Firstly, one must try and discuss the reason to evil in the world:
1. If an all powerful (omnipotent), all loving (omnibenevolent) God exist, then pain and suffering could not exist; pain and suffering does exist therefore God cannot exist.
William Craig explained in relation to the statement above how philosopher Doctor Russell once commented that there were no good reasons to proving god’s existence. Here, Doctor Russell is clearly forgetting all of the good that comes from the evil. For instance the millions of dollars the world spends on charity funds to help those less fortunate than they are. Perhaps it takes evil to produce good and that was the reason God does not prevent evil.
Think about it. If the world was never in devastation and forever in harmony, how does one tell good from bad? Would ‘good’ exist? And in that case how would we define God to be omnibenevolent if we can not define ‘all loving’ as being ‘good’. God’s reason to evil is so that there could be an identification to good deeds.
However another philosopher Epicurus believed otherwise and stated his opinion as shown below:
God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
What can be drawn from this is that God must have intended evil to exist in order for it to exist. If God is omnipotent and had created the world, as we assume, then evil too would have been created by him. If God were omniscient then he also would have known that philosophers were going to discuss his existence. Without ‘evil’ humans would feel no purpose to question or think about God, because humans would be content. Humans would feel no need to question the reason of having no ‘evil’ as we would not have any more than the good that surrounds us.
However these are all assumptions, and humans have no right to judge God and “the problem of evil” without first being certain of the world we live in. This therefore gives humans no right to judge or calculate whether Gods reason for permitting evil is morally sufficient.
William Augustine’s theories are evident to my statement, he quoted: “It is impossible, unprincipled for us to justify in supposing that God does not have sufficient reasons for permitting evil.”
He too recognized that humans are still extremely ignorant of our universe and with such a lack of knowledge of where we come from. Humans cannot ever have an answer to God. Humans can only work towards an answer.
William Craig also mentioned that “the only reason to us thinking God would prevent pointless evil is because we (humans) think God, if he exists is there to create a comfortable environment for his creations.”
I believe this statement is true. More often than not people believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. But in a theist point of view, a Christian point of view as Craig mentions that the purpose of life is to “understand God” so in that case us humans are on the right track, as we move forward understanding the good and bad situations we are confronted with.
Furthermore, William Craig ended his lecture by expressing his views on whether the problem of evil defeats the existence of God. He stated:
- If God does not exist than objective moral values do not exist.
- Evil exists
- Therefore objective moral values exist
- Therefore God exists
As I mentioned at the beginning, I too do not believe that “the problem of evil” defeats God, it helps to prove God’s existence. Epicurus and Doctor Russell may believe that there is already too much bad in the world to justify his existence. However, I believe that the good we come across in life justifies the bad and without bad there would be no way of knowing good, so in that case God permits evil in the world for humans to challenge themselves as believers and thinkers.
