I got back my philosophy paper today...

[Ask Mr. Religion]

You are preaching to the choir in your response to me, Confessor. Naturally, I "get it". I was adopting the professor's attitude in my response. Have you thoroughly reconciled the om's of God with evil to bolster your position that there is "no problem"? From your outline in your opening post, I don't see that you have. Perhaps only a full read of the paper is required. If you like, I am happy to review it. Send email to me: amr AT askmrreligion DOT com

Your professor will argue that the distinction you draw between the first and contingent causes of evil is irrelevant in the face of omniscience. God is not caught by surprise for the actions of His creatures and He is certainly omnipotent enough to have prevented evil in the first place. (Again, here I am merely being the prof's devil's advocate).

Again, as a prof I would agree with your teacher's views, that you are being simplistic if what you have written in your opening post is the crux of your argument. You cannot claim simply that God has His ways and means without showing how those ways and means remain thoroughly righteous. You show nothing in your opening post that relates to the necessity of evil as a means of demonstrating mercy or grace, all to the glory of God. In fact, I see nothing about God's glory even mentioned in your paper's outline.

I am not trying to be harsh, and want to stress, that I have been there, done that, so I am willing to bet I know what the prof is thinking. Even as a Christian teacher of philosophy, I would hold my student's feet to the fire on the theodicy issue, not letting them off the hook with a simple "God has his own purposes" argument. I think your prof wants you to simply dig deeper.

AMR

Patrick

 

[Confessor]

Again, as a prof I would agree with your teacher's views, that you are being simplistic if what you have written in your opening post is the crux of your argument. You cannot claim simply that God has His ways and means without showing how those ways and means remain thoroughly righteous.

You seem to think that I am trying to offer a positive apologetic, i.e. a positive reason to believe that Christianity as true, but I am not. The problem of evil attempts to show an internal inconsistency, and I am showing why there is no internal inconsistency at all.

You show nothing in your opening post that relates to the necessity of evil as a means of demonstrating mercy or grace, all to the glory of God. In fact, I see nothing about God's glory even mentioned in your paper's outline.

As I said, the statement, "All things work together for good" is completely self-sufficient to seal the gap that the problem of evil may create. Examples of how things may work together for good (e.g. demonstrating His glory by displaying His attributes) are helpful and persuasive, but they are not logically necessary. If they were logically necessary, I would have to "bail God out" of every single evil action ever done.

I would have given plenteous examples of how this is done, how it when rightly viewed is not an emotional case against God (in many cases, not all), etc. But I did not have enough room to deconstruct all aspects of the problem of evil, so I simply attacked the foundation and left it at that.

I am not trying to be harsh, and want to stress, that I have been there, done that, so I am willing to bet I know what the prof is thinking. Even as a Christian teacher of philosophy, I would hold my student's feet to the fire on the theodicy issue, not letting them off the hook with a simple "God has his own purposes" argument. I think your prof wants you to simply dig deeper.

Again, I would have dug deeper, but I did not for two reasons: (1) spatial constraints (she placed a general range of a word limit), and (2) it was logically unnecessary. Seriously, "God has His own reasons" is a perfect solution to the problem of evil. It is not very persuasive as a positive apologetic, but it is never intended as a positive apologetic. As I said above, I don't plan on converting people by showing how Christianity is not prone to the problem of evil. Showing that Christianity is not incoherent is not supposed to convert anyone.

 

[cih1355]

I said in a previous post that if God has good reasons for allowing evil to exist, then it is not a logical contradiction to say that God is all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful and at the same time evil exists. I would like to add that even if we do not know what those good reasons are, it still would not be a logical contradiction to say that God is all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful and at the same time evil exists.

 

[Confessor]

I said in a previous post that if God has good reasons for allowing evil to exist, then it is not a logical contradiction to say that God is all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful and at the same time evil exists. I would like to add that even if we do not know what those good reasons are, it still would not be a logical contradiction to say that God is all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful and at the same time evil exists.

Agreed. Giving specific reasons for specific events can be more persuasive and emotionally alleviating, but it is not a logical part of the argument. The proof against the "problem" of evil is simple and stout.

 

[Zeno333]

An all powerful God and Evil are compatible, since Evil is essentially "non-being"...and therefore this "non-being" does not have any "being" to effect the "being" of God. Therefore the 2 entities can so to speak "live together".
I wrote a paper in College on St Aquinas, and i used this "non-being" argument regarding God and Evil in that paper....At the time the idea of Evil is "non-being" was an idea that I came up with entirely on my own....At the time I was not aware that St Augustine had already exposed the idea that Evil was "non-being". So all of the other ideas in my College paper were footnoted, but my part about Evil and its "non-being" was not footnoted since it was my own idea at the time. (This is a good example where something can "appear" to be plagiarism when it is not.)
I of course am not trying to claim I am on the par with St Augustine, but it is a bit ironic that I came up with the idea that evil is "non-being" on my own....something that Augustine was already noted for.