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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    God's allowing natural evils is justified. — Carmelics
    Home/Problem of Evil
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    God's allowing natural evils is justified.

    Problem of Evil
    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.It is important that events in the world take place in a regular way, since otherwise effective action would be impossible.
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    • 2.Events will exhibit regular patterns only if they are governed by natural laws.
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    • 3.If events are governed by natural laws, the operation of those laws will give rise to events that harm individuals.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.An omnipotent God could sustain regular natural laws while miraculously preventing specific instances of catastrophic suffering without disrupting the broader causal order.
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    • 2.The argument from natural law regularity only justifies the existence of natural evil in general, not the existence of gratuitous suffering like the slow death of innocent animals or childhood cancer.
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    • 3.If God routinely intervened to prevent only the most extreme natural evils, the resulting world would still exhibit sufficient regularity for rational agency, as Mackie and Flew argued.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Hick's soul-making theodicy presupposes that moral and spiritual development requires exposure to natural suffering, but empirical evidence shows extreme suffering more often destroys character than builds it.
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    • 2.A perfectly good God possessing omniscience would have access to alternative means of producing virtuous souls that do not involve the scale of suffering caused by tsunamis, plagues, and earthquakes.
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    Topics

    Problem of Evil

    Related

    A perfectly good God possessing omniscience would have access to alternative mea...A world without natural laws would be a much worse world.An omnipotent God could sustain regular natural laws while miraculously preventi...Events will exhibit regular patterns only if they are governed by natural laws.
    +6 moreShow less
    Hick's soul-making theodicy presupposes that moral and spiritual development req...If God routinely intervened to prevent only the most extreme natural evils, the ...If events are governed by natural laws, the operation of those laws will give ri...It is important that events in the world take place in a regular way, since othe...The argument from natural law regularity only justifies the existence of natural...The existence of natural evils is entailed by natural laws.

    Similar

    The evils that the world contains can be seen to be justified.84%The existence of natural evils is entailed by natural laws.84%If natural evils do not result from morally wrong actions, then free w...80%If evil does not follow from the essential natures of created things, ...80%

    Source

    AI-extracted
    SEP: evil
    View source passageHide passage
    But the above argument is subject to a very different sort of criticism, one that is connected with a feature of the above argument which seems to me important, but which is not often commented upon—the fact, namely, that the above argument is formulated in terms of axiological concepts, that is, in terms of the goodness or badness, the desirability or undesirability, of states of affairs. The criticism that arises from this feature centers on statement (3), which asserts that an omniscient and morally perfect being would prevent the existence of any states of affairs that are intrinsically b...

    Details

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