Why Do All Evil Exist

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In this paper, I will be looking at the problems of evil and discussing why an all loving and all-powerful being would allow for such evil to exist in this world. Aquinas and Anselm suggest that God’s allowance for evil is to bring good out of evil through the virtues of freedom, choice and responsibility. Throughout this paper, I will argue that the suggestion of greater goods occurring from these evils is insufficient due to the logical and evidence-based problems. The defense of moral evil states that an omnibenevolent and omnipotent god would allow for evil to exist, because through those evils, greater good could emerge. We are free beings and as free beings we should have the opportunity to choose, and the free being who has the opportunity …show more content…
While there is a good in, for example, human beings curing the diseases of others, this is not possible for other animals. These creatures are not even being pushed towards the good. A god that is allowing for natural evils to occur to most of the living beings in the world, without an end in sight to which they are being pushed, is utterly sadomasochistic and malevolent.
Given the fact of moral evil that people create towards one another, we cannot help but pose the question: do we even need the pushes of natural disasters to begin with? Is the evil that we humans commit against one another not itself a push towards the good? Why should we add more opportunities for suffering, given that they pose no new contribution to good?
There are three premises relevant to our discussion. Namely, god is all loving, all-powerful and there is evil in the world. We can see some degree of evil as necessary because through the existence of evil, greater good will come forward. This argument is more reasonable when it concerns moral evil - the evil that results of relations between people - and is allowing of some extent of natural evil. Yet the argument of good through pushes appears dubious when we consider how unnecessary these elements of evil truly are. Even though god’s allowance for evil is to bring good out of evil through the virtues of freedom, choice and responsibility, I believe that the quantities of suffering occurring outweighs the good that comes from

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