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Transcript

Who do you agree with?

Criticisms

J.L.Mackie - God could have made:

1.) Humans who act freely and always do right

2.) Humans who would act freely but sometimes get it wrong.

The fact that God chose 2.) makes the problem of evil very real.

Why could God not create a world where we would be free but would always choose God?

Freewill Defences

  • We need freewill to do good/evil otherwise we would not be free individuals with real choice. When freewill is exercised, by its very definition will involve wrong choices leading to suffering.

  • Death - necessary, since without knowledge of the end, we’d have forever to get it right and therefore there would be no incentive to do good.

  • Too much evil is impossible to define - we must take the world as it is now or only accept a pain free world (therefore there can be no middle ground in this argument)

Leibniz

  • This world is the ‘best of all possible worlds’ because God couldn’t have made it any other way.
  • Therefore suffering must be an illusion.

  • Mark Baker Eddy - Evil is in the mind

Monism

  • Evil doesn’t exist’ its simply an illusion.
  • The universe is single, harmonious entity which is good therefore evil only appears so because it misses the big picture which always works to good.

  • Spinoza
  • We assess things of how useful they are to use, thus missing their true value.
  • Objectively, ignoring our needs, everything has value.

Process Theodicy

  • God is part of the created universe and is bound by its laws. Therefore he is not omnipotent.

  • God started the evolutionary process which led to humans, who are free to ignore him.

  • He suffers because he is part of this universe and it therefore the ‘fellow sufferer who understands’.

  • God can’t stop suffering

  • God is partially to blame since he started off the process knowing he couldn’t control it.

  • BUT the universe has produced sufficient good to outweigh evil.

Criticisms

  • Not biblical (Genesis 1.31 says God made everything good)

  • Suggests all will go to heaven which isn’t fair or just.

  • Makes doing good futile?

  • Not all suffering leads to good especially the extent which the human race has endured in the past.

  • D.Z.Phillips - Love could never allow suffering.

The Problem of Evil and Suffering

John Hick

  • Maintains the importance of freewill in allowing humans to have a valuable existence, otherwise we would be like robots.

  • ‘Soul making’.

  • Epistemic Distance - God distances himself from humans so that their free-will would not be compromised. If God revealed himself too closely to us, we would be overwhelmed by him and so would be compelled to obey him, which rules out freewill.

  • Counterfactual hypothesis the idea that suffering and freewill allows the development of love, honour, courage.

Irenean Theodicy

  • Suffering and evil is due to freewill.

  • God made the world imperfect so that humans could have had the opportunity to develop into perfection, which they couldn’t do without the presence of good and evil and the freewill to choose between the two.

  • Man rejected God and chose evil but he still doesn’t intervene to maintain human freedom.

  • Eventually suffering and evil will negate.

Secular Approaches

Part Two

Science

  • Evolutionary theory/Big Bang theory suggest the world wasn’t originally perfect but developed from chaos.
  • Counter argument - Chaos and evil are totally different things.

Survival

  • Suffering is the key to survivla. Therefore call’s into question God’s original world order - how did animals survive before the fall?

Biology

  • If we are all seminally present in Adam - i.e. all responsible for what he did, it seems harsh to blame all humans for the sin of one.

Criticisms to Augustine's Theodicy

Schleirmacher:

  • It's a contradiction to say God made the world good then it went wrong because evil would have come from nothing. Either, the world was never perfect in the first place, or God made it go wrong. Either way, God must be blamed not humans.

  • If the world was made perfect and there was no knowledge of good and evil, how could there be the freedom to disobey God?
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