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Wednesday, April 05, 2006

The Problem of Evil

Every Christian should realize that the problem(s) of evil are difficult to deal with and can stand as legitimate obstacles to someone's belief in the existence of God. For those that are not familiar with this problem, I will give you a very quick version:
  1. If God exists, he is omnipotent and omnibenevolent
  2. Evil exists.
So, it seems that:
  1. God wanted to prevent evil, but couldn't and so is not omnipotent, or
  2. God could have prevented evil but didn't want to and so is not omnibenevolent.
It seems that there is an inconsistency within the first two premises, so they both cannot be true at the same time. The non-theist says we have good reasons for believing evil exists, so we should reject (1). The theist, however, doesn't want to reject either so must figure out a way to make (1) and (2) consistent. This version of the problem of evil is one of many, but gets the general idea across.

What I hope is that Christians understand the force of this problem and do not just chalk it up to the lack of faith in God in the non-believer. That probably plays a role, but even many Christians are troubled by this as well. I feel that we have good responses to this type of problem in the 'free will' defense, but it isn't likely to answer the non-theists questions on the first pass. I recently had the opportunity to lecture for two introduction to philosophy classes at the University of Oklahoma on the problem of evil and had some really good discussions with many of the students. If you would like more information on this type of objection, let me know and I'd love to direct you to some great resources.

Grace and peace,
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1 comment:

@wpaul said...

kal-el,

Thanks for the response! This is the general area that I'm going to write my dissertation on, so hopefully at some point I'll have a good response to someone that proposes the problem of evil.

As for your comment about God creating something so big he couldn't move it; most philosophers (and theologians as far as I know) will say that God could not create anything that big. There are some things that even God can't do. Some worry about statements like that, but it's no real blow to God's omnipotence (which is what worries many people). God can't do anything that would cause him to cease to be God. If God sinned, he wouldn't be God, so God can't sin. If God created a bolder so big he couldn't move it, then he isn't omnipotent and would cease to be God.

Another way to look at it is to say that it is logically contradictory to say God could make something he couldn't move because being able to move everything is part of the concept of God. It's similar to saying God can't create a square circle. To be a sqaure is have four sides and to be a circle is to have 360 degrees. It's logically impossible for anything to have both those attributes at the same time. God can't create square circles, but it's no big deal because it's a logically impossible thing to do.

10:29 AM, June 09, 2006

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