Or one could answer the problem of evil as saying that much like a dog can't understand physics, we can't understand the complexities of God. In this we could still choose to believe, God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent. If God created the universe surly he/she/it is beyond western logic.
"The question of whether or not evil is possible in a world created by a good and omnipotent God is basically equivalent to the question of whether or not it is logically possible for good to exist without evil."
No, not really. Apples and oranges.
"The problem doesn't really arise in any interesting way for the Gods of non-Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions."
Lack of imagination here. You really can't imagine various gods for whom the question of evil arises in any interesting way?
Well, there are some atheists that argue that God's omnibenevolence is incompatible with the evils in the world, meaning God cannot exist (or at least, is either not omnibenevolent or not omnipotent, and if these are part of the definition of God, then God insofar as the term refers to something with at least these two properties, does not exist). Theists have responses to this argument, but the point is that the subject matter is something that can be rationally discussed.
The problem of evil arises when all three of the following are true: 1) the deity is omniscient; 2) the deity is omnipotent; 3) the deity is omnibenevolent. If God knows all, can do all, and is all good, why does evil exist?
If any of those conditions is not true, the existence of evil is a lot easier to explain:
- omniscient and omnipotent, but not 100% morally good
- omniscient and omnibenevolent, but has limited power to change the bad things
- omipotent and omnibenevolent, but isn't aware that evil exists
It's only when someone's making the claim that all three are true at the same time that it starts to get interesting, because some of the arguments get really hokey.
So to address your observation that there's an implicit assumption that one god exists, I would wager a guess that it's because polytheistic religions don't wade into the waters of theodicy much (if at all), as they don't deal in "omni-'s" to the same extent as monotheistic religions tend to.
Well now you're saying something quite different. Before, you said it was "necessary" to find out which (if any) gods exist before asking whether or not the existence of various kinds of god is compatible with the existence of evil. Now you're just saying that this particular sort of hypothetical question seems pointless to you. I can't argue with your lack of interest, but there is no reason to think that hypothetical questions in general are pointless; and in the particular case at hand, moral philosophers have learned a lot by investigating these questions. The question of whether or not evil is possible in a world created by a good and omnipotent God is basically equivalent to the question of whether or not it is logically possible for good to exist without evil, and this is a question of fundamental interest in moral philosophy (whatever one's religious beliefs).
It's worth repeating that the scope of the problem is very narrow with respect to classes of deity. There is basically only one kind of God for whom the problem of evil arises -- a God who is omnipotent and wholly good. The problem doesn't really arise in any interesting way for the Gods of non-Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions. For this reason, it's not the case that we have to catalog many kinds of god, one-by-one, and then consider the problem separately in relation to each kind of God.
This sort of discussion usually gets trapped in discussions about God allowing Evil in order to allow free will; but that is an evasion; especially since the universe is probably deterministic; and consciousness is probably an illusion.
The problem of evil; is logically caused by the existence of life that strives and competes within an environment of finite resources.
Give us a universe where all the beings are powered by an infinite source of energy so they don't need to chase, catch, kill and eat each other.
Problem solved; would have expected God could figure this out.
So you're saying there's evil and suffering in the world, but God can't prevent it because he created free will? Sounds like a limit on his omnipotence.
Your explanation makes it out that free will is inherently prone to evil and suffering. If so, that would make free will somewhat inherently evil even though it arises from God. Strikes at the heart of omnibenevolence.
Either there's a limit to his ability or a limit to his goodness. No amount of hand waving can remove that.
If He is all good but can create creatures that corrupt his good works… You see the logical conundrum there, right?
I would understand if you don't WANT to see it. It feels wrong to see it. But it's there if you're being honest. You can ignore it. Many do. It's still there despite any aversion to it.
Oh my God. Of course I’m presupposing the idea of the omnipotent/omniscient/… God:
> > Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then from whence comes evil?
Because that’s the premise of the problem statement!
> This is an assumption you are making that many (most?) religions do not.
I think you've identified one of the hardest intellectual problems for believers the problem of evil. If a perfect God exist that created everything how is there evil? It's one of the more difficult ideas to wrestle with. Far deeper than most of the arguments most people make against the existence of God. I'm a Christian myself but I've not come up with a satisfactory answer for me.
God created everything directly and indirectly, everything includes evil. Even if it was indirect, being omniscient makes him ultimately responsible for it.
Either that or you start to get into pantheistic territory.
It makes a little bit of sense, but I don't see how it's relevant to the problem of evil. You can pose the problem with pretty much whatever notion of evil you like: "If there is a good, omnipotent God, why do terrible things happen?"
