This turns out to be a logical contradiction, as stated previously, evil does exist in this world in many different forms, so this being of which no greater can be conceived must not exist. Epicurus’ questions or paradox, as it has come to be known, goes as follows, “If God is willing to prevent evil, but is not able to? Then he is not omnipotent. If He is able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Evil as Disproof of a Perfect God Proving the existence of God is a tricky matter. The fact that no definitive empirical evidence for God exists is not the proof of non-existence. In other words the “absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence”, (Carl Sagan). To refute the existence of a theistic God, one would have to provide some sort of proof against the notion. Theologians have long struggled over the philosophical problem of evil.
An omnipotent God would be able to prevent evil if he wanted to. A God both omnipotent and omnibenevolent would both want to and be able to prevent evil. P2 states that evil and suffering do exist, making it apparent that an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good Gods existence would be almost impossible. If a tri-omni god existed, then evil would not be able to exist The biggest weakness of the argument will be P1 that if an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good God exists, then evil and suffering would not exist. If God is all knowing and all powerful and all good, therefore god would not want us to suffer and not put evil on earth.
B. Swinburne claims that if there is a God, the occurrence of evils is to be expected. C. If the theist cannot explain why the co-existence of God and Evil is possible, then his belief in God is not rational. II. Moral Evil: Any evil doing that does harms to others and is done by humans with intents. A.
The problem with this is there shouldn’t be anything more powerful than God because he is omnipotent. Another situation in which God’s omniscience could be questioned is whether he can be lost. If not, then there is something that God has not experienced, and so he cannot be omniscient. if God
Recognising this reaffirms that God is more than we can ever imagine – he is ineffable, can never be described so we cannot say what they are not. Strengths of via negativa are that it allows things to be said about God without implying that the finite (humans) can grasp the infinite (God), it also asserts the claims of revelation, that God is good and then recognises goodness to be a human word and so must be negated by saying too that God is not good to
Cameron Farrell God’s Involvement in the Creation of Right and Wrong The argument pertaining to God’s involvement in the existence of right and wrong is very complex, as one can gather from analyzing the text. The general idea the author is trying to convey to the reader is that it is difficult to say that God is good while also saying he created right and wrong, and specified the differences between the two. The writer is not trying to argue against the differences between right and wrong, but more so the situation that exists within the difference between the two. The situation at hand is if the differences of right and wrong were God’s decision to create, or not. If God did create the difference between right and wrong then that means that for God, initially, there wasn’t a difference between to two.
Overall, I believe that Aquinas’ 3 ways are not very convincing as a proof of the existence of God. The different ways in which Aquinas try to prove the existence of God just make it either impossible for there not to be a God, which rejects any other ideas or, they make misleading assumptions that are not justified. My first reason for believing that Aquinas’ 3 ways are not very convincing is the 2nd way – from Cause. David Hume argues that you cannot see, hear or use any of your senses to see a cause. You cannot see a cause only two things happening in conjunction with one another.
The first premise states that “If there is evil, God either isn’t willing or isn’t able to prevent it.” The idea of a God who is neither willing nor able to do something is almost immediately equating to no God. Without even delving further into the argument, we can already see where these premises are leading. The second premise states that “If God is all powerful, he can prevent it” and the third states that “If God is perfectly good, God will prevent it if God can.” There is no denying that the Judeo-Christian possibly Islamic God is supposed to be both all powerful and perfectly good (as stated in the fourth premise of the argument). However, Laurence also mentions that perhaps it just does not make sense for there to be a world without evil, bringing to light the validity of the second and third premises. He speaks of how a world with humans is better than a world without, and because of this it is just does not make sense to have a world without evil.
On one hand you have the philosophers who believe you can speak and write about God, because God is reality. On the other hand, are the Logical Positivists who claim that statements about God have no meaning because they don’t relate to anything that is real. There are a number of philosophers who claimed to have proven conclusively that religious language is meaningful, for example Aquinas’ theory of analogy. An analogy is an attempt to explain the meaning of something which is difficult to understand and forming relations through attributes or relations that are similar. Aquinas rejected univocal and equivocal language when talking about God.