POEE 🤢

Question 1

What is thread 1?

Answer 1

LPOE
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Free Will Defence
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Mackie’s no Evil World
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Plantinga, this world is not possible
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However, this conflicts with the idea of Heaven
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Well this fits perfectly with Hick’s soul making theodicy.
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So the LPOE may fail

Question 2

What is thread 2?

Answer 2

EPOE
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Hick’s soul making theodicy
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However, this fails as the soul making theodicy can’t account for all suffering
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God’s existence is incompatible with evil

Question 3

What is the LPOE?

Answer 3

• deductive + aposteriori
• If God is omniscient, omnibenevolent, and omnipotent, then he would know evil exists, want to stop it and be able to stop it.
• Therefore God cannot exist if evil does
• But evil does exist
• Therefore God and evil are incompatible

Question 4

What is Plantinga’s Free Will defence?

Answer 4

God sees that allowing humans to have free will is more morally valuable than having us be in a “toy world”. God is therefore still supremely good by letting us have free will, it is humans who are abusing our free will that create the evil.

Question 5

What is Mackie’s No evil world?

Answer 5

If God exists, and has all the attributes, then he would have been able to make a world where all the moral agents had the free will to only do good actions, and there would therefore be no moral evil in that world.

Question 6

Plantinga, this world is not possible

Answer 6

• Every free person will go wrong at least once in any possible world.
• So any person created by God would misuse their free will no matter what world they were in.
• This is logically possible so it is therefore within God’s power to create a world where no moral evil exists.

Question 7

Issue of Heaven with Plantinga

Answer 7

• Plantinga: Every free person will go wrong in any possible world.
• Objection: If God can create Heaven with free people who never do wrong, why not Earth?
• Point: Heaven shows it is possible to have free agents without moral evil.
• Implication: Plantinga’s claim that all possible worlds with free creatures contain evil is challenged.

Question 8

How does Hick respond to the heaven objection?

Answer 8

• Hick: Heaven is the final stage of soul-making.
• In Heaven, people are already morally and spiritually perfected.
• Free will no longer produces moral evil because everyone freely chooses good.
• Therefore, Heaven does not contradict the Free Will Defence; evil exists on Earth to develop souls, not in the perfected world of Heaven.

Question 9

What is the Evidential problem of evil?

Answer 9

God is omnibenevolent, so all evil that exists must have a morally good reason. We cannot find a morally good reason for some events. If we cannot find out one, there probably isn’t one, so god probably doesn’t exist

Question 10

What is Hicks Soul Making theodicy?

Answer 10

• The existence of some evils are for creatures to help themselves develop morally and spiritually as it is morally valuable. Therefore God has done the right thing by allowing evil to exist.

Question 11

How does soul making fail?

Answer 11

Some suffering is unnecessary (rowe), and doesn’t lead to any soul making. For example, if a deer is shot in the woods and left to die in pain over the span of a few hours, the deer is suffering without any soul making.