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The Problem of Evil and Modern Philosophy — I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Brian Davies O P
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God is all-powerful, all-knowing and perfectly good. But there is a great deal of evil in the world. People inflict suffering on others and on themselves. And there is suffering which is not caused by what anybody does. So must we not conclude that there can, after all, be no God? This question is an ancient one, but in what follows, I shall briefly try to indicate how it has been answered by modem philosophers of religion. Then I shall comment on the answers to which I refer.

One popular line of reasoning holds that in view of the existence of evil God’s existence is simply disprovable. The charge here is that someone who believes in God is caught in a straight logical contradiction given that he also accepts that evil is a reality. Many modem philosophers take this line (which is, incidentally, sharply raised as a topic for discussion by St Thomas Aquinas in Question 2 of the First Part of the Summa Theologiae). H J McClos- key, for example, writes:

Evil is a problem for the theist in that a contradiction is involved in the fact of evil, on the one hand, and the belief in the omnipotence and perfection of God on the other.

The late John Mackie expresses a similar viewpoint. He says:

... it can be shown, not that religious beliefs lack rational support, but that they are positively irrational, that the several parts of the essential theological doctrine are inconsistent with one another ... In its simplest form the problem is this: God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; and yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so that if any two of them were true the third would be false. But at the same time all three are essential parts of most theological positions: the theologian, it seems, at once must adhere and cannot consistently adhere to all three.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 63 , Issue 750 , December 1982 , pp. 529 - 539
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 McCloskey, H. J., ‘God and Evil’, Philosophical Quarterly, 10, 1960, p 97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

McCloskey's article is reprinted in Pike, Nelson (ed.), God and Evil (Englewood Cliffs. N.J., 1964)Google Scholar.

2 John Mackie, ‘Evil and Omnipotence’, reprinted inMitchell, Basil (ed.) The Philosophy of Religion (Oxford, 1971), p 92Google Scholar. Mackie's article is also reprinted in the Pike collection noted above.

3 Mackie, op. cit. Mackie continues to defend this position in his posthumously pubwed The Miracle of Theism (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar, Chapter 9.

4 1Plantinga, Alvin, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford, 1974), pp 165Google Scholar f. Plantinga's approach to God and evil can also be found in his book God, Freedom and Evil (London, 1975)Google Scholar.

5 The Nature of Necessity, p 190.

6 Hick, John, Evil and [he God of Love (2nd edn. London, 1977).Google Scholar

7 Swinburne, Richard, The Existence of God (Oxford, 1979)Google Scholar. For Swinburne on evil see also Brown, Stuart C. (ed.) Reason and Religion (London, 1977)Google Scholar, where Swinburne debates the problem of evil with Professor D. 2. Phillips.

8 Hick, op. cit. pp 226 ff.

9 The Existence of God, pp 210 f.

10 The Existence of God, pp 207 f.

11 The Existence of God, p 219.

12 Ibid.

13 London, 1976, Ch. 7.

14 The Presumption of Atheism, p88.

15 Summa Theologiae, la, 45, 1 and 5.

16 ‘God: I — Creation’, New Blackfriars. October 1980.

17 Summa Contra Gentiles, III, 67.Google Scholar