Many believe God does not have the power to be other than what God is. If God is existence itself, then evil, as humans understand evil, seems to be within God, just as it is within each of us.
No, they come down to almost the same thing. If God is both good and omnipotent, it's obvious that evil should only exist if it is logically necessary for some amount of evil to exist in order for the maximum amount of good to exist. (God's omnipotence doesn't allow him to do things which are _logically_ impossible, such as creating a square circles, so if some degree of evil is a logically necessary corollary of maximal good, it follows that the best world that God can possibly make must still contain some evil.)
> You really can't imagine various gods for whom the question of evil arises in any interesting way?
It only arises in an interesting way for the kind of God I mentioned, so far as I can see. Can you suggest another kind of God for whom it arises? If God is not 100% omnipotent, we can put down the existence of evil to his inability to fix it. If he's not 100% good, we don't expect the world to be 100% good in the first place. I suppose you could argue that the world is in some sense "too evil" to have been created by a God who is (say) only 99% good, and pose the problem of evil in that way for a non-maximally-good God (and similarly for a non-maximally-potent God); but that seems like a pretty uninteresting variant. I think it is a fairly accurate historical statement that the problem of evil is really one that only came to be posed with the advent of monotheistic religions, which all have a broadly similar conception of god.
In any case, what would it matter if the problem of evil arose for other kinds of god? It would not make the hypothetical questions any less interesting. At the very least, it's a cute way of framing questions about good, evil and various kinds of necessity.
That's the thing; having a whole pantheon of gods, each of differing levels of 'goodness' neatly solves the problem of evil. (so does postulating one true god who isn't entirely good or entirely evil.)
The problem of evil is only a philosophical problem insofar as you postulate a god of infinite ability, infinite knowledge and infinite goodness. Obviously, such a god contradicts the world as we see it. remove any one of those three pillars, and the contradiction goes away;
Further, I think, once you start knocking one of those three pillars out, so that we get a god who matches observable reality, I question if that god can create any more meaning than the traditional "What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power"
I mean, would you worship an insufficiently good god? one who intentionally chose some people for very good lives and others for very bad lives? My argument is that worshiping such a god would be either an act of fear or a grasp for power. What about an insufficiently powerful god? a god who really was doing his best?
I don't think you get to say "just design a universe such that X" without actually producing one. In this context, that's a circular argument, since the possibility of such a universe is precisely what we're debating. And lots of things that look reasonable turn out to have inconsistencies buried deep inside. If you're not familiar with computability, "write a program that figures out if another program will run forever" sounds possible at first. You can make specific counterexamples to my argument, but just saying "it must be possible" illuminates nothing.
Anyway, I'll try to do better. Basically, in a universe in which "evil" is physically impossible, you may have "free will" in some sense to choose which good, but you cannot choose whether to do good, because all possible choices are "good". It's specifically freedom to choose good or evil that's the key ingredient in "good" being a meaningful concept, or at least it's consistent to so assume. You're back to the pretty clockwork.
I don't know if it's possible to construct a bulletproof argument here. Shaky foundations are an occupational hazard of metaphysics, for both sides. Saying "well, he's God so he should be able to figure it out" works just as well as "he's God and couldn't do it, ergo it's inconsistent". The best we can do is show our positions are consistent under some set of assumptions.
Exactly, unless one sees the suffering of others as suffering of NPCs or punishment for a former life, I cannot understand how one can believe in a benevolent omnipotent god. The cruelty that some have to endure is simply not explainable with a such a god. It cannot be benevolent AND omnipotent by definition. It becomes far far far more likely that there is simply no such a god. It's not like this dilemma is new so there should be a better explanation by now.
> The fact that he didn't means he's either not omnipotent or not omnibenevolent (a contradiction for those who ascribe both properties to god).
This doesn't really follow. We are creative so we could come up with infinite amounts of nonsense questions that are really logical paradoxes and not real objections. Why can't God create something so heavy that he can't move it? The question of why a loving God allows evil is in that same category if you believe:
- love requires free will
- free will requires choices
- meaningful choices require evil to be an available choice
There are probably other formulations of how love requires the option of rejection and how evil follows from there. But the point is that they turn the contradiction between omnipotence and omnibenevolence into a paradox in the same category as "could God grow a mustache so great that he himself could not shave it?"
It stands to reason, then that the job of the objectors is to show that it's possible to love meaningfully without free will, really. And if you don't believe in objective morality, it's hard to argue what love is and isn't.
> if God's perfectly good, and created the universe, why does evil exist?
Doesn't this depend on your definition of "created"? It seems this presupposes certain things like ex nihilo creation (matter out of nothing) and god being able to create people (i.e., people are not co-existent with god).
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