One cannot permanently argue for or against what the basic problem of evil and the consequences are without first getting a grasp of the nature of good and evil in itself in the context of the society in which we find them. Each society has its own relative understanding of what is good and what is evil. These conceptions however are believed to come with their own boomeranging circumstances on the one who chooses any of them.
It is no longer confusing to note that the choice of the individual speaks of the consequences he is to expect in the coming future. Either he likes if or not, there is the comeuppance that attends the human actions. Nonetheless, the focus of this content is to feed you with the knowledge of evil, the basic problem of evil and the consequences that follow it.
The Basic Problem of Evil and the Consequences
But is the presence of evil the problem we are going to be analyzing in this short discourse? No! What draws this attention is the metaphysics of evil? We intend to plunge into the question of how evil came to be when there is the existence of a supreme creator who is acclaimed to be good and that he is ultimately all-knowing. Isn’t this reconciliation problem thought-provoking?
How then, if the preceding truth about the all-powerful is true, does evil creep into the world? We shall look into the basic problem of evil and the consequences of it on the human society at large.
Reconciling Evil With God
Evil has never had to itself a definite meaning or explanation, reason being that copious cultural standards hold relative consciousness and thus, the definition has never had any absolute concept to its nature. This phenomenon is rooted in the fulfilment of desires, that may be either selfish or selfless. However, the fact that there is God gives credence to the argument in this article that since God is good naturally, there shouldn’t anything called evil in the existence of which he is the creator.
The problem of evil is the question of how to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering with an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient God. There are currently differing definitions of these concepts. The best known presentation of the problem is attributed to the Greek philosopher Epicurus.
The problem of evil is generally formulated in two forms: the logical problem of evil and the evidential problem of evil. The logical form of the argument tries to show a logical impossibility in the coexistence of God and evil, while the evidential form tries to show that given the evil in the world, it is improbable that there is an omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good God.
The problem of evil has been extended to non-human life forms, to include animal suffering from natural evils and human cruelty against them. The existence of evil and suffering in our world seems to pose a serious challenge to belief in the existence of a perfect God.
If God were all-knowing, it seems that God would know about all of the horrible things that happen in our world. If God were all-powerful, God would be able to do something about all of the evil and suffering. Furthermore, if God were morally perfect, then surely God would want to do something about it. And yet we find that our world is filled with countless instances of evil and suffering which are naturally inflicted either by the conscious design of man or by natural design.
These facts about evil and suffering seem to conflict with the orthodox theist claim that there exists a perfectly good God. The challenged posed by this apparent conflict has come to be known as the problem of evil. The concern is whether evil provides a reason to disbelieve in God. There are four things one might say about evil, ranging from that it proves that God does not exist to that it provides no evidence at all against God’s existence.
The Incompatibility Problem of Evil
The ‘Incompatibility’ or ‘Logical’ versions of the Problem of Evil claim that evil’s existence is logically incompatible with God’s existence: believing in God and evil is like believing in a five-sided square, a contradiction.
Most philosophers today reject this argument. They think that God could have some sufficient reason to permit some evil: e.g., personal growth requires confronting challenges that inherently involve some evil or bad things. These defenses seem to show that it is not contradictory to believe in God and the existence of evil.
The Evidential Problem of Evil
Other philosophers argue that the mere existence of evil does not prove that God does not exist, but that the facts about evil provide good evidence against God’s existence.
There are probably billions of evils such that we do not know why God, if there is a God, would permit them. Many argue that if even one of these instances is gratuitous—i.e., God could have prevented it without thereby sacrificing an equal or greater good and without thereby permitting an equal or worse evil—then God does not exist.
Theists have reason to find an explanation or set of explanations that could plausibly justify all evils. This involves trying to find plausible theodicies or explanations of why God would permit that evil or why that evil is not as evidentially weighty as it might seem. Here’s a summary of two of the best theodicies.
