The Argument from Evil
In Michael Martin (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Atheism. Cambridge (2007)
| Abstract | Where was God? Where was the intelligent designer of the universe when 1.5 million children were turned into smoke by zealous Nazis? Where was the all powerful, all knowing, wholly good being whose very essence is radically opposed to evil, while millions of children were starved to death by Stalin, had their limbs chopped off with machetes in Rwanda, were turned into amputees by the diamond trade in Sierra Leone, and worked to death, even now, by the child slave trade that, by conservative estimates, enslaves 250 million children worldwide?Without divine justice, all of this suffering is gratuitous. How, then, can a wholly good, all-powerful God be believed to exist? The existence of evil is the most fundamental threat to the traditional Western concept of an all-good, all-powerful God. Both natural evil, the suffering that occurs as a result of physical phenomena, and moral evil, the suffering resulting from human action, comprise the problem of evil. If evil cannot be accounted for, then belief in the traditional Western concept of God is absurd. | |||||||||
| Keywords | atheism | |||||||||
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Similar books and articlesRenée Jeffery (2008). Evil and International Relations: Human Suffering in an Age of Terror. Palgrave Macmillan.
Robert Lehe (2009). The Nihilistic Consequences of the Argument From Evil. International Philosophical Quarterly 49 (4):427-437.
Frederick Sontag (1970). The God of Evil: An Argument From the Existence of the Devil. New York,Harper & Row.
Andrew Chignell (1998). The Problem of Infant Suffering. Religious Studies 34 (2):205-217.
Daniel Howard-Snyder (2005). On Rowe's Argument From Particular Horrors. In Kelly Clark (ed.), Readings in Philosophy of Religion. Broadview.
Bruce Russell (1989). The Persistent Problem of Evil. Faith and Philosophy 6 (2):121-139.
A. M. Weisberger (1999). Suffering Belief: Evil and the Anglo-American Defense of Theism. Peter Lang.
James R. Beebe, Logical Problem of Evil. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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