The Problem of Evil

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If God is all-powerful and all-good, why is evil permitted to exist? Or as Mackie (1955) puts it, arguing the necessary logical inconsistency: "In its simplest form the problem is this: God is omnipotent; Good is wholly good; and yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so that if any two of them were true the third would be false. But at the same time all three are essential parts of most [theistic] theological positions; the theologian, it seems, at once must adhere and cannot consistently adhere to all three" (200). It is my contention that Mackie and those who argue like him are wrong. I intend to defend my position through the use of a philosophic argument first put forward by British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, that of "process theology".

It is my belief that Mackie's idea that evil and the all-mighty, all-good God cannot exist in the same set of logical suppositions and conclusions does not properly examine the meaning of "all-mighty, all-good God." The argument I wish to use to refute this statement is based on Whitehead's later philosophy. Whitehead held that philosophy's purpose is to make ideas more clear through an analysis of their meanings, an idea espoused most strongly by the logical positivist school of which Whitehead was an early adherent. In the third and final phase of his career, Whitehead espoused a complex theory of "process" t

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d is its primordial, non-temporal accident" (7). According to the Thomists, God is pure actuality without any possibility of potentiality. Opposed to this view of God, Whitehead saw his creativity as more along the lines of potentiality and process rather than actuality. Thus, he was able to talk about God and other entities as "accidents" or "creatures" of creativity (1978:31). He also said that God was "the aboriginal instance of this creativity, and is therefore the aboriginal condition which qualified its action" (225). By making creativity essential to God's nature and by making that creativity potential rather than actual (always in a state of process instead of frozen), Whitehead allows humans to establish a new type of relationship with God and "for the first time to begin thinking of God as a living subject of experience rather than as an inert object of thought" (Bracken, 1996:725). What does this switch from actuality to potentiality and from permanent entity to process mean when it comes to the problem of evil? Whitehead is able to argue that God can set up a creation whereby some creatures within it will act in a spontaneous way. In other words, God is taking some chances that evil will appear in His creation be
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Approximate Word count = 1452
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

The Problem of Evil

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