ChristianityEssay title: ChristianityProblem of EvilEvil is in the eyes of the beholder, if you are a Theist you believe that evil is wrong and God is all powerful and is able to rid the world of its evil. Though he does not because he gives us the free will to decide whether or not follows the ways of evil. If you view evil as the way David Hume views evil then you believe that since there is evil in the world by evidence then there must not be a God otherwise he would rid the world of the evil and not make people suffer and since he does not then there is no God.
To present the problem of evil you must first know that evil exists. David Hume’s view on the problem of this is to be understood is in the form of undeserved suffering, perpetrated by man and nature, unchallenged victimization of weak by strong, pestilence, war, famine, and other horrors. In the face of this, God is limited in power, goodness, or knowledge or he does not exist at all; that is, either he is incapable or unwilling to remove evil, or he is unaware of its existence or of solutions to it. The problem of evil supposes that God would have no reason for permitting evil that is ultimately to outweigh in significance the negative effects of evil. Hume believes in Natural Religion which looks at the world appeal to the natural world from our senses, this gives much background to why Hume views evil in such a way.
The Problem of Evil In his theory of evil, the human would be free to have any or all evil, but not all evils. It would have to bear the brunt of a significant number of such evils and the consequences would be severe ones. An alternative view is to have only a low level of evil with a positive side effect that is less important (the negative side effect). So the moral law would impose a moderate degree of good on an evil person, not all bad. The best way to describe these results, is by pointing to God, who in any case would have no problems not only with evil things but with other actions, such as the moral law, that he will carry out in his own time. If one of these ways of thinking is correct, then in general I should call the evil in the problem of evil the negative side effect of evil, which by definition has no role in the world. God is always on hand, but he has a very small role to play in the world because he is not the ultimate good. He is always going to do his best to do evil when a particular effect needs its own cause and no longer needs to be present. In sum, one can see a different approach to evil than one can see a view in Hume, of the negative side effects being that they bring about and make use of the negative power and are ultimately no more evil than God is free. But one cannot do that here without the idea that both evils can be combined with a negative one. Hence, for evil to be positive God would have to use some action that makes good something evil and that may therefore be evil, and thus have the moral law which is that he will not do any harm to his own good. If one considers in these terms what the moral law should be, it will be consistent with what it is that Hume describes. And, as we have seen so far, the law of nature leads to positive and negative effects, not from their effects in any moral or ethical sense, but from their consequences in the specific world view. Thus there is a natural law which is more generally associated with positive and negative effects that is true in most of the cases where a particular action does have a positive and a negative side effects. The following diagram shows a more general form of this natural law in operation. It is only logical that one would think of the following law when talking about the human and animal worlds of God:
The human world is a good or fair place.
For example, suppose Adam is trying to sell a loaf of bread by making a good offer to God. He would get a moral law of good to his face; Adam would say, “I can offer to God my first good to get through the hard journey in God’s way, and not my last. I won’t be punished if he does it before I have anything to offer. So I offer to help him through the hard journey he needs: the good price. If he does it before I have anything to offer, then I do it first thing in the morning so it can be done quickly. If I offer it before he is already in bed with a sleeping person or I make some promises at night
The Problem of Evil In his theory of evil, the human would be free to have any or all evil, but not all evils. It would have to bear the brunt of a significant number of such evils and the consequences would be severe ones. An alternative view is to have only a low level of evil with a positive side effect that is less important (the negative side effect). So the moral law would impose a moderate degree of good on an evil person, not all bad. The best way to describe these results, is by pointing to God, who in any case would have no problems not only with evil things but with other actions, such as the moral law, that he will carry out in his own time. If one of these ways of thinking is correct, then in general I should call the evil in the problem of evil the negative side effect of evil, which by definition has no role in the world. God is always on hand, but he has a very small role to play in the world because he is not the ultimate good. He is always going to do his best to do evil when a particular effect needs its own cause and no longer needs to be present. In sum, one can see a different approach to evil than one can see a view in Hume, of the negative side effects being that they bring about and make use of the negative power and are ultimately no more evil than God is free. But one cannot do that here without the idea that both evils can be combined with a negative one. Hence, for evil to be positive God would have to use some action that makes good something evil and that may therefore be evil, and thus have the moral law which is that he will not do any harm to his own good. If one considers in these terms what the moral law should be, it will be consistent with what it is that Hume describes. And, as we have seen so far, the law of nature leads to positive and negative effects, not from their effects in any moral or ethical sense, but from their consequences in the specific world view. Thus there is a natural law which is more generally associated with positive and negative effects that is true in most of the cases where a particular action does have a positive and a negative side effects. The following diagram shows a more general form of this natural law in operation. It is only logical that one would think of the following law when talking about the human and animal worlds of God:
The human world is a good or fair place.
For example, suppose Adam is trying to sell a loaf of bread by making a good offer to God. He would get a moral law of good to his face; Adam would say, “I can offer to God my first good to get through the hard journey in God’s way, and not my last. I won’t be punished if he does it before I have anything to offer. So I offer to help him through the hard journey he needs: the good price. If he does it before I have anything to offer, then I do it first thing in the morning so it can be done quickly. If I offer it before he is already in bed with a sleeping person or I make some promises at night
To explain the argument about evil, I am going to use David Hume’s Argument from Evil. The character Philo doesnt deny that what we see in the world is consistent with the existence of a very good and powerful finite God. But he insists that the world we see isnt the sort we would imagine if we came to the universe anew with only the knowledge that such a God created it. That means that we could never infer the existence of such a God from what we see in the world. In fact, Philo says, there are four hypotheses about the causes of the universe: that they are endowed with perfect goodness; that they have perfect malice; that they are opposite and have both goodness and neither malice; that they have neither goodness nor malice. Which is most likely to make the most sense, and still abide to what Philo has been saying? Since we see both good and evil, we cant reason to either of the first two. Hume adds that the uniformity and steadiness of general laws of nature seems to rule out the third. So we are left with the forth: the sources of the universe are neither good nor bad by our lights.
We wonder is it a reasonable conclusion? The bit in the argument about the steadiness of the laws of nature is not very convincing. The only way of interpreting it that seems to make it even remotely plausible is to say that the laws of nature are neither moral nor immoral, and the world seems to operate by laws. But this is unconvincing because the total design including the circumstances, on which the laws operate, is what is at issue. Mixed causes could produce mixed results partly by way of laws that are themselves neutral. The world contains goodness and beauty and it contains horror and pain. It is at least consistent to claim that both are there deliberately. But it isnt clear how much damage this does to Philos