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/* Is the Argument Sound? */
[[Image:Michelangelo creation-of-sun-and-moon.jpg|alt=creationism|right|thumb|250px|[[Michelangelo|Michelangelo's]] painting of the [[creation]] of the [[Sun]] and [[Moon]].]]The so-called '''problem of evil''' is a topic of much debate in [[theology]] and the [[philosophy]] of [[religion]]. It was first proposed by the ancient Greek philosopher [[Epicurus]]. Many [[Atheism|atheist]]s base their views to some degree on their assessment of this argument's strength, and this problem has been investigated by many theologians, such as [[Thomas Aquinas]]:
[[God]] is, according to accounts given by the holy texts of most monotheistic religions, [[omniscience|omniscient]], [[omnipotence|omnipotent]] and [[omnibenevolence|omnibenevolent]].
== Is the Argument Sound? ==
As with all logical [[logic]]al arguments, we must ask if the premises of the "argument from evil" are true. If one or more premise is false, then an argument does not constitute a good reason for believing its conclusion.
The argument can be dismissed if one is willing to drop one or more of its premises: that God is [[omniscience|omniscient]], that God is [[omnipotence|omnipotent]], that God is [[omnibenevolence|omnibenevolent]], or that [[evil ]] exists.
'''Rejecting omnipotence:'''
If a deductive argument is valid, the conclusion ''must be'' true if the premises are true. If it turns out that the conclusion is false while all the premises are true, then one has exposed an "argument" as invalid. Many theists think the argument from evil is logically invalid, meaning that the conclusion (God does not exist) does not necessarily follow from the premises (which theists tend to accept as true).
One who objects to the conclusion along these lines might say something like the following:
== Free Will ==
''See also:'' [[Atheism and free will]]
[[File:Freethinkers.jpg|thumbnail|200px|right|Dr. [[Jonathan Sarfati]] is a staff member of [[Creation Ministries International]].
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See also: [[Atheism and free will]] ]]
The twentieth century saw the rise of a "reformed" philosophy of religion, spearheaded primarily by Alvin Plantinga, a prominent professor at Notre Dame. Plantinga introduced, in his 1967 work ''God and Other Minds'', a defense of theism that counters the argument of evil with several observations about freedom of will. Rather than trying to give a moral justification for evil, Plantinga prefers to establish only that the existence of God and evil are jointly ''possible''.
Suppose God creates an agent with the intent that this agent freely chooses good all the time. Now, if the agent is to ''freely'' choose some good, he must actually be free to choose it or to refrain from choosing it. Further suppose that there is a world - the world God wants to make actual - in which that agent does choose the good all the time. This world can only be made actual if its predecessor - a "world segment" that includes all of the world's states of affairs save the agent's choice - is first made actual (before it can be true that an agent chooses the right thing in a situation, the agent must be presented with the situation at hand). But if a world segment is made actual, then, if the agent is free with respect to the decision that must be made, God cannot control whether the agent will ''freely'' choose to do right or wrong. The upshot is that theological compatiblism must be false - for God to determine that an agent will do right all the time is inconsistent with that agent freely choosing to do right all the time. "God determines that an agent must freely choose to do right" is analogous to "God creates a married bachelor."
Plantinga furthers his defense in ''God, Freedom and Evil.'' If it is ''logically possible'' that all agents are depraved (will go wrong with respect to some action or other) in any world in which they exist, then it is logically possible that God could, no matter which agents he caused to exist, never create a world with human freedom and no moral evil.<br><br>
He thinks there is no reason to question the possibility of "transworld depravity," and thus concludes that his defense fends off the problem of evil. Many philosophers - both theistic and atheistic - agree with this assessment{{who says}}, although there is no settled consensus. The problem of evil will not likely go away so easily, as the matter of non-moral evils (diseases, predation and natural disasters, for instance) cannot be solved by Plantinga's defense alone.
We creatures really have no right to complain about God creating a world which contains evil, for without evil we would not exist — when we are complaining about God creating a world which contains evil, what we are really objecting to is our own existence, for God creating such a world is necessary to our own existence.
The objection is made to this account, that it could also justify all kinds of evil acts committed by human beings, e.g. the mass murderer could claim that they committed their crimes out of a special love for those who would only exist as a result of those crimes. On the contrary, this justification is only valid for a being who has perfect foreknowledge of the future — i.e. God. Although the mass murderer can know that certain people will only exist as a consequence of their mass murder, the mass murderer cannot claim to know and love those people as specific individuals, only as an amorphous potentiality. Only God can know and love those people as individuals, thus this is only a valid moral justification for acts of God, not for the acts of any lesser beings.
