God Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents God by Douglas S. Huffman & Eric L. Johnson

Author:Douglas S. Huffman & Eric L. Johnson [Huffman, Douglas S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: ebook
Publisher: ZONDERVAN
Published: 2009-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

(1B) There are no limits to what an omnipotent being can do.12

Mackie confidently asserts that the only way out of this problem is for the theist to abandon some aspect of traditional theism. “If you are prepared to say that God is not wholly good, or not quite omnipotent, or that evil does not exist, or that good is not opposed to the kind of evil that exists, or that there are limits to what an omnipotent being can do, then the problem of evil will not arise for you.”13 It is uncontroversial that propositions (1) and (2) are incompatible if we assume that premises (1A) and (1B) are true. Mackie’s argument is valid. But classical theists have responded to Mackie by arguing against the truth of either (1A) or (1B), or both.14

Although the logical argument from evil was the dominant form of the argument against classical theism during most of the twentieth century, most philosophers of religion, many of whom are atheists or agnostics, now hold that this form of the argument is totally ineffectual. Those who accept this verdict and yet still believe that evil counts against the rationality of classical theism have resorted to an alternative formulation of the argument from evil. This formulation is widely known as the evidential argument. It allows that classical theism may not harbor a contradiction, as asserted by Mackie. Nevertheless, it maintains that evils of certain kinds make it highly unlikely that a God who is omnipotent and perfectly morally good exists. This argument reasons that if proposition (2) is true, then proposition (1) is probably false.

Some who favor this line of argument replace proposition (1) with the following proposition:

(3) God exists and is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly morally good.15

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