Evil and Suffering

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What is meant by the problem of evil and suffering? [8]

The problem of evil and suffering is perhaps the greatest of all challenges to religious belief. It is the difficulty of reconciling the existence of wickedness in the world with the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God. It is best explained in the inconsistent triad; a vertex dating from Epicurus and Augustine that acknowledges the main problem believers face; how can there be a deity that is all good, powerful and knowing if evil exists, as the problem of evil itself is a contradiction within the idea of a deity.

The problem of evil is an extensive problem. Whether malum culpae; moral evils we inflict upon one another (murder), or malum poenae; evil caused by natural occurrences (earthquakes) it is the direct cause of the suffering we endure each day.

Different religious perspectives require different answers; the 'problem of evil', which in itself has numerous debatable aspects, is therefore interpreted in different ways by atheists, agnostics and theists. To theists particularly, the existence of evil in our world poses more than a merely philosophical or apologetic problem; it creates a very personal religious