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Problem Of Evil Research Paper

2016 Words9 Pages

The problem of evil is a very debated discussion in philosophy and the philosophy of faith. All of us have struggled with why evil has happened either to ourselves, people who are close to us, our nation, and even our world. Our mother gets cancer, the Holocaust, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, violence, and murders all bring us back to the question and problem of evil. This paper will explore the concept of evil and the problems that it creates in philosophy. It will also discuss many of the scholars and philosophers who took on this question to form their opinion and debate it.
Evil is understood as a problem when we try to explain why it exists and its relationship to the world as a whole. Some believe that “explanations of evil are necessary …show more content…

Plantinga states that God and evil could coexist if God has a morally sufficient reason for allowing evil. One of the reasons he gives is the importance of free will. J.L. Mackie responded to Plantinga’s free will defense in this way: “Since this defense is formally [that is, logically] possible, and its principle involves no real abandonment of our ordinary view of the opposition between good and evil, we can concede that the problem of evil does not, after all, show that the central doctrines of theism are logically inconsistent with one another. But whether this offers a real solution of the problem is another question” (Beebe). As a result of Plantinga so easily undermining the problem of evil, scholars and philosophers believe that the issue is even more difficult and perplexing than the arguments stated by Plantinga.
Current discussions of the problem focus on what is called ‘the probabilistic problem of evil’ or ‘the evidential problem of evil.’ According to this formulation of the problem, the evil and suffering (or, in some cases, the amounts, kinds and distributions of evil and suffering) that we find in the world count as evidence against the existence of God (or make it improbable that God exists). Responding to this formulation of the problem requires much more than simply describing a logically possible scenario in which God and evil coexist.

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