Introduction to Philosophy

Achieve Test Prep: Philosophy

primarily what is called physical evil, that is to say pain. The most important proposed solution is that evil is due to human free will. Evil is not ascribed to God at all but to the independent actions of human beings, supposed to be endowed by God with freedom of the will and that God cannot be held responsible for it. This all leads to his last thought of Paradox of Omnipotence, which asks the question “Can an omnipotent being make things which he cannot subsequently control?” This also leads to the question “Can an omnipotent being make rules which then bind himself?” This leads to the belief that an invincible God creates the rules of logic or casual laws and is then bound by them suggesting that God’s omnipotence must be in any case restricted in one way or another, that unqualified omnipotence cannot ascribe to any being that continues through time. John Hick: Philosophy of Religion John Hick presents his own approach to the complex and disturbing issue of evil in his writing from Philosophy of Religion. Hick states that if God formed our characters in the process of creating us to ensure that we always chose the morally right alternative, we could not be considered genuinely free. Even though we might not be limited by external constraints, our actions would have already been limited by God through internal constraints. Genuine freedom means making choices that are truly autonomous, independent of both internal and external constraints. Hick maintains that God interfaced with the creation or development of people that we would be like helpless puppets acting out a series of posthypnotic suggestions because it would undetermined free choice. He maintains that if God prevented natural disasters from occurring, it would mean negating all of the laws of science and that the sorrows, tragedies, and disappointments of this world are necessary ingredients for soul-making. Hick believes that because there is not enough time on this Earth for our souls to become sufficiently enlightened, there must be an afterlife in which this process is continued. A Critique of Hick’s Theodicy Edward Madden and Peter Hare discuss the difficulties involved in Hick’s position and discuss in detail the three informal fallacies that Hick uses in his solution to evil. Three informal fallacies include: • All or nothing: The claim that something is desirable because its complete loss would be far worse than the evil its presence now causes. The mistake is the assumption that we must have this thing either in its present form and amount or not at all, but it is often the case that only some amount of the thing in some form is necessary to the achievement of a desirable end. • It could be worse: This is the claim that something is not really bad because it will be followed by all manner of desire bale things. The mistake is the assumption that that having these later desirable things is a great benefit and shows that the original evil is a necessary and not costless. It actually only shows that the situation would be worse if the desirable things did not follow and to show that it could be worse does not show that it could not be better. • Slippery slope: This is the claim that if God once started eliminating evils of this world, we would have no place to stop short of a perfect world in which only robots were possible. The mistake is the assumption that God would have no criterion to indicate where on the slippery slope to stop and no ability to implement it effectively.

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