These revision notes for the new OCR Religious Studies A level cover the Problem of Evil. They cover the theodicies of St Augustine and Irenaeus as well as in-depth evaluation from a variety of scholars. They are detailed and are to an A* standard
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6: The Problem of Evil
Moral evil Suffering caused by human selfishness/cruelty
Natural evil Suffering caused by natural disasters and evil in nature
The 'Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able but not
Inconsistent willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence comes evil? Is he
Triad neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?' - Epicurus
Bible quote 'My God, why have you abandoned me? I have cried desperately for help, but still, it
about does not come' Psalms
suffering
Theodicy An attempt to justify the goodness of God given the fact of evil
Deism The belief that there is a God who created the universe but had no further connection
with it
Objection to We know pain is real, there is evil and suffering in the old testament and if evil was an
Idea that Evil illusion this would make Jesus' sacrifice meaningless
is an Illusion
The Theodicy God created a perfect world without suffering and evil. 'God saw all that he had made
of St and it was very good' - Genesis 1.31. He argues that evil is not a thing in itself, rather it is
Augustine the absence of good. 'evil is a privation or lack of good’. God gave his creation free will -
when we turn against God it creates an absence of good within themselves
The Fall of the Angles - Lucifer and other angles chose to reject God. Their choice upset
the natural order of the world and brought natural evil into the world
The Fall of Man - Adam and Eve rejected God by eating the forbidden fruit. As a
consequence, evil entered the world and was passed to all humans through semen so
we are all born in sin
God shows his justice by not interfering to prevent evil and shows his love by offering
eternal life the those who repent
He believed that a free world with evil is better than an unfree world
It is a soul-deciding theodicy because evil tests your faithfulness to God
Objections to Schleiermacher argues that it is a logical contradiction for a perfect world to go wrong or
the Theodicy for perfect beings to choose to do wrong
of St J L Mackie argues that God could have given us free will but we, as perfect beings,
Augustine would always choose to do good
It relies on a literal interpretation of genesis so it is limited to creationists
Why do people suffer for something that wasn't their fault - that is neither just nor loving
Was the world made perfect? This is at odds with science
Is it reasonable to argue that evil is not a real thing?
If God made hell (as Augustine believed) then he must have anticipated evil and is also
partially responsible for it because he made a place of eternal suffering and torment
It is biologically impossible to be seminally present in Adam's sin
The Theodicy 'And now we will make human beings; they will be like us and resemble us'
of Irenaeus Irenaeus distinguished between the 'image' and the 'likeness' of God. He believed that
we were created in the image of God but needed to grow into his likeness
Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden of Eden because they were immature
and needed to develop to become morally mature. The whole of the human race needs
to do this, and this takes time
Evil serves the purpose of helping us to mature - it is instrumental
God gave the people free will so that we could learn what is right and wrong. The free
will leads to evil but without it we would be reduced to robots
Jesus linked God and humanity because he is both human and divine. His obedience to
God ad sacrifice helped to bring people back to God
John Hick's His theory is based on the idea of genuine freedoms. He argued that God wanted a
development genuine relationship with people, one which is freely chosen. In order to do this God
of the created an Epistemic Distance (a gap in knowledge) between ourselves and God. This
Irenaean makes us question his existence and allows us to freely choose to believe in him.
Theodicy He believed an unfree world without pain would be meaningless and not good for
people to improve their morals. Real freedom requires the real possibility of harm
Believed the world in instrumentally good but does also recognise the problem of
dysteleological evil
Hick believed in universal salvation which Irenaeus rejected. He believed that hell is
essential purgatorial and provides a further opportunity for us to better ourselves.
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