Evil and Suffering

• Natural evil is evil which 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.
• David Hume points to four types of evil found in the natural world: animal suffering, limited abilities to ensure survival and happiness, extreme natural conditions, and individual natural disasters.
• Hume claims that an omnipotent God would have the power to prevent these forms of natural evil and therefore the existence of natural evil is a problem for belief in God.
• Moral evil is evil which is caused by human action, such as murder and torture.
• This is a problem for God’s existence because why doesn’t God intervene to prevent morally evil actions by humans, such as the holocaust?
• God could have designed us with less physical ability to cause suffering and less vulnerability to suffer at the hands of other people.
• God could even have created us without free will and given us a good nature that would have avoided causing moral evil.
• The logical problem of evil is the a priori argument that evil and the God of classical theism (as defined as omnibenevolent and omnipotent) cannot exist together.
• Epicurus is an ancient Greek philosopher, one of the first to formulate the problem of evil.
• Is God willing but not able to prevent evil? Then he isn’t omnipotent.
• Is God is able to prevent evil but not willing? Then he isn’t omnibenevolent.
• If God is both able and willing, then why is there evil?
• If God is neither able or willing then why call him God?
• The logical problem of evil is an a priori argument because the conclusion follows from a logical analysis of the definitions of the concepts ‘omnibenevolence’, ‘omnipotence’ and ‘evil’, without reference to experience.
• P1: An omnipotent God has the power to eliminate evil.
• P2: An omnibenevolent God has the motivation to eliminate evil.
• P3: Nothing can exist if there is a being with the power and motivation to eliminate it.
• C1:Evil, omnipotence and omnibenevolence thus form an inconsistent triad such that God (as classically defined) and evil cannot possibly co-exist.
• The evidential problem of evil is the a posteriori argument that the evidence of evil in the world makes belief in God unjustified.
• Hume is an empiricist and approaches the problem of evil as such.
• Hume points out the a posteriori evidence of evil in the world: animal suffering, limited abilities to ensure survival and happiness, extreme natural conditions, and individual natural disasters.
• Hume says it is ‘possible’ that a perfect God exists but allows evil for reasons consistent with omnibenevolence, ‘but they are unknown to us’.
• Hick argues for Epistemic distance, meaning that we cannot truly know of God’s existence.
• Irenaeus made a distinction between man being made in the image of God verses the likeness of God.
• Irenaeus argues that creation has two steps: being made in God’s image where we have only a potential for good due to spiritual immaturity, and achieving God’s likeness by choosing good over evil which enables us to grow spiritually and morally.
• According to Hick, 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.
• Irenaeus & Hick’s theodicy claims that God allows evil because it serves the good purpose of soul-making.
• Hume concludes that the consistency of the world with the idea of a perfect God does not provide an inference to God’s existence.
• Hume argues that the misfortunes in the universe could easily have been remedied, and that the evidence of an imperfect world does not justify belief in a perfect God.
• Hick argues that everyone will be saved since a loving God would not send people to hell, but post-mortem soul making is needed.
• Hume argues that speculations about God’s reasons for allowing evil are not evidence of God’s existence.
• The evidential problem of evil claims that the evidence of evil in the world makes belief in God unjustifiable.
• Irenaeus views the Fall as a necessary stage in the development of humans towards perfection.
• There is evidence that encountering and overcoming evil develops a person’s character and virtue, which is behind the idea of character development in literature and the idea that people become spoiled if they have too much luxury and not enough responsibility or difficulty to overcome.
• Hick argues that human beings were not created perfect but develop in two stages: Spiritually immature: through struggle to survive and evolve, humans can develop into spiritually mature beings, and Grow into a relationship with God.
• According to Irenaeus, Adam and Eve are like children who go astray because they lack sufficient wisdom to do what is right.
• Hume, as an empiricist, insists that we are only justified in believing what the evidence suggests.
• Process theologians argue that the traditional view of God’s omnipotence is coercive, meaning it is a form of domination that simply overpowers resistance and forces a thing to do what God wants.
• Griffin responds that it is better to worship a God who lacked the power to prevent the holocaust than to worship one who had the power but didn’t.