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" that attempted to tackle the problem of God's relation to the world He created. The major tenets of that philosophy are (Clarke, 1999):
That even basic concrete entities are not enduring substances but rather events connected by some type of space-time and reflecting both qualitative and mathematical templates (or eternal objects);
That God is an actual entity, bringing together all the acts of experiencing into one eternal act;
That God's experiencing of eternal objects (the qualitative and mathematical templates) forms the...