In my first of three posts devoted to philosophy of religion, I will be briefly addressing the problem of evil. Anyone who's had a religious debate as an atheist or a theist who disagrees with your position has either used or responded to the problem of evil. Basically, the objection is this: there are clear examples of evil in the world, so why does God let them happen? Before addressing such an under-formulated instance I will first lay down a few unstated premises. The first is that God, as debated in most arguments holds all of the “omni’s” that is to say he is omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful), omnipresent (everywhere) and benevolent. The second is that prevention of a moral evil is a benevolent action whereas permitting an evil action to continue when having the ability to prevent or discontinue it is non-benevolent. The argument shows that God cannot have all of these characteristics as they are logically incompatible with the existence of evil. There are two logically acceptable theistic responses, the first is to deny God’s omnipotence, the second is to deny God’s benevolence; one could also deny God’s omniscience, but I’ve never heard of anyone attempting to do so. So here’s the most important lesson to be taken from this post: all Christians either deny God’s omnipotence or benevolence or have never thought meaningfully about the nature of God.
That being said, some of the theistic responses I mentioned before have been pretty brilliant. Sons of the Enlightenment Leibniz and Spinoza denied the existence of evil; Spinoza’s argument as found in Ethics is among the most brilliant works in human history. He demonstrates, in a 200+ page logical proof just a few of the following facts: you don’t exist, God exists, God is perfect, there is only one substance, there is only one logically possible expression of existence, and, most importantly to our discussion at this point in time, there is no evil, in fact, everything that happens is perfect. This is in many ways the more logically sound approach to responding to the problem of evil, but is often avoided because of the apparent strength of the existence of evil; people don’t like denying evil because it contradicts what they feel to be their empirically validated experience.
Therefore, the far more common approach is to deny God’s omnipotence. This is through the traditional “free will” response. This argument states that it was God felt it was better to create humans with free so as to allow them to willingly arrive at belief in his existence than to force them to believe and thus act in accordance with His moral laws. This, although many do not realize it is denying God’s omnipotence because God could still logically create a world in which people are only presented with good options and are compelled (by their availability of options) to make a good choice. Even if this theoretical world doesn’t force everyone to believe in God, it could still remove everyone’s possibility to act evilly and thus resolve the issue.
That’s all I wanted to say, for anyone who’s interested in the free-will argument, I have a selection from a paper I wrote on Alvin Plantinga’s formulation of the argument in which he seeks to establish the possibility of God co-existing with evil, rather than the necessity towards which many theists argue (weaker modality is always the better choice in an argument). So here it is:
Imagine two worlds, W and K. In these two worlds all things are identical up until time T, at which point situation S occurs in which a hypothetical individual is to make a choice. At S, one of two options must be true, either the individual will make a positive or negative choice to the action (symbolically S then (P v N)). Say in W, P results (and in K, N results), that is to say given S, P. As a result, world K is no longer logically possible because S must result in P despite the conditions of world K. Here, the argument returns in relevance to the argument from evil; God cannot actualize both I and K due to the logical inconsistencies of the combination and therefore, assuming the gift of free will, is unable to bring about any world He so chooses.
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