The argument is that a truly loving God would not interfere with our free will, even if it meant allowing evil in the world. Like many large problems, sometimes it is helpful to break them down into their components. However, this criticism fails, because if God is also all-powerful and all-knowing, he would be able to allow us to have free will while simultaneously being able to do away with evil. But so-called natural disasters are often considered evil as well because of all the suffering they cause. A theodicy attempts to solve the apparent tensions in what is often termed the problem of evil. Further, if God allows one evil to allow for a different good, he is not all-loving. it can be asked over and over again, without any answer being sufficient. As Plantinga notes, it’s not at all obvious that this was possible. It could be that our world contains the most amount of good and the least amount of evil possible for free creatures. This is a logically coherent explanation to why this world contains the amount of evil it does. Admittedly, such a proposition cannot be proven, but neither can it be disproven. As William Lane Craig notes, our epistemic finitude prohibits us from being able to properly evaluate such grand cost-benefit calculations. God, however, is not limited in this way. So long as it is logically possible that the amount of evil in the world is necessary to obtain a maximal amount of goodness, the argument against God’s existence based on the amount of evil in the world fails.
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Solving the seeming contradiction between a loving God and the reality of evil is usually referred to as a theodicy. Therefore, God indirectly caused all the evil in the world.
In days gone by many atheists thought the existence of evil in the world disproved theism. Largely due to the work of philosopher Alvin Plantinga, however, most professional philosophers now concede that the presence of evil in the world does not disprove the existence of God (unfortunately, lay atheists failed to get the memo). As atheist and J.L. Earthquakes, tidal waves, floods, and so forth, are all examples of what might be termed natural evil.
Some critics of the Problem of Evil argue that God gave us free will, which changes the dynamics of the proposed problem of evil all-together. If there was only half the amount of evil in the world, the question could still be asked, “Why is there so much evil in the world?” Indeed, if the amount of evil was cut in half again, the question could still be asked ad infinitum. It quickly becomes apparent that the real issue is not the amount of evil, but the presence of evil in the world altogether. Ultimately, then, the argument against God based on the amount of evil in the world is just a restatement of the general problem of evil.
There is an even deeper problem that often goes unnoticed: How does one even go about quantifying evil? As Plantinga notes in God, Freedom, and Evil, evil is not the kind of thing that can be quantified. It wouldn’t make any sense to say “that act contained 35 turps of evil.” This is not to say it’s impossible for there to be a world in which fewer evil acts/events occurred. There could be, but that point is irrelevant. God could have created a world containing no evil by creating a world without any free creatures at all. The relevant question, however, is whether He could have created a world containing free creatures that not only contains less evil, but the same amount of proportional good. But the problem of evil is really a series of problems. Any amount of evil, no matter how small or for what good purpose, is still evil and contradicts God being all-loving.
According to Christianity, Judaism and Islam God created the world which he/she knew in advance would become evil. Moreland made the point that asking why there is so much evil in the world is an iterative question; i.e. The claim that God’s existence is improbable given the amount of evil in the world is a much more modest and tenable argument, but it too is problematic. In his debate with Clancy Martin, J.P. Mackie came to admit, “Since this defense is formally possible, and its principle involves no real abandonment of our ordinary view of the opposition between good and evil, we can concede that the problem of evil does not, after all, show that the central doctrines of theism are logically inconsistent with one another.”. Evil, you see, actually extends not only to the moral world, but also to the natural world. When human beings do bad things to one another, this is moral evil.
Solving the seeming contradiction between a loving God and the reality of evil is usually referred to as a theodicy. Therefore, God indirectly caused all the evil in the world.
In days gone by many atheists thought the existence of evil in the world disproved theism. Largely due to the work of philosopher Alvin Plantinga, however, most professional philosophers now concede that the presence of evil in the world does not disprove the existence of God (unfortunately, lay atheists failed to get the memo). As atheist and J.L. Earthquakes, tidal waves, floods, and so forth, are all examples of what might be termed natural evil.
Some critics of the Problem of Evil argue that God gave us free will, which changes the dynamics of the proposed problem of evil all-together. If there was only half the amount of evil in the world, the question could still be asked, “Why is there so much evil in the world?” Indeed, if the amount of evil was cut in half again, the question could still be asked ad infinitum. It quickly becomes apparent that the real issue is not the amount of evil, but the presence of evil in the world altogether. Ultimately, then, the argument against God based on the amount of evil in the world is just a restatement of the general problem of evil.
There is an even deeper problem that often goes unnoticed: How does one even go about quantifying evil? As Plantinga notes in God, Freedom, and Evil, evil is not the kind of thing that can be quantified. It wouldn’t make any sense to say “that act contained 35 turps of evil.” This is not to say it’s impossible for there to be a world in which fewer evil acts/events occurred. There could be, but that point is irrelevant. God could have created a world containing no evil by creating a world without any free creatures at all. The relevant question, however, is whether He could have created a world containing free creatures that not only contains less evil, but the same amount of proportional good. But the problem of evil is really a series of problems. Any amount of evil, no matter how small or for what good purpose, is still evil and contradicts God being all-loving.
According to Christianity, Judaism and Islam God created the world which he/she knew in advance would become evil. Moreland made the point that asking why there is so much evil in the world is an iterative question; i.e. The claim that God’s existence is improbable given the amount of evil in the world is a much more modest and tenable argument, but it too is problematic. In his debate with Clancy Martin, J.P. Mackie came to admit, “Since this defense is formally possible, and its principle involves no real abandonment of our ordinary view of the opposition between good and evil, we can concede that the problem of evil does not, after all, show that the central doctrines of theism are logically inconsistent with one another.”. Evil, you see, actually extends not only to the moral world, but also to the natural world. When human beings do bad things to one another, this is moral evil.
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