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The Argument from Evil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Robert J. Richman
Robert J. Richman
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy, University of Washington
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Extract

The traditional problem of evil is set forth, by no means for the first time, in Part X of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in these familiar words: ‘Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?’ This formulation of the problem of evil obviously suggests an argument to the effect that the existence of evil in the world demonstrates that God does not exist. The purpose of this paper is to examine this argument, with a view to showing that while it is not a conclusive argument, it is much stronger than some apologists for traditional theism allow.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , April 1969 , pp. 203 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1969

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References

page 203 note 1 See, e.g., Mackie, J. L., ‘Evil and Omnipotence,’ Mind, Vol. LXIV, No. 254 (1955), pp. 200–12,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and McCloskey, H. J., ‘God and Evil,’ The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. X, No. 39 (1960), pp. 97–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Both of these papers are reprinted in God and Evil cited in the following footnote.

page 203 note 2 E.g., Plantinga, Alvin, ‘The Free Will Defense’ in Philosophy in America (Ithaca, N.Y., 9965), pp. 204–20,Google Scholar and Pike, Nelson, ‘Hume on Evil’ in God and Evil (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1964), pp. 85–102.Google Scholar Page references in parentheses will be to these two papers.

page 204 note 1 Cf. Quine, W. V. O., ‘On What There Is’, in From a Logical Point of View (New York and Evanston, 1963), p. 19:Google Scholar ‘An antinomy arose between the undular and the corpuscular accounts of light; and if this was not as out-and-out a contradiction as Russell's paradox, I suspect that the reason is that physics is not as out-and-out as mathematics.’

page 208 note 1 ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, op. cit., p. 43. ‘Any statement’ may be a bit strong. What about the denial of the quoted statement itself?