Christianity

Problem of Evil

Evil is in the eyes of the beholder, if you are a Theist you believe that evil is wrong and God is all powerful and is able to rid the world of its evil. Though he does not because he gives us the free will to decide whether or not follows the ways of evil. If you view evil as the way David Hume views evil then you believe that since there is evil in the world by evidence then there must not be a God otherwise he would rid the world of the evil and not make people suffer and since he does not then there is no God.

To present the problem of evil you must first know that evil exists. David Hume’s view on the problem of this is to be understood is in the form of undeserved suffering, perpetrated by man and nature, unchallenged victimization of weak by strong, pestilence, war, famine, and other horrors. In the face of this, God is limited in power, goodness, or knowledge or he does not exist at all; that is, either he is incapable or unwilling to remove evil, or he is unaware of its existence or of solutions to it. The problem of evil supposes that God would have no reason for permitting evil that is ultimately to outweigh in significance the negative effects of evil. Hume believes in Natural Religion which looks at the world appeal to the natural world from our senses, this gives much background to why Hume views evil in such a way.

To explain the argument about evil, I am going to use David Hume’s Argument from Evil. The character Philo doesn't deny that what we see in the world is consistent with the existence of a very good and powerful finite God. But he insists that the world we see isn't the sort we would imagine if we came to the universe anew with only the knowledge that such a God created it. That means that we could never infer the existence of such a God from what we see in the world. In fact, Philo says, there are four hypotheses about the causes of the universe: that they are endowed with perfect goodness; that they have perfect malice; that they are opposite and have both goodness and neither malice; that they have neither goodness nor malice. Which is most likely to make the most sense, and still abide to what Philo has been saying? Since we see both good and evil, we can't reason to either of the first two. Hume adds that the uniformity and steadiness of general laws of nature seems to rule out the third. So we are left with the forth: the sources of the universe are neither good nor bad by our lights.

We wonder is it a reasonable conclusion? The bit in the argument about the steadiness of the laws of nature is not very convincing. The only way of interpreting it that seems to make it even remotely plausible is to say that the laws of nature are neither moral nor immoral, and the world seems to operate by laws. But this is unconvincing because the total design including the circumstances, on which the laws operate, is what is at issue. Mixed causes could produce mixed results partly by way of laws that are themselves neutral. The world contains goodness and beauty and it contains horror and pain. It is at least consistent to claim that both are there deliberately. But it isn't clear how much damage this does to Philo's