WHY DO BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE?2Life invariably has its shares of pain, anguish, suffering and turmoil, which make people,feel depressed and rant against fate. They feel that even God does not care, or He would notallow such things to happen. This is the basis of theodicy.What is theodicy? The term means giving explanations for God’s actions. God, who is apowerful and Supreme Being, allows innumerable acts of evil to take place. According to theEncyclopedia Britannica, if we look at theodicy and defense, only some evil can coexist with anomnipotent God. There are several views on what theodicy actually means. Christian theology isbased on two schools of thought, one based on the views of St. Augustine and the other works ofSt. Irenaeus. …show more content…
The Irenaean view is that goodand evil coexist and man must use their experience to learn from it and strive towards perfection.Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a German philosopher, said that there were three kinds of evil,physical, metaphysical and moral. According to the English theologian Richard Swinburne, whenany natural calamity occurs, it causes destruction and havoc but also allows people to exhibittheir good qualities in the face of danger. It allows them to be better prepared for futureeventualities so an event may have a negative as well as a positive effect. John Hick says, “Allforms of suffering are ultimately constructive because they somehow advance God's purposes increating the world. We live in a providential world where souls can grow, despite their sufferings,into a true and lasting relationship with their Creator” (Surin, 1983, pp. 238).It is difficult to have a viable theodicy for diverse reasons such as: (i) historicalarguments state that in today’s world, the concept of God as all powerful no longer holds true asthe world is governed by strict mechanistic system, as shown by Newton, Galileo and
“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.
After reviewing the work of David Hume, the idea of a God existing in a world filled with so much pain and suffering is not so hard to understand. Humes’ work highlights some interesting points which allowed me to reach the conclusion that suffering is perhaps a part of God’s divine plan for humans. Our morals and values allow us to operate and live our daily lives in conjunction with a set of standards that help us to better understand our world around us and essentially allows us to better prepare for the potential life after life. For each and every day we get closer to our impending deaths and possibly closer to meeting the grand orchestrator of our universe.
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.
A second and stronger objection to Mackie’s version of the problem of evil is explained to us using the terms 1st and 2nd order goods and evils. 1st order goods/evils are purely physical. Examples are pleasure and pain, happiness and misery. It is claimed by many theists that 1st order evils such as pain and suffering are necessary for 2nd order goods like courage and charity. However there exists what Mackie calls a “fatal objection” to this claim and that is that along with 2nd order goods there must also exist 2nd order evil...
Despite its prevalence, suffering is always seen an intrusion, a personal attack on its victims. However, without its presence, there would never be anyway to differentiate between happiness and sadness, nor good and evil. It is encoded into the daily lives people lead, and cannot be avoided, much like the prophecies described in Antigone. Upon finding out that he’d murdered his father and married his mother,
In fact, we may never find out why bad things happened to us. Our faith teaches us that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. The bible tells us that God will never leave his children forsaken. Base on our faith and believe we know for sure that things will get better.
The Problem of Evil is the question that asks if God is perfectly benevolent, all-powerful, and all-knowing, then how can he allow evil to exist? Many philosophers have tried to answer this age-old question, often focusing on the intellect and the will. This essay will explore and compare the ways in which Descartes, Leibniz, and Berkeley each attempt to solve this dilemma.
To begin, bad and good things are just as likely to happen to a good person as they are to a bad person. Second, everyone has an equal chance of success in all of the things that matter, and finally, only things we do with our own effort determine our success and failure in life. “How to understand your own good: … the intelligent man sees it in his own actions.” (Aurelius, 6.51) We derive comfort from these statements by knowing that the universe is not out to “get” us. It is neither unfair nor fair, it is A-fair, everyone is in the same boat, and death is just as likely to happen to you as anyone
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.
Leibniz was a German theorist who developed the philosophical system of optimism. According to the introduction, 18th-century France had a very narrow understanding of optimism, “the opinion of those philosophers who assert that this world is the best that God could create, the best of all possible worlds” (Voltaire xii). Liebniz argued that if God was perfect then He must have created a perfect world. Voltaire and many other philosophers were concerned about this interpretation because it provided “divine justification for suffering and injustice” (xii). Leibniz argued that it is the suffering and injustice that are part of the “harmonious universe, in which the human perspective was simply too limited to grasp the role of the individual pieces in the greater design” (xii). In other words, he thought that God works in mysterious ways, an explanation that many people still use today, and that people need to just accept the world as is.
Webster dictionary defines Theodicy as “Defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil” (Webster Dictionary). We ultimately cannot eliminate evil and suffering but those whom have a strong faith in God often seem to find inner peace. The bible tells us “for there is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not” (King James Version, Ecclesiastes 7:20). All humans are, by nature, sinful and condemned and in reality no one really is good. We are far more interested in pleasing ourselves than we are in pleasing the one who made us. We must try to understand there is good and there is evil no matter what religion we are. We as humans always seem to hold God responsible for things that happen in the world, or in our everyday lives. We are all born with pure hearts and souls and have a free will to choose between what is good and what is evil. We must remember our character and we should be stronger than our circumstance. We can’t always control what happens to us, but we can always control how
“I have a point to argue, which is that mankind’s quest for the good has been a struggle between humanism, on the one hand, and religious conceptions of the world, on the other hand. The latter have proved resistant in the face of efforts by the former to free not just the imagination but the very life of man from the authority of religious world views, whether in the classical epoch, the Renaissance, or the eighteenth century and since. The durability of religious views might be variously explained, but one main historical reason is that most people are naturally superstitious
The definition and presence of evil in the temporal world, while largely recognized as a theological subject, has major political implications. Political institutions, what power they retain, and the types of laws constructed are each determined by evil and what it implies about human nature.
Why do bad things happen to good people? Something I always pondered about. We see so many different people everyday. From parents, to grandparents, to siblings, to aunts and uncles, even strangers, most people spend their days growing old with their families. For example, today just a normal Tuesday afternoon going to work I see kids running around with their parents, grandparents going for a walk around the neighborhood, and I see aunts and uncles coming into work to buy shoes for their two year old niece. Family is a big part of my culture. But how much do we really think about how in a blink of an eye, you never know if you will see your family tomorrow. I guess we may need to rely on our faith a little to keep us safe and together right?
“Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes, he does not care to, or he does not exist. God is either impotent, evil or imaginary. Take your pick, and choose wisely.” –Sam Harris