Weblog of a Christian philosophy student

Weblog of a Christian philosophy student. Please feel free to comment. All of my posts are public domain. Subscribe to posts [Atom]. Email me at countaltair [at] yahoo.com.au. I also run a Chinese to English translation business at www.willfanyi.com.

Name:
Location: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Friday, May 30, 2008

The Problem Of Evil (Short Version)

Will G

God is the greatest possible being that can exist. But the greatest possible being is even greater if only he can exist by definition. That's an argument that only God can exist; I think this idea of God has no problem of evil which I'll argue for here.

Assume that God really wants to create other persons.

If God is the only thing that can exist, then God cannot make people by making them out of a different substance from himself, since only he can exist. Nor can he make people by making them out of himself and giving them a different identity, because they'd be perfectly God if they were made at all.

If only God can exist by definition, then the only way he could make other people is by making people less real than him and therefore imperfect, because that would be the only thing that could distinguish other persons from him.

It makes sense that if we're less real then we'd have worse versions of God's qualities: we'd be less intelligent, sometimes evil, and very importantly, much less happy (since God is totally content.)

This unhappiness is evil. Therefore, logically, anyone God creates must suffer terribly (unless there is some other thing to consider.)

It makes sense that God could help us, because he's all powerful[1]. But what if he needs our involvement? If God needs our input to help us, then we'd have to experience accepting God's help, and therefore experience a moment when he hasn't helped us yet, and therefore a moment of horrible suffering for everyone while we are partially real and God hasn't done something to help us yet.

Therefore, logically, the idea of God can explain how everyone would suffer horribly for one moment of existence, while they are accepting his help, even though is all powerful and all good.

But why does the world go on for so long; i.e. not just a single moment? I don't know, but the confidence anyone has that there could be a reason, is the confidence that person has that the problem of evil is based on a mistake.

[1] Within logic

Labels:

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home