God And Evil Co-Exist Essay

For many Theists, the ‘Problem of Evil’ is one of the greatest difficulties that consequently contradict the image of God or the existence of a Deity. The Problem challenges how a limitlessly benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent God can allow evil to exist. The problem was first tackled as early as 342-270 BC by Epicurus, "Is God willing but not able to prevent evil? Then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?" (Clark, PJ, 1999:125). This poses the question, if God truly possesses these attributes, how can he not foresee or prevent evil and how can God and evil co-exist? Many Atheists would argue that God simply does not exist as the argument is not …show more content…
However, some are considered to acquire greater goodness than others whereby God has endowed them with some level of measure, form and order. Augustine puts forward the thesis that some creatures (although they are corrupted) are considered to have a greater variety of goodness, as opposed to those creatures that remain uncorrupted. For example, a rational spirit who is corrupted by evil is better than irrational and uncorrupted spirit. In addition Augustine states that the idea of ‘evil’ should rather refer to the ‘privation’ of good, opposed to an evil creature with the absence of good; they must be considered a good creature with a measured privation of goodness (Stump, E and Kretzmann, N 2001:44). However an atheist response to this would be; If God has created creatures with a tendency to be corrupt, this can be perceived as a spectrum of ‘goodness’ rather than the presence of evil - this does not appear to be a satisfactory answer. For example, how can we justify the Holocaust as an occurrence of lesser good measured on a spectrum opposed to not accounting for the palpable presence of evil? This does not seem reasonable or