Explain Away Our Problems
Resolutions to the problem of evil generally entail one of the following:
* What humans consider evil or suffering is an illusion or unimportant.
o Events thought to be evil are not really so (such as deaths by natural disaster).
* God's divine plan is good. What we see as evil is not really evil; rather, it is part of a divine design that is actually good. Our limitations prevent us from seeing the big picture.
* A perfect God is not only good but also evil, since perfection implies no lacking, including not lacking that which is evil. A lacking of evil would imply that there is something external to his all-encompassing perfection. This is related to monistic philosophies such as advaita, or pantheism.
* Evil is the consequence of God permitting humans to have free will, or God may intend evil and suffering as a test for humanity. Without the possibility to choose to do good or evil acts humanity would be nothing but robots.
* Evil is the consequence, not cause, of people not observing God's revealed will. Universal reciprocated love would solve most of the problems that lead to the evils discussed here.
* God's ultimate purpose is to glorify Himself (which, by definition, He alone is infinitely entitled to, without vanity). He allows evil to exist so that we will appreciate goodness all the more, in the same way that the blind man healed by Jesus appreciated his sight more so than those around him who had never experienced blindness.
* God created perfect angels and perfect humans with a free will. Some of his creations chose independence and lost their perfection: they began to sin, which resulted in evil doing and death. For a while God will allow this to continue, so that it can be proven that his creations can not be happy while independent from God because this was the challenge which caused the rebellion in the first place. In due time God will restore the people who choose to depend on God to perfection and so bring an end to sin and with it an end to evil.
* God is a righteous judge; people get what they deserve. If someone suffers, that is because they committed a sin that merits such suffering. (This is also known as the just world hypothesis).
* Evil is one way that God tests humanity, to see if we are worthy of His grace.
* Evil and pain exist in this world only. This world is only a prelude to the afterlife, where no pain will exist. The scales of justice are balanced in the afterlife.
* The world is corrupt and of itself shouldn't have been created, but the work of Christ (or some savior figure) redeems the world and thus God's creation of it.
* Absolute evil is not actually real. Rather, it is only the condition of lack of goodness. (See also mention of William Hatcher's explanation.)
o Evil is relative to good; neither good nor evil could exist without both existing simultaneously.
* Karma: Evil is caused by past bad deeds, either in one's current life or one's previous lives. It is only when this karmic chain of causation is broken that reincarnation ends. This explains why an infant may be born into misery, due to actions that may have been perpetrated in previous lives.
* One of the conflicting assumptions is wrong: Drop either the assumption that God is omniscient, or omnipotent, or perfectly good. See the entry on the subject of God and omnipotence for more details on this point.
* Religions such as Gnosticism and Manichaeism, and even some Christian groups, dispense with the issue by embracing various forms of dualism, in which God is opposed by an evil counterpart, and is therefore not omnipotent.
* Maltheists go even further than the Gnostics, in a sense, by saying that God simply is evil himself. To them, the problem of evil is not a problem at all, and is neatly resolved by acknowledging that an omnipotent benevolent God would not create a world in which there was evil, concluding that God, assuming he exists, is either not omnipotent, not benevolent, or perhaps both. (They frequently add that if God is not omnipotent but claims that he is, he is thus lying, and consequently is also justifiably deemed evil in nature.)
* Evolutionary theodicy, suggests that the plan that God has involves the elimination of all evil at the end of time, but that the means by which creation occurs always leads to the presence of evil in the interim. This theory is linked to the evolution of God himself as present in the cosmos.
* Nontheists claim that statements about God are unimportant or meaningless.
* Atheists resolve the apparent contradiction by rejecting the hypothesized existence of God (possibly for reasons other than the problem of evil). Some atheists think that the problem of evil can be used to prove that no gods exist by the method of reductio ad absurdum. This method does not prove the non-existence of all gods, rather it is an argument that if such a god exists then he is not both omnipotent and benevolent.
* Agnostics believe that no answer to the question of religion will ever be found, so decide to ignore the problem altogether.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy
I have searched, and I have not seen evil. I have seem mistakes, incorrect reasoning, and insanity, but no evil. I have combed through the diaries of heinrich himmler and the crime scenes of charles manson and found no evil. We are all gloriously human. The closest to evil I have found is a laziness, a lack of curiosity, an indifference, Conforming to an idea one does not even believe. These are as close to evil as we will ever reach.
