Chapter 15– How Can God Exist
With All the Evil There is in the
World?
Some Solutions
• God is not omnipotent
• God’s plan for the world is inscrutable
• All things (including evil) actually contribute to
the goodness of the whole
• A perfect world is a logical impossibility
• Evil is a necessary by- product of nature
• Why didn’t God create a perfect world?
• Why can’t evil and a omnipotent exist at the
same time?
Evil As A Privation of Goodness
• Evil is nothing at all but the absence or privation of
something, namely of being & goodness
• The world & human souls are seen as created by the
highest being “from above” but at the same time as
corruptable by nonbeing “from below.”
• “God is therefore responsible for isness and goodness in
the world, not the nonbeing and evil.”
• What makes people become evil?
• Is there an absence of goodness and the world is evil?
Free- Will Defense
• In order for humans to be truly capable of moral
goodness they must also be capable of moral evil which
means they must have free choice which means the
possibility of moral evil
• Incompatibilities
• 1. All people always freely choose to do good (no
contradiction)
• 2. God so constitutes all people that they always freely
choose to do good (contradiction)
• 3. No one can do otherwise than choose to do good.
• Why did God endow humans with free will knowing they
would abuse it?
• Could God have made us free and unable to sin?
Evil As Therapy
• Evil is the instrument by which God has determined to
correct, purify, and instruct his creatures
• John Hick “to obey and believe God is good and not to
obey God is evil and this is his death.”
• The mind recognizes through the experience of both the
knowledge of what is good and by the means of
repentance, disobedience
• Goes with the “free will” defense, free will is a condition
of humanhood, and sin enters the world through human
free will.
• God gave us independence so that a genuine
relationship of love and humanity and this free will is
what makes the possibility of disobedience and this is sin
• How can something so evil, like Nazi death camps, be a
spiritual growth?
• Why do the innocent have to suffer the evil of others?
Evil is Irrational
• Nihilism- nothingism; absolute rejection of all value &
meaning
• Philosophers are atheist/ humanist
• Humanism: belief that humanity is the ultimate reality
• Evil becomes one of reconciling evil not with God but
rather with man
• Human dignity is about our struggle with evil
• Why is it anymore difficult to have evil with God than to
have goodness without him?
• If God is all things good then why does evil exist?