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Leibniz's Theodicy And Evil

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The German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz coined the term "theodicy" in 1710 in his work Theodicies. Other philosophers have suggested that theodicy is a modern discipline because deities in the ancient world were often imperfect. Theodicy is the answer to the question why God permits evil. (Wikipedia, 2015) “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things” Isaiah 45:7
A similar account is found in the New Testament where in 2 Thessalonians 1:8-9 (King James Version) the distinction between the elect of God and the non-elect is clearly distinguished stating: "In flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ:/ Who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power” It seems that God could have eliminated more evil in the world and still accomplished the divine purposes but then a large amount of evil in the world does not seem to be connected to the divine purposes.
"Natural evil fulfills a higher divine …show more content…

God subjected or cursed the natural world to death because of human rebellion. In doing so, God brings about a world where we are no longer comfortable in the present. God wanted us to freely love him, which meant allowing for the possibility that we might choose against him. And we have. Free will provides good—self-determination--and carries with it significant responsibility, which is also good. This is especially true of relationships involving love. Evil is an unfortunate result of human free will. If God were to intervene at every point of our wrongdoing, our free will would be compromised. So evil in the world is not entirely God's fault; however, this position does not claim that God is not responsible in any way for evil. If you have the power to intervene and do not, that implies choices. (Oxford University Press ,

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An example of these beliefs was Josiah Royce, who would question the existence of evil and why god would allow evil to exist, an idea that became known as theodicy. An Royce says “For consider. A suffers ill. B sees A suffering. Can B, the onlooker, help his suffering neighbor, A?

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In theory, he thinks that if God exists then evil should not, but it does. So he creates and argues a theodicy to show that God and evil can exist at the same time. He comes up with the “Free Will Theodicy” which states that humans are the cause of evil, not God. The Free Will Theodicy discusses two kinds of evil: moral evil and natural evil.

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Is a God unable to suppress the evil or does he have no solution to problem of evil? The thesis posited by Mackie that evil exists and there is no God to stop the evil is still relevant to today. We still have wars, incurable diseases and struggles on this planet.

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And we read about a God who, I gather from the text, is purposefully making a tyrant out of a king by hardening his heart and sends terrible things from the sky that seem purposefully designed to create pain and suffering within his creation (I am hoping we will discover another way to read this? Was there no way to produce the same effect with less "collateral damage"?)

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