By the objective standards of goodness and power, in face of the existence of evil, atheists reject the existence of God, 'For', they say, 'God cannot tolerate evil.' But, if God is both good and powerful, then it is not God Himself who cannot tolerate evil; rather, it is us, who are evil, who cannot tolerate God. God does not kill the fallen body, rather, it is the fallen body which cannot remain alive in the face of its knowledge of itself as fallen from the holiness of God. God did not say, "I will kill you if you partake of the least arrogance against me", rather, He said, "You shall die if you partake of it."<ref>[http://www.blueletterbible.org/Bible.cfm?b=Gen&c=2&t=KJV#17 Genesis 2:17]</ref> In rejecting God, the atheist most profoundly condemns himself for being that which he most implicitly knows himself to be: corrupt. And, how can he know himself to be corrupt unless there is the image of God in his soul? In fact, God is so good, and so powerful, that He is far more tolerant of evil than are we: This is the root of mercy, else we each, and all, would perish at conception. Each of us accords ourselves a measure of patience in face of other's evils. But, in so far as patience is a function of love, patience is an act of self-sacrifice. And, what greater love can there be than that the eternal God become a man so as to sacrifice himself for us? Like a door, in an infinitely wide-and-tall impenetrable wall in total darkness, becomes luminous red.
== The problem of evil for [[atheists]] ==
''See also:'' [[Atheism and the Problem of Evil]] and [[Atheism and suffering]] and [[Atheism and gratitude]] Rejecting God does not dispose of the problem of evil; evil continues to exist, and continues to be as problematic as before. While the [[atheism|atheist]], having rejected God, no longer needs to justify the goodness of God to themselves ([[theodicy]]), now they are faced with the equally difficult task of justifying the goodness of their new objects of faith, humanity and the universe. Thus they turn to what are the atheistic equivalents of theodicy, [[anthropodicy]] (the attempt to justify humanity as good despite the great evils humanity has been responsible for) and [[cosmodicy]] (the attempt to justify the universe as good in face of the great evils it contains). It is necessary for atheists to do so because the atheist worldview falls apart without faith in the goodness of humanity or the universe. These disciplines are as difficult as theodicy is.
J. Matthew Ashley explains the relationship between theodicy, anthropodicy and cosmodicy:
:In classical terms, this is to broach the problem of theodicy: how to think about God in the face of the presence of suffering in God's creation. After God's dethronement as the subject of history, the question rebounds to the new subject of history: the human being. As a consequence, theodicy becomes anthropodicy — justifications of our faith in humanity as the subject of history, in the face of the suffering that is so inextricably woven into the history that humanity makes. Mutatis mutandis, the universe story brings with it the need for a "cosmodicy." How do we think about the presence of suffering, on a massive scale, in the story of the cosmos, particularly when the cosmos itself is understood to be the subject of history? How do we justify our faith in the cosmos?<ref>J. Matthew Ashley, "Reading the universe story theologically: the contribution of a biblical narrative imagination", ''Theological studies'', 2010, vol. 71, no. 4, pp. 870-902</ref>
So, the depth to which we try to objectify our existential experience of evil is merely a reflection of the depth to which we hold the good and the rational to be at once objective and ''[[transcendence|transcendent]]''. The very standards of good-and-evil by which the existence of God is rejected as impossible are rendered epistemologically impotent if God really does not exist. In other words, if it were true that God does not exist, and, thus, that there is no universal standard, or source, of right and wrong, then the argument from evil would be invalid. The argument from evil is like using the tools and materials for building a house to tear down an existing house, and then, since there is no house there, concluding that a house is an impossible kind of object.
Apart from viewing the indifferent cosmos as most essentially pro-human, the denial of the existence of God renders human beings as essentially no better than animals. So, to the extent that humans view animals as having no inalienable rights, such as in regard to the human need to eat meat, and such as the acceptance by humans of animal cruelty against animals as the admirability of 'an integral part of Nature's way', atheism has no objective standard by which either to deny that any kind of violence by humans to humans is anything but part of 'Nature', or to assert that the simple killing of humans by some higher life form is abhorant to 'Nature'.
Those who object to God's typical inaction with regard to human conflict and human plight feel that if God were truly good and truly omnipotent, then God would be stepping in every time injustice is done to one person or group by another. But, no descendent of Adam is essentially more moral than the worst known tyrants in history, else we must explain their tyranny as the product of an essentially lesser and immoral kind of being which merely looks human. No tyrant in history was born practicing the evils he is known for, and every tyrant-in-waiting will, if opportunities fully allow it, strive for his own peace to the detriment of his fellows. This means that no descendent of Adam is as good as he thinks he is during his days of being the underdog. Lack of opportunity to succeed tyrannically in our own selfish interests means only that we tend to focus on how we may best survive by being good. This is what gives us our sense that we are essentially more worthy of God's intervention than are murderous tyrants, when, in fact, we all, including tyrants, are entirely unworthy. [[David]] understood this long before he became King of Israel, which is a key reason for why God called him the 'apple of my eye'.
== References ==
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[[Category: Philosophy]][[Category:Theology]]
