Bertrand Russell. As Flew (1955, p. 149) put it, “If there is no contradiction here then Omnipotence might have made a world inhabited by perfectly virtuous people.” Mackie (1955, p. 209) writes. Since evil and suffering obviously do exist, we get: (13) God is either not omnipotent, not omniscient, or not perfectly good. Many theists answer “Yes.” If (17) were true, (9) through (12) would have to be modified to read: (9′) If God knows about all of the evil and suffering in the world, knows how to eliminate or prevent it, is powerful enough to prevent it, and yet does not prevent it, he must not be perfectly good—unless he has a morally sufficient reason for allowing evil. There is nothing contradictory about supposing that there is a possible world where free creatures always make the right choices and never go wrong. Our hypothetical person does, however, have complete freedom to decide which of the two good courses of action to take. It seems, then, that the Free Will Defense might be adapted to rebut the logical problem of natural evil after all. This fundamental relevance to our day to day lives made "The Problems of Philosophy" extremely popular. The dissatisfaction many have felt with Plantinga’s solution may stem from a desire to see Plantinga’s Free Will Defense respond more generally to the problem of evil and not merely to a single formulation of the problem. To make the conflict more clear, we can combine (1), (2) and (3) into the following single statement. So, when they do perform right actions, they should not be praised. Can he make 2 + 2 = 5? An implicit assumption behind this part of the debate over the logical problem of evil is the following: (18) It is not morally permissible for God to allow evil and suffering to occur unless he has a morally sufficient reason for doing so. But evil of this sort is the best hope, I think, and maybe the only effective means, for bringing men to such a state. The logical problem of evil claims that God’s omnipotence, omniscience and supreme goodness would completely rule out the possibility of evil and that the existence of evil would do the same for the existence of a supreme being. It is impossible for them to do wrong. (7) If God is omniscient, he would know about all of the evil and suffering in the world and would know how to eliminate or prevent it. It is difficult to see that they do. Can he make contradictory statements true? Horrible things of all kinds happen in our world—and that has been the story since the dawn of civilization. It would be one thing if the only people who suffered debilitating diseases or tragic losses were the likes of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin or Osama Bin Laden. God was not, then, faced with a choice between making innocent automata and making beings who, in acting freely, would sometimes go wrong: there was open to him the obviously better possibility of making beings who would act freely but always go right. Although there is no evil and suffering in this world, it is not because God causally determines people in every situation to choose what is right and to avoid what is wrong. (14) God is omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good. Bertrand Russell uses an analytic method to make distinctions concerning our judgments about reality. If you can show that x is merely possible, you will have refuted (40). The ease with which Plantinga undermined that formulation of the problem suggests that the logical formulation did not adequately capture the difficult and perplexing issue concerning God and evil that has been so hotly debated by philosophers and theologians. It should be obvious that (13) conflicts with (1) through (3) above. Plantinga suggests that morally significant freedom is necessary in order for one’s actions to be assessed as being morally good or bad. In The Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russellasks us to look more closely at what we consider common sense about reality. It seems clearly possible that whatever creatures God were to make in such a world would not have morally significant free will and that there would be no evil or suffering. In other words, the Garden of Eden is pictured as a peaceful, vegetarian commune until moral evil entered the world and brought natural evil with it. He wrote many books and some of them tried to introduce the discipline of philosophy to the public. Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. Although sketching out mere possibilities without giving them any evidential support is typically an unsatisfactory thing to do in philosophy, it is not clear that Mackie’s unhappiness with Plantinga is completely warranted. Statement (14) is simply the conjunction of (1) through (3) and expresses the central belief of classical theism. is the contradictory of (40). Some theists suggest that perhaps God has a good reason for allowing the evil and suffering that he does. Plato’s thought: A philosophy of reason. 1990. As a perfectly good God, he also feels your pain. Plantinga (1974, p. 190) writes. Plantinga can’t put all the blame for pain and suffering on human beings. Death, disease, pain and even the tiresome labor involved in gleaning food from the soil came into the world as a direct result of Adam and Eve’s sin. So, the existence of evil and suffering makes theists’ belief in the existence of a perfect God irrational. It is not that they will contingently always do what is right and contingently always avoid what is wrong. Peterson (1998, p. 39) writes. Course. All you need is a possible x. Atheologians claim that a contradiction can easily be deduced from (1) through (4) once we think through the implications of the divine attributes cited in (1) through (3). However, Mackie is reluctant to attribute much significance to Plantinga’s accomplishment. Is this kind of situation really possible? According to this proposal, God is not ignoring your suffering when he doesn’t act to prevent it because—as an all-knowing God—he knows about all of your suffering. Moreover, (MSR2) would have us believe that there were real persons named Adam and Eve and that they actually performed the misdeeds attributed to them in the book of Genesis. Furthermore, if God were morally perfect, then surely God would want to do something about it. Plantinga, however, doesn’t take God’s omnipotence to include the power to do the logically impossible. A higher moral duty—namely, the duty of protecting the long-term health of her child—trumps the lesser duty expressed by (21). Returning to the main issue, there does not seem to be anything impossible about God causally determining people in every situation to choose what is right and to avoid what is wrong. In other words, it appears that W3 isn’t impossible after all. If that freedom were to be taken away, we might very well cease to be the creatures we are. Academic year. Since this is something that God could have done and since a world with free creatures and no evil is better than a world with free creatures and evil, this is something God should have done. No amount of moral or natural evil, of course, can guarantee that a man will [place his faith in God]…. Not just any old reason can justify God’s allowing all of the evil and suffering we see. And yet we find that our world is filled with countless instances of evil and suffering. Cancer, AIDS, famines, earthquakes, tornadoes, and many other kinds of diseases and natural disasters are things that happen without anybody choosing to bring them about. The problem is that he can’t do anything about it because he’s not omnipotent. These facts about evil and suffering seem to conflict with the orthodox theist claim that there exists a perfectly good God. If there is no logical impossibility in a man’s choosing the good on one, or on several occasions, there cannot be a logical impossibility in his freely choosing the good on every occasion. If God were all-powerful, God would be able to do something about all of the evil and suffering. Now let’s consider the philosophically more important world W3. Bishop Berkeley proposed that physical objects are actually ideas in the mind of God. If God were to have a morally sufficient reason for allowing evil, would it be possible for God to be omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and yet for there to be evil and suffering? And for that they must be free. This article addresses one form of that problem that is prominent in recent philosophical discussions–that the conflict that exists between the claims of orthodox theism and the facts about evil and suffering in our world is a logical one. Chapter Summary for Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy, chapter 1 summary. She claims that a world full of evil and suffering is “conducive to bringing about both the initial human [receipt of God’s gift of salvation] and also the subsequent process of sanctification” (Stump 1985, p. 409).

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