Fallacies to Avoid in Writing on the Problem of Evil

Assuming that God, the almighty, good Creator exists, explain why, if you can, does evil exist. (It does not matter whether or not you have a belief in God. You should try to write your essay with that assumption. If you can show why the existence of evil cannot be reconciled with the existence of God, that contradiction between evil and God might lead you to reject belief in God, of course. But try your best to reconcile evil's reality with reasonable belief in God.)

By evil, philosophers generally understand human suffering from disease and nature and the morally bad things that people sometimes do. First, for example, human suffering can come from any disease such as cancer or from any event in nature such as a hurricane or flood, and second, for example, terrible moral evils such as murder, rape, and war crimes against humanity such as the Nazi death camps can also hurt humans very much, causing tremendous suffering. And when these things happen to people who believe in God, they ask why. Their belief in God can be shaken to the very core of their being. Sometimes people adopt a relativistic way of answering their question. They say that although this suffering seems to be evil from a human point of view, from God's point of view it is really good. That kind of answer seems to trivialize human suffering, but the suffering is obviously very real, very painful, even excruciatingly so. Furthermore, that kind of answer assumes a relativism about good and evil. But the whole tendency of the course in Philosophy 101 has tended against relativism because of the arguments of Socrates, the world religions, Burtt, Aristotle, Kant, and Mill. How could one say that in God's view, rape, murder, torture, abuse, and war crimes against humanity are really good even though they `seem' evil to humans? Hardly! So if one does not adopt relativism about good and evil, how can one explain why these real evils, both human suffering from events in nature and human suffering from the terrible moral evils that people do, occur if one believes that God is good and almighty?

Sometimes people try to answer this problem of why evil occurs if God is good and almighty by praising God's great mind which the puny human mind could not even begin to understand. Once again, this approach adopts relativism as a basis for its answer and must face the difficulty of saying that in God's view murder, rape, torture, and crimes against humanity are really good, but the human mind is too puny to understand at this stage of their life on earth. What may be even worse in this approach is that it changes true humility into false humility. True humility is exemplified by Socrates who recognizes that his knowledge is limited and that therefore he must strive to develop his knowledge. But false humility is involved in the approach which magnifies God's mind and degrades the human mind. For such an approach recognizes that human attempts to know may be limited but then concludes fallaciously that human thought is practically nothing and can never understand and should not even try to understand.