* What humans consider evil or suffering is an illusion or unimportant.
o Events thought to be evil are not really so (such as deaths by natural disaster).
* God's divine plan is good. What we see as evil is not really evil; rather, it is part of a divine design that is actually good. Our limitations prevent us from seeing the big picture.
* A perfect God is not only good but also evil, since perfection implies no lacking, including not lacking that which is evil. A lacking of evil would imply that there is something external to his all-encompassing perfection. This is related to monistic philosophies such as advaita, or pantheism.
* Evil is the consequence of God permitting humans to have free will, or God may intend evil and suffering as a test for humanity. Without the possibility to choose to do good or evil acts humanity would be nothing but robots.
* Evil is the consequence, not cause, of people not observing God's revealed will. Universal reciprocated love would solve most of the problems that lead to the evils discussed here.
* God's ultimate purpose is to glorify Himself (which, by definition, He alone is infinitely entitled to, without vanity). He allows evil to exist so that we will appreciate goodness all the more, in the same way that the blind man healed by Jesus appreciated his sight more so than those around him who had never experienced blindness.
* God created perfect angels and perfect humans with a free will. Some of his creations chose independence and lost their perfection: they began to sin, which resulted in evil doing and death. For a while God will allow this to continue, so that it can be proven that his creations can not be happy while independent from God because this was the challenge which caused the rebellion in the first place. In due time God will restore the people who choose to depend on God to perfection and so bring an end to sin and with it an end to evil.
* God is a righteous judge; people get what they deserve. If someone suffers, that is because they committed a sin that merits such suffering. (This is also known as the just world hypothesis).
* Evil is one way that God tests humanity, to see if we are worthy of His grace.
* Evil and pain exist in this world only. This world is only a prelude to the afterlife, where no pain will exist. The scales of justice are balanced in the afterlife.
* The world is corrupt and of itself shouldn't have been created, but the work of Christ (or some savior figure) redeems the world and thus God's creation of it.
* Absolute evil is not actually real. Rather, it is only the condition of lack of goodness. (See also mention of William Hatcher's explanation.)
o Evil is relative to good; neither good nor evil could exist without both existing simultaneously.
* Karma: Evil is caused by past bad deeds, either in one's current life or one's previous lives. It is only when this karmic chain of causation is broken that reincarnation ends. This explains why an infant may be born into misery, due to actions that may have been perpetrated in previous lives.
* One of the conflicting assumptions is wrong: Drop either the assumption that God is omniscient, or omnipotent, or perfectly good. See the entry on the subject of God and omnipotence for more details on this point.
* Religions such as Gnosticism and Manichaeism, and even some Christian groups, dispense with the issue by embracing various forms of dualism, in which God is opposed by an evil counterpart, and is therefore not omnipotent.
* Maltheists go even further than the Gnostics, in a sense, by saying that God simply is evil himself. To them, the problem of evil is not a problem at all, and is neatly resolved by acknowledging that an omnipotent benevolent God would not create a world in which there was evil, concluding that God, assuming he exists, is either not omnipotent, not benevolent, or perhaps both. (They frequently add that if God is not omnipotent but claims that he is, he is thus lying, and consequently is also justifiably deemed evil in nature.)
* Evolutionary theodicy, suggests that the plan that God has involves the elimination of all evil at the end of time, but that the means by which creation occurs always leads to the presence of evil in the interim. This theory is linked to the evolution of God himself as present in the cosmos.
* Nontheists claim that statements about God are unimportant or meaningless.
* Atheists resolve the apparent contradiction by rejecting the hypothesized existence of God (possibly for reasons other than the problem of evil). Some atheists think that the problem of evil can be used to prove that no gods exist by the method of reductio ad absurdum. This method does not prove the non-existence of all gods, rather it is an argument that if such a god exists then he is not both omnipotent and benevolent.
* Agnostics believe that no answer to the question of religion will ever be found, so decide to ignore the problem altogether.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy
I have searched, and I have not seen evil. I have seem mistakes, incorrect reasoning, and insanity, but no evil. I have combed through the diaries of heinrich himmler and the crime scenes of charles manson and found no evil. We are all gloriously human. The closest to evil I have found is a laziness, a lack of curiosity, an indifference, Conforming to an idea one does not even believe. These are as close to evil as we will ever reach.
posted by Tristan Tzara at 6:51 AM
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