definition, having free will entails having the choice to perform evil actions, a choice that some of us exercise. So in this case, God’s “omni” attributes are preserved since God is able to prevent evil but doesn’t do so because he doesn’t want to interfere with free will and maximizing goodness at the same time. However, Plantinga’s theodicy alone isn’t enough to refute Mackie’s argument since it only focuses on moral evil and doesn’t consider natural evil. To address natural evil, the English theologian John Hick introduced the “Soul Making Theodicy”. Hick suggests that we shouldn’t view evil as an obstacle; instead evil should be viewed as a tool to achieve moral perfection. In other words, God uses the harshness of life to give us a robust character that wouldn’t be possible to achieve without an imperfect world for good and morally superior actions are only considered “good” in the light of challenges and hardships. While both the above theodicies succeed at explaining why evil exists, both of them fail at explaining why evil is very