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Evil and Suffering (Augustine (Challenges to Augustine (Peter Cole - being…
Evil and Suffering
Augustine
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God created a world without flaws and created humans in the likeness of God - "God saw all that he had made, and it was good"
God is not to blame for evil as he created evil ex nihilo (out of nothing) - evil is not a substance so God can't have created evil
Evil is an absence of good, like blindness is an absence of sight - "For what we call evil is the absence of good"
Angels brought evil into the world by following Satan in his fall from grace - they abused their free will and turned away from God
Free will is good but has the potential of actualising evil - "nature therefore which has been corrupted, is called evil"
Evil is a punishment - it is still in the world as a punishment of Adam and Eve - we were all seminally present in the loins of Adam
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God foresaw our fall from grace and so planned our redemption through his son, Jesus Christ. If we accept Jesus into our lives, then we will go to heaven. If you don't then you are condemned to hell
Challenges to Augustine
Peter Cole - being free is a risk for God - but freedom allows us to learn to love God - "without freedom we could not share in God's goodness by freely loving him"
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Hick - it is not flawless as the world has evil so it goes wrong - "the ultimate responsibility must be with his its creator" - "Hell remains forever a blot upon God's creation"
Darwin - Augustine's Theodicy is not consistent or relevant - it is biologically impossible for us to come from the loins of Adam
The Irenaean Theodicy
Soul Making Theodicy
Based upon Genesis 1:26 "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness"
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God did not create a perfect world because true goodness has to be developed. "the harder we strive, so much is it more valuable"
Free will allows us the potential to disobey God as God stand back at an epistemic distance to allow us to make decisions
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Challenges to Irenaeus
D.Z. Phillips - love can not be expressed through evil - "a purpose planned from eternity - that is the deepest evil"
Plantinga - evil does not teach valuable lesssons and can cause people to lose faith - "soul breaking not soul making"
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Dostoevsky - If this world was the best God could do, he shouldn't have made a world
Wykstra
There is a point to suffering, it just has low seeability
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Elephant and flea - we can see the elephant because it has high seeability but we can't see the flea because it has low seeability like evil
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"We humans are simply unable to understand the goods of ... the apparently pointless evil suffering"
Rowe
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Suffering in animals and children does not result in a greater good and makes it unlikely that an all-powerful, all-good being exists
If there was a God, there would be no pointless suffering
Fawn analogy
fawn is trapped in a forest fire, gets injured, unable to escape
fawn has to endure painful, unnecessary suffering before dying
As the fawn has no soul, it's intense suffering is seen as pointless
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Innocent suffering
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In war, there is a strong reaction to the blatant unfairness of their suffering
The book of Job
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"Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know"
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Different types of evil
Natural evil
Any suffering that is brought about as a consequence of the events outside of the control of free-will agents - tornados, disease, ageing, tsunamis
Moral evil
free-will agents that have the ability to choose good or evil-
child abuse, terrorism, slavery, rape
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