JUNE 27, 2016 JAMES BISHOP

Epicurus (341-270 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher known today (particularly in skeptical circles) for providing what some tend to believe is a knockdown argument against belief in God. Epicurus’ argument focuses on the problem of evil and how it might present a big problem for a classical concept of God generally embraced by Christian theists,

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”

Epicurus would seem to capture the heart of skepticism held by many today, namely, the use of evil and suffering as an argument against God or justifying why one shouldn’t believe in a good God. Whether this argument is successful or not, one should not hesitate to credit Epicurus for raising an important question on the subject of evil in the world given belief in an all-powerful and all-loving creator God.

However, my contention is that the argument does not follow, and I hope to show that this is the case by breaking it into smaller units.

1. If God is willing but not able to prevent evil, then He’s not omnipotent (therefore not God).

One way Christians have responded to this is by pointing to the narratives of the Bible which teach that although God is willing to prevent (or end) evil but doesn’t, does not necessarily mean that God cannot prevent it. Importantly, for the Christian, this raises crucial questions, and theologians have sought after answers. One of these answers is that God does not prevent all evil (or instances of evil) because he has morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil to exist in the world. Philosopher, theologian, and apologist William Lane Craig explains that

“In terms of the intellectual problem of suffering, I think that there you need to ask yourself is the atheist claiming, as Epicurus did, that the existence of God is logically incompatible with the evil and suffering in the world? If that’s what the atheist is claiming, then he has got to be presupposing some kind of hidden assumptions that would bring out that contradiction and make it explicit because these statements are not explicitly contradictory. The problem is no philosopher in the history of the world has ever been able to identify what those hidden assumptions would be that would bring out the contradiction and make it explicit” (1).

As Craig rightly challenges, how could the atheist, skeptic, or anyone else, know that God would not, if he existed, permit the evil and suffering in the world? This is the assumption made by the atheist, and more often than not merely remains an assumption. One of Craig’s hypotheses to account for God’s allowing of evil and suffering is that it is a way for God to bring the maximum number of people freely into his kingdom to find salvation and eternal life, all of which requires the existence of evil and suffering. For Craig, it could be the case that salvation, at least how Christian theology teaches it, requires a world that is suffused with natural and moral suffering, and perhaps only in a world such as that could a maximum number of people freely come to know God and find salvation. Craig explains,

“So the atheist would have to show that there is a possible world that’s feasible for God, which God could’ve created, that would have just as much salvation and eternal life and knowledge of God as the actual world but with less suffering. And how could the atheist prove such a thing? It’s sheer speculation. So the problem is that, as an argument, the Problem of Evil makes probability judgments, which are very, very ambitious and which we are simply not in a position to make with any kind of confidence.”

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