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    God lacks at least one of the traditional divine attribut... — Carmelics
    Home/Divine Attributes
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    God lacks at least one of the traditional divine attributes (omniscience, omnipotence, or omnibenevolence), and therefore the God of traditional theism does not exist.

    Divine Attributes
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.An omniscient God would have knowledge of the evil in the world.
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    • 2.An omnibenevolent God would desire to halt or prevent evil.
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    • 3.An omnipotent God would be able to halt or prevent evil.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Libertarian free will requires that God permit creatures to choose evil, making divine non-intervention a logical necessity, not an attribute deficiency.
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    • 2.Alvin Plantinga's Free Will Defense shows that an omnipotent God cannot both create free creatures and guarantee they always choose good, as this is a logical contradiction.
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    • 3.Therefore, the coexistence of omnipotence and creaturely freedom entails the possibility of evil without impugning any divine attribute.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.John Hick's Irenaean theodicy holds that a world without suffering cannot achieve the soul-making necessary for moral and spiritual development toward the imago Dei.
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    • 2.Omnibenevolence is not equivalent to maximizing immediate comfort, but to willing the highest good, which may require permitting suffering as a necessary developmental condition.
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    • 3.If the elimination of evil would prevent a greater good constitutive of human perfection, an omnibenevolent God has positive reason to permit it, dissolving the alleged contradiction.
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    Divine Attributes

    Related

    A being possessing all three attributes would not permit the evil that exists; t...Alvin Plantinga's Free Will Defense shows that an omnipotent God cannot both cre...An omnibenevolent God would desire to halt or prevent evil.An omnipotent God would be able to halt or prevent evil.
    +7 moreShow less
    An omniscient God would have knowledge of the evil in the world.If the elimination of evil would prevent a greater good constitutive of human pe...John Hick's Irenaean theodicy holds that a world without suffering cannot achiev...Libertarian free will requires that God permit creatures to choose evil, making ...Omnibenevolence is not equivalent to maximizing immediate comfort, but to willin...Therefore, the coexistence of omnipotence and creaturely freedom entails the pos...Yet evil is rife in the world.

    Similar

    Omnipotence should not be assumed to be attributable only to the God o...81%If one is neutral about whether God exists, then omnipotence should no...81%The argument against the possibility of accidental omnipotence presupp...80%The attributes ascribed by theists to God are attributes derived eithe...79%

    Source

    AI-extracted2/3 agreementValid
    SEP: providence-divine
    Classical formulation of the problem of evil
    View source passageHide passage
    What is described above is the problem of evil. Because evil poses the most difficult problems for traditional views of divine providence, this discussion will be organized around the theme of evil. In its classical formulation, the problem of evil is a problem of logical consistency. The opponent of theism alleges that a triad of properties traditionally held to belong to God’s nature — omniscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence — are not jointly consistent with the existence of evil in the world. An omniscient God, we must assume, would have knowledge of the evil in the world. An omnibenev...
    Extraction notes

    Validity: The extracted argument accurately captures the classical logical problem of evil as presented in the passage, where premises 1–4 establish the tension between the divine attributes and the existence of evil, and premise 5 draws the inference that at least one attribute must be lacking, leading to the conclusion that the God of traditional theism does not exist.

    Confidence: High confidence — the text explicitly lays out this argument as the classical logical problem of evil.

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit