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Example research essay topic: Problem Of Evil Heredity And Environment - 1,652 words

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Religion Philosophy: The Problem of Evil Some people view the problem of evil as the most serious challenge to the Christian tradition. "How can God exist when there is evil in the world?" This question arises due to the nature of God. God is understood to be benevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent. If God is all-knowing, all powerful and all good he would know that some evil would occur, he would have the power to prevent it and the desire to do so as well. Consequently, there should be no evil. When one observes society, numerous examples of moral evil abound. How can God allow this?

Even more pressing is the question of: "Why doesn't God intervene to stop all the evil and injustice?" (MacIntyre, p. 579) Because God does not appear to be doing anything about the problem of evil, many people have simply ceased to believe He exists, while others feel He cannot have all three characteristics previously ascribed to Him. There are other kinds of evils as well, such as earthquake, fire, and flood. For the purposes of this paper, however, I will focus on moral evils, the evil which one person does to another. Despite these arguments, there is a God who created the world, who is loving, all-powerful, and who knows what He is doing, but the reason that moral evil is in the world is because God, by giving man freedom of choice, allows it. Theists often state that moral evil is due to free will.

If it is man's free will that accounts for moral evil then God cannot be blamed for it. (Planning, p. 282) If the possibility of choosing evil is a logical consequence of free will, then the occurrence of some such evils is virtually a logical necessity. Philosophers have many opposing arguments with which to counter this assumption. If it is not a logical impossibility for man to choose good on one or even several occasions, then there is no logical impossibility in man's freely choosing the good on every occasion. If there was open to a benevolent God the possibility of creating beings who freely choose good, and He did not take this opportunity, this would prove that He is not omnipotent.

If God is all-powerful He should have made human beings perfect. (Hume, p. 226) A perfect God should create perfect beings. A second difficulty in claiming moral evil is due to free will is the very definition of free will. There are several different theories about what causes human behavior. The Determinist view holds that every action is caused by one's heredity and environment, which act together on the will.

Determinists believe that actions that stem from an individual's internal states are free, yet they are still acted upon by heredity and environment. Libertarianism states that indeed there is determinism in the world but one chooses to manipulate these laws. However, if the Libertarian view is correct and the ability to make wrong choices is logically necessary for freedom, then this must mean that free will constitutes randomness. Human behavior must be unpredictable. Consequently, if decisions made by people are random, they must not determined by one's character.

If free will comes without interaction of the will with one's character, how can decisions or actions possibly increase moral character? What value or merit would be in free choices if these were random actions that were not determined by the nature of the agent? It is important to realize that this nullifies the idea that evil exists for development of moral character, or that evil is a necessary by-product of free will. A third problem in the belief that moral evil can be attributed to free will is paradox of omnipotence. If God made human beings with free will, it logically follows that He must be unable to control them.

God is thus, not omnipotent. One could argue that He simply refrains from controlling human behavior because an evil act is not really wrong and that there is more value in the ability to choose than in the wrongness of the act, however this is in direct opposition to what theists say about sin. Therefore, God must not be able to control human beings. There are two other reasons why God cannot be omnipotent as we understand it. If God can make rules that He is bound by, He cannot be all-powerful. Similarly, if God cannot make laws by which He is bound, then He is not omnipotent.

It would seem that if God made humans free in relation to His control, then He would have made a law that He would be bound by. If He created beings that were subject to His control, they would not be free in relation to Him. If, at the beginning of time, when God first created the world as we human beings recognize it, God knew everything that would be done at the time he created the world, then nothing can be done presently to prevent or change what has happened in the past; the past cannot be altered. We cannot change the fact that God knows everything that will happen tomorrow and every day afterwards. That fact that God knows what will happen tomorrow, means that it will happen. If anyone, including God, or you or me, knows that X will happen, then X will happen.

Therefore, no one can prevent doing whatever it is that they will do tomorrow; because of the unalterable quality of the past caused by Gods knowledge of all future actions makes it necessary that these events will happen. So there is no free choice, yet free will is one of the basic tenets of what makes human beings human. We have been told stories about our free will, and the trouble it has caused us as a species; the story of Adam and Eve, for example, and we have always known that we are free. So how then, can these two ideas that most humans have believed to be true for so long both be possible? It is quite a paradox: if God is omniscient, then humans do not really have free will, but if human beings do have free will then God is not omniscient, and is flawed. The problem of solving these two seemingly contradictory premises of theology has been kicked around for ages.

Two of the more credible solutions to this paradox are the divine eternity method of solving the problem and the method of Luis de Molina, a 16 th century Spanish Jesuit. The timeless eternity method of solving the problem of divine foreknowledge and free will is rooted in the belief that God resides in all of eternity. If eternity is the possession of all things all at once, then God is essentially beyond linear time, as human beings know it. Gods knowledge lies in the midst of all that has and will happen, and so time is a part of what God knows, in the sense that things will happen before some events and after certain others, but time is not a part of Gods actual knowledge. God is outside of time, while his knowledge and deeds are not. God is timeless and so his knowledge knows no before or after, everything is simply embraced at once.

God, though omniscient, has no foreknowledge of our actions because he exists outside of time. He simply knows what will happen, because essentially, everything is happening at once in Gods eyes. There are several objections to this proposition. One such argument is that in many religious traditions, God acts in human history. If God exists outside of time, it can be argued that God cannot respond to prayers and other appeals to him within humanity's linear time, as in the story of the Ten Commandments or the Prayer of Hannah we discussed in class.

Another argument against the timeless eternity model is that God would have to have a temporal mind. That would suggest that Gods knowledge never changes, and is concurrent with everything that occurs within time. Additionally, all of Gods actions would have to be occurring simultaneously as well. Temporally though, they would have ordered themselves linearly within the human concept of time.

That means that God would simultaneously be willing, for example, Jesus birth and death, making Jesus birth and death simultaneous within Gods knowledge. Another method of solving the problem of divine foreknowledge and free will is the Molinist idea of Middle Knowledge. Molina's solution of divine foreknowledge and free will is that Gods will doesnt necessarily cause people to act the way they do, so it is not unavoidable for human beings to choose their actions because they are not going to be caused to do it by God. Molina believes that Gods knowledge if the future is not parallel to our knowledge, through our perception, more accurately; it is parallel to the knowledge we have of our own actions, and knowledge we possess through our own experience.

Therefore, God intends the universe to be a certain way, and he knows what will happen and knows that, since he is God, it cannot change. Choices are undetermined because more than one future course is compatible with history up until now. Molinists believe that Gods knowledge is not confined to what will actually happen. They also suppose that God knows what any person would decide to do under any circumstance. God knows all possibilities of human choice, and what choices will freely be made. Arguments arise with this theory as well, the primary argument being that if God knows all possible choices that people will make, how can he allow people to choose to sin. (Swinburne, p. 207) If God created a world in which sinners were allowed to choose sin, then the God that created them to choose evil is responsible for their sins, making God imperfect...


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Research essay sample on Problem Of Evil Heredity And Environment

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