Problem of Evil

Question 1

What is natural evil?

Answer 1

Results from the workings of the natural world, such as natural disasters and disease. God designed and created the natural world which seems to make God responsible for the evil and suffering that occurs as a result of nature.

Question 2

What is moral evil?

Answer 2

Is caused by human action, such as murder and torture.

Question 3

What is the logical problem of evil?

Answer 3

This is the a priori argument that evil and the God of classical theism (as defined as omnibenevolent and omnipotent) cannot exist together.

Question 4

What is Mackie’s inconsistent triad?

Answer 4

Holds that the God of classical theism cannot exist if evil exists. Either Omnipotence, omnibenevolence or evil must not exist, since all three are inconsistent. Omnipotence entails the power to eliminate evil. Omnibenevolence entails the motivation to prevent evil. Therefore if evil exists, an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God cannot exist.

Question 5

What is the evidential problem of evil?

Answer 5

This is the a posteriori argument that the evidence of evil in the world makes belief in God unjustified. There is a logical possibility that evil and a perfect God exist together, but the evidence is against that possibility actually being true.

Question 6

What is Hume’s evidential problem of evil?

Answer 6

Hume is an empiricist and approaches the problem of evil as such.
A God could have made this world without such evil, making it evidence against a perfect God existing. Hume says it is ‘possible’ that a perfect God exists but allows evil for reasons consistent with omnibenevolence, ‘but they are unknown to us’.

Question 7

Why does Hume believe belief in God is unjustified?

Answer 7

Hume, as an empiricist, insists that we are only justified in believing what the evidence suggests. The evidence of an imperfect world, while logically compatible with a perfect God, makes belief in a perfect God unjustified. You can’t infer perfect goodness from evil.

Question 8

What does Augustine believe evil is derived from?

Answer 8

Evil is derived from original sin, “All evil is either sin or a punishment for sin” – Augustine.

Question 9

Why does evil not exist to Augustine?

Answer 9

Augustine argued Evil does not actually exist. It is merely a privation of good, meaning it is the absence of Good. As humans fell away from God, we fell away from his goodness, resulting in what we mistakenly call ‘evil’.

Question 10

What is Plantinga’s free will defence?

Answer 10

Plantinga develops a ‘free will defence’ of the co-existence of God and evil. Plantinga argues that it is possible for God and evil to exist together because evil is the result of free will. Moral evil results from human actions. Some object that free will cannot explain natural evil, but Plantinga explains that it is logically possible for natural evil to either result from: The free will of demons and Satan.
The free will of Adam and Eve justifying God in allowing natural evil into the world as punishment.

Question 11

What is moral responsibility to Augustine?

Answer 11

Augustine does not make the mistake of arguing that we are morally responsible for Adam and Eve’s actions. His argument is that a factual consequence of Adam’s sin was that all future humanity became infected with original sin and thus deserve punishment.

Question 12

What does Psalm 25:10 argue for Augustine’s theodicy?

Answer 12

‘All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth,’ and concludes: neither can his grace be unjust, nor his justice cruel”.

Question 13

Why is Augustine’s theodicy not logically coherent?

Answer 13

There is no logically coherent way to claim that small children deserve to suffer. So, Augustine’s theodicy is not logically coherent and thus fails to solve the logical problem of evil.

Question 14

What study supports human corruption, leading to an explanation of original sin?

Answer 14

the Stanford prison experiment.

Question 15

What is Irenaeus’ theodicy?

Answer 15

Instead of viewing the Fall as negative, Irenaeus views it as a necessary stage in the development of humans towards perfection.

Question 16

What is Hick’s epistemic distance?

Answer 16

This means that we cannot truly know of God’s existence. If God did make himself known to us, we would follow his commands out of obedience to his authority instead of following them because we had figured out that they were the right thing to do.

Question 17

Why is fail important to Hick?

Answer 17

Hick argued that it’s only if we have faith in God and still do good because we want to do good, rather than because we know for sure there’s a God who wants us to, that we can truly grow spiritually and morally.

Question 18

Why does Hick believe in universal salvation?

Answer 18

Everyone will be saved since a loving God would not send people to hell – universal salvation but post-mortem soul making is needed.

Question 19

Why does dysteleological evil incoherent with Hick and Irenaeus’ theodicy?

Answer 19

It has no chance of leading to spiritual development. For example, a child who dies of cancer. They are too young to even understand what is happening, let alone learn anything from it. Most animal suffering is also dysteleological.

Question 20

Why is the existence of soul breaking evil incoherent?

Answer 20

It destroys a person’s character rather than building it up and developing it. Some people are crushed into a depression or post-traumatic stress disorder when they experience evil. This suggests that evil doesn’t have this positive purpose that Irenaeus & Hick try to claim.

Question 21

Why is moral evil necessary according to Hick?

Answer 21

A perfect natural world and God’s intervention every time someone misused their free will. We would then clearly know that there was a God controlling the process. This would break the epistemic distance.

Question 22

Why is Hick’s argument successful?

Answer 22

The universe is indeed morally ambiguous.

Question 23

How does the evidential problem remain from Hick’s theodicy?

Answer 23

Hick’s defense is that the logic of his theory means we shouldn’t expect to find evidence of his theory. That may be true, but the issue follows that we have no evidential basis on which to justify belief in God. The evidential problem remains.

Question 24

What is a strength to soul making theodicy?

Answer 24

A strength of soul-making theodicy is its premise that creating us fully developed was logically impossible. A fully developed soul is one which has chosen good over evil. This requires having made a choice. Therefore, it’s logically impossible for God to create us fully developed.

Question 25

What is Benatar’s anti natalist approach?

Answer 25

Creating beings that will suffer cannot be justified by pointing to benefits of that suffering. This is because if we never existed, then we wouldn’t need those benefits. A morally good God would not create beings whose development required evil and suffering. It would be better for those beings to have never existed.

Question 26

What is Dostoevsky’s argument against soul making theodicy?

Answer 26

It’s not that the evil is dysteleological, nor that the process of soul-making is not worth it. It’s that the whole process of soul-making is actually not morally acceptable. If the suffering of a child was the cost of the of the soul-making of others, Ivan’s point is that this is indecent. It’s not moral. Building heaven on a foundation of children suffering is not what Hick’s supposed ‘God of love’ would accept.

Question 27

Why is free will necessary?

Answer 27

They can then argue that removing evil is not logically possible without impacting our free will in some way which would either leave us even worse off or is simply logically impossible for God to do.

Question 28

What does Mackie argue free will is determined by?

Answer 28

Our actions are either the result of randomness, external causes, or our own character. It is those choices which originate from our character that we typically call moral. Human free choice simply involves doing what it is in our character to do, but we did not choose our character.

Question 29

How does Mackie relate free will to a perfect God?

Answer 29

If there were a perfect God, he would have made sure to have given us all a morally good character.

Question 30

What is Plantinga’s morally sufficient reason?

Answer 30

that it is actually not logically possible for God to create a world where free agents always make good choices. The possibility of a world of free creatures only choosing good depends on their free choices, which God cannot control without taking away their free will.