- Positions Overview
I hold that no theodicy answers the problem of evil, that divine hiddenness is itself evidence against a loving god, and that Pascal's Wager is an appeal to consequences rather than an argument.
- Angels
Angels make the problem of evil worse. A god who delegates protection to a host of agents has a host of agents who were also absent from Auschwitz. The believer who thanks an angel for a near miss should be asked what the angels were doing…
- Deism
One honest advantage. Deism escapes the problem of evil, because its god never claimed to be good or to be paying attention. That is a real advantage, bought at the price of there being no reason to care whether he exists.
- Divine Hiddenness
The relation to evil. Hiddenness is a species of the problem of evil: the suffering of the person who searched and was answered with silence, and the suffering of everyone condemned for a belief they could not form. The theodicies do not r…
- God
The classical attributes are also in tension with one another and with observation. The problem of evil (Epicurus; David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 1779) remains unanswered: an omnipotent and omnibenevolent being would ne…
- Heaven
Heaven breaks the free-will defence. The standard reply to the problem of evil is that God permits suffering because free will is worth it. But heaven, by every account, contains free beings who never sin and never suffer. If God can make…
- Reincarnation and Karma
Karma is a theodicy, and it fails like the others. It exists to answer the question the problem of evil asks: why do the innocent suffer? Its answer is that nobody is innocent; the child with leukaemia and the villager under the landslide…
- Argument from Beauty
The data are cherry-picked. The world also contains the guinea worm, the tumour, the smell of a corpse, and the sound of a child in pain. If beauty is evidence of a good maker, ugliness is evidence of a bad one, and the argument has to be…
- Argument from Existential Dependence
If God sustains every instant, God does everything. A being who holds the cancer cell in existence at each moment it divides is not permitting the cancer; he is making it. This is occasionalism, and it removes the free-will defence, the "n…
- Argument from Psychophysical Harmony
The data are not harmonious. Chronic pain with no injury, phantom limbs, cluster headaches, the pain of the dying, dysmenorrhoea, depression's misery without cause, the pleasures of addiction that destroy the addict, and the whole of anima…
- Argument from the Principle of Sufficient Reason
David Hume made the essential point in 1779 (Dialogues, Part IX): if each member of a collection is explained, it is a further demand, and an unwarranted one, to ask for an explanation of the collection as a whole (Composition Fallacy). Le…
- Cumulative Case Argument
The Bayesian version needs numbers it does not have, and leaves out the evidence against. Swinburne's probabilities are assigned by intuition. The same method, applied honestly, must also count the Problem of evil, Divine Hiddenness, the t…
- Reformed Epistemology Argument
The model does not escape the arguments anyway. Plantinga grants that properly basic beliefs can be defeated by evidence. So the believer must still answer the Problem of evil, hiddenness, the brain-dependence of mind, and the religious di…
- Theodicy
The problem of evil does not disprove every god. It disproves the one who is all three of omnipotent, omniscient and good. That is the one on offer.
- Epicurus
Epicurus (341–270 BC), Greek philosopher. Taught that the universe is made of atoms and void, that the gods, if they exist, take no interest in us, that the soul dies with the body, and that the good life is one of modest pleasure and free…
- J. L. Schellenberg
Problem of evil
- John Hick
Problem of evil
- Stephen Fry
His 2015 answer on RTÉ to the question of what he would say to God at the gates of Heaven ("bone cancer in children? What's that about?") is the problem of evil stated in under a minute. His closing speech in the 2009 Intelligence Squared…
- Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), who wrote as Voltaire, French Enlightenment writer, satirist, and relentless critic of the Catholic Church and of religious intolerance. Candide (1759) is the funniest book ever written about the problem…
- William Rowe
William L. Rowe (1931–2015), American philosopher of religion at Purdue. His 1979 paper "The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism" set out the evidential problem of evil in its modern form, with the example of a fawn dying slowly…
- Just World
Problem of evil
- World View
Religion. Atheism is not a belief system; it is the position left over once the god claims have failed to meet their burden. I do not claim to know there is no god (Hard Atheism). I do hold that the concept of God is, in most of its defini…
