And yet animals and humans suffer (through natural processes of disease and accident), and they cause each other to suffer (we hurt and maim each other and cause each other to starve).Read more at location 1325
An omnipotent God could have prevented this evil, and surely a perfectly good and omnipotent God would have done so. So why is there this evil?Read more at location 1326
what good things would a generous and everlasting God give to human beings in the course of a short earthly life.Read more at location 1341
He will seek to give us great responsibility for ourselves, each other, and the world, and thus a share in his own creative activity of determining what sort of world it is to be.Read more at location 1343
The problem is that God cannot give us these goods in full measure without allowing much evil on the way.Read more at location 1345
there are plenty of evils, positive bad states, which God could if he chose remove. I divide these into moral evils and natural evils.Read more at location 1350
I understand by ‘natural evil’ all evil which is not deliberately produced by human beings and which is not allowed by human beings to occur as a result of their negligence.Read more at location 1351
The free-will defence claims that it is a great good that humans have a certain sort of free will which I shall call free and responsible choice, but that, if they do, then necessarily there will be the natural possibility of moral evil.Read more at location 1361
A God who gives humans such free will necessarily brings about the possibility, and puts outside his own control whether or not that evil occurs. It is not logically possible—that is, it would be self-contradictory to suppose—that God could give us such free will and yet ensure that we always use it in the right way.Read more at location 1364
Free and responsible choice is rather free will (of the kind discussed) to make significant choices between good and evil, which make a big difference to the agent, to others, and to the world.Read more at location 1369
A world in which agents can benefit each other but not do each other harm is one where they have only very limited responsibility for each other.Read more at location 1384
God would have reserved for himself the all-important choice of the kind of world it was to be, while simply allowing humans the minor choice of filling in the details. He would be like a father asking his elder son to look after the younger son, and adding that he would be watching the elder son’s every move and would intervene the moment the elder son did a thing wrong. The elder son might justly retort that, while he would be happy to share his father’s work, he could really do so only if he were left to make his own judgementsRead more at location 1388
A good God, like a good father, will delegate responsibility. In order to allow creatures a share in creation,Read more at location 1392
Note further and crucially that, if I suffer in consequence of your freely chosen bad action, that is not by any means pure loss for me. In a certain respect it is a good for me. My suffering would be pure loss for me if the only good thing in life was sensory pleasure, and the only bad thing sensory pain; and it is because the modern world tends to think in those terms that the problem of evil seems so acute.Read more at location 1409
Recall the words of Christ, ‘it is more blessed to give than to receive’ (asRead more at location 1415
Being allowed to suffer to make possible a great good is a privilege, even if the privilege is forced upon you. Those who are allowed to die for their country and thereby save their country from foreign oppression are privileged. Cultures less obsessed than our own by the evil of purely physical pain have always recognized that.Read more at location 1420
Note: IL SACRIFICIO (PER LA PATRIA x LA FAMIGLIA...) È UN OPPRTUNITÀ... SIAMO OSSESSIONATI DAL MALE FISICO. Edit
I am fortunate if the natural possibility of my suffering if you choose to hurt me is the vehicle which makes your choice really matter. My vulnerability, my openness to suffering (which necessarily involves my actually suffering if you make the wrong choice), means that you are not just like a pilot in a simulator, where it does not matter if mistakes are made.Read more at location 1434
So then God, without asking humans, has to choose for them between the kinds of world in which they can live—basically either a world in which there is very little opportunity for humans to benefit or harm each other, or a world in which there is considerable opportunity.Read more at location 1486
There are clearly reasons for both choices. But it seems to me (just, on balance) that his choosing to create the world in which we have considerable opportunity to benefit or harm each other is to bring about a good at least as great as the evil which he thereby allows to occur.Read more at location 1488
Its main role rather, I suggest, is to make it possible for humans to have the kind of choice which the freewill defence extols, and to make available to humans specially worthwhile kinds of choice.Read more at location 1495
First, the operation of natural laws producing evils gives humans knowledge (if they choose to seek it) of how to bring about such evils themselves.Read more at location 1498
Note: CONOSCERE X CONTRASTARE: DIO NN IMPEDISCE IL MALE SOSPENDENDO LE LEGGI NATURALI AL FINE DI NN OSTACOLARNE LA CONOSCENZA Edit
But could not God give us the requisite knowledge (of how to bring about good or evil) which we need in order to have free and responsible choice by a less costly means?Read more at location 1502
That knowledge would greatly inhibit his freedom of choice, would make it very difficult for him to choose to do evil.Read more at location 1506
Natural processes alone give humans knowledge of the effects of their actions without inhibiting their freedom,Read more at location 1510
The other way in which natural evil operates to give humans their freedom is that it makes possible certain kinds of action towards it between which agents can choose. It increases the range of significant choice.Read more at location 1511
A particular natural evil, such as physical pain, gives to the sufferer a choice—whether to endure it with patience, or to bemoan his lot.Read more at location 1513
I have then the opportunity to show gratitude for the sympathy;Read more at location 1519
If you are callous, I can choose whether to ignore this or to resent it for life.Read more at location 1519
It may, however, be suggested that adequate opportunity for these great good actions would be provided by the occurrence of moral evil without any need for suffering to be caused by natural processes. You can show courage when threatened by a gunman,Read more at location 1522
But just imagine all the suffering of mind and body caused by disease, earthquake, and accident unpreventable by humans removed at a stroke from our society.Read more at location 1525
Many of us would then have such an easy life that we simply would not have much opportunity to show courageRead more at location 1527
God has the right to allow natural evils to occur (for the same reason as he has the right to allow moral evils to occur)—up to a limit.Read more at location 1529
Natural evils give to us the knowledge to make a range of choices between good and evil, and the opportunity to perform actions of especially valuable kinds.Read more at location 1532
There is, however, no reason to suppose that animals have free will. So what about their suffering?Read more at location 1534
Animals had been suffering for a long time before humans appearedRead more at location 1535
while the higher animals, at any rate the vertebrates, suffer, it is most unlikely that they suffer nearly as much as humans do. Given that suffering depends directly on brain events (in turn caused by events in other parts of the body), then, since the lower animals do not suffer at all and humans suffer a lot, animals of intermediate complexity (it is reasonable to suppose) suffer only a moderate amount.Read more at location 1536
one does not need as powerful a theodicy as one does in respect of humans.Read more at location 1539
That said, there is, I believe, available for animals parts of the theodicy which I have outlined above for humans. The good of animals, like that of humans, does not consist solely in thrills of pleasure. For animals, too, there are more worthwhile things, and in particular intentional actions, and among them serious significant intentional actions.Read more at location 1541
Animals do not choose freely to do such actions, but the actions are nevertheless worthwhile. It is great that animals feed their young, not just themselves;Read more at location 1548
Suppose that you exist in another world before your birth in this one, and are given a choice as to the sort of life you are to have in this one.Read more at location 1556
You can have either a few minutes of very considerable pleasure, of the kind produced by some drug such as heroin, which you will experience by yourself and which will have no effects at all in the world (for example, no one else will know about it); or you can have a few minutes of considerable pain, such as the pain of childbirth, which will have (unknown to you at the time of pain) considerable good effects on others over a few years. You are told that, if you do not make the second choice, those others will never exist—and so you are under no moral obligation to make the second choice. But you seek to make the choice which will make your own life the best lifeRead more at location 1559
While believing that God does provide at any rate for many humans such life after death, I have expounded a theodicy without relying on this assumption.Read more at location 1571
