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Theodicy: the study of the goodness of God. Obviously this should be with my section on God, but since it is such a large topic I figured that it should be written separately. Anyway, theists have one of the largest arguments against God. That is that evil contradicts the definition of God; if God is omnibenevolent, why does he allow evil? Even if we say God is omnibenevolent regardless, then if God is omnipotent it has the ability to eliminate evil. And you can't say it didn't know humans would create evil since it is omniscient. This brings up the two types of evil: natural evil which is caused by nature and moral evil which is caused by man. So obviously evil is a problem. So how do we solve it? Some say evil does not exist. But since this is a problem of the Judeo-Christian God this brings in the Bible which says evil does exist, so there goes that argument. Another argument says that without evil you would not have good since good is the contrast of evil. There are several ways to attack this view. One says that so what if we don't know good specifically? What would be more loving:to create pure goodness even though you don't know it, or to create good but have to have evil with it. Obviously pure goodness is better. It is not really that important that we know goodness since we would be happy and worry-free. Who would not want to never have to know evil? Another argument against this idea of needing contrast allows evil. It says that you can know evil without experiencing it. Do you have to experience being shot to know that it is going to hurt? No, you know it will hurt a priori. You know that having a metal object rip through your arm will hurt, whether you heard it was painful or not. So you can know evil without experiencing it. With either objection it shows that you do not have to have evil to know or have good. Besides, why would a omnibenevolent being want to create evil and make us suffer? If God love all he would not want to put us through it. This disproves the idea that we have to prove ourselves since this would be saying God puts our proving ourselves above loving us which once again goes against the definition with omnibenevolence. Some people say that Satan made evil but that puts him to the level of God and goes against the definition of God being a being in which there can be no greater. It is sometimes said that evil is a by-product of our free will, but since God is omniscient that means that he knew that we would create evil with our free will, so that puts evil back on God's shoulders, figuratively speaking. So where does this leave us? Well, most people either take one of these positions and pretty much ignore the arguments against them or they say something along the lines of that we as humans can not understand God and his reasons for things so we can not understand why it allows God. This of course requires faith so it does not work for someone who does not have it. The last way of explaining evil is to say that God is not perfect. He is either not omnibenevolent or omnipotent. If he is not omnibenevolent that would allow God to do anything, and if he is omnipotent that is a scary thought. If he is omnipotent it means that this world is the best it could do. That is definitely better than the previous explanation. Either way, there appears logically that there is something wrong here with evil. Who would have thought that evil would cause so much trouble? |