Our group’s topic is “The Problem with God, Evil, and Suffering: Theodicy & the Monotheistic Religions. For this portion of the Project, we split the research up into sections, and I’m focusing on aspects of God and evil within the Christian religion. I choose to examine the book, “The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil” by Brian Davies. Davies defines “evil” as not the common annoyances of our daily lives but refers to “a great or horrendous deal of badness,” (Davies) which he gives examples of such as genocide, serial killing, cruelty, cancer, or an earthquake that results in the deaths of thousands of people. He concludes his definition with the Medieval terminology of evil (ranging on a scale from mild to atrocious), “malum.”
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Mackie who wrote a paper, “Evil and Omnipotence,” which claims that God and evil don’t exist in an either/or dichotomy- that can both exist. However, the thinking and understanding of both together tend to contradict traditional Christian views on God. Mackie states that, “a good omnipotent thing eliminates evil completely, and the propositions that a good omnipotent thing exists and that evil exists are incompatible” (Mackie 200-212). He also affirms that “the problem of evil” would not arise as a contradiction if a person were to give up one of the characteristics that defines God (i.e. denying that God is omnipotent would not fall in conflict the essence of …show more content…
Davies argues that along with knowing that God is the Creator, he is human-like and is eternal, free, able to do anything, knows everything, is perfectly good, and other qualities leads to a comparison to human life and function. Humans are, as philosophers Ren Descartes and Swinburne state, people made of two compartments: our mental, incorporeal, indivisible self (mind), and our physical, extended, divisible self (body). So, within this context, God is extraordinary, a soul without a body within which the soul can manifest itself. However, Davies also questions why an understanding of human gives us an understand of God. Some biblical text can interpret God to be very much like a human being, and other passages focus on the difference between God and human, as to create a sense of separation between human and
Mackie who wrote a paper, “Evil and Omnipotence,” which claims that God and evil don’t exist in an either/or dichotomy- that can both exist. However, the thinking and understanding of both together tend to contradict traditional Christian views on God. Mackie states that, “a good omnipotent thing eliminates evil completely, and the propositions that a good omnipotent thing exists and that evil exists are incompatible” (Mackie 200-212). He also affirms that “the problem of evil” would not arise as a contradiction if a person were to give up one of the characteristics that defines God (i.e. denying that God is omnipotent would not fall in conflict the essence of …show more content…
Davies argues that along with knowing that God is the Creator, he is human-like and is eternal, free, able to do anything, knows everything, is perfectly good, and other qualities leads to a comparison to human life and function. Humans are, as philosophers Ren Descartes and Swinburne state, people made of two compartments: our mental, incorporeal, indivisible self (mind), and our physical, extended, divisible self (body). So, within this context, God is extraordinary, a soul without a body within which the soul can manifest itself. However, Davies also questions why an understanding of human gives us an understand of God. Some biblical text can interpret God to be very much like a human being, and other passages focus on the difference between God and human, as to create a sense of separation between human and