The Argument from Evil

Abstract

The argument from or problem of evil concludes that the existence of evil is, in one way or another, incompatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient being (God). 1 For anyone who is a student of or familiar with modern philosophical orthodoxy in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of action (I will simply refer to the three together as "modern philosophical orthodoxy"), the problem of evil can be likened to the skeletal remains of dinosaurs that are housed in the back room of a museum and occasionally brought out for reexamination and public viewing. This is the case for four reasons.First, the problem of evil is fundamentally, in the words of C. S. Lewis, the problem of pain (Lewis 1962), where an experience of pain is an irreducible, conscious feeling or quale that hurts. The occurrence of such a psychological event is, however, vigorously contested by many adherents of modern philosophical orthodoxy. Given the seemingly outlandish nature of their position, some defenders of this orthodoxy vehemently insist they do not deny that we experience pain. Nevertheless, when one reads their accounts of pain, one cannot help but be suspicious. Almost invariably, they talk about the "functional role" of pain, which is cashed out in terms of pain's extrinsic or relational features in the form of causal inputs and outputs. And these defenders of modern philosophical orthodoxy make clear that this functional role exhausts what pain is. The problem here is that while no one who is sane will deny that an experience of pain has certain relational features (e.g. other things being equal, one who is experiencing pain will act for the purpose that the pain be mitigated), no one who is sane will hold that an experience of pain is nothing more than its relational features. After all, pain feels a certain way. It has an intrinsic nature for which the only adequate description is that it hurts. And it is precisely because pain has this kind of intrinsic nature that it also has the relational features that it has. It is this irreducible, intrinsic qualitative nature of pain that modern philosophical orthodoxy is intent on either 1. The meanings of these concepts are widely debated, but I will assume that sense can be made of them.

God in the Face of Natural and Moral Evils: A Thomistic Approach

“…Philosophical debates on this topic are innumerable (Possenti 1997;Peterson 1998;van Inwagen 2006;Ward 2007;Goetz 2009;Søvik 2011;Echavarría 2013Echavarría , 2017Tooley 2021;Beebe 2023; other authors will come out in the rest of the article). Some scholars argue the incompatibility between the presence of so many evils in the world and the existence of an omnipotent and good God, or at least claim that those evils make God's existence unlikely (Mackie 1982;Rowe 2001;Trakakis 2023).…”